Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer died today. Here is a poem from his Selected Poems, edited by Robert Hass.
The Half-Finished Heaven
Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.
The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a drink.
And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.
Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.
Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.
The endless ground under us.
The water is shining among the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.
Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton
27 March 2015
Friday photo 2015/13
2 Torsos
The top is a detail of Venus & Cupid, School of Fontainebleu, ca. 1559; and the bottom is a detail of St John the Baptist by El Greco. Both are from the Legion of Honor, San Francisco.
******************************
The top is a detail of Venus & Cupid, School of Fontainebleu, ca. 1559; and the bottom is a detail of St John the Baptist by El Greco. Both are from the Legion of Honor, San Francisco.
23 March 2015
This Victorian Novelist Knew About Buzzfeed, and It Was Everything
Conclusive evidence that '90s* kids knew all the best journalism hacks:
* 1890s
"Precisely, but the rubbish is capable of being made a very valuable article, if it were only handled properly. [ . . .] In the first place, I should slightly alter the name; only slightly, but that little alteration would in itself have an enormous effect. Instead of Chat, I should call it Chit-Chat!" . . . Chat doesn't attract anyone, but Chit-Chat would sell like hotcakes, as they say in America. I know I am right, laugh as you will." [. . . ]
"Now do let me go on," implored the man of projects, when the noise subsided. "That's only one change, though a most important one. What I next propose is this: – I know you will laugh again, but I will demonstrate to you that I am right. No article in the paper is to measure more than two inches in length, and every inch must be broken into at least two paragraphs. [. . . ] Let me explain my principle. I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated; that is to say, the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains, and on buses and trams. As a rule they care for no newspapers except the Sunday ones; what they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information – bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can't sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat." [ . . .]
"It would all depend on the skill of the fellows who put the thing together every week. There ought always to be one strongly sensational item – we won't call it an article. For instance, you might display on a placard: 'What the Queen eats!' or, 'How Gladstone's collars are made!' – things of that kind." [ . . .]
". . . And then, you know . . . when people had been attracted by these devices, they would find a few things that were really profitable. We would give nicely written little accounts of exemplary careers, of heroic deeds, and so on. Of course nothing whatever that could be really demoralising. . . ."
from New Grub Street by George Gissing, pp 446 - 448 (with omissions) in my Modern Library edition.
Previously: Williams Wordsworth has looked into smartphones, and Captain Ahab has pondered the advantages and disadvantages of GPS.
* 1890s
"Precisely, but the rubbish is capable of being made a very valuable article, if it were only handled properly. [ . . .] In the first place, I should slightly alter the name; only slightly, but that little alteration would in itself have an enormous effect. Instead of Chat, I should call it Chit-Chat!" . . . Chat doesn't attract anyone, but Chit-Chat would sell like hotcakes, as they say in America. I know I am right, laugh as you will." [. . . ]
"Now do let me go on," implored the man of projects, when the noise subsided. "That's only one change, though a most important one. What I next propose is this: – I know you will laugh again, but I will demonstrate to you that I am right. No article in the paper is to measure more than two inches in length, and every inch must be broken into at least two paragraphs. [. . . ] Let me explain my principle. I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated; that is to say, the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains, and on buses and trams. As a rule they care for no newspapers except the Sunday ones; what they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information – bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can't sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat." [ . . .]
"It would all depend on the skill of the fellows who put the thing together every week. There ought always to be one strongly sensational item – we won't call it an article. For instance, you might display on a placard: 'What the Queen eats!' or, 'How Gladstone's collars are made!' – things of that kind." [ . . .]
". . . And then, you know . . . when people had been attracted by these devices, they would find a few things that were really profitable. We would give nicely written little accounts of exemplary careers, of heroic deeds, and so on. Of course nothing whatever that could be really demoralising. . . ."
from New Grub Street by George Gissing, pp 446 - 448 (with omissions) in my Modern Library edition.
Previously: Williams Wordsworth has looked into smartphones, and Captain Ahab has pondered the advantages and disadvantages of GPS.
Poem of the Week 2015/12
Doom is the House without the Door –
'Tis entered from the Sun –
And then the Ladder's thrown away,
Because Escape – is done –
'Tis varied by the Dream
Of what they do outside –
Where Squirrels play – and Berries die –
And Hemlocks – bow – to God –
Emily Dickinson
This poem radiates between the mundane and the apocalyptic, the former grounded in concrete details of daily life (a house, the sun, the squirrels, berries, hemlocks) and the latter in abstract terms (Doom, Escape, Dream, even God). Oddly the generalized abstractions seem more real than the weirdly specific details, which is perhaps a source of the poem's uneasy power. The poem opens with Doom – doom in general, doom as fate, not an individual's doom. And yet Dickinson's metaphorical definition of doom conveys a sense of domesticity and even intimacy: doom is a house. It's where you live. And you are trapped in there, because, as in a nightmare, there is no door. So how did you get in there? From the Sun (the source of light and life, and frequently a stand-in for God, as in the opening of Book III of Paradise Lost: "Hail holy light. . . "). But not through the rays of light: from a ladder. This may just be part of the poem's use of very literal processes (you aren't just showing up inside this house, you have to have a way to get into it, and a ladder would make sense) combined with intense, surreal images: the ladder is from the Sun. It may also be a reference to, or a reminiscence of, Jacob's vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder from Heaven (Genesis, chapter 28). But here the angels are unmentioned, and the ladder is thrown away, because there is no escape once you're in there. That's the nature of doom. (Is it perhaps also the nature of the version of Christianity prevalent in the poet's nineteenth-century New England? While fewer and fewer believed in the literal nature of the Bible, they were still very much enmeshed in the social behaviors produced by it. But doom seems too harsh a term in this context. It would be a mistake to limit Dickinson's possible meanings just to one thing.)
Perhaps the house without a door may also be seen as the body that holds an individual's consciousness or soul, which could be seen as entering "through the Sun," that is, via God, or another source of generation. And you can't escape from the body you were born into. What happens outside your individual consciousness – that outside where the unspecified they do things – is, in some ways, a Dream. Again, very precise details are subsumed by an abstract state: just as the house and the ladder and the sun are a metaphor for doom, so the squirrels and berries and hemlocks are seen as ultimately unreal, as a Dream. And some strange things are going on: not so much the squirrels playing, but definitely the berries dying – even if that's just a vivid way of summing up the ripening/rotting world of a berry, it's a strikingly strange way of putting it, and the summation of life processes as death is suitable for a poem examining Doom. And then we have the hemlocks, bowing to God. This is most likely a reference to the hemlock tree that was common in New England, and you could easily describe trees bending in the wind (that unseen force!) as bowing to God. But it's also almost impossible for a literary person (for the sort of person who would read this kind of poetry) to hear hemlock, particularly in conjunction with bowing to God, and not to think of the poisonous herb used to kill Socrates for promoting impiety (it's difficult for me to believe that Dickinson wouldn't have been aware of this resonance in the term hemlock; there are plenty of other terms she could have used). On that level the poem's final line seems to be reinforcing such a punishment for free philosophical inquiry: the hemlocks bow to God. But on another evel, the line is rejecting such a punishment: the reader is mistaken if he or she thinks this is the same plant that was used to kill Socrates. We're wrong if we think there is divine punishment in that dream-world outside. As with the ladder, with its possible cryptic reference to Jacob's dream, so the hemlock suggests an evocative episode in humanity's relationship with heavenly authority. The Doom described remains mysterious, perhaps inexplicable, but powerful and inescapable.
I took this from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. In the years after her death in 1886 several volumes with selections of her work were published; I'm not going to go into her whole publication history (which is actually quite fascinating and entertaining, what with adulterous affairs and family rivalries and separated stashes of increasingly valuable manuscripts) except to note that all those editions tamed Dickinson's poetry by smoothing it out, reducing perceived irregularities, and imposing standard punctuation. Johnson's edition, published in 1955, was the first to publish her work accurately and completely. There is also a more recent edition edited by R W Franklin, which incorporates more current discoveries and thoughts about what Dickinson intended (again: a complicated publication history, which I am mostly gliding over). I haven't seen the Franklin edition but I came across this blog which has several interesting entries comparing the two editions. Another recent book, which I have not seen but which sounds intriguing, is The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems, which gives you an idea of what some of Dickinson's manuscripts look like.
'Tis entered from the Sun –
And then the Ladder's thrown away,
Because Escape – is done –
'Tis varied by the Dream
Of what they do outside –
Where Squirrels play – and Berries die –
And Hemlocks – bow – to God –
Emily Dickinson
This poem radiates between the mundane and the apocalyptic, the former grounded in concrete details of daily life (a house, the sun, the squirrels, berries, hemlocks) and the latter in abstract terms (Doom, Escape, Dream, even God). Oddly the generalized abstractions seem more real than the weirdly specific details, which is perhaps a source of the poem's uneasy power. The poem opens with Doom – doom in general, doom as fate, not an individual's doom. And yet Dickinson's metaphorical definition of doom conveys a sense of domesticity and even intimacy: doom is a house. It's where you live. And you are trapped in there, because, as in a nightmare, there is no door. So how did you get in there? From the Sun (the source of light and life, and frequently a stand-in for God, as in the opening of Book III of Paradise Lost: "Hail holy light. . . "). But not through the rays of light: from a ladder. This may just be part of the poem's use of very literal processes (you aren't just showing up inside this house, you have to have a way to get into it, and a ladder would make sense) combined with intense, surreal images: the ladder is from the Sun. It may also be a reference to, or a reminiscence of, Jacob's vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder from Heaven (Genesis, chapter 28). But here the angels are unmentioned, and the ladder is thrown away, because there is no escape once you're in there. That's the nature of doom. (Is it perhaps also the nature of the version of Christianity prevalent in the poet's nineteenth-century New England? While fewer and fewer believed in the literal nature of the Bible, they were still very much enmeshed in the social behaviors produced by it. But doom seems too harsh a term in this context. It would be a mistake to limit Dickinson's possible meanings just to one thing.)
Perhaps the house without a door may also be seen as the body that holds an individual's consciousness or soul, which could be seen as entering "through the Sun," that is, via God, or another source of generation. And you can't escape from the body you were born into. What happens outside your individual consciousness – that outside where the unspecified they do things – is, in some ways, a Dream. Again, very precise details are subsumed by an abstract state: just as the house and the ladder and the sun are a metaphor for doom, so the squirrels and berries and hemlocks are seen as ultimately unreal, as a Dream. And some strange things are going on: not so much the squirrels playing, but definitely the berries dying – even if that's just a vivid way of summing up the ripening/rotting world of a berry, it's a strikingly strange way of putting it, and the summation of life processes as death is suitable for a poem examining Doom. And then we have the hemlocks, bowing to God. This is most likely a reference to the hemlock tree that was common in New England, and you could easily describe trees bending in the wind (that unseen force!) as bowing to God. But it's also almost impossible for a literary person (for the sort of person who would read this kind of poetry) to hear hemlock, particularly in conjunction with bowing to God, and not to think of the poisonous herb used to kill Socrates for promoting impiety (it's difficult for me to believe that Dickinson wouldn't have been aware of this resonance in the term hemlock; there are plenty of other terms she could have used). On that level the poem's final line seems to be reinforcing such a punishment for free philosophical inquiry: the hemlocks bow to God. But on another evel, the line is rejecting such a punishment: the reader is mistaken if he or she thinks this is the same plant that was used to kill Socrates. We're wrong if we think there is divine punishment in that dream-world outside. As with the ladder, with its possible cryptic reference to Jacob's dream, so the hemlock suggests an evocative episode in humanity's relationship with heavenly authority. The Doom described remains mysterious, perhaps inexplicable, but powerful and inescapable.
I took this from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. In the years after her death in 1886 several volumes with selections of her work were published; I'm not going to go into her whole publication history (which is actually quite fascinating and entertaining, what with adulterous affairs and family rivalries and separated stashes of increasingly valuable manuscripts) except to note that all those editions tamed Dickinson's poetry by smoothing it out, reducing perceived irregularities, and imposing standard punctuation. Johnson's edition, published in 1955, was the first to publish her work accurately and completely. There is also a more recent edition edited by R W Franklin, which incorporates more current discoveries and thoughts about what Dickinson intended (again: a complicated publication history, which I am mostly gliding over). I haven't seen the Franklin edition but I came across this blog which has several interesting entries comparing the two editions. Another recent book, which I have not seen but which sounds intriguing, is The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems, which gives you an idea of what some of Dickinson's manuscripts look like.
20 March 2015
16 March 2015
Poem of the Week 2015/11
The harp that once through Tara's halls
The soul of music shed,
Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls
As if that soul were fled. –
So sleeps the pride of former days,
So glory's thrill is o'er,
And hearts, that once beat high for praise,
Now feel that pulse no more.
No more to chiefs and ladies bright
The harp of Tara swells;
The chord alone, that breaks at night,
Its tale of ruin tells.
Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes,
The only throb she gives,
Is when some heart indignant breaks,
To show that she still lives.
Thomas Moore, from Irish Melodies
Tara is the legendary home of the ancient kings of Ireland, and the harp is the traditional instrument of the Irish bards (hence the use of harps as a slang term for the Irish, though I think no one uses it that way anymore). Once you know that, the mood as well as the direction of the poem are fairly clear: the days of glory have passed; the ancient kings honored their poets, and the poets sang their glorious deeds; and both have sunk into silence, taking the golden times with them – but an implicit hope for the future lies in the indignant, breaking hearts of the people, which show that the old ideals have not completely passed away.
What we have here is a mid-nineteenth century Irish-born poet offering a romanticized view of his nation's past in the hopes of inspiring its political future: the references at the end to Freedom, and to the indignant hearts that break, are clearly aimed at oppressive British control of its neighboring island. And yet Moore uses traditional English verse forms and vocabulary: the revival of the Celtic language would come later. But his series of lyrics on Irish themes made him a hero to the Irish struggling for independence. He was writing in the heady days of the Romantic movement, which rejected the universal and the rational in favor of (among other things) the local and the long-lost, a tendency linked to the growing nationalism of the nineteenth century. Moore was a friend of Byron, who died at a fairly young age when he went to help the Greeks fight for independence – another attempt at restoring self-determination driven by admiration for a country's past. He was close enough to Byron to be a literary executor, and he at least acquiesced in the infamous destruction of the poet's memoirs.
I took this from Moore's Irish Melodies: The Illustrated 1846 Edition, republished by Dover Publications. It's quite elaborately illustrated, with early Victorian vignettes and borders engraved on every page, so if that style appeals to you, you should definitely check it out. It seems not to be available anymore from Dover Publications, but you can still find it on Amazon. I've kept the mid-nineteenth century punctuation, though current style is lighter; I do think that omitting the comma after The chord alone would make the sense more immediately available to a current reader.
The soul of music shed,
Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls
As if that soul were fled. –
So sleeps the pride of former days,
So glory's thrill is o'er,
And hearts, that once beat high for praise,
Now feel that pulse no more.
No more to chiefs and ladies bright
The harp of Tara swells;
The chord alone, that breaks at night,
Its tale of ruin tells.
Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes,
The only throb she gives,
Is when some heart indignant breaks,
To show that she still lives.
Thomas Moore, from Irish Melodies
Tara is the legendary home of the ancient kings of Ireland, and the harp is the traditional instrument of the Irish bards (hence the use of harps as a slang term for the Irish, though I think no one uses it that way anymore). Once you know that, the mood as well as the direction of the poem are fairly clear: the days of glory have passed; the ancient kings honored their poets, and the poets sang their glorious deeds; and both have sunk into silence, taking the golden times with them – but an implicit hope for the future lies in the indignant, breaking hearts of the people, which show that the old ideals have not completely passed away.
What we have here is a mid-nineteenth century Irish-born poet offering a romanticized view of his nation's past in the hopes of inspiring its political future: the references at the end to Freedom, and to the indignant hearts that break, are clearly aimed at oppressive British control of its neighboring island. And yet Moore uses traditional English verse forms and vocabulary: the revival of the Celtic language would come later. But his series of lyrics on Irish themes made him a hero to the Irish struggling for independence. He was writing in the heady days of the Romantic movement, which rejected the universal and the rational in favor of (among other things) the local and the long-lost, a tendency linked to the growing nationalism of the nineteenth century. Moore was a friend of Byron, who died at a fairly young age when he went to help the Greeks fight for independence – another attempt at restoring self-determination driven by admiration for a country's past. He was close enough to Byron to be a literary executor, and he at least acquiesced in the infamous destruction of the poet's memoirs.
I took this from Moore's Irish Melodies: The Illustrated 1846 Edition, republished by Dover Publications. It's quite elaborately illustrated, with early Victorian vignettes and borders engraved on every page, so if that style appeals to you, you should definitely check it out. It seems not to be available anymore from Dover Publications, but you can still find it on Amazon. I've kept the mid-nineteenth century punctuation, though current style is lighter; I do think that omitting the comma after The chord alone would make the sense more immediately available to a current reader.
13 March 2015
09 March 2015
Poem of the Week 2015/10
An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish
Here we have thirst
and patience, from the first.
And art, as in a wave held up for us to see
in its essential perpendicularity;
Not brittle but
Intense – the spectrum, that
Spectacular and nimble animal the fish,
Whose scales turn aside the sun's sword by their polish.
Marianne Moore
This poem is sort of a modern version of the Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn: both take containers from ancient civilizations and use them for an analysis of Art, Nature, and the human urge towards significant ornament. Pulled glass is a technique in which the glassblower creates patterns on an object by pulling and otherwise manipulating rods of colored glass. This poem is based on an actual glass bottle from ancient Egypt that Moore saw in the British Museum (you may see it here). Long ago, when I was last in London, I bought a postcard of the fish-bottle because I found it endearingly goofy; I was surprised years later when a bit of research connected that object with this poem. The bottle is dated about 1400 BC, so this piece of glass has survived over 3,400 years. Yet Moore does not specifically mention its age; outside of the implication of the glancing reference from the first in the second line, she makes it stand outside of time, as we shall see.
In her first line, Moore declares Here we have thirst: the first thing to realize about this object is that it has a practical purpose; it is a bottle, and it holds liquids – a vital function in a dry hot climate like Egypt's. Yet thirst can refer not only to the physical need for water, but to the desire that led the anonymous artist to take the time and trouble to turn an ordinary useful object into a striking and luxurious one. That's where the patience referred to in the second line comes in: the glassblower could have created many plain bottles in the time it takes to create a fancy fish-bottle. And this is from the first: from the very earliest days of human civilization, we see the imperative urge to take something basic to survival (like a device for storing water) and make it significant through making it beautiful, which is a thirst that is never fully satisfied.
In the first two lines, Moore identifies the deep underlying sources that produced this object: thirst (in both senses, as described above) and patience – taking infinite, time-consuming care. And she closes the lines off with a period. In the third line, indented to signal a shift, she adds almost as an afterthought: And art. You feel that the art (which is not given the significance of an initial cap: art, not Art) is not so much an end in itself as a by-product of the personality that thirsts yet is patient. But art is undeniably present, an end result and culmination – it unites thirst and patience, and also becomes its own thing.
The bottle is a practical object, but it is also an artistic creation, and it is also (remember that it is shaped like a fish) a reference to the natural world. Moore compares it to a wave: that too is something that comes from the natural world (like the fish, and like the human needs that led to the creation of a bottle shaped like a fish). Its watery element also links the wave back to thirst. A wave is one in an endless series; they come and go, but here Moore describes the wave as held up for us to see: the artist is holding up an object for our closer inspection and meditation. Held up can mean not just lifted high but also delayed. The artist is stopping time, freeze-framing this one particular wave at its crest (as in Hokusai's famous print of the Great Wave off Kanagawa, and compare this also with the processional frozen in time and place in the Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn) so that we may examine its prime qualities, that is, its essential perpendicularity.
Essential here implies not just that perpendicularity is of the essence of a wave, but also that it is necessary for us: the wave is not only perpendicular in its nature, but we need it to be so. And why would that be? Waves are constantly in motion, endlessly cresting and then crashing. Why is perpendicularity essential to it, and us? Perhaps it is exactly because when a wave is at its literal height – when it is perpendicular to the sea – it has reached its apex, and if we can hold it there for a second before it rolls down and is replaced by another, we can truly see it captured at the moment in which it fulfills its necessary form. And art is like this: a created thing held fast in its moment, even for what passes in human terms for eternity, capturing something we thirst for in its brief perfection before life moves on. There is no progression in art, but rather an endless series of these moments, each essential.
Moore then clarifies what she's getting at; what she's describing is Not brittle but / Intense: waves and glass both shatter easily, but what she's more concerned with here is not fragility and not the ephemeral nature of things but the intensity that causes certain things to stand outside of time; that is, this object (the fish-bottle, the crested wave), which might seem transient, too delicate to last, is in fact strong and concentrated, enough so to hold out against the constant on-rush of time.
After the dash comes a description of the fish-bottle, but one that blurs to the point of obliteration the distinction between this created object and the natural world it represents. The spectrum – this may refer to the undulating waves of color broken out over the body of the bottle. It may also refer to the way glass – the basic material of the bottle – can, if cut in a certain way, refract light into a rainbow of colors: an infinity coming out of a natural phenomenon (compare this with Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish, in which a very detailed, precise description of the fish she has caught explodes at the end into a vision of rainbows – I wonder if Bishop, to whom Moore was a mentor and a friend, had this poem somewhere in her mind when she wrote that one?). A spectrum can also be used in an attempt to classify something by points on a scale – another version of fixing something in time, perhaps. I suspect spectrum is at least partly there for the musical echo with spectacular in the next line. That's a word that usually applies to something huge, flamboyant, eye-catching. It may seem odd to apply it to a fairly commonplace creature, but Moore's adjective forces us to re-evaluate an everyday animal we may take for granted otherwise. Spectacular derives from spectacle, and she singles out this object as if it were a grand show presented for our admiration. (Throughout this poem we hear the distinctive Moore tone: the erudite language, precise yet suggestive, with hints of scientific scrupulosity; the dazzled love for what might seem small and ordinary animals or objects; the unexpected but considered comparison; the high-minded wit.)
The other quality she specifically cites in the fish is nimbleness. Again, she could be referring to nature or art or both: she admires lightness of touch and sureness of perception, a speed and compression in comprehension. The last line of the poem – Whose scales turn aside the sun's sword by their polish – armor the animal (or is it the bottle? or both?) in the shining perfection of its scales, which can turn aside the destructive sunlight (the sun's sword) by their polish – polish can refer to something smooth and shiny, and also implicitly to the labor that made the object so – to the care in crafting a bottle that looks like a fish, or a poem reflecting on a bottle that looks like a fish. The admirable, natural or created, is all around us. A fish becomes a fish-bottle which in turn becomes a poem; all freeze in time something flashing, bold, and elusive.
The British Museum site gives further information here on the technique used to create the fish-bottle, and on the possible significance of its shape (since Moore omits this information and derives her own meaning from the object, I have omitted it while discussing her poem, but it's interesting so I'm sticking it here).
I took this from The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman. I bought the hardback when it was published in 2003 but it seems to be out of print so I am linking to the Penguin paperback, which I'm assuming is mostly the same.
Here we have thirst
and patience, from the first.
And art, as in a wave held up for us to see
in its essential perpendicularity;
Not brittle but
Intense – the spectrum, that
Spectacular and nimble animal the fish,
Whose scales turn aside the sun's sword by their polish.
Marianne Moore
This poem is sort of a modern version of the Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn: both take containers from ancient civilizations and use them for an analysis of Art, Nature, and the human urge towards significant ornament. Pulled glass is a technique in which the glassblower creates patterns on an object by pulling and otherwise manipulating rods of colored glass. This poem is based on an actual glass bottle from ancient Egypt that Moore saw in the British Museum (you may see it here). Long ago, when I was last in London, I bought a postcard of the fish-bottle because I found it endearingly goofy; I was surprised years later when a bit of research connected that object with this poem. The bottle is dated about 1400 BC, so this piece of glass has survived over 3,400 years. Yet Moore does not specifically mention its age; outside of the implication of the glancing reference from the first in the second line, she makes it stand outside of time, as we shall see.
In her first line, Moore declares Here we have thirst: the first thing to realize about this object is that it has a practical purpose; it is a bottle, and it holds liquids – a vital function in a dry hot climate like Egypt's. Yet thirst can refer not only to the physical need for water, but to the desire that led the anonymous artist to take the time and trouble to turn an ordinary useful object into a striking and luxurious one. That's where the patience referred to in the second line comes in: the glassblower could have created many plain bottles in the time it takes to create a fancy fish-bottle. And this is from the first: from the very earliest days of human civilization, we see the imperative urge to take something basic to survival (like a device for storing water) and make it significant through making it beautiful, which is a thirst that is never fully satisfied.
In the first two lines, Moore identifies the deep underlying sources that produced this object: thirst (in both senses, as described above) and patience – taking infinite, time-consuming care. And she closes the lines off with a period. In the third line, indented to signal a shift, she adds almost as an afterthought: And art. You feel that the art (which is not given the significance of an initial cap: art, not Art) is not so much an end in itself as a by-product of the personality that thirsts yet is patient. But art is undeniably present, an end result and culmination – it unites thirst and patience, and also becomes its own thing.
The bottle is a practical object, but it is also an artistic creation, and it is also (remember that it is shaped like a fish) a reference to the natural world. Moore compares it to a wave: that too is something that comes from the natural world (like the fish, and like the human needs that led to the creation of a bottle shaped like a fish). Its watery element also links the wave back to thirst. A wave is one in an endless series; they come and go, but here Moore describes the wave as held up for us to see: the artist is holding up an object for our closer inspection and meditation. Held up can mean not just lifted high but also delayed. The artist is stopping time, freeze-framing this one particular wave at its crest (as in Hokusai's famous print of the Great Wave off Kanagawa, and compare this also with the processional frozen in time and place in the Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn) so that we may examine its prime qualities, that is, its essential perpendicularity.
Essential here implies not just that perpendicularity is of the essence of a wave, but also that it is necessary for us: the wave is not only perpendicular in its nature, but we need it to be so. And why would that be? Waves are constantly in motion, endlessly cresting and then crashing. Why is perpendicularity essential to it, and us? Perhaps it is exactly because when a wave is at its literal height – when it is perpendicular to the sea – it has reached its apex, and if we can hold it there for a second before it rolls down and is replaced by another, we can truly see it captured at the moment in which it fulfills its necessary form. And art is like this: a created thing held fast in its moment, even for what passes in human terms for eternity, capturing something we thirst for in its brief perfection before life moves on. There is no progression in art, but rather an endless series of these moments, each essential.
Moore then clarifies what she's getting at; what she's describing is Not brittle but / Intense: waves and glass both shatter easily, but what she's more concerned with here is not fragility and not the ephemeral nature of things but the intensity that causes certain things to stand outside of time; that is, this object (the fish-bottle, the crested wave), which might seem transient, too delicate to last, is in fact strong and concentrated, enough so to hold out against the constant on-rush of time.
After the dash comes a description of the fish-bottle, but one that blurs to the point of obliteration the distinction between this created object and the natural world it represents. The spectrum – this may refer to the undulating waves of color broken out over the body of the bottle. It may also refer to the way glass – the basic material of the bottle – can, if cut in a certain way, refract light into a rainbow of colors: an infinity coming out of a natural phenomenon (compare this with Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish, in which a very detailed, precise description of the fish she has caught explodes at the end into a vision of rainbows – I wonder if Bishop, to whom Moore was a mentor and a friend, had this poem somewhere in her mind when she wrote that one?). A spectrum can also be used in an attempt to classify something by points on a scale – another version of fixing something in time, perhaps. I suspect spectrum is at least partly there for the musical echo with spectacular in the next line. That's a word that usually applies to something huge, flamboyant, eye-catching. It may seem odd to apply it to a fairly commonplace creature, but Moore's adjective forces us to re-evaluate an everyday animal we may take for granted otherwise. Spectacular derives from spectacle, and she singles out this object as if it were a grand show presented for our admiration. (Throughout this poem we hear the distinctive Moore tone: the erudite language, precise yet suggestive, with hints of scientific scrupulosity; the dazzled love for what might seem small and ordinary animals or objects; the unexpected but considered comparison; the high-minded wit.)
The other quality she specifically cites in the fish is nimbleness. Again, she could be referring to nature or art or both: she admires lightness of touch and sureness of perception, a speed and compression in comprehension. The last line of the poem – Whose scales turn aside the sun's sword by their polish – armor the animal (or is it the bottle? or both?) in the shining perfection of its scales, which can turn aside the destructive sunlight (the sun's sword) by their polish – polish can refer to something smooth and shiny, and also implicitly to the labor that made the object so – to the care in crafting a bottle that looks like a fish, or a poem reflecting on a bottle that looks like a fish. The admirable, natural or created, is all around us. A fish becomes a fish-bottle which in turn becomes a poem; all freeze in time something flashing, bold, and elusive.
The British Museum site gives further information here on the technique used to create the fish-bottle, and on the possible significance of its shape (since Moore omits this information and derives her own meaning from the object, I have omitted it while discussing her poem, but it's interesting so I'm sticking it here).
I took this from The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman. I bought the hardback when it was published in 2003 but it seems to be out of print so I am linking to the Penguin paperback, which I'm assuming is mostly the same.
06 March 2015
02 March 2015
Poem of the Week 2015/9
(Titania to Oberon)
These are the forgeries of jealousy;
And never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By pavèd fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beachèd margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud,
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The plowman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is filled up with mud;
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, scene 1, ll 81 - 117
. . . because Shakespeare knew about everything, including climate change. When we studied The Tempest in Janet Adelman's Shakespeare class at Cal, she told us, when we came to the scenes of Stephano and Trinculo introducing Caliban to booze, that she found it remarkable that Shakespeare already knew the havoc alcohol would wreak on colonized populations (she had worked on American Indian reservations and seen its effects at first hand). In this excerpt from A Midsummer Night's Dream, harmonious, musical language tells us of a disharmonious world. I'm posting this because – and I realize that anyone outside of California is going to sneer at me for this – I've really missed winter this year, and I have to admit it's skipping us (possibly because it's doubling up on the east coast). I know, I know: I too roll my eyes when Californians complain bitterly when the temperature drops down to the low 60s. But there really is such a thing as winter in California, and I miss the chill, and the darkness, and the early silence, and I miss the rain. This year we never really got the cold weather that triggers dormancy, and this has given us a misshapen spring. I planted tulips, and for the second year in a row only a few came up, and those have full-sized flowers on stubby little stalks, to weird effect. Roses are blooming all over my backyard, but they are strangely lopsided. I think one of my apricot trees is dead; the other is spotted rather than covered with blooms. The lilacs started budding in December and seem stuck there. I've been describing a place with too little water, and Titania's speech covers a world with too much, but the effect is the same: an unhealthy, and even dangerous, confusion of the regular cycle of nature.
I took this photo in my backyard on 20 December 2014, and that is indeed a lilac starting to bud in late December. But it's now over two months later, and it seems stuck at this stage. It doesn't look very healthy.
To go through the speech: Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies, meet accidentally in the woods outside Athens. The meeting is accidental because they are quarreling over possession of a little Indian boy, born to one of Titania's mortal companions. So in the first line, these refers to accusations Oberon has just made about various love affairs of hers (which he has made in answer to similar accusations from her). She dismisses his claims as "the forgeries of jealousy" and goes on to recount the problems caused by his anger: whenever she and her band meet, he shows up brawling, and disturbs them. In the second line, she refers to "the middle summer's spring," which means the beginning of midsummer, but the conjunction of summer with spring prepares the way for the confusion of seasons with which the speech ends. She refers to their sport, but clearly there's deeper significance to their dances, which maintain a sort of regularity and amity in the natural order; without them the wind sucks up fogs and vapors from the sea and dumps the excess liquid on the land. The wind is presented as a sort of orchestra for their fêtes; it is the whistling wind, and it's piping in vain. Let's just pause here a moment to bask in the beauty of the line To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind: the line is not really necessary, but it is essential, which might be a useful definition of poetry. Ringlets to me conveys not only the little circles in which they dance (emphasizing once again the tiny, other-worldly quality of the fairy kingdom in this play), but also curling hair tossing and bobbing in the breeze.
Back to the overflowing waters: remember that in Shakespeare's time (as well as before and after his time) there were medical theories about the disease-causing qualities of certain vapors or miasmas; there was also a theory, derived from ancient Greece, of four humors, linked to the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, the balance among which controlled health and general well-being. So an excess of water indicates a world dangerously out of balance. The food supply is being disrupted; the fields are plowed and grain planted, but it's too wet and the grain rots while still green without reaching the gold of ripeness. The comparison to a youth lacking a beard refers wittily to the tassels of ripe wheat. (Corn refers to grain in general, not to what we think of as corn, which I think had not yet crossed the Atlantic from Mexico.) This was of course written at a time when food storage was in a fairly basic state; failed crops for one year meant hard times, and for two years meant disaster.
The fold – the enclosure for livestock, usually sheep – is empty because the animals have died of the murrain (an infectious disease, referred to here by its older form, murrion) and are benefiting no one but the scavenger crows. Nine men's morris is a board game, but sometimes large equivalents were cut into village greens, and that has been filled with mud, and the quaint (that is, curious, intricate) mazes are sinking back indistinguishable in the grass, since no one is walking through them. The grass itself is wanton (that is, luxuriant and profuse, with an implication of something tending towards the disorderly or promiscuous – what might seem like merely a colorful and appealing adjective is emphasizing the main theme of the speech, a breakdown in what is becoming and orderly). Humanity is being threatened by the squabbling in Fairyland; both work and play are sinking into mud and disease. These are frightful things, but in the Fairy Queen's description they seem so lovely: perhaps this is a sign of her distance from mortal struggles, and of the beauty permeating her existence.
Titania continues that "human mortals want [that is, lack] their winter here" and night is not blest with hymn or carol: both blest and hymn imply a religious significance to this singing; and (remember that the play takes place in ancient Athens) Artemis, the goddess of the moon, responds angrily to the lack of due praise: again, the excess of water caused by the disruption in the regular order of things leads to disease (here, specifically, rheumatic diseases). The result is a topsy-turvy world that intermingle the seasons in a confusing and destructive way. Hiem is the Latin for winter, used here, as it often is in poetry, as a personification of the season. This confused profusion of different seasons appearing simultaneously leaves the world mazèd, that is, amazed, lost as in a maze.
Autumn is described as childing, that is, fruitful, breeding. This reference to childbirth continues in the end of the speech, in the terms progeny, parents, and original (that is, origin) and will echo through the play. Remember that their quarrel is about a child; and the play itself will end with all the sets of quarreling divided lovers joined in amity, and conclude (right before Puck's epilogue, which stands outside the action of the play) with Oberon blessing the newlyweds and wishing them healthy children: "And the blots of Nature's hand / Shall not in their issue stand. / Never mole, harelip, nor scar, / Nor mark prodigious, such as are / Despisèd in nativity, / Shall upon their children be." (Act V, scene 1, ll 411 - 416): nothing prodigious (in its now archaic sense of unnatural or abnormal) shall harm their children. Order is restored.
There are of course dozens of editions of A Midsummer Night's Dream; I use the one from Signet Classic.
These are the forgeries of jealousy;
And never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By pavèd fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beachèd margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud,
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The plowman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is filled up with mud;
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, scene 1, ll 81 - 117
. . . because Shakespeare knew about everything, including climate change. When we studied The Tempest in Janet Adelman's Shakespeare class at Cal, she told us, when we came to the scenes of Stephano and Trinculo introducing Caliban to booze, that she found it remarkable that Shakespeare already knew the havoc alcohol would wreak on colonized populations (she had worked on American Indian reservations and seen its effects at first hand). In this excerpt from A Midsummer Night's Dream, harmonious, musical language tells us of a disharmonious world. I'm posting this because – and I realize that anyone outside of California is going to sneer at me for this – I've really missed winter this year, and I have to admit it's skipping us (possibly because it's doubling up on the east coast). I know, I know: I too roll my eyes when Californians complain bitterly when the temperature drops down to the low 60s. But there really is such a thing as winter in California, and I miss the chill, and the darkness, and the early silence, and I miss the rain. This year we never really got the cold weather that triggers dormancy, and this has given us a misshapen spring. I planted tulips, and for the second year in a row only a few came up, and those have full-sized flowers on stubby little stalks, to weird effect. Roses are blooming all over my backyard, but they are strangely lopsided. I think one of my apricot trees is dead; the other is spotted rather than covered with blooms. The lilacs started budding in December and seem stuck there. I've been describing a place with too little water, and Titania's speech covers a world with too much, but the effect is the same: an unhealthy, and even dangerous, confusion of the regular cycle of nature.
I took this photo in my backyard on 20 December 2014, and that is indeed a lilac starting to bud in late December. But it's now over two months later, and it seems stuck at this stage. It doesn't look very healthy.
To go through the speech: Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies, meet accidentally in the woods outside Athens. The meeting is accidental because they are quarreling over possession of a little Indian boy, born to one of Titania's mortal companions. So in the first line, these refers to accusations Oberon has just made about various love affairs of hers (which he has made in answer to similar accusations from her). She dismisses his claims as "the forgeries of jealousy" and goes on to recount the problems caused by his anger: whenever she and her band meet, he shows up brawling, and disturbs them. In the second line, she refers to "the middle summer's spring," which means the beginning of midsummer, but the conjunction of summer with spring prepares the way for the confusion of seasons with which the speech ends. She refers to their sport, but clearly there's deeper significance to their dances, which maintain a sort of regularity and amity in the natural order; without them the wind sucks up fogs and vapors from the sea and dumps the excess liquid on the land. The wind is presented as a sort of orchestra for their fêtes; it is the whistling wind, and it's piping in vain. Let's just pause here a moment to bask in the beauty of the line To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind: the line is not really necessary, but it is essential, which might be a useful definition of poetry. Ringlets to me conveys not only the little circles in which they dance (emphasizing once again the tiny, other-worldly quality of the fairy kingdom in this play), but also curling hair tossing and bobbing in the breeze.
Back to the overflowing waters: remember that in Shakespeare's time (as well as before and after his time) there were medical theories about the disease-causing qualities of certain vapors or miasmas; there was also a theory, derived from ancient Greece, of four humors, linked to the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, the balance among which controlled health and general well-being. So an excess of water indicates a world dangerously out of balance. The food supply is being disrupted; the fields are plowed and grain planted, but it's too wet and the grain rots while still green without reaching the gold of ripeness. The comparison to a youth lacking a beard refers wittily to the tassels of ripe wheat. (Corn refers to grain in general, not to what we think of as corn, which I think had not yet crossed the Atlantic from Mexico.) This was of course written at a time when food storage was in a fairly basic state; failed crops for one year meant hard times, and for two years meant disaster.
The fold – the enclosure for livestock, usually sheep – is empty because the animals have died of the murrain (an infectious disease, referred to here by its older form, murrion) and are benefiting no one but the scavenger crows. Nine men's morris is a board game, but sometimes large equivalents were cut into village greens, and that has been filled with mud, and the quaint (that is, curious, intricate) mazes are sinking back indistinguishable in the grass, since no one is walking through them. The grass itself is wanton (that is, luxuriant and profuse, with an implication of something tending towards the disorderly or promiscuous – what might seem like merely a colorful and appealing adjective is emphasizing the main theme of the speech, a breakdown in what is becoming and orderly). Humanity is being threatened by the squabbling in Fairyland; both work and play are sinking into mud and disease. These are frightful things, but in the Fairy Queen's description they seem so lovely: perhaps this is a sign of her distance from mortal struggles, and of the beauty permeating her existence.
Titania continues that "human mortals want [that is, lack] their winter here" and night is not blest with hymn or carol: both blest and hymn imply a religious significance to this singing; and (remember that the play takes place in ancient Athens) Artemis, the goddess of the moon, responds angrily to the lack of due praise: again, the excess of water caused by the disruption in the regular order of things leads to disease (here, specifically, rheumatic diseases). The result is a topsy-turvy world that intermingle the seasons in a confusing and destructive way. Hiem is the Latin for winter, used here, as it often is in poetry, as a personification of the season. This confused profusion of different seasons appearing simultaneously leaves the world mazèd, that is, amazed, lost as in a maze.
Autumn is described as childing, that is, fruitful, breeding. This reference to childbirth continues in the end of the speech, in the terms progeny, parents, and original (that is, origin) and will echo through the play. Remember that their quarrel is about a child; and the play itself will end with all the sets of quarreling divided lovers joined in amity, and conclude (right before Puck's epilogue, which stands outside the action of the play) with Oberon blessing the newlyweds and wishing them healthy children: "And the blots of Nature's hand / Shall not in their issue stand. / Never mole, harelip, nor scar, / Nor mark prodigious, such as are / Despisèd in nativity, / Shall upon their children be." (Act V, scene 1, ll 411 - 416): nothing prodigious (in its now archaic sense of unnatural or abnormal) shall harm their children. Order is restored.
There are of course dozens of editions of A Midsummer Night's Dream; I use the one from Signet Classic.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)