Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
English Poetry Up To 1830 - George Volceanov
English Poetry Up To 1830 - George Volceanov
821.111.09–I”…/1830”
Preface….................................................................................................. 7
Anglo-Saxon Poetry.......................................................................…….. 79
Middle English Literature...................................................................…. 88
The Anonymous Poetry..........................................................….. 89
The Fourteenth Century (Ricardian) Poetry......................................….. 94
William Langland………………………………………………. 94
John Gower…………………………………………………….. 97
The Gawain Poet……………………………………………….. 100
Geoffrey Chaucer...............................................................……... 105
The Renaissance ...............................................................……………... 117
Edmund Spenser...................................................................…… 118
Philip Sidney.........................................................................…… 122
Shakespeare’s (and Marlowe’s) Non-dramatic Poetry................. 126
The Elizabethan World Picture.............................................….... 143
The Seventeenth Century Poetry.............................................…………. 144
John Donne...........................................................................….... 145
Andrew Marvell....................................................................…… 157
John Milton................................................................................... 164
John Dryden.................................................................................. 180
5
The Eighteenth Century Poetry ............................................................... 184
Alexander Pope………………………………………………… 185
The “Pre-romantic” Poets………………………………………….. 190
Edward Young………………………………………………….. 191
James Thomson…………………………………………………. 192
Thomas Gray……………………………………………………. 195
William Collins…………………………………………………. 198
Oliver Goldsmith……………………………………………….. 200
William Cowper………………………………………………… 203
James Macpherson……………………………………………… 207
Thomas Chatterton……………………………………………… 208
An Introduction to English Romanticism............................……………. 210
William Blake…………………………………………………... 215
William Wordsworth............................................................…… 219
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.....................................................……. 224
George Gordon Byron.........................................................……. 230
Percy Bysshe Shelley............................................................…… 237
John Keats............................................................................……. 248
Bibliography..........................................................................………….. 365
6
PREFACE
George Volceanov
8
PART ONE
INTERPRETING POETRY
9
10
INTRODUCTION
12
Middle English Literature 1100-1400
Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Verse and Prose
Malory and Fifteenth-Century Drama, Lyrics and Ballads
Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century
English Drama 1485-1585
English Drama 1586-1642: Shakespeare and his Age
The Early Seventeenth Century 1600-1660: Jonson, Donne,
and Milton
Restoration Literature 1660-1700: Dryden, Bunyan, and
Pepys
The Early Eighteenth Century 1700-1740: Swift, Defoe, and
Pope
The Age of Johnson 1740-1789
The Rise of the Romantics 1789-1815: Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Jane Austen
English Literature 1815-1832: Scott, Byron, and Keats
The Victorian Novel
Victorian Poetry, Drama, and Miscellaneous Prose 1832-1890
Writers of the Early Twentieth Century: Hardy to Lawrence
A few facts should be remarked upon as regards this
periodization. First, there is an obvious gap between the last period
covered by the Oxford literary historians and the present day, a gap
that, probably, represents “work in progress”. We cannot know for
sure whether the scholars appointed to fill out the missing decades will
divide those decades into one, two, three, or four ages or periods.
Secondly, it is obvious that the Oxford scholars did not lay emphasis
on politics (on the rulers’ names) in labelling the various periods dealt
with, but chose instead to single out the leading personalities of each
century, or of the decades, taken as a temporal unit. Such a view leads
to the translation of the “Elizabethan Age” into “Shakespeare and his
Age”; Jonson, Donne, and Milton displace the Stuart monarchs, James
and Charles, and Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence likewise
supplant King Edward VII.
In his relatively recent Short Oxford History of English
Literature, Andrew Sanders has taken a rather neutral stance and
applied the following temporal scheme, which elevates neither
political rulers (Victoria and Edward are merely an exception to the
13
rule), nor writers, but strictly sticks to a chronological scheme
measured in years, decades, and centuries:
Old English Literature
Medieval Literature 1066-1510
Renaissance and Reformation: Literature 1510-1620
Revolution and Restoration: Literature 1620-1690
Eighteenth-Century Literature 1690-1780
The Literature of the Romantic Period 1780-1830
High Victorian Literature 1830-1880
Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature 1880-1920
Modernism and its Alternatives: Literature 1920-1945
Post-War and Post-Modern Literature
My former teacher of English Literature, Professor Ştefan
Stoenescu, when interviewed about the historical, or chronological
approach to English poetry, kindly suggested the following
periodization of Modern English Poetry:
The Renaissance or the Sixteenth Century
The Metaphysical Poets and Milton (the Baroque) or the
Seventeenth Century
Neo-Classicism and New Pastoralism or the Eighteenth
Century
The Romanticism and Victorianism or the Nineteenth Century
Modernism and Post-modernism or the Twentieth Century
But Professor Stoenescu also draws our attention to the fact
that temporal borders are not rigid. Sometimes different literary
schools and trends partly overlap or occur simultaneously.
Professor Pârvu’s “second argument” in the aforementioned
books reads: “When English Literature is overviewed with disrespect
to chronological criteria or rather in terms of genres we have, in the
initial stage, a three-term picture: English Poetry – English Drama –
English Prose.” His aforementioned books consist of long theoretical
introductions, anthologized texts and lots of marginalia, footnotes and
comments, historical and theoretical data, etc. All in all, the vast
critical apparatus is eclectic and sometimes esoteric rather than user-
friendly, and the books’ ultimate end seems to remain occult. I do not
find of much help these theoretical introductions insofar as the
introduction to the volume of dramatic poetry is actually a survey of
14
narratology, while the introduction to the volume of epic poetry
focuses on character as a literary / aesthetic category. The author
might have obviously presented things the other way round and
chosen the survey of narratology as an introduction to epic poetry (it
really would have made more sense) while reserving the theory of
literary character to the dramatic poetry.
Ever since Ronald S. Crane’s famous essay on Fielding’s Tom
Jones we have grown accustomed with the idea that the plot (the
backbone of any epic structure) is a temporal synthesis among
character, action, and thought. So why should we discuss mainly
about character when we speak about epic poetry? As for drama, it is,
indeed, not only an imitation of dialogue, as Northrop Frye famously
upheld in The Anatomy of Criticism. It is also an imitation of action,
and the characters act and think as well. And they do this in space and
time. The dramatic and the epic may co-exist in drama: Marlowe (in
the two parts of Tamburlaine the Great), Brecht, and even
Shakespeare (in the Henry VI trilogy) wrote epic theatre. But should
we really focus on narratology and the discussion of issues such as
point of view, stream of consciousness, telling and showing, and so on
(aspects pertaining to the novel and to fiction, in general) in a book
about dramatic poetry? And, in Andrew Gurr’s opinion, the
Elizabethan drama poses a special question for students as it may be
interpreted in two different ways, depending on the generic approach
one chooses. All of the Elizabethan drama may be discussed either as
narrative structures, in terms of plot, action, character development,
etc., or, as ample dramatic poems, in terms of themes, motifs,
symbols, imagery, prosody, etc. My impression is that,
notwithstanding their extraordinary coherence and range of
information, Professor Pârvu’s two introductions are arbitrary and
interchangeable. They provide students with excellent instruments that
unfortunately do not fit the purpose of the respective text-books: it is
like slicing cucumbers with a fork and eating soup with a knife made
of excellent stainless steel.
I also find Professor Pârvu’s “either / or” presentation of the
two approaches (historical versus generic) to be too trenchant, and in
the following pages I shall return to this idea. The generic approach
cannot be drastically separated from history. And a historical approach
15
to literature is, after all, concerned with the evolution of literary genres
and forms. One cannot write literary history leaving aside the
specificity of literary genres. I quote once again from my Survey of
English Literature from Beowulf to Jane Austen: “When we come to
speak about Elizabethan drama, we shall discuss specific categories
such as plot, subplot, character, language, play-within-a play,
prologue, etc. Speaking about the development of the eighteenth-
century novel, we shall make use of terms such as point of view,
narrative level, telling, showing, implied author, etc.” In that very
same book I included a model of analyzing a poem. I do appreciate the
impressive range of information provided by Professor Pârvu in his
text-books but I also find them baffling, bewildering from his targeted
readership’s viewpoint. It is as if one listed the ingredients of various
dishes in a cookery book without allowing the readers to learn the
secrets of an award-winning chef’s recipes. While Professor Pârvu’s
books are haute cuisine, this book purports to pursue more pedestrian
ends, in being more accessible and, hopefully, more practical.
The practical side of the book resides in its introductory
chapters, which tackle the very notion of poetry as a distinct literary
type or genre, the language of poetry, elements of prosody, poetic
forms, imagery, symbols, and so on. All these are the bricks that
contribute to the building of a poem. The logical conclusion, and the
cherry on the cake, of these theoretical chapters, will be a chapter
dedicated to how students should analyze a poem. All of the books on
textual analysis I have read in recent years have glossaries appended at
the end. Here I revert the traditional order and choose to discuss first
things first, the components, the parts that make up the whole before
embarking on the historical survey of poetic forms.
A marginal note to Sorin Pârvu’s aforementioned two
arguments, “Further arguments”, simply lists the names of Petre
Grimm, Iancu Botez, Dragoş Protopopescu, Ana Cartianu, Viorica
Dobrovici, Leon Leviţchi, Dan Duţescu, Andrei Bantaş, Ştefan
Stoenescu, Ioan Aurel Preda, and Adrian Nicolescu. I really cannot
grasp the use of this impressive roll of scholars listed without any
further reference whatsoever. As an undergraduate, I myself was lucky
to learn indeed “English Poetry – English Drama – English Prose” as
taught by three giants of English studies, Professors Preda, Leviţchi,
16
and Stoenescu, but as far as I remember none of them “overviewed
English literature with disrespect to chronological criteria” (to use
Professor Pârvu’s words). On the contrary, all of them used the
chronological or historical approach to literature without belittling or
disregarding the importance of the generic approach; conversely, they
were genre-focused and still preserved the chronology of the authors
discussed as exemplars of the given genre. Professor Leviţchi taught
English drama chronologically, insisting on its generic roots, (he
focused on Shakespeare, of course) but at the same time he was alert
to instilling the knowledge of textual analysis in his students, while
Professor Stoenescu taught a chronological course of lectures on the
English and the American novel, with introductory lectures consisting
of an extraordinary, updated synthesis of the most important
achievements in narratology, thus arming his undergraduates with the
necessary theoretical equipment for a suitable approach to the novel
“as a complex genre”. These theoretical lectures (never published by
Professor Stoenescu himself) shared the fate of Ferdinand de
Saussure’s lectures in that they were decades later reused by an
enthusiastic graduate, who drew on them to write some of his own
lectures while duly acknowledging their provenance. In a recent
personal communication, dated July 30, 2006, Professor Stoenescu
clearly stated his viewpoint as regards the generic approach: “The
starting point of the generic approach is the poetics of the respective
genre. The generic approach focuses on the study of literary forms
along the centuries; the ballad, the ode, the elegy, the sonnet, the
dramatic monologue etc. etc. etc. can be studied autonomously via
their most telling examples, or in relation with the changes in various
historical periods, wherein these forms either held a central position,
or were quite neglected (due to historical causes). The generic
approach invites a comparative treatment across cultures. I used both
the generic and historical approach during my teaching career in
Bucharest (1964-1987) and I daresay that both perspectives are fertile
and may engender stimulating discussions when they come to
collide.”
That the chronological approach and the generic approach are
not mutually incompatible has long been proved. I remember that as a
sophomore undergraduate I had to write an examination paper in
17
English literature in which I had to draw a comparison between the
ways in which Daniel Defoe and Virginia Woolf handled several
narrative categories. The founder of the eighteenth century realistic
novel and the modernist user of the stream of consciousness technique
were divided by a huge gap in time and narrative techniques, and yet,
nothing was impossible for a student when the teacher in charge was
Ştefan Stoenescu. History and genre obviously collided in such a topic
and yet, as undergraduates, we did survive this examination.
I shall cherish forever the memory of the day when, as a third-
year undergraduate, I had to take my written examination in English
poetry. To my colleagues’ surprise, the late Professor Ioan Aurel
Preda, after a two-semester course delivered in the form of a survey,
demanded that we should analyze and interpret passages from poems
by Alexander Pope, John Keats and Robert Browning. Some of my
colleagues got the shock of their life; and yet we managed to
somehow survive that examination, too.
I might say that my experience as both an undergraduate and a
teacher of English literature has persuaded me that literary history
must not be separated from interpretation. That is why this book
combines the diachronic approach (data about the poets’ lives, the
poets’ artistic output, and the main literary, cultural, and political
trends of various ages) and the generic approach (notions concerning
the theory of genre, attempts to define poetry, the specific language
and forms of poetry, etc.) as well as elements of literary criticism and
textual interpretation.
There are two points at issue in the design and purpose of this
book. On the one hand, there is a corpus of poets and poems from
different ages that the undergraduates are supposed to get familiar
with. On the other hand, there is yet another challenge they are faced
with: the interpretation of these poems. So, on the one hand, we have a
diachronic survey, but, on the other hand, we also aim not only at the
traditional interaction between teacher (and text-book) and students,
but also at the interaction between the students and the texts (the
poems) they are to be confronted with.
18
*
The very term genre is in itself confusing. Chris Baldick justly
warns us that in French it defines a type, species, or class of
composition. “A literary genre is a recognizable and established
category of written work employing such common conventions as will
prevent readers or audiences from mistaking it for another kind.” For
Wilfred L. Guerin, genre is, simply, “a literary type: poetry, drama,
fiction” (where the latter term refers to “works written in prose”). But
Baldick points out that “much of the confusion surrounding the term
arises from the fact that it is used simultaneously for the most basic
modes of literary art (lyric, narrative, dramatic), for the broadest
categories of composition (poetry, prose fiction), and for more
specialized sub-categories, which are defined according to several
different criteria including formal structure.”
We use the word genre in his book as signifying poetry as a
basic type of genre. This means that poetry, in turn, can be categorized
according to its sub-categories or sub-divisions that belong to the
lyric, epic, or dramatic mode. Paul Van Tieghem defined genre as “a
kind of pattern that shapes thought or fiction” and he regarded the
evolution of the literary genres as a struggle between inherited forms
and originality, between tradition and individual talent. Speaking of
poetry, Van Tieghem listed as genres the epic, the didactic poem, the
mock heroic, the elegy, the fable, the eclogue, the descriptive (or
landscape) poem, and the dramatic poem.
In Northrop Frye’s theory of genres there are “four main
genres”: epos or epic (supposing an oral address and an audience),
lyric (in which the poet “turns his back on his audience”), drama, and
fiction (prose). Speaking about poetry, Frye discusses the following
types of poetry: religious or sacred poetry (the psalm and the hymn);
the panegyrical ode to a human representative of deity; the poem of
community (patriotic verse, work songs, battle songs – as lyrical
contrasted with the ballad as epic); the panegyrical funeral ode (the
elegy); the epitaph and the elegiac meditations; the complaint
(expressing exile, neglect, or protest); the poem of paradox versus the
poem of debate (“The Owl and the Nightingale” illustrates the latter
type); the carpe diem poem; the riddle; the parable; the pastoral; the
medieval love vision; the dithyrambic and rhapsodic forms. A detailed
19
presentation of these poetic forms is the subject-matter of the chapter
titled “Types of Poetry”.
In his more recent Literary Theory, Jonathan Cullers lays
emphasis on the readers’ horizon of expectations in defining the
concept of genre. The lyric is defined in terms of a narrator who
speaks in the first person; the epic – in terms of a narrator who
likewise speaks in the first person but allows his characters to make
themselves heard; and drama as a form in which only the voice of the
characters can be heard.
The Romanian scholar Silvian Iosifescu has produced one of
the best approaches to the theory of genres in his acclaimed theoretical
book titled Configuraţie şi rezonanţe, in the chapter simply titled
“Genres”. Iosifescu surveys the history of genre taxonomies from
Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, via the Renaissance (Scaliger and
Castelvetro) and the Neo-classicists (Boileau), down to the twentieth
century contributions signed Croce, Frye, etc. Iosifescu’s book
discusses interesting aspects such as the types of lyrical “I” that speak
in poetry and the co-existence of epic and lyric elements in one and
the same poetic texts.
I hope it is by now clear that this textbook uses the concept of
genre so as to draw a line between poetry and other modes of writing.
The following chapters will draw further distinction between epic,
lyric, and dramatic types within the boundaries of poetry.
20
WHAT IS POETRY?
HORSE
Horses are ubiquitous in literature until recent times. Greek
and Roman warriors fight from horse-drawn chariots, knights ride on
steeds and do chivalrous deeds (“chivalry” is from Old French
chevalerie, from cheval, horse), the cavalry charges enemies or
rescues friends (“cavalry” has a similar etymology), and every hero’s
horse has a name from Achilles’ horse Xanthos, who speaks (Iliad), to
Don Quixote’s “hack” Rosinante. In more recent literature horses (and
26
unicorns) have been the heroes of their own stories: e.g. Anna
Sewell’s Black Beauty.
The most common metaphorical horses are those that draw the
chariot of the sun, the moon, etc. Probably the most influential
symbolic horses are those that Plato describes in his simile for the
soul. The soul is a union of three parts, a charioteer (judgment or
reason) and two horses, one of which is noble and obedient (honour or
mettle), the other base and disobedient (appetite or will) (Phaedrus);
the charioteer must learn the difficult art of managing two different
steeds (“manage” in its earliest English sense referred only to horses).
Whether driving several or riding one, the reason could be disobeyed
or overthrown by the wilful, bestial, or irrational part of the soul. So
Euripides’ Hippolytus, whose name means something like “horse-
looser,” is killed when his horses bolt at the sight of a monster,
ultimately the doing of Aphrodite, whom Hippolytus had scorned.
Marlowe’s enamoured Leander chaffs at the bit:
28
the horse caused a breach through which “the noble seed of the
Romans escaped” (Inferno).
MIRROR
The symbolism of mirrors depends not only on what things
cause the reflection – nature, God, a book, drama – but also on what
one sees in them – oneself, the truth, the ideal, illusion.
As early as Roman times real mirrors were instruments of
vanity or “narcissism” and soon came to stand for it. The myth of
Narcissus, indeed, is the first great mirror tale, told in full by Ovid
(Metamorphoses, III.339-510). In the Amores Ovid reminds a vain girl
that has ruined her hair by constantly curling it with irons; now “you
lay aside the mirror with sorrowful hand” (I.14.36). Petrarch calls
Laura’s mirror “my adversary” because it has driven him away, and he
warns her to remember Narcissus and his fate (Rime, 45); in the next
sonnet he blames his miserable state on “those murderous mirrors /
which you have tired out by gazing fondly at yourself” (46). Spenser’s
proud Lucifera “held a mirror bright, / Wherein her face she often
viewed fain, / And in her self-lov’d semblance took delight” (Faerie
Queene, I.4.10-12).
But we might profit from watching others as potential mirrors.
A character in Terence tells a friend “to look at other men’s lives as in
a mirror” (Adelphoe, 415-16). Certain people are models or ideals and
serve as mirrors for everyone. “Mirror of X” had become a common
phrase by Chaucer’s time. In Chaucer one’s lover is the “mirour of
goodlihed” (Troilus and Criseyde, II.842); Shakespeare has “mirror of
all Christian kings” (Henry V, Prologue to Act II, 5), “mirror of all
martial men”” (1 Henry VI, I.4.74), “mirror of all courtesy” (Henry
VIII, II.1.53), while Ophelia calls Hamlet “The glass of fashion and
the mould of form” (III.1.153); Waller calls Ben Jonson the “Mirror of
Poets” (“Upon Ben Jonson”).
By extension a book can be a mirror. Jean de Meung says his
Romance of the Rose might be called a Mirror of Lovers, “since they
will see great benefits in it for them” (10620-22). Hundreds of books,
in fact, were titled Mirror of X or Mirror for Y, beginning with
Augustine’s Speculum; there have been mirrors of the world, of faith,
29
of astronomy, of alchemy, of sin, of fools, of drunkenness, and for
magistrates, all calculated to instruct and admonish.
The ancient idea that the arts imitate nature or the world led
sometimes to an analogy with a mirror, as in Plato, Republic, 596, d-e.
Donatus attributed to Cicero the opinion that comedy is a “mirror of
custom” (Commentum Terenti, I.22). Skelton refers to his own play
Magnificence: “A myrrour incleryd [made clear] is this interlude, /
This life inconstant for to behold and see” (2524-25). Marlowe invites
his audience to “View but his picture in this tragic glass”(1
Tamburlaine the Great, Prologue, 7). Hamlet’s speech on acting is
justly famous: the end of playing is “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to
nature; to show virtue her feature, scorn her won image, and the very
age and body of the time his form and pressure” (III.2.21-24). Shortly
after Don Quixote likens a play to a mirror (II.12), he encounters the
Knight of the Mirrors, sent by his friends to defeat him and bring him
home (II.15). The mirror became a common analogue in neoclassic
aesthetic theory, according to which art imitates reality, but even after
the Romantic analogue lamp or fountain took hold, the mirror could
still be invoked (with a difference); says Shelley: “A story of
particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which
should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that
which is distorted” (Defence of Poetry). With the advent of realism the
mirror again assumed a central role: says Stendhal: “a novel is a
mirror being carried down a highway. Sometimes it reflects the azure
heavens to your view; sometimes, the slime in the puddles along the
road” (The Red and the Black).
Many romances and fairy tales have magic mirrors. Spenser’s
Merlin has a “looking glass, right wondrously aguiz’d [fashioned],”
which could show everything in the world (Faerie Queene, III.2.180);
Britomart’s adventure begins when she sees Artegall in “Venus’
looking glass” (III.1.8). The mirror of Snow White’s stepmother is
both a means of magic and a mundane tool of vanity. Lewis Carroll’s
Alice begins a tale by stepping Through the Looking-Glass. Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray is about a portrait as “the most magical of
mirrors” (Chapter 8): it reveals the inner degradation of its subject.
30
The mirror as a literary symbol, cliché, metaphor and theme is
the subject of my recent book titled The Eye Sees Not Itself but by
Reflection: A Study in Shakespeare’s “Catoptrics” And Other Essays.
ROSE
There were several varieties of rose in the ancient world, as
there are hundreds in the modern, but the rose in poetry has always
been red (or “rose”) in colour, unless otherwise described. “Red as a
rose” is the prime poetic cliché, and poets have used every other term
for red to describe it, such as Shakespeare’s “deep vermilion” (Sonnet
98) or the “crimson joy” of Blake’s “Sick Rose”. The rose blooms in
the spring, and does not bloom long; the contrast is striking between
its youth in the bud and its full-blown maturity, and again between
both these phases and its final scattering of petals on the ground, all in
the course of a week or two. It is rich in perfume, which seems to
emanate from its dense and delicate folds of petals. It is vulnerable to
the canker-worm. And it grows on a plant with thorns. All these
features have entered into its range of symbolic uses.
The rose is “the graceful plant of the Muses,” according to the
Anacreontic Ode 55; indeed, Sappho had called the Muses themselves
“the roses of Pieria”. So it is only right that the rose has been the
favourite flower of poets since antiquity. The most beautiful poems, in
fact, were compared to the flower, as when Meleager praises some of
Sappho’s as roses (in “The Garland”), a metaphor in keeping with the
meaning of the word “anthology,” which is gathering of poetic
flowers.
Homer does not mention the rose (Greek rhodon), but his
favourite epithet for Dawn is “rosy-fingered” (rhododaktylos).
(Sappho also liked “rose” compounds, calling the moon “rosy-fingered”
and both Dawn and the Graces “rosy-armed”.) The Greek tragedians
do not mention the rose, either. But thereafter the rose comes into its
own: it is the flower of flowers, their glory, their queen, their
quintessence. In Achilles Tatius’ novel (II.1), Leucippe sings a song in
praise of the rose: “If Zeus had wished to give the flowers a king, he
would have named the rose, for it is the ornament of the world, the
glory of plants, the eye of flowers, the blush of the meadow… the
agent of Aphrodite.” Another Anacreontic poem (44) goes on in the
31
same vein: “Rose, best of flowers, / rose, darling of the spring, / rose,
delight of the gods,” and so on. Goethe theorized that the rose was the
highest form of flower. Cowper wrote: “Flowers by that name
promiscuously we call, / But one, the rose, the regent of them all”
(“Retirement”, 723-24).
Almost any flower can represent a girl, but the rose has
always stood for the most beautiful, the most beloved – in many
languages “Rose” remains a popular given name – and often for one
who is notably young, vulnerable, and virginal. Shakespeare’s Laertes,
when he sees his sister Ophelia in her madness, cries “O Rose of
May!” (Hamlet, IV.5.158), bringing out not only her uniqueness but
also the blighting of her brief life. Othello, on the verge of killing
Desdemona, thinks of her as a rose which he is about to pluck
(Othello, V.2.13-16); Orsino tells Viola, “women are as roses, whose
fair flower / Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour” (Twelfth
Night, II.4.38-39).
If red and white roses are distinguished, the red stands for
charity or Christian love, the white for virginity. The red rose can also
represent Christian martyrdom, red for the love martyrs showed and
for the blood they shed. Shelley, writing of atheist martyrs to Christian
bigotry, nonetheless preserves the image: “earth has seen / Love’s
brightest roses on the scaffold bloom” (Queen Mab, IX.176-77).
The rose had been the flower of Aphrodite (Venus) and
Dionysus (Bacchus). The Anacreontic Ode 44 begins, “Let us mix the
rose of the Loves [plural of Eros] with Dionysus [wine],” and a
connection between wine and roses was established that has lasted in
common phrases to this day. Horace describes rose petals scattered
about in a scene of love-making (I.5.1), and Propertius writes, “I am
glad that plenteous Bacchus enchains my mind, / And that I always
keep my head in venal roses” (III.5.21-22). The statue of Venus in
Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale wore “A rose garland, fresh and well
smelling” on her head (1961). The rose garden, or “bed of roses,” is
the traditional place of love, as in the medieval French allegorical
Romance of the Rose (where the lover’s goal is to pluck the rosebud),
in Walther von der Vogelweide’s medieval German poem “Under der
Linden,” or in Tennisyon’s Maud (I.22). So the transformation of the
rose into a symbol of Christian charity or chastity is a good example
32
of the cultural expropriation of pagan culture by the church. As
Spenser tells it, God planted the rose in Paradise and then replanted it
in earthly stock so women may wear it as symbol “Of chastity and
virtue virginal” (Faerie Queene, III.5.52-53; cf. “fresh flowering
Maidenhead” in the next stanza). While Adam and Eve slept (before
the Fall), according to Milton, “the flowery roof / Showered Roses,
which the Morn repaired” (Paradise Lost, IV.772-73).
A familiar proverb, repeated in many poems, is “Roses have
thorns” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 35) or “never the rose without the thorn”
(Herrick, “The Rose”). If you go about plucking roses, gentlemen, you
may get pricked. In his famous “Heidenröslein,” Goethe presents a
dialogue between a boy and a rose:
34
in The Rose and the stories in The Secret Rose: the first poem is
addressed “To the Rose upon the Rood [Cross] of Time”.
The rose is often associated with the lily, both to express a
contrast in colours and to symbolize two usually complementary
virtues, love and purity (or virginity): both flowers, of course, are
emblems of the Virgin Mary. Tennyson has “My rose of love for ever
gone, / My lily of truth and trust” (“The Ancient Sage”, 159-60).
Roses and violets are often joined as two flowers of love, both rich in
aroma; Keats strikingly assigns the rose to Madeline and the violet to
her lover, Porphyro (whose name means “purple”): “Into her dream he
melted, as the rose / Blendeth its odour with the violet” (The Eve of
St. Agnes, 320-21).
The phrase “under the rose”, more often used in the Latin sub
rosa, means “in secret” or “silently”. It was supposed to be a practice
in ancient Greece and Rome to swear a council to secrecy by placing a
rose overhead during its deliberations. Many council chambers in
Europe for that reason have roses sculpted into their ceilings.
36
*
The next subchapter is dedicated to the types of metrical feet,
types of rhymes and strophic patterns that contribute to the way in
which a poet establishes the overall mood of his poem. All these are
formal aspects pertaining to prosody.
The trochaic foot is made up of trochees (_/_). The trochee,
the reverse of the iamb is a two-syllable foot, the first of which is
stressed, as in the word “tender”. Lines of verse made up
predominantly of trochees are referred to as trochaic verse or
trochaics. Regular trochaic lines are quite rare in English,
Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (1855) being a celebrated example of
their extended use: “Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple…”
The iambic foot is made up of iambi (_ _/). The iamb, a foot
of two syllables, is the most important unit of English poetry. The
iamb has one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, as
in the word “beyond”. Lines of poetry made up predominantly of
iambs are referred to as iambics or as iambic verse. Its most important
form is the 10-syllable iambic pentameter, either rhymed (as in heroic
couplets, sonnets etc.) or unrhymed in blank verse: “Beyond the
utmost bound of human thought” (Tennyson).
The eight-syllable iambic tetrameter is another common
English line: “Come live with me, and be my love” (Marlowe).
The English iambic hexameter or six-stress line is usually
referred to as the alexandrine.
The dactylic foot is made up of dactyls ( _/_ _ ). The dactyl is
a metre associated with Latin poetry. The dactyl has one stressed
syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in the word
“carefully”. Dactylic hexameters were used in Greek and Latin epic
poetry, and in the elegiac distich, but dactylic verse is rare in English:
Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” uses it, as does
Thomas Hardy’s “The Voice”, which begins “Woman much missed,
how you call to me, call to me.”
One of the most beautiful illustrations of the dactylic foot is
probably John Lennon’s celebrated “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”,
often anthologized in collections of English verse:
37
Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and
marmalade sky,
Someone is calling you answer quite slowly a girl with
kaleidoscope eyes;
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green towering over your
head,
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone.
40
In the masculine rhyme the final syllable of the line is
accented, as in “Had we but world enough and time, / This coyness,
Lady, were no crime”.
The crossed rhyme has the effect of making the couplet sound
like a quatrain rhyming abab, as in Swinburne’s “Hymn to
Proserpine” (1866):
Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high
sea with rods?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all
ye Gods?
41
The rhyming couplets (aabb) were the favourite rhyme
throughout the Restoration (1660-1700) and the first half of the
eighteenth century. Andrew Marvell and Alexander Pope (in poetry)
and John Dryden (in drama) best illustrate this tendency. A suitable
prosodic pattern in poetry, the rhyming couplet does not work well in
drama, on the stage, where it turns the speech of characters into
artificial, bombastic language. That is why Dryden’s plays are no
longer played today, while Shakespeare’s plays, written in blank
verse, which imitates colloquial speech, are still widely staged.
45
The apostrophe is one of the conventions appropriate to the
ode and to the elegy. The poet’s invocation of a muse in epic poetry is
a special form of apostrophe.
50
TYPES OF POETRY
Allegory
An allegory is a narrative that has two meanings, one a literal
or surface meaning (the story itself) and one a metaphorical meaning
(the characters or actions or even the objects of which have a one-to-
one equivalence with those of the literal narrative). Or, it is a story or
visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind
its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory is
personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape – as
in public statues of Liberty or Justice. An allegory may be conceived
as a metaphor that is extended into a structured system.
Allegorical thinking permeated the Christian literature of the
Middle Ages, flourishing in the morality plays and in the dream
visions of Dante Alighieri and William Langland.
Ballad
Ballads are short folk songs that tell stories. The oldest
recorded ballad in the English language, called Judas, was written
down in a late thirteenth-century manuscript. The Celts and Anglo-
Saxon undoubtedly composed ballads but there is no record of these
early works.
Ballads were very popular throughout the Middle Ages. Many
first appeared in written form with the introduction of the printing
press in 1476. They flourished particularly strongly in Scotland from
51
the fifteenth century onward. They were printed on sheets of paper
about the size of a banknote. Pedlars sold the ballads in the streets
singing the songs so that anyone who did not know the melody could
learn it. Since the eighteenth century, educated poets outside the folk-
song tradition – notably Coleridge and Goethe – have written
imitations of the popular ballad’s form and style. Coleridge’s “The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) is a celebrated example.
Elegy
Until the seventeenth century the term “elegy” was used to
refer to any poem whose theme was solemn meditation. Since then, it
has been applied to poems in which the speaker laments the death of a
particular person (a friend or public figure) or the loss of something he
valued.
In Greek and Latin verse, the term referred to the metre of a
poem alternating dactylic hexameters and pentameters in couplets
known as elegiac distichs, not to its mood or content: love poems were
often included. John Donne, for example, applied the term to his
amorous and satirical poems in heroic couplets. But since Milton’s
“Lycidas” (1637), the term in English has denoted a lament, while the
adjective “elegiac” has come to refer to the mournful mood of such
poems. Two important English elegies that follow Milton in using
pastoral conventions are Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821) on
the death of Keats and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1867). This
tradition of the pastoral elegy, derived from Greek poems by
Theocritus and other Sicilian poets in the third and second centuries
BC, evolved a very elaborate series of conventions by which the dead
friend is represented as a shepherd mourned by the natural world:
pastoral elegies usually include many mythological figures such as the
nymphs who are supposed to have guarded the dead shepherd, and the
muses invoked by the elegist.
In a broader sense, an elegy may be a poem of melancholy
reflection upon life’s transience or its sorrows. In this respect, an
eighteenth-century example is Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
by Thomas Gray.
The elegiac stanza is a quatrain of iambic pentameters
rhyming ABAB, named after its use in Gray’s “Elegy”.
52
Epic
The epic is one of the earliest literary forms. It consists of a
long narrative in elevated style that deals with a great and serious
object. The works of Homer and Virgil provide the prototypes in
classical literature, while Beowulf and Milton’s Paradise Lost are
examples in English literature. Epics generally have the following
features:
9 The hero is a figure of great importance;
9 The setting of the poem is ample in scale;
9 The action involves superhuman deeds in battle or a long and
difficult journey;
9 The gods or supernatural beings take an interest or active part in
the action;
9 There are catalogues of some of the principal characters,
introduced in formal detail;
9 The narrator begins by stating his theme and invoking a muse;
9 The narrative starts in medias res, i.e. “in the middle of things”,
when the action is at a critical point.
Virgil and Milton wrote about the founder of a nation and the
human race itself (Aeneas and Adam) in “secondary” or literary epics
in imitation of the earlier “primary” or traditional epics of Homer,
whose Iliad and Odyssey, dating from the eighth century BC, are
derived from an oral tradition of recitation.
Epigram
An epigram (from the Greek for “inscription”) is a very short
poem which is condensed in content and polished in style. Epigrams
often have surprising or witty endings. Originally a form of
monumental inscription in ancient Greece, the epigram was developed
into a literary form by the poets of the Hellenistic age and by the
Roman poet Martial, whose epigrams were often obscenely insulting.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “On a Volunteer Singer” is an epigram:
Mock Epic
A mock heroic (or mock epic) poem imitates the elevated
style and conventions (invocations of the Gods, descriptions of
armour, battles, extended similes etc.) of the epic genre in dealing
with a frivolous or minor subject. The mock heroic has been widely
used to satirise social vices such as pretentiousness, hypocrisy,
superficiality, etc. The inappropriateness of the grandiose epic style
highlights the trivial and senseless nature of the writer’s target, as in
Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad.
Ode
An ode is an elaborately formal lyric poem, often in the form
of a lengthy ceremonious address to a person or an abstract entity,
serious in subject, usually exalted in style and varied or irregular in
metre. The first odes were written by the Greek poet Pindar in the fifth
century BC. There are, in fact, two different classical models: Pindar’s
Greek choral odes devoted to public praise of athletes, and Horace’s
more privately reflective odes in Latin. A version of the ode which
imitated the Pindaric ode in style and matter but simplified the stanza
pattern became very popular in seventeenth-century England.
Abraham Cowley’s “Pindarique Odes” (1656) introduced the fashion
of this type of looser irregular ode with varying lengths of strophes.
The Romantic poets at the end of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth century wrote some of their finest verses
in the form of odes, for example John Keats and Percy Bysshe
Shelley. Odes in which the same form of stanza is repeated regularly
are called Horatian odes. In English these include the celebrated odes
of John Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale”.
The popularity of the ode continued while the classics formed the
basis of English education. By the middle of the Victorian period,
however, it was considered old-fashioned and had fallen out of use.
54
Pastoral
Pastoral poetry is a highly conventional mode of writing, an
ancient literary form which deals with the lives of shepherds, and the
idyllic aspects of the rural life in general, and typically draws a
contrast between the innocence of a simple life and the corruption of
city and especially court life. Pastoral literature describes the loves
and sorrows of shepherds, usually in an idealized Golden Age of rustic
innocence and idleness. It is an elaborately artificial cult of simplicity
and virtuous frugality. Pastorals were first written by the Greek poet
Theocritus in the third century BC. He wrote for an urban readership
in Alexandria about the shepherds in his native Sicily. His most
influential follower, the Roman poet Virgil, wrote eclogues set in the
imagined tranquillity of Arcadia. Edmund Spenser’s Shepherd’s
Calendar (1579) introduced the pastoral into English literature and
throughout the Renaissance it was a very popular poetic style. In later
centuries there was a reaction against the artificiality of the genre and
it fell out of favour. Critics now use the term “pastoral” to refer to any
work in which the main character withdraws from ordinary life to a
place close to nature where he can gain a new perspective on life.
Romance
The romance is a form of narrative poetry which developed in
the twelfth century in France. It relates improbable adventures of
idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting; or, more
generally, it shows a tendency in fiction opposite to that of realism. It is,
hence, characterized by the fanciful, often idealistic treatment of subject
matter. The word “romance” refers to the French language which evolved
from Latin or “Roman”. The plot of these poems usually centres on a
single knight who fights at tournaments, slays dragons and undergoes a
series of adventures in order to win the heart of his heroine. Romances
introduced and concentrated on the idea of courtly love according to
which the lover idealizes and idolizes his beloved, who is usually another
man’s wife (marriage among the medieval nobility was usually for
economic or political reasons). The lover suffers agonies for his heroine
but remains devoted to her and shows his love by adhering to a rigorous
code of behaviour both in battles and in his courtly conduct. The
Arthurian stories are typical illustrations of the romance.
55
Satire
The satire is a mode of writing that exposes the failings of
individuals, institutions, and society to ridicule and scorn. It deals with
external objects and facts. It cannot ridicule a state of mind, a feeling, but
something that is obvious, palpable, such as one’s behaviour or deeds;
hence, the aim of the satire is to reform, to contribute to the elimination of
a particular vice. The satirist has to exaggerate, to distort, to reduce to the
absurd his demonstrations for proving in an irrefutable manner what he
wants. The tone of the satire may vary from tolerant amusement (Horace)
to bitter indignation (Juvenal). The modes of Roman satire, especially the
verse satires of Horace and Juvenal, inspired some important imitations
by Boileau, Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Chaucer and Byron are also
worth mentioning among the greatest English satirists.
Sonnet
The term sonnet comes from the Italian word “sonetto”, which
means “little song or sound”. In a sonnet a poet expresses his thoughts
and feelings in fourteen lines. The sonnet originated in Italy, where it
was popularised by the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch. In the Italian
or Petrarchan sonnet the first eight lines – the octave – introduce the
subject while the last six lines – the sestet – provides a comment and
express the personal feelings of the poet. The rhyming scheme is
usually ABBA-ABBA-CDC-CDC.
The English sonnet (also called the Shakespearean sonnet
after its most famous practitioner) comprises three quatrains and a
final couplet rhyming ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG.
As a major form of love poetry, the sonnet came to be adopted
in Spain, France and England in the sixteenth century and in Germany
in the seventeenth century. The standard subject-matter of early
sonnets was the torments of sexual love (usually within a courtly love
convention), but in the seventeenth century John Donne extended the
sonnet’s scope to religion, while Milton extended it to politics.
Although largely neglected in the eighteenth century, the sonnet was
revived in the nineteenth century by Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats.
The essential characteristic of most sonnets is the dynamic
interrelationship of their parts – the octave with the sestet or the three
quatrains with each other and the final couplet. According to the
supporters of New Criticism, with this interrelationship in mind, we see
that the sonnet can be a good index to a formalistic reading of poems.
56
HOW TO ANALYZE A POEM
58
– the familiar elements in the poem and explain why they seem
so (because of personal experience, through reading, or contact with
other arts).
– the unfamiliar elements (the novelty) and analyze if they seem
vivid or if they offer a lively imaginative experience.
65
Initiation: the Hero undergoes a series of excruciating ordeals in
passing from ignorance and immaturity to social and spiritual adulthood.
The initiation consists of three stages or phases: 1. separation;
2. transformation; 3. return. Like the Quest, this is a variation of the
Death-and-Rebirth archetype.
The Sacrificial Scapegoat: the Hero, with whom the welfare of
the tribe or nation is identified, must die in order to atone for the
people’s sins and restore the land to fruitfulness.
Northrop Frye has worked out a sophisticated theory of
archetypes: in addition to appearing as images and motifs, archetypes
may be found in even more complex combinations as genres or types
of literature which conform with the major phases of the seasonal
cycle. Those willing to learn more about the mythological approach to
literary analysis should consult Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and
Fables of Identity.
“Language itself writes literature” takes us to the formalistic
and structuralist approach to literature. The object of this type of
criticism is to find a key to the structure and meaning of the literary
work. It takes as granted the fact that such a work is an art form. As
such, it leaves aside extra-literary considerations such as biographical
and historical facts, sociological phenomena, etc. it proposes that we
should narrow our attention to what the literary work says, by first
considering how it is said.
The formalistic approach is usually associated with the rise of
the New Criticism in the 1930s and 1940s. John Crowe Ransome,
Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks are some of the
leading figures of this critical school. They all insisted upon a work’s
containing everything necessary for its interpretation. In other words,
they advocated the idea that a literary work is an autonomous, self-
sufficient microcosm, whose meaning can be reached without external
data. For them, a poem is, first of all, a structure of words. The
meaning must be sought in the poem, not outside it. In an analysis of
the work’s text, we should move from the smaller to the larger
elements that make it up (the words, phrases, sentences, stanzas).
A logical first step in explaining the literary work is to see what
the words actually mean in their full denotative (literal, dictionary
meaning) and connotative (suggestive) value. This is a very important
66
aspect, as many students tent to start “analyzing” a poem without
having a clear idea about the literal meaning(s) of each and every
word on the page.
Another important step is to pinpoint, to identify the words or
phrases that we take as a starting point for a further analysis. If we
succeed in identifying the key words in a poem, we can try to detect
the theme of the poem. The semantics of the key words will point to
the main theme(s). I have often warned my students about the dangers
of confusing the theme with the summary of a literary work. The
theme is by no means a paraphrase or summary, but a general, abstract
idea. I have already insisted of the importance of the grammatical
person in which a poem is composed. I shall next insist on the
importance of verbs and verbal categories. The verbs can provide us
with precious interpretive clues: they can express stasis or motion.
They can construct a static, frozen microcosm, or a vivid, lively,
kinesthetic chain of rapid events. Verbal tenses can help us to decide
whether a poem is past-oriented, present-oriented, or future-oriented.
We can thus decide whether the poem we analyze is a recollection of
past events (anamnesis), a presentation of immediate feelings and
emotions, or the anticipation of events to come (promnesis).
Another useful step, as we move from one level to another
(from vocabulary to morphology, and from morphology to syntax) is
to consider the structure of clauses and sentences. Elliptical clauses
construct a “world” (a form) that is different from that made up of,
say, complex sentences. They may suggest an immediacy of
perception, or fatigue, or dullness, and so on. Simple sentences may
point out an ordered way of thinking, coherence, preciseness, or lack
of sophistication. Complex sentences may point to a penchant for
sophistication, or philosophical thinking; or they may suggest mental
disturbance, a state of excitement, and so on. Coordination and
subordination are also telling clues. The neo-classical poets prefer the
nearly syllogistic, logical syntax of coordinated clauses, while the
Romantics opt for a more complex texture; Robert Browning is the
master of broken syntax, of aposiopesis, expressing hesitation,
wavering, unfinished thoughts, which helps us better understand the
psyche of his characters in his famous “dramatic monologues”. Back
to where we have started from, to the semantics of the text, we can
67
decide whether the poem is made up of abstract or concrete terms;
whether the adjectives can be linked to the various types of images
listed in a previous chapter; we can decide whether a certain type of
imagery is prevalent.
An empiric definition of poetry, one I came to work out with
my students during classes, after several textual analyses, could be
“the recollection of an important event usually retrieved in terms of
sensorial experience”. This definition, reached empirically,
unwittingly and ironically echoes William Wordsworth’s famous
definition of poetry as “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
originating from “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. This definition
fits past-oriented poems that abound in sensorial imagery. And it also
may give students a further hope that poetry can be, after all, defined
one way or another.
The New Critics claimed that the formalistic approach is a
democratic act in that it enables any single reader to work out a
personal interpretation of a given literary text. However, they also
insisted that the empiric reader should avoid being trapped by what
Monroe Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt termed the intentional fallacy
and the emotional fallacy. The former fallacy refers to what a gross
error it is to assume that “my” interpretation and the author’s
intention(s) overlap. It is a terrible mistake to start an interpretation by
stating “the poet wants to…”, or “it was the poet’s intention to…;”
hence, it is better to use introductory statements like “I think”, or “in
my opinion”. The latter fallacy refers to the fact that the emotions
arising in the reader of a literary work are not necessarily the emotions
the author intended to arise. Sometimes the author can be suspected of
irony as he can disguise his real feelings while manipulating the
emotions of his readership. Hence, we must not take at face value
every word in a text; we should rather be cautious and insist on the
ambiguity of certain words and phrases that may point to an author’s
ambivalent attitude.
Another empiric definition of poetry produced by me and my
students during a seminar reads: “Poetry, like science, is a means of
expressing, a universal truth. The main truth that concerns humanity is
the human condition: life and death; loss (at several levels, like loss of
identity, loss of hope, loss of youth, loss of the dear and the near)”.
68
It is generally acknowledged that a literary translator must be a
good interpreter in so far as all the subsequent commentaries of a
work rendered from a source language into a target language depend
on the translator’s interpretive efforts. The late Professor Leon
Leviţchi produced an impressive Handbook for the Translators of
English Literature (Îndrumar pentru traducătorii de literatură
engleză) some thirty years ago. This book is still in print and, as an
instrument, it is as useful as it was at the time of its first edition. I shall
briefly discuss Leon Leviţchi’s contribution to the question of textual
interpretation in this very chapter as Professor Leviţchi drew on some
of the ideas advanced by the New Critics.
For instance, the translator’s first step in evaluating a text to be
translated should be, as in the New Critics’ guidelines, the assessment
of denotation and connotation. Interpretation without literal translation
is impossible. Conversely, translation without interpretation is either
an impossible task or a poorly done job. The importance of
dictionaries must be emphasized over and over again. Denotation
refers to the meanings that the dictionaries ascribe to words.
Connotation is whatever is not mentioned about words in dictionaries,
it is what words suggest either to an individual or to a community.
“Morcov” in Romanian is described by dictionaries as an edible plant
with certain distinctive features of its own. This is the denotative level
of the word. But any student knows that the same word suggests
anxiety when one is faced with a difficult task, say, with an
examination. The English word “space shuttle” is defined by
dictionaries as a vehicle designed to carry humans to the outer space
and transport them on an orbit around planet Earth. But for very many
people, especially for Americans, the word contains the suggestion of
hazard, death, and disaster in the aftermath of the ill-fated end of the
space shuttles Challenger and Columbia.
Accentuation is another important aspect that a translator /
interpreter should treat with due attention. Some authors emphasize
the meaning of their text by introducing certain markers, as if to draw
our attention. They choose to use the emphatic “it”, the emphatic
“do”, inversions, exclamation marks, series of negations, or series of
antonyms, etc. Linguistic repetitions are, probably, the strongest
means of accentuation. Phonological repetitions (in the form of rhyme
69
or alliteration), lexical repetitions (which can be classified in various
subtypes), and syntactic repetitions do not occur accidentally; they are
part of what the New Critics label as how a form transmits its
meaning.
Modality, which has been defined as “the speaker’s / writer’s
attitude toward his utterance / the conveyed information” (Bally,
Stubbs), is yet another important factor. We can try to detect whether
the prevalent modality in a text is volitive, intellective, or emotive.
However, we should bear in mind the New Critics’ warning about the
intentional and emotional fallacy.
Coherence is another aspect that ought to be taken into
consideration. Is an author’s style consistent throughout a text or not?
Does it succeed in conveying any meaning at all? How do we cope
with oxymoronic phrases? Are they stylistic lapses or deliberate
tricks? Shakespeare’s Bottom roars “like a nightingale” in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream; Shelley coins the phrase “swiftly walks”,
although “to walk” does not contain the idea of speed in itself, and
Eminescu uses a noun in the genitive instead of a noun in the
accusative, to announce that you can see a “silver forest”.
When any of the aforementioned aspects (denotation,
connotation, accentuation, modality, and coherence) prevails, we can
refer to it as the stylistic dominant of the respective text. Style is thus
essential in discussing the form of the literary work. It is the result of
the way in which all previously discussed layers of language combine
to produce a meaningful text.
*
Next, I shall try to stimulate our students’ individual, personal
approach to literary texts by reminding them, in passing, how
fashionable the reader-response approach has become in the past few
decades. Literature has been perceived more and more as the result of
interaction between the text (a set of signs waiting to be decoded, a set
of signs originally produced by a missing author) and the reader, a
person with his / her own psyche, emotions, outlook, experience of
life, etc.) Hence, it is no longer the author that matters but the reader.
The author is dead or absent, and his survival depends solely on his
readership. A text with no reader is a dead text. It is the reader that
70
resuscitates the text, brings it back to life and ascribes it a meaning.
Every new generation enriches an old text with new meanings: the text
becomes the product of the interaction between the initial author and
the successive generations of readers, who, while re-reading it, also re-
write it.
In the process of re-reading the text, the reader preserves his
anonymity. The author of the text he interprets is not likely to learn
about his interpretation. The author, more often than not, is also an
anonymous person, who writes for unknown readers. He cannot know
or predict who will read his work, or what his readers will think of the
respective work.
And, perhaps, the best way to stimulate my future
undergraduates attending the course on English poetry up to 1830 is to
provide some examples of textual interpretation by graduates who
once were in their shoes. I shall quote below the full text of Selima
Hill’s poem “My First Bra” and the way in which several former
undergraduates responded to it. As Selima Hill is a present-day
contemporary British poet who has not yet become canonical and is not
included in any syllabus, it is clear that the interpretations below were not
downloaded from the Internet. Moreover, these interpretations were given
during a written examination, as a first-hand response to a previously
unknown text. Here is the text of the poem:
A big brown bear
is knocking at the door:
he wants to borrow a dress
and matching knickers.
The smell of lilac
smothers me like wool;
beyond the lawns
I hear my naked sister
crying in the nettles
where I threw her:
nobody else is having
my first bra.
71
Student A wrote the following commentary:
“I think that the first poem breathes an overwhelming personal
need of possession coming from a sense of frustration. The woman is
not willing to respond to the others’ requests anymore, or to share
personal experiences, material or moral values. In fact, those she
stands up against are men ready to grab whatever she has agreed to
give to only one of them, and the image of that bra that she used to
wear is the starting point of her awareness. Therefore, she finally
understands that her past belongs to her alone, and the bra becomes
the symbol of a feeling of comfort, self-confidence, and certainty. The
smell of lilac (an olfactory image) brings back memories connected
with her first experience as an adult woman. The present depends on
her very attitude, on how determined she is, and on how confident in
her actions she can be. Written in the first person, the poem takes the
form of a confession made in a metaphorical manner. The last two
lines, having the function of a conclusion, are the expression of her
self-confidence. She has already reached a point in which she can
freely cry out her self-determination, without any guilty feeling.”
Compare the previous commentary with student B’s interpretation:
“The poem is about a woman’s first encounter with her
sexuality and about this period in her life presented as a memory. The
way in which the woman remembers that period is filled with images
of a lost childhood, like the big brown bear, the smell of lilac. These
images are mixed with the woman’s discovery of sex, symbolized by
the bear asking to borrow a dress and matching knickers. Here the
word ‘matching’ has a strong value because it represents a sort of
boundary between childhood and adolescence. She stops being
indifferent about the way in which she dresses. The fact that the bear
is her own impersonation as a child comes to sustain that same idea.
The third stanza clears the mystery of the first two and it gives a clue
about the time, the moment when the transformation from childhood
to adolescence took place. ‘The smell of the lilac’ is the key to
unravelling the mystery. The lilac blooms in spring. Here is a subtle
comparison between the blooming of nature in spring and a girl’s
becoming a woman. The next line is very suggestive because it
probably represents the feelings, transformed in memories, which the
adolescent back then must have experienced. She may have not felt
72
comfortable or proud of her sexuality, and the comparison with wool
and the sensation of smothering are very eloquent in this respect.
The fourth and fifth stanzas give us more clues about that
period in the girl’s life. The woman no longer looks into the past as a
child but already as a grown-up frustrated by her memories. The
‘lawns’ represent the vastness of her memories, and her ‘naked sister’
is herself as she stood and watched her naked body only to discover
her first signs of sexuality. The fact that she cries is a proof that she
did not accept that part of herself, while the nettles are the feelings she
experienced at that time. The last two lines are a return and kind of
waking up after recollecting the unpleasant memories. The woman
states her uniqueness and her pride of having passed over the most
difficult period of a woman’s life. The poem impressed me, indeed,
because it is very vivid and intense with feeling.”
Student C wrote in a similar vein:
“In my opinion, My First Bra is a poem about passing from
childhood to adolescence and puberty. The girl is trying to find her
identity, to discover her sexuality. She is now somewhere in between,
neither a girl, nor yet a woman. I would say she is becoming a woman.
The big brown bear knocking at the door represents her childhood, her
being a little girl, while the dress and the matching knickers are the
symbols of her becoming a woman that is interested in fashion, in
being smart. But matching the dress with the knickers proves that she
lacks the skill of a lady in matching clothes. She is still a little girl,
who thinks there’s no problem in wearing a dress and knickers at the
same time. In fact, at a second reading I draw the conclusion that she
is playing and the bear is her playmate: she wants the bear to wear
those clothes. I think the girl wants to turn into a lady. This is a
regular game played by little girls. They wear their mothers’ clothes
and shoes, and use their perfumes. The smell of lilac is the smell of a
perfume with lilac fragrance. In order to be a real lady, the girl uses
perfume, but she is not used to the fragrance, so that she feels it
smothers her. The fourth stanza takes us to the present. The adult
woman is now thinking about her childhood years. I think that ‘I hear
my naked sister / crying in the nettles where I threw her’ refers to the
girl she used to be. It is a recollection of those years when she was
73
searching for sexual identity. The bra is a new episode in her life, the
first step in her sexual development (…).”
Student D wrote:
“The first four lines illustrate a sort of fairy-tale, in which the
main character is a ‘big brown bear’. The lines are epic, showing the
desire of a bear ‘to borrow a dress / and matching knickers’. The other
four stanzas are lyrical, and this aspect can be deduced not only from
the meaning of the lines, but also from the fact that the poet marked
this distinction by inserting a full stop. In these lines the speaking ‘I’
is included, with its variants ‘me’ and ‘my’. The elements used here
are taken from nature: ‘the lilac’, ‘the lawns’, ‘the nettles’. Even if the
lilac is the symbol of purity and beauty, the poet associates it with the
suffocating wool. These two elements, ‘the lilac’ and ‘the wool’ have
an opposite meaning, because the former is a spring flower, while the
latter is an element that strongly suggests winter. The girl’s sister has
to pay for having taken away her ‘first bra’. Using the negative
pronoun at the beginning of the last stanza, the poet underlines the
importance it has for her heroine.”
And here is student E’s interpretation:
“The central idea of this poem is the process in which a girl
becomes a woman. The ‘door’ is the door opening to adulthood. The
girl is coming out of the tomboy stage (she is playing with the bear)
and seems to be anxious to become a woman (she dresses her bear
with matching clothes as an elegant, fashion-conscious woman). The
personification of the bear makes me think that she has already started
to have some interest in love and the opposite sex. The olfactory,
tactile, and visual images reflect the strong feelings which disturb her
to the point of making her throw her little sister outdoors; the little
sister (maybe an infant, as she is naked) is seen as a menace to her, as
a future rival for capturing the boys’ attention. Childhood is seen as a
hard period (‘the nettles’) and, in contrast with it, adulthood appears to
be very attractive and promising (‘lawns’). However, the adult woman
is jealous of this past moment of her first bra, which still reminds her
of her childhood.”
Student F voices a similar interpretation of the poem as a
metaphor for the transition from one phase of life to another in a
female character’s biography:
74
“The poem is about adolescence. It describes the transformation
of one’s ‘little sister’ into a young woman. The verbs are in the
present tense. They express an action that is taking place at present –
the transformation of the girl is continuous. The ‘big brown bear’ is a
symbol for adolescence. Adolescence is the age when the little girl
becomes aware of the way she looks and is conscious that she must
look pretty. So, ‘borrowing a dress and matching knickers’ (probably
from her elder sister) is another symbol for this period in a girl’s life.
The ‘nettles’ may express the unknown world of womanhood. The girl
is thrown into the unknown but she is protected by her elder sister
even if she does not know it.”
These specimens of first-hand response are partly immature;
sometimes they betray their authors’ incoherence or imperfect
command of the English language; and yet all these students managed
to detect, basically, the same theme: the transition from girlhood to
womanhood. These examples of interpretation prove the validity of
the New Critics’ axiom according to which a structure of words can
convey meaning in a rather precise way. “Rather” leaves room for
differences. The overall result of interpretation may be identical with
several readers, but each reader is allowed, even entitled, to reach his /
her personal conclusion by taking a different path. As we have seen
there are many variations in the ways in which the students identified
the key words, referred to them as symbols or metaphors, and, finally,
decoded their denotative and connotative values. Some students chose
to capitalize on the prosodic structure of the poem (the function of
stanzas), on the grammatical function of words (verbal tenses,
negative pronouns, first person pronouns), on the types of images used
by the author. We can easily notice that there are obvious variations in
the symbolic meanings ascribed to some of the key words; in fact,
each student re-constructed a different story, with different
relationships among the participants in that story. These variable
results substantiate the validity of Umberto Eco’s theory of opera
aperta: a literary work is an open structure liable to numberless
interpretations. To put it bluntly, each new reader of a work enriches
its meaning with his / her personal interpretive contribution.
Interpretations can even contradict one another, as in Shakespearean
criticism, where all of the Bard’s texts are sites of struggle among
75
competing literary and ideological interpretations. Selima Hill’s poem did
not produce opposite interpretations among my students as regards the
identification of its theme. But each student had the opportunity to
interact with the text in the absence of the author, relying just on their
theoretical instruments, personal experience, and, above all, common
sense, and the results of their approach turned out to be quite satisfactory.
I shall quote one more interpretation, by student G, who chose a
nearly Freudian approach, insisting, like Freud, on the importance of
sexuality in an individual’s life:
“My First Bra is the poem of a girl entering the adolescence
years. The ‘big brown bear’ is the pubic hair; she associates the hair
with a bear because in the beginning, in that area, there wasn’t any
kind of hair, and now the place is invaded by it. She wants to hide the
hair under ‘a dress and matching knickers’, because now she is a
teenager and she can look more attractive in the boys’ eyes. She starts
to use perfume that smells like lilac, and she uses a lot of it to make
herself remarked. She has bought her first bra and her little sister
wants to try it on. Angry with her sister, she throws her in the nettles.
She is desperately trying to look older and more beautiful. She thinks
that the bra, her first bra will take her out of childhood and introduce
her to adolescence.”
A, B, C, D, E, F, and G are, in real life, my graduate students
Tatiana Blaj, Ioana Alexandra Vasile, Andreea Ioana Racariu, Daniela
Zariosu-Voinea, Valentina Dumitru-Iacono, Suzana Dumitrescu, and
Tatiana Nicoleta Gratie, and I am grateful to them for their unwitting
contribution to this course in English poetry.
76
PART TWO
77
78
ANGLO-SAXON POETRY
*
In 410 A. D. the Romans finally withdrew from England. 449
A.D. is the year in which the first Germanic warriors led by the hero
Hengest settled down in England. They had been initially asked by the
Britons to come and help them in their fight against the invading Scots
and Picts who kept attacking them from the North. The Angles, the
Saxons and the Jutes founded Saxon, Anglian and Jutish small
kingdoms. Their language was essentially the same. They all
considered themselves part of “Germania” and they had a common set
of heroes. The most sophisticated European culture during the nine
centuries separating the decline and fall of the Roman Empire from
the birth of the Renaissance was that of the Anglo-Saxons.
Half of the words used in spoken English are Anglo-Saxon in
origin; it was the Anglo-Saxons who turned England into a land of
little villages. If the English are stoic, or nostalgic and disposed to
melancholy, or have a love of ritual implying a strong conservatism,
these are characteristics inherited from the Anglo-Saxons.
The migrating Germanic tribesmen brought with them a code
of values typical of a heroic society. Its axis was the bond between a
lord and his retainers and its stress was on the importance of physical
and moral courage, on the blood feud (corresponding to the Greek and
Latin lex talionis), and on loyalty. They were also possessed of an
acute sense of fate.
80
*
About 30,000 lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry have survived. The
fact that most of it is religious, ecclesiastical, and has been carefully
preserved is due to the flourishing Northumbrian monasteries of
Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Whitby, the very hub of the Christian world
(before the Danish invasions). Religious poetry consisted mainly of
translations of Books from the Bible.
On the other hand, very few scarcely preserved manuscripts of
heroic poems have survived. The Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry is close
in mood and purpose to its old Germanic and Scandinavian origin. It
belonged to a largely oral culture; it was recited by the scop, the
itinerant minstrel. This is proved by the use of stress and alliteration.
The blank verses were made up of long, irregular lines, each with at
least four stressed syllables and at least three alliterative syllables.
Michael Schmidt provides us with an excellent explanation of
how the scop fulfilled his artistic mission: “Poets of the seventh and
even of the eleventh century composed for recitation, not for the page.
Their job was to charm the ear and to keep it charmed, in some
instances for hours at a time. They strove for clarity and vividness of
sense. They accompanied themselves on musical instruments of
various levels of sophistication. The tools of their trade were not the
quill, the pen, the biro, nor did they compose on parchment, paper or
keyboard. They had memory and accompaniment and they unfolded
poems, by means of voice, on the attentive air. It was poetry’s purest
ecology. The poems were infinitely reusable, never quite the same
twice, because memory added and removed decoration. The audience
responded or lost interest at different points and thus collaborated in
the unique experience of recitation. The scop was revising every time
he re-opened his mouth.”
The heroic poems present a pagan world of superstitions, fears,
beliefs and ignorance, in which the runes have magic powers, while the
stones, the trees and the wells are held in veneration. Nature is generally
perceived as a hostile force. It is “a man’s world” in which only the
strongest and the fittest survive, a world allowing no room for women.
Widsith, consisting of 143 lines, dates from the late seventh or
early eighth century. It is the story of a scop, of a “far wanderer”. The
scop was a crucial member of a tribe or a society; he was its living
81
memory. His visits from one ruler to the other cover the whole
Germanic world and a list of rulers whose lifetimes extend over two
hundred years (hence their fictional character). Some heroes mentioned in
this poem also appear in Beowulf. They are Huns, Goths, Franks,
Burgundians, Danes, Swedes, Angles, Saxons, Langobards etc. This is
another proof that the heroes of the Anglo-Saxon poetry were not
regional or national, but common to all the Germanic world. Widsith is a
primitive combination of historical memories and heroic traditions, a
catalogue of rulers comparable with Homer’s catalogue in the Iliad.
The poem includes elements of epic and elegy. The kernel of
it may be a fourth century poem by a minstrel who visited the Gothic
court of Eomenric, who died in 375. To this a subsequent poet or
poets added later journeys and genealogies, giving the poem the shape
that was passes down to us. According to Michael Schmidt, “given the
cryptic, abbreviated quality of certain passages, it is tempting to
suggest that the poem represents a kind of prompt-text and that the
scop would have filled out the rather skeletal story as he performed”.
*
Beowulf was composed by an anonymous poet sometime
between 680 and 800. The reader is told in 3,182 lines about the rise
and fall of a hero, about the three fights against supernatural enemies
(a man-eating monster, his mother and a dragon). It is an epic poem
concerned with a main plot to which several digressions and allusions
are added. They are stories of murder and vengeance supposedly
known by the scop’s auditors, episodes in Germanic history and
legend (Beowulf is compared to the dragon-slayer Siegemund).
Although composed in England, the poem refers to the period
of Germanic history long before the Anglo-Saxon invasion.
The main theme of the poem is the celebration of a great
warrior’s deeds. Certain similarities with Homer’s Odyssey reside in
the delineation of human characters. The old king Hrothgar, the young
hero Wiglaf and Beowulf himself are the three protagonists and the
three representatives of different generations who embody and
proclaim a pronounced and coherent set of values. In their actions and
words, they repeatedly express a belief in the importance of generosity
of spirit and a self-awareness that makes them responsible members of
82
the society to which they belong. The generosity of the rulers and the
loyalty of the retainers, the solemn boasting of the warriors, the pride
in noble heredity, the thirst for fame through the achievement of deeds
of courage make up the world of the heroic age.
The mood and the atmosphere of the poem is varied,
combining moments of slow terror and suspense with elegy.
Underlying the poet’s appetite for life is his acute sense of the
transitoriness of life: man’s days are numbered and it is a good name
that constitutes immortality on earth; the final lines approve of
Beowulf’s desire for worldly fame.
Few Christian elements such as God’s creation or Cain’s
murder of Abel seem to have been added later to a genuinely pagan text.
Cyclical in movement, unified by striking contrasts – youth
and old age, success and failure, bravery and cowardice – Beowulf
mingles dramatic speeches, battle action, elegiac evocation of place
and aphoristic comment in the greatest surviving masterpiece of the
Old English Literature.
There are several excellent translations of Beowulf into
modern English and a remarkable translation into Romanian by Leon
Leviţchi and Dan Duţescu. The most recent modern English
translation is by the Noble Prize laureate Seamus Heaney. Although
not very faithful to the original, Heaney’s version has rekindled the
British and American students’ interest in one of the ever greatest
European epic poems.
Another extant heroic poem, The Battle of Maldon, tells the
story of Byrhtnoth, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman who fought an army of
Danish invaders on the bank of the river Blackwater in 991. The poem
appears to be the work of a man who had firsthand information about
the battle, perhaps from a wounded survivor.
Before the battle begins, the poet offers a generalized view of
the two armies. Then, the poet’s eye fastens on Byrhtnoth and, after
his death, on a succession of individual Anglo-Saxon warriors. Some
of them take flight, while others seek to avenge their dead lord or die
in the attempt. This narrow concentration of heroic tragedy has been
often compared with the twelfth book of the Iliad. The poet
successfully achieves the detailed description of the words and efforts
of single protagonists.
83
The contrast between the muted landscape and the violent
action; the interplay between the cowardice of those who fled and
those who stayed; the energetic use of conventional motifs, such as the
need for men to take their boasts and stick to them (a tradition that is
also found in Beowulf), the brilliant use of direct speech all point to a
quite exceptional poet.
“The Battle of Brunanburh” describes the defeat of Anlaf, the
Norse king of Dublin, and Constantine, King of the Picts and Scots,
by Athelstan, King of England, and his brother Eadmund.
Conservative in both vocabulary and imagery, this poem is concerned
from first to last with king and country; it is one of the first Anglo-
Saxon texts imbued with vigorous nationalism.
*
The lyric mood in the Anglo-Saxon poetry is almost always
the elegiac. The six surviving so-called elegies are poems where the
topic itself is loss – loss of a lord, loss of a loved one, the loss of fine
buildings fallen into decay.
• “Deor (‘s Lament)” presents in 42 lines the complaint of a
scop who, after years of service to his lord, has lost his position, being
replaced by a rival. Allusions to four legendary events precede the
description of his own misfortunes. This is the only surviving Old
English poem composed in stanzas with a variable number of lines
and with a refrain (“That passed away, this also may”).
• “The Wanderer” is the lament of a solitary man, once happy
in the service of a loved lord, who now, after the death of his lord, has
lost his place in society and has become an outcast in exile, across the icy
sea. The wanderer’s best source of comfort lies within himself. Some
elements may suggest Christian consolation; it is hard to infer whether the
author was a pagan or a Christian poet. The main theme of the poem
might be related to the Latin ubi sunt or the favourite medieval “mais ou
sont les neiges d’antan?” to be later produced by Villon.
• “The Seafarer” was translated into modern English by Ezra
Pound. Some critics consider it to be a dialogue, a “for and against” debate
between an old sailor and an eager young man willing to take to the sea.
Others consider it to be the monologue of an old sailor who
mingles regret and self-pity while speaking about the loneliness and
84
hardships of a life at sea, of self-imposed exile, on the one hand, and
the fascination and rewards of such a life, on the other hand. Life at
sea is equated with the renunciation of worldly pleasures and with the
life dedicated to God. The transience of life is visible on the land, but
the seafarer – on his symbolic journey – is sailing to eternal bliss.
• “The Wife’s Lament” and “The Husband’s Message” are
devoid of sufficient frame of reference. One of the very few female
characters and speakers in an Anglo-Saxon poem, the wife of an
outlawed man complains about her being kept in an earth-cave, the
captive of her husband’s relatives. Unlike “TheWanderer”, she is
constrained to a single place, but like him her life and identity depend
upon a lord whose absence leaves her purposeless and friendless. The
second poem has a more optimistic tone, the exiled husband has
become a retainer in a foreign country and he hopes to get reunited
with his wife. They are among the very few love poems which
survived an age of severe religious censorship.
• “The Ruin” is the eighth-century poem describing the stone
buildings of a ruined city – the Roman Bath. The art of building in
stone was unknown in early Anglo-Saxon England and the ruins of
Roman towns and roads are referred to as “the work of giants”. The
poet is aware that everything man-made will perish. And yet, there is
no sense of loss, but rather of admiration and celebrations. It is
tempting to read “The Ruin” as anticipating Oliver Goldsmith’s
masterpiece, “The Deserted Village”.
The main stylistic devices of Old English poetry are:
– the lexical repetition;
– the syntactic parallelism;
– the alliteration;
– the kennings, the stereotypical concentrated metaphors: e.g.
life = a sea travel;
the world = moonlight;
the warrior = helm-bearer;
the ship = the sea-steed;
the sea = the swan-track; the ship’s road; the whale’s path.
The religious poetry produced by Northumbrian monks during
the seventh and eighth centuries consists of retellings of books and
episodes from the Old Testament and it often has a heroic emphasis.
85
Monks used these poems in the course of their missionary work:
therefore, it is no wonder that Satan was portrayed as an arrogant and
faithless retainer.
This period of the Old English Poetry is called “Caedmonian”
after Caedmon, a cowherd at the monastery of Whitby, who wrote
religious songs in Anglo-Saxon. None are extant, but they are
described by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, which contains the
Latin version of Caedmon’s first work, a hymn. Caedmon was the
very first to apply the Germanic heroic poetic discipline of
vocabulary, style, and general technique to Christian matter and story.
Thus, he preserved for Christian art the great verbal inheritance of
Germanic culture.
Bede (673-735), better known as the Venerable Bede, studied,
taught and wrote at the monastery of Jarrow. He wrote himself in
Latin, but one epigrammatic poem in the vernacular, “Bede’s Death
Song”, is also attributed to him. It reads as follows:
Before he leaves on his fated journey
No man will be so wise that he need not
Reflect while time still remains
Whether his soul will win delight
Or darkness after his death-day.
The second phase of Old English Christian poetry is the
product of early ninth-century Mercia. The anonymous author of “The
Dream of the Rood” presents Christ in Germanic heroic terms as the
leader of a warrior band; the Cross is one of His followers and the
dreamer. Much of the drama of the first part of the poem derives from
the paradox that, in order to be loyal to its Lord, the Cross has to be
disloyal and, in fact, to crucify Christ.
The tone of the second part of the poem is homiletic. At the
end the dreamer speaks of his own life and aspiration. The whole
poem is a remarkable fusion of old and new. In its use of the dream
vision, so much favoured by medieval poets, and in its prosopopeia
(i.e. putting words into the mouth of an inanimate object) it stands
alone in Old English poetry, as a work of great originality and passion.
86
*
Although much the most charming poems in the canon of Old
English literature, the ninety-six riddles preserved in the Exeter Book
are rarely mentioned by literary historians. The whole body of Old
English literature is packed out with mini-riddles, the condensed
metaphors known as kennings and already referred to earlier in this
lecture. The riddles vary enormously in subject matter and tone. Some
are concerned with instruments of war, such as sword and shield and
bow and helmet. Others describe ideas and objects associated with the
Christian faith (e.g. Creation and Soul and Body).
What the riddles reflect above all, though, are not aspects either
of the Germanic heroic world or of the Christian faith but simply the
everyday life of the working man; they describe household objects, man’s
artefacts, natural phenomena, animal life. A few of the riddles are witty
and obscene double entendres; their sense of humour is something not to
be found anywhere else in Old English literature. Here is an example of a
riddle displaying all the subtlety of a Japanese haiku:
On the way a miracle: water become bone.
*
The importance of Anglo-Saxon poetry in the history of
English literature has been emphasized over and over again. In the
early twentieth century, A. R. Waller still considered the year 657
(when Caedmon is thought to have composed his mystic poem known
as “Caedmon’s Hymn”) the beginning of English poetry: “And from
those days to our own, in spite of periods of decadence, of apparent
death, of great superficial change, the chief constituents of English
literature – a reflective spirit, attachment to nature, a certain
carelessness of ‘art’, love of home and country and an ever-present
consciousness that there are things worth more than death – these
have, in the main, continued unaltered.” Waller’s view was endorsed
by Stanley Greenfield in the second half of the twentieth century:
“Microcosm and macrocosm, ubi sunt, consolation, Trinitarianism –
these are but some of the ideas and motifs that Old English literature
shares with the works of later writers like Donne, Arnold, Tennyson,
and Milton.” Even if these assertions are seemingly far-fetched, the
value of Anglo-Saxon poetry is hard to deny.
87
MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE
*
The popular ballads are another kind of anonymous poetry
which was to have a great effect on English writing centuries later.
The ballads flourish in the fourteenth century England, but the extant
texts were preserved in manuscripts or printed texts dating from the
sixteenth century.
The word “ballad” seems to be derived from the Latin
“ballare”, i.e. “to dance”. Towards the end of the Roman Empire the
songs known as “ballistes” were in fashion; the Italian poetry of the
twelfth century brought forth the “ballata” and the French borrowed it
as “balade”; originally, these poems had a lyrical character.
The ballads are orally transmitted narrative poems which are
not made and sung for the people, but made and sung by the people
(i.e. collective authorship is implied).
Two facts cannot be established for sure:
a) one is the “original” version of a ballad;
b) the other is the date when a ballad was composed.
Michael Schmidt explains that ballads were originally a
minstrel’s job, working to a lord (“minstrel” meaning “a dependent”).
In Piers Plowman one monk knows the ballads and rhymes better than
his pater noster. Monasteries, for a fee, provided minstrels with fresh
or reheated songs and stories, and themselves used them for holy days.
Some abbeys and monasteries supported a resident minstrel. Welsh
abbeys occasionally sustained a Welsh-language bard and were
repositories for the poetry of the Britons. But as the times grew harder
minstrels were fired by employers, or grew bored with the court or
90
monastery, or were set loose by military defeat (especially in Scotland
and the North). The dissemination of printing dealt them a final blow.
Strolling minstrels disappear in Elizabeth’s reign, arrested as
vagabonds or displaced by the circulation of “town literature”. For two
centuries after Shakespeare’s death, broadsheet ballads were a
profitable venture for printers.
As a rule, the popular ballad appeared after the end of the
great migrations on the European continent; it belongs to a settled
group and it deals with the affairs of that group.
Here are the characteristic features of the English popular
ballads:
– they have a narrative kernel;
– they present a dramatic story;
– they display simplicity of vocabulary and grammar;
– they are written in iambic meter;
– their “ideal” pattern is the 8/6/8/6 quatrain later employed
by Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, Oscar Wilde, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Rudyard Kipling, John Lennon and many more;
– the events described in the ballads have a local character;
– they rarely tell a story from beginning to end – they take us
immediately into the story and often open when narrative has turned
towards its catastrophe or resolution, hence we know little of the
events leading up to the climax;
– description is brief and conventional and very little
information is given about the characters;
– the narrative is impersonal – the narrator tells the story
without expressing his personal attitudes or feelings, which means that
there is no moral comment on the characters’ behaviour, and the
motives behind their actions are largely unexplained;
– nature is only mentioned as an external background (unlike
in the Romanian popular ballads);
– the early ballads have a refrain (burden), i.e. a repeated line
or half-line;
– the rhythm of the narrative is either (a) lingering, i.e. slow,
insisting on significant details and resorting to repetitions, or (b)
leaping, i.e. avoiding details and resorting to an abrupt manner of
story-telling;
91
– repetitions, interior rhyme and syntactic parallelism are
specific devices;
– sometimes several ballads were turned into a coherent
whole, in an epic poem such as The Gest of Robin Hood.
Literary historians have produced several possible classifications
of the popular ballads. Here is Furnivall’s classification:
a) ballads of domestic relations;
b) ballads of superstition;
c) humorous ballads;
d) ballads of love and death;
e) historical ballads;
f) ballads of outlawry.
David Daiches proposes the following taxonomy:
a) themes derived from romances;
b)popular class heroes;
c) historical events;
d) domestic tragedy;
e) themes common to international folk song (such a theme
closer to our culture is the theme of immuring, recurrent in Romanian,
Hungarian, Bulgarian, Greek and Serbo-Croatian folklore).
Robert Graves stresses the pagan witchiness of surviving
ballads, and he classifies them under four heads:
a) festival songs;
b) songs to lighten repetitive tasks: spinning, weaving,
grinding corn, hoeing, etc; “occupational ballads”;
c) sea shanties (songs sung by sailors in the past);
d) entertainments to pass an evening.
Most recently, Michael Schmidt has advanced two more
categories of ballads: the ballads meant to keep in memory historical
events which, with the passage of time, are refined to legend, and the
savage and satirical ballads that avenge an ill or pillory a wrong-doer.
Scurrilous poems and satirical ballads may have led to the first law
against libels in 1275, under the title: “Against slanderous reports, or
tales to cause discord betwixt king and people”. Later satirists and
libellers managed to “publish” their poems to advantage, “although
they did not enjoy the many conveniences which modern
improvements have afforded for the circulation of public abuse”. One
92
poem, in the time of Henry IV, was stuck on the palace gates while the
King and his counsellors were sitting in Parliament. A few years earlier,
when Henry V returned after Agincourt, ballads celebrating his deeds
were pinned to the gates, but he discouraged this cult of personality.
• The Two Sisters is the story of a jealous girl who murders her
sister by drowning; the dead body is discovered by a miller who takes it
to the king’s harper; the latter strings his harp with the dead girl’s hair and
the song played in front of an audience reveals the murder.
• Tam Lin is a ballad of metamorphoses and witchcraft. The
hero is carried away, bewitched, and he is redeemed when the heroine,
following his instructions, holds him tight while he undergoes a series
of terrifying transformations. Similar changes occur during a fight
between Menelaus and Proteus in Homer’s Odyssey.
• Sweet William’s Ghost narrates the return of a dead lover
who forces his fiancée to follow him to the Realm of the Dead.
• King John and the Bishop is one of the few humorous ballads.
• Chevy Chase presents the border fight between Henry Percy
of Northumberland and Douglas the Scot. This episode was centuries
later described by Shakespeare in 1 Henry IV (I, 1).
• Thirty-six ballads were dedicated to the legendary figure of
Robin Hood. According to some sources he was a contemporary of
King Richard the Lion-Heart; according to others, Robert, Earl of
Huntingdon (d. 1247) was the real Robin.
The ballad-minstrel tradition thrived most and survived
longest in Scotland and the Borders. Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper”
is doing nothing less than warbling a ballad when the poet beholds her
single in the field.
93
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY (RICARDIAN) POETRY
WILLIAM LANGLAND
94
certainly a poeta doctus, and his poem is littered with scholastic
digressions and embellishments.
William Langland is the author of Piers Plowman, an
impressive “dream allegory” dealing with the religious, social and
economic problems of his time. Piers Plowman was one of the most
popular poems of its time. It survives in over forty manuscripts from
the fifteenth century. The work as a whole belongs to a religious
idealist genuinely distressed by the social and moral condition of
England. The author fights against corruption in the Church, against
false religion, criticizes the evils of his age, looking for solutions that
might lead to improvement.
The first (A) text of Piers Plowman seems to date from 1362,
a rather young man’s poem. Shortly afterwards Langland settled in
London, in Cornhill, with his wife Kitte and his daughter Calote. In
1376 the second (B) text was begun. It is generally held to be
poetically the best. The third (C) text, overlong and over-embellished,
was composed between 1392 and 1398. If all three texts are by the
same man, the poem was the work of a lifetime.
In Piers there is a poet – Lange Wille. If he took minor orders,
because he married, he failed to ascend in the church hierarchy. He
was poor, earning his keep by “saying prayers for people richer than
himself” and copying legal documents. The poem reveals his
knowledge of courts, lawyers and legal procedures. A proud man, he
is reluctant to defer to lords, ladies and other social superiors unless he
feels they merit deference. His “I” is strong and affirmative – one
might say “modern” in the way of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis –
as compared with Gower’s and Chaucer’s reticences.
The first reformer poet, he is visionary but not revolutionary.
Calmly, using allegory, he exposes corruptions in church, state and
society. He wants people to understand the causes of their suffering
and put things right, not to throw the hierarchies down.
Piers first appears, well into the poem, as a ploughman,
representing the common laity, then metamorphosing into a priest, and
finally into a Bishop with Saint Peter and his papal successors. He is
exemplary; his developing model of morality inspires love and
respect, and indicts those who fail to follow him.
95
Piers Plowman has four parts. First we witness the world of
human transactions and meet Piers. Debates and trials are enacted
involving, among others, Holy Church and Lady Meed, supported by
lesser allegorical figures, especially the Seven Deadly Sins.
The first part of the poem ends with a general decision to
make a pilgrimage to Saint Truth. Piers the Plowman offers to serve as
guide provided the pilgrims first help him to finish harrowing his
field. After a few further complications, the poet wakes up. In the
second part of the poem he reflects on his vision. Piers returns in the
third part, and the poem builds beyond its theological to its spiritual
climax, evoking God as man in the Incarnation, Crucifixion and
descent into Hell. The final part tells of Christ’s triumph over sin and
death, and our triumph through Him and his authority vested in Peter
(now Piers). The poem resolves not in triumph but in a determination
to seek the exalted Piers, after Holy Church has been besieged by
Anti-Christ.
Piers Plowman is an enlarged or extended proverb. Piers, the
honest yokel, gradually and imperceptibly grows into Do-well, Do-
better and Do-best; he becomes the symbol both of mankind and of
Christ. The poet-reader relationship is not that of preacher and
congregation so much as a conspiracy of author and audience, who are
exploring the nature of reality simultaneously and together. John
Trueman alias John Ball, executed in 1381 for his part in the Peasants’
Revolt, used a combination of Christian Utopianism, proverbial wisdom
and cryptic references to Piers Plowman in a letter to his followers.
Langland’s public tone belongs in the sermon tradition,
explaining the unfamiliar through the familiar. Chaucer has tales,
Gower has legends, Langland has homilies. It is all a question of
audience.
Verse form sets Langland apart from Chaucer and Gower. So
does his direct teaching. He draws on the everyday world but writes of
types, not characters. For him, more than for Chaucer, social conduct
is spiritual.
Though he uses a rich vocabulary drawn from every current
and archaic source, Langland does not avail himself of the
“improvements” of English. Rather than advance the language, he
deliberately makes it old, using the unrhymed alliterative verse of a
96
dying tradition. Yet he gives the impression of being often closer to
the daily speech of the people and popular priests of his time than
Gower is. And unlike Chaucer or Gower he does not write in the first
person. Langland creates an everyman for the men and women who
warmed to the Miracle and Mystery plays, pageantry and religious
festivals. He pursues general moral truth, not psychology, certainly not
the “bourgeois individualism” that begins in Chaucer. He addresses a
congregation of like-minded souls, not a single reader, certainly not an
assembled court. His poetic constituency is the people at large.
The verse accommodates numerous voices, from snatches of
the cries of street-vendors and exclamations of the poor to the honeyed
words of Lady Meed and the eloquence of moral lawyers. Despite its
seeming rusticity, Piers Plowman is in no sense crude. Like Gower,
Langland is a moralist who asks us to attend to his matter, not his
manner. He seeks to portray not only the world, but the truth; he is a
man speaking not to students and professors but to men.
JOHN GOWER
99
THE GAWAIN POET
100
moralizing embroideries. He knew the Bible, too. He was learned,
possibly a clerk, probably not a full member of the clergy.
The language of Pearl is easier to understand than that of
Gawain. It is much closer in sound and texture (though insistently
alliterative) to early Chaucer, but plainer and more assured in its faith
and its allusions; more complex in prosody and form than anything in
Gower, and more compelling in the feelings it evokes. Like Gawain, it
is a unique and uniquely beautiful work, but while Gawain tends to
epic and romance, Pearl is elegy and consoled lament.
Pearl is an elegy of 1,200 lines arranged in twelve-line
stanzas; it combines rhyme and alliteration. The poet also employs the
catchword (i.e. the first word in the first line of each new stanza is the
last word of the previous stanza). The central image is of a man who
has lost a priceless pearl in a garden. He falls asleep on the spot where
it vanished into a mound of earth. Within this allegorical figuration is
another – real – story. The poet laments the loss of a little girl who
died before she was two years old. Her name (the Middle French
Margarite, derived from the Latin margarita, i.e. pearl, the equivalent
of the Romanian mărgăritar) gives the title of the poem.
Falling asleep, the man has a vision of her, transformed into a
queen of Heaven. The lost daughter appears in the poet’s dream as a
shining maiden dressed in white with ornaments of pearl. She is in
New Jerusalem, in a land of great beauty, divided from her father by a
river. From there she teaches him the lessons of faith and patience,
and she lets him glimpse the Holy City. He wants to cross the river,
but she warns him that the time has not yet come for him to do this,
because the river can only be crossed in death. The girl preaches
salvation. She is one of many maidens and, eager to be with her, he
throws himself into the stream to swim across – and wakes, recumbent
on her grave. “My head upon that hill was laid…” Thus, a matter of
personal grief is turned into a religious poem. There is no mention
about the mother; this made certain critics wonder whether the lost
daughter was a love-child.
The poem is at once rooted in the Book of Revelation and in
The Romance of the Rose, an allegory and a genuine lament. The fact
that the beloved is a child rather than a woman removes the vexed
element of courtly eroticism. The clarity of purpose and the innocence
101
of the voice are unprecedented in English poetry. There is a sense of
true feeling, and in the unfolding theology a sense of deep and
consoling belief.
Sir Israel Gollancz a little but not entirely implausibly likens
the Gawain poet’s sensibility to Wordsworth’s. But Pearl is more
ambitious and perfect than any work that Wordsworth produced. Its
complexities, and Gawain’s, might suggest a closer affinity with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Gawain survives in one manuscript only. It is the last of four
untitled poems (the first three being the luminous romance which
editors have dubbed Pearl, followed by works they call Purity or
Cleanness and Patience), preserved in the British Museum and dating
from the late fourteenth century.
The story draws on Arthurian legend and folklore, the usual
mix of heroism, magic and daftness that characterizes the romances.
The poet’s tone and intention are hard to determine, it is hard not to
assume that the writer was sophisticated and good humoured and
perhaps gently parodic in his intentions.
In form, the poem combines complex alliterative unrhymed
lines with a little coda consisting of a short line (two to four syllables)
and a rhymed quatrain. It is misleading to call these irregular
components “stanzas”; “verse paragraphs” is closer to the form. In the
original manuscript, the paragraphs are not numbered. Divisions within
the poem are signalled by large blue initial letters, with red decorations.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a romance in verse
dedicated to King Arthur’s nephew, the embodiment of chivalrous
ideals. The general structure of a romance contains three moments in
the evolution of the plot: the quest (i.e. the initiation of the hero), the
test and the rite of passage (i.e. a major change in his life or status).
Gawain is the only hero of the Arthurian romances to become
the hero of a whole cycle of romances, eleven in all. The poem has
2,530 lines arranged in variable stanzas, combining long alliterative
lines and short rhyming ones. It has been named the jewel of English
romance and of medieval literature.
Like many medieval romances, Gawain begins by establishing
its legitimacy as a history, tracing its narrative back to Troy.
102
A two-paragraph preface reminds us of Troy’s fall, and the legends of
the diaspora of the heroes.
Here is an extended recount of the plot. Time passes, and
eventually in Brutus’ line come Arthur and his knights. The poem’s
action begins in the British King’s court. It is New Year. There is
dancing and mirth richly brought alive in a feast of descriptive
language. The king calls for a high, heroic tale to be told before he
will break bread. Suddenly, instead of a tale, a genuine adventure
begins: into the party bursts a Green Knight on a green horse, lavishly
described in the detail of his richly wrought costume and his features,
including his hair that falls to his shoulders, and his beard which “as a
bush over his breast hangs”. The Green Knight wears no helmet or
halberd, no armour or shield, but bears a bunch of holly in one hand
and a huge, hideous axe in the other.
He challenges the knights: one of them must deal the first
blow to him, on condition that, twelve months later, the knight who
accepts the challenge will seek out the Green Knight for a return
match, subjecting himself to a counter blow. Arthur’s knights are
understandably shocked, so the elderly Arthur, out of a sense of
honour, begins to accept the challenge. But Gawain, Arthur’s nephew,
the son of Loth, the youngest knight and a popular Arthurian hero,
proposes himself. The Green Knight does not flinch: Gawain chops
off his head which rolls away from the block. The Green Knight gets
to his feet, collects his head, tucks it under his arm and rides off,
reiterating the conditions of the challenge as he goes.
Gawain honours his pledge and sets out on his journey to the
Green Knight’s domain. On Christmas Eve, weary and depressed, he
prays for guidance from the Virgin and crosses himself three times. A
moated castle appears out of nowhere, among the trees. The parkland
is green; curiously, here the season is not winter. This is Bertilak de
Hautdesert’s castle, and Gawain is invited to stay for Christmas. He
meets the host’s beautiful young wife and the crone who is her
chaperone.
The celebrations last for three days, after which Gawain plans
to seek his foe, using Bertilak’s castle as his pied à terre. He and
Bertilak agree that, on each of the three days, while Bertilak goes
hunting, Gawain will pursue his own interest at the castle. When
103
Bertilak returns, he will give Gawain the day’s catch, and in return
Gawain will give him whatever he has managed to gather at home.
Bertilak goes on a wonderful hunt. Gawain stays abed and is visited
by the beautiful lady of the house, who tries to seduce him. They
exchange a kiss and compliments. In the evening Bertilak presents
Gawain with deer, and Gawain gives Bertilak a kiss. They repeat the
process the next day. Bertilak hunts for wild boar; Gawain gets two
kisses and gives them to his host in the evening. On the third day
Bertilak pursues a wily fox. Gawain is lured by the lady of the house.
She kisses him thrice but he remains chaste. She at last persuades him
at least to accept a token of her esteem, a green lace or garter, which
will help protect him from the Green Knight’s powers. That evening
Gawain fails to keep his part of the bargain with Bertilak. He gives his
host the three kisses but keeps the garter for himself.
The next morning he rides off to his rendezvous with magic in
the wilderness of the Cheshire Wirral, to the Green Chapel, a kind of
cave. The Green Knight materializes with his familiar blade. Gawain
prepares to take his blow and kneels down, but as the blade falls he
flinches and the Green Knight scorns his cowardice. A second time he
is steadfast as a rock, but now it is the Green Knight who misses his
mark. On the third attempt the Green Knight nicks him, but the wound
is neither deep nor threatening. Gawain has had enough, he has
honoured his part of he bargain with the Green Knight. Then the
Knight reveals himself as Bertilak in fancy dress. He knows all that
has occurred beneath his roof – he planned it all – and chides Gawain
for withholding the lace or garter (his punishment was the little
wound), but he praises him for having resisted the advances of the
lady in paraphrase: “I sent her to assay you, and truly I think you the
faultlessest fellow that ever walked upright; as pearls are than white
peas of price much more, so is Gawain, in good faith, than other gay
knights.” Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s crafty half-sister, contrived the trial
to test the hero’s nerve. Gawain goes home wearing what he regards
as the badge of his dishonour, the green girdle. He tells his story and
the delighted court of the Round Table undertake to wear a green
garter in honour of his adventure and success.
104
The three literal hunts (timid deer, wild and angry boar, and
wily fox) parallel the symbolic hunts (the Lady’s attempts on
Gawain’s virtue) which parallel the three attempts with the axe.
Its originality of form is superior to Langland’s and its
language richer than Gower’s. As the poet Basil Bunting says, the
Gawain poet is writing an English poem while the followers of
Chaucer and Gower were trying to write French poems in English.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Chaucer is the greatest English poet of medieval times and
one of the greatest English poets of all times. As a man, Chaucer knew
the ups and downs of life, he experienced both the joys and
disappointments of human existence. He led an active life. Compared
with Gower, Chaucer belonged to the wider world. He was born
around 1340 and survived for sixty years. He died as the century
turned, in 1400.
In his poetry Chaucer draws a funny figure of himself, a small
man, hooded, a little beard, eyes used to gazing to the side – the
portrait of an innocuous spy, one might say. Lydgate celebrates him in
his Life of the Virgin Mary as one who used to “ammend and correct the
wrong traces of my rude pen.” Kind and generous to his younger
contemporaries, he had foreign admirers, too. The historian Froissart
praised him as a diplomat. Eustache Deschamps wrote a laudatory ballad
to him as a translator. In the mid-sixteenth century Lilius Giraldus, the
eminent Italian humanist, recognized his accomplishments.
Chaucer’s colourful life is as captivating as his poetry. Here is
a somewhat abridged and adapted version of Chaucer’s biography
reconstructed by Michael Schmidt. Chaucer was born in London. His
father, John Chaucer, was citizen and vintner in London, himself son
of Robert le Chaucer who was collector of customs on wine. John
Chaucer served Lionel, son of Edward III, later Duke of Clarence.
Chaucer’s mother, Agnes, outlived John and in 1367 married again.
Well placed as the Chaucers were with regard to the court, they
remained a merchant family. Despite patronage, Geoffrey was never
assimilated into courtly life, nor did he – as Gower did – stand aloof
from the world. He was a man of affairs first and a poet after.
105
It is unlikely that he attended university, though he was a
member of the Inns of Court. As a young man, some report, he was
fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street. In
1357 he received a suit of livery as a member of Lionel’s household.
In his late teens – it was 1359 – he entered military service, was sent
to France and taken prisoner near Rennes or Reims. By March 1360
he was freed on payment of a ransom. Some believe that during his
captivity he translated part of The Romance of the Rose.
Philippa Chaucer, his wife, was awarded an annuity of
10 marks for life in 1366. She was born Roet, daughter of Sir Payn
Roet, a Hainault knight, and sister of the third wife of John of Gaunt.
This helps explain, if virtue is not enough, Gaunt’s long patronage of
the poet and Chaucer’s familiarity with Wycliffe, whom Gaunt
(fatefully) patronized as well.
The King gave Chaucer an annuity of 20 marks in 1367 as
dilectus valettus noster [our beloved valet] and by the end of 1368 he
was an esquire. Six years later he was granted a pitcher of wine per
day (commuted to a money gift). He rejoined the army, and in 1370
went abroad on public duty of some kind. He must have been
successful because other commissions followed. In 1372 he spent a
year away, part of it in Genoa, arranging the selection of an English
port for the Genoese trade. He went to Florence and perhaps to Padua.
Petrarch died in 1374, but it has been suggested that Chaucer was
introduced to him in Italy, at the wedding of Violante, daughter of the
Duke of Milan, with the Duke of Clarence and that it is not impossible
that Boccaccio was also at the party.
Back home, Chaucer leased Aldgate gatehouse; he was
prospering. Later in the year he was made controller of customs for
wools, skins and hides in the Port of London, with an extra £10
pension from John of Gaunt. How did he conduct his duties and
manage to write as well? In 1377 he was back on diplomatic business
in Flanders and France. He was in France once more when Edward III
died and Richard came to the throne in 1378, and then went to Italy,
on a mission to Bernabo Visconti.
The controllership of petty customs was added to his duties in
1384, and two years later he sat in Parliament as a knight of the shire
of Kent. He lived for a time in Kent, where around 1386 he began
106
planning The Canterbury Tales. Then the wheel of fortune began to
turn: during Gaunt’s absence in Spain the Duke of Gloucester rose,
Gaunt was eclipsed and Chaucer lost his controllership. In 1387,
Philippa died. The next year he assigned his pensions and property to
someone else, a sign of financial distress. Then in 1389 the Duke of
Gloucester fell, Gaunt was reinstated, and Chaucer became clerk of
works to the King for two years. He was also a commissioner
responsible for maintaining the banks of the Thames. He was rising
again but it was hard. In 1390 he fell among the same thieves twice in
a day and was robbed of public money, but excused from repaying it.
In that year and the next he held the forestership of North Petherton
Park, Somerset, and in 1394 his pension was refreshed by Richard II.
But he remained needy. His third royal patron, Henry IV, added forty
marks to the pension Richard had restored. Henry gave him a purple
robe trimmed with fur, and he felt secure enough to lease a house in
the garden of St Mary’s, Westminster, close by the palace. He enjoyed
it briefly. On 25 October 1400 he died and was buried in the Abbey, in
the chapel of St Benedict. Poets’ Corner came into being, with
Chaucer as cornerstone and first tenant.
Chaucer’s literary career has been conventionally divided into
three periods:
1. The French period includes the years in which the young
poet writes love poems imitating French models. He also endeavours
to produce an “augmented” translation of Roman de la Rose, which is
left unfinished.
The Book of the Duchess or The Death of Blanche (1369) is a
narrative poem written in the dream allegory convention. Composed
in octosyllables, the poem tells about the vision of the poet who meets
a black knight in the wood; the latter laments the death of his beautiful
lady.
2. The Italian period marked a great step forward in the poet’s
career. During his missions in Italy, Chaucer may have met Petrarch
and Boccaccio. From Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, Chaucer learnt
(a) the real vigour of poetical genius, (b) an exquisite sense of form
and (c) the art of story-telling.
• The House of Fame was written under the influence of
Divina Commedia.
107
Book I is a discussion on dreams; the poet finds himself in a
temple of glass; on its walls the story of Aeneas is engraved. “Then I
saw” is the leitmotiv of Book I, reminiscent of Dante’s cliché.
Book II tells how a golden eagle seizes the poet and bears him
to the House of Fame. The poet is a dull man who must learn what
love is and the self-important bird has a didactic tone.
Book III presents the House of Fame which is located on a
rock of clear ice. The place is furnished with the statues of Homer,
Statius, Virgil and Ovid. The Goddess of Fame grants her favour on a
crowd of petitioners begging for fame. Then, the poet is taken to the
house of Rumours. The conclusion of the poem is that Fame is as
important as Love.
Chaucer’s novelty in handling the conventional pattern of
allegory is his irony and self-irony.
• The Parliament of Fowls is a dream allegory written in a
seven-line stanza rhyming ababbcc known as rhyme royal. The poem
is written in celebration of St. Valentine’s Day. The birds gather at
Venus’s temple to choose their mates in accordance with Nature’s
rule.
Elements of social satire appear in the parallel between
various kinds of birds and the representatives of various social strata:
the goose embodies the practical bourgeois, while the falcon embodies
the proud courtier.
• The Legend of Good Women is a collection of nine stories
about famous and unhappy ladies. The stories are borrowed from Ovid
and Boccaccio. The Prologue explains the punishment inflicted on the
poet by Venus for his having written about a faithless woman in
Troilus and Criseyde.
• Troilus and Criseyde is not the last in chronological order
but the most important work of Chaucer’s “Italian period”. It deals
with an episode taken from the Greek mythology via Boccaccio’s Il
Filostrato. The characters are no longer abstract concepts with
allegorical function, but psychological entities. The actions and the
plot evolve according to their reasons, their desires. That is why
Troilus and Criseyde is considered to be the first English
psychological novel, and Chaucer is often compared with Shakespeare
as a great explorer of man’s psyche.
108
Criseyde is a faithless lover and yet she is aware of her
weakness; Troilus evolves from carelessness to fervent love and then
to disappointment and self-destruction. The poem was later used by
Shakespeare as a source for his Troilus and Cressida.
Woman betrayed, woman betraying – are the alternative
images of woman Chaucer deals with in The Legend of Good Women
and Troilus and Criseyde. The image of woman betrayed was
associated with the examples that make up Ovid’s Heroides, the
collection of fictional letters supposedly addressed by women of
classical story and legend to communicate their anguish and despair to
the men who had deceived, deserted or simply neglected them. The
Heroides, like other works of Ovid, was read and commented on as a
school-text throughout the Middle Ages. (Jonathan Bate justly claims
that throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Ovid was the
most popular writer in the Western cultures.) The names of Ovid’s
heroines became symbols of unhappy love in the writings of the
period. But in uneasy contrast to this picture of woman as pathetic
victim of male carelessness and duplicity stands the picture of woman
as temptress and destroyer of men. The contradictory images of
woman betrayed and woman betraying are likewise inherited from
Ovid. The first two books of the Latin poet’s Ars Amatoria teach men
how to seduce women, and how to hold their affections once won. In
the third book, however, Ovid announces his intention to give parallel
instruction to women, so that they may go into battle on equal terms
with men. To those who might object to his intention, Ovid replies
that not all women are bad, citing Penelope, Laodamis, Alcestis, and
Evadne as examples of selfless devotion to their husbands. What is
more, men deceive women more often than women deceive men. Like
Ovid, Chaucer constructs a two-fold type of woman in his works, and
The Legend of Good Women, which follows the Heroides’ model in
presenting women as betrayed victims, answers the picture of woman
as betrayer in Troilus and Criseyde.
3. The English period: The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales follows a pattern known as
“frame-story” which had already been used by Boccaccio in his
Decameron and which was later used by Margaret of Navarre in her
Heptameron, too. At a time when the plot had not yet been discovered
109
as a literary device, the “frame” was a pretext for grouping together
several stories. The work is made up of a “general prologue”, in which
the characters are introduced to the readers, and of the tales of the
pilgrims, preceded by their own prologues, called “lesser prologues”.
The English custom of organizing yearly pilgrimages to the
tomb of Thomas-a-Beckett (murdered in 1170) in Canterbury
suggested to Chaucer a broad plan for his tales. The pilgrims were
twenty-nine in number, Chaucer himself being the thirtieth. They met
at Tabbard Inn at Southwark quite accidentally. The inn-keeper
proposed that each pilgrim should tell two stories on the way to
Canterbury and another two stories on the way back; the best one was
to receive a square dinner at the expense of the others. Out of the 120
tales planned only twenty-four were written.
▪ In a way, Chaucer is the first modern English creator: he has
a special way of handling IRONY, which is definitely a modern
feature. His characters are described one by one; the details are those
that would strike the eye of a fellow-traveller. The deliberately
contrived disorder, giving an air of naturalness and spontaneity, is
another proof of Chaucer’s originality. The author as a fellow-pilgrim
naively notes what he sees or learns about the others in casual order. It
is Chaucer’s assumed naivety as an observer that turns him into a
great ironist.
Ironic storytelling whose subject is storytelling is, according to
Harold Bloom, pretty much Boccaccio’s invention, and the purpose of
this breakthrough was to free stories from didacticism and moralism,
so that the listener or reader, not the storyteller, became responsible
for their use, for good or for ill. Since Chaucer was a greater ironist
and even a stronger writer than Boccaccio, his transformation of the
Decameron into the Canterbury Tales was a radical one.
The image of life as a pilgrimage, not so much to Jerusalem but to
judgment, fuses with Chaucer’s organizing principle of the pilgrimage
to Canterbury, with 30 pilgrims telling stories as they go. Yet the
poem is immensely secular, almost unfailingly ironic. Its narrator is
Chaucer himself reduced to a total simplicity: he has zest, endless
good nature, believes everything he hears, and has an amazing
capacity for admiring even the dreadful qualities displayed by some of
his 29 companions.
110
Chaucer revises Boccaccio by seeing that the tale each pilgrim
told could tell a tale about its teller. The tales thus fill in some of the
gaps left by Chaucer the pilgrim.
Chaucer is indeed a great feminist and ironist at the same
time. Jill Mann argues that in assigning the tale of Melibee to himself,
Chaucer identifies himself with the values it embodies, and with the
centrality of woman’s role: Melibee learns from his wife Prudence
what “great patience” means: he submits himself to his wife and to
patience in one and the same process; his patience must match hers.
But Chaucer also allots himself the romance of Sir Thopas, which is
interrupted by the Host’s violent protests that he can bear no more of
it. Chaucer mildly excuses himself by saying that it is the best poem
he knows. This sublimely comic scene is a brilliantly conceived
articulation of Chaucer’s relationship to his own poetic creation. “The
Poet is the Maker; he is the creator of a cosmos; and Chaucer is the
creator of the whole world of his creatures”, wrote G. K. Chesterton
back in 1932. But Chaucer does not remain external to his creation,
the hidden puppet-master pulling its strings. Instead, he enters it,
placing himself on the same fictional level as the other pilgrims: he
enters it only to be hooted off the stage by his own literary creations.
Chaucer had already experimented two different tones of
voice in The Parliament of Fowls. His two voices (i.e. the anonymous
voice, the conventional literary man’s voice, on the one hand, and the
voice of a vividly present persona calling itself Chaucer, on the other
hand) exploit the dramatic effects of the most serious technical
limitation of Middle English literature: its dependence on oral
recitation.
The frontispiece to the Cambridge manuscript of Troilus and
Cryseyde shows Chaucer reading the poem to Richard II, the royal
family and other members of the English court. Some of the younger
courtiers are chatting or flirting, and they do not seem to be paying
much attention to what Chaucer is saying. A public reading of any
length tends to be monotonous at any time. Chaucer’s brilliant
solution of the problem was to include his audience in the narrative by
direct appeals to them to confirm or assist his own interpretations.
Next, Chaucer complemented his pseudo-chorus of an oral audience
by gradually evolving his own pseudo-narrator – well meaning, a little
111
thick in the head, without any personal experience of sexual love, who
was and was not Chaucer himself. (Langland, in Piers Plowman, had
also exploited the literary convention of the pseudo-narrator that
originated in the practice of oral delivery).
▪ Chaucer’s characters belong to almost all the social strata
and classes:
– the Knight and the Squire represent the nobility;
– the Prioress, the Monk, the Friar, the Parson and the Nuns
represent the clergy;
– the Merchant, the Clerk of Oxford, the Doctor of Physics,
the Wife of Bath, the Cook, the Sailor, the Dyer, the Weaver and the
Miller represent the middle-class and the townsfolk;
– the Sergeant of Law and the Summoner represent the law.
All these individuals representing every class from Plowman
to Knight recreate the social scene of Chaucer’s age. They are more
than a framework: the poet minutely presents their habits of thinking,
prejudices, professional bias, familiar ideas, personal idiosyncrasies.
Chaucer also gives us a vivid description of the chromatic
elements in the garments of various characters:
– the Knight is dressed in black and white;
– the Squire is dressed in red and white;
– the Yeoman is dressed in green and white.
The embroideries on the Squire’s shirt resemble a “meadow
bright”.
Each and every character is a coherent entity: the outer
appearance of the characters is in accordance with their inner
disposition and with their stories. The characters are portrayed by
means of physical details, the language they speak and the content or
type of the tale they tell. The Summoner, for instance, has both a very
ugly character and a repulsive outer appearance; the Miller has a wart
on his nose and on top of that wart he has a tuft of hair. He has a
reddish skin and hair and, at his sight, the children usually run away.
The Knight is a wise and distinguished man. He praises truth,
honour, courtesy, generosity. His romance about Palamon and Arcite
was later used as a source by Shakespeare and John Fletcher in their
collaborative play The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613).
112
The Monk is fat, he likes worldly pleasures, he likes to eat
much; he is a man of fashion, his coat is trimmed with fine grey fur,
and he has greyhounds swift as birds.
Speaking about Chaucer’s characters, Harold Bloom claims that
his men and women begin to develop a sense of self-consciousness. The
Canterbury Tales anticipates depth psychology in contrast to the
moral psychology of the literature written throughout the entire
Middle Ages. Bloom goes as far as to claim that without characters
like the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner “there would be less life in
literature and less literature in life”.
The Wife of Bath, Alison is one of Chaucer’s most original
contributions to the portraits of the pilgrims. Married five times, she is
still exuberant, healthy, enjoying life to the maximum. William Blake
considered her the Female Will incarnate.
The Wife’s prologue to her tale is a kind of confession, but
even more a triumphant defence or apologia. The first word of her
prologue is “experience”, which she cites as her authority. To be the
widow of five successive husbands, whether six hundred years ago or
now, gives a woman a certain aura, as the Wife is well aware. What is
awesome about the wife is her endless zest and vitality: sexual, verbal,
polemical. Despite her five late husbands she appears to be childless
and says nothing about the matter.
Her sheer exuberance of being has no literary antecedent and
could not be matched until Shakespeare created Falstaff. Both the
Wife and Falstaff mockingly echo the learning of Saint Paul from the
First Epistle to the Corinthians, in which he called on Christianity to
persist in their vocation. Both Falstaff and the Wife are perseverant
characters.
The Pardoner who sells indulgences is Chaucer’s greatest
masterpiece of character drawing, implying a whole world of moral
hypocrisy. Harold Bloom claims that the Pardoner is the prototype of
the villain from whom Shakespeare’s Iago (in Othello) and Edmund
(in King Lear) descend. Like Iago, the Pardoner combines the gifts of
dramatist and storyteller, actor and director; and, again like Iago, the
Pardoner is a supreme moral psychologist. The Pardoner, Iago and
Edmund cast a spell over their victims. All of them openly proclaim
their deceptiveness, but only to us (in the case of Shakespeare’s
113
dramatic characters) or, in the Pardoner’s case, to the Canterbury
pilgrims as our surrogates.
Chaucer’s irony is best expressed in the portrait of the
Prioress. Her portrait is built in sentences going in pairs and the
second sentence is always introduced by the conjunction but in a
dichotomy of appearance versus essence:
– she had a perfect command of French, but not the French of
Paris;
– she was well-bred, but her good breeding meant that she let
no morsel fall from her lips;
– she was very piteous, but her pity concerned mice and dogs
(not men);
– she had a small mouth, but a large forehead;
– she was a nun, but her brooch was engraved with the Latin
proverb Amor vincit omnia (instead of Labor vincit omnia).
Only three characters are treated without any touch of irony,
namely:
– the Knight, who embodies the highest ideals of chivalry and
courtesy;
– the Poor Parson, who displays genuine Christian behaviour;
– the Plowman, who is an honest, good-hearted, hard-working
fellow.
According to Jill Mann, in Chaucer’s poetical works woman
is at the centre instead of at the periphery and she becomes the norm
against which all human behaviour is to be measured. The Canterbury
Tales, for all its variety of mode and genre, contains not a single
example of the story-type that embodies its ideals in the central figure
of a male hero. Instead, the tales that mediate serious ideals are
focused on a series of women: Constance, Griselda, Prudence, Cecilia.
The male hero enters only in the burlesque form of Sir Thopas, to be
unceremoniously dismissed in favour of the tale that celebrates the
idealized wisdom of a woman, Chaucer’s tale of Melibee. The
twentieth century interest in women as a serious subject makes it
possible to acknowledge that they were an equally serious subject for
Chaucer throughout his career.
The tales go in pairs. The Friar, for instance, tells a story in
connection with the corrupt character of the Summoner. Taking the
114
Friar’s story as an offence, the Summoner tells a story about a corrupt
Friar.
▪ In the twenty-four tales, Chaucer employed several literary
species such as:
– the courtly romance (in the Knight’s tale);
– the fabliau (in the Miller’s tale and in the Reeve’s tale);
– the hagiographic legend of saints’ lives (the Second Nun’s
tale and the Prioress’s tale);
– the fable (the Nun’s Tale);
– the sermon (the Parson’s tale).
Jill Mann has recently argued that the “dialogue between text
and reader” means that a writer’s work is realized in different forms,
not only by each century, but almost by each individual reader and
that “this is the relation between text and audience that Chaucer
represents in the Canterbury Tales, where the pilgrims react to each
story in terms of their personal experience and interests – the Reeve
feels personally affronted by a story about a carpenter, the Host
wishes his wife was like Griselda or Prudence, the Franklin wishes his
son resembled the Squire. The Friar and the Summoner use their
stories in the service of mutual aggression; the Pardoner thinks he can
use his one to make a fast buck.” Chaucer seems to anticipate the so-
called reader-response criticism which lay emphasis on the reader in
the triangle author – text – reader.
According to Bateson, in a country that suddenly finds itself
depopulated, procreation becomes one of the essentials of the
society’s survival. That is why the topic to which the pilgrims keep on
returning is love and marriage. That is why the General Prologue
includes a hymn to the regenerative power of sun and the rebirth of the
dead year. Human love thus carries with it remnants of the half-buried
pre-Christian fertility cults. As for Chaucer’s characters, William
Blake rightly noticed that they “remain forever unaltered”, i.e.
prototypes or archetypes.
▪ In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer established the prosodic
pattern of decasyllabic couplets, i.e. rhyming iambic pentameters,
which was later used by Marlowe in Hero and Leander.
▪ Chaucer’s style can be described as simple, natural, direct,
ironic. Chaucer’s self-irony is obvious when the author himself is
115
hushed by the other pilgrims when he wants to tell a story in the form
of an epic romance.
▪ Chaucer’s language is extremely rich. He used words from
both Norman-French and Anglo-Saxon. This mingling of the two
languages led to the birth of modern English. It is, therefore, no
exaggeration to say that Chaucer “found the English language brick
and left it marble”. Edmund Spenser called him “the English Tityrus”
and “the well of English undefiled”. Chaucer made a great step ahead
in combining conventional medieval literary patterns and traditions
with a profound interest in the men and women of the society of his
time.
The fact that Chaucer is an evergreen, popular poet is proved
by the numerous recent critical studies dedicated to him. And I shall
emphasize that these studies keep adding endless interpretations to the
poet’s medieval texts. And the fact that Chaucer’s text can produce
never ending meanings is yet another proof of his greatness and
immortality. Feminist critics have been extremely busy in reshaping
Chaucer’s interest in woman. Carolyn Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual
Poetics (1989), Priscilla Martin’s Chaucer’s Women (1991), Jill
Mann’s Feminizing Chaucer (1991, 2002), and Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s
Chaucer and the Fiction of Gender (1992) set a new trend in Chaucer
criticism. And Blackwell, the reputed publishing house in Oxford,
issued no less than three major reference books dedicated to Chaucer
in a short space of time: Companion to Chaucer edited by Peter
Brown (2000), Chaucer (2001) and A Concise Companion to Chaucer
(2006) edited by Corinne Saunders.
116
THE RENAISSANCE
EDMUND SPENSER
PHILIP SIDNEY
123
Sidney’s Arcadia exhibits the sophistication to which much
courtly Elizabethan prose fiction aspired.
Although Spenser was an incomparably greater poet, Sidney
was the one who wrote better sonnets, because Sidney was a court
poet in the full sense, a living part of the life he celebrated, while
Spenser described it from the outside.
Astrophil and Stella is a collection of 108 sonnets plus various
songs dedicated to Penelope Devereux, the sister of Robert Devereux,
Earl of Essex. It speaks about a hopeless love.
C. S. Lewis draws our attention to the fact that the first thing to
grasp about the sonnet sequence is that it is not a way of telling a story. It
is a form which exists for the sake of prolonged lyrical meditation, chiefly
on love but relieved from time to time by excursions into public affairs,
literary criticism, compliment, or what you will. External events – a
quarrel, a parting, an illness, a stolen kiss – are every now and then
mentioned to provide themes for the meditation.
Scholars draw a distinction between the first thirty-two
sonnets and the rest. In Sonnet 33 the “real” (that is, the historical)
passion is supposed to begin. The change coincides with the marriage
of Penelope Devereux to Lord Rich.
In Greek, “astrophil” means star-lover and in Latin “stella”
means star. This very difference between the two classical languages
from which the names of the lovers are derived suggests the
irreconcilable nature of their relationship (comparable with the
situation of Ion Barbu’s characters in Riga Crypto şi Lapona Enigel).
Sidney acknowledges that he is working in a well-tried
Petrarchan tradition, but sometimes he is ironic; unlike Petrarch who,
at the end of the cycle, feels as if he has passed through a purifying
spiritual experience, Sidney is aware of his failure.
While Petrarch’s Laura remains coolly unresponsive, Sidney’s
Astrophil somehow still holds to the hope that his Stella might still
favour him. Astrophil and Stella is both an extended dialogue with the
conventions of the Italian sonneteers and a varied Elizabethan
narrative which, by means of a constantly changing viewpoint,
considers the developing conflict between private and public
obligation. Stella is from the first the un-giving beloved and the
generous inspirer of poetry, the object of the poem and the provoker of
124
it, the dumbfounder and the giver of eloquence. The opening sonnet
proclaims the ambiguities of the sequence as a whole. In Sonnet 34 the
potential confusions and conflicts between public statement and
private silence are expressed in the form of an internal dialogue.
Although Stella is portrayed as the enabler of poetry, she is
also the star, “the only Planet of my light”, who in Sonnet 68 seeks to
quench the star-lover’s “noble fire”. Throughout the sequence, the
“noble” concerns of a soldier and courtier intrude only to be frustrated
by a woman who commands chivalric service and who exercises a
sometime whimsical authority over those who willingly give her
service. She who elevates by virtue of her heavenly nature also
degrades. “That Stella’s star-like authority seems at times to parallel
that of the Queen, of whose enigmatic political behaviour Sidney
complained in his letters, is scarcely coincidental”, claims C. S. Lewis.
Sidney’s sonnets mingle natural tenderness and humour,
which plays over the surface of his despair, and the colloquial phrase,
giving an impression both of sincerity and control.
The nineteenth century critics wrongly thought that all these
poets had to be really in love and addressing to a real mistress. In fact,
everything was a mere illusion or convention: Sidney’s marriage to
Frances Walsingham in 1583, before the Astrophil cycle of sonnets
had even been completed, seems to have been a happy one.
The Defence of Poesie answers the Puritan objections to
imaginative literature. Sidney draws his arguments from the Italian
Humanist critics; he also frequently quotes Aristotle and Horace. It is
the first attempt in English to build a coherent system of arguments
about a) the nature, b) the function, c)the possibilities, d) the future of
poetry.
Sidney’s own taste is that of a chivalrous, heroic, and
romantic person. He thinks “high flying liberty of conceit” proper to a
poet. Epic is the “best and most accomplished” (i.e. most perfect) of
the kinds. He thinks peace may be hostile to poetry, for it is the
companion of camps.
Sidney explicitly dissents from the popular Platonic doctrine
of Inspiration. He is not a man following a “Movement”. He is the
man in whom the “Golden” poetics, as by right, become most fully
articulate.
125
Sidney’s defence of poetry contends that where there is no
pretence in truth, there can be no imposture: “now for the poet, he
nothing affirms, and therefore never lies”. The poet is the maker of a
better, ideal world. Poetry is a better moral teacher than philosophy or
history. The lively image created by the poet is contrasted with the
dullness of historians and philosophers. Put in highest terms, poetry
was inspired, representing eternal truths which might be breathed into
the poet by supernatural powers.
Decorum, or the right adaptation of means to ends, is a key
concept in Sidney’s poetics. “The end of all earthly learning being
virtuous action, these skills must serve to bring that forth that have a most
just title to be princes over all the rest.” The chosen subject was the first
and principal means towards his end, which was the conversion of the
readers’ whole mind. The problem of finding fitting means was however
chiefly a problem of style. The three style or modes of writing – high,
middle and low – which the Renaissance inherited from the Middle Ages
would be appropriate not so much to given subjects as to given intentions.
The choice of subject was however the poet’s first step towards
presenting his central, or governing, idea.
According to Sidney’s theory of form and style, the poet’s
purpose is not to create a “golden world” but to “move” his readers.
Various forms and styles attain variable degrees of persuasion and
“moving”.
The Arcadia, Sidney’s long prose romance interspersed with
poems and pastoral elegies, his royal entertainment The Lady of May,
and his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella all suggest processes of
negotiation, persuasion, self-projection, and self-fashioning which
inter-relate affairs of state with affairs of the heart. Sidney is as much
a statesman and military man as he is a poet.
127
with various other feet. Shakespeare and Milton further contributed to
the flexibility of the blank verse.)
Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis precisely when
Christopher Marlowe was composing his poem Hero and Leander.
Marlowe’s premature death, in May 1593, prevented him from
finishing his poem. Many historians have interpreted the two poems as
a friendly literary competition. Their common denominator is Ovid’s
influence on both of them. Both Venus and Adonis and Hero and
Leander were conceived as fashionable exercises in re-writing
Ovidian topoi. As a learned University Wit, Marlowe himself had
translated Ovid’s Amores and Metamorphoses. In 1990, Jonathan Bate
first advanced his historicized view on “certain symptoms of anxiety
in Renaissance imitation theory”. Bate claimed that “in fact,
Shakespeare’s prime precursor was Ovid”. Francis Meres, the “Harold
Bloom”, or “Elizabethan Yale critic” of Shakespeare’s times had
pointed out that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and
honey-tongued Shakespeare’. In 1993, Bate took this argument a step
further and argued that for the sixteenth century Western literature
Ovid was the equivalent of our days’ Shakespeare: “If you admire a
writer, it is quite natural to wonder which writers that writer admired”.
At the time, there was no Shakespeare for schoolchildren to study;
Shakespeare himself had Ovid.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses depicted an antropomorphic nature
where there was a story behind every flower, every tree, almost every
stone and stream. The world was peopled with transformed heroes and
heroines of Ovidian story. Metamorphosis was, in fact, the answer to
the medieval anxieties about Mutability, the transience of love and
earthly happiness, the death of the rose, etc.
Was Ovid the presiding authority above the siblings’ would-
be rivalry? Bate’s claim dovetails with Eric Sams’ remark, that “the
dramatist drew nine-tenth of his classical mythology from Ovid”. We
may wonder whether Shakespeare’s anxiety of imitating Ovid actually
stemmed from his tacit competition with Marlowe, the expert on
Ovid; or, whether it is just another indicator of Marlowe’s strong
influence on Shakespeare’s early writings and readings, as well.
The subject-matter of Venus and Adonis is borrowed from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book X. The poem is made up of two
128
contrasted halves: the wooing and the hunt. Adonis is compared with a
snared bird, a dabchick, a deer, a hunted roe: he is the hunted quarry.
Venus is compared with an eagle, a vulture, a wild bird, a falcon: the
love-hungry goddess appears as a bird of prey. The lily, the snow, the
ivory and the alabaster, all suggesting chilly whiteness, are used as
symbols of Adonis’s chastity. Though a goddess, Venus has no
supernatural powers: she is as helpless as any country lass to save
Adonis or even reach him quickly. She is not even responsible for his
metamorphosis into a hyacinth.
The pace of Shakespeare’s poem is slower than Marlowe’s,
the ornament more elaborate and the comedy not so sustained.
The Rape of Lucrece deals with a stock-theme. The subject is
more serious. Written in Chaucer’s “rhyme royal”, it is a better
exercise, but still an exercise. Lucrece herself is pathetic and beautiful,
but not a person. It is a carefully worked out poem, but not the
spontaneous work of a genius. As a literary species, The Rape of
Lucrece is a complaint. (The complaint was a late medieval form).
The combat between Lucrece and Tarquin represents the combat
between saint and devil. According to M.C. Bradbrook, the soliloquies
of Tarquin are like a first cartoon for the study of Macbeth, while
Lucrece anticipates Lavinia, the ravished heroine of Titus Andronicus.
The poem clearly shows the idea of tragedy in Shakespeare’s early
period: the blind, senseless horror of purely physical outrage. The
final part is brought to an abrupt end, briefly summing up the contents
presented in the poet’s dedication to the same Earl of Southampton.
The long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece,
are, seemingly, formal rhetorical exercises, one on a mythological, the
other on an ancient historical theme. But in 1992, just a few years
before his death, England’s then Poet Laureate Ted Hughes worked
out an extraordinary mythical interpretation of these two longer poems
in his bulky Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Hughes
claimed that Shakespeare’s last fourteen plays, starting with All’s Well
That Ends Well (1601) are rewritings of the two poems which contain
an underlying mythic structure. Like Venus and Lucrece,
Shakespeare’s heroines from those plays perform the role of either
huntress or game: “The female figure who is the heroine is a constant
as Venus / Lucrece.” According to Hughes’ myth of the Equation, the
129
man appears either as the Puritan Adonis, who rejects the heroine’s
love or as a Tarquin figure that rapes, kills, or destroys the innocent
heroine. Examples of the latter case are Hamlet, who drives Ophelia to
madness and suicide, Othello, who murders Desdemona, Leontes, in
The Winter’s Tale, who likewise has Hermione die of sorrow, and
Leonatus Posthumus, in Cymbeline, who is intent on killing his wife.
The theme of the Rival Brothers (triggering betrayal, usurpation, or
fratricide) complements this mythic pattern of the Equation. The
rational being is usurped by the irrational. The myth is obvious in
Macbeth and Hamlet, with their regicides, in As You Like It, King
Lear, and The Tempest, with their usurpation stories, in Julius Caesar
and Antony and Cleopatra, where former friends and allies become
each other’s foes. Says Ted Hughes: “All the plays of the tragic
sequence are a ‘proof’, so to speak, of the criminality of that rejection
[of love]. In play after play, from every angle, Shakespeare is focusing
his stubborn investigation into the nature of that rejection. In the end
(…) he brings to court this specific act – the rejection – and calls
down the God of Truth to judge it in his words. This means that
everything happened, in a sense, within the first poem, Venus and
Adonis, where Adonis rejected Venus:
133
dissociating from the violence which still flamed around ‘Mistress
Line’ and her ‘phoenix’ memory.”
Thomas Rist follows another path in investigating
Shakespeare’s connection with Ann Line, proposing a re-reading of
the Sonnets, “which recent editors argue Shakespeare continued to
revise until 1609. The lines of the Sonnets contain so many puns on
‘lines’. Close consideration of Sonnet 74, however, may suggest how
the search might proceed. The narrator of the sonnet confides to its
implied recipient that ‘My life hath in this line some interest’ but the
sonnet’s theme is – as in ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ – death and its
posterity. Specifically, death is figured as ‘that fell arrest / Without all
bail’ which, the speaker says, ‘shall carry me away’: it thus assumes
the character of an unforgiving law-enforcer considered to threaten the
speaker’s life. And we are given a further picture of that law-enforcer:
the speaker calls his own dead body ‘The coward conquest of a
wretch’s knife’. That death is a law-enforcer who uses a ‘knife’ –
particularly in a poem interested in Line – suggests the quarterings at
Tyburn. The speaker – whether Shakespeare or a fictional self-
presentation of him – seems thus to anticipate what Catholics such as
Line or indeed the younger Southampton considered martyrdom.”
All these recent re-readings of “The Phoenix and the Turtle”
indicate that Shakespearean texts are sites of oblivion or dormant
memory that can still produce unexpected meanings. They may also
encourage students to refuse any definitive interpretation of any poem.
Each age, each critical method, even each reader may produce endless
and refreshing interpretations of one and the same text.
*
The Sonnets, first published in 1608, were written in the 1590s
as a fashionable literary exercise. The 154 sonnets fall into three
distinct groups:
a) Sonnets 1-126 are addressed to a fair youth, possibly Henry
Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Sonnet 126 is actually a douzaine
(a twelve-line poem). Sonnets 1-17 are intended to persuade a young
man of good birth and good looks to marry, while Sonnets 18-126
celebrate the varying fortunes of the poet’s friendship with the
aforementioned young man;
134
b) Sonnets 127-152 are addressed to a mysterious Dark Lady;
c) Sonnets 153 and 154 are adaptations of a well-known
Greek epigram, the story of Cupid and the loss of his brand.
The sonnets have been read time and again for clues about
Shakespeare’s life, attempts to link him with this man and that, to pin
him down biographically in the shadows of four hundred years ago,
and, seeing the nature of Shakespeare’s achievement elsewhere, one
understands this tendency to turn the sonnets into data for biography.
And here are some examples of biographical speculations attached to
the sonnets.
Martin Dodsworth’s contention that the stories in the Sonnets
are pure fiction has been refuted by Shakespearean biographers for
centuries. August Wilhelm von Schlegel was the inventor of the so-
called conjectural biography, which re-constructs an author’s life
from hints and allusions provided by his texts. In the light of this
method, there have been several attempts to establish the identity of
the mysterious Dark Lady and of the fair youth in the Sonnets. For
those readers who have a penchant for historicist speculations, here
are some possible answers to the excruciating questions, “Who was
the Dark Lady?”, “Who was the fair youth?”
In 1889 Sidney Lee identified Mary Fitton as the Dark Lady.
One of Queen Elizabeth’s maids of honour, she fell pregnant by
William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke (the late Sir Philip Sidney’s
nephew). Her infant died soon after her birth and Pembroke refused to
marry her, even though the Queen sent him to the Fleet Prison. Mary
Fitton had soft and fair curls, and grey eyes, hence she does not fit
Shakespeare’s physical description of the Dark Lady in Sonnet 130.
Although G.B. Shaw made her the heroine of his Dark Lady of the
Sonnets, today her candidature is dismissed by most Shakespeare
biographers.
Jane Davenant, the wife of an Oxford innkeeper who became
the Mayor of that city, was the mother of Sir William Davenant,
England’s second Poet Laureate after Ben Jonson. Davenant was
known to be Shakespeare’s godson, but in his later years he boasted
that he was actually Shakespeare’s illegitimate son. Davenant’s claim
is reinforced by a curious work called Willobie his Avisa, or The True
Picture of a Modest Maid, a strange mixture of prose and verse
135
published in 1594, and signed with the pseudonym Hadrian Dorrell.
The true identity of the pamphlet’s author was Henry Willoughby, a
connection by marriage of Shakespeare’s Warwickshire friend
Thomas Russel. The pamphlet gave serious offence to somebody with
influence, so it was banned and burned before 1600. The obscure
allegory enacted in it featured Henrico Willobego, his friend WS, and
a beautiful and apparently virtuous woman, who drew to her inn a lot
of importunate gallants only to drive them all away, even threatening
to murder one of them, a nobleman, rather than permit him to stain her
honour. WS is described as “the old player”, while Henrico Willobego
quotes proverbs from John Florio’s collection of proverbs, and Florio
was actually Henry Wriothesley’s tutor, so… Avisa’s nest is clearly
indicated: “See yonder house where hangs the badge of England’s
saint”. The tavern kept by the Davenants had the red-cross shield of St
George hanging outside its front door. The only piece that does not fit
in the puzzle is William Davenant’s birth date: he was born in 1606,
while the events in the sonnets point to the early 1590s.
Some two or three decades ago, A.L. Rowse made the case for
Emilia Lanier, announcing that anyone who disagreed with him was
talking “complete rubbish”. Peter Levi vigorously approved this
discovery. After all, Emilia Lanier had been the mistress of Lord
Hunsdon, the patron of Shakespeare’s acting company, and, having
fallen pregnant by him, had been married off to Alphonse Lanier, a
Court musician. Shakespeare, claims Rowse, “first fell in love with the
lady out of pity for the situation she was in”. This is less than mere
guesswork; it is nonsense. Rowse’s Shakespeare has an irreproachable
character even when he turns out to cuckold a cheated husband.
Rowse’s speculations, based mostly on textual conjectures, are highly
inconsistent, inasmuch as he repeatedly insists that Shakespeare was a
“normal”, heterosexual person, while contemporary witnesses like
Simon Forman, the astrologer, made it clear that Emilia Lanier
favoured sodomy to satisfy men’s lusts. She reformed during the latter
part of her life and turned poetess, and in 1611 she published a long
religious poem called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a sort of vindication
of the principal female characters in the Bible, from Eve to Virgin
Mary. Robert Nye contends that had she been Shakespeare’s mistress,
she would have written as a poetess about the love of her life.
136
Both Anthony Burgess and Robert Nye have singled out Lucy
Negro, alias Lucy Morgan, as the most plausible candidate to the title
of Dark Lady. She kept a brothel in St John Street, Clerkenwell, hence
she was known as the Abbess of Clerkenwell, head of the infamous
sisterhood of the Black Nuns. From March 1579 to January 1582,
while still very young, she had been one of Queen Elisabeth’s most
favoured attendants. She was then expelled from Court after the usual
fall from grace. This “woman colour’d ill” was a mulatto from the
West Indies. In the 1590s she was charged with prostitution, or with
“keeping a house of ill repute”. Her friends in high places kept her out
of jail on this occasion. Later, in January 1600, she was sentenced to
serve a term in the Bridewell, though even then she was spared the
usual carting through the streets of London. She died in 1610 – of the
pox. This disturbing detail may, then, explain the disillusionment and
scepticism that are so manifest in most of Shakespeare’s late
comedies, which came to be labelled as “dark comedies” or “problem
plays”.
Jonathan Bate has recently put forward a new contender to the
title of Dark Lady. In his opinion, her “profile”, as a criminal investigator
would put it, seems to be that of a married woman in or close to the
household of the Earl of Southampton, a woman whom both
Southampton and Shakespeare slept with. Bate thinks that an Elizabethan
earl of possibly homosexual orientation would be more likely to sleep
with a married woman of lower social status because he wanted to score
off her husband than because he desired her in herself.
“Suppose that the young Earl’s guardian, who wishes to marry
him off his will, places an agent in his household in order to report back
on the progress of the marriage suit and related affairs. Suppose that the
agent is married. To sleep with his wife would be the most delicious
revenge for the man’s presumption in reporting intimate matters back to
Burghley (Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer).”
The agent in Southampton’s household was John Florio, whose
presence there accounts for much of Shakespeare’s broad, though very
patchy, acquaintance with Italian literature and his slight knowledge of
the Italian language. Bate’s Dark Lady, then, is John Florio’s wife, who
happens to have been the sister of Samuel Daniel, the sonneteer.
Biographical and textual data support Bate’s theory. Florio wrote that in
137
order to be “accounted most fair” a woman should have “black eyes,
black brows, black hairs”. Fairness was regarded as synonymous with
aristocratic and courtly elevation, darkness with low origins. A dark
woman meant a country wench and Miss Daniel was a low-born
Somerset lass. She gave birth to four children, the last three of which
were born in 1585, 1588, and 1589. In sonnet 143 “Will” compares
himself to his mistress’ “neglected child” and Mrs. Florio is the only
candidate to have given birth to children at that time. After carefully
constructing his theory, Bate is the first critic to view it with objective
detachment:
“We will never know whether Shakespeare and / or Southampton
really slept with Florio’s wife and the sonnets knowingly allude to actual
events, or whether the sonnets are knowing imaginings of possible
intrigue… we must be denied knowledge of the original bed deeds,
because the sonnets are interested not so much in who lies with whom as
in paradoxes of eyeing and lying.”
The latest biographical speculations belong to Jonathan Gibson,
the man who has come to identify the Dark Lady as Mary Wroth.
According to Gibson, at least two biographical details corroborate Mary
Wroth’s identity as the Dark Lady. She was a sonneteer herself, actually
the best poetess of the Elizabethan age. Her poems are included in the
academic syllabus of most universities in the USA and forty-six pages of
web sites stand proof for the high regard she enjoys these days. Not only
was she a talented sonneteer, but she is also known to have been the
mistress of the Earl of Pembroke (one of the two most probable
candidates to the “fair youth” figure in the Sonnets, alongside
Southampton). She bore two illegitimate children to William Herbert and
her cycle of sonnets might have been written in response to
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, something not very unusual among sonneteers.
Shakespeare’s harem of Dark Ladies gets more and more populous with
the passing of time, and the future will certainly present us with further
candidates as well as with reassessments of the current biographical
theories. The flip side of all these theories is that we shall probably never
know whether the Dark Lady was not actually just a synecdoche in the
private life of a man fond of all brunettes living in the London of his
times.
138
As for the identity of the young man in the sonnets, in the
early 1890s Sir Sidney Lee contributed entries to the Dictionary of
National Biography (DNB) in which he stated categorically that the
dedication to the 1609 Quarto “is addressed to Pembroke, disguised
under the initials of his family name – William Herbert” and,
furthermore, that Shakespeare’s young friend “was doubtless
Pembroke himself”. In 1897, the serially issued DNB reached the
letter S and, while writing his article on Shakespeare, Lee shifted his
allegiance to the other leading candidate for fair youth: the sonnets
clearly affirm that the youth is Shakespeare’s patron, Henry
Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. At this point the reader is
invited to choose the suitable pronunciation of the Earl’s name. Robert
Nye repeatedly insists that it should be pronounced “Rizley”, while
Bate claims that, in the nineteenth century, Henry Wriothesley’s
descendants said that their name was pronounced “Rosely”. The latter
pronunciation would thus explain the symbolism of the “rose”, one of
the key words in the sonnets dedicated to the fair youth.
*
According to Jan Kott, Shakespeare’s sequence of sonnets
may be regarded as a drama with four characters and a plot. The
dramatis personae are a man (who is the first-person narrator), a
young man, a woman and Time.
Time as a major theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets is not
necessarily an original one. Time and mortality are as old as the first
recorded pieces of world literature (from Gilgamesh to Spenser’s
“mutability cantos” in the unfinished Book VII of The Faerie
Queene).
Time is ubiquitous in the Sonnets as it is in Shakespeare’s
Troilus and Cressida:
CRESSIDA: When time is old and hath forgot itself
When water drops have worn the stones of Troy
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up… (III.2)
139
In Sonnet 64, each quatrain begins with “When I have seen”,
followed by the misdeeds of Time and the obsessive image of Death.
Similar thoughts and images coincidentally occur in the
writings of Leonardo da Vinci.
In Sonnet 71, “No longer mourn for me when I am dead”
introduces an increasingly overwhelming atmosphere. It abounds in
mutability imagery of a “vile world, with vilest worms”.
Andrew Sanders also comments on two thematic subgroups:
one encouraging the youth to marry and to procreate (1-17) and one
about the threat represented by a rival poet.
Procreation is viewed as the only defence against death; life
can be perpetuated by means of progenies.
Sonnet 3 describes the youth as a son who is the mirror, the
repetition, the copy of his parents, a copy annihilating time:
140
This conceit of immortality, previously employed by Edmund
Spenser, is also known as exegi monumentum.
Speaking about the sexuality of the sonnets, Andrew Sanders
refers to the ambiguous relationship between the narrator, the young
man and the Dark Lady, which takes the nature of an emotional triangle.
Jan Kott has developed an entire theory of the erotic ambiguity
of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The young boy is a type of a female beauty,
cf. “thy mother’s glass” (Sonnet 3). The ambiguity consists in choosing
either a male or a female partner as a lover. The same ambiguity is
detected by Jan Kott in Shakespeare’s early comedies (The Two
Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice) and in his later so-
called romantic comedies (Twelfth Night and As You Like It). It is the
ambiguity of the line drawn between friendship and love.
The Humanistic Academy of Florence (represented by Pico
della Mirandolla and Marsilio Ficino) had proclaimed that eros
socraticus, the pure love felt by a male for a male youth, represented
the highest form of spiritual affinity.
Sonnet 39, with “let us divided live /And that thou teachest
how to make one twain”, echoes the Platonic myth of the androgyn,
first recorded in Plato’s Banquet. According to this myth, the human
beings were originally endowed with four arms, four legs, two faces
and two sexes. The gods punished them by separating them into two
distinct entities, longing for each other, that is, for completion,
reunion, oneness. The same hesitation, dilemma in choosing between
a male and a female occurs in Michelangelo’s sonnets.
Shakespeare’s sonnets also display the influence of the
Renaissance painting, in which the angels have androgynous features,
a blending of male and female characteristics; the nymphs have boyish
features, while David has a girlish pose and girlish gestures in
sculptures by Donatello, Verrocchio and Michelangelo. Here is the
description of the youth in Sonnet 20:
A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart…(/…)
And for a woman were thou first created.
141
In Sonnet 53 the youth is compared with Helen of Troy.
In the Dark Lady sequence, Shakespeare questions the use of
conventional similes, hyperboles and metaphors, in Sonnet 130. Jan
Kott regards Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Julia in The Two
Gentlemen of Verona, Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as
alter-egos of the Dark Lady. Most biographers, however, have chosen
the faithless Cressida as the dramatic counterpart of the mysterious
sonnet-heroine.
The dramatic situation in the Sonnets resembles that in
Twelfth Night, a comedy of erotic ambiguities, in which Duke Orsino
loves Countess Olivia, Olivia loves Cesario (i.e. Viola disguised as a
boy, hence the danger of lesbianism), and Viola herself loves Orsino.
Within this triangle, Orsino is also attracted by Cesario.
In Shakespeare’s age, female parts were performed by actors.
Female characters in disguise were actually young actors disguised as
women who, in turn, were disguised as boys.
In a famous elegy, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the
“metaphysical” poet John Donne, advises his beloved not to travel in
disguise for fear the Italians might take her for a page and make a pass
at her.
Worst of all, the narrator is betrayed by both lovers. However,
as Andrew Sanders warns us, the Sonnets should not be necessarily
read as an autobiographical confession.
Shakespeare’s originality is not to be looked up in the themes
and imagery of his sonnets. His originality resides in the exploration
of a new emotional range: the idea of being torn between two lovers;
the oscillation between idealizing and rejecting love. Shakespeare is
no longer concerned with the conventions of courtly love, he is rather,
interested in the exploration of the psychological inner self.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets became the object of serious criticism
only in the twentieth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries the editors’ and critics’ opinions were not always favourable.
Wordsworth thought Sonnet 116 to be the best but he objected to the
sonnets to the Dark Lady, which he found “abominably harsh, obscure
and worthless”. Coleridge was more enthusiastic about them, and John
Keats, yet another Romantic poet, wrote about Shakespeare as
sonneteer, “he has left nothing to say about nothing or anything…”
142
The Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson produced the following
paradoxical remark: “Sometimes I think Shakespeare’s Sonnets finer
than his Plays – which is of course absurd. For it is knowledge of the
Plays that makes the Sonnets so fine.” In the twentieth century, Robert
Graves and Laura Riding were the first editors to expound in detail the
wealth of meanings and nuance that the sonnets contain. And William
Empson, in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), emphasizing the
countless interpretive possibilities of Sonnet 94, counted no less than
“4096 movements of thought” in the poem (and as many
interpretations).
144
The satire resorts to Horace and Juvenal as models. John
Donne is considered the father of English satire.
The “songs” or mellifluous poems, poems written as lyrics
were extremely popular. Thomas Campion, Thomas Lodge and
Thomas Nashe among others produced such songs. Shakespeare’s
plays also contain songs which were in vogue at the time.
The first half of the seventeenth century is clearly dominated
by the poetry of John Donne and Ben Jonson: their followers came to
be labelled as metaphysical versus Cavalier poets.
The Cavalier poets defended the monarchy against the
Puritans during the reign of Charles I. Their ranks included Robert
Herrick, Thomas Carew, Robert Lovelace, and Sir John Suckling.
They saw the ideal gentleman as being a lover, a soldier, a wit, a
musician and a poet, and their poetry reflects their rather light-hearted
approach to life. Their poems embodied the spirit of the upper classes
before the Puritan Commonwealth. They wrote poetry for occasions
such as births, marriages, or great parties. They are remembered
primarily as the first poets to celebrate the events of everyday life and,
as such, are the forerunners of an important tradition in English
literature.
JOHN DONNE
146
I had longer work to do than many other men; for I was at first to blot
out, certain impressions of the Roman religion, and to wrestle both
against the examples and against the reasons, by which some hold was
taken; and some anticipations early laid upon my conscience, both by
Persons who by nature had a power and superiority over my will, and
others who by their learning and good life, seemed to me justly to
claim an interest for the guiding, and rectifying of mine understanding
in these matters.
148
Coming under scrutiny are the frivolous, materialistic values
of his society (1), the legal system (2), religious institutions (3), the
court and courtiers (4, I), and the judicial system and structure of
rewards in late Elizabethan England (5). The speaker of the Satires
embodies qualities that oppose the viciousness of society: he is
constant and scholarly (1), devoted to God and spiritual values,
earnest and searching rather than complacent (3), preferring the
“mean” to either extreme (2), filled with hatred for vice (2) and
vicious people in power (5) but moved by pity for humanity (3, 5). He
presents himself as virtually alone in condemning the vices of his time
– as if he were the last good man in a totally corrupt society. He
criticizes not only the vices of his society but also the corruption of its
institutions and systems. This opposition to the political establishment
reappears in the Elegies and Songs and Sonnets; and the
accompanying feeling of isolation is seen in much of Donne’s poetry,
where there is little sense of fitting into a community.
• Donne’s 20 elegies are poems about love, written in iambic
pentameter couplets. Some are cynical, some are simply exercises in
wit, while some celebrate a clandestine love with an uncomfortable
realism. The Elegies take place less inside Donne’s head than the
Songs and Sonnets do. They are more involved in the social world.
In contrast to the Satires, with their public and political focus,
the Elegies are concerned with the supposedly private sphere of love.
In his Elegies, he turns to the example of the Roman poet Ovid, rather
than imitating the Petrarchan, courtly love poetry popular during this
period.
In Donne’s Elegies, as in Ovid, love is very much of the body.
The male speakers in these poems often frankly admit their interest in
money and sex, and are moved by practicalities, not ideals. “Love’s
Progress”, for example, humorously defines the “right true end” (line
2) and means of love in terms that reject the conventional postures of
courtly lovers. The goal is sexual intercourse, and the best way to
attain it is to take the path of least resistance.
Some elegies present women as objects of revulsion and
nausea and, for all the Ovidian emphasis on the naturalness of sex,
reveal a distaste for the activity.
149
In some poems, women are debased by comparison with
animals, water, and land. In other elegies, however, women and
women’s bodies are treated as immensely desirable.
Elegy XIX, also known as “Going to Bed”, is a clever and
lively piece of bawdry, a description of his going to bed with his
mistress. Before Donne, in Petrarchan poetry the role of the wooer
was defined by convention, but that of the lady had not been
developed. It was masculine poetry. The woman’s part was seen from
outside, as
- the fair warrior who inflicted cruel wounds;
- the saint to be worshipped;
- the divinity to be appeased;
- the relenting mistress to be hymned.
The witty seduction poem “Going to Bed” celebrates sexual
love and is less cynical than many of the other elegies. But even here
we find conflicting valuations of woman and contrary impulses in
love:
151
bold suitor claiming his right to salvation. The poetry expresses
radically contradictory views – of women, the body, and love.
• Donne’s Songs and Sonnets are by far his most interesting
works. David Daiches has pointed out that the opening of these poems
captures the reader’s attention, often in the form of a question.
Donne’s characteristic method is first the shock, then the ingenuous
development of the thought. These poems display the perfect union of
passion and logical thinking. The complex development of thought,
which is twisted this way and that way, serves to embody rather than
to cool the passion.
Love in the Songs and Sonnets eliminates the world, whereas
in the Elegies social ties make us see love from the outside and usually
contribute a rank flavour of Jonsonian comedy as well. The character
of the speaker in many of the Elegies is unattractive and the situations
in which he is involved are ugly and shameful.
Most commentators think that the Elegies were written before
Donne’s marriage. Helen Gardner thinks that they circulated in
manuscript as a book of elegies. There is a strong Ovidian flavour to
the collection. All are written in pentameter couplets (apart from “The
Dream”), which would be an English equivalent for Ovid’s elegiac
couplets.
In the absence of strong evidence for dating or clear
distinctions between the Elegies and Songs and Sonnets, Helen
Gardner made an ambitious attempt to order the poems in a roughly
developmental scheme. For her, they are not about actual loves but are
essays in love, very loosely related to his life.
“A Valediction: of Weeping” combines protective tenderness
with intellectual cunning:
156
imaginative temperament, a swift and subtle intellect, a mind stored
with theology, science and jurisprudence.
ANDREW MARVELL
159
“Bermudas”, another poem in which Marvell’s political
sympathies are obvious, describes the experience of Puritan friends in
exile, in the exotic New World.
“On a Drop of Dew” begins with the most accurate
description of a dew drop on a rose and turns this picture into a
symbol of the soul’s relation to earth and to Heaven. The dew drop
“Shuns the… blossoms green”, a wilfully mismatching word-choice,
even if Marvell meant simply to convey the flourishing of a flower he
has already described as purple. Green once again is Marvell’s
favourite visual image.
“The Garden” has often been compared with Shelley’s “Ode
to the West Wind”. It was first composed in Latin and then rendered
into English. It is a poem full of imaginative intensity. In Marvell’s
view, Fair Quiet and Innocence are to be found among the birds and
the flowers.
The poem begins in its first two stanzas mildly enough with
jokes that establish garden retreat as the truly successful and civilized
life. The trees themselves wear crowns of oak, bay and palm, which
were given to victors in the ancient world. The joke is not just a poetic
triumph over successful men of the world. It plays on the notion that
the end of action is rest, that even those who disturb peace with their
“industrious valour” do so to be at peace at last. There are perhaps
gentle hints of death in the “short and narrow verged Shade”.
Stanzas III-IV more extravagantly turn the way of the world
into the ways of the garden, for there Marvell makes out that his real
passion is for plants not women and invents a mock love theology, a
parody of Platonic love, to support his unsociable tastes.
Marvell makes up a tree-lover’s version of the Platonic ladder
of love. The first stage is sensual love. Lovers of women adore a
lovely complexion – “red and white”. The lovely complexion for
Marvell is green. Ordinary lovers cut their sweet-hearts’ names in the
bark of the trees Marvell loves, but he will cut only the names of the
trees themselves. Marvell rather lets slip the pretence of dendrophilia
at the beginning of stanza IV, saying that the garden is a retreat for
wearied lovers of women. But he is showing what he wants to say
behind his game: the green world is a solace after the disturbance of
sexual passion.
160
And then in the seventh stanza, Marvell enters upon an
erotically rampant garden, where fruit-bearing plants make love to
him and in their taste, touch and entanglings imitate sexual play.
The second stage of Marvell’s spiritual love of the plants
comes with the retreat from pleasures of physical love (“pleasures
less”) to an ideal love of plants’ beauty. Abstracting the essence of
vegetable loveliness by “annihilating” all particulars, Marvell arrives
at the idea of what moves him so, “a Green thought in a green Shade”,
and then in a minor ecstasy slips out of his body into the tree above.
In the eighth stanza, Marvell descends from his ecstasy to
make a misogynistic joke about the superiority of the paradisal love of
plants to the love of women, a joke that at once passes the matter off
lightly and points to the heart of the matter – that his feeling for the
garden is a refuge from sexual love.
“The Garden” ends by declaring that its amusements have
been innocent: “How could such sweet and wholesome Hours / Be
reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!” Marvell’s playfulness in “The
Garden” is self-mocking and self-aware.
“Upon Appleton House” treats divided feelings about
retirement at great length, running through an extraordinary series of
Marvellesque caprices and freaks of mind. It rambles, though not
without design, from Appleton House to its garden, its meadows,
grove and river and finally returns to the house. The walk around the
estate takes up the theme of retreat first in its opening complimentary
salute to General Fairfax and his retiring ways; then in the episode
treating the nunnery, which in true Marvellesque fashion tries to
enclose the world by walling it out; in the garden, which excludes the
Civil War and yet is drawn up in regiments of flowers; in the grove,
where Marvell turns to green shade again; and finally by the river,
where he fishes. “Upon Appleton House” is generally classified as a
country house poem, of a kind that became very popular in the Civil
War period, when country houses were the only centres left where
Royalists might imagine that the feudal order held. But Fairfax was
not a Royalist. The poem takes on a very singular shape for its genre,
combining reverie with celebration of a great house in apparently free
form in a way that looks forward to Thomson’s Seasons.
161
Marvell is also the author of memorable love poems such as
“The Definition of Love” and “To His Coy Mistress”.
“The Definition of Love” defines love by the ideal type.
Marvell begins with a proud account of its pedigree:
162
According to David Reid, Marvell’s relation to his lovers is
distant. His love object is “strange and high”, or his coy mistress is
addressed as “Lady”. He writes out of deprivation of contact, where
Donne assumes a history of intimacy and a distinct love predicament
and situation of utterance. Marvell’s coy mistress, is not more vaguely
represented than Donne’s mistresses. She is beautiful, a lady and
difficult to get into bed. Marvell’s love poem is certainly not unusual
in ignoring the fact that she has every reason to be coy in an age
before reliable contraception.
Reid has recently proposed an entirely new interpretation of
“To His Coy Mistress”. In his opinion, this carpe diem poem is not
really about a love relation, nor even about Marvell’s lust, but about
his feeling for his life in time.
In the first section, he entertains the counterfactual hypothesis
that his life, luxuriating grossly in vegetable love, might expand to fill
most of the world and its history, like Jack’s bean-stalk.
JOHN MILTON
167
As the poem proceeds, the first person voice is replaced by a
third person narrator, and the poem finally turns it into a fictional
character whose values and attitudes Milton no longer necessarily
shares.
168
And so, of course, it did. Rather than remaining in the
cloistered calm of Horton, Milton travelled extensively in France and
Italy and shortly afterwards plunged into public life in London. Rather
than remaining chaste, he soon married Mary Powell. And rather than
fulfilling his poetic ambitions, he devoted the next twenty years of his
life to establishing himself as one of the principal public champions of
the Puritan and Parliamentarian cause. Lycidas is thus a pivotal work
in Milton’s career. For the fact is that, with the exception of a few
sonnets, Lycidas is the last poem Milton wrote in English for the next
twenty years. Not until the dying days of the Commonwealth when he
was almost sixty would Milton reassume that part of his identity
which he had discarded at the end of Lycidas.
In 1638 Milton started on his fifteen-month travel to Europe.
His travel to Italy is considered to be one of the great Wanderjahre of
literary history, a moment of contact between cultures comparable
with the Italian journeys of Erasmus and Goethe.
In 1642 Milton got married only to be left by his wife three
weeks later; she came back to her husband in 1645, to put her royalist
family under his protection. Between 1642 and 1652 Milton wrote
mainly pamphlets, treatises and essays. His own experience made him
write some essays defending the idea of divorce.
In 1652, a crucial year in his biography, Milton completely
lost his sight while working as Latin secretary to the parliamentary
committee for foreign affairs. His successor in office was Andrew
Marvell. During the next ten years Milton produced no important
literary piece of work except his memorable Sonnet 23 (1658)
dedicated to his dead second wife, “Methought I saw my late espoused
saint”.
Milton’s blind years were to be the years of his greatest
literary achievements.
• Paradise Lost, designed between 1663 and 1665, was
written (i.e. dictated!) soon after the Great Plague had forced him to
leave London. It was first conceived as a drama, then as an epic; it had
four successive drafts, the last of which was titled Adam Unparadized.
The poem was published in 1667.
Paradise Lost is a poetic rendering of the story of the Fall in
such a way as to illuminate some of the central paradoxes of the
169
human situation and to illustrate the tragic ambiguity of man as a
moral being.
The plot develops on four great theatres of action: Heaven,
Eden, Hell, and Our familiar world.
Milton uses the blank verse and the verse paragraph. The
cosmic scenery of the epic and the world of ordinary men in their day-
to-day activities are linked by means of epic similes.
Paradise Lost shows Milton as a Christian Humanist using all
the sources of the European literary tradition that had come down to
him – biblical, classical, medieval, Renaissance. Imagery from
classical fable, medieval romance, allusions to myths, legends, stories
of all kinds, geographical imagery deriving from Milton’s own
fascination with the books of travel, biblical history and doctrine,
Jewish and Christian learning make up this great synthesis of Western
culture. Milton’s synthesis is more successful than Spenser’s because
he places his different kinds of knowledge in a logical hierarchy, and
never mingles, as Spenser often does, classical myth and biblical story
on equal terms. (The description of Eden in Book IV is a fine example
of Milton’s use of pagan classical imagery for a clearly defined
Christian purpose.)
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, speaking of the genres illustrated by
Paradise Lost, considers it to be an epic whose closest structural
affinities are to Virgil’s Aeneid; it is also an encyclopaedia of literary
forms.
The panoply of forms includes pastoral: landscape
descriptions of Arcadian vistas; pastoral scenes and eclogue-like
passages presenting the otium (ease, contentment) of heaven and
unfallen Eden; and scenes of light georgic gardening activity. Also,
several kinds of lyrics embedded in the epic have received some
critical attention: celebratory odes, psalmic hymns of praise and
thanks-giving, submerged sonnets, and epithalamium (wedding song),
love lyrics (aubade, nocturne, sonnet), laments and complaints.
In Andrews Sanders’s interpretation, Milton’s subject was the
failure of humankind to live according to divine order and its slow but
providential deliverance from the consequences of the Fall. The myth
with which he chose to deal, and in which he believed literally, was,
like many other parallel myths and folk-tales, an exploration of the
170
moral consequences of disobedience. The discovery of the knowledge
of good and evil is neither accidental nor happy. The central
“character”, Adam, has no heroic destiny. Through his, and Eve’s
corruption all humankind is corrupted and, as both are finally obliged
to understand, the spiritual struggle to regain Paradisal equity and
equability extends through each generation of their descendants. In a
profound sense Adam and Eve fall from the ideal into the human
condition. The great theme of the poem is obedience to the behests
implicit in the creative order of an omnipotent God. The will of God is
imprinted in the harmony of nature, and the disaster of the Fall is as
much ecological as it is moral. Despite the temptation presented by the
poem itself to see the rebellion of Satan as a heroic gesture of
liberation and the Fall of Adam as a species of gallantry towards his
wife, Paradise Lost insistently attempts to assert to a reader the
ultimate justness of a loving God’s “Eternal Providence”.
In vastly elaborating the bald account of Adam’s Fall in the
Book of Genesis, Milton extends his viewpoint beyond the acts of
Creation and Eden to an imaginative history of how the peccant angels
fell from Heaven, how Satan evolved and perfected his scheme to mar
Creation, and how God’s promise of redemption will be realized.
Milton describes ideal nature, which is neither purely
decorative, nor solidly grounded in reality.
Book I shows us the fallen angels in Hell beginning to recover
from their defeat. Satan rallies the fallen angels after their defeat by
God and declares that he will fight against God in every possible way.
Satan’s speeches are magnificent and they prove that Milton had
grown suspicious of rhetoric as the art of persuasion. These speeches
represent the attractiveness of plausible evil. The opening sentence of
the poem is sixteen lines long.
A fairly favourable image of Satan comes across from the
lines. We can almost sympathise with the rebels, who have been flung
into a “dreary plain, forlorn and wild”, and there is not only energy but
also a kind of bravery in Satan’s words as he refuses to accept defeat.
He is, of course, the incarnation of evil and entirely motivated by hate,
and in a way his words graphically reveal such shortcomings, but none
the less this is someone who leads, speaks to and inspires his forces in
terms we can understand.
171
In his speech Satan talks of freedom, and obviously prefers
freedom in hell to servitude in heaven. Yet his words can also be
viewed from another perspective: he begins by talking about how “We
shall be free”, but within these few lines has shifted from this general
concern for all his followers and is merely concerned with his own
position as the leader who will “reign in hell”. The same double-sided
quality is also apparent in the very sound and texture of his words: his
words can appear elevated, dignified and heroic, but they can also be
judged as empty bombast. At times the manner of his speech almost
resembles a salesman’s clever play with words.
Satan can appear as heroic, but by making his words specious.
Milton can simultaneously show the hollowness of everything Satan
represents. As William Blake shrewdly said, “Milton was of the
devil’s party without knowing it”.
In Harold Bloom’s opinion, Paradise Lost is magnificent
because it is persuasively tragic as well as epic; it is the tragedy of the
fall of Lucifer into Satan, though it declines to show us Lucifer, light-
bearer and son of the morning, chief of the stars that will fall. We see
only the fallen Satan, though we behold Adam and Eve before, at the
very moment of, and after the fall. In another sense of the tragic,
Paradise Lost is the tragedy of Eve and Adam, who, like Satan, have
their inevitably Shakespearian qualities and yet seem somewhat less
persuasive representations than Satan, who is granted more of a
Shakespearian inner self.
Bloom contends that the Miltonic representation of Satan’s
ambivalence toward God, like the Freudian account of primal
ambivalence, is wholly Shakespearian, founded upon Iago’s
ambivalence toward Othello, Macbeth’s toward his won Oedipal
ambition, and Hamlet’s toward everything and everyone, himself most
of all. Ambivalence, in its Freudian definition, is the essence of all
relationships between the superego, that which is above the “I”, and
the id or “it”, below the “I”. Mingled and equal affects of love and
hatred simultaneously flow back and forth drowning the unhappy ego.
In Book II Satan displays traces of true heroism, and yet a self
frustrating spite is his dominant emotion. His most impressive heroic
terms are just meaningless language.
172
Book III is the least effective part of the poem because of
God’s continuous need of logically justifying the necessity of
punishment, and hence the episode of the temptation. The a priori idea
of justice to be done, of a scapegoat, is inconsistent.
Book IV presents Satan’s arrival in Eden.
In Book V Milton emphasizes the beauty of prelapsarian
simplicity, he is fascinated by innocent nakedness, especially Eve’s.
He opposes this attitude to perpetual celibacy and the courtly love
tradition. With Milton, the conventional notions of heroism turn out to
be diabolical, while conventional attitudes to sex are Puritan. The
Garden of Eden is opposed to the Garden of the Rose tradition.
Books V and VI present Raphael’s account of the war in
Heaven.
Book VII presents Raphael’s account of the creation (with
imagery borrowed from Genesis, the Psalms, Book of Job, and Plato).
In Book VIII Adam tells Raphael of his own experience after
his creation.
In Book IX Milton lingers on the final moment before the
temptation scene. Eve is fooled by the cunning serpent, whose effort is
compared to the speech “of some orator renowned / In Athens or free
Rome”. Eve tastes the forbidden fruit. She then tells Adam the truth.
Eve’s sin is disobedience, but also credulity, a paradox reminding us
of Othello’s trusting Iago.
In this following extract, we see Adam deciding what to do,
whether to be loyal to God or whether to stay with and support Eve:
174
Satan’s reason for feeling he could love Adam and Eve – that
they look so like God – naturally surprises the reader, as we have been
led to suppose it is God Satan hates.
When he sees Eve in Eden, Satan is so enraptured by her
beauty that he becomes momentarily good (9.460-79). He is deprived
of his “fierce intent” as he watches her, “abstracted” from his own
evil:
175
foreground where their answers can be inspected for both literary and
doctrinal coherence.
Says Harold Bloom: “As a Protestant prophet, indeed the
Protestant poet, Milton would be very unhappy that Paradise Lost
now reads like the most powerful science-fiction (…) what makes
Paradise Lost unique is its startling blend of Shakespearian tragedy,
Virgilian epic, and Biblical prophecy.”
The “woman question” in Milton will never be decided; good
poems never end, as Diane K. McColley has put it. Milton was radical
in making Eve an ardent caretaker of the natural world, a passionate,
sensuous, and pure erotic partner, a spontaneous composer of
exquisite lyric and narrative poetry, a participant in numerous kinds of
conversation including political debate, and the leader in peacemaking
after the Fall. He was probably more serious about the relations of the
sexes, more careful of their resonances, and more hopeful of their
happiness and holiness than any other poet of his or perhaps any other
time. He was radical in his insistence on women’s spiritual
completeness, responsibility, and fitness for “all rational delight” and
in his celebration of erotic bliss in the morning of Creation. Perhaps
no one else has depicted sexual happiness at once so lavishly and so
purely. His loving portrait of Eve, not excusing her sin on any
grounds, certainly not incapacity, but portraying her as a person of
delightful mind as well as beautiful form, honour as well as charm,
sanctitude as well as radiant looks and graceful gestures, moral
searching as well as artistic creativity, political combativeness as well
as sweet compliance, asperity as well as gentleness, and a capacity for
repentance and forgiveness as well as rash default, raises her
immeasurably above other Eves of art and story.
Anthony Burgess contends that Milton created a highly
artificial language and blank verse. His sentences are long, like Latin
sentences; he inverts the order of words, like a Latin author, and he
talks about “elephants endorsed with towers” instead of “elephants
with towers on their back”. However, the subject of the poem
obviously justifies such a poetic diction.
Paradise Regained (1671), a poem in four books, presents the
temptation of Christ in the wilderness. In Book I, Satan first appears in
the likeness of an “aged man in rural weeds”. Unlike Eve, Jesus has
176
the advantage of knowing who Satan is. Satan resorts to rhetoric, to
oratory, while Christ’s language is quiet, precise.
At the beginning of the poem, Jesus, newly baptized in the
Jordan, walks out into the desert in deep thought, reviewing the course
of his life. He recollects his first delighted boyhood reading in
Scripture and then a further reading, after Mary has told him how at
his birth the angels proclaimed him Messiah. What he knows of
himself is what has been revealed in the Old Testament. When Satan
comes to the contest with him, he comes straight from a council of the
fallen angels called after the baptism, at which he reported that when
Jesus rose out of the Jordan a voice from heaven was heard to say,
“This is my son beloved, in him am pleased” (I.85).
Book II deals with temptation through luxury, riches and
sensuality. Having rejected the first temptation to turn stones into
bread, in Book II of Paradise regained, after forty days in the
wilderness, Jesus for the first time is conscious of hunger as he
prepares to sleep. Satan takes advantage of Jesus’s drama to bring on
the banquet that concludes the temptation to appetite. The banquet
scene is a Miltonic invention, not suggested by any of the Gospels.
Book III presents temptation through fame, glory and power.
In Book IV Satan evokes the civilization of Greece and Rome.
Jesus rejects public life. Private life is identified with virtue.
In Paradise Regained Satan quotes Scripture in his own cause
and the Son responds with interpretations that wrest Scripture back
from him again. Milton constructs a dramatic conflict by opposing to
Satan’s literal but worldly reading of the biblical theme of
messiahship an evolving higher reading of the theme by the Son.
Satan, who apparently has read through the Hebrew Bible with an
inquiring but cold eye, makes an adversarial or ironic use of scriptural
quotations, seeking to persuade the Son that they define the Messiah
as an earthly king, for on that basis Jesus might betray the spiritual
values in Holy Writ. Jesus replies with an inspired reading of
scriptural quotations to defeat Satan’s strategy; he not only eludes
entrapment, he enunciates the true meaning of messiahship by his
truer hermeneutic.
177
The poem is dramatic rather than epic. Its psychological
conflict is reminiscent of the “psychomachia” tradition (see the
morality plays, Marlowe’s Faustus, etc.).
Milton’s last great poem, Samson Agonistes (1671),
dramatizes a biblical episode taking Aeschylus’s Prometheus
Unbound and Oedipus at Colonus as models. Dialogues, monologues,
comments by the chorus, the final reported account of the hero’s death
in pulling down the temple, all those details make up a dramatic poem.
The myth, the story of Samson is located principally in the Old
Testament, specifically Judges XII-XVI. Milton’s dramatic poem
generally follows the biblical account, with a number of changes. In
the Bible, Delilah is Samson’s mistress. Milton makes her his wife,
presumably to emphasise the intensity of their relationship. Also, the
biblical Samson is presented as a folklorish giant with no special
claim to intellect while Milton’s figure continually reflects upon and
scrutinises his past, his condition and his future. Along with the
biblical legend, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and Sophocles’s
Oedipus at Colonus both have tragic-heroic figures respectively
imprisoned and blinded.
The opening 330 lines are an exchange between Samson and
the “Chorus of Danites” which inform us of his past and current state.
He is, or rather, was, a military hero of the Jewish people (the Chorus
is comprised of lamenting Jews). He was betrayed by his wife Delilah,
who belonged to the tribe with whom the Jews were at war, the
Philistines. They, as a result, captured him and cut off the hair upon
which his God-given strength depended; next he was blinded and cast
into imprisonment and slavery.
The exchange between Samson and the Chorus is interrupted
by the arrival of his father, Manoa (332). Manoa proposes that a
ransom be paid to secure his release (483) (this is Milton’s invention
and not the part of the biblical account). Samson responds that, while
the suggestion is tempting, he is aware that his punishment is just. He
betrayed the secret of his strength to his wife, not because of love but
because he responded vainly to her flattery and was willingly
entrapped by her physical charms (521-40). He feels that he deserves
his humiliating plight.
178
His next visitor is Delilah herself (724), who supports his
father’s proposal, and seeks his forgiveness in return for the
alleviation of his sufferings (733-818). Samson replies that, while he
cannot pardon himself, her crime is still more unpardonable (819-42,
871-902, 928-50).
The third visitor is Harapha (1076), the Philistine giant, who
comes to mock and taunt him. Strengthened by his exchanges with his
father and Delilah, Samson resists Harapha’s verbal assaults with
discourses that emphasise his own sense of tragic certainty, and
Harapha departs “somewhat crestfallen”.
Finally, an Officer from the Philistine court arrives (1308) and
summons Samson to perform feats of strength before them. He departs
with the Officer (1426) and the poem ends with the Chorus and
Manoa being informed by a Messenger from the court of what has
happened (1596-1660): Samson has rooted up the two pillars which
supported the building in which he was supposed to perform, bringing
down the roof and killing himself and the assembled dignitaries.
As Joan S. Bennett argues, as a tragic hero, Samson is not
constructed nor held up as an exemplar for reader to emulate. In place
of heaven, hell, paradise, or even the wilderness, the drama shows us a
familiar world: of family (parent, lover, wife); of friendship
(colleagues, countrymen); of conventional beliefs and values
(religious, societal, political); of glimpses of human intersection with
the divine. It is the world of personal discovery and of commitment to
an individual life’s meaning; of exhilaration in the achievement of
goals against the odds; of betrayal and abandonment; of personal
failure and despair; of deep guilt, of the struggle for religious faith, of
liberation, of the purest individual freedom within the confines of
history.
The blind Milton has been identified with the blind Samson.
Milton again attacks the courtly love tradition, according to which the
man was regarded as “love’s prisoner”.
Despite the voices of several famous detractors, such as
Voltaire or Dr. Samuel Johnson, Milton’s work stands as one of the
ever greatest achievements of English poetry.
179
JOHN DRYDEN
181
• Dryden the Poet was appointed poet laureate (in succession
to Davenant) in 1668; he was also appointed historiographer royal
after he had published Annus Mirabilis (1667). It is the account of the
“wonderful year” which came to know a four-day naval battle with the
Dutch and the Great Fire of London. It is made up of 304 quatrains in
alternate rhymes. The mood of the poem is patriotic and encomiastic.
In the poem it is the King’s policies that serve to defeat the Dutch in
war and the King’s prayers that persuade Heaven to quell the flames.
In 1679 Dryden was brutally assaulted by the Earl of
Rochester’s hirelings for supposedly being involved in the
composition of an anti-Rochester pamphlet.
In 1681 Dryden wrote his best work, Absalom and Achitophel.
It is a satire mixing serious intent with pleasant manner, in the vein of
Lucian’s Dialogues or Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae. The political
satire is veiled under the transparent guise of one of the most familiar
episodes of the Old Testament, namely Absalom’s rebellion against
David at Achitophel’s urge. In Dryden’s satire Absalom points to
Monmouth, the king’s natural son; David stands for Charles II and
Achitophel is Shaftesbury, Monmouth’s supporter and adviser. It is a
party poem, one designed to please friends by advancing their cause
and to provoke enemies by ridiculing theirs. “The true end of Satyre”,
he wrote in his preliminary declaration to his reader, “is the
amendment of Vices by correction”; the satirist himself is a physician
prescribing “harsh Remedies to an inveterate Disease”, a disease
affecting the body politic.
Shaftesbury / Achitophel is cast as the Satanic tempter of the
honourably gullible Monmouth / Absalom; he holds out the prospect
of personal glory and public salvation, and he flatters the young man
with perverted biblical images pregnant with a sense of a divine
mission.
The poem, as Andrew Sanders observes, has relatively little
“plot” in the strict sense of the term, is structured around a series of
vivid arguments and apologies. It closes with a reasoned affirmation
of intent from the “Godlike” David, part a regretful denunciation, part
a defence of royal prerogative, part a restatement of an ideal of
constitutional balance. It is presented as a second Restoration with the
182
King’s position approved, in late baroque pictorial fashion, by an
assenting God and a thundering firmament.
The satirical narrative is not complete; the poem was to lead
up to the trial and conviction of the rebel. Dryden’s enemies
(Buckingham among others) are ridiculed with sarcasm.
The Medal (1682), written at the King’s suggestion, was
another attack directed against Shaftesbury’s hypocrisy.
Mac Flecknoe, written in the same year, is a short satirical
poem against Thomas Shadwell, Shaftesbury’s literary supporter. It is
a purely personal satire in motive and design, anticipating Pope’s
personal attacks in The Dunciad. One of history’s many ironies is that
in 1688, on their accession to the throne of England, King William
and Queen Mary appointed Shadwell poet laureate long before
Dryden’s death.
Religio Laici (1683) is a poem summing up Dryden’s views,
who wanted to know where in the matter of religion he stood. In 1686
he became a Roman Catholic. In the preface of Religio Laici Dryden
describes himself as one who is “naturally inclin’d to Scepticism in
Philosophy” though one inclined to submit his theological opinions
“to my Mother Church”. The poem sees the Church of England as
serenely fostering “Common quiet” in the face of attacks from Deists,
Dissenters, and Papists and it blends within the form of a verse-epistle
theological proposition with satirical exposition. Its striking opening
image of human reason as a dim moon lighting the benighted soul is
developed into an attack on those Deists who reject the Scripturally
based teachings of Christianity. As it proceeds, the poem also attempts
to demolish both Roman Catholic claims to infallible omniscience and
the Puritan faith in individual inspiration, but it ultimately begs the
vital question of religious authority.
The Hind and the Panther is Dryden’s longest production in
verse, written after his reception into the Roman Catholic Church in
1685. It is a fable. It is a wordy and unworthy tribute to his new-found
religious security, an allegorical defence of James II’s attempts to
achieve official toleration for Catholics in a predominantly Anglican
culture and an attempt to prove the validity of Catholic claims to
universal authority. It takes the form of a beast fable in which Quakers
appear as hares, Presbyterians as wolves, Romans as hinds, and
183
Anglicans as panthers. It is obliged to resort to the absurdity of a good
natured conversation about the mysteries of religion in which a hind
actually attempts to persuade a panther, and to the incongruity of
casting the Christian God as the nature god, Pan. Allegorical only in
its mise en scéne and list of characters, the poem lacks verisimilitude,
with the animals indulging in theological controversy and Biblical
criticism.
• Dryden the Translator was a hard-working man who had to
earn his living by translating classical poets. No longer a favourite
court-poet, Dryden published the complete translation of Persius and
Juvenal as well as Vergil’s Georgics and Aeneis. The Trojan hero on
the title-page of the latter volume resembled King William’s face with
his hooked nose, in an attempt to placate the king. Dryden also
translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses and fragments from Homer’s Iliad
(without Chapman’s excellence). Apart from his translations and his
libretto for Henry Purcell’s extravagant “Dramatick Opera” King
Arthur, or The British Worthy (1691), two late lyric poems – A Song
for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687, and Alexander’s Feast; or the Power fo
Musique. An Ode, in Honour of St Cecilia’s Day (1697) – proved of
particularly fruitful impact on the eighteenth century. Both poems
contributed to the fashion for the irregular stanzas and verse
paragraphs of the “Cowleyan” Ode.
A critic of imitators and plagiaries (see his opinion on
Jonson), Dryden could not go beyond the limits of being an imitator
himself.
ALEXANDER POPE
185
Alexander Pope, the most important English neoclassicist
poet of the eighteenth century started his literary career by imitating
Chaucer and the ancients.
One of Pope’s most demanding poems is Essay on Criticism
(1711), in which he tries to explain the history of literary criticism, the
importance of the classics, the doctrine of mimesis, the reason why
English poetry has developed the way it has, and the relationship
between writing and reading. The poem opens in a casual way: “’Tis
hard to say, if greater Want or Skill / Appear in Writing or in Judging
ill.” The whole poem remains similarly accessible even as it explores
complex issues. Part of the poem’s accomplishment is in the very ease
and friendliness with which it approaches complexity.
The poem is not important for its originality; every thought in
it is a commonplace. It summarizes the literary doctrines accepted by
the best, the most cultivated minds of the age. It is, thus, less worth
reading for its general ideas than for its illustrations of them. Pope
tells us that to read poetry for the sound not for the sense is like going
to church not for the doctrine but for the music; that Nature is the best
guide of the judgement; that the poet must be skilful in his choice of
words:
188
repetition of approved cultural definitions and traditions introduced
into a new context.
Pope parodies the works of great poets such as Homer, Vergil,
Milton and Dryden. The use of the heroic couplet emphasizes the
majestic tone superimposed on the trivial topic. Juxtaposing the
conventional with the colloquial is the main stylistic device in any
parody. A trivial social quarrel becomes a second Trojan War. The
poem takes the form of a point-by-point miniature version of the Iliad.
In Pope, Belinda’s description, with the “heroine” sitting in front of
her dressing-table mirror parodies the scenes in which Homer’s heroes
arm themselves for battle. Lord Petre prays to Love, builds an altar of
French novels, lights it with torches made of love-letters, and
sacrifices upon it the souvenirs of previous love-affairs. The feasting
and ritual libations made to the gods in Homer reappear in The Rape
of the Lock as ritual chocolate-and coffee-drinking. Pope’s “Amazons”
fight with their peculiar weapons, their fans, silk dresses and corset-
whalebones. A fashionable drawing-room is turned into a battlefield.
The language of the poem recalls the epic models continuously, but
scriptural allusions also occur now and then (Belinda is compared to
creative divinity during her game of cards: “Let spades be trumps!”)
Besides the comic effects derived from parody, the value of Pope’s
poem resides in its satirical genius. The Rape of the Lock is ultimately
a social satire, it discloses the falsehood of social conventions and
exposes the false values of an age in which female beauty is used as a
weapon, while reputation is a fortress worth defending. The poem
reconstructs the world of fashion in the eighteenth century, the ladies’
sophisticated fashion, the walks along the banks of the Thames, the
atmosphere of the coffee-houses, the favourite sources of
entertainment.
A fervent supporter of the neo-classic principles defined by
Boileau (clarity, order, reason, wit and balance), Pope endeavoured to
attain perfection throughout his life.
Alexander Pope was the most celebrated poet of the early part
of the eighteenth century. In the second half of the century he fell out
of favour, as tastes began to change and his sophisticated poetry was
considered to lack feeling. He did not appeal to readers again until the
189
beginning of the twentieth century, when once more his wit and
technical ability found an appreciative public.
EDWARD YOUNG
191
about his “wrecked desponding thought” (I, 10), only to move
promptly to the nature of God and of man:
JAMES THOMSON
THOMAS GRAY
WILLIAM COLLINS
199
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
WILLIAM COWPER
Some of his best and most striking lines show the poet as a
wounded deer:
204
For Cowper a relation to Nature is always subsumed by a
relation to God: he instructs the reader to acquaint himself with God.
Such an acquaintance, however, remains extra-textual, not to be
justified, as the Romantics would do, through representing
transcendence. As foundations for poetic values and authority,
Cowper’s Christian humility and wounds do not correspond to either
Augustan or Romantic notions of poetic competence.
Cowper’s wounds are keen because of his sensibility; alive to
wounds that never heal, the poet of sensibility fails to master himself.
Unlike Cowper, who remained at the mercy of external forces, the
Romantic poets had sensibility contained by, or subordinated to, other
values, such as the imagination or the sublime.
In The Task Cowper gave the most striking and forceful
expression to the later eighteenth-century orthodoxy that rural living
was ethically superior to urban living. Cowper’s verse sums up a
powerful strand of eighteenth-century thinking that represents the
town as the locus of luxury, which destroys the moral fibre of those
who inhabit it. Cowper values solitude above society, the country
above the city, the private above the public, the meditative and
conversational poetic forms above the declamatory and satirical forms.
If nature keeps a path for Cowper, it is a path of self-discovery.
Wordsworth and Coleridge were to tread, quite deliberately, in his
footsteps, for, as Tim Fulford argues, Cowper’s “pacing out of time
and space allowed the Romantic self to be articulated. It remains
contemporary.”
And yet, even though a poet of sensibility, Cowper frequently
returns to public concerns. The sense of isolation and alienation he
conveys in his image of himself as wounded deer receives fuller
expression in his explicit criticism of his country – for the specific
nature of its capitalism as well as of its military exploits. Valuing the
associations of human beings based on feeling, he deplores alliances
of self-interest. Thus he criticizes the “merchants” that “build factories
with blood / Conducting trade at sword’s point” (The Task, VI.676,
682-83). Cowper stands up against social triviality, public
degradation, and political corruption. The poem ends in a rare
utterance of self-satisfaction, with the speaker describing himself as a
quiet man, treading “the secret path of life” (VI.956), attracting no
205
notice, yet doing good to others. First he claims the conventional
virtues of “sympathy”. The poet is a generous being ready to soothe
sorrows, to comfort and help through his “works” (VI.963-66).
Gradually he develops a tone of contempt toward the “sensual world”
(978) that surrounds him, complaining about the superficiality of that
world, which judges by the eye instead of conscience and heart. His
rage increases as he suggests the prevalence of vice throughout
society:
JAMES MACPHERSON
THOMAS CHATTERTON
CONCLUSIONS:
1) The shift from rationalism to sentimentalism, from
neoclassicism to pre-Romanticism and Romanticism is not an abrupt
but a gradual process. The specific elements of both trends did coexist
for a while in the works of major eighteenth century poets.
2) The eighteenth century “pre-Romantic” poets established
poetic patterns to be later followed not only by the English Romantic
poets, but by the entire Europe.
3) Certain dominant features of the Romantic attitude can be
already traced in the eighteenth-century poetry:
– the rediscovery and exploration of historical past;
– the return to mythology and folklore;
– the attraction exerted by exotic, richly coloured worlds;
– love of the wild and picturesque nature.
209
AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
210
Arthur O. Lovejoy, in “On the Discrimination of
Romanticism” (1924) upheld the idea that the movement in Germany
alone “has the indisputable right to be called Romanticism, since it
invented the term for its own use”; he called the other similar
European movements a “plurality of romanticisms”; English
Romanticism consisted in fact of several “romanticisms”, often
mixing essentially antithetic ideas.
Byron attacked the Lake Poets in his English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers and Canto I of Don Juan. Southey denounced the
“Satanic School” of poetry (i.e. Byron); Shelley attacked Wordsworth
and Coleridge; Keats rejected Wordsworth; even Coleridge ended up
by contradicting the theoretical ideas promoted by Wordsworth; the
younger generation also had different likes and dislikes: while Byron
started his career by imitating Pope, Keats clearly condemned the neo-
classical school of the eighteenth century.
Lovejoy declared that the word “romantic” has come “to mean
so many things that, by itself, it means nothing”. Lovejoy was
challenging the very ontological status of Romanticism. For him, there
seems to be no one feature shared by all Romanticists.
Paul O’Flinn has recently argued that the term Romanticism
should not be conflated with the so-called commercial pink literature
or with excessive sentimentalism. O’Flinn has also colourfully shown
that Romanticism is a notion that covers a complex and heterogeneous
reality:
“There are two ideas that it is essential to hold on to from the
start. The first is that you need to think of Romantic literature not as
escapist in the way the term ‘Romantic’ sometimes suggests, but as
literature that tries passionately to come to terms with the modern
world as it emerges through a series of wrenching changes. And
secondly you have to be aware that, because those changes affected
men and women, working class and middle class, north and south and
so on in different ways, what we get in the literature of the period is a
range of competing, arguing, contending voices rather than a series of
common assumptions that all share and that can be neatly summarised.
Let us look at these two claims in a bit more detail.
First, then, ‘Romantic’. Say the word and what do you think
of? Something dreamy and remote – impossibly idealised versions of
211
love, perhaps, vaguely glimpsed through Barbara Cartland’s veils
while violins scrape somewhere in the background. Or, if you move a
bit closer to easily available notions of Romantic literature, the term
still carries much the same connotations: the first thing that comes to
mind maybe is an unfortunate picture of Keats looking a wistful wimp
or Wordsworth maundering on about daffodils; Shelley flits past with
too much hair but not much practical skill when it comes to paying the
bills; over there lies Coleridge, stoned out of his mind, while in the
corner Blake is talking to the fairies.
Against these superficial images we need to place some facts.
In 1795 Coleridge lectured against the Government’s war policy and
was the target of Government spying. In 1798 Wordsworth and his
sister Dorothy were driven out of Alfoxden because of the neighbours’
suspicions of their radical politics. In 1804 Blake was put on trial for
sedition and avoided a long prison sentence because of the common
sense of an English jury rather than the compassion of the English
judiciary. In 1813 it seems that a Government spy tried to murder
Shelley. In 1824 Byron died in exile in Missolonghi while fighting for
Greek independence.
What those incidents (and the list could be considerably
extended) suggest is a group of men and women who were certainly
not ‘Romantic’ in any escapist or trivial sense but who on the contrary
challenged dominant contemporary values and chose to use their pens
not to doodle prettily in the margins of life but to probe and dissect at
the heart of things. And they did it to the profound annoyance of the
authorities, not to mention most contemporary reviewers and readers
of poetry.
It is this brave thinking and writing that makes Romantic
literature still exciting reading, and it is reading that is all the more
powerful because it speaks about a world that we not only recognise
but also still inhabit.
The major Romantic poets were a diverse group of
individuals. Keats was born over a livery stable, the Swan and Hoop,
in north London, whereas Shelley was born on the family estate at
Field Place, Warnham, in Sussex. Byron was a Cambridge graduate,
whereas Blake never went to school. Coleridge was a life-long
Christian, whereas Keats was an atheist. Byron was an aristocrat,
212
whereas Keats was sometimes sneered at as a Cockney. Blake was in
lodgings in Soho at a time when Shelley was lodging at a palace in
Pisa. The government that tried Blake for sedition was the same
government that appointed Wordsworth Distributor of Stamps for
Westmorland.”
There is no coherent Romantic “programme”, nor a conscious
sense of belonging to a “movement” and yet the poets writing between
1790 and 1840 share a great number of common features making up a
peculiar unity of mode and feeling in a diversity of individual attitudes
and biases.
The “Preface” to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, a
joint-venture collection of poetry produced by Wordsworth and
Coleridge, brings about interesting critical ideas. The primary purpose
of the authors was to reform poetry by rejecting the “artificial”
literature of the previous century. Poetry should rely on “a selection of
language really used by men” and its preferable subject matter should
be “the humble and rustic life”. The authors rejected the notion of
“poetic diction”; poetry was defined as “the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings”. They also rejected the purely selfish, rational and
unimaginative way of looking at life displayed by their forerunners.
Poetry was not necessarily metre, rhythm and poetic diction, but
subjective feelings emerging from one’s experience.
An attempt to define the Romantic attitude might include the
following features and themes:
1. the rediscovery and exploration of the historical past (either
the glamorous Middle Ages or ancient Greece). Some poets took
refuge in a supposedly glorious past; others, like Byron and Shelley
tried to extract from it human potentials able to change their world; the
Middle Ages, with its stories of knights and damsels in distress, had a
special appeal. Old literary forms such as ballads, with their magical
atmosphere and haunting settings, became popular. The historical novel
was one of the most appreciated forms of fiction of the period;
2. the attraction exerted by the Orient with its exotic and
richly coloured world rather than the wisdom assigned to it by the
eighteenth century;
3. the conviction that a less advanced stage of culture, even a
savage condition, breeds greater happiness than modern society;
213
4. the idea of progress, the belief in a more glorious tomorrow,
in continuous improvement (suggested by the social revolutions);
5. humanitarianism and democracy are supported by the belief
in the equality and inherent worth of every man as well as the hostility
to monarchical authority and established institutions;
6. originality definitely replaces the fashion of imitations and
original compositions are considered to be the only valuable works;
7. confessionalism: verse, notes, diaries, correspondence stand
proof for the poets’ interest in self-analysis. Coleridge, in Biographia
Literaria, claims: “the most of what I have written concerns myself
personally” (Wordsworth and Shelley also share this concern);
8. fundamental antipathy of the artist to his times: the Romantic
writer goes his own way against the conventions of his time – he is a
protester, a discontented type;
9. love of the wild and the picturesque in external and human
nature. The wild inner and outer nature were opposite sides of the
same coin, the devastating spectacles of Nature corresponding to the
poet’s tormented soul;
10. diversitarianism, i.e. the loss of cultural centrality. The
doctrine of diversity had Romantic roots: its twentieth century
counterpart is the concept of multi-culturalism;
11. the cult of childhood; the neo-classicists believed that
children had savage instincts that needed to be civilised: children were
important because, through social training, they could become
sophisticated adults who contributed to society. The Romantics, on the
contrary, saw the children as pure and uncorrupted. They believed that
children were close to God, had powerful and creative imagination
and could be “the father of the Man” (Wordsworth).
12. the striving for the infinite and the preference for cosmic
visions;
13. the deep longing for wholeness and a painful search for
answers concerning ontological problems;
14. a deep feeling of Nature associated with the exaltation of
the simplicity of everyday life;
15. the love of beauty and its relation to truth;
16. the cultivation of solitude etc.
214
The birth of English Romanticism is considered to be the
publication of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and
Coleridge. Their ideal was to form a Naturalistic and Imaginative
School of Poetry. (Nature and Imagination are key words in any
approach to Romanticism). This dual purpose was to be illustrated in
two ways: Coleridge was to deal with fantastic themes of legend and
romances in such a way as to produce upon the reader the impression
of detailed reality; Wordsworth was to treat subjects of common
homely life so imaginatively as to give them the charm of romance.
WILLIAM BLAKE
216
interpretation, contortion, and distortion; they remain, however,
singular, fascinating, elusive, and at times infuriating works.
Blake’s cosmological system is defined in The Four Zoas
mainly, the most esoteric poem from the long cycle of epic poetry
widely known today as The Prophetic Books.
According to Blake, existence precedes creation, which is
mainly a fall from eternity. Existence is identified in Blake with the
supreme principle, the Perfect Unity, which “Cannot Exist but from
the Universal Brotherhood of Eden, / The Universal Man, to Whom be
Glory Evermore. Amen.”
The basis of Blake’s cosmogonical theories is the conception
about the four Zoas, the “Starry Eternals”, “the living beings”; this
idea might originate from Ezekiel’s vision or that experienced by St.
John in his Revelation. These “Four Mighty Ones are in every
Man”(The Four Zoas, I, 6); the first Zoa is Tharmas, “the Parent
power”, who is in the West; the second one is Urizen, “Prince of
Light”, who is in the South and shall want to become God, thus his
world or sphere becoming a ruin. The third Zoa is Luvah, “the Prince
of Love”, and he is in the East; he will steal Urizen’s “Horses of
Light”, as if reiterating Michael’s fight with Lucifer, as a result of
which Michael took the torch of Light that Lucifer was holding, the
first Light, the most troubling revelation of God’s Face, hence the
name “Angel of the Presence”. The last Zoa is Urthona, “the keeper of
heav’n’s gates”(FZ, IV, 42), he is also the most enigmatic of them all,
and he is in the North. After the Fall Urthona becomes Los, i.e. time,
as Blake himself explains in Milton, and he still remains “the
Watchman of Eternity”. Each Zoa has an emanation or feminine
counterpart as a result of the progressive division from within
Creation: Tharmas – Enion, Urizen – Ahania, Luvah – Vala, Los –
Enitharmon. Tharmas is God of the Waters, the one who rules over
the Waters.
The infinite in Milton is the creational whole and not only the
visible infinite universe; it refers to all the levels of conscience and the
corresponding ontological planes through which the voyage of the
traveller through eternity goes. The beings of the Earth are in the
middle of the Earth-Vortex, they live at a constant level of conscience,
which also makes human experience possible. In Blake, the macro-,
217
micro-universe relationship is always complete, everything is
interdependent, interrelated, interfused, so that the journey through the
universe of inward conscience, through the vortices-planes of
conscience, is also a journey through the macro-universe, it is actually
the key by means of which a conscience can enter other universes-
planes of conscience, which explains the romantic poet’s notorious
formula: ”all you behold; tho’ it appears Without, it is Within,/In your
Imagination, of which this World of Mortality is but a
Shadow.”(Jerusalem, 71, 18-19)
The external creation is the mirror-the symbol-the trace of
man’s within. Blake always explores the universe of consciousness
and its relativity as opposed to the absoluteness of the world of
eternity. In the human body the four Zoas are the four main physical
eternal senses which have become the four elements (Jerusalem, 36,
31-32): Tharmas – the Tongue, Urizen – the Eyes, Luvah – the
Nostrils, Urthona – the Ears (Jerusalem, 98, 16-18), they are “the four
Rivers of the Water of Life”, they are the gates of the soul opening
towards manifestation. Thus, as man is created in the image and after
the likeness of God, the four Zoas are reflections of the divine aspects:
Tharmas is the Voice of the Father who speaks to the Son; Urthona is
the Son who hears the Father and fulfils the Father’s Will, thus
making the Voice of the Father heard in the temporal manifestation
(Los). This fact explains why Urthona is in the North and is described
as being solid, earth; he is a corner stone, the Word-the Logos, the
peak of reality, the Logos of the Father. Blake actually says that Jesus
is the image and likeness of Los (Jerusalem, 96, 7), and the
consequence thereof is that here we have the idea of a patibilis deus –
a God who suffers with his Creation the whole drama of Creation.
Urthona is therefore the Son. Urizen stands in front of the Trinity
(Tharmas-Urthona-Luvah). By falling, he loses his divine attribute
(holding the uncreated light), thus becoming the master of the physical
world, of the stars, and so he enters the world of time. Luvah is the
Ghost of life of all beings; the name resembles phonologically the
Hebrew ruah (ghost of life). Luvah is represented as being invisible,
and he is related to a golden age of mankind.
218
Those eager to learn more about Blake’s esoteric cosmogony
may find further information in Mihai Stroe’s critical works listed in
the bibliography.
As the poem Milton (1804) suggests, Blake identifies himself
both with the author of Paradise Lost and with the angels, both fallen
and unfallen, who figure in Milton’s narrative. It is Blake who,
assuming a diabolic voice, declares in The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell (1790-3) that Milton was “a true poet and of the Devil’s party
without knowing it”.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
219
4. the poems of his later period, marked by classic austerity of
style, inspired by Vergil and Milton and dedicated to National
Independence and Liberty.
For Wordsworth, poetry is no longer mimesis but the
representation of the world filtered through the eyes and the soul of
the poet. The universe is no longer perceived as a mechanical but as
an organic entity. Wordsworth is neither Christian, deist, nor
rationalist. He is best described as a Pantheist, one who identifies the
natural universe with God, and thus denies that God is over everything
or possesses a distinct “personality”. The immanence of the divine in
Nature confers it a sacramental dimension as God is perceived to be
present everywhere in the world. Hence, the Romantic communion
between man and Nature, and the Romantic poet’s conviction that the
book of Nature could serve as man’s best teacher.
Wordsworth’s theory of poetic language derives from his
deeper nature-philosophy. Although made up mostly of simple words,
Wordsworth’s poetry is rich in emotions and epiphanies (those sudden
revelations significant for the human being). There are two main
versions of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The first is that of 1800 (the
1798 edition of the poems had been prefaced simply by an
Advertisement) and the second that of 1802, which is the basis of
Wordsworth’s final version of 1805. The main difference between the
two versions is the addition in the 1802 text of the passage which
discusses the question “What is a Poet?”. In the Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads, Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings”, originating “from emotion recollected in
tranquillity”. Such a recollection of emotions is “I Wandered Lonely
as a Cloud”, in which the poet recreates the splendour of a crowd of
daffodils beside a lake.
The principal object of Poetry is, according to Wordsworth, to
make the incidents of common life interesting. The purpose of Poetry
is “to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the
great and simple affections of our nature”. Wordsworth insisted that
he wished to adopt the very language of men, to bring his language
“near to the language of men”. In Wordsworth’s opinion, some of the
most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be “strictly
the language of prose when prose is well written.”
220
Wordsworth also tried to answer “what is meant by the word
Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what
language is to be expected from him?” The Poet is, in Wordsworth’s
phrasing, “a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with
more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a
greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul,
than are supposed to be common among mankind.” The Poet has
added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent
things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself
passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced
by real events. The Poet is different from other men not in kind but in
degree. The Poet thinks and feels in the spirit of the passions of men.
The Poet describes and imitates passions. Poets do not write
for Poets alone, but for men. The Poet is a kind of translator.
For Wordsworth, poetry is “the most philosophic of all
writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but
general. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge: it is the
impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.”
Wordsworth’s conclusion is that the end of Poetry is to produce
excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure.
Nature is ubiquitous in most of Wordsworth’s poems. In the
sonnet “It Is a Beauteous Evening Calm and Free”, the poet records
the sudden perception of a thunder signalling to the world that the
“mighty being” is awake.
“Tintern Abbey” moves from a process of telling or listening
implied by a poem such as “The Thorn” (with its insistent interplay of
personal experience, speculation, and hearsay) into introspection and
meditation.
In “Tintern Abbey”, the poetic narrator is emotionally stirred
by his return after five years to the banks of the river Wye. Both a
nature poem and a poem on man’s mind, “Tintern Abbey” records the
movement of the poet’s mind in time. The poet considers the three
important stages in the development of his mind, from childhood,
when nature is approached through senses (Nature being presented in
terms of growth, of organic life, all “colours” and “greenness”) to
adolescence, when the approach is passionate (Nature being perceived
as a “presence”, a “motion and a spirit”) and to maturity (when the
221
poet transcends the human, the transient, the evil, and has the privilege
of experiencing Nature’s eternal principles of kindness and joy, when
Nature becomes a moral guide, impressing with beauty and feeding
with lofty thoughts).
In “Tintern Abbey”, Wordsworth offers a self-justifying
explanation of his partial retreat from politics. Here it is the sensations
of remembered natural scenery, “felt in the blood, and felt along the
heart”, that bring “tranquil restoration” to a once troubled soul, and the
recall of the “still, sad music of humanity” that makes for a chastening
and subduing of restlessness. The intensity of his expressed love of
nature and its teachings seems to preclude other perceptions,
particularly those related to the acute class division inherent in urban
industrialization, in the related depopulation of the countryside, or,
most pressingly, in the explosion of social questioning presented by
the French Revolution.
In “The Idiot Boy” the human feelings are simple:
neighbourliness, mother-love, the boy’s elation, anxiety, and relief.
The circumstances are slight, and have no consequences. The whole
occurs within a setting which is pure delight – to be alone on the hills,
moonlight, and the owls calling, all isolated and intensified by the
reduction of the boy to a mere existence. In this poem, and the
pleasure of it is the imaginative solution of natural solution of natural
emotions in natural surroundings – the “music of humanity” and the
music of nature in one strain.
In “Nutting”, Wordsworth recollects a boyhood episode,
when, after picking hazelnuts, he suddenly realized he had plundered
the place and sinned against Nature. Wordsworth’s fundamental
feeling is the joy stirred by Nature and the deep sadness caused by the
human condition, of “what man has made of man”. “The child is
father of the man” has been a favourite line of several generations of
psychoanalysts but in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood” children are regarded as
repositories of virtue and even wisdom. The poet touches the
Romantic obsessive theme of Nature’s eternity and man’s transience;
he expresses the particular feelings or emotional experiences, the
vividness and splendour associated with natural objects during
childhood, and the loss of capacity to see all these things when you
222
grow up. The child is the “mighty prophet” who retains a feeling of
Nature’s wholeness, while adulthood suggests a “palsied age”, a
“prison-house”, a “thought of grief”.
The Prelude, or the Growth of a Poet’s Mind, a vast poem
written in blank verse, is perhaps the most convincing illustration of
the idea that with Wordsworth a journey in space is the cause for a
deeply felt journey through life. The Prelude is made up of fourteen
books in which the author traced the psychology of his mind and
heart, marking the “spots” of time and the dearest spaces which
registered his poetic growth. Wordsworth the pupil, Wordsworth the
student at Cambridge, Wordsworth the adult living in London,
Wordsworth the tourist in the Alps are recollected via various
autobiographical incidents and yet, it is the poet’s philosophy, his
vision concerning the relationship between man and the infinite that
makes up the bulk of The Prelude: the incidents are mere illustrations
of his philosophy. The Prelude might be best defined as a
psychological study of childhood’s perceptions and a poetic quest for
creative powers.
Wordsworth enriched the language of poetry by bringing into
use many words regarded as too humble for such an honour. He
showed the beauty of common things and humble lives and opened
men’s eyes to a new and unsuspected world of beauty lying round
them. The distinctive feature of his innovation remains simplicity. He
used less symbols than the other Romantic poets. His language is his
own, his natural descriptions are fresh and immediate; he is a poet of
the particular scene, not the general abstract image. Wordsworth
wanted poetry to stay on the ground and extract thrills from the
commonplace. As Coleridge said, it was when he forgot his theories
that Wordsworth wrote best – when, as a competent and complete
artist, he has all his faculties and experiences converge in one creative
act. He is one of the greatest formative and inspiring influences of
modern English poetry. And yet he is unequal in his works. Shelley
accused him of being a deserter from the Cause of Humanity;
Browning later renewed this charge; some of his early poems were
regarded as silly etc.
223
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
225
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was conceived as a joint
enterprise, but once the unimaginable motion began only one wit
could continue it. Wordsworth supplied a suggestion and a few lines:
his main contribution was his habitual assumption that a piece of a
work once begun would be carried through. When Coleridge was
alone or disturbed by unhappy relations with other men, his endurance
was unequal to his wit, and “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan” remained
unfinished. However, the greatness of these poems lies in their being
free exercises of the imagination working in a medium of clear
concrete images.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is summarized by
Anthony Burgess as follows: “The Ancient Mariner kills an albatross
and is forthwith tormented with the most frightening visions and
visitations, all of which are presented in the style and metre of the old
ballads, but with far greater imagination and astonishing imagery”.
Despite its metrical and verbal debts to the simplicity of the traditional
ballad form, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is distinctly in
Coleridge’s manner. A more complex reading of the poem might
decode it as a voyage leading to self-knowledge and self-discovery,
both literally and figuratively, but it is also a psychodrama concerned
with the guilt and expiation of a Cain-like figure, the arbitrary
“murderer” of an albatross which, we are told, appears trough the fog
“as if it had been a Christian soul”. The curse and the haunted ship
suggest that redemption can only be attained through deep suffering.
(The same motif will be later employed by the German composer
Richard Wagner in The Flying Dutchman). The poem defeats precise
definition. The Mariner’s experience is tangled and often bewildering;
he is not a pilgrim who measures himself by definable spiritual
milestones or who encounters and progressively overcomes obstacles;
he is, rather, an outcast who witnesses an invisible action which
interpenetrates the physical world. Despite its framework of Catholic
Christian faith and ritual, the Mariner appears to discover a series of
meanings concerning the interdependency of life, not merely the
consequences of breaking taboos.
It would be possible to argue, according to John Peck, that the
purpose of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is moral. There is a
positive idea of turning to God and putting one’s faith in God. The
226
problem with such a coherent reading of the poem, however, is that it
seems to sweep out of existence all the possibly disturbing elements in
the poem. They offer a strong sense of the dark mystery of existence;
the simple concept of Christian prayer does not, in the overall context
of this poem, outweigh and banish those disturbing forces. Coleridge
uses symbols: the way in which he uses the sea, the sun and all the
surrounding references creates a sense of unfathomable mysteries.
A more detailed analysis of the same poem might reveal the
fact that it is a complex metaphor of the poet’s fate. The poem
abounds in metaphors which all seem to focus towards one great
image: that of the inner pain of choosing or of having been chosen by
the creative powers. It is a kind of misological metaphor, as Kant
called it, of hatred against intellect. Thus, the poem turns out to be a
cry against the self-pain-inducing loneliness considered as a
primordial sin which must be punished.
“Kubla Khan”, written in the summer of 1797, derives much
of its exotic imagery from Coleridge’s wide reading of mythology,
history, and comparative religion. The poem famously remains “a
fragment”, because, as the poet explains in his prefatory note, he
wrote it down immediately after waking from “a profound sleep, at
least of the external senses” in which he had composed “two to three
hundred lines” but was interrupted by a caller,” “a person on business
from Porlock”. This “Vision in a Dream” remains a riddle, a pattern of
vivid definitions amid a general lack of definition, expressed with a
rhythmic forward drive which suggests a mind taken over by a process
of semi-automatic composition. Like “Christabel”, it is a dream-poem
written in trance. It goes to the fabulous Orient for its theme (the
creative, strange power of imagination) and presents the vision of an
exotic, unearthly world which is, actually, the lost paradise. “Kubla
Khan” is a fantastic invocation of a “sunny pleasure-dome with caves
of ice”: a microcosm where both body and spirit may coexist in
happiness.
What makes “Kubla Khan” so exciting is the way in which it
deploys its symbols and the way in which it uses poetic structure. The
symbols suggest a dark and mysterious world: they seem to plunge
into a concealed world, including the world of the unconscious mind.
It is all a step further on from the Romantic poets’ use of imagery:
227
imagery can suggest the diffuseness and diversity of experience but it
all seems within the sphere of a knowable world. Symbolism suggests
the unfathomable, the unmappable, and the unconscious. Yet at times
Coleridge seems to be getting possession of that world, as if his poetic
structure can contain and explain it. This is most evident when the
poem becomes most incantatory or musical, as if Coleridge were
finding an answer in the shape and sound and movement of poetry.
Coleridge’s third visionary “Gothic” poem, “Christabel”, was
originally intended to be included in the second edition of Lyrical
Ballads but was excluded partly because of Wordsworth’s distaste for
its strangeness and partly because of Coleridge’s own “indolence” in
leaving the poem yet another substantial fragment. In Andrew
Sanders’s opinion it is in many ways a complement to “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner”, not simply because it too echoes the style of old
ballads, but because it appears to link the nature of Christabel’s
experience of the powers of life and death to that of the Mariner.
“Christabel”, with its flexible metre anticipating Gerard Manley
Hopkins, but also reminding us of pre-Chaucerian rhythms, is a
Gothic ballad full of the mystery of evil. The poem is concerned with
the attempted penetration of Christabel’s psyche by the daemonic
force represented by Geraldine (Geraldine, the beautiful daughter of
Roland, has her body inhabited by an evil spirit), but it also allows for
a balancing contrast of two powerful aspects of nature, the
sympathetic and the energetic, and for a symbolic investigation of
what Coleridge later called “the terra incognita of our nature”.
Christabel meets Geraldine in the forest and although the latter
discloses her evil qualities in subtle ways, Christabel cannot bring
herself to tell the truth. Geraldine’s eyes betray the presence of the
devil within her: it is a nightmare situation and a nightmare poem,
touched with the glamour of old castles and medieval remoteness. The
poem might be interpreted as a journey leading to knowledge (see
Christabel’s route: the castle yard – the stairs – the room – the bed)
and as the metamorphosis of the self into the “other”.
“Dejection: An Ode”, written in April 1802, opens with an
epigraph from, and a reference to, the ballad of Sir Patrick Spence. It
is the last and most despondent of Coleridge’s conversation poems,
marked as it is by an acknowledged failure of response to the
228
phenomena of nature and by an expression of the decay of an
imaginative joy fed by “outward forms”. The poet’s former “shaping
spirit of Imagination”, suspended by various “afflictions”, seems to be
no longer subject to external stimuli: the alternative inspiration, a
recognition of inward vision, remains as yet a dim positive to set
against a series of negatives.
The “shaping spirit” of “Dejection” manifests itself
throughout Biographia Literaria as the unifying power of
imagination. Biographia Literaria (1817) is a loosely shaped,
digressive series of meditations on poetry, poets and, above all, the
nature of the poetic imagination. Its complex philosophy draws both
from Coleridge’s fruitful relationship with Wordsworth and from a
wide range of European thinkers; it is both original and plagiaristic,
prophetic an profoundly indebted to tradition, at once a personal
apologia and a public discourse on metaphysics. Coleridge’s
statements do not always agree to Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical
Ballads, but Coleridge writes much late, in 1817, at a time when his
main interest lies in philosophy. The most influential attempts at
definition concern the distinction which Coleridge carefully draws in
the thirteenth chapter between “Fancy”, which merely assembles and
juxtaposes images and impressions without fusing them, and
“Imagination”, which actively moulds, transforms, and strives to bring
into unity what it perceives. What Coleridge sees as the “primary
Imagination” is, moreover, nothing less than “a repetition in the finite
mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”, a reflection of
the working mind of the Creator himself. It is, however, through a
discussion of the “vital” “secondary Imagination” that he most
develops the contrast with Fancy for here he describes the mind
creatively perceiving, growing, selecting, and shaping the stimuli of
nature into new wholes.
Coleridge’s Gothic elements strongly influenced the poetry of
later poets, most notably that of Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven, Annabel
Lee).
Leon Leviţchi upheld the idea of Eminescu’s indebtedness to
Coleridge (according to him, Eminescu must have read Coleridge
during his stay in Berlin); this opinion was rejected by Ştefan
Avădanei in Eminescu şi poezia engleză.
229
Coleridge remains the author of vast unfinished projects in
poetry, philosophy and criticism. Thomas Carlyle characterized
Coleridge as “a hundred horse-power steam-engine stuck in the mud
and with the boiler burst”. Charles Lamb considered Coleridge “a
damaged archangel”. He inaugurated the habit of writing under the
influence of opium (later pursued by Rimbaud, Huxley, etc.) and had
he lived in the twentieth century, he might have become a cultural
hero of the underground artistic movement illustrated by Andy
Warhol, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, etc.
231
Unlike Shelley, who sincerely believed in the perfectibility of
the mankind, Byron was the only English Romantic poet who
presented his contemporary world as “falling apart”, as disintegrating
into small pieces which could not cohere into a whole. That is why his
poems do not deal with mankind’s future, but rather seem to be
concerned with himself. If this contention were true, Childe Harold,
Cain, the Corsair, the Giaour, Manfred, Mazeppa and Don Juan would
all be facets of one and the same personality: Byron’s personality.
The appearance of the first two cantos of Childe Harold in
1812 gave Byron an immediate celebrity, or, as he famously
remarked, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous”.
Childe Harold offers a view of the western Mediterranean
scarred by war and of the “sad relic” of Greece decaying under
Ottoman misrule, but it also introduces as a central observer and
participant a splenetic aristocratic exile, “Sick at heart” and suffering
strange pangs “as if the memory of some deadly feud / Or
disappointed passion lurk’d below”. The memories of feuds and
passions in the poem were as much historical and public as they were
present and private.
Byron’s meeting Shelley in Switzerland and reading Goethe’s
Faustus led to the creation of a Faustian dramatic poem, Manfred,
while the Italian sojourn and Pulci’s influence account for Don Juan,
the long comic narrative poem mocking at everything the English held
sacred; it is still considered the greatest English satire in verse.
Byron’s neo-classical sympathies may be examined in certain
of his dramas. He himself described Manfred (1817), which was
begun while he was working on the third canto of Childe Harold, as a
work “of a very wild, metaphysical, and inexplicable kind”, and he
considered it “not a drama properly – but a dialogue”. Manfred
himself is the only important human character, for the Spirits of the
Earth and Air, which speak choral verse which reminds us of Shelley,
have much more important roles than the Hunter or the Abbot. The
subject of the drama is the last days in the life of a man who has
discovered by his own experience that “the Tree of knowledge is not
that of life”. He is haunted by the sense of having destroyed his sister
Astarte, whom he has passionately loved. Although he dies
unrepentant, he is not dragged off to Hell: instead he proclaims that it
232
is “not so difficult to die”. While Manfred owes a good deal to the
story of Faust, its deepest sources of inspiration were Byron’s love for
his half-sister Augusta and the profound impression made on him by
the Alps.
Byron’s hero is daring, proud and selfish. His fierce passions
and actions destroy both the human being he loves and himself.
Manfred is doomed to die of too much loneliness and corrosive inner
anxiety. However, he prefers death to nothingness. Manfred, like
Cain, is endowed with a profound thirst for knowledge and a certain
philosophical and psychological depth. Manfred sees heaven and hell
as purely internal states. Unlike the Giaour or the Corsair, other
typical Byronic heroes, who find relief in passion or fight, Manfred
realizes that there is no room for him and his higher aspirations. Tired
and vanquished, he does not try to struggle against social injustice but
lets himself be tortured by human nothingness. And yet, Manfred’s
isolation is not a melancholy, static frame of mind: it is filled with the
tragic tension rooted in his awareness of the clash between his infinite
spiritual powers and their mortal frame. Manfred rejects any
compromises, particularly the acceptance of his mortality, and this
makes him so isolated in the gallery of Byron’s heroes.
In Beppo we find satire as well as joking. The fact that Beppo
is “A Venetian Story” does not prevent Byron from glancing
satirically at English life. With a fine impartiality he satirizes England
for being different from Italy and Italy for having something, after all,
in common with England.
Byron seems to have realized that he had made an important
discovery. “If Beppo pleases, you shall have more in a year or two in
the same mood”, he wrote in April 1818; and when Shelley heard a
reading of part of Don Juan later in the year he described it as “a thing
in the style of Beppo, but infinitely better”.
In spite of his references to “the regularity of my design” and
his claim that “My poem’s epic, and is meant to be / Divided in twelve
books” it is clear that he started without any definite idea of how he
would finish.
It is difficult to decide what Byron’s object was as he wrote
the poem. It is clear that he wished épater les bourgeois, less clear
whether he had any further objective.
233
Don Juan is an exception among Byron’s heroes. Don Juan
introduces a new kind of central character, one who is at once more
passive and more vivacious. The scheme of Don Juan allows for
colloquy and polyphony, the voice of the often cynically droll narrator
being the dominant one. Byron’s narrator casts himself as relaxed and
speculative, digressive and discursive – “never straining hard to
versify, / I rattle on exactly as I’d talk / With anybody in a ride or
walk” (Canto XV, 19). The ease of telling is matched by the hero’s
indeterminate peripateticism (the term is proposed by Andrew
Sanders), an often disrupted, circuitous wandering across the
Mediterranean world ending in a movement northwards to the Russia
of Catherine the Great and finally westwards to the amorously
frivolous world of aristocratic London society from which Byron had
attempted to distance himself. Juan’s adventures and misadventures,
and the narrator’s worldly-wise commentary on them, serve to debunk
a series of received ideas and perceptions ranging from the supposed
glory of war and heroism to fidelity in love and oriental exoticism.
Byron is also undermining the myth of a picturesque and educative
journey across Europe, the Romantic idea of a splendidly benevolent,
fostering nature, and the Rousseauistic faith in basic human goodness.
The poem veers easily, and often comically, between extremes of
suffering and luxury, hunger and excess, longing and satiety,
ignorance and knowingness, shifting appearance and an equally
shifting reality. Both the art and the artfulness of the narrator are
frequently concealed under a pretence of purposelessness and
self-deprecation.
Don Juan wanders in space through years and centuries,
judging everything with an ironical detachment. He has been not just
once compared to the wise Fool in King Lear. His power of
generalizing originates in his experience, in his life lived among his
fellows. He opposes the ruin and disorder of England to the beauty
and glory of Greece.
Don Juan’s visit to England, which results in some of the most
pointed satire in the poem, gives Byron a chance to commend
hypocrisy: “Be hypocritical, be cautious, be / Not what you seem, but
always what you see...”
234
He addresses the English public directly, in these words: “You are not
a moral people, and you know it, / Without the aid of too sincere a
poet.”
The most audacious parts of the poem are its digressions.
Although the digressions sometimes swamp the main narrative, as in
Canto III, they are so essential to Byron’s intention that the beginnings
of the cantos are bound to remind us of Fielding, who was clearly in
Byron’s mind as he wrote his “comic epic poem in verse”; but at times
we are reminded even more unmistakably of Sterne. Byron reminds us
of Sterne in his alternations between gaiety and gravity, in the
confidential tone in which he discusses his book with the reader,
debating points of literary criticism and morality, in the apparent
shapelessness of his plot, and in the mischievous way in which he
stands things on their heads and is determined to cheat the reader of
the expected “stock response”. Like Sterne, Byron presents himself as
a broad-minded philosopher who has seen farther than the common
run of mankind. Juanism has something in common with Shandyism
and in many ways Don Juan, a poem unfinished and unfinishable,
stands to the tradition of English poetry as Tristram Shandy stands to
that of the English novel.
In Don Juan’s speeches, which make up all the cantos of the
poem, the truth is always concealed behind an ironical veil; all
contemporary evils are cynically distorted under this ironical guise.
Don Juan is perhaps “not strictly a Romantic poem at all: there is too
much laughter in it, too much of the sharp edge of social criticism”,
says Anthony Burgess.
The use of “the language of every day” in Beppo and Don
Juan has nothing to do with the theories of Wordsworth: Byron’s use
of familiar diction is that of an aristocratic writer conversant with
classical literature and the English poets of the early eighteenth
century. He is aware of the different “levels of style”, and is
deliberately choosing to “wander with pedestrian Muses”.
Falsehood, cowardice, smallness are bitterly attacked; women
and marriage, governments and politicians, poets and their works,
wars, great military men, religion, God himself, and all his angels are
mercilessly mocked.
235
Byron’s irony is different from that of his neoclassical
predecessors Dryden and Pope. Byron takes an eighteenth century
artistic device and revolutionizes it: his witty spirit permanently
vacillates between the denotative and the connotative level of words,
in a “continuous wrestling with words”. The bathos or anticlimax is
one of Byron’s favourite figures of speech: highly philosophical
reflections are immediately followed by personal reflections, the
idyllic atmosphere of a scene is often brought to an abrupt end by
some unexpected intrusion, one topic is suddenly dropped and
replaced by another.
In Byron’s self-centred poetry, Nature is no longer a distinct
topic as in Wordsworth’s poems. It appears closely knit with love and
Time. And yet, Nature’s beauty appears in highly emotional, genuine
descriptions, in images such as “loud roar of torrents”, “black pines”,
“lofty fountains” and “transparent lakes”, “rosy ocean, vast and
bright” and “glittering sea”.
If with the other Romantics the interest fell more on ideas
such as the creative process, imagination, the poet and his creations
etc., with Byron the richest study was on love. Whole passages in
Hebrew Melodies and whole cantos in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage or
Don Juan are concerned with this feeling in its multifarious aspects:
love for a woman, love for friends, love for liberty (freedom and
independence), love of nature etc. Byron did not try to create a
deformed image of erotic love. The gamut of emotions, fears and
stirrings was subtly presented. Byron seems to have studied two
intense moments of erotic experience: the void left in one’s soul
following a passionate experience and the painful realization of the
deeper solitude in two.
The Haidée episode in Don Juan is the most touching
presentation of two youthful beings falling in love with each other.
The gradual stages leading to the moment “where heart, and soul, and
sense, in concert move” are depicted with candour and this “first love”
prolonged in Nature, with “the silent ocean, and the starlight bay, /
The twilight glow” attending on the lovers, is the only ecstatic union
in Byron’s whole creation.
Byron’s heroines in Oriental Tales (Gulnare, Leila, Zuleika)
belong to the same pattern as Haidée. They are kind-hearted, pretty,
236
loving, dutiful to their beloved man. They are the women who can
“restore” and “soothe” the men’s tortured souls.
Ian Jack, in discussing the similarities between Byron’s
biographical person and the Byronic heroes, has reached the following
conclusion:
“Of all the differences between Don Juan and Childe Harold
perhaps the most important lies in the presentation of their heroes, and
this is closely related to the style in which the two poems are written.
Although some details in Don Juan’s life may be paralleled in Byron’s
own, he is not a self-projection in the sense in which Childe Harold is:
as a consequence he is presented with a detachment and irony which
are not to be found in the earlier poem. The fundamental difference
between the two poems is that Byron has moved from a world in
which the passions are presented ‘straight’ to one in which the
predominant spirit is that of satiric comedy. As a consequence, while
it might be said that there are in Childe Harold no other people, apart
from the hero himself, Don Juan is almost as full of human beings as
the Canterbury Tales.”
Byron is not a great Nature poet, but a great satirist; he was
not a deep thinker; his anti-social attitude made himself become a
comic figure; and yet – his influence on the continent was second to
none. Byronism became the fashionable pose throughout the
nineteenth century: Alfred de Musset, Heinrich Heine, Goethe, Lenau,
Lermontov, and many more acknowledged Byron’s strong influence.
… Cities then
Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed
The warm winds, and the azure aether shone,
And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen.
(II. IV.94-97)
244
After the lullabies comes a rousing though relatively
uncomplicated chorus about the progress of Freedom from Greece,
through the Italian city-states, to modern protestant nations
(“Florence, Albion, Switzerland”, 63), and thence to America and the
rest of Europe, and so back to Greece: a geographical as well as
temporal cycle. The next striking idea is provided by the description
of Ahasuerus, the ancient Jewish visionary, whose character is
described to Mahmud by Hassan in a memorable passage.
“Death’s scroll” (1079) in the final chorus, is only black and
white, a writing of fixed oppositions. And the rest of this chorus
explains how the fixity is constituted: by the alternation of good and
evil, freedom and slavery, love and hate”, which is summed up in the
movement from a renewed Golden Age (1090) to the possibility that
this will be followed, as before, by the return of evil.
Edward Larrissy conjectures that the identity of Ahasuerus in
Book of Esther makes him that Xerxes who figures in Aeschylus’s
Persae, which is, of course, the chief model for Hellas. As Xerxes to
the ancient Greeks, so Mahmud to the modern; as the ghost of Darius
to Xerxes, so the Phantom of Mahomet II to Mahmud.
Shelley’s Ahasuerus thus comprises the opposites of master
and slave: as a Jew, given the name of a Persian ruler of the Jews who,
in the book of Esther turns out to be fairly enlightened despot; and as
one who has perhaps been Xerxes (what has Ahasuerus not been?)
offering advice to one who is, in effect, a second Xerxes. Ahasuerus
contains the whole history of the world hitherto: he has been master;
he has been slave; and now, escaping from these hateful contraries, he
possesses that affinity with process, with the disseminations of self-
delighting thought, which is the only hope of achieving another
Hellas.
However, it is as the lyrical poet of Nature that Shelley makes
the greatest appeal. He has the same sensitivity as Wordsworth, and
perhaps a far greater melodic power. Like Wordsworth, Shelley had
no humour. He held comedy in poetry to be a crime. To Wordsworth
Nature was the voice of God, but Shelley desired to be made one with
Nature. In “Ode to the West Wind” the poet cries “Be thou me,
impetuous one!” In his Odes Shelley endeavours to look beyond the
visible, as he feels attracted by the various processes hidden within the
245
frame of the One. In “Ode to the West Wind”, the natural effects
caused by the wind underlie a cyclical process of death and rebirth:
what is lasting and durable wells up again in spring. The wind
becomes a symbol, the carrier of knowledge (“the seeds and the
leaves”) from one generation to another.
“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”, the final line
brings a note of fear, of anxiety into the serene space of the poem.
The same idea of perpetual metamorphosis is evident in “The
Cloud”, too. The temporal transformations and progress are measured
not by the clock but by the natural phenomena of days and years. The
cloud’s various transformations, with the cloud speaking, are
presented in a materialistic way: “I bring fresh showers… / I sift the
snow… / I rest…”. But the cloud also has a symbolic value, it stands
for Shelley’s conception about eternity versus transience, about
cosmic immortality versus human evanescence.
In “Ode to Heaven”, the “Chorus of Spirits” provides a three-
fold definition of Heaven: the embodiment of eternity and constancy,
“the mind’s first chamber” and the evanescence of a dew drop.
Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” is undoubtedly amongst the
best-known of all his poems.
246
It is a simple moral. The tyrant’s affirmation of his omnipotence,
sneeringly arrogant and contemptuous of its human cost, has been
ironized by time. The scene reported by the traveller gives the lie
unanswerably to the boast on the pedestal; moreover, the scene most
tellingly inverts the claims of the legend, “Look on my Works ye
Mighty, and despair!”. Ozymandias’s message to posterity has ended
up articulating just exactly the opposite to what was intended.
“With a Guitar. To Jane”, written in the same tetrameter as
Prospero’s epilogue in The Tempest, is a kind of second epilogue to
Shakespeare’s romance play, from Ariel’s point of view. Jane is
Miranda, her husband Edward Williams is Ferdinand, and Shelley
himself, Ariel. The poem lightly and touchingly mediates Shelley’s
admiration for Jane through the fantasy of Ariel being silently and
unrequitedly in love with Miranda. Art – the music of the guitar which
is metonymic of the poem itself – offers the ideal or intellectual form
of nature. Jonathan Bate suggests that Shelley’s poem foreshadows the
late-twentieth-century eco-criticism. The price of art is the destruction
of a living tree. You can’t have music without dead wood; you can’t
have poetry without paper. That the tree died in sleep and felt no pain
implies that a tree might be killed while awake and feel pain. Culture
is created by enslaving nature.
In his essay A Defence of Poetry (written in 1821 and
published only posthumously in 1840) Shelley confidently proclaims
the essentially social function of poetry and the prophetic role of the
poet. His assertions, like Sir Philip Sidney’s before him, are large,
even at times outrageous, but his examination of the idea of political
improvement as a criterion of literary value and his idea of poetry as a
liberator of the individual moral sense carry considerable intellectual
force. The argument of the Defence opens with the development of a
distinction between the workings of the reason and the imagination,
with the imagination seen as the synthesizer and the unifier which
finds its highest expression in poetry. Shelley dismisses as “a vulgar
error” the distinction between poets and prose writers, and proceeds to
dissolve divisions between poets, philosophers, and philosophic
historians. Thus Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton emerge as
“philosophers of the very loftiest power” and Plato and Bacon,
Herodotus and Plutarch are placed amongst the poets. Essentially, the
247
essay seeks to demonstrate that poetry prefigures other modes of
thought and anticipates the formulation of a social morality.
Poetry enhances life, it exalts beauty, it transmutes all it touches, and
it tells the truth by stripping “the veil of familiarity from the world”
and laying bare “the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of
its forms.” The poet is priest and prophet to a world which can move
beyond religion and magic; he is an “unacknowledged legislator” for a
future society which will learn to live without the restrictions of law;
he is, above all, the liberator and the explorer. Shelley’s projection of
the poet as hero, as the leader and representative society, is more than
veiled self-aggrandizement, it is a reasonable assertion of the irrational
power of the imagination against a purely utilitarian view of art.
Throughout Shelley’s work we find a technical mastery of
both traditional forms such as the Spenserian stanza (in Adonais),
blank verse (in Alastor), couplets, Dante’s terza rima and innovative
prosodic patterns; his eloquence and music stand unmatched among
the English poets of the time. Shelley is best in his briefer and simpler
lyrics. Key words in the approach to his works are the democratic
dreams inspired by “the sacred name of Rousseau” and the
Revolution; faith in man; humanitarianism; his longing for ideal
beauty.
Matthew Arnold characterized Shelley the man and his work
as a “beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous
wings in vain”.
JOHN KEATS
John Keats was the most talented English Romantic poet. His
work seems, at least at first sight, richer and more colourful than that
of his predecessors’. In one of his letters he confessed: “Imagination is
my Monastery and I am its Monk”. For Keats, Beauty is necessarily
Truth and Truth is Beauty.
Beauty’s truth lies in love, love is true only when imagination
is at work and then it is equated with a blissful mood which is the
attribute of “poesy”. To enjoy such a blissful mood means to know.
248
When one contemplates Keats’s life one is struck not only by
its sad brevity but by the extraordinary and triumphant fullness of its
achievement.
John Keats was born in London, where his father was the
manager of a large livery stable. His early life was marked by a series
of personal tragedies: his father was killed in an accident when he was
eight years old, his mother died when he was fourteen and one of his
younger brothers died in infancy. He received relatively little formal
education and at age sixteen he became an apprentice to an
apothecary-surgeon. His first attempts at writing poetry date from the
years of his apprenticeship and include “Imitation of Spenser”, a
homage to the Elizabethan poet he greatly admired.
In 1816 Keats obtained a licence to practise apothecary, but
abandoned the profession for poetry. He became friends with Shelley
and in March 1817 his first book of poems was published.
Despite frequent and persistent periods of illness, Keats
dedicated himself to writing, and in what is often referred to as the
Great Year (1819) he produced some of his finest works, including his
five great odes.
Keats’s health was now in a critical state and Shelley asked
him to join him in Pisa. He did not accept Shelley’s invitation but did
decide to move to Italy, where he hoped the warmer climate would
improve his condition. Before leaving, he managed to publish a third
volume of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other
Poems. In 1820 he settled in Rome, where he died in February 1821 at
the age of twenty-five.
John Keats, ever sensitive to criticism and ever open to the
influence of other poets, both living and dead, was also extraordinarily
able to assimilate and then to transform both criticism and influence.
His development as a poet was rapid, particular, and individual and it
was articulated in the bursts of energetic self-critical analysis in his
letters. Keats’s background and education denied him both the social
advantages and the ready recourse to classical models shared by those
contemporaries to whose work he most readily turned (though not
always favourably) – Wordsworth and Coleridge, Scott, Byron, and
Shelley.
249
He was extremely well read and his letters record a series of
new, excited, and critical impressions formed by his explorations of
English seventeenth-century drama, of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and
Dryden, of Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso (whose Italian he
was beginning to master towards the end of his life) and, above, all, of
Shakespeare. It is to the example of Shakespeare that he habitually
refers in his letters when he seeks to demonstrate a sudden insight into
the nature of poetic creation, notably in 1817 in his definition of what
he styles “Negative Capability” (“when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason”).
Keats’s heroes were patriot champions of popular freedom:
King Alfred, William Tell, Robert Burns, Robin Hood, or the Polish
patriot Tadeusz Kosciusko. The beginning of Book III of Endymion
was considered a “Jacobinical apostrophe” by the Tory government.
Endymion is, however, more than that. It is also the tale of a
shepherd on Mount Latmos, living, under Zeus’ spell, an everlasting
youth. The first pangs of love make Endymion wonder about life and
true happiness; the poem records the stages of a descent from
a) the external life to the inner world of Endymion’s soul;
b) from Endymion’s self to his deeper self.
The hero embarks upon a journey and pursuit metaphorically
rendered by the image of net and labyrinth. Night registers all the
changes by means of which the young man is spiritualized. The poem
abounds in architectural and visual imagery, in animal and vegetal
imagery, which underlie the hero’s quest aiming at self-knowledge
and harmonious integration into Nature. Endymion becomes the poet’s
alter-ego in his search for Beauty in life.
In Endymion Keats’s consistent ambition to move beyond the
lyrical to the narrative and the epic finds its first significant
expression, but it is an experiment with which he had evidently
become restless before he had completed it. The strengths of the poem
are most often occasional and lie chiefly in the introduction of the
lyrical hymns and songs which enhance the meandering narrative line.
The poem is elusive in its return to suggestions of sickness, death, and
penitence.
250
Hyperion, an unfinished romance in three books is, through
the images it uses, complementary to Endymion. If Endymion has
become immortal through spiritualized love, absolute knowledge
makes a god of the poet: “Knowledge enormous makes a god of me”.
Lamia, a poetic romance in two parts, may stand as the
symbol of imagination contrasted to reason. In demonology a ‘lamia’
was a monster in a woman’s shape. Lamia, the serpent, persuades
Apollo to transform her back into a woman. Next, she lures the young
Lycius and dares him to happiness through love. Lycius abandons
cold rationalism in order to reach ‘blissful mood’, but his unnamed
bride turns out to be just an illusion, a cold symbol who finally has to
die.
In “The Eve of St Agnes” erotic love associated with storm
results in unexpected effects. Here Keats tells the story of Madeline
and her lover Porphyro. The action takes place on St Agnes’ Eve,
when maidens have visions of their lovers or future husbands.
Madeline is preparing to go to bed when Porphyro arrives at her
house; his family and Madeline’s are enemies and it is therefore
dangerous for him to be there. The story is very similar to that in
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
However, an old nurse, Angela, is his friend, and she conceals
him in Madeline’s bedroom. In the middle of the night he joins
Madeline, and early next morning they leave together.
252
The poem allows for the high compensations offered by art,
but its vocabulary steadily suggests the loss, even the desolation,
entailed in the “teasing” process of contemplating eternity. In “Ode on
a Grecian Urn” Keats again asserts his creed: “Beauty is truth, truth
beauty – that is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.”
Permanence – transience, immortality – mortality, urn –
scenes are the antitheses the poem is built on.
“Ode to a Nightingale” takes as its subject the local presence
of a nightingale, and the contrast of the “full-throated ease” of its
singing with the aching “numbness” of the human observer, the rapt
and meditative poet. The ode progresses through a series of precisely
delicate evocations of opposed moods and ways of seeing, some
elated, some depressed, but each serving to return the narrator to his
“sole self” and to his awareness of the temporary nature of the release
from the unrelieved contemplation of temporal suffering which the
bird’s song has offered.
The nightingale in “Ode to a Nightingale” undergoes a
dramatic change in its gradual transformation from a bird alive in the
sky to a symbol of imaginative art. Poetry is equated in stanzas IV and
V with the poet’s imaginary participation in the nightingale’s song.
And yet, for man the only way to achieve a similar ecstatic mood and
to render it eternal is to die. Death here is not extinction but the eager
wish to make a transient state of happiness become eternal.
In his analysis of “Ode to a Nightingale”, John Peck arrives at
the following conclusions:
1.Keats deals with the pain of reality and how desirable it
would be to escape to a happier world.
2.What is so attractive about Keats’s poetry is the vivid way
in which he can create a picture of a world of the senses.
3.Keats’s poem is not escapist, however. There is a clear way
in which reality in his verse intermingles with and disrupts the perfect
vision.
4.This makes for an interesting instability in the poem, so that
we are presented with a dream world but never lose sight of the real
world.
In “Ode to Psyche” the poet creates a delightful “sanctuary”
(the world of imagination) in honour of Psyche the goddess (the
253
human soul in love), who will be forever worshipped by her priest (the
poet).
The latest of the odes, “To Autumn”, was written in
September 1819. Here the tensions, oppositions, and conflicting
emotions are diminished amid a series of dense impressions of a
season whose bounty contains both fulfilment and incipient decay,
both an intensification of life and an inevitable, but natural, process of
ageing and dying. “To Autumn” is only on the surface a descriptive
poem; the stillness (“stationing”, to quote Keats) and the rich variety
of details conceal the signs of an on-going process, as if there were no
winter to follow.
The obsession with Time is characteristic of the three central
Odes, dedicated to the Nightingale, the Grecian Urn, and Melancholy.
It is not to be found in the last and most triumphant of them all, “To
Autumn”. No melancholy throws its shadow over this poem of
fruition and acceptance. Autumn had always been a season that had
meant a great deal to Keats, as may be seen by tracing the earlier
allusions in his poems; and it was always the achievement of autumn
that appealed to him, rather than the fact that it heralds winter and
death. Whereas Shelley, in the “Ode to the West Wind”, regards
autumn as the forerunner of death, and rises to hope only by
contemplating the resurgence of spring that lies beyond, Keats
remains wholly in the present.
255
256
PART THREE
257
258
ANGLO-SAXON POETRY
259
by former friends forsaken, grieving over
scions of lineage long since gone.
Life ebbs, the flesh feels less
and fails to savour sweet or sour
is frail of hand, feeble of mind
Though men may bury treasured pelf
beside their brother’s born remains
and sow his grave with golden goods
he goes where gold is worthless.
Nor can his sinful soul, quaking before his God
call hoarded gold or mortal glory to his aid
that Architect is awesome
Whose might moves the world
Whose hand has fixed the firmament
earth’s vaults and vapours.
Dull is the man who does not dread the Lord
on him will death’s descent be sudden
blissful the man that meekly lives
on him will heaven benisons bestow.
A mind was given man by God to glory in his might.
A man should steer a steadfast course
be constant, clean and just in judgement
a man should curb his love or loathing
though flame consume his comrade
and fire the funeral pyre
for fate is set more surely,
God more great, than any man surmise.
Come, consider where we have a home, how
we can travel to it, how our travail here
will lead us to the living well-head
and heaven haven of our Lord’s love.
Thus let us thank His hallowed name
that He has granted us His grace
Dominion enduring, the Ancient of Days
for all time.
Amen.
Translated into Modern English by Charles Harrison Wallace
260
DEOR’S LAMENT
Translated by C. W. Kennedy
BEOWULF (fragments)
266
Contention was especially strong
When each abused the other’s song.
The first to speak, the Nightingale,
In a corner of the vale
Was perched upon a pretty twig
Where blossom showed on every sprig
And, fast entwined with reeds and sedge,
There grew a thick and lovely hedge.
She sang her varying tuneful lay,
Delighting in that flowering spray.
It seemed the melody she made
Was on a pipe or harpstring played,
That pipe or harp, not living throat,
Was shooting forth each pleasant note.
Nearby there stood a stump alone,
Decayed, with ivy overgrown,
And here the Owl had made her den,
And here sang out her “hours” to men.
The Nightingale surveyed the Owl,
And reckoned her opponent foul;
Indeed all men declare with right
That she’s a hideous, loathsome sight.
“Monster!” she cried, “Away! Fly off!
Simply to see you’s quite enough
To make me lose the urge to sing,
You’re such an ugly, evil thing.
When you thrust out before my eyes,
My tongue is tied, my spirit dies,
Because your filthy clamouring
Makes me rather spit than sing.”
The Owl held back till evening fell:
Then, as her heart began to swell,
Her breath to catch, her rage to grate,
She felt she could no longer wait,
And straight away exploded, “How
Does this my singing strike you now?
D’you think I have no singing skill
267
Merely because I cannot trill?
You’re always loading me with blame,
Girding at me with mock and shame.
If you were off that twig of yours,
And I could get you in my claws
(And would I could is all my boon),
You’d sing a different kind of tune.”
…………………………………………
(13)
(14)
(15)
272
and said, “Look here, by heaven! Have you lost your mind?
If you want to be mad, I will make you welcome!
Nobody I know is bowled over by your big words,
so help me God! Hand me that ax –
I will grant you the gift you beg me to give!”
He leaped lightly up and lifted it from his hand.
Then the man dismounted, moving proudly,
while Arthur held the ax, both hands on the haft,
hefted it sternly, considered his stroke.
That burly man bulked big and tall,
a head higher than anyone in the house.
He stood there hard-faced, stroking his beard,
impassively watching as he pulled off his coat,
no more moved or dismayed by his mighty swings
than anybody would be if somebody brought him a bottle
of wine.
Gawain, sitting by the queen,
could tell the king his mind:
“Lord, hear well what I mean,
and let this match be mine.”
(43)
(44)
(48)
(49)
(50)
277
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
(fragments)
THE PRIORESS
There was also a nun, a prioress,
Who, in her smiling, modest was and coy;
Her greatest oath was but “By Saint Eloy!”
And she was known as Madam Eglantine.
Full well she sang the services divine,
Intoning through her nose, becomingly;
And fair she spoke her French, and fluently,
After the school of Stratford-at-the-Bow,
For French of Paris was not hers to know.
At table she had been well taught withal,
And never from her lips let morsels fall,
Nor dipped her fingers deep in sauce, but ate
With so much care the food upon her plate
That never driblet fell upon her breast.
In courtesy she had delight and zest.
Her upper lip was always wiped so clean
That in her cup was no iota seen
279
Of grease, when she had drunk her draught of wine.
Becomingly she reached for meat to dine.
And certainly delighting in good sport,
She was right pleasant, amiable – in short.
She was at pains to counterfeit the look
Of courtliness, and stately manners took,
And would be held worthy of reverence.
But, to say something of her moral sense,
She was so charitable and piteous
That she would weep if she but saw a mouse
Caught in a trap, though it were dead or bled.
She had some little dogs, too, that she fed
On roasted flesh, or milk and fine white bread.
But sore she’d weep if one of them were dead,
Or if men smote it with a rod to smart:
For pity ruled her, and her tender heart.
Right decorous her pleated wimple was;
Her nose was fine; her eyes were blue as glass;
Her mouth was small and therewith soft and red;
But certainly she had a fair forehead;
It was almost a full span broad, I own,
For, truth to tell, she was not undergrown.
Neat was her cloak, as I was well aware.
Of coral small about her arm she’d bear
A string of beads and gauded all with green;
And therefrom hung a brooch of golden sheen
Whereon there was first written a crowned “A,”
And under, Amor vincit omnia.
………………………………………..
THE PARDONER
PROLOGUE
Here ends the prologue of this book and here begins the first tale,
which is the knight’s tale.
EDMUND SPENSER
AMORETTI
SONNET 61
SONNET 69
286
Of my love’s conquest, peerless beauty’s prize,
Adorn’d with honour, love, and chastity.
Even this verse vowed to eternity,
Shall be thereof immortal monument:
And tell her praise to all posterity,
That may admire such world’s rare wonderment.
The happy purchase of my glorious spoil,
Gotten at last with labour and long toil.
SONNET 75
SONNET 1
SONNET 7
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
HERO AND LEANDER (fragments)
289
Nor that night-wandering, pale, and wat’ry star
(When yawning dragons draw her thirling car
From Latmus’ mount up to the gloomy sky
Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty,
She proudly sits) more overrules the flood
Than she the hearts of those that near her stood.
Even as, when gaudy nymphs pursue the chase,
Wretched Ixion’s shaggy footed race,
Incensed with savage heat, gallop amain
From steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain.
So ran the people forth to gaze upon her,
And all that viewed her were enamoured on her.
And as in fury of a dreadful fight,
Their fellows being slain or put to flight,
Poor soldiers stand with fear of death dead strooken,
So at her presence all surprised and tooken,
Await the sentence of her scornful eyes.
He whom she favours lives, the other dies.
There might you see one sigh, another rage;
And some, (their violent passions to assuage)
Compile sharp satires, but alas too late,
For faithful love will never turn to hate.
And many seeing great princes were denied
Pin’d as they went, and thinking on her died.
On this feast day, O cursed day and hour,
Went Hero thorough Sestos from her tower
To Venus’ temple, where unhappily
As after chanced, they did each other spy.
So fair a church as this had Venus none.
The walls were of discoloured jasper stone
Wherein was Proteus carved, and o’erhead
A lively vine of green sea agate spread,
Where by one hand lightheaded Bacchus hung,
And, with the other, wine from grapes out wrung.
Of crystal shining fair the pavement was.
The town of Sestos called it Venus’ glass.
There might you see the gods in sundry shapes
290
Committing heady riots, incest, rapes.
For know, that underneath this radiant floor
Was Danae’s statue in a brazen tower,
Jove slyly stealing from his sister’s bed,
To dally with Idalian Ganymede,
And for his love Europa bellowing loud,
And tumbling with the Rainbow in a cloud;
Blood quaffing Mars heaving the iron net
Which limping Vulcan and his Cyclops set;
Love kindling fire to burn such towns as Troy;
Sylvanus weeping for the lovely boy
That now is turned into a cypress tree,
Under whose shade the wood gods love to be.
And in the midst a silver altar stood.
There Hero, sacrificing turtle’s blood,
Vailed to the ground, vailing her eyelids close,
And modestly they opened as she rose.
Thence flew Love’s arrow with the golden head,
And thus Leander was enamoured.
Stone still he stood, and evermore he gazed
Till with the fire that from his countenance blazed
Relenting Hero’s gentle heart was strook.
Such force and virtue hath an amorous look.
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin
We wish that one should lose, the other win.
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots like in each respect.
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
He kneeled, but unto her devoutly prayed.
Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said,
“Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him;”
And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him.
291
He started up, she blushed as one ashamed,
Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed.
He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled.
Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled.
These lovers parleyed by the touch of hands;
True love is mute, and oft amazed stands.
Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled,
The air with sparks of living fire was spangled,
And night, deep drenched in misty Acheron,
Heaved up her head, and half the world upon
Breathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid’s day).
And now begins Leander to display
Love’s holy fire, with words, with sighs, and tears,
Which like sweet music entered Hero’s ears,
And yet at every word she turned aside,
And always cut him off as he replied.
At last, like to a bold sharp sophister,
With cheerful hope thus he accosted her.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
SONNETS
SONNET 18
SONNET 66
91
130
294
VENUS AND ADONIS (fragments)
JOHN DONNE
A VALEDICTION: OF WEEPING
On a round ball
A workman, that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all.
So doth each tear,
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mix’d with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolvèd so.
THE FLEA
299
She’s all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is;
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
THE GOOD-MORROW
300
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.
LOVE’S ALCHEMY
SONNET 10
ANDREW MARVELL
THE GARDEN
305
JOHN MILTON
PARADISE LOST
Book II (fragments)
The Argument
JOHN DRYDEN
I
From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony
This universal Frame began.
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring Atoms lay,
And could not heave her Head,
The tuneful Voice was heard from high,
Arise ye more than dead.
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
309
In order to their stations leap,
And MUSICK’s pow’r obey.
From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony
This universal Frame began;
From Harmony to Harmony
Through all the compass of the Notes it ran,
The Diapason closing full in Man.
II
What Passion cannot MUSICK raise and quell!
When Jubal struck the corded Shell,
His list’ning Brethren stood around
And wond’ring, on their Faces fell
To worship that Celestial Sound.
Less than a God they thought there could not dwell
Within the hollow of that Shell
That spoke so sweetly and so well.
What Passion cannot MUSICK raise and quell!
III
The TRUMPET’s loud Clangor
Excites us to Arms
With shrill Notes of Anger
And mortal Alarms.
The double double double beat
Of the thund’ring DRUM
Cries, hark the Foes come;
Charge, Charge, ’tis too late to retreat.
IV
The soft complaining FLUTE
In dying notes discovers
The Woes of hopeless Lovers,
Whose Dirge is whisper’d by the warbling LUTE.
310
V
Sharp VIOLINS proclaim
Their jealous Pangs, and Desperation,
Fury, frantick Indignation,
Depth of Pains, and height of Passion,
For the fair, disdainful Dame.
VI
But oh! what Art can teach
What human Voice can reach
The sacred ORGAN’s praise?
Notes inspiring holy Love,
Notes that wing their heav’nly ways
To mend the Choires above.
VII
Orpheus could lead the savage race;
And Trees unrooted left their place;
Sequacious of the Lyre:
But bright CECILIA rais’d the wonder high’r;
When to her ORGAN, vocal Breath was giv’n
An Angel heard, and straight appear’d
Mistaking Earth for Heaven.
Grand CHORUS
311
AN ODE, ON THE DEATH OF MR. HENRY PURCELL
Late Servant to his Majesty, and Organist of the Chapel Royal, and of
St. Peter’s Westminster
I
MARK how the Lark and Linnet Sing,
With rival Notes
They strain their warbling Throats,
To welcome in the Spring.
But in the close of Night,
When Philomel begins her Heav’nly lay,
They cease their mutual spite,
Drink in her Music with delight,
And list’ning and silent, and silent and list’ning,
And list’ning and silent obey.
II
So ceas’d the rival Crew when Purcell came,
They Sung no more, or only Sung his Fame.
Struck dumb they all admir’d the God-like Man,
The God-like Man,
Alas, too soon retir’d,
As He too late began.
We beg not Hell, our Orpheus to restore,
Had He been there,
Their Sovereign’s fear
Had sent Him back before.
The pow’r of Harmony too well they know,
He long e’er this had Tun’d their jarring Sphere,
And left no Hell below.
III
The Heav’nly Choir, who heard his Notes from high,
Let down the Scale of Music from the Sky:
They handed him along,
And all the way He taught, and all the way they Sung.
Ye Brethren of the Lyre, and tuneful Voice,
312
Lament his Lot: but at your own rejoice.
Now live secure and linger out your days,
The Gods are pleas’d alone with Purcell’s Lays,
Nor know to mend their Choice.
ALEXANDER POPE
EPISTLE I
Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of Kings.
Let us, since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die,
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;
A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot,
Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.
Together let us beat this ample field,
Try what the open, what the covert yield;
The latent tracts, the giddy heights, explore
Of all who blindly creep or sightless soar;
Eye Nature’s walks, shoot folly as it flies,
And catch the manners living as they rise;
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can,
But vindicate the ways of God to man.
I
Say first, of God above or Man below
What can we reason but from what we know?
Of man what see we but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known,
’Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
He who thro’ vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
315
What varied being peoples every star,
May tell why Heav’n has made us as we are:
But of this frame, the bearings and the ties,
The strong connexions, nice dependencies,
Gradations just, has thy pervading soul
Look’d thro’; or can a part contains the whole?
Is the great chain that draws all to agree,
And drawn supports, upheld by God or thee?
EDWARD YOUNG
316
Procrastination is the thief of time;
317
JAMES THOMSON
RULE, BRITANNIA!
HYMN ON SOLITUDE
THOMAS GRAY
ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD
The Epitaph
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,
323
And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,
He gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.
WILLIAM COLLINS
ODE TO EVENING
325
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
MEMORY
WILLIAM COWPER
THE CASTAWAY
327
He shouted: nor his friends had fail’d
To check the vessel’s course,
But so the furious blast prevail’d,
That, pitiless perforce,
They left their outcast mate behind,
And scudded still before the wind.
328
No poet wept him, but the page
Of narrative sincere,
That tells his name, his worth, his age,
Is wet with Anson’s tear.
And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalize the dead.
WILLIAM BLAKE
LONDON
329
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
THE TIGER
331
THE LAMB
332
THE LITTLE BOY FOUND
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft –
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart –
334
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. – I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. – That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
335
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, – both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
336
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance –
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence – wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love – oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
337
I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD
338
SHE DWELT AMONG THE UNTRODDEN WAYS
THE RAINBOW
339
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
KUBLA KHAN
FROST AT MIDNIGHT
346
DON JUAN (fragments)
Canto IV
All this must be reserved for further song;
Also our hero’s lot, howe’er unpleasant
(Because this Canto has become too long),
Must be postponed discreetly for the present;
I’m sensible redundancy is wrong,
But could not for the muse of me put less in ’t:
And now delay the progress of Don Juan,
Till what is call’d in Ossian the fifth Juan.
Canto V
When amatory poets sing their loves
In liquid lines mellifluously bland,
And pair their rhymes as Venus yokes her doves,
They little think what mischief is in hand;
The greater their success the worse it proves,
As Ovid’s verse may give to understand;
Even Petrarch’s self, if judged with due severity,
Is the Platonic pimp of all posterity.
*
His Highness cast around his great black eyes,
And looking, as he always look’d, perceived
Juan amongst the damsels in disguise,
At which he seem’d no whit surprised nor grieved,
But just remark’d with air sedate and wise,
While still a fluttering sigh Gulbeyaz heaved,
“I see you’ve bought another girl; ’t is pity
That a mere Christian should be half so pretty.”
349
To slacken sail, and anchor with our rhyme.
Let this fifth canto meet with due applause,
The sixth shall have a touch of the sublime;
Meanwhile, as Homer sometimes sleeps, perhaps
You’ll pardon to my muse a few short naps.
I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingéd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
II
Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
350
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
351
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
THE CLOUD
354
TO JANE, WITH A GUITAR
JOHN KEATS
357
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
ODE TO AUTUMN
359
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
ODE ON MELANCHOLY
362
ON SITTING DOWN TO READ KING LEAR ONCE AGAIN
363
364
BIBLIOGRAPHY
366
Jack, Ian – English Literature 1815-1832: Scott, Byron, and Keats, The
Oxford History of English Literature, Vol. XII, Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1990.
Koch, Kenneth – “The Language of Poetry,” in The New York Review of
Books, May 14, 1998, pp. 44-47.
Leviţchi, Leon – Istoria literaturii engleze şi americane, Vol. 1, Cluj-Napoca,
Editura Dacia, 1985.
Leviţchi, Leon et al. – Istoria literaturii engleze şi americane, Vol. 2,
Cluj-Napoca, Editura Dacia, 1994.
Lewis, C. S. – Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, The Oxford
History of English Literature, Volume IV, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1990.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. – The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass., 1936.
Mann, Jill – Feminizing Chaucer, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, Second edition,
2002.
O’Flinn, Paul – How to Study Romantic Poetry, Basingstoke, Hampshire,
Macmillan Press, 2001.
Pârvu, Sorin – Narrative Poetry: The Mythical Mode, Iaşi, Institutul
European, 2000.
Pârvu, Sorin – Dramatic Poetry: The Mythical Mode, Iaşi, Institutul
European, 2003.
Peck, John – How to Study a Poet, Basingstoke, Hampshire, Palgrave, 1988.
Punter, David, ed. – William Blake, New Casebooks, Basingstoke,
Hampshire, Macmillan, 1996.
Reid, David – The Metaphysical Poets, Harlow, Essex, Pearson Education,
2000.
Renwick, W. L. – The Rise of the Romantics, 1789-1815: Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Jane Austen, The Oxford History of English
Literature, Vol. XI, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990.
Sanders, Andrew – The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, Second edition, 2000.
Saunders, Corinne, ed. – A Concise Companion to Chaucer, Oxford,
Blackwell, 2006.
367
Schmidt, Michael – The Story of Poetry: English Poets and Poetry from
Caedmon to Caxton, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001.
Sitter, John, ed. – The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century
Poetry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Stroe, Mihai, ed. – A Reader in English Literature from Chaucer to Marvell
(1350-1650), Bucureşti, Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine, 2000.
Stroe, Mihai – Romantismul englez şi german, Iaşi, Institutul European,
2004.
Volceanov, George – The Shakespeare Canon Revisited, Bucureşti, Editura
Niculescu, 2005.
Volceanov, George – A Survey of English Literature from Beowulf to Jane
Austen, Bucureşti, Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine, Ediţia a II-a,
2006.
Volceanov, George – “The Eye Sees Not Itself but by Reflection”: A Study in
Shakespeare’s “Catoptrics” And Other Essays, Bucureşti, Editura
Universitară, 2006.
368