Poem of the Week 2024/47

Dead

The Winter is her lover now,

    A brilliant one and bold;

And she has gone away from me,

    Estranged and white and cold.

He painted all the hills for her

    And laughed the skies blue-warm;

He rattled down the pears and plums

    And crashed a happy storm.

Then southward-swinging lines of birds,

    And chilly rains he sent,

And sharpness in the air to prove

    His serious intent.

And now at last her heart is won.

    She's gone – where did she pass?

For Winter holds his breath and see –

    This frost upon the grass.

– Elizabeth Bishop

This early (1930) poem by Bishop has the feeling of a classic English lyric – the ballad meter (4/3/4/3 beats in a quatrain, with regular rhymes on the second & fourth lines), the vivid evocation of a seasonal change, with metaphorical implications, the attention-catching details – yet it also has something modern & ambiguous about it.

Who is the she being described? On the most basic level, it's another human being, a friend or former lover of the poet. But you could also read it in a larger sense as the Earth (usually characterized as a woman; in many mythologies, the earth, the source of life, is a woman & the sun, which helps bring forth life in the warmer seasons, is a male) conquered by Winter. You could see the poem as describing the death of this woman, or perhaps as the death of her relationship with the narrator. The title Dead perhaps tips the scale too much, but what is dead could refer to a romance as well as to a once-living person.

The characterization of Winter, usually portrayed as an icy old man nearing his end, is unusual. Winter is quite a dashing figure here, dashing in both the sense of extremely, energetically active & also stylish & attractive. He is brilliant & bold, adjectives usually associated with sunnier times, but they make perfect sense in this poem's presentation. In the second stanza, like an artist he paints the hills (& leaves & grass do change color as Winter approaches; Bishop was always an accurate observer of the natural world) & it is his laughter, a distinctive way of describing Winter, that turns the skies blue-warm during second summer, the brief period of warm weather that usually occurs sometime in the Fall. He energetically rattles down the pears & plums, & though they're falling, the reference to them is a reminder of harvest-time abundance. Also, plums are a summer fruit, & pears ripen in autumn, so again the transition of seasons is underlined through precise observation of Nature. Then in the third stanza, Winter's energy turns a bit darker, a bit more threatening: he sends the birds migrating south, there is increasing sharpness in the air. There are chilly rains; storms, like the theatrically crashing one in the previous stanza, tend to be of shorter duration than rain, which can last steadily for days.

In the first stanza, the declaration that Winter is her lover now strongly (though maybe not definitively) suggests that the woman is a former lover of the poet's; estranged in the final line suggests (again, not definitely) that what is being described is the end of a romance instead of a life. It would be an unusual word to describe someone's physical death, but a standard one to describe a spouse or lover who had moved out or moved on. She has gone away from me could refer metaphorically to death, or to her departure from the narrator's life.

The final stanza both both summarizes & suggests. Bishop continues the metaphor of Winter as a successful wooer of the woman – at last, her heart is won; all the colors & falling fruit & increasingly serious signs of Winter have succeeded. She is gone. And where did she pass? Pass can mean to go in a certain direction or to leave behind; it is also a common euphemism for death. But the poem's question is not when, why, or how but where did she pass – where did the final act, whether it was moving on or dying, take place? It's an interesting emphasis that suggests the importance of place, & encourages a reader to think of the departed She as maybe not a single individual but, as I suggested earlier, the Earth itself, or as a sort of Persephone abducted to the Underworld, bereaving us of flowers & greenery. Whether an individual or more generally the Natural world, the phrase could also mean where did she pass to, suggesting our never-ending curiosity about & ignorance of what happens to our spirits when physical death strikes us (or, in the case of the Earth, where are the snows of yesteryear?). It's a resonant question.

Even the Winter, the successful wooer, is holding his breath to see what happens. Throughout the poem there has been a conflation of death & love; Winter, usually a time of endings, is here presented as a vigorous, appealing new suitor. The narrator's sadness is presented in a few lines, but the bulk of the poem is a quite appealing picture of an oncoming end: laughter, blue skies, fruit falling. Whether it is the end of a season, or a love affair, or a life that is being presented here, the process is shown as enticing, as seductive, though it ends in some form of death. The final line is powerfully evocative & mysterious. We are left with that sign of Winter, frost upon the grass. Does this represent where she "passed"? The growth (eternal renewal of Nature!) on her gravesite? Is the frost on the grass a sign of what happened to the Earth? A sort of Whitmanesque invocation of the power of even small manifestations of life force as a leaf of grass to move us beyond an individual passing? It is, appropriately for a poem titled Dead, a haunting ending.

I took this poem from Poems, Prose, and Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Robert Giroux & Lloyd Schwartz for the Library of America.

Museum Monday 2024/47

 

detail from one of the tapestries on display as part of the de Young Museum's current special exhibit, Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries

Friday Photo 2024/46

 

an urn at First Church in Berkeley

Poem of the Week 2024/46

Air has no Residence, no Neighbor,

No Ear, no Door,

No Apprehension of Another

Oh, Happy Air!

Ethereal Guest at e'en an Outcast's Pillow –

Essential Host, in Life's faint, wailing Inn,

Later than Light thy Consciousness accost me

Till it depart, persuading Mine –

– Emily Dickinson

Possibly the first science fact that made a huge impression on me was the statement "Air is everywhere". I'm not sure what about it hit my first-grade brain with such force. Perhaps it was just the realization that where I had thought there was Nothing, there was in fact Something, something unseen but ever-present, even unavoidable, something that, without knowing it, I had depended on from the moment of birth..

Dickinson begins this poem with something of that aura (or, we might say, something of that air) of being present & necessary while also absent. Air is disembodied, as the poet implicitly wishes she were: no set residence, so no housekeeping or neighbors; no ears to have to listen to them, no doors either keeping one in or letting other people in (as there's no residence, air is always out, without needing to go out formally through something so mundane as a door). Above all, air has no apprehension of another, and apprehension can mean both understanding or grasping conceptually a person or thing & also anxiety or fear about dealing with a person or thing. The poet is wishing to be cut off from the limitations, the bother, the unpleasantness & boredom, & also the anxieties & fears, of life: free from all that, like the Air; Oh, Happy Air!

But can Air actually be happy? Underlying the conception here is an assumption of consciousness: the poet wishes to be as free as the air, but still, somehow, connected to humanity, or at least the "good" parts of it (like happiness): present, in the "air is everywhere" way; essential to life, but free of its burdens.

The second stanza develops this idea. While the first emphasizes the ways the envied Air is different from people (no set dwelling or irritating neighbors, none of the floating anxieties of existence), the second emphasizes the way Air is deeply connected with human life. In the first line, Air is modified by ethereal, & besides the musical sound of ethereal air, the word suggests something heavenly, floating above the world, yet this almost angelic atmosphere visits, as on a mission of mercy, even the lowliest & most wretched – the outcast of the earth.

In the second line, Air transmutes from Guest to Host, from visitor to provider at Life's faint, wailing Inn. And it's true, Air provides essential sustenance, just as an earthly innkeeper does. The Inn is Life, & we, humanity, are the passing guests, maintained there for a while by Air. But this isn't some bustling, hearty Inn out of a Victorian novel; it's faint & wailing. Faint suggests fading, loss of consciousness, weakness; wailing suggests lamentation, sobbing, anger. The two seem connected: our weakness leads to anger & sorrow. The two adjectives together also suggest both childbirth & death: the weakness of a mother after labor, the crying of her newborn; the loss of consciousness attendant on death, followed by our sorrow at our loss.

The association with death is strengthened in the final lines, in which the poet, realizing that her lot is with humanity & not the air, reflects on her own end: Light is one of the last things left as we lose our grip on existence, & when that goes, when we can no longer see (or, to use a term evoked earlier in this poem, apprehend) the world, we have one more final & most essential thing: breath. Air is breath, & our final exhalation can carry our soul with it, out of our body, into the air. Dickinson uses the intimate form in addressing & personifying this manifestation of air: thy; such is her dependence on, & subsequent intimacy with, this universal element. She talks, as if she were addressing a friend, about thy Consciousness, which suggests both the air's awareness – all along, she has been describing the air as if it had human components, not merely atmospheric – & her own awareness of the world as its light passes from her (as she is the one projecting consciousness onto a non-living gas).

This Consciousness accosts her: that is, it approaches her boldly, as a determined & final messenger. She & the Air, meaning she & her breath, & she & her soul, are tied up with this universal (air is everywhere!) element. The Air comes to receive from the dying poet her last breath. It departs, persuading Mine – meaning it takes her final breath with it, "persuading" it to join itself to Air. The poem ends, significantly, with a dash – beyond the finality of the death described in the final lines, there is an unknown ending, a possible continuation of some sort – nothing so firm & definitive as a period belongs here. The poem floats off, like our final breath.

Throughout, despite her envy of Air's nonhuman qualities, Dickinson gives to Air a certain awareness, & a vital role in human life. In this way Air mirrors our own consciousness; however much we may long to float above the boredom & suffering of life, however tired we are of the constant maintenance it needs, we can never quite imagine the world without our consciousness floating through it, present everywhere.

This is Poem 1060 in the Thomas Johnson edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Museum Monday 2024/46

 

detail of Light Falling Like a Broken Chain; Paradise by Mary Weatherford, currently on view at BAM/PFA as part of Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection

On 14 November, the museum presents a Conversation with Artists Mary Weatherford and Aria Dean: Gut Punch – Reenvisioning Abstract Expressionism, moderated by Katy Siegel of SFMOMA

Friday Photo 2024/45

 

a pear

Poem of the Week 2024/45

Our legions are brimful, our cause is ripe.

The enemy increaseth every day;

We, at the height, are ready to decline.

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

– William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3, ll 214 - 223

I had a different poem planned for today, but agitation over the presidential election has gotten the better of me & my original selection will have to wait. This passage jumped into my mind, because Shakespeare has something to say to every moment, & this does feel like a turning point in the country's history, a pretty clear choice between a backward-looking – well, that's not quite the right phrase; backward, yes, but looking to a past that was invented, or merely hallucinated, by some citizens, to the exclusion & often intense suffering of many other citizens – rage-filled fascist (who is also, quite clearly, in cognitive decline, & I do not say that lightly or callously) versus, you know, an actual functioning adult, who has a track record of trying to help her fellow citizens. And yet it's close. I remain baffled & frankly disgusted. I guess this election, like the Civil War (of which it is, in fact, another manifestation) will never end, but only continue in different mutations.

Brutus makes this speech to persuade his fellow conspirators to join battle at Philippi with the forces of Octavius Caesar (later to be Caesar Augustus), Marc Anthony, & the negligible Lepidus. Brutus, famously described in his funeral oration for Caesar by Marc Anthony with searing, sneering irony as "an honorable man", is, in actual fact, an honorable man, brought in my Cassius to lend moral & intellectual respectability to their plot to assassinate Caesar, thereby ending his burgeoning power. The alliance between the conspirators is already fraying, but Cassius gives in to Brutus, to conciliate him, with disastrous results for their cause.

Yet Brutus really isn't wrong in his assessment: he knows their alliance, their armies, their power, are all starting to fall apart, while the strength of Octavius & Anthony is growing. Strike while the iron is hot, in other words, & strike before your enemy gets out of your control. Brutus, being a philosophically inclined politician, speaks not of strategy or military advantage, as a politician or a general would, but of things a philosopher would talk of: how to live in the world, how to judge the unknowable ways of Fortune (& of History). The metaphors are grand: the ocean, the tide rising & falling, the full sea, & we in our uncertain little ship, trying to negotiate the hazards around us. Brutus knows that the events around us are uncontrollable; it's how we respond that makes a successful life. We are on a voyage, separated from the deep & powerful sea only by our relatively frail ship, trying to negotiate often unseen dangers. Brutus's advice here is actually quite sound; it turns out to be exactly the wrong thing to do, as the more realistic & calculating Cassius had tried to say, but still: good advice. But the mysterious turns of Fortune (or, as we might say, of History) are as unfathomable as the sea.

When I was young, Julius Caesar used to be featured on high school reading lists (which is not where I read it; I read all of Shakespeare on my own); I suspect the real reason is that the verse is fairly straightforward (plus there's a stabbing, & ghosts, & it's "historical", but not about English kings we don't care about anymore unless it's through Shakespeare's words), but it used to be presented as showing "Shakespeare supported democracy", because we like to believe that great artists believe what we claim to believe. This struck juvenile & precocious me as, you know, implausible: even the American revolutionaries, two centuries after Shakespeare's birth, didn't believe in "democracy" the way we understand it (which is one of the reasons we're saddled with the goddam Electoral College), & even if Shakespeare (the all-seeing!) had somehow decided democracy was the way to go, it's unlikely that he could present a work defending it under a monarchy vigilant of its prerogatives & on the constant look-out for subversion.

So Julius Caesar is not about "supporting democracy"; as always with Shakespeare, any interpretation can be undercut, even if it's the official resolution of the play (think of the happy ending of The Merchant of Venice; after what we've experienced of Shylock, & why he acts the way he does, & how he's treated (& how in turn he treats others), it's difficult to take the "happy ending" without some reservations; even the end of Twelfth Night leads some people I know to a feeling of sadness for the madly-used Malvolio). We can come away concluding that it was wrong to assassinate Julius Caesar, but Caesar himself is presented as a superstitious, flawed man with a constant politician's eye on the main chance – he often seems like a performative Noble Roman, in such moments as the one in which someone urges on him a petition concerning his own safety & he grandly announced that that one will be considered last.

So if you need to find a "meaning" or "moral" in this play, perhaps it's only that we are all wandering, lost, through the mysteries of life. Noble, well-meant actions end up in murder, deceit, & treachery; cruelty & cunning result in peace & prosperity. Much depends on chance & actions & outcomes we don't control. Brutus & Cassius thought they were saving the Republic, or (for Cassius), maybe just themselves; centuries later, Dante stuck each of them, along with the arch-traitor Judas Iscariot, each in one of Satan's three mouths. Others consider them heroes &, despite their aristocratic standing, revolutionary role models.

All we can do is try for the best. That means choosing openness, respect, accountability, mutual support. If my deluded fellow citizens & our semi-functioning system do put the fascist back in power, it's important to remember that we still don't know how things will turn out. Keep hopeful, keep fighting.

Perhaps by the time this entry is posted, we will know if Americans chose, to be blunt, Right or Wrong. But it's good to keep in mind, for purposes of checking our own egos, that everybody thinks their choice is for the Right. The essential thing is to look clearly, widely, & compassionately (to see, in short, with the sort of vision Shakespeare had).

Museum Monday 2024/45

 

detail of Saint John the Baptist by Domenikos Theotokopoulos (El Greco), now at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

Friday Photo 2024/44

 

Lincoln Park San Francisco

Poem of the Week 2024/44

 For Halloween week, two by Robert Herrick. The first:

The Hag

1.    The hag is astride,

        This night for to ride;

The Devill and shee together:

        Through thick, and through thin;

        Now out, and then in,

Though ne'r so foule be the weather.

2.     A thorn or a burr

        She takes for a Spurre:

With a lash of a Bramble she rides now,

        Through Brakes and through Bryars:

        O're Ditches, and Mires;

She followes the Spirit that guides now.

3.     No Beast, for his food,

        Dares now range the wood;

But husht in his laire he lies lurking:

        While mischeifs, by these,

        On Land and on Seas,

At noone of Night are a working.

4.    The storme will arise,

        And trouble the skies;

This night, and more for the wonder,

        The ghost from the Tomb

        Affrighted shall come,

Cal'd out by the clap of the Thunder.

The second:

The Hagg.

    The staffe is now greas'd,

    And very well pleas'd,

She cockes out her Arse at the parting;

    To an old Ram Goat,

    That rattles i' th' throat,

Halfe choakt with the stink of her farting.

    In a dirtie Haire-lace

    She leads on a brace

Of black-bore-cats to attend her;

    Who scratch at the Moone,

    And threaten at noone

Of night from Heaven for to rend her.

    A hunting she goes;

    A crackt horne she blowes;

At which the hounds fall a bounding;

    While th' Moone in her sphere

    Peepes trembling for feare,

And night's afraid of the sounding.

– Robert Herrick

Two poems by the same poet, on the same theme, using many of the same images – the flying witch, the noon of night (that is, midnight), fear spread among wild animals, the Devil (the Ram Goat in the second poem is an image of a devil) – even the same title (with an additional g in the second), & yet I find the effect of the two very different.

Both hags are clearly "bad", of, if you prefer, outside of standard societal norms, but with Hag 1 there's something frankly appealing about the picture: she's powerful, insouciant, with a literally Devil-may-care attitude. She has the traditional witch/pagan link to the Natural world: she rides out at night, soaring through the sky, fearless of wind or rain; the references in Stanza 2 to her using a thorn as a spur & a prickly vine as a lash are reminiscent of poetic descriptions of the fairy-world (see, for example, A Midsummer Night's Dream or the Queen Mab speech in Romeo & Juliet). And even though the fairy-world is darker & more menacing than we of the modern age like to think, there is still something appealing about it, something striking & beautiful, as in any natural mystery. We could live side by side with this world & feel not unease or danger but the richness of unseen possibilities.

Hag 1 causes mischief (or mischeifs, as the seventeenth-century spelling has it) but implicit in the word is a sense of playfulness, something that is more an inconvenient prank than a serious threat. And the harm that is being done isn't shown affecting humans, at least directly; it's the forest predators (who are themselves possible dangers to people) who cower in their caves until the hag passes. She causes storms (like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth), but, again, the danger doesn't seem to threaten humans directly. Instead we get the extremely picturesque image of ghosts, themselves frightened by her powers, coming out when the thunderclaps are most violent. Hag 1 seems to have great power, which, at some level, is always appealing, or at least intriguing, to people. She soars above, heedless. She is linked to Nature, but can also manipulate it (mostly, it seems, for theatrical effect; her actions don't seem to have any purpose more specific than stirring things up). It's an image that charms.

Hag 2, on the other hand, is much grosser. The first stanza describes some sort of sexual encounter with a devil, & not a charming, sophisticated devil either (like Goethe's Mephistopheles), but an old goat (click here for one of Goya's images of witches consorting with Satan in the form of a giant goat). The staff that is greased might refer to the stick she uses as her air-borne steed, but it has an unmistakably phallic undercurrent; perhaps she & Satan are using some sort of dildo. Her parting shot is an offensive fart. It's a physical encounter, but a mostly unappealing one: greasy, smelly, gagging.

Hag 1's appearance is never mentioned, except for what's implicit in the word "hag". Hag 2's appearance is described a little more fully. She is wearing a haire-lace, which seems to be a wig of some sort with a lace base. So she probably is bald, or balding, & her wig is dirty (& if the wig is dirty, she herself is probably not clean either). We are made conscious of her ass & her farts. It's a crude picture. Her familiars are a little crowd of black cats, of nasty disposition, scratching at the Moon, as if they would scratch it out of heaven. The moon is often associated with Hecate, a goddess who became associated with witchcraft, as well as with night-time & changeability. Hag 2 shoves her butt at the Devil & her cats claw at the Moon: she certainly seems to bite the hand that feeds her, but mostly in a crude, fairly nasty way: nothing insouciant here! She also haunts & hunts through the forest, but it's a little unclear what she's hunting for – whatever it is, she's out to harm; even Night & the Moon fear her hunting. Even the sound of hunting (so often invoked by composers) is ugly here: her horn is cracked (another unavoidably phallic reference, to a damaged instrument), producing a sound that produces fear & trembling. We have the feeling in both poems of supernatural forces, but with Hag 1 they seem at play & with Hag 2 at work.

Happy Halloween!

These poems are from The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, edited by Tom T. Cain and Ruth Connolly, published by Oxford University Press.