Lord Byron – She Walks in Beauty (1813)

This poem is pumpkin spice latte level in terms of being a basic bitch favorite. Put it up there with the Sonnets from the Portuguese and some Pablo Neruda and you’ve got  yourself a trifecta of about 99% of what’s on Pinterest poetry boards covered.

It is on the quals list, I expect, because it is famous and popular, and it is popular because it is beautiful, but popularity and beauty don’t really mean that it has a great deal of poetic merit in terms of conveying meaning, evoking feeling, or provoking thought, which is what the best poetry does/should do. That said, I always tell my students that poetry of any kind falls on a spectrum between literature and music, and this poem has inspired a lot of music and art, so while my taste and training run closer to the literature end, this poem falls away from that and lands more on the music/art end. It’s very short, so I’ll post it here:

        She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

In terms of form and genre, it’s an 18-line poem in 3 stanzas of six lines each, it’s a lyric poem, and it’s in iambic tetrameter (so, four iambs per line, iambs being two-syllable “feet” of unstressed-stressed syllables – see the scan of the first line below).

x       /         x   /         x   /         x       /
She walks in beauty, like the night

The story behind this poem is that Lord Byron met his cousin by marriage at a ball, and she was in mourning dress, wearing a black sparkly dress, and he wrote this the next day.

Wordsworth – The Thorn

This poem opens with a description of an old, gnarled thorn growing on a mountaintop, near a muddy pond and a small mound, about the size of a child’s grave. We are given to understand that it is well tended and very beautiful, with a gorgeous array of colors, green, red, white; moss and flowers growing on the child’s grave.

There is a woman there in a scarlet cloak (imagery evocative of a “scarlet woman,” so already bringing in the Fallen Woman trope) weeping and crying “misery!” and “woe is me.” She is always there beside the thorn, and always lamenting. The idea that the thorn is old and gnarled may give some indication that this grave has been there a long time too. The woman may not be a young mother recently bereaved, then, but an older woman lamenting an old loss. She lives in a hut near the spot, and the speaker states that the grave is such a beautiful spot that if one spots her in her hut, one should go straight to the spot and enjoy it while possible, because no one dares go near it while she’s there. I find this kind of insensitive; the spot is beautiful because it is the well-tended grave of a child she buried and still grieves almost night and day. Maybe it is because I think grief is and should be private, and this speaker is intrusive in his desire to go look at the grave’s beautiful colors, and rude in even just his awareness that she’s always there, since he hints she’s blocking the spot from his and perhaps other people’s enjoyment.

Then we get some of her history: He states “Full twenty years are past and gone” since she, Martha Ray, was to give her hand in marriage to one Stephen Hill, but he left her at the altar and married another girl, and she was left heartbroken. The speaker is sympathetic to her plight, saying “Poor Martha!” Six months later, she is always going up to the mountaintop and it is clear that she is pregnant. She is exceedingly sad, and some people in the village gossip that the unborn child is actually helping clear her depression and restore her to a more healthful state of mind: “And when at last her time drew near / Her looks were calm, her senses clear.” But the story stops there. No one knows what happened – she would often go up into the mountains, and nobody knows if the baby was stillborn, or if it was born alive and she killed it. The speaker mentions some people think she hanged the baby from a nearby tree, or drowned it in the muddy pond, but everyone agrees that the mossy mound is where she buried the baby.

“I’ve heard, the moss is spotted red

With drops of that poor infant’s blood;

But kill a new-born infant thus,

I do not think she could!

Then there’s a bit about how if you go to the pond and look into the water, the baby will look back out at you, and that there have been people who wanted to dig up the bones and bring her to justice, but when they tried, the land began to shake and it scared them off, so there’s an element of the supernatural at play here, or at least superstition. The speaker says “I cannot tell how this may be” and does not really comment on that further, just states that the thorn is always struggling up against the moss that seems bent on dragging it down to the earth, and the woman is always there wailing and crying “misery” and so she and the thorn, both aged, gnarled, past blooming, keep their sorry vigil over the child’s grave.

Middlemarch – George Eliot 1871-2

Middlemarch is one of my favorite novels. This is my third time reading it and, as with all great works of literature, it seems completely different every time I read it.

I’ve organized my notes to more or less follow the original serial structure of the novel, that is to say it is split into eight sections and each was published separately before the novel was collected into its current form.

Book I – Miss Brooke

This section centers largely around Miss Dorothea Brooke, a character Eliot/the narrator seems to have regarded with a mixture of affection and exasperation. Dorothea is an idealistic young woman, wealthy, beautiful, and austere. She loves coming up with plans to improve things, and worries about how much she enjoys doing things like horseback riding, to the point where she seems to enjoy renouncing her pleasures more than the pleasures themselves – rather defeating the point of self-denial. Her sister Celia hits the nail on the head when she claims Dorothea has a taste for giving things up. Celia in general is able to see things clearly where Dorothea, whom she calls by the affectionate nickname “Dodo”, cannot make heads or tails. Celia ends up marrying Sir James Chettham, who is in love with Dorothea at the beginning of the novel (and whom, in this reader’s wildly speculative fancy, Dorothea would have much more happily been married, for he actually listens to her). Dorothea is not interested in Sir James, however, preferring the dusty Dr. Casaubon, a pedantic academic old enough to be her father. Mrs. Cadwallader says that if you put his blood under a microscope all you would see is periods and semicolons. He is not a good match for her. She thinks he is because she wishes to be just like Milton’s daughters, a useful helper in a great man’s great project that will make an important contribution to knowledge and to the world.

The Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood

I read this book as a part of my 20th century Queer Literature directed reading, but it is also on the 20th century Anglophone list, 1900-1939. In a lot of ways it makes sense to discuss it in two separate sections, considering that is how it is set up in publication.

The first part is Mr. Norris Changes Trains, a novel, and the second part consists of a series of shorter stories and vignettes, which collectively are known as Goodbye To Berlin. These two are usually published together in a single volume, called The Berlin Stories.

Mr. Norris is a strangely opaque novel. I’ve described reading it as somewhat similar to that feeling you get when you run a fingernail over a roll of tape but can’t quite catch the edge. It’s hard to get in, because it’s weirdly slick and glossy. This mysterious slippery quality makes the novel something of a frustrating read since I often had the sense of missing more than I was catching on to. The novel’s opening scene, with Bradshaw and Norris sitting in a train compartment making awkward eye contact is a cruising scene, but from a given cultural moment that makes it hard to interpret. Things were so much more subtle, as they had to be, and people had to interact without the mediation – and safety – of digital interfaces: “He appeared to be engaged in some sort of rapid mental calculation, while his fingers, nervously active, sketched a number of flurried gestures round his waistcoat. For all they conveyed, he might equally have been going to undress, to draw a revolver, or merely to make sure I hadn’t stolen his money.” All Bradshaw has said so far is “I wonder, sir, if you could let me have a match?” It’s also the first words spoken aloud in the novel, a sort of buried opening sentence – and it’s a pickup line. It’s meant to be spoken in German as well, and rather than asking for a match, which carries a phallic connotation in English, the way it’s phrased in German (and French too) is literally “do you have fire?”, which is a sort of veiled question about desire/passion. In this way, if you know what to look for (which I didn’t), it’s immediately clear that this is a queer novel. This is not, however, a novel about queerness, although that’s an important component. Isherwood, who became recognized as an important queer writer after the publication of other works, including Goodbye To Berlin, and his reputation as such, is a big part of why this novel is sort of retroactively canonized into capital letter Queer Literature. The fact of the matter is, back when he was writing this, there was no such category, certainly not the way people understand it today. Indeed, Bradshaw is sort of a neutral eye, regarding the Berlin scene almost from a third-person perspective, he’s so removed (hence the most famous line, “I am a camera” although that appears in Goodbye). In that sense, to try to unpick the characters’ sexualities – Norris’s tastes for BDSM and erotica, Baron von Pregnitz’s homosexuality, etc. – is not an especially useful exercise. A more useful approach is to understand these characters as types, as representative of, say, the figure of the morally (and politically) unmoored con man, or the vestigial aristocrat, etc. In other words, their sexualities are important, but not what is most important about them.

There’s a reason, then, that this novel appears on the 20th century Anglophone 1900-1939 list, but not on the Theory of Genders and Sexualities list. The novel is concerned in large part with considering life in Berlin at a strangely liminal political moment, when Germany teetered between Communist and the Nazi parties. Germany had, post-Weimar republic, one of the largest communist parties in Europe, if not the world, and was very close to following in Russia’s footsteps. The novel is written in the early 30s, before it was sure which way things would go, and this is especially interesting in the Goodbye To Berlin  sections since we see Isherwood, this time writing from the first person, live through the rise of Nazism in Germany, the imprisonment of many of his communist friends, and the decision, finally, to return to England after Hitler comes to power. Isherwood’s reasons for being in Germany were, he said later, based partly on the desire to have sex with young, strong German laborers. He taught English to support himself. That said, his writing is largely political – and that can be supported by the consideration that the one idealized figure in the novel, Bayer, is a communist authority who is brave, wise, strong, admirable, and is also later martyred (I’ve said that if I were casting him in a movie, I’d cast 1990s Ed Harris or maybe Robert Duval circa The Handmaid’s Tale era). It’s a stark contrast to the flawed Baron, or the powdered, toupéed, Norris, the makeup-wearing queer conman. Between the two of them, Norris and the Baron, there’s a sense that they are holdovers from a by-gone era, and perhaps also that Isherwood is nodding his head to the literary inheritance left him by the Yellow Nineties types, the Decadents and the Aesthetes, the self-presentation of Oscar Wilde (green carnations and all).

Notes for next time: “Bayer as communist authority, Goodbye To Berlin: Sally Bowles’s abortion”

 

Wordsworth – We Are Seven

This poem’s speaker describes meeting an eight-year-old, a little cottage girl. He asks her a question: “Sisters and brothers, little maid, / How many may you be?” And she answers “Seven in all.”

He asks where they are, so she goes into more detail: “Two of us at Conway dwell, / and two of us are gone to sea,” which, including her, brings the headcount up to five. Then she continues “Two of us in the churchyard lie, / My sister and my brother.” Now we have seven, but since two of them are in the graveyard by the church, we don’t really have seven at all. The speaker asks her about this: “Yet ye are seven! – I pray you tell, / Sweet maid, how this may be.” And she repeats that they are seven, with two lying in the churchyard.

The speaker contradicts her more firmly: “If two are in the churchyard laid, / Then ye are only five” but the little girl disagrees. She argues that because she and her mother live near the churchyard, and the two siblings lie side by side in the cemetery, she often goes and visits with them, sitting with them while she knits stockings, hems kerchiefs, and she sings them songs, and sometimes has dinner out there with them. She names them. First her sister Jane died, and she and her brother John would go out there and play around her grave, play “with” her, and then when John died, she kept playing out there with them, even though she’s really alone. She repeats, “we are seven.”

The speaker becomes harsh and blunt: “But they are dead; those two are dead! / Their spirits are in heaven!” But the little girl insists on her opinion: “Twas throwing words away; for still / The little maid would have her will, / And said, “Nay, we are seven!””

This poem does interesting things with how adults and children understand death differently. It comes back around to the opening lines:

-A simple child,

That lightly draws its breath,

And feels its life in every limb,

What should it know of death?

When it comes to performing literary analysis of poetry, I really love when a poem includes a question. It’s such a simple device and yet so powerful. What should a child know of death? If Wordsworth means this rhetorically, then he may be asking more along the lines of “well, what can we expect a child to know about death, really, when they’re so innocently vibrant with the fresh life and easy breath coursing through their bodies?” and indeed that seems to be what the speaker might believe. The speaker tries to teach the little girl that death is final (“you are FIVE!”) and that her siblings are in heaven and therefore must be subtracted from the number of siblings she counts. Yet, in this question, “What should a child know of death?” another interpretation is available. The little girl, by insisting they are seven, and by refusing to acknowledge death as a severing force between herself and her siblings, performs an interesting sort of existential/phenomenological blurring of the line between life and death; it isn’t that she’s too young and naive to grasp that death is final, but more that she is able to keep her late siblings alive, at least for her, in her own mind. The mental activity on her part is what is important here, more than his insistence that they are five.

Wordsworth – Simon Lee and Intersubjective Time

Simon Lee, The Old Huntsman, With an Incident in which he was Concerned

This poem features the figure of “Old Simon Lee,” an old huntsman who is the “sole survivor” of a lost time in which he served as the huntsman for 35 years to, one presumes, a noble family. The poem states that the master has died,  and that “no one now / dwells in the Hall of Ivor” and that “men, dogs, and horses, all are dead.”

It recalls the days when he’d go out hunting, performing Wordsworth’s typical doubling of time and playing with affect and memory.

Returning to the present, Simon now lives with his wife Ruth, who is the “stouter of the two” so she does what her husband can’t (which is most things, it seems) and they are the “poorest of the poor.”

Then there’s a moment of narrative play – the speaker addresses the reader: “O reader! had you in your mind / Such stores as silent thought can bring, / O gentle reader ! You would find / A tale in everything.” Oh patient reader, you’ve been waiting for the story to start, for some tale to be told, you probably feel like I’ve been setting the stage for something to happen! And then the speaker refuses to do so, by stating that it is not a tale, and that a tale is what a reader must make in their own minds… and yet he also complies at the same time, by continuing on and actually finishing describing the “incident” he alluded to in the title.

The incident is that the speaker, one summer day, saw Simon trying to unearth the root of an old tree, and struggling with it: “So vain was his endeavor, / That at the root of the old tree / He might have worked for ever.” The speaker then volunteers to help him with it, and gets the job done in two seconds when it would have taken Simon Lee much longer.

The final octet is where things get really interesting, and really Wordsworthian I suppose you could say:

The tears into his eyes were brought,

And thanks and praises seemed to run

So fast out of his heart, I thought

They never would have done.

I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning,

Alas ! the gratitude of men

Hath oftener left me mourning.

In this passage there’s a recollection of an outpouring of emotion by two people, in a sort of time-warped intersubjectivity.