Museum Monday 2024/38

 

detail of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes by Jacopo Bassano, now at thee National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC

Friday Photo 2024/37

 

a wall at the Oakland Museum of California

Poem of the Week 2024/37

Then came October full of merry glee:

    For, yet his noule was totty of the must,

    Which he was treading in the wine-fats see,

    And of the ioyous oyle, whose gentle gust

    Made him so frollick and so full of lust:

    Vpon a dreadfull Scorpion he did ride,

    The same which by Dianaes doom vniust

    Slew great Orion: and eeke by his side

He had his ploughing share, and coulter ready tyde.

Next was Nouember, he full grosse and fat,

    As fed with lard, and that right well might seeme;

    For, he had been a fatting hogs of late,

    That yet his browes with sweat, did reek and steem,

    And yet the season was full sharp and breem;

    In planting eeke he took no small delight:

    Whereon he rode, not easie was to deeme;

    For it a dreadfull Centaure was in sight,

The seed of Saturne, and faire Nais, Chiron hight.

And after him, came next the chill December:

    Yet he through merry feasting which he made,

    And great bonfires, did not the cold remember;

    His Sauiours birth his mind so much did glad:

    Vpon a shaggy-bearded Goat he rode,

    The same wherewith Dan Ioue in tender yeares,

    They say, was nourisht by th'Idæn mayd;

    And in his hand a broad deepe boawle he beares;

Of which, he freely drinks an health to all his peeres.

– Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Mutabilitie, Canto 7, 39 - 41

The Faerie Queene is a very long, complex, dazzling, allusive & elusive poem, whose stated intention is to inculcate virtue in the reader by illustrating through allegory correct moral choices. These stanzas occur towards the work's end, after the six main books, in the fragment of a seventh book known as the Mutabilitie Cantos. Mutabilitie is a Titaness, goddess of perpetual change & uncertainty, who is seeking to overthrow the rule of Jove & his associated gods & goddesses on the grounds that they, too, are subject to the perpetual change she embodies. The judge is Nature, an androgynous figure embodying all creation; there are vague gestures made towards a Christian God who has appointed Nature to this role, but they are surprisingly muted for a poem that is often reduced to an allegory supporting the Protestant Reformation.

As part of her case, Mutabilitie brings out the four elements, the sun & moon, the seasons & the months, the hours & life & death as proof that all is constantly changing. Nature ultimately rules against her, as the change is not chaotic but ordered (the seasons give way to each other, the months & hours succeed in turns. . . ). Despite the denial of Mutabilitie's claim, we are left with a disturbingly unsettled view of the world; what does it mean to infer moral lessons from the ambiguous adventures we have been shown? The world seems swept out from under our feet, & the avoidance of answers provided by the theology of Christian salvation makes the final cantos, despite their formal structure, sometimes antiquated language, & reliance on classical learning, seem very much of the forlorn modern world.

The procession of months begins with March, as did many calendars of the time; this makes sense, as March is when the world begins its annual renewal, known as Spring. All twelve months go by in turn, though I've only put three of them here. The stanzas act as units, often detachable from their surroundings; each month is personified in traditional ways (as in those beautiful pages in illuminated manuscripts showing the aristocratic patron, month by month, the appropriate rural activities of the peasants, from planting through to harvesting, along with such lordly amusements as hunting & feasting).

The language of these stanzas may seem more recondite & antiquated than it really is; some of that is due to the retention not only of the poem's original spelling, but its original typesetting – after a while, certainly by the time of the Mutabilitie Cantos, the reader is used to the i/j & u/v conventions, & doesn't even pause to puzzle out that Ioue is Jove. And it's simple enough, especially with context, to figure out that steem is steam & boawle is bowl.  (I've been reading Catherine Nicholson's Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism, which has a fascinating discussion of the convention of not modernizing the poem's spelling.) 

In the first stanza, second line, his noule was totty of the must, noule means his head (noll) & must, though maybe an obscure term, is still used for young wine; put the two together, & it's easy enough to deduce that totty means dizzy (& what a wonderful & vivid word to describe the condition!). In the next line, wine-fats see means a sea of wine vats. October is wine-making month, obviously. The months are accompanied by their astrological symbols, in this case the scorpion (though Scorpio doesn't take over until towards the end of the month). The myth referred to is the hunter Diana's punishment of the mortal Orion for boasting of his prowess in the chase; she had him killed by a scorpion & then, to make up for it, threw them both in the sky as constellations. (From Mutabilitie's point of view, Dianaes doom vniust emphasizes the failures of the gods as equitable rulers & also their own changeability.) The ploughing share (plowshare) & coulter (the metal blade in a plow that cuts the furrows) are ready, but fastened securely – they won't be needed until the next Spring.

November is the traditional month for hog slaughtering, & despite the increasing cold (sharp and breem; breem means cold, chill, rough weather – notice how many of the odd words are rhyme words, though they sound natural enough in context, & it's an amazing technical feat that Spenser was able to sustain the formal requirements of his stanza through so many pages). the month is sweating with his labor. I'm assuming that In planting eeke he took no small delight (eeke meaning also, as well) means "he took no delight, even a small amount, in planting"; November, with its oncoming cold, isn't planting season. The zodiac sign is Sagittarius the Centaur, & the half-man/half-horse seems a suitable symbol for a month both chill & steaming, abundant yet harsh.

December, like October, is drinking too much, but in his case, it's not the heady proximity of new wine but part of the season's cheer (the reference to Christmas, in the form of His Sauiours birth, is almost startling, so unChristian, at least on the surface, is this world). Capricorn, the Goat, is the astrological symbol, associated with the myth of Jupiter's childhood; there are variants, of course, on the story, which may explain They say in line 7. [T]h'Idæn mayd is Amalthea, a goat-herder (or, in some tellings, an actual goat) who suckled Zeus/Jove/Jupiter when he was hidden as a child to prevent his father from eating him like his other children. (Again, Mutabilitie is emphasizing the changeable status & uncertain rights of the gods themselves.) The goat is shaggy-bearded, part of the rich & exuberant descriptive language of the poem, which has made it, regardless of its ostensible moral purpose, much-loved by sensuous poets such as Keats.

Despite the Spenserian stanza's strength in presenting emblematic pictures, its accumulation does not result in a static poem but in one that is endlessly oscillating & shimmering. The Faerie Queene's world of knights, dragons, & sorcerers is rooted in the world of romance & such elaborate Italian Renaissance epics as Orlando Furioso, but such subjects have become newly popular in our own time, as what is loosely termed Fantasy Fiction has claimed a large number of readers. I always hope these posts will lead someone to try a new poet or rediscover an old one; let me recommend The Faerie Queene. (The edition I have is the one edited by Thomas P Roche Jr with the assistance of C Patrick O'Donnell Jr, issued by Yale University Press, though it might now be out of print.)

Museum Monday 2024/37

 

Dust by Nayland Blake, displayed as part of BAM/PFA's special exhibit To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection

Friday Photo 2024/36

 

dahlias

Poem of the Week 2024/36

Birth

Oh, fields of wonder

Out of which

Stars are born,

And moon and sun

And me as well,

Like stroke

Of lightning

In the night

Some mark

To make

Some word

To tell.

– Langston Hughes

There's a wonderful sense of possibility in this poem, suitable to its subject, birth. Hughes uses his characteristically clear & direct language, but his approach to his subject is oblique & indirect. Birth most likely makes us think of humans or other animals, or some sort of biographical or autobiographical impulse, but we start off, after the praise-giving interjection Oh, with fields of wonder. Why are we out in the fields? Where are these fields? What is a field of wonder?

A field is not only open land planted with crops or pasture, which is probably the first meaning we think of, but also a sphere of activity or interest. So immediately we think of the earth, & things growing out of the earth, but also what you might call a source of energy, the activity & interest of the second definition. Wonder is an emotion of surprise & admiration, but it can also mean to be curious & even doubtful about something.

Immediately, in the four-word opening line, the tone is set of acclamation & praise, of the marvelous potential of creation, of the power of our earth, & also of our curiosity (&, perhaps, buried in some deep way, our doubts) about all these things.

These fields seem much vaster & more connected to the larger universe than we may have first thought when we registered field. The crops are not wheat or corn, but stars, sun, & moon, giant planetary constructs – and me as well, we are told by the poet in a separate line (a line which end-rhymes with the final word of the poem, tell, giving a retrospective emphasis to the line that introduces the speaker & a subtle strength to the line that mentions the imperative to tell). He is connected with nature, but not in the mundane way of being linked to other mammals, or even some earthly ecosystem: he is connected with the biggest elements, at least one of which determines life on earth. It's an image of understated but definite power, yet it also has a slightly comic irony in the offhand way he adds himself (me as well!) after the celestial fires.

Though this poem doesn't sound at all like Whitman, I find in it the same sense of human connection to the larger natural world, & that connection as a sense of beauty & joy, but also strength & even divinity, an approach that can be traced back to the New England Transcendentalists.

The poet goes on to compare himself to some stroke / Of lightning / In the night; once again, he is comparing himself to mighty natural elements, but again there is a sober subtext that undercuts what might otherwise seem braggadocio: lightning is a powerful & potentially destructive force, but it hits where it hits (the lightning doesn't pick a target; the atmospheric events that produce it also direct it) & after a brief flash it is gone. The poet specifies the lightning hits in the night, in the darkness: dark before, then the brief flash, then darkness afterward. Underlying the dramatic image of the lightning flash is a poignant sense of the brevity of human life, & of how little we control the circumstances that produce & shape us.

The poem ends with the speaker, the "me" who is like a stroke of lightning, with Some mark / To make / Some word / To tell. The words fall with a strong rhythm, strengthened by their parallel structure. What is the mark? What is the word? We don't know, & we never find out; the infinitives – to make, to tell – here indicate future action. This is the moment of birth, of potential (I typed that word too quickly & it came out poetential, & maybe I should have left it at that), when we have our brief moment in which to try to express, if we can, what the lightning in us needs to say.

I came across this poem while leafing through my copy of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersand & Associate Editor David Roessel. I liked this poem a lot, but something about it struck me as not quite . . . I don't know what. Was it, despite its underlying tenderness & potential sadness, just too optimistic & energetic for me? Then I noticed I had flagged another page in the volume, so I went there & found this poem:

Flotsam

On the shoals of Nowhere,

Cast up – my boat,

Bow all broken,

No longer afloat.

On the shoals of Nowhere,

Wasted – my song –

Yet taken by the sea wind

And blown along.

– Langston Hughes

It struck me that this poem, well over 200 pages later in the collection than the first one, formed an excellent companion to it (such are the rhythms in a poet's life's work). There is the same clear & direct phrasing, the same use of brief lines whose rhythm is strengthened by parallelism, the same connection of the speaker with greater natural forces. There are differences as well, of course, as the predominant mood of this poem is one closer to an exhausted end rather than an exhilarating beginning – there's the use of dashes to indicate broken phrasings, for example, & instead of fields of wonder, we are, twice, on the shoals of Nowhere (we're not even at sea, or on the sand, we're in that liminal limbo space designated a shoal). Yet just as the optimism of Birth is subtly undercut, so is the despair of Flotsam: though the poet says that his song (his word to tell, in the phrasing of the first poem) is wasted, yet it is taken up by the sea wind – taken up can mean not only carried along, but also promoted by, as if the wind is not just a neutral carrier but interested in this broken singer's song. Who knows where that song will end as the wind carries it over the sea, or whose ears it will end up falling into, & to what fruitful ends?

Museum Monday 2024/36

 

detail of Vasanta ragini (apparently the title means something like Spring Melody) by an unknown 18th century Indian artist, on view as part of To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection at BAM/PFA