Facing Loss and Death: Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry 9783110486339, 9783110484229

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Peter Hühn Facing Loss and Death

Narratologia

Contributions to Narrative Theory Edited by Fotis Jannidis, Matías Martínez, John Pier, Wolf ­Schmid (executive editor) Editorial Board Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik, José Ángel García Landa, Inke Gunia, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn, Markus Kuhn, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers

Volume 55

Peter Hühn

Facing Loss and Death Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry with contributions by Britta Goerke, Heilna du Plooy, and Stefan Schenk-Haupt

ISBN 978-3-11-048422-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-048633-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-048498-4 ISSN 1612-8427 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents 1

Introduction (Peter Hühn) 

2 2.0 2.1

 15 Mourning the Death of a Beloved Person  Introduction (Peter Hühn)   17 Ben Jonson: “On My First Daughter” and “On my First Son” (Peter Hühn)   19 John Donne: “Since She Whom I Loved” and John Milton: “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” (Peter Hühn)  Lord Byron: “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” and “And Thou Art Dead” (Peter Hühn)   30 E. A. Poe: “Lenore” (Peter Hühn)   37 Seamus Heaney: “Mid-Term Break” (Heilna du Plooy)   41 Eavan Boland: “The Blossom” and “The Pomegranate” (Peter Hühn)   45 Summary (Peter Hühn)   54

2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

 1

 25

Coping with Loss in Love  61 Introduction (Peter Hühn)  63 William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (Peter Hühn)  65 John Donne: “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (Stefan Schenk-Haupt)   79 William Wordsworth: “Lucy Poems” (Peter Hühn)  84 Emily Dickinson: “After Great Pain” (Heilna du Plooy)   94 Thomas Hardy: “The Voice” (Britta Goerke)  99 Sylvia Plath: “The Other” (Stefan Schenk-Haupt)  107 Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters (Peter Hühn)  114 Summary (Peter Hühn)  132 Confronting One’s Own Death  139 Introduction (Peter Hühn)  141 Sir Walter Raleigh: “Verses Made the Night Before He Died” and Chidiock Tichborne: “Tichborne’s Elegy” (Peter Hühn)  143 John Donne: “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night” (Peter Hühn)  148 William Cowper: “The Castaway” (Britta Goerke)  152 John Keats: “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be” and Lord Byron: “On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year” (Peter Hühn)  162

VI  4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 5 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

 Table of Contents

Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” (Heilna du Plooy)  169 Rupert Brooke: “The Soldier” and Wilfred Owen: “Strange Meeting” (Peter Hühn)  174 D. H. Lawrence: “Bavarian Gentians” (Peter Hühn)  181 Summary (Peter Hühn)  185 Lamenting the Death of Poets  191 Introduction (Peter Hühn)  193 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: “An Excellent Epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt” (Peter Hühn)  195 Thomas Carew: “An Elegie upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr John Donne” (Peter Hühn)  199 Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” (Peter Hühn)  206 W. H. Auden: “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (Peter Hühn)  212 Seamus Heaney: “Audenesque: in memory of Joseph Brodsky” (Peter Hühn)  217 Summary (Peter Hühn)  222

6.6 6.7 6.8

Thematizing the Loss of an Old Order  227 Introduction (Peter Hühn)  229 John Donne: An Anatomy of the World and William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (Peter Hühn)  232 William Wordsworth: “The World is too Much with Us” and W. B. Yeats: “High Talk” (Peter Hühn)  242 Shelley: “Lift not the Painted Veil” (Peter Hühn) and “The Cloud” (Britta Goerke)  250 Matthew Arnold: “Dover Beach” and Gerald Manley Hopkins: “No Worst, there is None” (Peter Hühn)  264 T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land (Peter Hühn) and “Journey of the Magi” (Britta Goerke)  275 W. B. Yeats: “Lapis Lazuli” (Peter Hühn)  295 Tony Harrison: “A Kumquat for John Keats” (Britta Goerke)  301 Summary (Peter Hühn)  311

7

Conclusion: Summary and Results (Peter Hühn)  319

6 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Index (authors and titles) 

 331

1 Introduction

Lyric poetry has always had a marked preference for elemental themes of human experience. In treating their topics, typically from a first-person perspective, the speakers of poems employ various “text-types” such as description, narration, argumentation, evaluation and exposition in the course of their utterances. Although the genre of lyric poetry – in contradistinction to narrative fiction – is not defined by narrativity as the predominating “discourse-type”1, poems do use narrative devices and they even do so pervasively and extensively. This is due to the function of narration as a privileged instrument for ordering and making sense of experience as well as communicating such meaning and understanding to others or to oneself. Ultimately, this privileging of narrative is based on the anthropological fact that human existence in the world, the conditions of life, experience, consciousness, social relations and communication are fundamentally and inevitably determined by change, that is, by being subject to time and transience  – a condition which individuals constantly attempt to understand, structure and control with the aim of achieving or securing happiness, fulfillment, stability or clarity, processes which centrally underlie the courses of reflection and utterance represented in poems. Because of the pervasive use of narrative elements in lyric poetry, it is legitimate and fruitful to apply categories and methods originally designed for the study of narrative prose fiction to analyze how lyric poems provide an aesthetic expression of experience and make sense of it. The narrative organization of the poetic utterance operates in two dimensions, the temporal concatenation of individual elements into a coherent sequence and the mediation of this sequence from a particular position and perspective: sequentiality and mediacy. The analytic application of narratological categories and principles has to be adapted to the genre of lyrical poetry, by taking into account the distinctly poetic manner in which poems render story elements such as characters, settings, actions, changes, narrators and perspectives and thereby mediate stories. Narrative sequences in poems are essentially made up of changes in the mental or psychological dimension, similar to what Dorrit Cohn2 has termed “psycho-narration”

1 For the distinction between these types, see Virtanen (1992). Virtanen distinguishes between superordinate “discourse-types”, which determine the overall function of a text, and subordinate “text-types”, which are employed (alone or in combination) on a lower level to serve this function. 2 See Cohn (1983, 21–57). Cohn restricts this term, however, to mental processes mediated by a narrator, distinguishing psycho-narration from the “monologic technique”, the direct rendering of such processes in the first person by a protagonist. This distinction is due to her specific definition of narrativity, which is based on the presence of a mediating instance, a narrator. But this rigorous distinction is implausible since the mental process is the same in both cases. One

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 Peter Hühn

in fiction. Moreover, narrative sequences occur typically in a condensed, abbreviated or summarized form, as compact “stories”, as it were, as “micro-narratives”3 or “mini-stories”4, omitting circumstantial details such as proper names, identified settings, dates, specified time spans, social backgrounds or outward appearances. For their understanding such mini-stories rely on the readers’ narrative competence to fill in gaps and supply missing or merely implied links by associating the backgrounds or outward appearances. For their understanding such mini-stories rely on the readers’ narrative competence to fill in gaps and supply missing or merely implied links by associating the appropriate “frames” and “scripts” (Schank and Abelson 1977), that is, the conventional schemata, stereotypical scenarios or procedural patterns, with which readers are already familiar on account of their world-knowledge. As for the dimension of mediacy, narratives are always presented from a particular position, that of the speaker (equivalent to the narrator in prose fiction) or the protagonist, and from a particular perspective (focalization). It is typical of poetry that speaker and protagonist are often identical persons, possibly with a temporal and psychological distance between experiencing self and narrating self. Speakers typically present their own experiences, telling – as it were – stories about themselves, a widespread phenomenon in lyric poetry, which accounts for the association of the poetic genre with a subjective stance. The mediation of narrative sequences in poetry may take two forms: the succession of thoughts, perceptions, imaginations can be presented diegetically (that is, narrated by a mediating speaker-narrator, usually in the past tense, as in prose fiction) or mimetically (that is, performed directly, in the present tense, without mediating speaker, as in drama). One essential further aspect of narrativity in all literary as well as non-literary genres is the feature of eventfulness. The ordering function vis-à-vis the sequence of changes (and thus the definition of their meaning) is achieved by the device of constituting an “event”, some decisive turn in the narrative sequence, some unforeseen, surprising deviation from the expected or familiar, which usually concludes the course of changes and renders the experience tellable or note­ worthy.

should rather distinguish between narrating in a narrower and narrating in a wider sense or between mediated (diegetic) and mimetic narration (see, for example, ­Schmid 2010, 6–7). 3 Cohn also describes compact or condensed forms of psycho-narration, which she calls “summaries” (1983, 34–35) and which might be termed “micro-narrative” or “mini-stories”. 4 Fludernik (2009, 124) uses the term “mini-story” to designate the narrative sequences implicitly inherent in certain images or metaphors.

Introduction 

 5

Events can assume a wide variety of shapes, from manifest change to the significant non-occurrence of an expected change (“non-events”) on the story level. But an event can also consist in the shift from story to discourse level. Essentially, events are linked to a figure, which undergoes a significant change: usually either the protagonist or the speaker (as the narrator), but in certain – unusual – cases the eventful change is attributable to the implied author and in others to the reader. Accordingly, one can distinguish events in the happenings (on the story level), presentation events (on the level of the speaker’s act of narration) and reception events (on the level of the reading process). Furthermore, another important aspect of the genre-specific use of narrative in poems concerns the material body of the poem, the conspicuous over-structuring of the language itself. Prosodic and poetic devices (such as rhymes, meter, segmentation, repetition and variation of elements, images and rhetorical figures, manipulation of syntax etc.) may be employed in order to shape, emphasize, differentiate, modify or undermine the meaning. Previous concepts and procedures of poetry analysis have predominantly neglected the dimension of sequentiality in poems, the way in which the speaker’s utterance progresses from beginning to end. The narratological approach is better suited to offer a more differentiated and specified approach for the description and analysis of this central dimension of poetry than was possible before. This can be considered the most valuable and productive contribution of narratology to poetry analysis.5 The purpose of the analyses in this book is to demonstrate the methodological and analytic value and the practical fruitfulness of such an approach for a deeper and clearer understanding of what the poems intend to achieve. It must be emphasized that applying narratological categories and tools to the analysis of lyrical poems is by no means intended to blur the distinction between poetry and prose fiction and treat poetry indiscriminately as a narrative genre. Rather, this approach is apt to highlight the specificity of the poetic uses of narrative, with respect both to the manner of their employment (for example the reduced circumstantiality of characterization and story) and their function (for example the self-attribution of a story for the definition of subjective identity). The poems selected in these chapters represent different facets of one specific thematic complex – the severe existential crisis caused by the shattering – traumatic – experience of loss or death: for instance, the death of a beloved or revered

5 For a more detailed presentation and practical exemplification of the transgeneric application of narratology to poetry, see Hühn (2005), Hühn and Schönert (2002), Hühn and Kiefer (2005, especially 1–13).

6 

 Peter Hühn

person, the disruption of love, the threat of extinction, the loss of stable orientation in life. These experiences are typically presented with clear indications of their biographical significance for the author. The thematic focus on loss and death is particularly apt to highlight the function of narrative in poetry for rendering, structuring, interpreting and controlling experience, since the confrontation with such a severe blow to the individual’s stability and existence constitutes a breach within the continuation of his life story and creates the need to come to terms with this destabilizing impact (Rosenblatt 2001). The poetic process of lamenting the loss and coping with it can be described as a narrative, more precisely: as a doubly eventful narrative. Event is defined as a profound change of state in a narrative development, an unforeseen, surprising deviation from the expected or familiar, which can take a negative or a positive turn for the person concerned, a change for the worse or for the better (Lotman 1977; ­Schmid 2003; Hühn 2008 and 2010, 1–13). The speaker’s initial confrontation, for instance, with a loved person’s death constitutes a negative event disrupting his life and undermining his identity. This negative event triggers the speaker’s attempt to come to terms with the disruption by revising his on-going life-story and integrating the loss in some way into a new narrative coherence of his life, which may lead to a new – a positive – event or else ultimately fail to achieve such a transformation, confirming the unrelieved trauma of loss. Although the cause of the initial event – death, destruction, loss – is a change in the external, physical world, the effect and decisive impact on the speaker is not physical, but mental, a change in his psychological condition. This is particularly apparent in the case of the loss of stable orientation. The remedy, the coping with this traumatic impact, is likewise mental, consisting in the cognitive integration of the loss into the speaker’s life’s tale. To be sure, the emphasis on the mental dimension of these events does not mean that such changes are subject to conscious control and can be manipulated at will. The narrative revision of the traumatic experience can only consciously be constructed by the bereaved speaker and offered to himself as a possible continuation of his life story and may subsequently meet with acceptance or rejection. What this acceptance or rejection depends on is another question. The analytic chapters of this book exemplify the experience of loss in five different forms and constellations: the loss – by death – of a beloved person (such as lover, spouse, friend or child), typically with indications of its biographical significance for the author, a constellation which can be classified as the prototypical experience of loss (Chapter 2), the (threatened) loss in love by absence, estrangement, betrayal or imminent death (Chapter 3), the imminence of one’s own death (Chapter 4), lamenting the death of a revered fellow-poet (Chapter 5), the loss of a basic stabilizing frame of orientation or meaning system in life (Chapter 6). The respective poem can then be seen to enact a poetic reaction

Introduction 

 7

to the disruptive (supposedly or allegedly real-life) event, constituting a poetic means of coping with the crisis. Experiences of death and loss may be dealt with in single poems, in poetic sequences or in entire poetry collections. The examples chosen for the five chapters are predominantly made up of single poems, in some cases analyzed in contrastive pairs. In addition, three poetic sequences or collections have been included to explore how the confrontation with the crisis is developed in an extended sequence of poems: Shakespeare’s The Sonnets (the young-man section), Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems” and Ted Hughes’s The Birthday Letters. The aim of coping with threatened or manifest loss through narrative in poetry can basically be achieved in two ways: first, by creating an aestheticizing, distancing effect through employing formal, poetic devices for formulating and thereby constraining the emotionally disturbing, traumatic experience (Robinson 2004)  – a fundamental capacity and function of art in general and poetry in particular (Heaney 1996, 2, 10 and passim); second, by imposing some kind of clarifying structure upon the happenings through association with already familiar narrative patterns or schemata, some established, re-assuring procedure or process (“frame” and “script”), particularly in conjunction with an event, a decisive turn or significant change of state, which in some way or other concludes the course of changes, constituting a reassuring resolution (or else significantly failing to do so) and rendering the experience and its conclusion tellable or noteworthy (Baroni 2009). The experiences of loss which underlie the poems and initiate the dynamic coping process, in the great majority of cases and most particularly with respect to the loss of a beloved person in Chapter 2, possess the quality of trauma. The processes enacted in the texts can therefore tentatively be viewed in the light of trauma theory, as introduced by Freud, especially in “Jenseits des Lustprinzips” / “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1955), and subsequently developed further (see Caruth 1996). Trauma theory divides itself into two basic trends: “the focus on trauma as the ‘shattering’ of a previously whole self” and “the focus on the survival function of trauma as allowing one to get through an overwhelming experience by numbing oneself to it” (Caruth 1996 131, 58). The definition of trauma as shattering the self’s wholeness clearly applies to the experiences of loss and death thematized in the poems analyzed here as does the function of survival which can be seen to motivate the poetic enactment in these texts. But the latent, evasive reaction to trauma in the form of repetition compulsion usually associated with traumatic experience – “overwhelming violent […] events […] are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (Caruth 1996, 91–92)  – is not at all typical of the treatment of shattering loss in poetry, at least in the poems selected for this

8 

 Peter Hühn

study.6 This seems to be due to the circumstance that the very fact of choosing the medium of poetry to address the trauma presupposes a high level of awareness and consciousness on the part of the author-speaker in facing the shattering experience and attempting to cope with it. In that respect coping with loss and death in poetry represents a special way of reacting to trauma. To apply a distinction of terms proposed by Dominick DaCapra: Addressing the traumatic experience in the medium of a poem can be classified as a mode of “working through” – as against “acting out” in the form of repetition compulsion (2001, 65–66). There is another psychological – a psychiatric – approach to trauma which is dedicated to the methodical elaboration of strategies of working through and which thus can plausibly be linked up with the present project, the description of the narrative processes and the analysis of their functions for trauma reaction: a recent constructivist approach to the psychology and therapy of bereavement, loss and grief (by Robert Neimeyer, Margaret and Wolfgang Stroebe and others).7 This concept focuses on “the subtle ways in which language and narrative configure our experience and the extent to which our most intimate sense of self is rooted (and uprooted) in our shifting relationships with others” (Neimeyer (2001, 261). This approach thus focuses on the cognitive dimensions both of reactions to loss and of possibilities of coming to terms with the concomitant crisis of identity. The central process on which the bereaved individuals rely in their attempts to cope with grief is conceived of as “meaning reconstruction”8, that is to say, they strive to re-build meaningful coherence and narrative continuity in their life after the painful disruption and paralysis brought on by the shattering experience of loss. This cognitivist concept offers a more fruitful and differentiated frame for the analysis of the wide spectrum of possible reactions to traumatic loss than the rather limited, one-dimensional Freudian model of “work of mourning” (or “grief work”), conceived of as the progressive withdrawal of psychic energy, of emotional attachment from the loved object.9 Seen in this light, the poems acquire also a therapeutic function, especially in their narrative dimension (see

6 With the partial exception of Plath’s “The Other” (Chapter 3.6) and Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” (Chapter 2.5), poems which show a delayed or repressed awareness of the painful loss. 7 See Neimeyer, ed. (2001); Neimeyer (1998); Stroebe et al. (2001) – especially Chapter 28: Fleming and Robinson. “Grief and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: The Reconstruction of Meaning” (647–669) and Ch. 17: Stroebe and Schut. “Models of Coping: A Review” (375–403) as well as the various overviews in Part V: “Coping: Exploration of the Mechanisms” (471–584). 8 As clearly highlighted by the title of the collection of articles in Neimeyer, ed. (2001): Meaning Reconstruction and Experience of Loss. 9 See Freud (1957, 243–45). For a critique of the standard Freudian concept, see for example the overview in Hagman (2001).

Introduction 

 9

for instance Romanoff 2001), with respect both to authors and to readers.10 That poems may take on such a function is documented, for instance, by Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H.H. (1849), written in reaction to the death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, in search for hope after great loss, and by Queen Victoria’s reception of this collection, from which she derived comfort and consolation after the loss of her husband Prince Albert.11 The potentially therapeutic function of poems does not necessarily interfere with their status as works of art. In fact, the aesthetic quality may serve as an intensification of the therapeutic effect: formulating, distancing and concluding the traumatic experience – and opening it for the public.12 For a comprehensive and more differentiated understanding of the way in which poems react to  – that is to say: perceive, work through, and tentatively solve (or, else, fail to solve)  – a profoundly disruptive crisis, it is necessary to take into consideration the essential ambiguity and ambivalence of poetry with respect to fictionality and factuality. Although poems as works of art are basically free from narrow pragmatic concerns or purposes and always generalize situations and experiences so as to make them potentially accessible for and relevant to a wide variety of readers, the individual poem can be (and frequently has been) understood – by poets in their production and by readers in their reception – as an authentic reference to the poet’s own life, problems, interests or activities.13 In such cases the poem invites the reader to read it as a quasi-personal utterance by the author, that is, in fact, as the medium in and through which the author has

10 The possible therapeutic effect of poetry is facilitated by poems functioning as what Walton (2011) calls “thoughtwriting” (in analogy to speechwriting): Poems offer a perspective and mental activities (thoughts, attitudes, sentiments etc.) which the reader reading the text may take over and vicariously “live, feel, think through” – a process which would qualify, in a very general sense, as “work of mourning” (Freud). 11 The reference to those psychological and psychotherapeutic approaches is meant to underline the mental and cognitive relevance of the narratological approach to poems on loss and death. The analyses of poems in this book are not intended as applications of psychological methods to poetry. But it would be worthwhile to pursue this connection between poetry and psychology further. 12 The present investigation of narrative approaches to coping with loss and mourning in poetry shows partial analogies with the study of the (therapeutic) treatment of melancholy in literature (prose and also poetry), for instance in Clark (2008) and Völker (1978). But these studies focus on the more general phenomenon of depression, rather than on the experience of personalized loss, and they do not employ specifically and explicitly defined methods of analysis, even when they analyze the function of narrative. 13 The great majority of the poems discussed in the subsequent chapters can be shown to possess an autobiographical background.

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 Peter Hühn

tried to come to terms with a destabilizing experience of loss. The basic fictional– factual ambivalence contributes to the impression of existential seriousness and urgency conveyed by a majority of these poems (cf. Zipfel 2011; Zymner 2009, 10–12; Hühn 2014). In this regard and with respect to what Seamus Heaney has called the “redress of poetry” poems are apt to take on a social and psychological function in life (Heaney 1996). The analyses of individual poems in this book concentrate on the various forms eventfulness can assume in poetry, as differentiated in the following five chapters. These chapters do not intend to provide comprehensive interpretations14 of the examples, neither with regard to the scope of their semantic or formal aspects nor to their place within the respective author’s œuvre. Instead, the analyses focus specifically on the narrative elements and the place and status of events within the poems in their quasi-therapeutic function. And since what counts as eventful appears partly to depend on the historical and cultural context in which the poems were written,15 the examples in each chapter are chosen from three periods usually taken to be marked by far-reaching shifts and turns in the development of society and culture as well as literature: the early modern, the Romantic and the modernist periods. In each analysis, when possible, the relevance of the context will briefly be pinpointed with regard to the eventfulness of the selected poem. Since no systematic comprehensive approach to the historical periods in question is available, the references to the context will be tentative and selective. The examples are predominantly taken from British poetry, supplemented by some Irish and American poems. As for the concrete procedure of analysis, the narrative approach is based on the following premises about narration in poetry: (1) Lyric poems cannot be said to “narrate” in the strict sense of the term. But they do in fact refer to temporal sequences, changes of state and developments which comprise constitutive narrative elements, such as characters endowed with mental interiority, successions of happenings or actions motivated and made coherent by intentions, desires or anxieties and accompanied by emotions.

14 Accordingly, references to criticism will be selective and concentrate on these specific aspects, which are rarely discussed in existing analyses. 15 In addition – and more fundamentally – the meaning of loss, the form and extent of grieving and the means of coping with loss and grief are culture dependent. As for instance Rosenblatt (2001) has demonstrated, compared to the enormous differences in extra-European (and extra-American) cultures, the concepts of and attitudes towards loss, grief and grieving in England (and the USA) do not betray wide variation. It remains to be seen whether the examples from different historical periods analyzed in this study do show conceptual differences in the experience of loss and the ways of coping with loss.

Introduction 

 11

(2) The overall progression in a poem typically represents a temporal and thus always (proto-)narrative sequence in its own right: The succession of thoughts, emotions, imaginations, perceptions (etc.), directly uttered by the speaker in the first person, constitute a mental story performed in the dramatic mode and usually presented in the present tense. (3) Thus, narrative sequences in poetry may be presented diegetically (spoken by a mediating instance, usually in the past tense) or mimetically (performed, as it were directly, in the present tense and from a first-person perspective, without a mediating instance, on the highest level of the poem). One may distinguish these two forms of presenting a “story” as narrating in a narrow and narrating in a broad sense. (4) Narrative elements, as they occur on various levels in poems, focus primarily on mental, psychological and cognitive processes, omitting circumstantial details characteristic of narrative fiction and drama, such as the specification of the social and geographical setting, names, age, sex, and other personal characteristics. (5) Narrative sequences in poems usually appear in a compact, condensed, abbreviated or allusive form, as mini- or micro-stories. For their understanding these compact narrative sequences rely on the readers’ narrative competence to fill in gaps and supply missing or merely implied connections by associating the appropriate conventional schemata or stereotypical procedural patterns (“frames” and “scripts”), with which they are already familiar on account of their world-knowledge.16 (6) Narratives are always linked to a figure, normally the speaker, who as “agent” and/or “patient” brings about or undergoes the reported changes of state and from whose particular position and perspective or point of view (focalization) these changes are presented. (7) The basic premise of the narrative approach to the analysis of poetry is that poems – in order to be considered tellable, that is, worthy of being retold – feature some kind of event in their narrative sequence, some point, some conspicuous turn, twist or shift, some significant change in the situation, behavior, knowledge or attitude of the person concerned. Exploring the precise shape, position and function of such events in poetry as well as the forms of erosion and problematization of the notion of eventfulness, especially in modernist poems, is the central aim of the present study. To enable a wide focus on what may qualify

16 The relevance of “a discursive framework of pre-established meanings that provides a socially sanctioned system for symbolic events” is stressed by Neimeyer (2001, 265).

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 Peter Hühn

as an event the analyses will not be based on a narrowly and rigidly defined concept of event. (8) Events can assume a wide variety of shapes, which range from manifest change to the significant non-occurrence of an expected change (“non-events”) on the story level, but also include the shift from story to discourse level; moreover, they can vary in the degree of eventfulness (depending on the extent of deviation from what is expected) as well as in the level of conventionality (whether established or newly defined). (9) Basically, events occur in two places as well as in two types within the poems selected for analysis in this study: the initial negative event consisting in the shattering experience of (threatened or manifest) loss and death, which triggers the course of reflection within the poem, and some kind of positive event, which is usually the ultimate aim of these reflections and which may conclude them (or fail to do so). (10) Since events are linked, as stated above (6), to a figure who is shown to cause or undergo a significant change, such as protagonist, speaker/narrator, implied/real author or addressee/reader, one can broadly distinguish among events according to the level on which they occur: events in the happenings (story-level), presentation events (discourse-level) and reception events (the reader’s reading experience), respectively (Hühn and Kiefer 2005, 7, 246–251). Eventfulness always depends on the perspective, the position, from which the change is experienced as an event (for instance, that of the speaker or that of the reader). This perspective determines the semantic frame (of parameters such as concepts, values or meanings, etc.) for the structuring and assessment of the change in question. Events may vary with respect to the extent of active participation on the part of the person concerned, whether passively endured (as a patient) or actively brought about (as an agent). (11) The material body of the poem, especially the language itself, may be functionalized for a modification, differentiation, highlighting or additional semanticization of narrative elements (Hühn and Kiefer 2005, 255–256; McHale 2009): prosodic or poetic features (rhythm and meter, sentence structure, rhymes, line breaks, various forms of repetition and segmentation, etc.), semantic implications of figures of speech (such as metaphors, metonymies, etc.) and recurrent semantic features or aspects in several words or phrases (“isotopies” [Greimas 1983]). Not all poems make conspicuous use of this additional tool to highlight or modify the meaning of the utterance.17 In addition, other aspects of

17 The analyses mention and discuss such prosodic features only if they are particularly relevant.

Introduction 

 13

the poetic text may have an impact on narrative and meaning, such as brevity and condensation, semantic obscurity, shifts in time and tense, locality and space or perspective. (12) The narratological approach as outlined here is intended as an operational tool for analyzing the dynamic, processural dimension of lyric poems.

References Baroni, Raphaël. 2014. “Tellability.” In Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf ­Schmid, eds. Handbook of Narratology, 2nd edition, fully revised and expanded. Vol. 2, 836–845. Berlin: De Gruyter. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Clark, Hilary. 2008. Depression and Narrative: Telling the Dark. Albany, NY: State University Press of New York. Cohn, Dorrit. 1983 [1978]. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Fludernik, Monika. 2009. “The Cage Metaphor: Extending Narratology into Corpus Studies and Opening it to the Analysis of Imagery.” In Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer, eds. Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, 109–128. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. Freud, Sigmund. 1955 [1920]. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In Sigmund Freud. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, edited by James Strachey, 7–23. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1957 [1917]. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In Sigmund Freud. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, edited by James Strachey, 243–258. London: Hogarth Press. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1983 [1966]. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, introduced by Ronald Schleifer. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Hagman, George. 2001. “Beyond Decathexis: Toward a New Psychoanalytic Understanding and Treatment of Mourning.” In Robert A. Neimeyer, ed. Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss,13–31. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Heaney, Seamus. 1996. The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London: Faber and Faber. Hühn, Peter. 2005. “Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry.” In Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik, eds. Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, 147–172. Amsterdam: Rodopi, Hühn, Peter. 2008. “Functions and Forms of Eventfulness in Narrative Fiction.” In John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, eds. Theorizing Narrativity, 141–163. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Hühn, Peter. 2010. Eventfulness in British Fiction. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hühn, Peter. 2014. “The Problem of Fictionality and Factuality in Lyric Poetry.” Narrative 22:51–164. Hühn, Peter and Jörg Schönert. 2002. “Zur narratologischen Analyse von Lyrik.” Poetica 34:287–305. Hühn, Peter and Jens Kiefer. 2005. The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in English Poetry from 16th to the 20th Century. Berlin: De Gruyter. Lotman, Jurij M. 1977. The Structure of the Artistic Text, translated by G. Lenhoff and R. Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McHale, Brian. 2009. “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry.” Narrative 17:11–30. Neimeyer, Robert A. 1998. Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping. New York: McGraw-Hill. Neimeyer, Robert A. 2001. “The Language of Loss: Grief Therapy as a Process of Meaning Reconstruction.” In Robert A. Neimeyer, ed. Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss, 261–292. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Neimeyer, Robert A., ed. 2001. Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Robinson, Jenefer. 2004. “The Art of Distancing: How Formal Devices Manage our Emotional Responses to Literature.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62:153–162. Romanoff, Bronna D. 2001. “Research as Therapy: The Power of Narrative to Effect Change”. In Robert A. Neimeyer, ed. Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss, 245–257. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Rosenblatt, Paul C. 2001. “A Social Constructionist Perspective on Cultural Differences in Grief.” In Margaret S. Stroebe, Wolfgang Stroebe, Robert O. Hansson, and Henk Schut, eds. Handbook of Bereavement Research: Consequences, Coping, and Care, 285–300. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Schank, Roger C. and Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. ­Schmid, Wolf. 2003. “Narrativity and Eventfulness.” In Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, eds. What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, 17–33. Berlin: De Gruyter. ­Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology: An Introduction, translated by A. Starritt. Berlin: De Gruyter. Stroebe, Margaret S., Wolfgang Stroebe, Robert O. Hansson, and Henk Schut, eds. 2001. Handbook of Bereavement Research: Consequences, Coping, and Care. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Virtanen, Tuija. 1992. “Issues of Text Typology: Narrative – A ‘Basic’ Type of Text?” Text 12:293–310. Völker, Ludwig. 1978. Muse Melancholie – Therapeutikum Poesie: Studien zum MelancholieProblem in der deutschen Lyrik von Hölty bis Benn. München: Fink. Walton, Kendall. 2011. “Thoughtwriting – in Poetry and Music.” New Literary History 42:455–476. Zipfel, Frank. 2011. “Lyrik und Fiktion.” In Handbuch Lyrik: Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte, edited by Dieter Lamping, 162–166. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler. Zymner, Rüdiger. 2009. Lyrik: Umriss und Begriff. Paderborn: Mentis.

2 Mourning the Death of a Beloved Person

2.0 Introduction The death of a beloved person can be considered the prototypical case of the painful, shattering experience of traumatic loss. Such a loss will occur in the course of most people’s lives regarding a person with whom they had a very close relationship, a relationship highly relevant to their sense of stable self and coherent identity – the loss of a parent, a child, a spouse, a lover or an intimate friend. Such an experience of loss as the topic of poems has had a long tradition in the form of the fairly well-defined lyric sub-genre of the elegy, regulated by clear conventions, especially during earlier periods. In that respect elegies about the loss of a loved person (including those about the death of a fellow poet analyzed in Chapter 5) differ from the poems about loss and death discussed in the other chapters of this book. The funeral elegy dates back to classical antiquity, but it took on a new form and significance in early modern England under the influence of the Reformation, when the Catholic Requiem Mass disappeared and “the focus of funeral observances shifted radically towards the secular” (Kay 1990, 2–3). These elegies invariably stress their autobiographical, private background – the recent death of a person dearly loved by the poet. Such elegies thus possess a pronounced factual quality suggesting the close affinity or even identity of speaker with author. Conventionally, elegies combine three concerns: lament, praise and consolation (Clymer 2010, 170), typically progressing from grief to consolation (Sacks 1985, 2). This progression serves as a general script for the genre tending to result in some kind of consoling resolution, a positive event. Like all “variation genres”, that is, genres regulated by strong conventions and enlivened by skilful variation, elegies are marked by a tension between imitation and innovation, between thematic, rhetorical and formal conventionality on the one hand and the desire for authenticity, sincerity and originality on the other – a tension which is apt to produce self-reflexivity and self-referentiality (Sacks 1985, 2; Clymer 2010, 173–75). The negative event of a beloved person’s death forms the topic of the text and provides the point of departure for the poet’s reflections. The poem then functions as the medium for his psychic struggle to cope with the loss, by clarifying and, possibly, modifying and transforming this negative eventfulness in the process of recollecting, and reflecting on, the life, character and quality of the deceased person as well as creating a memorial, an epitaph for him or her in the poem, thus in some way or other offering consolation and constituting a positive event. The poems selected in this chapter exemplify a spectrum of intimate personal and private relationships disrupted by death, ranging from family constellation to erotic love and intimate friendship. Examples refer, on the one hand, to the death of a child in Ben Jonson’s “On My First Daughter” and “On My First Son” (2.1) or

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the imminent loss of a daughter through growing up and leaving the mother in Eavan Boland’s “The Blossom” and “The Pomegranate” (2.6), to the death of the wife in John Donne’s “Since She Whom I Loved” and John Milton’s “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” (2.2), of a brother in Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” (2.5) and, on the other, to the death of a lover in Lord Byron’s “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” and “And Thou Art Dead” (2.3) as well as in Edgar A. Poe’s “Lenore” (2.4). Three poems, one by Poe and two by Boland, differ for a number of reasons from all others and were chosen because these texts by their very difference highlight the common features of the other elegies on a loved person. Poe’s “Lenore” obviously lacks an autobiographical (factual) background; it is placed into a public (instead of a private) context. Its overall stance is not the subjective first-person point of view of the bereaved lover but his juxtaposition with another speaker in a dramatic interchange, which relativizes his perspective. Thus this text self-referentially highlights and exposes the conventional features of an elegy as well as the literary, fictional set-up of the constellation. Boland’s “The Blossom” and “The Pomegranate” address the problem of loss not by death but by the natural process of a child growing up and leading an independent life of her own. The underlying conflict is that of opposed desires, between the mother’s loss and the daughter’s gain, which throws into relief the aspect of selfishness and possessiveness in the experience of loss. As will be shown, the laments about the death of a beloved person vary in the degree of conformity with the conventional script. The generic script is directly relevant only for a few of the early examples chosen for this chapter, losing its relevance for later authors, possibly indicative of the gradually diminishing power of generic rules as such. But taken less schematically these three aspects of mourning the death or loss of a loved person – lament, praise and consolation – can be seen to inform and structure the mourning process in all these elegies. These elegies furthermore vary in the degree to which they succeed in coping with the trauma of loss and achieve some kind of positive compensation. One measuring foil for the processes performed in these poems might be the notion of the successful “work of mourning” as suggested by Freud (1957, 243–245) and others18, that is to say, the final withdrawal of emotional attachment from the loved person.

18 For an overview of forms of this so called attachment theory, see for instance Shaver and Tancredy (2001).

2.1 Ben Jonson: “On My First Daughter” (1593) and “On My First Son” (1603) Ben Jonson lost his first daughter Mary in 1593 and his first son Benjamin in 1603. In each instance he wrote an epitaph in reaction to the negative – explicitly factual – event of their death, in which he poetically performed and mediated his attempt to come to terms with the loss of his child. The two poems differ in the degree of severity with respect to the experience of loss and, on account of that difference, in the degree of conventionality.

2.1.1 “On My First Daughter” The epitaph “On My First Daughter”, who died at six months of age, conforms closely to the conventional script of formal funeral elegies, the sequence of lament, praise and consolation (Clyme 2010, 170).

On My First Daughter

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Here lies to each her parents’ ruth, Mary, the daughter of their youth; Yet, all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due, It makes the father less to rue. At six months’ end, she parted hence With safety of her innocence; Whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears, In comfort of her mother’s tears, Hath placed amongst her virgin-train: Where, while that severed doth remain, This grave partakes the fleshly birth; Which cover lightly, gentle earth! (Maclean 1974, 7)

The poem starts with a reference to the parents’ grief (“ruth”, 1), as an expression of their lament, at the death of their first child (“the daughter of their youth”, 2), and continues by praising her “gifts” from heaven (3) and her “innocence” (6). Lament and praise are followed by a brief story of the daughter’s death, her soul’s ascent to heaven and reception by the Mother of God into her “virgin-train” (5–9), while her body remains on earth, in the grave (10). Such assurance of their daughter’s instant salvation is said to alleviate her parents’ distress: “It makes the father less to rue” (4) and “In comfort of her mother’s tears” (8). This consolation functions as the eventful conclusion of the epitaph, compensating for the negative event of their daughter’s death. The turn from loss to comfort is achieved

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without strong resistance from intense emotional attachment to the child. Emotional detachment is moreover indicated by the fact that the father, the speaker of the epitaph, refers to himself (as to his wife) in the third person throughout the poem, thereby viewing his subjective attitude and reaction from a distance. In keeping with this lack of emotional intensity the epitaph ends with the gentle gesture of covering her “fleshly” remains with earth, thus formally – and composedly – taking leave of her. In all, the poem conveys the traditional concept of Christian comfort without any (latent) qualification.

2.1.2 “On My First Son” In comparison to the rather facile, conventional consolation achieved in the epitaph on his daughter, Ben Jonson’s reaction ten years later to his son’s death in “On My First Son” is conditioned by a much stronger resistance to coming to terms with the experience of loss. The difference seems to be due to a more intense emotional and, as it were, existential involvement. Because this child died at the age of seven, the father had had time to develop a closer emotional relationship to him. And as a son this child had been invested with a special role for the father’s self-image and his future existence. In “On My First Son”, as against the epitaph on his daughter, Ben Jonson speaks in the first person and self-referentially identifies himself by name as the speaker (“Ben Jonson”, 10). He starts off by punning on the given name of his son, Benjamin (1), which is identical with his own. Spelling out, in translation, its Hebrew root, “child of the right hand”, implying “dextrous” or “fortunate” (Parfitt 1996, 489), he indirectly defines his son’s supreme value for him and thereby stresses the severity of his loss, thus linking praise and lament.

On My First Son

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy. Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I lose all father now! For why Will man lament the state he should envy? To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh’s rage, And, if no other misery, yet age? Rest in soft peace, and asked, say: “Here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry, For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such As what he loves may never like too much.” (Maclean 1974, 8)



2.1 Ben Jonson: “On My First Daughter” (1593) and “On My First Son” (1603) 

 21

In the first line the poet both addresses his son and acknowledges the need to face his loss and cope with it, that is, take leave of him and let him go (“Farewell”). The poem then proceeds, first, to give a brief narrative of the son’s life and, second, to formulate two successive reactions to this loss, one Christian, the other poetical, before he finally adds a resolution for the future. In this sequence the structure of the poem basically conforms to the script of the conventional elegy, the triadic structure of lament, praise and consolation. The condensed narrative of the son’s life (2–4) states its length of seven years and the fact that he died on his birthday, thus symmetrically linking the end back to the beginning: “Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay, / Exacted by thy fate, on the just day” (3–4). But his life is not presented as a self-sustained development. On the one hand, the brief narrative refers to the superior power (“thy fate”) which controlled the son’s existence and determined its end. And on the other, this life is viewed from the father’s position and perspective. The son’s existence was accompanied by the father’s emotions and high hopes, but the son was only lent to him and had to be given back (“I thee pay”, 3). No direct critique of the premature date of the boy’s death is voiced. On the contrary, the phrase “on the just day” acknowledges that fate was fully justified in ending his life so soon. Furthermore, the father now evaluates his own former attitude critically: His hopes (expectations for the continuation of the son’s life and future achievements) were excessive and therefore culpable (“My sin was too much hope of thee”, 2). The excessive value and excessive prospective hope attached to the son’s evolving future life then set the point of departure for attempting to find some consoling compensation for the painful loss incurred by his premature death. The first attempt is based on the traditional Christian concept of devaluating this world in favor of eternal life in the beyond, which thereby enables the speaker to re-define the loss as a gain and turn the “lament” into an expression of “envy” (6). The sad narrative of premature death is thus converted into a joyful story of lucky escape: By dying young the son has avoided the miserable conditions and painful circumstances of his secular physical existence in later life (“so soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage”, 7; “And, if no other misery, yet age”, 7). But this consoling thought, summed up in the concluding wish “Rest in soft peace” (9), allegedly a universally acknowledged truth, is inherently weakened through its very conventionality, which is stressed by being formulated as a rhetorical question. And, generally, the readiness with which the son’s premature death is here accepted as justified and even beneficial appears to betray suppressed protest and unrelieved despair. Set against this familiar strategy of consolation (which resembles the argument in “On My First Daughter”) is a more daring move – a second attempt at

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mentally coping with his great loss, based on the speaker’s double role of father and poet. The pain he experiences is essentially caused by being the deceased boy’s father, as spelt out in the opening line of the poem: “thou child of my right hand” and expressed in the (patently unrealizable) wish to alleviate the pain by abandoning the role of father: “O, could I lose all father” (5). In the second strategy of coping with the loss the speaker unexpectedly turns around and emphatically embraces his paternal role in conjunction with that of poet. Drawing on the Greek root of the word “poetry” (poēsis), meaning ‘making’, he (metaphorically) circumscribes fathering a child as writing a poem: “here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry” (9–10), thereby praising the highly personal value of the son for him. While the conventional trope conceives of the work of art as the creator’s offspring, Jonson inverts this notion, re-activating the root-meaning of the metaphor: fathering a child. Thus Jonson makes his son coequal with his writings, inscribing him within his œuvre. The son now exists in this written poem and he also exists – or rather: existed – independently as a “poem” in his own right, acting as the protagonist in these two parallel micro-narratives. Jonson utilizes his achievement in his role as a poet to compensate for the painful loss which he has suffered in his role as a father – an unexpected, daring move, the force of which is conspicuously given particular emphasis in three ways: first, Jonson explicitly mentions his own name at this point; second, he presents this statement as the declarative answer to a question (“asked, say […]”, 9); and, third, he speaks of himself in the third person,19 thereby signalling emotional distance and detachment. Thus, this statement deliberately purports to function as an eventful turn in the development of the present poem. However, the conjunction of the roles of father and poet by the very move of their equation also works the other way round, surreptitiously pointing to an essential difference: “While his poem lives, his son does not, and […] a gap remains between a poet’s and father’s kind of making.” (Cain 1983, 181) So, what the speaker both as father and poet has achieved in the poem up to this point actually amounts to the composition of an epitaph for his son (Scodel 1989, 247–252), a “compensatory burial ritual” and the creation of an “immortalizing gravestone inscription for the boy”.20

19 The intricate syntax of this utterance can be construed as follows: The request “say” is addressed to his son, like the preceding imperative phrase “Rest in peace”; and though the statement (“Here doth lie“) is nominally ascribed to his son, it actually refers to the author in the third person. 20 In the contemporary reality of the plague epidemic in London Jonson’s son had probably not received the proper funeral ceremonies, especially as a Catholic child. See Scodel (1989, 236).



2.1 Ben Jonson: “On My First Daughter” (1593) and “On My First Son” (1603) 

 23

After claiming to have alleviated the pain of the past loss by writing a preserving epitaph as “the poet’s own consolatory fiction” (Scodel 1989, 252), the speaker then concludes his reflections with the resolution to forestall a similar painful experience of loss for the future (in his own future life-story) by avoiding henceforth to bestow again too much emotion on any object or person: “all his vows be such / As what he loves may never like too much”.21 This resolution is explicitly linked to the previous statement, as its point of reference and its justification, by the phrase “[f]or whose sake”. That is to say, “[…] for the sake of his dead son he takes an oath not to be too self-satisfied, too pleased with what he loves in the future.” (Beaurline 1966, 67) This resolution refers to the same selfish, possessive attitude he had accused himself of as a “sin” vis-à-vis his son in the beginning of the poem (“My sin was too much hope of thee”, 2).22 Both statements share the desire and intention to overcome, and distance oneself from, excessive pain as the result of loss. But both statements also raise doubts: Pleasure cannot really be separated from love, and therefore the desire to regard the loved object with pleasure cannot be controlled and restricted by a mere act of will (Cain 1983, 182), even less so as a resolution for future behavior, and the artistic achievement of the present poem is inadequate in deflecting the undercurrent of grief (Scodel 1989, 258). Thus the eventful compensation for the loss through forced detachment is made visible in its precariousness by foregrounding the desire together with the obvious inadequacy of the means. The eventful turn is deliberately staged but at the same time undermined by its apparent ineffectiveness.23 This ambivalence about the eventful conclusion does not ultimately invalidate the successful coping strategy. It might be argued that the undercurrent of unrelieved pain of loss beneath the concluding consolation may make the imaginary transformation of the son into a work of art more acceptable since it does not betray but rather confirms his emotional relevance to his father. Thus, the real event of this poem consists in the indirect expression and acknowledgement of ultimately unalleviated grief and mourning together with the consoling gesture of poetic transformation. The difference between the two poems and their coping strategies has to do with the different degrees of the felt severity of loss. One obvious factor in this is

21 A sentiment apparently taken over from Martial’s epigram VI, xxiv. 8: “Quidquid ames, cupias non placuisse nimis” (“Whatever you love, may you wish not to have been overly pleased by it”). Cf. Maclean (1974, 8). 22 For the precise description of this attitude (the meaning of “hope” and “like”), see Baxter (2010, 103–104). 23 Cf. Beaurline (1966, 70): “Consolation is hard to find when you mourn a first son. Jonson tried to find consolation but his attempts to comfort himself merely dramatize his grief.”

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the difference in age between daughter and son: The older the child, the stronger the parent’s emotional attachment has grown over time. Another more personal factor is the value of the deceased child for the speaker: The son clearly had a specific and specifically higher relevance than the daughter in that he represented something like an extended refined self for the speaker, promising future continuity and high achievements. This relevance, which constitutes the object of praise and the reason for lament in terms of the conventional structure of the elegy, is here not defined objectively (as in the case of the daughter: “heaven’s gifts”), but subjectively, with respect to the poet’s own self  – his name (1) and his creative work (10). This fact underlines the very personal nature of Jonson’s lament of his son.

2.2 John Donne: “Since She Whom I Loved” (1617) and John Milton: “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” (1658) In the two sonnets “Since She Whom I Loved” by John Donne and “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” by John Milton each speaker reacts to the recent death of his beloved wife,24 but they do so with a marked difference. Donne consciously reflects on the severe loss and directly re-formulates it as a gain, whereas Milton involuntarily and sub-consciously, as it were, namely in a dream, re-experiences the loss as a severe shock. While Donne’s poem finally succeeds in transforming the loss into a positive event, Milton has the loss inadvertently repeat itself to an intensified degree as a heightened negative event with a vengeance.

2.2.1 John Donne: “Since She Whom I Loved” (Divine Poems, 17)

Since She Whom I Loved

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt To nature, and to hers, and my good is dead, And her soul early into heaven ravished, Wholly in heavenly things my mind is set. Here the admiring her my mind did whet To seek thee, God; so streams do show the head, But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed, A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet. But why should I beg more love, when as thou Dost woo my soul, for hers offering all thine:25 And dost not only fear lest I allow

24 Biographically, both poems can be read as reactions to actual deaths. Donne’s wife Ann died in 1617. In Milton’s case the factual background is either the death of his first wife Mary Powell in 1652 or, more likely, of his second wife Katherine Woodcock in 1658. For an overview of the critical debate about the biographical reference, see Woodhouse and Bush (1972, 486–491). 25 For the punctuation of this line, see the edition of the Divine Poems by Gardner (1952, 15). Gardner convincingly argues in favor of this punctuation for l. 10 – the comma preceding instead of following “for hers” – because it makes more sense than an alternative one also found in manuscripts and later adopted in the edition by Smith (1986, 316).

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12 My love to saints and angels, things divine, 13 But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt 14 Lest the world, flesh, yea Devil put thee out. (Smith 1986, 316)

In Donne’s sonnet, the octave intimately – both causally and temporally – links two narrative sequences. The first narrative development occurred in the past and was completed in the past: The speaker’s wife died and her soul rose to heaven, to God (“she […] hath paid her last debt / To nature, and to hers, and my good is dead, / And her soul early into heaven ravished”, 1–3). The second development has taken place since the end of the first and was caused by it. Triggered by his wife’s death and the perception of her quasi-holy nature during her life (“the admiring her”, 5), the speaker’s love has been re-directed towards God (“Since she […] hath paid her last debt […] / Wholly in heavenly things my mind is set. / Here the admiring her my mind did whet / To seek thee, God”, 1, 4–6). The causal (psychological) connection of the two micro-narratives, the wife’s holy life and death and the speaker’s present search for God, is stressed both metaphorically (“did whet [my mind] / To seek thee, God”) and by a simile (“so streams do show the head”, 6), that is, his wife’s holy life pointed to God as the source of her holiness (“head”). The second development seems to have come to an end, too, apparently reaching its aim: “[…] I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed” (7). But in the very act of stating it this achievement is immediately qualified as insufficient and incomplete: “A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet” (8). The speaker’s search for God and his love (see l. 9) is as yet unsatisfied, and therefore he demands more (Smith 1986, 635). This demand for more of God’s love now functions as a dynamic element which leads to a new turn in the development within the sestet, answering the speaker’s desire with an extended reference to God’s love for him. At the same time, the agency shifts from the speaker in his role of lover – first of his wife, then of God (dominating the octave, apart from l. 7, second half) – to God (dominating the sestet, apart from l. 9, first part). God’s active love for the speaker is now envisaged or, more precisely, postulated in increasingly striking terms. God appears in the role of a lover himself, the lover of the speaker’s soul, in progressive acts of wooing, thereby constituting a kind of further narrative development in two steps or manifestations. A strong sign of God’s love is seen, first, in the fact of Christ’s redemptive death (10), offered as a replacement for the speaker’s beloved wife or, possibly, in exchange for his soul’s love (Ray 1990, 303). Such ultimately still conventionally consoling notion is then, second, daringly and shockingly surpassed by presenting God’s love for the speaker as blatantly human: He is said jealously to fear rivals (saints and angels, possibly including the speaker’s deceased wife, 12) and the temptation of the world, even the devil, supplanting



2.2 John Donne (1617) and John Milton (1658) 

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God in the speaker’s affection (14).26 This imaginative presentation of God daringly deviates from the conventional notion, for two reasons. Reversing the usual constellation of roles, of man seeking God’s grace and love, God now is shown to seek the speaker’s undivided love; and God’s love for the speaker is conceived of in human and implicitly erotic terms (“jealousy”27, 13). The event is constituted in two stages with different degrees of eventfulness: It consists, first, in the replacement of the wife by God as the object of the speaker’s love and, second, the event occurs, especially, as the reversal of the speaker’s position from that of the subject of loving (that is, loving his lost wife) to that of being himself the object of love (that is, loved by God). In the first instance, this is conventional Christian consolation in compensation for the painful loss; but in the second more radical instance, the speaker copes with the painful loss of his beloved by transforming himself into the desired object of another’s (God’s) love. Having lost his human beloved (his wife) to the divine realm, the speaker finally gains a divine lover, God, whom he imagines (or rather postulates) as quasi-human. The final outcome at the end of the poem is left open indicating the ongoing continuation of the narrative sequence of the speaker’s life. The humanization of God as well as the application of erotic metaphors to the modeling of man’s relation to God are characteristic of Donne,28 signaling the emotional, passionate intensification of man’s religious allegiance and bringing the secular and transcendent dimensions close together.29

2.2.2 John Milton: “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” (Sonnet 19)

Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint

1 2 3 4 5

Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force though pale and faint. Mine as whom washed from spot of childbed taint,

26 For a clear re-construction of the changing love constellation of God and speaker in this poem, see Ray (1990, 302–304). 27 Of course, in the first commandment (Exodus 20: 5) God calls himself “jealous” in the sense that he demands absolute devotion from believers excluding all other gods. But in the context of Donne’s poem this general meaning is obviously shifted to the erotic sense of the term. 28 For a general discussion of this phenomenon in Donne’s religious lyric, see Low (1994). 29 Donne produces the same effect by applying religious metaphors in his love poetry.

28  6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

 Peter Hühn

Purification in the old Law did save, And such, as yet once more I trust to have Full sight of her in heaven without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind: Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight, Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined So clear, as in no face with more delight. But O as to embrace me she inclined I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night. (Carey and Fowler 1968, 415–416)30

The speaker narrates a dream, in which his recently deceased wife (deceased after child-birth) appears and is restored to him in her old sweet, good and saintly nature and love for him (1–12). The dream narrative of her resurrection is presented in three successive sequences of increasing length. He starts by summarizing the mere fact of his wife’s return from death to life as a gift to him: “my late espoused saint / Brought to me” (1–2), from the very start implicitly qualifying this “fact” as imagination (“Methought I saw […]”). Next, he provides a model – a “script” – for such a restitution to life, the ancient Greek mythic tale of Alcestis (2–4), made into a play by Euripides: Heracles, Zeus’s (Jove’s) son, restored the deceased Alcestis to her husband Admetus. Finally, the story of the speaker’s wife’s death is repeated with more details (5–12): She died some time after giving birth to a child, which according to the old Mosaic law made women unclean and stipulated a period of ritual purification (Leviticus xii), which the wife had in fact completed when she died: “washed from spot of child-bed taint” (5).31 The achievement of such purification is then associated with the Christian notion of her (imminent) salvation (see “save”, 6, and especially the implication in “Full sight of her in Heaven”, 8). Her appearance in a white dress (“Came vested all in white”, 9) signals her purity of mind. Like Alcestis, the speaker’s wife is veiled, but, unlike Admetus in the Greek myth, the speaker is able to recognize her. This tale of resurrection culminates in the manifestation of the saint-like, exemplary nature of the speaker’s wife (“Love, sweetness, goodness”, 11) and in the expectation of the imminent final re-union of husband and wife (“as to embrace me she inclined”, 13).32

30 In Milton (1931, 68–69) this sonnet is numbered as XXIII. 31 For the analysis of this sonnet in the present thematic frame it is irrelevant whether the biographical reference is to the death of Milton’s first or his second wife. 32 There has been a controversy between a biographical and an abstract interpretation of the sonnet: For a summary of these approaches, see Woodhouse and Bush (1972, 492–499). Despite the possibility of additional generalizing interpretations, the concrete personal elements (figures and actions) in the happenings certainly justify a reading of the poem within the frame of death and loss of a beloved person.



2.2 John Donne (1617) and John Milton (1658) 

 29

At the very point of the wife’s imminent return, the story abruptly breaks off and is disclosed as having merely been a dream illusion: “I waked, she fled” (14). This radical disillusionment represents the event of Milton’s sonnet. Although the disillusionment is only the repetition and confirmation of the loss which had occurred before and of which the speaker had been basically aware (see “my late espoused saint”, 1), the degree of this negative eventfulness is heightened in two ways. On the one hand, the speaker’s sudden disappointment of the imaginatively staged promise of his wife’s miraculous return shockingly repeats and re-activates the experience of her painful loss.33 And on the other, this painfully re-activated recognition is further intensified by the close connection with the speaker’s renewed awareness of his blindness, underscored by the paradoxical identification of day with night for the blind man (“day brought back my night”, 14).34 The loss of the beloved wife as the desolate reality of the speaker’s present life is exacerbated by his deprivation of sight: Only in dreams can he see, but what he sees turns out to be a mere illusion. This desolation is the more severe as no religious consolation is envisaged further, also emphasized by the use of a pagan Greek myth as a script. The single Christian allusion in “I trust to have / Full sight of her in heaven” (7–8, emphasis added) is afterwards disproved as illusory. There is a striking difference between these two sonnets with respect to type and nature of eventfulness vis-à-vis the comparable experience of severe loss (the loss of a beloved, saint-like wife), especially in view of the fact that both poets are to be considered decidedly religious in orientation (both in life and work). While Donne draws on basically Christian notions to cope with the experience of loss, albeit in a highly unconventional, daring manner, Milton conspicuously does without Christian consolation and directly faces the existential, secular fact. Thus the eventfulness in both poems is “modern”, that is to say, deviating from traditional concepts – Donne still on the basis of the Christian religion, Milton essentially without recourse to it. In addition, the degree of eventfulness is affected by a marked difference in the speaker’s perspective. Donne deflects the focus away from the lost person to his own central self, constituting himself as the object of God’s desire, whereas Milton broadly and longingly focuses on the person of his wife, only to be left in solitary desolation after her confirmed disappearance.35

33 The structure of the delayed or repeated awareness of loss bears a remote resemblance to Freud’s (1955) trauma theory (repetition compulsion). 34 Additionally this is also a metaphorical reference to the night of his grief. 35 See the comparison of these two sonnets in Tillyard (1956, 2–11).

2.3 Lord Byron: “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” (1811) and “And Thou art Dead, as Young and Fair” (1812) Like the examples by Jonson, Donne and Milton analyzed above, Byron’s two occasional poems “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” and “And Thou art Dead, as Young and Fair” possess a verifiable biographical background: Byron’s love for a chorister boy in Cambridge (John Edleston) and the early death of this boy in 1811, whom Byron – for propriety’s sake – called by the female name of Thyrza in several of his poems written in reaction to this loss.36 In compliance with this fictionalization, the following analyses will refer to the lost beloved in both poems as a woman, whether explicitly named Thyrza or left nameless.

2.3.1 “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” The situation underlying “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” is indicated by scattered indirect references throughout the text: The speaker is reminded of his love for Thyrza and of her death (“dust thou art”, 14) by hearing a song she used to sing (9–10, 19), which formerly had pleased him as a “soothing strain” (2) but now only triggers the sad memory of “brighter days” (5) and is therefore perceived and addressed as “notes of woe” (1). The four stanzas then enact the process of reacting to this sad memory of past happy love and final loss, constituting – on the discourse level – a mental narrative sequence, first addressed to the triggering “notes”, then to (dead) Thyrza (13). Within this sequence the speaker repeatedly – in a compact, condensed form – refers to the happy past, the narrative of his former happy life with Thyrza, on the story level.

Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Away, away, ye notes of woe! Be silent, thou once soothing strain, Or I must flee from hence—for, oh! I dare not trust those sounds again. To me they speak of brighter days— But lull the chords, for now, alas! I must not think, I may not gaze, On what I am—on what I was.

36 See Marchand (1965, 119–21; 1971, 38, 44, 107, 435).



2.3 Lord Byron (1811, 1812) 

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

The voice that made those sounds more sweet Is hush’d, and all their charms are fled And now their softest notes repeat A dirge, an anthem o’er the dead! Yes, Thyrza! yes, they breathe of thee, Beloved dust! since dust thou art; And all that once was harmony Is worse than discord to my heart!

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

’Tis silent all!—but on my ear The well remember’d echoes thrill; I hear a voice I would not hear, A voice that now might well be still: Yet oft my doubting soul ’t will shake; Even slumber owns its gentle tone, Till consciousness will vainly wake To listen, though the dream be flown.

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Sweet Thyrza! waking as in sleep, Thou art but now a lovely dream; A star that trembled o’er the deep, Then turn’d from earth its tender beam. But he who through life’s dreary way Must pass, when heaven is veil’d in wrath, Will long lament the vanish’d ray That scatter’d gladness o’er his path. December 6, 1811 (Page 1970, 63; McGann 1980, 349–350).

 31

In the course of the four stanzas the speaker successively presents four gradually shifting attitudes towards the experience and the memory of his painful loss, from vehement rejection at the beginning to qualified acceptance at the end. The process starts, in the first stanza, with the recollection of the speaker’s former love for Thyrza, which is evoked by a melody she used to sing. He spontaneously attempts to suppress the memory of his love (“Away […] / Be silent”, 1–2; “lull the chords”, 6; “I must not think, I may not gaze”, 7), because the renewed remembrance of the loss and the intensified awareness of its devastating effect on his emotional state (as apparent in the difference between “what I am” and “what I was”, 8) are too painful to bear. But in spite of its attempted suppression the memory has, in fact, been revived: “to me they [that is, those sounds] speak of brighter days” (5).  – The second stanza then revives this memory in further details, the memory of the voice, the notes, the singer Thyrza herself (who is now addressed directly) as well as, repeatedly and emphatically, of her death (“hush’d”, “fled”, 10; “dead”, 12; “dust”, 14). He thus specifies and links the two points of the past narrative: happy love and painful loss. The emphasis

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 Peter Hühn

on her death is enhanced by the changed impression of the melody, which was once made particularly sweet by her voice (9) but now is perceived as a “dirge, an anthem o’er the dead” (12). Like the first stanza, the second ends with a reference to the disturbing effect of the loss on the speaker – in the painful contrast between former “harmony” and present “discord” (15–16). The third stanza advances the activation of the memory one step further. While up to that point the speaker had been reminded of his former love by actually hearing the melody, he now actively calls to mind Thyrza’s voice in the absence of such an external stimulus (“’Tis silent all”, 17), his strong latent desire finally overcoming his open reluctance (“I hear a voice I would not hear”, 19; “oft my doubting soul ‘t [that is, the voice] will shake”, 21; “consciousness will vainly wake / to listen”, 23–24). The memory of the beloved is now fully accepted and even welcomed (as emphasized by the references to it in every line of this stanza). Though the happy memory is accompanied by a renewed awareness of the loss (“though the dream be flown”, 24), this is mentioned only once at the end, as an afterthought. The last stanza, in its first half, draws out the memory of Thyrza’s life and death more fully than before. She is first addressed and later further characterized in her endearing qualities (“Sweet Thyrza”, 25; “lovely”, 26; “tender”, 28). Then her life and death are rendered in the form of a metaphorical story: “A star that trembled o’er the deep, / Then turn’d from earth its tender beam” (27–28), attributing to her a heavenly quality. Throughout, the recollection of Thyrza includes an awareness of her final loss (“dream”, 26; “turn’d from earth”, 28), but in the manner of mild resignation. In the second half of the stanza the speaker describes his own reactions to Thyrza’s life and death, first dwelling on the sad experience of her loss and his lament (“dreary”, 29; “heaven is veil’d in wrath”, 30; “long lament the vanish’d ray”, 31) but emphatically ending with the focus on the effect she had had on him while still alive: “gladness” (32). The stanza thus balances various aspects of the speaker’s experience and of his reaction to it: references to lover and beloved, love and loss, happy memory of the past and continuing lament at present and in future. The negative aspect, loss and lament about loss, is deliberately played down – by highlighting the positive aspect and by distancing the perspective of the speaker’s own suffering, who in the end refers to himself in the third person (“he”, 29; “his path”, 32). This move of balancing out love and loss in combination with self-detachment then constitutes the event of this poem: The speaker is finally able to cope with his severe loss by acknowledging it as an integral and inevitable component of the experience of love, accepting it as an essential part of his existence and toning down his immediate emotional involvement by adopting an external perspective on himself.

2.3 Lord Byron (1811, 1812) 



 33

2.3.2 “And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair” Like in “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe”, the course of reflections in “And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair” constitutes the basic narrative sequence, the speaker’s evolving attempts to cope with his beloved’s loss, with embedded references to the (condensed) story of her life and death. The eight stanzas of the poem are preceded, on the extradiegetic level, by an epigraph in Latin,37 which – translated into English – states: “Alas, how much less it is to live with those who remain than to remember thee”. This statement, addressed like the poem proper to the dead beloved, anticipates and corroborates the solution the speaker finally (in the eighth stanza) arrives at in his reflections on how to come to terms with her death. And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair ‘Heu, quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!’ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

And thou art dead, as young and fair As aught of mortal birth; And form so soft, and charms so rare, Too soon return’d to Earth! Though Earth received them in her bed And o’er the spot the crowd may tread In carelessness or mirth, There is an eye which could not brook A moment on that grave to look.

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

I will not ask where thou liest low, Nor gaze upon the spot; There flowers or weeds at will may grow, So I behold them not: It is enough for me to prove That what I loved, and long must love, Like common earth can rot; To me there needs no stone to tell, ’Tis Nothing that I loved so well.

19 20 21 22 23

Yet did I love thee to the last As fervently as thou, Who didst not change through all the past, And canst not alter now. The love where Death hath set his seal,

37 The epigraph quotes the inscription on an ornamental urn which the poet William Shenstone (1714–1763) dedicated to a Miss Dolman. See McGann (1981, 390).

34 

 Peter Hühn

24 25 26 27

Nor age can chill, nor rival steal, Nor falsehood disavow: And, what were worse, thou canst not see Or wrong, or change, or fault in me.

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

The better days of life were ours; The worst can be but mine: The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers, Shall never more be thine. The silence of that dreamless sleep I envy now too much to weep; Nor need I to repine, That all those charms have pass’d away; I might have watch’d through long decay.

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

The flower in ripen’d bloom unmatch’d Must fall the earliest prey; Though by no hand untimely snatch’d, The leaves must drop away: And yet it were a greater grief To watch it withering, leaf by leaf, Than see it pluck’d to-day; Since earthly eye but ill can bear To trace the change to foul from fair.

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

I know not if I could have borne To see thy beauties fade; The night that follow’d such a morn Had worn a deeper shade: Thy day without a cloud hath pass’d, And thou wert lovely to the last; Extinguish’d, not decay’d; As stars that shoot along the sky Shine brightest as they fall from high.

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

As once I wept, if I could weep, My tears might well be shed, To think I was not near to keep One vigil o’er thy bed; To gaze, how fondly! on thy face, To fold thee in a faint embrace, Uphold thy drooping head; And show that love, however vain, Nor thou nor I can feel again.

64 Yet how much less it were to gain, 65 Though thou hast left me free,



66 67 68 69 70 71 72

2.3 Lord Byron (1811, 1812) 

 35

The loveliest things that still remain, Than thus remember thee! The all of thine that cannot die Through dark and dread Eternity Returns again to me, And more thy buried love endears Than aught except its living years. February 1812 (Page 1970, 64–65; McGann 1981, 3–4).

The initial situation, in the first stanza, is characterized on the one hand by the speaker’s compact recapitulation of the stages of his beloved’s brief existence  – birth (2), life in youth and beauty (“young and fair”, 1), death (1), and burial (4–5) – and on the other hand his inability and unwillingness to look at the grave, that is to say, to face and accept her loss. The severity of this emotional difficulty is emphasized by the impersonal, self-detached form in which the inability is expressed (“There is an eye […]”, 8). The resistance to acknowledging the fact of his beloved’s death is then successively dissolved in the course of the subsequent eight stanzas. The second stanza re-formulates his unwillingness by “disnarrating” (Prince 1988) the look at the grave, that is, by repeatedly stating that he did not look (“I will not ask where thou liest low, / Nor gaze upon the spot”, 10–11; also: 13). But this refusal is paradoxically justified by his acute awareness of the fact of death: “To me there needs no stone to tell / ‘Tis Nothing that I loved so well” (17–18). In the third stanza the speaker then shifts the focus from the fact of his beloved’s death to the story of her former life and their mutual love experience. But, in a surprising and, again, paradoxical move, he couples both aspects by radically transforming and re-valuating death from a negative to a positive quality: “The love where Death has set his seal / Nor age can chill, nor rival steal, / Nor falsehood disavow” (23–25; similarly: 20–22, 26–27). The beloved’s death precluded the later deterioration both of her beauty and their mutual love relationship and thus paradoxically made her and their love effectively unchangeable. Seen in this light, the developing story of their love has been arrested and turned into an eternal, unchanging state, a “non-story”. This imaginative transformation of death and loss into the permanent preservation of life and love functions as the event in this poem, the eventful turning point in the speaker’s reflections. The paradoxical notion of the beloved’s changeless story preserved by death is then pursued further and elaborated on in the subsequent three stanzas. It is contrasted with the speaker’s present personal misery in the fourth stanza, illustrated by flower imagery in the fifth stanza and highlighted by meteorological and astronomical similes in the sixth stanza, in combination, however, with a renewed reference to the violent ending (“extinguished”, 52). The emphasis on the end (rather than on the preserved perfect life) leads, in the

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 Peter Hühn

seventh stanza, to the regret of not having been present at the beloved’s hour of death to comfort her (“To think I was not near to keep / One vigil o’er thy bed”, 57–58). In the last stanza the speaker emphatically takes up the notion again, which was first developed in the third stanza, of the unchanged perfection of his beloved’s person and life preserved in memory: “The all of thine that cannot die / Through dark and dread Eternity / Returns again to me” (68–70). This memory is valued above “[t]he loveliest things that still remain” (66)38 – second best only to the actual experience itself (“its living years”, 72). Basically the speaker’s strategy to cope with his beloved’s loss consists in the re-definition of the brief span of life and love cut off by early death as a gain, instead of as a loss: the escape from change and decay and the preservation of the perfect experience in memory – a memory which the speaker initially had been unable to accept fully. The vitality of the memory and the continuing imaginative presence of the beloved are underpinned by the direct address to her throughout the poem. This solution is finally qualified, however, by the awareness that living itself was nevertheless superior to remembering it: “more thy buried love endears / Than aught, except its living years” (71–72). In these two poems Byron presents two different coping strategies and eventful closures for the same loss, with respect both to the biographical background and to the (fictional) situation presupposed in the texts: the resigned reconciliation with the unalterable loss and its acceptance as an integral part of life in “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” in contrast to the paradoxical transformation of loss into the precondition, as it were, of a gain in “And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair”. This difference in the closing event is based on a re-conceptualization of the antagonistic force within the narrative: in the first poem this is the undeniable death of the beloved, in the second her potential decay, which was prevented by her death. One might tentatively link the difference between these two ways of coping with loss to the metrical and prosodic structures of each poem. The relatively straightforward process of accepting the inevitable in “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” corresponds to the simple pattern of alternating rhymes and equal line lengths (tetrameter): ababcdcd; similarly, the rhetorically contrived solution of treating loss as a gain in “Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair” seems reflected in the artificial complexity of the rhyme scheme with varying line lengths (trimeters, tetrameters): ababccbdd, which resembles the Spenserian stanza (ababbcbcc).

38 This idea is expressed in the epigraph.

2.4 Edgar Allan Poe: “Lenore” (1844–1849) As in the other examples of this chapter, the topic of Poe’s “Lenore” is an individual’s reaction to the loss by death of a beloved person, but the mode of presentation is significantly different. In this poem the reaction is not rendered from the subjective position in isolation as in all other cases but thematized and vehemently contested in a dramatic interchange between the lover, Guy De Vere, and an unnamed representative of the community with respect to the proper reaction to the premature death of beautiful young Lenore, thereby confronting the private and the public perspectives with each other. The aristocratic name of the lover and the references to Lenore’s wealth and pride (8) may be taken to suggest a court-setting in a traditional romance context, in some remote past, which is also underscored by the somewhat archaic, non-colloquial language used (see the pronouns “thou” and “ye”, exclamations like “avaunt”, images like “golden bowl”). The interchange between the two speakers is conducted through alternating stanzas, opened by the unnamed member of the community admonishing De Vere to join the public mourning rituals. De Vere, in the second stanza, responds by accusing the community of causing Lenore’s death. The other speaker, in his answer in the third stanza, then seems to concede the guilt. Finally, in the fourth stanza, De Vere ends the interchange by envisaging Lenore’s ascent to heaven and by corroborating his refusal to mourn. That De Vere’s two stanzas are enclosed by quotation marks may either be intended merely to distinguish his utterances from the others, or it might, possibly, indicate that the overall level of utterance and perspective of the poem is that of the community member, who – as the superordinate “narrator” – quotes the deviant attitude of De Vere in order to stress its deviance. Lenore 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! – the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll! – a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; – And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? – weep now or nevermore! See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come! let the burial rite be read – the funeral song be sung! – An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young – A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

8 “Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride; 9 And, when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her – that she died! 10 How shall the ritual, then, be read? – the requiem how be sung 11 By you – by yours, the evil eye, – by yours the slanderous tongue 12 That did to death the innocence that died and died so young?”

38  13 14 15 16 17 18 19

 Peter Hühn

Peccavimus: – yet rave not thus! but let a Sabbath song Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong! The sweet Lenore hath gone before, with Hope that flew beside, Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride – For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies, The life upon her yellow hair, but not within her eyes – The life still there upon her hair, the death upon her eyes.

20 “Avaunt! – avaunt! to friends from fiends the indignant ghost is riven – 21 From Hell unto a high estate within the utmost Heaven: – 22 From moan and groan to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven! 23 Let no bell toll, then, lest her soul, amid its hallowed mirth, 24 Should catch the note as it doth float up from the damnéd Earth! 25 And I – tonight my heart is light: – no dirge will I upraise, 26 But waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days!” (Mabbott 2000, 336–337).

The controversy underlying the interchange of the two speakers refers to two narrative sequences and the problem of their appropriate, faithful rendering and representation. Both are introduced in the first stanza and then taken up and debated in all subsequent stanzas. The first narrative concerns Lenore’s life and early death (“broken is the golden bowl! The spirit flown forever!”, 1; “a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river”, 2), which as the initial negative event motivates the interchange of utterances in the poem. The second narrative sequence represents the appropriate course of action to be performed in reaction to the result of the first narrative, that is, the mourning ritual which in itself is constituted as a sequence of acts (“Let the bell toll”, 2; “weep”, 3; read “the burial rite”, sing “the funeral song”, 5; sing an “anthem” and a “dirge”, 7). Whereas the narrative of Lenore’s death is told retrospectively, the references to the mourning ritual are prospective and adhortative: De Vere is admonished to perform these rites. In the second stanza De Vere addresses both narratives rejecting each in the form in which it was offered by the other speaker. As to the story of Lenore’s living and dying, De Vere accusingly adds the cause of her death: the community’s hatred and slander (“the evil eye […] the slanderous tongue / […] did to death the innocence that died and died so young”, 11–12). And on account of this guilt he cannot accept nor join the funeral rites – the second narrative sequence – as performed by the members of the community (“How shall the ritual, then, be read? – the requiem how be sung / By you […]?”, 10–11). De Vere’s opposition to the public sphere is foregrounded on the formal level by the marked difference in length of this stanza from the preceding one (as well as from the two following ones): It comprises only five instead of seven lines. In his reply, in the third stanza, the other speaker accepts the guilt (“Peccavimus” – we have sinned) and



2.4 Edgar Allan Poe: “Lenore” (1844–1849) 

 39

thus De Vere’s version of Lenore’s story and the causes of her death but rejects his indignation (“rave not thus!”) and therefore also his refusal to join the public mourning rites, since her early death caused no wrong but instead enabled her to ascend to heaven: “Peccavimus: – yet rave not thus! but let a Sabbath song / Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!” (13–14, also 15). In accordance with this emphasis, De Vere in his final reply focuses on the second part of Lenore’s story, her redemption and ascent to heaven, which he now triumphantly “narrates” as presently being achieved: “the indignant ghost is riven  – / From Hell unto a high estate within the utmost Heaven: – / From moan and groan to a golden throne beside the King of heaven!” (20–22). Thus convinced of the positive completion of Lenore’s fate, De Vere emphatically repeats his refusal to mourn and his rejection of the public burial rite (“Let no bell toll”, 23), but for reasons different from before – not because of the suspected guilt and insincerity on the part of the public but because of the possible detrimental effect on Lenore’s joy (23–24). Instead of a dirge he offers a paean, a song of praise. In the course of his interchange with the representative of the community – constituting an enacted narrative sequence on the discourse level  – De Vere’s mood seems to have undergone a decisive change, from rage and aggressive accusation of the community (presumably expressing his wild grief, cf. 16) to contentment and reconciliation with Lenore’s death (“tonight my heart is light”, 25). This change seems to indicate a gradual mutual approximation of public and private attitudes through the exchange of statements. On the one side, the other speaker concedes the common guilt in bringing about Lenore’s death and attempts to alleviate De Vere’s wild pain by pointing to her ascent to heaven, thus trying to re-integrate him into the community, and on the other side, De Vere accepts the emphasis on her redemption. At the end of the interchange the lover thus seems to have come to terms with his severe loss, successfully shifting his concern from his own needs and emotions to those of the beloved and her happy “flight”. However, by declining to participate in the social conventions and announcing a song of praise instead of a dirge, De Vere effectively, as it were, snatches Lenore from the public sphere and claims her for himself: “[I will] waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days” (26). He insists on his subjective position in opposition to the community, which can be seen as a Romantic concept. A number of features, however, confuse and undermine the serious thematic focus on loss and the grief about the loss of a beloved person in “Lenore”: the romance-like setting and the archaic language (second-person pronouns and inflectional verb-endings, obsolete and conspicuously literary exclamations, words and images like “avaunt”, “float on the Stygian river”, “debonair”, “hallowed”, “fiends”, “waft”, “a golden throne beside the King of Heaven”); the mixture of heterogeneous or contradictory implications (Christian versus pagan

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 Peter Hühn

concepts in “saintly soul” and the “Stygian river”, in “spirit” and “soul”, 1–2; “saintly soul” versus “wealth” and “pride”, 8); the emphasis on conspicuously elaborate and melodious sound patterns in consecutive lines as well as within individual lines (end rhymes and internal rhymes; alliterations as in “low lies thy love, Lenore”, 4; consonances as in “bell toll”, 2; assonances and repetitions of vowels as in “broken is the golden bowl! – the spirit flown forever”, 1). These features combine to foreground the poetic constructedness of the process of coping with loss and the employment of the conventional script of mourning and consolation (especially the notion of the beloved’s ascent to heaven). The principles and devices of such a contrived poetic construction are outlined by Poe in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) with respect to his own poem “The Raven”. What he says there about the suitable topic of such a constructed poem applies to “Lenore” as well (Weekes 2002, 148), including even the name of the beloved: When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic of the world – and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover. (Thompson 2004, 680).

Thus “Lenore” is “in part a poem about itself” (Haliburton 1973, 160), self-referentially displaying the topic of death and loss and staging the role of the lover as he reacts to and copes with the death of a beloved person. The specifically dialogical setup of “Lenore” foregrounds the situation of coping with loss and places it into a dramatic constellation, highlighting the lover in his subjective feelings in opposition to the unfeeling collective public. The high degree of self-consciousness to which this technique of displaying the topic of intense emotion and subjective solitariness testifies is Romantic both on account of the emphasis on the subjectivity of the experience and on its foregrounded presentation.

2.5 Seamus Heaney: “Mid-Term Break” (1966) The negative event in Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break”, which initially triggers the speaker’s utterance, is the death of a little boy. But the poem does not directly tell the story of his death and how he died. Rather, the boy’s eldest brother narrates, from his subjective perspective, his own perceptions and experiences from the moment he was informed of the death while away at school until the next morning when he goes to see his little brother’s corpse in the coffin. It is only at the very end of this sequence that the manner of the boy’s death is succinctly summarized (“the bumper knocked him clear”, 21). Thus the poem actually tells two stories: The (compact) story of the little boy’s death is embedded in the (more detailed) story of his brother’s experience and reaction during this crisis period.

Mid-Term Break

1 2 3

I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells, knelling classes to a close. At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

4 5 6

In the porch I met my father crying – He had always taken funerals in his stride – And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

7 8 9

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand

10 And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’. 11 Whispers informed strangers that I was the eldest, 12 Away at school, as my mother held my hand 13 In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. 14 At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived 15 With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. 16 Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops 17 And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him 18 For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, 19 Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, 20 He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. 21 No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. 22 A four-foot box, a foot for every year. (Heaney 1990, 7).

42 

 Heilna du Plooy

The title of the poem, “Mid-Term Break”, is deceptively innocuous and ordinary, carrying associations of the leisure of holidays, but the real meaning of the title becomes clear when the poem is reinterpreted retrospectively. Not only the college term but also the narrator’s life (and by implication also the lives of his entire family) is interrupted by a break, a breach, namely the death of his little brother in a car accident. The unexpected end of a child’s short life is the most radical interruption of all and reading backwards makes one aware of the wry irony of the title. The poem is written in the past tense indicating that the happenings are recounted by the eldest brother retrospectively from a temporal distance, some time after the event.39 But they are mediated simultaneously from his subjective perspective at that time in the past: That is, the eldest brother is the focalizer acutely perceiving the details of the situation, but presenting his perceptions as if from the outside (“from without”) and understating or rather hiding his own emotional reaction. The understatement may be interpreted as the stunned reaction of the brother who realizes that everything has changed irrevocably. The distanced voice is sustained up to the last lines of the poem, in which his confrontation with the little brother’s corpse is described.40 On the discourse level, the narration begins after the event without, however, referring to it directly. What has happened is little by little hinted at, and finally the main story of the accident is embedded in the story of the elder brother’s reaction. The focalization is an important aspect of his reaction to his brother’s death. He obviously shies away from acknowledging the reality of the event.41 Accordingly, he filters and regulates his perceptions. Since he does not dwell on his own emotions and reactions, the poem presents a view from a distance, choosing to record all those things that are different from what they used to be in the past, the changes in his own circumstances as well as in the behavior of other people. The description of his arrival at home also remains focused on the external manifestations of the conduct of other people: his father’s crying, his mother’s shocked gasps of grief, the old men embarrassing him by treating him like a grown-up while expressing their condolences. The indirect style of narration contributes to the narrative suspense created in the poem and increases the shocking impact of the event, when at the very end the details of what had happened are revealed. Though no direct information is

39 Heaney wrote this poem ten years after his brother Christopher’s death. See Corcoran (1998, 243–44). 40 Cf. the description of the speaker’s distanced perspective in Foster (1989, 20–21). 41 In partial conformity with Freud’s (1955) trauma concept.



2.5 Seamus Heaney: “Mid-Term Break” (1966) 

 43

provided, a somber tone is established in the first four stanzas, which suggests that someone has died. While the speaker is waiting in the sick bay, he is “counting bells” and the bells are “knelling classes to a close” (2). These references to bells clearly signify that a death has occurred, but there is no mention of who has died. In the course of the subtle and indirect narration, Big Jim Evans is recorded as merely referring to “a hard blow” (6), which can be read literally as well as figuratively; other people are described as expressing their condolences and the parents as crying. Mention of the whispers about the narrator being “the eldest” (11) suggests that the grief might concern a sibling, but only in the fifth stanza is the first direct piece of information provided: “At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived / With the corpse” (14). And still there is no mention of whose corpse it is. The last seven lines of the poem are devoted to the speaker’s own conduct in direct confrontation with the accident: how he goes to the room where the casket with the body is and looks at the dead little brother with only the “poppy bruise on his left temple” (19) as an indication of his injuries. Only then is revealed what actually happened: “the bumper knocked him clear” (21). The last line of the poem indicates for the first time the thoughts of the narrator: “A four foot box, a foot for every year” (22). In the narrative structure of the poem the levels of story and discourse function in different ways. On the story level the death of the little boy sets a chain of actions and reactions in motion, and some of these find a place in the selected narrative details. On the discourse level the narrator tells his story by focussing on everything around the central event avoiding explicit mention of the harsh fact itself. This is an effective way of working through, first refraining from confronting the painful loss and then at a meaningful point in the text, revealing the whole truth. The narrational style thus acquires an iconic meaning, illustrating as well as mediating the emotional resistance of the narrator, who at first does not acknowledge the harsh reality and is only belatedly able to face the trauma. This narrative strategy is especially effective in communicating the shocking impact of the event to the reader.42 The intensity of feeling and the tenderness experienced are made apparent only when the narrator looks at the corpse of the little brother. His tenderness is reflected by the details mentioned, such as the snowdrops and candles, which “soothed the bedside”. The casket is described as a bed or cot as if the little boy were asleep. The bruise is also described as a flower, as “a poppy bruise”, which links up with the snowdrops placed in the room. In the flower-filled room the casket is a “four-foot box” and the central piece of information is only then pre-

42 For a brief description of the two perspectives, cf. Parker (1993, 68).

44 

 Heilna du Plooy

sented by pointing out the connection between the four foot size of the casket and the short four years of the little boy’s life. As to eventfulness, the event of the little boy’s death can be defined in two respects, that is, in relation to two different positions or perspectives – the untimely curtailment of a small child’s life as generally viewed by any human being (and by the reader) and as specifically experienced by the child’s eldest brother. The first alternative is clearly foregrounded by the structure of the poem, namely the suspenseful postponement of the shocking relevation of the boy’s age until the very end. The second alternative, the relevance of the boy’s death for the eldest brother and his personal development, is not spelt out explicitly nor even implicitly and can only speculatively and cautiously be inferred from the situation as a common experience. As a result of this event one might assume the narrator’s introduction to grief and his first encounter with the uncompromising nature of death as part of the process of coming of age, of crossing the boundary between the innocence and ignorance of childhood or youth and the maturity brought about by the knowledge and experience of the harsh realities of life (Foster 1989, 3; Regan 2007, 11–12). It has to be stressed, however, that this effect of the event on the narrator’s development is merely a speculative assumption on the basis of common human experiences – the only oblique indication in the text being the eldest brother’s respectful treatment as an adult by the old men (8–11). What is important about the eventfulness of Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” is the conspicuous foregrounding of the devastating event as such with only speculative implications about the relevance for the narrator-speaker and, especially, without any clear indication of how he tries to cope with the experience of loss. Indeed, the point of the speaker’s narrative recollection of the past event seems not to be the attempt to come to terms with (and alleviate) the painful loss but rather to revive and intensify the experience in its painfulness. The intensity of the recollected shock of being directly confronted with the small boy’s tiny corpse is underscored by linking the last two lines of the poem by rhyme, the two lines which refer to the lethal accident are the boy’s age and the only rhyme in the entire text (Regan 2007, 12).

2.6 Eavan Boland: “The Blossom” (1998) and “The Pomegranate” (1994) The constellation and the narrative setup in Eavan Boland’s “The Blossom” and “The Pomegranate” differ from the other examples discussed in this chapter in that the speaker, a woman and mother, does not react to a loss which has already occurred but to a loss that will, by necessity, occur in future  – the foreseeable loss of her beloved daughter not through death but on account of the child’s inevitable, natural development into an independent personal existence as an adult. This is a basic human experience of specific existential significance for women and mothers,43 rendered here in association with biblical and classical myths as its frame and script, namely in the terms of the Judeo-Christian myth of the garden of Eden and the Greek and Roman myth of Ceres and Persephone44. Apart from “The Blossom” and “The Pomegranate”, Boland has addressed this imminent loss in a number of other poems, frequently using one or the other of the same myths or their combination.45

2.6.1 “The Blossom” As in several other poems about the speaker’s relationship to her daughter,46 “The Blossom” obliquely alludes to the story of Adam and Eve’s fall and expulsion from Eden in Genesis as the consequence of eating the fruit from the forbid-

43 The exceptionally close bond between mother and daughter is described by American poet Adrienne Rich as “the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement” (1986, 226). Rich traces the strength of this special bond to a fundamental similarity in their self-image: “Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other […] a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge between two bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other” (220). See Müller (2004, 89, 92) for a reference to the importance of Rich for the development of Boland’s poetry. 44 In this as in her other poems drawing on this myth, Boland uses the Latin name for the mother (Demeter in Greek) and the Greek name for the daughter (Proserpina in Latin). 45 For instance in “Night Feed”, “Partings”, “Endings” and “In the Garden” (1975), “The Making of an Irish Goddess” (1990), “This Moment” and “Legends. For Eavan Frances” (1994), “Daughter”, “Ceres Looks at the Morning” and “The Lost Land” (1998). Boland usually uses the motif of the apple for an oblique allusion to the biblical story of Eden. – For an overview of Boland’s use of these two myths in connection with the mother-daughter relationship in her poetry, see Müller (2004) and Müller (2005, 231–253), a slightly revised version of the earlier article. 46 For instance, in “Endings”, “In the Garden” (1975), “This Moment” (1994) and “Ceres Looks at the Morning” (1998).

46 

 Peter Hühn

den tree, commonly interpreted as an apple tree (11).47 This story, employed as the script for the narrative development of the poem – the growth of the fruit from the apple blossom to the ripe apple falling to the ground (30) – is coupled with two other temporal sequences: the course of the day from darkness to light (see for example: “after a long night”, 4; “morning”, 1; “Light starting”, 2; “dawn”, 9) and the course of the year from spring to summer (“May”, 1; “blossom on the appletree”, 7, “summer”, 22).

The Blossom

1 2

A May morning. Light starting in the sky.

3 4 5 6

I have come here after a long night. Its senses of loss. Its unrelenting memories of happiness.

7 8 9 10

The blossom on the apple tree is still in shadow, its petals half-white and filled with water at the core, in which the freshness and secrecy of dawn are stored even in the dark.

11 12

How much longer will I see girlhood in my daughter?

13 14 15 16

In other seasons I knew every leaf on this tree. Now I stand here almost without seeing them

17 18 19 20 21

and so lost in grief I hardly notice what is happening as the light increases and the blossom speaks, and turns to me with blonde hair and my eyebrows and says –

22 23 24 25

imagine if I stayed here, even for the sake of your love, what would happen to the summer? To the fruit?

47 Although the Bible does not name the fruit, tradition assumes this to have been an apple.



2.6 Eavan Boland: “The Blossom” (1998) and “The Pomegranate” (1994) 

 47

26 Then holds out a dawn-soaked hand to me, 27 whose fingers I counted at birth 28 years ago. 29 And touches mine for the last time. 30 And falls to earth. (Boland 2005, 262–263).

These sequential patterns, especially that of the fruit’s seasonal ripening process, are directly and intimately linked to the growth of the daughter (see: “girlhood”, 12; “what is happening / […] the blossom speaks, / and turns to me”, 18–20; “whose fingers I counted at birth”, 27). In fact, these two chronological lines – blossom and girl – are identified with each other: “the blossom speaks […] / with blonde hair and my eyebrows” (19/21). The particular phase of this sequence selected for the speaker’s utterance is the daughter’s imminent momentous transition from girlhood to adulthood, the eventful change in her life. According to the story of man’s fall in Genesis, the eating of the forbidden fruit causes and signifies the emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness, the discovery of sexuality and the development of adult independence, responsibility, and conscience – a specific meaning which is merely implied in the poem but can be inferred by the reader on the basis of his world knowledge (Müller 2004, 94, 96). The development – the ripening of the fruit and likewise the physical and cognitive maturation of the girl – are explicitly declared, by both blossom and girl, to be natural and necessary achievements (24–25). However, though natural, the loss (5) which this growth entails for the mother is described as painful, and the intensity of the pain is constituted by the degree of happiness she experienced before, as is stated at the beginning of the reflections, in the close coupling of “Its [that is, a long night’s] senses of loss” and “Its unrelenting memories of happiness” (5 and 6). One essential cause for the severity of the loss seems to be that the daughter is perceived by the mother as an extension of her own identity  – her augmented self directly retaining some of her own features (“my eyebrows”, 21), as an embodiment of parts of her own life (Müller 2004, 97). This bonding of mother and daughter resembles that between father and son in Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son” (see above 2.1) The poem ends with the completion of the ripening process of fruit and girl, the fall of the apple to the ground, and thus by implication with the daughter’s loss to the mother  – her development into a grown-up person, by which the special attachment finally ends, which began with her birth (“Then holds out a dawn-soaked hand to me, / whose fingers I counted at birth / years ago”, 26–28)

48 

 Peter Hühn

and which always also meant physical closeness and touching the body, now occurring for the last time (29).48 The last line thus confirms the negative event of loss. But this seemingly conclusive and definitive acknowledgement of the end is not the dominating and lasting attitude of the speaker’s reflections in the poem as a whole. Before the finally approaching end is mentioned, a consoling element – an argument – has already been introduced, which alleviates the expectation of loss in advance. The daughter herself justifies the severing from her mother and pleads for its acceptance. Although aware of her mother’s intense love (23), she argues for the impersonal necessity of fulfilling her potential growth and destiny in a rhetorical question: “what would happen to the summer? / To the fruit?” (24–25). The plea is all the more forceful insofar as the daughter does not set her own subjective needs and happiness against her mother’s but appeals to a superordinate impersonal value: the summer, that is, the inherent dynamic course of the vegetational cycle, the overall order of nature. The force of the argument is further strengthened by the fact that the daughter does not actually speak herself but that her utterance is no more than a projection by the mother, that is, that the mother ultimately advances this argument against her own personal grief. The consoling effect of the justification subtly but effectively undermines beforehand the ensuing negative event. On the other hand, the justification does not seem to constitute a completely successful alleviation of the pain of loss in the speaker’s mind, since the poem concludes with a reference to the daughter’s imminent change in the negative image of a fall (30). The mother’s strategy of coping with the foreseeable loss of her child is thus marked by Boland’s characteristic ambivalence about the effectiveness of poetic devices as well as the relevance of myth – their hypostasizing and eternizing power against change and loss is carefully established, but at the same time it is undermined and, as it were, deconstructed. It is both advanced as valid and shown to be deficient – the cyclical renewal of the myth does not apply to humans.

2.6.2 “The Pomegranate” The same problem of the mother facing the future loss of her daughter is represented with reference to the classical myth of Ceres, the vegetation goddess,

48 Allen Randolph (2014, 145) misses the point of the poem when she interprets the growing up of a daughter as leading to the “transformation of language”.



2.6 Eavan Boland: “The Blossom” (1998) and “The Pomegranate” (1994) 

 49

as script for “The Pomegranate”. The myth narrates how Ceres’s daughter Persephone is abducted by Hades, the God of the underworld, to become his wife. When Ceres protests against her daughter’s loss by laying waste to the world’s vegetation, Persephone is given back to her. But because she had eaten something (namely a pomegranate) while in the underworld, she is permanently bound to it. So, as a compromise, she can stay with her mother only for part of the year and has to return to the underworld during winter. The poem opens with a condensed summary of this traditional myth, here called a “legend” (1–5), naming the decisive stages of the story development: “a daughter lost in hell”, “found and rescued there”. This narrative is then presented as an overall (favorite) script for the whole of the speaker’s existence: She “can enter it anywhere” (7), namely in her two essential roles in the changing course of her life – during her childhood as an “exiled daughter” and during her adulthood as a mother with a teenaged daughter. This progressive story of her life (“at first”, 10; “later”, 12; “I was Ceres then”, 19) in terms of the myth is rendered in the past tense and leads up to the point in time, winter (20), when the daughter is obliged to leave and descend to the underworld (“inescapable”, 22), imaginatively accompanied for part of the way by her mother (“we”, 22), who, however, finally is left alone (“for me”, 23).

The Pomegranate

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

The only legend I have ever loved is the story of a daughter lost in hell. And found and rescued there. Love and blackmail are the gist of it. Ceres and Persephone the names. And the best thing about the legend is I can enter it anywhere. And have. As a child in exile in a city of fogs and strange consonants, I read it first and at first I was an exiled child in the crackling dusk of the underworld, the stars blighted. Later I walked out in a summer twilight searching for my daughter at bed-time. When she came running I was ready to make any bargain to keep her. I carried her back past whitebeams and wasps and honey-scented buddleias. But I was Ceres then and I knew winter was in store for every leaf on every tree on that road. Was inescapable for each one we passed.

50  23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

 Peter Hühn

And for me.               It is winter and the stars are hidden. I climb the stairs and stand where I can see my child asleep beside her teen magazines, her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit. The pomegranate! How did I forget it? She could have come home and been safe and ended the story and all our heart-broken searching but she reached out a hand and plucked a pomegranate. She put out her hand and pulled down the French sound for apple and the noise of stone and the proof that even in the place of death, at the heart of legend, in the midst of rocks full of unshed tears ready to be diamonds by the time the story was told, a child can be hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance. The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured. The suburb has cars and cable television. The veiled stars are above ground. It is another world. But what else can a mother give her daughter but such beautiful rifts in time? If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift. The legend will be hers as well as mine. She will enter it. As I have. She will wake up. She will hold the papery flushed skin in her hand. And to her lips. I will say nothing. (Boland 2005, 215–216).

This narrative rendering of the imminent loss of the daughter is immediately continued (in the same line, 23: “It is winter”) with an abrupt shift from the mythic to a “realistic” context. The continuation is set in a contemporary suburban environment and told in the present tense, likewise approaching the time of separation. But one element from the mythic script is retained linking the mythic and the contemporary setting and suggesting an interpretation of the speaker’s present situation and its future development in terms of the legend: The daughter has plucked a pomegranate, which if consumed will cause her definitive loss to the mother. The consumption of the pomegranate here has the same function as the eating of the forbidden fruit (the “apple”) in Genesis, the awakening of sexuality and the transformation of her into a mature and adult woman (Müller 2004, 93–94, 96). The story’s progression is advanced up to this point and arrested there



2.6 Eavan Boland: “The Blossom” (1998) and “The Pomegranate” (1994) 

 51

for the time being, just before the imminent eventful change in the daughter’s life, her “awakening” (see 51), her growing up to become an adult, a sexually mature woman leading her own, independent life (Schrage-Früh 2004, 73). At this point in time (where the child is still “asleep” [26], literally and metaphorically) both developments seem possible yet. On the one hand, there is “still a chance” (41) of preventing the girl’s decisive transformation and independence, which would end the story, keep her safely at home and spare her mother the pain of loss (29–31) – the mother could warn her (41). But on the other hand, the daughter has already plucked the fruit (32–33) and will naturally be inclined to eat it (will be “hungry”, 41) and, in addition, the mythic model prefigured this turn (49–50). The mother deliberates whether to interfere in the imminent change but decides against it: “I will say nothing” (54). That is, she deliberately accepts the coming loss of her daughter. This decision is presented as particularly hard owing to the strength of her attachment, which was spelled out in the first phase of the narrative: “When she came running I was ready / to make any bargain to keep her” (15–16). The mother advances three reasons for her decision to do nothing and let her daughter go to become independent and lead her own life: This renunciation would prove a precious gift, a benefit for the daughter (“such / beautiful rifts in time”, 46–47), the preciousness of the gift entails the intensity of the grief (48), and the mother herself had undergone the same change before in conformity with the “legend” (50). The first two reasons are motivated by an unselfish concern for her daughter’s happiness, the third is grounded in the acknowledgement of the impersonal, natural necessity of the development. This last reason: “The legend will be hers as well as mine. / She will enter it. As I have” (49–50), possesses a particular force, since it defines the similarity, the mythic role-identity between mother and daughter, suggesting their special affinity within the script of the myth, the notion that the daughter re-embodies the mother’s self and is a part of it.49 As for the particular form in which this myth is drawn on, its application is conspicuously deprived of the cyclical dimension that is central to it in its classical version. Although the cyclicality is stated in the beginning: “the story of a daughter lost in hell. / And found and rescued there” (2–3, emphasis added), the latter part of the narrative implies a linear rather than a cyclical course. This is obviously presupposed at the end of the first phase of the narrative (“I knew / winter was in store for every leaf”, “Was inescapable for each we passed. / And for me”, 19–23, emphasis added).50 The irreversibility of the development – and

49 See Rich’s discussion of the mother-daughter-relationship (1976, 226). 50 Emphasis in the preceding quotations added.

52 

 Peter Hühn

hence its finality – is further implied at the end of the poem, corroborating and foregrounding the gravity of the coming loss. Boland revises and, as it were, deconstructs the myth in its application to the speaker by acknowledging human mortality against Ceres’s divine timelessness.51 This anti-mythic awareness of living “within history, within linear boundaries of time” implicitly underlies the narrative in this poem and is made explicit in some of her treatments of the Ceres myth in other poems, notably in “The Making of an Irish Goddess” (1990)52: Ceres went to hell with no sense of time. […] But I need time – my flesh and that history – to make the same descent. (Boland 2005, 178: ll. 1–2, 11–13)

In other words, the myth is humanized in its application, and in this critically modified form it functions as a clarifying contrastive script for the rendering and interpretation of a very subjective, personal experience, “as a lens through which to view the contemporary woman’s relationship to her daughter” (Schrage-Früh 2004, 74). This modified form of the myth is relevant for the coping strategy employed in “The Pomegranate”. On the one hand, the speaker rejects the consoling potential of the mythic notion of cyclical recovery and thereby underlines the finality of the loss – in fact, this modification is apt to foreground the painful severity of the loss. On the other hand, the vegetational basis of the myth stresses the inevitability and necessity of the loss as defined by nature – thus facilitating the mother’s acceptance of the coming independence of her daughter as inevitable. The force of this argument is corroborated by her recollection that she herself underwent the same development before, that her daughter as the continuation or replica of her self repeats her precedent, in a kind of cyclical repetition53. This implicit self-related argument is connected and strengthened by the self-less emphasis on

51 Villar-Argáiz repeatedly refers to Boland’s “revisionary” use of myth, her “hybrid” mingling of myth and human history (2007, 240, 247–249, 308, 363). 52 See Schrage-Früh’s (2004, 62–65) analysis of “The Making of an Irish Goddess” under the aspect of temporality. 53 This notion of vicarious identity binding mother and daughter is spelt out explicitly by Boland in “Legends. For Eavan Frances” (1994), dedicated to her daughter Eavan Frances: “Our children are our legends. / You are mine. You have my name. / My hair was once like yours. / And the world / is less bitter to me / because you will re-tell the story” (Boland 2005: 229). See Schrage-Früh (2004: 74–75).



2.6 Eavan Boland: “The Blossom” (1998) and “The Pomegranate” (1994) 

 53

the value of the happiness as a gift to the daughter: “what else / can a mother give her daughter but such / beautiful rifts in time?” (45–47). Boland’s use of myth to stress both the painfulness of loss and its inevitability and imminence can be considered a clear modern(ist) feature54, expressing longing for established stable structures in a period where traditional certainties are radically eroded. The modernity of this feature is further underlined by the subsequent deconstruction of this recourse in the clear acknowledgement of human finitude and mortality. The appeal to mythic models foregrounds human limitations all the more through the added emphasis on the discrepancy between human and mythic conditions.

54 See the pervasive reference to myth in the works of the High Modernists W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and, in prose fiction, James Joyce.

2.7 Summary Out of the ten poems analyzed in this chapter only those written by Ben Jonson and John Donne conform wholly or partly to the conventional pattern (“script”) of the funeral elegy prevalent in early modern England: the progression from lament and praise to consolation. Nevertheless, Jonson’s and Donne’s elegies deviate more or less directly from a straight route to consolation. If understood less schematically, these three elements can be seen to structure the act and process of mourning the death of a beloved person in most if not all cases. For mourning is always motivated by – and depends in its intensity on – the importance of the deceased person for the mourner (“praise”). Moreover, mourning, as an expression of pain and suffering, tends to seek alleviation, that is to say, come to terms with the experience of loss (“consolation”). The poems in this chapter vary particularly in their strategy of coping with grief as well as in the degree to which they finally do come – or else fail to come – to terms with loss; that is, they vary in their achievement of consolation. In two poems (Milton and Heaney) no consolation is achieved. With respect to the value of the deceased person (“praise”) there is less variation: To some extent, this value is defined by the intrinsic qualities of the beloved person, but it ultimately rests on the speaker’s love for him or her, usually merely presupposed or implied in the text rather than stated explicitly. And love presupposes an essential dependence on the other for one’s integrity, stability and happiness. In two special – parallel – cases this dependence on the beloved other assumes a very particular additional shape: The child is seen as the parent’s extended and surviving (second) self – the son for the father in Ben Jonson’s “On His First Son” and the daughter for the mother in Eavan Boland’s “The Blossom” and “The Pomegranate”. All three poems imply a continued latent grief of loss in spite of conscious resignation and acceptance. Although in all examples the loss of a beloved person functions as the initial event which induces and motivates the attempt to cope with the experience and reach some kind of resolution, in two poems the focus of the reflections is directed back to the devastating event itself: Milton’s “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” and Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break”. The setup of these poems (their reference to the experience in the past tense) suggests a retrospective re-presentation or a re-vivification of the loss, from a temporal position some time after the event. In both instances the speaker does not primarily seek alleviation of the loss and consolation but strives to recover and to face (anew) the devastating impact of the loss as such. These poems therefore do not serve as therapeutic devices to cope with loss but aim to re-sharpen the awareness of the loss  – possibly as a starting point for future attempts to come to terms with it, which have not yet

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begun.55 In Heaney’s case, however, another eventful turn may be inferred from the course of the speaker’s experiences: the crossing of the boundary from childhood to adulthood and the initiation into a new phase of life. This potential positive effect of the shattering experience of loss is not explicitly spelt out and only obliquely hinted at in a few subtle signs but might be ascribed to the process. It would qualify as an instance of growth through loss. This is the only poem in which the speaker is an adolescent, or, in other words, in which the speaker recollects the experience of a loss which occurred when he was an adolescent. Only one example  – Ben Jonson’s “On My First Daughter”  – demonstrates what is usually considered the “normal” way of recovery from loss through the successful completion of “the work of mourning” (cf. Freud 1957, 243–245), namely gradually giving up the close emotional attachment to the deceased person (“letting go”).56 That this move succeeds here is facilitated by the extreme youth of the lost person and of the great benefit she is said to gain through her early death (immediate salvation). A similar attempt in his elegy on his son can be seen to be ultimately unsuccessful on account of too strong an attachment. A related conventional move is initiated in the first part of John Donne’s “Since She Whom I Loved”: The speaker begins by trying to replace the lost beloved with another (superior) love object, God (1–6), but immediately abandons this move as not sufficient. In the successful examples of coping with grief the speaker achieves some kind of eventful consolation by successfully integrating the death of the beloved person into a (superior) meaningful structure, which provides coherence and continuity – either for the deceased or, in a few instances, primarily for the speaker himself. In several poems, the speaker finally re-directs his focus and his concern away from himself and his grief to the situation of the deceased person, which in the context of the Christian doctrine is conceived of as salvation and eternal happiness. This traditional move is employed by Jonson both in “On My First Daughter” and (partly) in “On My First Son” and conspicuously foregrounded by Poe in “Lenore”. In a fundamentally different respect this shift from the self to the other, the lost beloved, can be observed in Boland’s “The Blossom” and “The Pomegranate”, where the beloved person herself pleads for the mother’s acceptance of loss and letting go as a natural event which is the fulfillment of freedom, independence and happiness. This pair of poems is the only example where  –

55 This reaction of delayed acknowledgement of the painful loss partly confirms Freud’s (1955) trauma concept. 56 One clear example of such a process is discussed in Chapter 3.4: Emily Dickinson’s “After Great Pain”.

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theoretically – the loss could be prevented and where the protagonist voluntarily refrains from attempting to prevent the loss – for the benefit of the loved one and as an unselfish manifestation of love. A somewhat similar effect of consolation is achieved in a different manner through the paradoxical argument that early death precludes subsequent change in the form of deterioration and degeneration, thus indefinitely preserving the youthful state in its perfection. Jonson’s “On My First Son” and Byron’s “And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair” make use of this notion, which in the last analysis depends on the speaker’s memory and consciousness and thus presents a precarious and purely rhetorical strategy. All these examples share the shift of the focus away from the speaker to the lost person and his or her suggested or postulated preservation: By this the speaker manages to detach himself from his own emotional situation and alleviate his experience of loss and his grief. In two instances the speaker directly addresses and attempts to influence – and alleviate – his own emotional state: Byron’s “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” finally accepts death and loss as part of the experience of life, whereas Jonson in “On My First Son” tries to forestall the repetition of pain on account of loss by vowing never to invest too much love in anyone again. These are two directly opposed attitudes: accepting loss as concomitant with life and love in general versus abandoning love and detaching oneself from life. Donne’s speaker in “Since She Whom I Loved” also focuses directly on his own emotional state but employs a very radical and daring strategy in order to come to terms with his pain: first, by trying to shift his love attachment from the lost person (his wife) to God; then by further shifting his own role from lover (husband) to that of the loved one (wooed by God), reversing the constellation of lover and loved one. In a way, he thereby overcomes the pain of loss by making himself the possible object of loss for someone else (God). As for the relevance of the historical period to the type and degree of eventful closure or its failure, the reference to the traditional, Christian concepts is restricted to the early modern period (Jonson and Donne). But Donne’s move – relying on the Christian background – can be considered a typical metaphysical conceit, exemplifying the exuberant and rhetorical style characteristic of his innovative poetic concept. The elaborate employment of rhetorical devices by Jonson and Donne seems typical for the period, but recurs in Byron. The inevitability of the imminent loss in Boland’s poems is presented in line with the widespread modernist recourse to myth, in a period where traditional certainties are radically eroded, but this recourse itself is deconstructed in the clear acknowledgement of human finiteness and mortality. This appeal to mythic models underlines human limitations through the heightened awareness of the discrepancy between human and mythic conditions. Byron’s final acknowledgement of death and loss as part

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of life is indicative of the Romantic notion of life in its totality. Milton’s rejection of illusion and his refusal to make use of Christian consolation seem modern, especially in view of the fact that his writings are otherwise firmly rooted in a religious context. In the disillusioned confrontation with loss Milton resembles Heaney’s attempt to expose himself directly to the shattering experience. Poe critically foregrounds the conventional attitude in its construedness as well as the Romantic insistence on the priority of subjectivity and the individual self as central in opposition to the collective and society. The text also self-referentially foregrounds the deliberate artifice and artificiality of the poem as a work of art. This survey shows that coping strategies in the reaction to personal loss are mainly period-specific, but not in all cases – Milton being the most obvious exception. A particularly interesting case for a comparison across periods is afforded by Jonson’s “On My First Son” and Boland’s “The Blossom” and “The Pomegranate”. The constellation (father – son, mother – daughter) shows a striking structural similarity; and in spite of specific differences in the speaker’s reactions there is also an emotional similarity: the lingering pain and grief, which ultimately cannot be relieved.

References Allen Randolph, Jody. 2014. Eavan Boland. Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press. Baxter, John. 2010. “Perilous Stuff: Poems of Religious Meditation.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 62(2):89–115. Beaurline, L. A. 1966. “The Selective Principle in Jonson’s Shorter Poems. Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 8:64–74. Boland, Eavan. 2005. New Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet. Cain, William E. 1983. “Self and Others in Two Poems by Ben Jonson.” Studies in Philology 80(2):163–182. Carey, John and Alastair Fowler, eds. 1968. The Poems of John Milton. London: Longman/New York: Norton. Clymer, Lorna. 2010. “The Funeral Elegy in Early Modern Britain: A Brief History.” In Karen Weisman, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, 170–186. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corcoran, Neil. 1998. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study. London: Faber and Faber. Foster, Thomas C. 1989. Seamus Heaney. Dublin: The O’Brie Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1955 [1920]. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In Sigmund Freud. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, edited by James Strachey, 7–23. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1957 [1917]. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In Sigmund Freud. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the

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Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, edited by James Strachey, 243–258. London: Hogarth Press. Gardner, Helen, ed. 1952. John Donne. The Divine Poems. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. Haliburton, David. 1973. Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heaney, Seamus. 1990. New Selected Poems 1966–1987. London: Faber and Faber. Hurley, Michael D. and Michael O’Neill. 2012. Poetic Form: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kay, Dennis. 1990. Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kennedy, David. 2007. Elegy. London/New York: Routledge. Low, Anthony. 1994. “John Donne: ‘The Holy Ghost is Amorous in His Metaphors’.” In John R. Roberts, ed. New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric, 201–221. Columbia/London: University of Missouri Press. Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed. 2000. Edgar Allan Poe. Complete Poems. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Maclean, Hugh, ed. 1974. Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets: Authoritative Texts. Criticism. New York/London: Norton. Marchand, Leslie A. 1965. Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Marchand, Leslie A. 1971. Byron: A Portrait. London: John Murray. McGann, Jerome J., ed. 1980. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works. Vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon. McGann, Jerome J., ed. 1981. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works. Vol. III. Oxford: Clarendon. Milton, John. 1931. The Works of John Milton. Vol. I, Pt. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. Müller, Sabine. 2004. “Apple Blossom and Pomegranate: Eavan Boland’s Mother-Daughter Story.” Anglia 122:89–108. Müller, Sabina. 2007. Through the Mythographer’s Eye: Myth and Legend in the Work of Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland. Tübingen: Francke Verlag. Page, Frederick, ed. 1970 [1904]. Byron: Poetical Works. New Edition, corrected by John Jump. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Parfitt, George, ed. 1996 [1975]. Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems. London: Penguin. Parker, Michael. 1993. Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Prince, Gerald. 1988. “The Disnarrated.” Style 22:1–8. Ray, Robert H. 1990. A John Donne Companion. New York/London: Garland. Regan, Stephen. 2007. “Seamus Heaney and the Modern Irish Elegy.” In Ashby Bland Crowder and Jason David Hall, eds. Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator, 9–25. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rich, Adrienne. 1986 [1976]. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton. Sacks, Peter M. 1985. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Schrage-Früh, Michaela. 2004. Emerging Identities: Myth, Nation and Gender in the Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Medbh McGuckian. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Scodel, Joshua. 1989. “Genre and Occasion in Jonson’s ‘On My First Sonne’.” Studies in Philology 86(2):235–259.

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Shaver, Philip R. and Caroline M. Tancredy. 2001. “Emotion, Attachment, and Bereavement: A Conceptual Commentary.” In Margaret S. Stroebe, Robert O. Hansson, Wolfgang Stroebe, and Henk Schut, eds. Handbook of Bereavement Research: Consequences, Coping, and Care, 63–88. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Smith, A. J., ed. 1986. John Donne: The Complete English Poems. London: Penguin. Thompson, G. R., ed. 2004. The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New York/London: Norton. Tillyard, E. M. W. 1956. The Metaphysicals and Milton. London: Chatto and Windus. Villar-Argáiz, Pilar. 2007. Eavan Boland’s Evolution as an Irish Woman Poet: An Outsider Within an Outsider’s Culture. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen. Weekes, Karin. 2002. “Poe’s feminine ideal.” In Kevin J. Hayes, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, 148–162. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodhouse, A. S. P. and Douglas Bush, eds. 1972. A Variorum Commentary of The Poems of John Milton. Vol. Two: The Minor English Poems, Pt. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

3 Coping with Loss in Love

3.0 Introduction Love is one of the most pervasive topics of lyrical poetry in all periods and literatures, across historical and cultural variations and differences, owing to the vital importance of such an intimate relationship (sexual or otherwise) not only for the individual’s happiness and emotional fulfillment but also for the self’s sense of psychological and existential completion, stability and continuity, as an essential and basic form of social bonding. Because of this fundamental importance the disruption of such a love relationship, the loss or even the merely threatened loss of the beloved, through death, betrayal, desertion or just absence, is always experienced as extremely painful and ultimately life-threatening. In the terminology of the present approach this shattering experience is to be classified as a negative event, a decisive, profoundly disruptive change and destructive turn for the worse. As in the case of a beloved person’s death discussed in the preceding chapter, the negative event of loss in love functions as the triggering impulse for the poem in which the speaker reacts to this severe crisis, trying in some way to come to terms with it. The speaker’s reaction may take diverse forms – for instance, coping by distancing him- or herself from the experience, by expressing, analyzing, explaining and formulating the loss and the pain, finally overcoming the negative experience by re-integrating it into his or her existence or possibly replacing it with a positive event. The fact that this coping attempt is conducted within the medium of a poem is frequently utilized as a conscious factor of the strategy, strengthening the distancing effect. By being presented in a work of art the experience is seemingly removed from the immediate concerns of actual living, although it retains its relevance, since the boundary between fiction and factuality can typically be blurred in poetry. The poems discussed in this chapter represent various examples of coping with the experience of (past, imminent or threatened) loss – in contradistinction to explicitly lamenting or mourning the recent actual death of a loved person, which was the topic of the previous chapter. The experience of loss or threatened loss is thematized in a number of different constellations, situations and contexts: the intimate male friendship with intense and unselfish adoration of a young man and, possibly, patron in the first part of William Shakespeare’s The Sonnets (3.1), the threat of loss posed by imminent physical absence in John Donne’s “The Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (3.2), the progressive stages of losing a beloved by death, who is intimately associated with extra-human nature outside society in William Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems (3.3), the psychological process of experiencing the pain of loss in a highly abstracted form in Emily Dickinson’s “After Great Pain” (3.4), the experience of recollecting, re-activating and re-living the loss of a past happy love which had been superseded by estrangement in Thomas Hardy’s

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“The Voice” (3.5), the loss of the husband through his betrayal and desertion in Sylvia Plath’s “The Other” (3.6) and the belated recapitulation and retrospective analysis of the long-past loss of the wife in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (3.7).

3.1 William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (1609) Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence thematizes a variety of reactions to (threatened or imminent) loss in an intense love-like friendship obliquely within the frame of Petrarchan love poetry. In the original Petrarchan convention a lover, the speaker of the poems, both adores and desires a physically and morally perfect lady. Although his wooing inevitably proves unsuccessful because of the lady’s moral integrity, this frustration of his desire ultimately ennobles the lover, refines his love and defines his self-concept. Shakespeare sets out to resolve the contradictory attitudes of (unselfish) adoration and (selfish) desire – contradictory when directed to one and the same person – by dividing their reference between two persons and addressing separate poems to each: an adorable male friend (sonnets 1 to 126), whom the lover (allegedly) looks at with intimate unselfish love, but without desire, and an erotically fascinating woman, the “dark lady” (sonnets 127 to 152), who willingly gratifies his desire.57 Quasi-narrative developments in the course of the sequence then indicate growing difficulties with this seemingly perfect solution to the problems of adoration and desire: the young man betrays moral flaws and the speaker-lover’s attitude towards him is revealed to be not so unselfish after all; the dark lady turns out to be promiscuous and deceitful and the lover is disgusted with her moral depravity.58 The following six poems selected from the first section of the sequence exemplify the growing instability of the speaker’s relationship with his male friend, the increasing awareness of the depth of his emotional attachment, his existential dependence on him for inner stability, orientation in life and fulfilled living, together with the increasing fear of losing him. The speaker’s attitude is a complex mixture of unselfish love, admiration and adoration as well as latent

57 This presupposes, of course, that the arrangement in the only edition of the sonnets was authorized by Shakespeare. Though this is the generally accepted notion among critics and readers, it has been rejected by some, for example Dubrow (1996). 58 For a general overview of the setup and generic frame of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, cf. for example Kerrigan (1986, 7–63), Schoenfeldt (2010, 57–111). For commentaries on the individual sonnets, see the numerous annotated editions, for example, Booth (1977); Ingram and Redpath (1978); Kerrigan (1986); Evans (1996); Duncan-Jones (1997); West (2007).  – Vendler’s (1997) method of analyzing the sonnets is remotely comparable to the approach in the present study in that she traces linguistic strategies on the lexical, syntactical and morphological as well as semantic levels, referring also to narrative features. But the method is practised rather intuitively and lacks a clear theoretical definition of the categories. And the analyses do not systematically consider the communicative, performative function of the utterances with respect to the relation between speaker and friend.

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(unacknowledged) selfish desire, jealousy and criticism.59 The poems purport to be utterances performed in a quasi-dramatic communication situation and addressed to the friend, either directly or, in a few cases, indirectly, as rhetorical speech-acts.60 Because of this underlying communicative constellation the function of narration is more complex here than in isolated poems.

3.1.1 Sonnet 29 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet, in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings. (Kerrigan 1986, 91).

Only towards the end does this sonnet indicate that the present desolate situation in which the speaker sees himself is caused by the loss of his friend’s love and that his reflections perform an elaborate strategy to recover it. The text traces a narrative development on the level of the speaker’s consciousness resulting in a sudden – eventful – turn (“Haply I think on thee […]”, 10). The first two quatrains express the speaker’s depressed mood in the successive focus on numerous parallel instances of insufficiency: being isolated, outcast and despised, lacking prospects, attractive looks, friends, skills, talents and satisfaction with what he does best. No remedy from God is forthcoming. This mood preoccupies the speaker’s mind, presented in the form of condensed narrative sequences, on-going mental activities as shown by the enumeration of predicates, either finite verbs (“beweep”, “trouble”, “look”, “curse”, 1–4) or present participles (“wishing”,

59 One other possible component is the expectation of support in an implied patronage constellation. Cf., for example, Barrell (1988, 18–43) for the discourse of patronage. 60 See Schalkwyk’s (2002) argumentation for such a rhetorical reading of the sonnets as performance.



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“desiring”, “despising”, 5–9), finally culminating in self-contempt (9). The event comes about by and as a shift of attention away from the speaker’s own miserable condition to his friend’s (former) love for him, a recollection which overrides all present misery and eventfully reverses his mood from depression to exultation (“sings hymns”, 12). The speaker experiences his recollection of the friend’s love as so precious that it outweighs all disappointments (13–14). This mental development is mirrored in the structure of one sentence. While the speaker’s miseries are enumerated in the sub-clause, the turn-about is expressed in the subsequent main clause (“haply”, 10, that is, “by chance”, with an overtone of “happily”). The use of the same word “state” both for his depression and for his exultation (2 versus 10) stresses the direct reversal of the mood. The couplet finally names the cause of this reversal, the recollection of his friend’s former love. Both states are described in extreme terms, hyperbolically, which stresses the intensity of the feelings but may also indicate its performativity. Moreover, the story – the narrative sequence – is mediated in the present tense, that is, in simultaneous narration  – describing the development at the same time as it is taking place. It is not immediately apparent that this performed eventful reversal of the speaker’s mood constitutes in fact a carefully arranged reaction to the loss of his friend’s attachment. On the surface, the eventful change seems to be no more than an expression of the speaker’s feelings. Overwhelmed by his mental burdens he suddenly brings to mind his friend’s love, and as a consequence his mood changes. But the foregrounded, conspicuously hyperbolic intensity (both before and after the turn) – in connection with references to the friend’s estrangement and hurtful behavior in neighboring sonnets within the arrangement of the collection (for example, sonnets 28, 33, 34, 35)  – make this exuberant expression ambivalent and in its literal sense unreliable.61 This utterance is unreliable (Duncan-Jones 1997, 168) in that it conceals an ulterior motive in the message to the addressee, implying that the friend has withdrawn his love and that the speaker is appealing to him to renew his attachment to the speaker and restore the loss. In this case, the real event has yet to take place: the actual renewal of the friend’s love. Such a function of narration resulting in an appeal to the addressee is frequent in poetry (in contrast to narrative fiction), typically in simultaneous narration: The story is advanced to a point immediately before the event; and the

61 The phenomenon of unreliability, widely discussed with respect to narrative fiction, since Booth (1961) introduced the term, also occurs in poetry (Hühn 1998) as in this Shakespeare sonnet (other examples are sonnets 71 and 87 analyzed below).

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speaker’s utterance in the poem then aims at advancing the story further towards the desired event.62 The double function of the narrative sequence of the speaker’s reflections – and thus the constitution of events on two levels: the (present) recollection of the friend’s love and its (future) actual renewal – is contrived by the strategic employment of focalization. The speaker focalizes himself from within at first only partially, later comprehensively. From the beginning he imparts his depressed self-perception as outcast and failure, but then he suddenly reveals his memory of the friend’s love, allegedly so far hidden from his consciousness. However, the previous reference to “friends” (6) betrays that such a relationship had been in his thoughts all along, indicating that he deliberately withheld this awareness in order to stage it as the basis for an effective emotional appeal at the end. The hyperbolic emphasis on the utter deprivation of the speaker’s present situation heightens both the relevance of his friend’s love for his existence and the severity of its loss.

3.1.2 Sonnet 71 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell. Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot If thinking on me then should make you woe. O, if, I say, you look upon this verse, When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, But let your love even with my life decay; Lest the wise world should look into your moan, And mock you with me after I am gone. (Kerrigan 1986, 112).

The form of loss the speaker of sonnet 71 faces and attempts to ward off is the fear that the friend will completely turn away from him in future and forget him

62 Since one may read this sonnet (and others in the series) within the frame of patronage, the friend’s love would also mean financial support and the poem thus be a request for such assistance.



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after his death. That the speaker has to be considered deliberately unreliable in his professed selflessness and in his emotionalized request to be forgotten can be deduced from the self-defeating nature of this request (Duncan-Jones 1997, 252; Burrow 2002, 522), which he can hardly be unaware of – all the more so, since he makes it over-conspicuous by repetition, “rubbing it in”, as it were. His rhetorical strategy consists in hiding this fear under its direct opposite: pretending paradoxically to urge the friend to do just that, forget him. The speaker’s problem is more difficult than in sonnet 29, where he reminded the friend of his former love in order to induce him to renew it at present. In sonnet 71, by contrast, he attempts to shape his friend’s future behavior. Accordingly, he employs prospective narration, culminating in an imperative: The speaker tells the addressee what to do in the future after his own death, how he is to act – emotionally. The poem presents three parallel sequences in its three quatrains, each coupling two successive phases in the addressee’s behavior: first, taking note of the speaker’s death and, second, reacting emotionally to it. In the course of the poem, the phases are being shifted in their temporal distance further away from the date of the speaker’s death: funeral and death knell (1–4), then reading this sonnet soon after his death (5–8) and finally doing so at a much later date (9–12). The narrative representation of the friend’s reactions is both prospective and negative: the addressee is told what he is not to do – refrain from remembering the speaker. Since this act of forgetting deviates from the normal behavior in love or friendship, it qualifies as an event, in this case as an intended and desired event. However, this instance of prospective and adhortative narration is logically paradoxical and self-defeating, since the very act of communicating this prospective narrative as a command makes its enactment impossible. Moreover, the degree of impossibility increases, when the speaker progresses from the funeral to the repeated reading of this very sonnet. The paradoxical structure of the prospective narrative alters also the nature and status of the intended event: It effectively prevents oblivion and instead practically forces the friend to remember the speaker. Thus the intended future recollection is the real event of the poem, deviating from the allegedly desired state of oblivion, which the speaker – as can be deduced from the paradoxical wording of the narrative – apparently foresees and fears. This poem is, like sonnet 29, performative: Its function is to bring about an event, the desired change in the attitude of the addressee restoring the friend’s attachment to the speaker. The emotional appeal inherent in this narrative is corroborated by the reason the speaker mentions for his pretended desire to be forgotten: His intense love for the friend (“I love you so”, 6) allegedly induces him to protect his friend against “woe” (9–11) and mockery by others (13–14). In this manner, emotional pressure reinforces the insinuated appeal to be remembered.

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In order to enable the prospective narrative to have this unacknowledged, secretly desired effect on the friend, focalization is arranged in a different manner from sonnet 29. On the one hand, the speaker focalizes himself merely from without (apart from a brief reference to his love in l. 6), that is, he does not disclose his mental state, his real wishes and anxieties regarding the friend’s attitude after his own death, nor does he acknowledge his real intentions in admonishing his friend to forget him. On the other hand, the friend is prospectively and insinuatingly focalized from within, since it is his emotional attitude that the speaker intends to shape by imputing a disreputable neglect to him which he wants the friend to reject.

3.1.3 Sonnet 87 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou know’st thy estimate. The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; My bonds in thee are all determinate. For how do I hold thee but by thy granting, And for that riches where is my deserving? The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting, And so my patent back again is swerving. Thyself thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing, Or me, to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking; So thy great gift, upon misprision growing, Comes home again, on better judgement making. Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter, In sleep a king, but waking no such matter. (Kerrigan 1986, 120).

In sonnet 87 the speaker employs a similar rhetorical strategy as in sonnet 71 to cope with the friend’s perceived or feared estrangement in that, here too, the speaker is unreliable and merely pretends to perform on his own accord what he secretly fears and intends to prevent: the ending of their close friendship. He tells the process of the eventful termination of this relationship presenting it as his (seemingly) voluntary leave-taking because he has become aware, as he alleges, of his own unworthiness. This process together with the resulting event of their separation is told thrice in a condensed form: in the first two quatrains, in the third quatrain and finally in the couplet. In the first seven lines, the speaker highlights the present precarious state of their relationship, repeatedly pinpointing as the reason for this instability the extreme discrepancy between his own unworthiness and his friend’s superior worth and status, using financial, legal or contractual metaphors (“too dear […] possessing”, 1; “thy estimate”, 2;



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“charter […] releasing”, 3; “my bonds […] determinate”, 4; “thy granting”, 5; “my deserving”, 6; “cause […] fair gift”, 7). The concluding lines of the first two quatrains employ similar images to define the (negative) event, the ending of their friendship (“My bonds in thee are all determinate”, 4; “so my patent back again is swerving”, 8). The tense indicates that the decisive turn is happening at the moment of speaking. The third quatrain repeats the narrative structure of this sequence with the analogous image of the friend’s giving away and later reclaiming a precious gift (his own self), when the recipient proves unworthy and the act of giving turns out to have been premature and injudicious. The temporal extension of the sequences is analogous, too: While the original gift occurred in the past (“thou gav’st”, 9, 10), the reclamation happens at present (“comes home again”, 12). In both narrative structures the eventful change is considered the logical consequence of the speaker’s unworthy status: “so” (8, 11). The couplet adds another structural repetition of the narrative sequence, the change from instability to collapse, from flattering illusion (“dream”, “king”) to desolate reality (“waking”, “no such matter”). The negative event consists in the disillusioning recognition of the painful loss. Taken at face-value the termination of their friendship possesses a low degree of eventfulness, since the preceding situation is described in such a way that this outcome is not only to be expected but fully justified – as underscored by the legal metaphors (“determinate”, 4; “back again […] swerving”, 8) and by the dream’s illusory status (“as a dream does flatter”, 13). However, the narrated change does not just represent an event that has actually happened in the story-world, but the narration as such is used as a moral appeal to the friend not to allow this to happen and, ultimately, as a means of criticising him for allowing this to happen. This is corroborated by the surreptitious shift in agency from speaker to friend (“on better judgment making”, 12). The strategy discredits the friend’s motives for terminating the friendship through the moral implications of the imagery (the self-righteousness and coldly calculating mind) as self-conceit, selfishness and arrogance. This perspective on the narrated process is liable to shift the focus to the subjective and emotional level and thereby raise the level of eventfulness: the end of the friendship as a painful loss and disappointment.

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3.1.4 Sonnet 94 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

They that have power to hurt and will do none, That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow; They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces And husband nature’s riches from expense; They are the lords and owners of their faces, Others, but stewards of their excellence. The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die; But if that flower with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. (Kerrigan 1986, 123).

In sonnet 94 the speaker addresses the possible disruption of the love-friendship indirectly and impersonally by describing a particular ideal type of persons (“they”), their appearance and attitude as well as behavior and effect on others, which is meant to refer to the friend, as indicated by the couplet in conjunction with the surrounding sonnets in the collection. This reflexion is to be understood as the attempt on the speaker’s part to confront the (imminent) loss of the friend’s affection by means of a distancing analysis of its causes. The speaker approaches this problem by presenting two compact narratives of what may happen to such ideal persons. The first narrative is literally about humans, “they”, in two quatrains (1–8), the second, figuratively, about flowers (“the summer’s flower”) in the third quatrain (9–12); and the couplet concludes the development of both narratives in one line each (13 and 14, respectively). The outstanding quality of this protagonist is excellence and perfection (“excellence”, 8; “sweet”, 9). Each sequence consists of two phases: first, the protagonist’s self-centered and self-sufficient existence in his original perfection in isolation (1–8 and 9–10) and, second, his potential subsequent corruption and fall (13 and 11–12, 14). In both sequences the excellence is characterized as an innate quality of splendid self-centeredness and independence without any deliberate designs on others. The first sequence, about humans, describes this excellence within three relative clauses (“that”, 1; “that”, 2; “who”, 3–4) linked as appositions and predicates to “they”: they will not hurt, will not act out what they imply, will affect others without being themselves affected – and for this reserved behavior they will be rewarded. The second sequence merely summarizes excellence (“sweet”, 9) as well as self-orientation (“to itself”, 10). In both cases the self-centered excellence is sanctioned by a superior instance (“heaven” and “the



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summer”, respectively, 5 / 9). The description of self-centered excellence, by the way, fits the stature of the Petrarchistic lady, thus emphasizing the connection to the convention of the love sonnet. However, the seemingly positive evaluation of these qualities is surreptitiously made ambivalent by combining positive overtones or pervasive semantic aspects (“isotopies”63) with critical, negative ones, for instance “power to hurt” versus “will do none” (1), “to temptation slow” (4) versus “as stone” (3) and “unmoved” (4); “sweet” (9) versus “to itself it only live and die” (10). Up to this point the two sequences do not yet feature an event: The reward of “their” excellence (“they rightly do inherit heaven’s graces”, 5) is no more than a superior confirmation of the inherent norm and does not qualify as an event. The second sequence repeats, in a condensed form, the protagonist’s quality as described in the first part but adds a decisive change, which does constitute an event (“But if that flower with base infection meet […] ”, 11), and a negative one at that. Any deviation from excellence, any event at all with respect to a perfect condition is inevitably negative to the same high degree. Thus the corruption corresponds in degree to the excellence the flower possessed before: corruptio optimi pessima. The couplet then takes up the potentiality (“if”) of such a negatively eventful change and defines it explicitly as the definitive closure of the two sequences. The first sequence differs, however, from the second. Whereas the flower may “fester” in the course of its natural development (with no indication of active responsibility), the type of person designated by “they” must be held responsible for their corruption, as is made clear by “their deeds”, by what they actually do, which takes up the verb “do” from the beginning (1, 2). This accusation refers to the ambivalent manner of self-centered behavior described before. Doing nothing has likewise to be considered a form of acting: One cannot not act – “moving others” without being “moved” oneself may also constitute a form of guilt, if one behaves inconsiderately. Strictly speaking, the narrative sequence does not actually reach its eventful conclusion yet. The present tense used throughout the sonnet indicates a generally existing phenomenon and the potential corruption spells out its innate consequences. But viewed in the context of the sonnet sequence as a whole, the function of this paradoxical narrative takes on a specific meaning. As other sonnets make clear, the friend is admired and loved by the speaker for his physical and moral perfection (on a par with the Petrarchan lover’s attitude towards his lady) but the friend betrays and hurts him for selfish reasons and thereby inflicts intense pain on him. Sonnet 94 therefore both expresses criticism for

63 See Greimas (1966).

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actual misbehavior and represents a warning against it. Two functions are possible. The negative event has either actually occurred or else is about to occur and the speaker attempts to forestall it.

3.1.5 Sonnet 107 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come Can yet the lease of my true love control, Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, And the sad augurs mock their own presage, Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes. And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent. (Kerrigan 1986, 130).

While sonnet 94 addresses the withdrawal of his friend’s love only indirectly in an abstract manner, sonnet 107 names the question of the continuity of their intimate relationship explicitly (“the lease of my true love”, 3). From the very start the speaker confidently rejects all fears or signs of loss (“supposed as forfeit to a confined doom”, 4, that is, destined to expire after a limited period [Kerrigan 1986, 319]) proceeding to tell in two narrative sequences the process of overcoming a crisis, a private and a public one. The first sequence (1–4) refers to the development of the speaker’s love-friendship (“my true love”), the second (5–8) to the political situation in contemporary society, which the speaker circumscribes only vaguely with general statements drawing on clichés of ‘peace’. These two successive sequences are apparently linked, as indicated by the common crisis threatening both: “mine own fears” – “the prophetic soul of the wide world” (1–2, emphasis added). Though linked in this way, they are subsequently separated by a temporal gap and distinguished by a different dynamic. In the first quatrain the speaker voices his confidence that the crisis will be overcome and his love will thrive, in the second – set some time later – he reports that in the meantime the political crisis has been overcome, the community has been stabilized and the threat of violent upheaval has permanently been warded off (“has her eclipse endured”, “peace […] endless age”). This is an eventful change for the community, but that is not yet the central and ultimate event in the sonnet.

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The connection between the private and public narratives is taken up and pursued at the beginning of the third quatrain when the consolidation of the public sphere is said to favor also the re-vitalization of the private love relationship: “with the drops of this most balmy time / My love looks fresh” (9–10, emphasis added). But then an abrupt turn occurs in that the focus (that is to say, the frame) suddenly shifts from the speaker’s love relationship to his artistic ability (as a poet) to create enduring works and thus to ensure his own immortality (and not, as the reader was led to expect, the continued strength of his love-friendship): “Death to me subscribes […] I’ll live in this poor rhyme” (10–11, emphasis added). This is the major event of the poem: a decisive change in the speaker’s self-definition, from his emotional dependence as a lover on the renewed relation with his friend to his defiant self-assertion as a poet. Seen in the context of the sonnet sequence as a whole, in which the speaker’s originally unqualified admiration and love for the young friend has frequently been contaminated by the friend’s moral corruption (see sonnets 87–96), the function of this eventful shift of focus (or frame) is to hold his own against his friend, stress his independence and even assert his superiority, claiming that the friend is dependent on him (for survival after death as preserved in a poem). Apparently despairing of re-gaining the friend’s love (despite his initially expressed confidence), the speaker thus tries to cope with the threatened loss by re-orienting his self-concept from dependence as a lover on his friend’s love to his defiant self-assertion as a poet creating immortal (and immortalizing) poetry. This move may ultimately be intended, however, as one more attempt to secure the continuity of the friend’s attachment.

3.1.6 Sonnet 116 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments; love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come, Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (Kerrigan 1986, 134).

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Sonnet 116 presents a (rhetorical) move by the speaker to ward off the threat of loss in love by ascertaining the immutable essence of true love. In a soliloquizing self-reflection he defiantly denies that in a perfect love relationship any deterioration and change is possible. That is to say, he postulates the non-eventfulness of an ideal love-relationship. This perfect quality of love is presented in two complementary ways: by positive statements and by negated negative narratives. In the first quatrain, the speaker starts off with a self-admonition which is based on a definition of true love (“the marriage of true minds”) and amounts to the negation of a negation of such love (“not […] / Admit impediments”), in order to continue with two negated stories (that is, changes of state) about love: “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove”. The second quatrain follows this up with two metaphorical, positive statements about unchangeability: “an ever-fixed mark” and “the [polar] star”, which guarantee stable orientation against risks or threats of change or instability (“tempests” and “wandering bark”, 6, 7). The third quatrain explicitly thematizes and negates the threat of eventful change over time: “Love’s not Time’s fool” (9) and spells this out both in a negated negative and in a confirmed positive narrative sequence: “Love alters not with his [that is, time’s] brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom” (11–12, emphasis added). In the couplet, these repeated rejections of eventful change are finally corroborated in their reliability by two (allegedly) irrefutable facts – the speaker’s poetic production (including this very poem) and the general experience of love. More precisely: This corroboration is expressed in the form of the negation of two negated actions: “I never writ, nor no man ever loved”. As in sonnet 94 any event with respect to a perfect state (there of a person, here of love) can only be negative. But whereas in sonnet 94 such a negative event is envisaged in the end as a potential occurrence, sonnet 116 rejects such an event outright, although the desire to stress this impossibility of eventful change so emphatically may be interpreted as a sign betraying lingering latent doubts, which the speaker tries to overcome in an act of self-persuasion and self-reassurance. * In these six selected sonnets the speaker employs a wide variety of rhetorical strategies to cope with the loss or the threatened loss of his friend’s love.64 The

64 Cf. Parker’s (1969) emphasis on the dramatic and rhetorical quality (“eloquence”) of Shakespeare’s sonnets.



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spectrum comprises: the speaker’s attempt to recover his lost love through a contrived emotional appeal in sonnet 29; the paradoxical devices in sonnets 71 and 87 of forestalling the future or the present withdrawal of the friend’s affection by pretending to induce him to do just that which he fears and tries to prevent; the indirect criticism of or warning against moral corruption as inherent in the friend’s very perfection in sonnet 94; the abrupt shift of interest from the desire to secure the love-relationship to the triumphant self-assertion in the role of poet with power over the friend’s fate in sonnet 107; the postulation of the permanence of true love as self-assurance against loss in sonnet 116. The initial negative event of loss, which – either as imminent or as manifest – is implied in each of these sonnets, is overcome by the (envisaged) eventful renewal or preservation of love in sonnets 29, 71, 87 and, possibly and obliquely, 94, not in the course of the argumentation inside the poem but beyond, as its desired result, whose realization is open. In 107 the event consists in the abrupt reversal from dependent lover to independent self-assured poet claiming superiority over the friend. And sonnet 116 denies the danger of eventful loss categorically as precluded by the perfection of love. The five sonnets 29, 71, 87, 94 and 107 show a particularly complex rhetorical structure, a two-level setup, in which the narrative elements with implied eventful changes both have a straightforward meaning on the surface level and are used for ulterior aims, surreptitiously communicating a specific sense to the addressee and trying to induce him to renew or continue his love-attachment. The programmatic sonnet 116, summarizing the essence of the love-experience for the friend, presents a seemingly eventless narrative without significant changes, expressing a profound, even existential desire – maybe counter-factually – for the continued changelessness of love. The historical context – the early modern period – manifests itself in the constitution and status of eventfulness in Shakespeare’s sonnets especially in three respects. The convention of Petrarchan love poetry as well as its critical modification or rejection is characteristic of the treatment of the theme of love in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century poetry. John Donne’s (anti-Petrarchan) poems are another example. This theme is closely connected with the contemporary intense concern for stable self-definition in that period of changing structures of social and cultural order. Poetry functioned as a new medium for self-reflection and self-stabilization vis-à-vis one important individual in love poems and vis-àvis God in religious poems.65 Here again one can refer to Donne as another and

65 In the young-man section of Shakespeare’s sonnets love actually functions as a replacement for religious orientation in life, see Chapter 6.1.

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more innovative example. In Shakespeare’s case the modern role of poet is also involved, for which Petrarch served as a powerful model. Another early modern feature is the extensive and elaborate application of rhetorical devices in the argumentation in the poems, the conscious reliance on the traditional art of rhetoric for achieving aims in communication and influencing others.66

66 See the high value accorded to rhetoric in poetry by Puttenham (1936, Ch. III, 19 / 196–246); cf. also Ong’s (1967, 220) remark on the pre-eminence of rhetoric in Renaissance humanism.

3.2 John Donne: “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (1633) The speaker addresses his beloved immediately before having to take leave of her for an unspecified period of time. Although he will only be temporarily absent, this is a situation fraught with potential risks for the continuity and future stability of their intimate relationship: such an absence always involves the possibility of changing feelings, estrangement or permanent separation and, ultimately, loss. Viewed especially from the perspective of the beloved, her lover’s  – the speaker’s – absence thus presents the threat of a negative event, in the form of a disruption of their love. In implicit acknowledgment of her fears, the speaker’s utterance is designed to relieve her anxiety and reassure her of the uninterrupted continuation of their love and of the certainty of his return to her – in the words of the title:67 he forbids mourning.68 What he assures her of is essentially the promise that his absence will prove uneventful, constituting a non-event.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

1 2 3 4

As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls, to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say, The breath goes now, and some say, no:

5 6 7 8

So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move, ’Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love.

9 10 11 12

Moving of th’earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did and meant, But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent.

13 Dull sublunary lovers’ love 14 (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

67 The titles of Donne’s poems are probably not by him but by the editors of the manuscripts and/or the early collections. 68 Almost all critics, cf. for example Freccero (1975), are exclusively concerned with the explication of the imagery and its roots in medieval and Elizabethan discourse and cosmology. The underlying situation and the narrative function of the utterance is hardly discussed at all. For comments on details of this poem, cf., for example, Donne (1983), Donne (2008), and Ray (1990).

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 Stefan Schenk-Haupt

15 Absence, because it doth remove 16 Those things which elemented it. 17 18 19 20

But we by a love, so much refin’d, That ourselves know not what it is, Inter-assurèd of the mind, Care less eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

21 22 23 24

Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat.

25 26 27 28

If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two, Thy soul the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th’other do.

29 30 31 32

And though it in the centre sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home.

33 34 35 36

Such wilt thou be to me, who must Like th’other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness draws my circle just, And makes me end, where I begun. (Donne 2008, 120–121).

The speaker sets out to overcome the addressee’s fear of imminent loss by devising a set of condensed or micro-narratives69. These are intended to exemplify the harmlessness of their temporary separation and predict the un-eventfulness of their life and love during his absence. The main strategy employed by the speaker consists in an act of prospective narration about the period of time until he comes back: “I must go” (22), “such wilt thou be to me” (33), “Thy firmness […] makes me end, where I begun” (35–36). By persuading his beloved to accept his prospective narrative of their future lives he helps her to cope with the dreaded possible consequences of the valediction. He thus stabilizes the feelings of the addressee as well as his own self-confirmation. The sequence of the narrative elements shows a clear progression. The first five stanzas present four different moves preempting the problem before it is

69 For the term and concept of the micro-narrative, see Fludernik (2009, 125). Furthermore, Fludernik argues that metaphors also can form “mini-stories” (124). See the Introduction (Ch. 1).



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finally stated explicitly: “though I must go” (22). The progression culminates in the images of “gold […] beat” (24) and the “twin compasses” (26). On the rhetorical level the progression is indicated by a string of conjunctions and connectors: “as” (1), “so” (5), “but” (11, 17), “therefore” (21), “though” (22), “not yet” (22), “if” (25), “though” (29), “yet” (30). Thus, three stories follow one another in quick succession: the story of virtuous men, who part from life without vexation of spirit; the story of “sublunary lovers”, who cannot endure separation; and the story of “us”, the speaker and his beloved, who embody the best of both worlds: being in love and being beyond the necessity of physical nearness. The underlying basic plot of valediction is presented through several evocative situations and images, in the form of five narrative sequences. The opening sequence refers to leave-taking in general, the next two sequences concern the example of fickle lovers and the last two the speaker and his beloved as a pair of ideal true lovers. As for the opening sequence, the first two stanzas concern the moment of dying, the most severe manifestation of parting. Normally, that moment is considered an occasion for greatest anxiety (in a Christian context), because the dying person does not know whether he will be redeemed or condemned. But “Valediction” opens with the scene of a mild death, as the virtuous man has lived a good life and can therefore be confident of directly entering heaven.70 This re-assuring confidence then sets the scene in the manner of an overture and prefigures tone and attitude for the ensuing prospective narratives about the speaker’s imminent absence. The re-assuring death scene is followed by a set of condensed counter-narratives, literally or metaphorically referring to improper ways of loving and parting, mainly in the form of disnarration (that is, telling what the present lovers do not or will not do): the exuberant public display of emotions in love (5–8), movements on the surface of the earth versus movements in the stars (9–12), and the behavior of “dull sublunary lovers” (13–16). Such negative representations of loving form the background to and are finally countered by two positive narratives about speaker and addressee. The first employs the image of beaten gold (stanza 6), the second the image of a pair of compasses (stanzas 7–9).71 These positive narratives are introduced by the direct

70 The image of death introduced at the beginning of the poem is not meant as a suggestion of the ultimate separation of the lovers through the death of one of them, as is usually thought (cf., among many others, Freitag [1975, 12–14]). Such an interpretation is refuted by the text itself, which explicitly states that the one who leaves will return (30, 32, 36). 71 These images exemplify one of the key features of Donne’s poetical rhetoric: “The poem is also a good example of one of Donne’s favourite methods or formulas – that of a proposition supported by arguments from analogy” (Leishman 1962, 233).

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characterization of true lovers’ behavior (stanza 5): They do not care if there is no physical contact between “eyes, lips and hands” (20). The contrast between the false and true forms of loving is corroborated by the implied opposition between publicity and secrecy, by the allusions to the hyperbolic spectacularity of Petrachism (alluded to in “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests”, 6) as against the association with the sacred seclusion and interiority of religious rites (cf. 7–8). While ordinary – “dull” (13) – people’s loving is characterized as profane and prone to mutability (“sublunary”, 13), the speaker’s and his beloved’s love is associated with the immaterial movements of the spheres (11–12), which – though of much greater proportion than the material earth – are exempt from mundane disasters. Thus, such ideal lovers are connected by a literally metaphysical bond, on the level of mind and soul. After establishing the exceptional intimacy of speaker and addressee in contradistinction to images of superficial, mutable love, the speaker proceeds to transform the notion of absence (15) metaphorically into an expansion (23) and into superior connectivity (25–36), intended as metaphorical model narratives for the lovers. They are like beaten gold and compasses in action, and both narratives are emphatically characterized as essentially eventless – in advance defusing the imminent negative event of the speaker’s leave-taking. The inter-relatedness of two distinct persons culminates in the image of the compasses. The lovers are synchronized across spatial and temporal distance. They are separated from one another only like the two legs of a pair of compasses, which are firmly connected at a higher level and thus form two integral parts of one larger unity. In spite of their apparent separation the couple is truly one. Their unifying love manifests itself in the coordinated harmonious movements of both legs of the compasses: “[…] when the other far doth roam, / It leans, and hearkens after it, / It grows erect, as that comes home” (30–32). The elaboration of this image forms the final and strongest counter-narrative to the risk of permanent loss in consequence of temporary separation. While the relationship of ordinary couples is characterized by the threat of loss, the possibility of a negative event, true lovers’ love is immune to such disruption: Their love will be eventless. The speaker’s prospective narratives are intended to downgrade his departure to a mere incident precluding any threat of eventful change for the future. This re-assuring promise of a non-event constitutes the coping strategy the speaker offers to his beloved to help her to overcome her anxieties. By emphasizing the lovers’ changeless unity in opposition to others (20) and by employing two prospective counter-narratives of timeless perfection in the form of suggestive images (gold, compasses, circle), the speaker’s and addressee’s love is elevated above all physical, temporal and spatial dependence. In his intention to re-assure his beloved the speaker essentially relies on the



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inherent persuasiveness of the chain of suggestive images he employs. In other words, Donne’s speaker employs particularly skillful and elaborate rhetorical devices. This intention is also reflected in Donne’s use of pronouns. The plural form pervading the first part of the poem (“us”, “our”, “we”, “ourselves”, 5, 7, 8, 17, 18, 21) is differentiated into singular forms in the second half (“I”, “thou”, “thy”, “my”, “me” as well as “the one” and “the other”, 22, 27, 33, 35, 36): The lovers, though grammatically one in the beginning, are perceived as two in the later stanzas, in contrast to the intention of the speaker to stress their oneness (“Our two souls […] are one”, 21). Since the narratives (“inter-assurance”, beaten gold, compasses) harp on the unity of the lovers, the speaker is finally able to foreground the imminence of physical separation by differentiating the respective particles. What at first seems paradoxical proves the outcome of the speaker’s stratagem – he can now face the moment of separation, because it has ceased to be a problem and a threat. In his rhetorical strategies the speaker consistently operates with various forms of duality and unity, notably with the dualistic opposition between true and false love and the opposition between duality and unity in love. This concern with constellations and transformations of pairs may be seen reflected in the formal structure of “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, especially in comparison to the frequently complex prosody of Donne’s other poems in Songs and Sonnets. The text employs a simple cross-rhyme scheme and allows the verses to flow smoothly in an undisturbed pattern of iambic tetrameters.

3.3 William Wordsworth: “Lucy Poems” (1800, 1801/1807) The second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800) contains four poems about a young woman called Lucy, which Wordsworth did not explicitly link and mark off as a self-contained sequence with a title of its own but which are usually grouped together and referred to as the “Lucy Poems”: “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known”, “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways”, “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” and “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”. To these, a fifth poem, “I Travelled among Unknown Men,” is normally added, which was also intended for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads but for some reason omitted.72 Although the explicit selection and grouping of these five “Lucy Poems” is not entirely Wordsworth’s but goes back to Victorian editors and critics73, a number of circumstantial indications (regarding composition and publication) can be understood as an invitation to read them in that sequence.74 Significant further clues are the use of the name Lucy in four of these poems (except for “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”) as well as the use of a slightly modified ballad meter in four texts (except for “Three Years She Grew”): The conventional form (a4b3c4b3) is enriched by additional rhymes in the first and third lines: a4b3a4b3. The form of the fourth poem, “Three Years She Grew”, is ultimately also based on the ballad meter, duplicating the first and third lines and rhymes: a4a4b3c4c4b3. As for the possible approach to these poems and their meaning, the spectrum in criticism ranges from symbolic or allegorical75 to auto-biographical76 readings, depending on the respective frame chosen in each case. In the following analysis these five poems will be read within the thematic frame of experiencing the loss through death of a beloved young woman. Framed in this manner the “Lucy Poems” reveal the coherent structure of a narrative sequence on two levels. The group as a whole and each individual poem possess narrative organizations, namely in the progress from the speaker’s premonition of the beloved’s death

72 “I Travelled among Unknown Men” was later published in Wordsworth’s collection of 1807; see Brett and Jones (1991, 302). 73 See Jones (1995, 7, 49–93). Jones criticizes this editorial practice (apparently from a post-structuralist perspective) as a means of simplification and reducing indeterminacy. 74 See Jones (1995, for example 7, 11, 12). 75 See the overview of the various readings of one of the Lucy Poems, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”, in Caraher (1991). 76 Such critics usually attempt to identify the person for whom Lucy is taken to stand: for instance a “child of nature”, a former “Lakeland love” (Beer 1998, 31, 95, 313) or Dorothy (Bateson 1971, 151–154; Hagstrum 1985, 98–100; Reiman 1978).



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to its actual event and on to its subsequent memory as well as in the attempts to cope mentally with this loss. The loss of the beloved is thematized as a highly significant – negative – event, the dread of which functions as the driving force behind the sequence and its narrative dynamic.

3.3.1 “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” 1 2 3 4

Strange fits of passion have I known: And I will dare to tell, But in the Lover’s ear alone, What once to me befell.

5 6 7 8

When she I loved looked every day Fresh as a rose in June, I to her cottage bent my way, Beneath an evening-moon.

9 10 11 12

Upon the moon I fixed my eye, All over the wide lea; With quickening pace my horse drew nigh Those paths so dear to me.

13 14 15 16

And now we reached the orchard plot; And, as we climbed the hill, The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot Came near, and nearer still.

17 18 19 20

In one of those sweet dreams I slept, Kind Nature’s gentlest boon! And all the while my eyes I kept On the descending moon.

21 22 23 24

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof He raised, and never stopped: When down behind the cottage roof, At once, the bright moon dropped.

25 26 27 28

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a Lover’s head! “O mercy!” to myself I cried, ”If Lucy should be dead!” (Sheats 1982, 112).

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 Stefan Schenk-Haupt

The sequence opens with an explicitly narrative poem, in which the protagonist tells of a past experience that once occurred on his ride to his beloved in her remote home and solitary environment. The poem presents temporal (narrative) developments in two closely linked respects: On the factual level, the speaker is approaching, on horse-back, Lucy’s cottage on a moon-lit evening; on the mental level, he associates Lucy with the moon, that is, Lucy’s life with the moon’s position in the sky (9, 19–20) and finally interprets the sinking moon as a sign of her imminent death. This mental activity, the spontaneous association of moon and beloved as well as the anxiety about her death (apparently unfounded at that time, see: “Fresh as a rose in June”, 6) is explained as the (irrational) effect of the heightened emotionality and susceptibility of lovers to imaginings and impressions (see “fits of passion”, 1; “dreams”, 17; “fond and wayward thoughts”, 25). The event of this narrative sequence is the abrupt emergence in the speaker’s mind of the loss of his beloved, his sudden fearful premonition of her possible death. This sudden thought derives its high eventful significance from the implied severe pain her death would mean for him. The foreboding on the mental level is indirectly corroborated by the fact that in the course of the spatial progression the speaker never reaches his destination and is never shown to be united with his beloved, that is, that the poem breaks off before the speaker’s arrival at Lucy’s cottage. For the continuation of the series and the speaker’s mental strategies of dealing with this envisaged loss the specific setting in this poem is important, namely that Lucy from the very start is closely associated with nature by living in a remote natural environment (cottage, orchard plot, hill).

3.3.2 “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” 1 2 3 4

She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love:

5 6 7 8

A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! – Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky.

9 10 11 12

She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me! (Sheats 1982, 112).



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The second poem features temporal changes  – in the form of compact narratives – again in two respects, with regard to Lucy’s existence and the speaker’s attitude. On the one hand, from the very beginning Lucy’s personality and life are defined – as in the first poem but more explicitly – by closeness to nature and remoteness from human society and human observation. This characterization is conveyed both directly in descriptions and indirectly in images (similes and metaphors): “among the untrodden ways” (1), no object of praise or love (3–4), “unknown” both in life and death (9), hidden like a “violet” and fair like a remote “star” (5–8). At the same time her characterization includes hints that Lucy is worthy both of love (4) and admiration (8), which indirectly describe the speaker’s attitude. After the first two stanzas have thus characterized Lucy’s existence, the third mentions (“narrates”) the decisive change, her dying – in two ways: her death was unknown to the public world (like her life) but highly relevant to the speaker (“the difference to me”, 2). Her actual death and the speaker’s reaction continue the mental narrative (in the past tense) begun in the first poem: the earlier fearful premonition has now been turned into a manifest fact. That Lucy’s death is of eventful relevance to the speaker as a severe loss is expressed by the exclamation (“oh”) together with the statement about the personal significance of this incident, emphasized by placing the pronoun “me” at the very end of the poem (“the difference to me”). At the same time, however, its impact is deliberately toned down and becomes strangely muted. Lucy’s death is never faced directly: While the first poem envisages merely its possibility, the second mentions it as a fact of the past, almost as an afterthought, and in a sub-clause (10). Lucy’s death is as unnoticed as was her life; and it is formulated in indirect, abstract phrases (“ceased to be”, “difference”, 10, 12). This is an essential feature of the coping strategy in this series: The loss of the beloved is never described directly in the present: It is either foreshadowed as a future event or mentioned as having occurred already in the past; and the development of the speaker’s relationship with Lucy is rendered as a past story, in the past tense.

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 Peter Hühn

3.3.3 “I Travelled among Unknown Men” 1 2 3 4

I travelled among unknown men, In lands beyond the sea; Nor, England! did I know till then What love I bore to thee.

5 6 7 8

’Tis past, that melancholy dream! Nor will I quit thy shore A second time; for still I seem To love thee more and more.

9 10 11 12

Among the mountains did I feel The joy of my desire; And she I cherished turned her wheel Beside an English fire.

13 14 15 16

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed The bowers where Lucy played; And thine too is the last green field That Lucy’s eyes surveyed. (Sheats 1982, 112–113).

The strategy of distancing and toning down the beloved’s loss is continued and intensified further in the third poem by introducing a new narrative and merely embedding Lucy’s fate (as well as the speaker’s love for her) in it and making her development dependent on this superordinate narrative: the speaker’s relation to his country, England, as a story of departure and return, of separation and re-unification together with increasing emotional attachment and love (1–8). Lucy and her life story are embedded in this love; she is an inhabitant of the English countryside, both when she was alive, working or playing (“She I cherished turned the wheel / Beside an English fire”, 11–12; “the bowers where Lucy played”, 14), and when she died (“the last green field / That Lucy’s eyes surveyed”, 15–16). The particular connection the speaker makes between his attitude towards England and towards Lucy is further indicative of his manner of coping with Lucy’s loss. He tones down the intensity of his relation to Lucy and ultimately of his loss stylistically and rhetorically by using less strong terms for his attachment to his beloved than to his country: “cherished” (11) versus “love” (4, 8) and “the joy of my desire” (10), and Lucy’s death is referred to only obliquely by mentioning the last natural objects she looked at (15). And, most importantly, the transitory status of her human existence is offset by the permanence of England and English nature; in a way, her loss is suspended in the continuity of the speaker’s communion with his country and his increasing love for it (8).



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In “I Travelled among Unknown Men”, again, Lucy’s death and the awareness of her loss for the speaker function as the event, the eventful change, once more placed at the very end of the text as in the two preceding poems. But the painful intensity of this loss has been reduced further and to a greater degree than before, especially by integrating the personal love for the beloved woman into the encompassing love for the greater and enduring entity of his country (6–7).

3.3.4 “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” 1 2 3 4 5 6

Three years she grew in sun and shower, Then Nature said, “A lovelier flower On earth was never sown; This Child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A Lady of my own.

7 8 9 10 11 12

“Myself will to my darling be Both law and impulse: and with me The Girl, in rock and plain, In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain.

13 14 15 16 17 18

“She shall be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn, Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things.

19 20 21 22 23 24

“The floating clouds their state shall lend To her; for her the willow bend; Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the Storm Grace that shall mould the Maiden’s form By silent sympathy.

25 26 27 28 29 30

“The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face.

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 Peter Hühn

31 32 33 34 35 36

“And vital feelings of delight Shall rear her form to stately height, Her virgin bosom swell; Such thoughts to Lucy I will give While she and I together live Here in this happy dell.”

37 38 39 40 41 42

Thus Nature spake – The work was done – How soon my Lucy’s race was run! She died, and left to me This heath, this calm and quiet scene; The memory of what has been, And never more will be. (Sheats 1982, 113).

The fourth poem of the series deviates from all the others not only through the greater length and a different metrical structure (the tail-rhyme stanza), but also in style and manner of speaking: an explanation is provided for Lucy’s death in the form of an allegory, an allegorical story, with Nature as the protagonist, who as a lover or, maybe, mother77 takes possession of Lucy to make her into a lady (6) and beloved in order to live together with her (35), assimilating her to various natural phenomena, transforming her into a natural object and integrating her into the natural scenery. This explanatory process is presented as a double narrative sequence. The main part consists of Nature’s speech, in which she or he acts as a divine force (2–36), which decrees Lucy’s fundamental change in the form of numerous successive episodes describing her integration into nature and subjecting her to natural laws. This development is first announced as a prospective (allegorical) narrative and subsequently put into actual practice (37–39), by dint of Nature’s divine creative power: “three years she grew”, “my Lucy’s race was run”, “she died” (1, 36–42). This section of the narrative sequence also defines the crucial turn, the event of the development, through an intersection between the allegorical and the realistic levels: By her death Lucy leaves the natural scenery to the speaker (39–40), that is, her loss is replaced by nature (“this heath and quiet scene”, 40) and thus muted in its negative impact. The idea of a replacement for the loss was first implied in the previous poem (last stanza) but is really introduced as a new element in this poem, if somewhat qualified in the end: The replacement still retains signs of what is lost (“The memory of what has been, / And never

77 It is ultimately left open, whether Nature is seen here as female, which is of course her conventional sex, or male, as the reference to Lucy as Nature’s “lady” (6) and the pervasive stress on Lucy’s femininity might be taken to suggest.



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more will be”, 41–42). That the speaker still painfully feels the loss is indirectly betrayed by the use of the personal pronoun (“my Lucy”, 38, emphasis added), for the first and only time in the entire series. The use of the possessive pronoun is also to be read as a counter-weight against Nature’s claim of Lucy for her- or himself (“a Lady of my own”, 6). So the event of this poem, the transformation of the speaker’s human (erotic) love into his love for nature, functions as a strategy to overcome the pain of loss but at the same time the consciousness of the loss is retained.78 The shift to an allegorical manner of speaking is reflected in the use of a more elaborate, sophisticated stanzaic form, which is still subtly linked, however, to the ballad meter as used in all the other four poems: the tail-rhyme stanza (a4a4b3c4c4b3) can be construed as an extension and modification of the ballad stanza (a4b3c4b3) by the duplication of the uneven-numbered lines (a and c).

3.3.5 “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” 1 2 3 4

A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.

5 6 7 8

No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees! (Sheats 1982, 113).

The last poem of the series completes and confirms the integration of Lucy into nature, her definitive transformation into an “insensate thing” (“Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower”: l. 18)  – conveyed in a dream or in an act of imagination (taking up the speaker’s mode of perception referred to in the third and fourth poems).79 This transformation makes her effectively immortal (“a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years”, 3–4) and finally resolves the

78 If the Lucy poems are read within an autobiographical frame as the deliberately obfuscated narrative about Wordsworth’s dangerously excessive love for his sister Dorothy, then Lucy’s death does not constitute a loss but rather a necessary “removal, subconsciously, of the guilty object” (Bateson 1971, 153). This reading also presupposes that Wordsworth did not know what he was doing. 79 This poem has received a great number of diverse interpretations, which are devoted to the text mostly in isolation – cf. Caraher (1991).

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s­ peaker’s anxiety (“I had no human fears”, 2), which was expressed in the first poem. However, the formulations may be seen to point to lingering, repressed relics of the pain of loss. Fears, always directed towards the future, ought not to be really relevant any more, after Lucy’s death has actually occurred; grief, however, an emotion always concerned with the past, a past loss, is not mentioned here at all as no longer acute, but such avoidance may indicate that latent grief is still virulent; and the statement that Lucy only “seemed” to have become a thing might be taken to signify that her transformation into nature has not been complete. However, this slight qualification of the resolution of loss is not continued into the last stanza so that the series does end with the implication that the loss has finally been overcome for good – through replacement. The internal sequence within this poem shows no development and no change with respect to Lucy. That she has achieved unchanging permanence is defined in two complementary – paradoxical – ways, by the statement that she has no motion (“No motion has she now”, 5) and by the description of her continuous cyclical motion (“rolled round”, 7). The achievement of changelessness is moreover expressed through a shift in tense from past to present. While all four preceding poems were rendered in the past tense indicating the passage of time, this one refers to a potentially permanent present, the eternal cyclicality of nature (“diurnal course”, 7). Furthermore, this is the only poem in the series which lacks an eventful change in itself, since it is wholly concerned with the presentation of a permanent state. But seen in relation to the entire series this fifth poem as a whole constitutes an eventful closure or consummation of what was indicated before (in the third and especially in the fourth poem). The loss of the beloved has finally and definitively been overcome by her transformation into nature as an unchanging permanent force. The speaker’s love of nature and his revitalising experience of nature thus include and replace his human love, as the ultimate fulfillment of that love. Because of her transformation from a human being into a part of nature, one might argue, her human identity and thus also the name signifying that identity has been completely dissolved: therefore her personal name “Lucy” is finally not mentioned any more. The first four poems present the beloved’s death either as a dreaded future event (first poem) or as a manifest past event (second to fourth poems), increasingly toning down its severity, before the concluding fifth poem finally resolves the negative eventfulness altogether into a permanent state. The changeability and transience of the beloved is transformed – through imagination – into a timeless stance, which paradoxically combines and identifies perfect stability with constant cyclical motion: the unchangeable and constantly changing vitality of nature. This resolution and suspension of eventfulness in the end constitutes



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a new eventful closure of the entire series.80 This move can be considered as a specifically Romantic project of overcoming loss and compensating for lack.81 To name a few other examples of succeeding or ultimately failing to overcome lack or loss through imaginative association with and integration into the force of nature: Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, “The world is too much with us”, “My heart leaps up”, “To the Cuckoo”, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads82, Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”, “The Cloud”. The prosodic form of the five “Lucy poems”, the traditional archaic ballad meter with certain variations (see above), serves to characterize the experience of loss and compensation as simple, elementary, unsophisticated and pre-modern.

80 To mention one other (completely different) attempt at reading the Lucy poems in terms of boundary crossing. Hartman (1964, 157–162) applies the schema of “rite de passage” to the sequence tracing in its progression two processes: Lucy’s development towards humanization, the speaker’s changing attitude from imagination to the philosophic mind. It is difficult to see how these transitions can be related to the texts. 81 Cf., for example, Hamilton (2003). 82 Brett and Jones (1991, for example 244–247).

3.4 Emily Dickinson: “After Great Pain” (ca. 1862) Dickinson’s poem “After Great Pain” addresses loss  – presumably the loss of a beloved person – on a high level of abstraction. The first words refer to the aftermath of “great pain” and the poem goes on to describe the reaction to and the consequences of the painful experience of loss. The negative event that causes the suffering is not explained and no further information about this event is provided – a clear indication that the focus in the poem is not on the (negative) event itself but on the effect it has on the speaker and on her reaction to it. The radical change brought about by the trauma in the speaker’s life is rendered in metaphoric terms and these metaphors represent the consecutive stages in the process of mourning up to an eventual measure of relief. The poem can be regarded as the performative and mimetic representation of the narrative process of working through and coming to terms with loss in which the emotional experience is objectified through the use of metaphors.

After Great Pain

1 2 3 4

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

5 6 7 8 9

The Feet, mechanical go round – Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

10 11 12 13

This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – (Johnson 1960, 162).

The story level of the narrative underlying the poem can be reconstructed as follows: A traumatic event that causes the speaker great pain occurs. This incident is followed by successive turns in the poem’s narrative sequence that bring about change and refer to the effect the initial event has had on the speaker. First, there is the intense suffering experienced by the speaker, but eventually a numbness develops that finally evolves into resignation. On the discourse level, the initial loss, although not specified, functions as the (negative) event that sets in motion a chain reactions. The first two stanzas represent the extended stage of



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suffering. In the third stanza a positive event signals the possibility of release from pain and suffering. The narrative development on the discourse level is mediated in metaphoric terms. The poem begins with the word “after” referring to a time prior to the “present” of the poem. The suggestion is that something crucial has happened before the poem’s temporal beginning and that the speaker in the poem is recounting the far-reaching effects this negative event has on her. The phrase “After great pain” thus represents the middle phase of a causal and logical narrative development, a moment between the past event and the ensuing consequences. Instead of providing detailed information about the loss the poem goes on to focus on the effects of the negative event metaphorically. The metaphoric elaborations also interrupt and halt the narrative progression and draw attention to the gravity of the impact of the loss. The description of the negative consequences of the event as an intensifying process is continued in the second stanza, and while mental and emotional aspects are foregrounded in the first stanza (“The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – / The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore”, 1–2), the second stanza is directed at the physical effects of the trauma (“The Feet, mechanical go round – / Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – / A Wooden way / Regardless grown”, 5–7), The poem refrains from using conventional ways of expressing suffering such as crying or complaining or even naming the loss itself. Instead, exceptional images are used to suggest the measure of the altered state of the speaker’s mind and heart and body. At first metaphors of social conduct are used: The grief is experienced as a “formal feeling”, the nerves “sit ceremonious, like Tombs” and the “stiff Heart” suggests mental and emotional immobility (2–3). The negative progression of the speaker’s emotions in their downward spiral is depicted in terms of mechanical, mineral and inorganic metaphors not usually associated with human emotions and therefore productive of a strongly defamiliarizing effect. The speaker experiences the emotional suffering so intensely that her body deteriorates and becomes cold and stiff (“A Wooden way / Regardless grown”, 6–7). She can only feel “A Quartz contentment” (8). Even after the change in the poem suggested by the onset of resignation the metaphors still call forth inorganic associations. Once again familiar images are avoided. The moment of full realization of the loss and the acknowledgement of its irreversibility is described as “the Hour of Lead” (10), and the eventual resignation and acceptance is reached in a progression from “Chill” to “Stupor” (13) to the smothering coldness of freezing under snow. The innovative metaphoric poetic style and diction, the avoidance of conventional notions and the lack of personal pronouns are suggestive of a conscious distancing technique, an objectification that is part of an implied process of coming to terms with loss. In a similar way the lack of

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detail about the negative event itself and the distanced position of the speaker-focalizer can be interpreted as coping strategies. The phrase “the Hour of Lead” (10) marks the ultimate low point in the emotional state of the speaker, therefore the climax of the description of the grieving process, which becomes a performance through the medium of the metaphors. At the same time, this phrase functions as the turning point in the narrative development in the poem. In narratological terms the reaction to trauma in the poem can be described as a process of degradation or deterioration (Bremond 1980) to the lowest point of emotional darkness, followed by a process of improvement or amelioration as the speaker eventually succeeds in finding a measure of release. This progression is summarized in the last line by referring to the stages of the reaction, from the initial awareness and fear  – “Chill”  – to numbing shock  – “Stupor”  – and eventually to release – “letting go” (12). This “outcome” of the whole experience constitutes the main (positive) event in the poem. The qualification of aspects of the state described in the phrase “This is the Hour of Lead” (“Remembered if outlived, / As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow”, 11–12) thus introduces and foreshadows the next stage in the emotional growth of the narrator in the poem. The low point is represented not as an ending but as another phase in the process of working through pain. The change inherent in the progression from the experience of various forms of immobility and stasis to “letting go”, the final event in the narrative sequence in the poem, consists of an active as well as a passive component. The surrender (“letting go”) comprises the active act of deciding to let go as well as the passive act of giving up, of passively allowing the pain and the resultant grieving to continue or even sweep over the grieving person. The phrase “remembered if outlived” (11), however, indicates that the speaker – imaginatively – looks back at the traumatic event and its effects from a later position, after having survived. Thus the poem can be read on one level as a presentation of the complex emotions experienced in a period after suffering “great pain” as well as, on another level, as the representation of a reflection on the grieving and healing process as a whole. On the story level the poem presents the successive stages of the suffering and the eventual overcoming of stasis by achieving release or detachment or at least some form of resignation. On the discourse level the feelings and reflections are represented in metaphoric expressions and within an artistic structure, making the poem as a poem a potential agent of change, for the poet as a possible means of further distancing herself from painful emotions and for the reader as a means of achieving clearer insight into suffering and experiencing the aesthetic force of the poem. The broken syntax and the separation of phrases by Dickinson’s eccentric dashes, the strong metaphors, the concentrated rhythm and economic use of



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word and phrase – poetic aspects in aid of what Ted Hughes (1990:9) described as “the wonderfully naked voltage of the poems” – emphasize the poeticity of the poem. Great intensity of feeling is generated by these defamiliarizing poetic techniques that qualify the narrative. Yet, the poetic intensification in the sequence of evocative metaphors and the meanings generated are inseparably connected and mutually supportive. There is a tension between the seemingly generalized nature of the discourse – in the lack of pronouns and the impersonal way of referring to body parts – and the clearly subjective choice of diction and metaphor that is typical of Dickinson’s poetry. In a technical narratological sense the objective and impersonal grammar (which operates as a coping mechanism on a personal level for the speaker in the poem) may point toward the universal relevance of the poem. Also relevant is the observation by trauma theorists that people under extreme stress lose the ability to tell a coherent narrative. Ricoeur83 writes extensively on narrative as an activity that not only establishes identity but also reconstitutes a faltering sense of self. The distancing needed to contemplate and to find patterns in traumatic material (logical and causal patterns and personal ways of structuring the material) is a healing factor in itself, because it substitutes a coherent narrative for the broken and disrupted narrative caused by suffering. In this case the narrative is not incoherent but the poetic structure of the poem imitates the interrupted and broken structure of trauma narratives, and at the same time the poetic patterning and structure of the poem as such is an example of the reconstitutive effects of using language and narrative to contemplate loss and to approach healing. Various scholars have pointed out that around 1862 indications of a stronger consciousness of the philosophical and technical implications of her writing can be discerned in Emily Dickinson’s work (Giles 2011, 1–21). She was aware of the fact that she wrote within the pervasive legacy of emotionality, intensity and possessiveness of the Romantic tradition, but Ryan Cull (2010, 40) makes the point that it is clear from the poems themselves that “Dickinson feels both the allure of the possessive Romantic paradigm of subjectivity and a revulsion toward how it disfigures the way in which she relates to the world and others”. Though her work is strongly influenced by the Romantic tradition, her idiosyncratic use of metaphor and the eccentricity of her poetic style are indications of a more modern approach to the act of writing poetry (see Kreider 2010, 67–103; Miller 1987, 24–74). Her poetical insight can even be described as proto-modernist on account of the way in which she undermines the poetic tradition of her own time, but specifi-

83 See Ricœur (1988, 246; 1991, 425–437); Van der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela (2007, Chapters 1 and 4).

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 Heilna du Plooy

cally on account of the way in which meaning is complicated and undermined within a poem. Death and oblivion as well as survival and remembrance co-exist in the associative frameworks that this poem activates which seem to be similar to the modernist way of exploiting ambiguity.

3.5 Thomas Hardy: “The Voice” (1912/14) Thomas Hardy’s “The Voice” shows the speaker’s reaction to the recent death of his wife. Her death functions as a catalyst for his utterance. But he mourns less her death than the fact that their love had come to an end long ago. The moment he loses her definitively he becomes painfully aware of this loss in the past.

The Voice

1 2 3 4

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.

5 6 7 8

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown!

9 10 11 12

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness Travelling across the wet mead to me here, You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness, Heard no more again far or near?

13 14 15 16

Thus I; faltering forward, Leaves around me falling, Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, And the woman calling. (Hynes 1987, 56–57).84

The speaker is wandering through the landscape; simultaneously, he formulates a narrative of this lonely wandering. He glances back and thus also gives a narrative of past happenings (ulterior narration). The essentials of this poem’s story are that the speaker imagines hearing his late wife’s voice calling him, and this triggers lively memories. It soon becomes clear that in spite of their initially happy time together, their marriage ended unhappily. In doubt whether it can really be his wife’s voice or whether this is not rather an illusion created by the wind in the trees and the grass, the speaker – unable to resolve the question – continues his lonely, forlorn walk.

84 This is one of numerous “Emma Poems” Hardy wrote after his wife’s death in 1912. Ramazani (1991, 958) calls Hardy “the poet of loss”.

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In relation to the narrative levels, the highest (diegetic) level contains the reflective process as such. Two hypodiegetic narratives add the narrative “of” the marriage, located in the past (1–8) and the speaker’s lonely walk in the present, at the point of utterance (9–16). The marriage narrative is split into two parts: the (presumably rather short) happy time they had together, followed by an unhappy period that ended with the woman’s recent death. Strikingly, the speaker turns the chronological order around, going back to and ending with recollections of the beginning. As no concrete details are given, the respective durations remain vague (apart from an overall impression that the unhappy phase was the dominant one and that his wife had died not very long ago). As regards frame and script, the most notable concept informing the poem is that of a love relationship; the text centers around the importance of the loved person for the speaker’s stability, his concept of identity and self. Important, too, is the idea of life after death, of an ethereal world surrounding the living. The most prominent, intriguing and thematized aspect of this realm of the unseen is the question of contact between the two worlds. From the world of the dead, the woman calls to him – or so it seems.85 As is well known, nature described in literature very often serves as a vehicle to transport the protagonist’s or speaker’s landscape of the soul. One of the keywords in “The Voice” is listlessness86, which characterizes rather the speaker’s emotional state than the breeze. Important, too, is the notion of change or, more specifically, dissolution (“changed”, 3; “dissolved”, 11; “oozing thin”, 15 etc.). Related to this, but an aspect of its own, is that of emptiness. Not only is the whole scenery strikingly devoid of details, of indications of place and time, of sound, color, life – it soon becomes clear that the speaker is in a situation of an inner void, too. His inner world seems to contain nothing of his own – as if his wife’s death had left him an empty shell; the whole attitude seems to consist of an attempt to fill up his inner emptiness. A related concept is that of a visitation, of being haunted. The visitation reinforces the aspects of helplessness and being overpowered, as the notion of a visitation implies an enforced passivity, a person subjected to an experience that comes unwanted and unintended. This concept highlights the conflict between passivity and activity – an ambivalent constellation, as will be shown later.

85 It lends the text an additional dimension that in doing so, she also calls him “to her”, calls him to the dead. 86 This occurs twice – once overt (9), once hinted at and implied in one of Hardy’s characteristic neologisms in line 11‚ “wistlessness”, which can be taken as a combination of semantic elements of “wistful” and “listless”.



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A highly important semantic level and topic of the poem is that of attachment, of commitment, of bonds existing, formed, reinforced and, maybe, questioned. The most important point in this respect is that the poem explores a very marked case of reconnection with the past. The ties that find their expression here are those with the past  – and, at the same time, with the beginnings (of the relationship). This fixation or commitment presents itself as a sort of voyage in time: back to the beginnings and – with this – back to the young woman the speaker fell in love with long ago. This “reaching through” towards the young woman is one of the most pertinent movements of the text. Taking up the comments concerning the sequences and relating them to the topics discussed above, especially the issue of emptiness/dissolution versus attachment, the speaker may be said to constitute himself, his own identity via the intimate relationship with the woman. In this respect the response and feed-back of “the other” are of utmost importance (see “call to”, 1; “wait for”, 7). It is against this background that he then feels her absence acutely in the second sequence. The situation of utterance on the discourse level is of extreme loneliness. This is not only an aspect of the “story” and the result of the failed love relationship, but also highly pertinent to the act of narration as such. The curious constellation of this one-sided “monologue” (this is not just a soliloquy, but addressed to a – silent – counterpart) underlines the speaker’s loneliness. Not only does he remember his wife, but he seems to feel and hear her and he even formulates an appeal to her. The only thing that is alive (!) in his world is a ghost. Apart from this, there is nothing but emptiness and forlornness. The impression of an isolation of enormous dimensions is augmented by another characteristic trait. The utterance seems to be quite cut off and ahistoric. The emotional and social isolation is underlined and reinforced by the impression that these thoughts and utterances take their starting point from an undefined, vague, “empty” situation, curiously unconnected to time and place. Thus without context and connection, the autumnal landscape drifts even more towards a symbolic level. Apart from one small hint (the phrase “when I drew near to the town” [6] seems to indicate an arrival) the text seems to float above history; a “story” like this could be placed in many decades and centuries. Of course, such a disconnected, vague placement is partly typical of lyrical poetry, but in addition the isolation here is part of a strategy and fulfills a distancing function. This impression of an utterance strangely levitating not only enhances the issue of isolation and loneliness. It also reinforces another characteristic facet of the text: namely its “archetypical” generalization. A story without names (the woman is never called anything but “woman”), stripped of indications of time and place and historical context is not only strangely anonymous, it also tendentially moves towards the description of an archetypical situation. The gen-

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eralization inherent in this lack of specific detail lends the poem a special, additional weight; it appears to be somewhat paradigmatic. Generalization may serve another purpose too: it can also be seen as a distancing strategy. This leads up to the strategies and techniques the text acts out. The first item in this section stands in close relation to the schema mentioned above, that of a world of spirits: Parts of the utterance equal an evocation – the evocation of the lost person being one of the most important strategies in texts concerned with lack, loss and death. The speaker not only evokes his late wife in the sense of remembering her, but also in a more literal sense: he evokes, that is, calls forth her ghost (5). This attempted evocation of a dead person is closely linked to another procedure: the strategy or mechanism of projection. In imagining that he hears a voice, in supposing that this might be his wife, in his urgent appeal to her to appear before him the speaker not only projects his innermost thoughts and wishes onto the outer world: he also creates a vehicle that helps develop these phantasms even further, to delve even deeper into this spirit realm. By way of externalization he succeeds in creating a sort of inner, psychological structure and order: memory, desire, haunting fragments of voice, appearance and attitude are assembled and transferred to the outside, ejected, as it were. Thus a situation arises in which the speaker can address his confusing, threatening inner world. This externalization is not only a help in coping with confusion and overwhelming emotions by way of imposing order and structure, by erecting an image that can then be addressed – it also gives the constellation of this relationship a characteristic twist. There is an element of compensation in the speaker’s visions and fantasies. This element is present right from the start. In the first stanza the speaker not only imagines his wife calling to him, but also adds a decisive element to this enticing call. The woman “promises” that she is, once again, the young woman he first knew, that is, the woman he loved in the early, happy days of their marriage (2–4). This promise is reinforced in the second stanza, which adds the desired and imagined vision – a vision of the young woman. This “re-creation” of the young, “unchanged” woman is a compensation and even a sort of fantasy of empowerment:87 He re-enacts the appeal that failed in reality (for as an unhappy husband he must often have wished for his wife to “be as she was”, again)  – only this

87 The obvious aspect of projection and fantasy is neglected by Gewanter, who stresses the fact that Hardy by writing the “Emma Poems” answered his wife’s notebooks after her death. Hardy certainly reacts to his findings, but his elegies are very far from a “true abstract” (1991, 193) of Emma.



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time his appeal is “successful”. What arises before his inner eye is the image of the young, happy woman. There is an element of enactment of power in this; he makes her appear, and he even decides “which” woman is to appear.88 In spite of the aforesaid it has to be stressed that on the level of the enounced, to use Easthope’s (1983) term, the representation of this appearance is ambivalent.89 The speaker seems to hover between the alternatives (“Can it be you that I hear?”, 5; “Or is it only the breeze […]”, 9) and “tries out” both. This ambivalent stance between outer reality and inner vision is a characteristic trait of this text.90 All these strategies are variations of the overarching topic “coping with loss”. In this case, the feeling of emptiness makes itself felt after considerable delay and urgently calls for the woman doubly lost (by alienation and death). Obviously, one aim of this utterance (self-address as well as appeal) is to come to a sort of conclusion, to reach a clarification – of the question “is it you that I hear” as well as of the speaker’s situation in general, that is, his condition with regard to his great loss. The first hints seem to point in the direction of a development, a sort of solution. After exploring the idea that his wife actually addresses him from the realm of the dead, the third stanza brings an alternative interpretation to the fore: what he hears might be nothing but the wind, and his wife gone forever, without the remotest possibility of any form of contact (11–12). The succession of thoughts might be read as indicating progression: the illusion of being addressed by a ghost is destroyed by the insight that it was only the “whispering” breeze. (This reading of the – intradiegetic – process of reflection would amount to a sort of re-enactment of his former experience, the succession of meeting and estrangement/loss). It can be argued, however, that this “linear” reading is undermined by what follows. Thus the expected solution is denied, namely that the idea of a ghost addressing the speaker just cites a long-since outdated belief and that the first impression

88 Gewanter errs when he argues that it “has not been apparent to critics” that “Hardy faced two forms of his wife” (1991, 199). Quite to the contrary, this duplicity of a younger versus an older woman has been thematized repeatedly; the “Emma Poems” would hardly be understandable otherwise. 89 In contrast to this analysis, Hühn (2005, especially 150–151) interprets the voice as a clear, obvious projection of which the speaker himself becomes conscious towards the end. 90 Stressing the ambivalence places this interpretation between clearly rationalist readings (“it is mere fancy”) on the one hand and a literal reading as a sort of “ghost story” on the other. Neither of these decisions “for” or “against” take into account the strange vagueness, the hovering indecision that is upheld until the end and is, in my opinion, the most striking and significant characteristic of this text, which – by refusing to resolve the tension – succeeds in becoming eery and uncanny itself: “The status of Hardy’s ghosts is very hard to determine” (Davie 1972, 44).

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of the voice turns out to have been merely imagination. The reading now suggesting itself, that the imagined voice certainly is nothing but the wind, is counterbalanced by the enigmatic last line referring back to the first idea again (“And the woman calling”, 16). That the idea of an address from the realm of the dead is not rationally refuted can be seen as an unexpected turn – an event. The last stanza makes it obvious: the speaker fails to reach a conclusion. The whole argumentation, pros and cons, is taken together in a sort of bundle and tagged by: “Thus I” (13). This unconsciousness is his (continuing, ongoing) situation. The seemingly one-time, single event or happening is contrasted with a permanent condition; the apparently linear narrative and argumentative movement with the indicated solution is left by moving one step on towards a sort of meta-level: Here, the two sides are simply elements of an unresolved situation, an undecided, limbo-like hovering. A further opposition and oscillation manifests itself: that of stasis versus linearity, of permanent state versus teleological development. So far, the attitude towards the dead woman seems vague and undecided. There is, however, a significant caesura on the level of narration – a clear, abrupt break between stanzas III and IV. Whereas stanzas I–III enact an address, a sort of speech directed at the woman, the last stanza is a decisive turn away from this dialogic setting. It is not only a surprising generalization on a meta-level, it is also a (narrative) “leaving behind” of the former addressee. The earlier “interaction” (an imagined interaction, but much more than a soliloquy) is superseded by something like a self-address.91 This means a distinct inward turn; on the narrative level the text is characterized by this surprising twist – away from an initial appeal towards a concentration upon the speaker alone. Abandoning the appeal directed towards the woman can be seen as an event on the discourse level. This turning away means that there is not only a polarity, a conflict, even a sort of contest between illusion and reality, but also between the options of the man “following” the woman versus “leaving” her. The relation of circularity versus linearity is certainly complex. On the level of the enounced, the situation is unresolved; the enduring presence of the woman seems to define the situation till the end. (The frustrating attempt to conjure the woman up only repeats and intensifies feelings of loss, which may even be seen as an event on this level.)

91 This shift not only finds its grammatical reflection in the change from second to first person. It is also underlined by the marked accumulation of second-person singular pronouns in the first three stanzas (nine times in total: 4 / 4 / 1), which has to be seen as an important stylistic device. In the fourth stanza there is not a single occurrence of “you”. There is, however, a mention of “the woman” in the third person.



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The level of enunciation, however, reveals an “emancipation”, a step away from the woman and her influence – in spite of the intriguing last line. It is of crucial significance that there is a shift from the address to “woman” (1) to the distance and detachment of the sober reference to “the woman” (16). Although there is one speaker, one narrative stance throughout, there occurs this subtle yet decisive shift. The speaker succeeds in introducing a meta-level; he is able to take a sober look at his own entanglement. Thus, he succeeds in integrating his “hauntedness” into his life with an almost ironic detachment; resignation is counterbalanced by sober distancing strategies: he is, indeed, “faltering forward”. The most outstanding and significant factor is the high degree to which the important caesura between I – III and IV is underlined; the stylistic, formal, syntactic break between these two parts is enormous. The regular, almost musical meter of the first three stanzas is set against the abrupt, laconic, irregular and peremptory style and meter of the last stanza.92 The formal side mirrors the subtle shift outlined above. The first three stanzas with their melodious, regular and song-like meter make an almost “natural” impression  – but only until the fourth stanza begins. The harsh, abrupt tone represents another sort of “naturalness”, which makes the easy-going, flowing sound of the first three stanzas sound almost artificial. The last stanza has the last word, and it exposes the to and fro depicted in the beginning as happenings on a lower level, less relevant than the peremptory summing-up looking upon all this movement from a more sober, objective and seemingly higher stance. The melodious, yearning, insecure first sequence is accepted yet left behind. This means that in terms of formal, stylistic devices the surprising shift is doubled, as it were. What is at first taken as an intimate, authentic and natural statement is abruptly left behind, the impression being of something suddenly demagnified, diminished, slipping far away as if looked at through binoculars held the wrong way. The place of this first utterance is then taken by another, even more “natural”, “authentic” one. After this shift and change “the woman” of the last line can no longer be seen as she appeared at first. What may be seen as the specifically poetic in a text is, of course, a complex topic. In this case the way the caesura is formed and underlined is certainly closely linked with poetical features and possibilities; such a significant shift in tone, style, attitude and perspective in the space of a few lines, taking place in such a short text (yet leaving the speaker’s persona intact and plausible), would be difficult to bring about in a prose text. The liberty with which the narrative

92 Davie (1972, 26) points out how the poem’s asymmetry is all the more striking when taking into consideration how symmetrical Hardy’s poems are as a rule.

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stance, or rather the speaker, is handled is a poetic license. The play with and interaction between two clearly distinct levels (which are not “explained”, yet do not break up the unity of the text as a whole) would be hard to imagine in a prose text. The poem opens a field on which several levels can be presented at the same time – and can be presented as interrelated, interacting, opposing yet somehow integrated. The great weight which the formal elements carry in a poem is drawn upon here as these elements as a whole constitute further “statements”; they underline and outline the narrative plot in a dense and impressive yet independent way. Although Hardy’s life span (1840–1928) and literary work position him mainly in the Victorian era and link him with (his variant of) realism and naturalism, not only the publication date of this text might serve as a bridge towards Modernism. His characteristic, idiosyncratic language is his very own; his timeless scenery – clearly rural, as is true of a large part of his prose and poems – has a tendency more towards the archaic than towards modern, urban life. The characteristic trait of this text, however – the irritating ambivalence93 as well as an openness, a “being in motion” in a situation that is hard to grasp and understand – is definitely a modernist issue.94 His numerous elegies95 markedly lack any religious solace, any hope for transcendence.96 In denying a solution, in depicting a threatened subject in a desperate yet touchingly dignified attempt to endure, to go on “self-upheld” (cf. Cowper, “The Castaway”), this text clearly touches central modernist topics.

93 This ambivalence is often ignored in view of a linear development in the “Emma Poems” as a whole. Ramazani states that “by the end of the sequence, Hardy will have displaced his wife with the masculine company of fellow elegists” (1991, 959); Sexton depicts a “pattern of recovery” (1991, 210). With regard to (not only) meter and rhythm of “The Voice”, Paulin finds that “it ends with a kind of compromise between the offered natural solution and her voice, between disenchantment and the old impulsive rhythm” (1986, 136), but a compromise suggests a solution, whereas ambivalence does not. 94 Sexton argues that the Emma Poems can be divided into “poems of ‘there’” and “poems of ‘here’” (1991, 210). By this she refers to the two settings of the poems – Cornwall (where Hardy met Emma) and “Max Gate” in Dorset (where they lived together, and where Emma died) – and, accordingly, to the two “versions” of Emma. According to Sexton, “The Voice” counts as a “poem of here”. Against this I would want to stress the ambivalence and oscillation between the points in time; obviously the young woman is very present in “The Voice”, too. 95 Ramazani (1991, 957) pointedly stresses his “obsessive elegizing”. 96 As Dolin puts it, Hardy “writes, for the first time, the elegy of an unbeliever”; this makes the elegies “the anatomy of a grief experienced and survived in a world without God” (2008, 122). Sacks states: “Hardy’s departure from convention is […] so radical as to place him and his poems in a strange, unhoused isolation with respect to the genre” (1985, 234).

3.6 Sylvia Plath: “The Other” (1962) Sylvia Plath’s “The Other” presents a narrative sequence in a particularly complex and ambivalent manner. A string of scattered elements refers to a clear state of affairs and its development, but at the same time a number of incongruous phrases are inserted which obfuscate and confuse understanding. The text uses adultery as a narrative frame and the discovery of unfaithfulness in marriage as a script. The speaker is a wife who becomes aware of her husband’s affair with another woman. She is deeply hurt, articulates accusations and tries to come to terms with her husband’s betrayal and the experience of loss.

The Other

1 2

You come in late, wiping your lips. What did I leave untouched on the doorstep –

3 4

White Nike, Streaming between my walls?

5 6

Smilingly, blue lighting Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts.

7 8

The police love you, you confess everything. Bright hair, shoe-black, old plastic,

9 Is my life so intriguing? 10 Is it for this you widen your eye-rings? 11 12

Is it for this the air motes depart? They are not air motes, they are corpuscles.

13 Open your handbag. What is that bad smell? 14 Is it your knitting, busily 15 Hooking itself to itself, 16 It is your sticky candies. 17 I have your head on my wall. 18 Navel cords, blue-red and lucent, 19 Shriek from my belly like arrows, and these I ride. 20 O moon-glow, o sick one, 21 The stolen horses, the fornications 22 Circle a womb of marble.

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23 Where are you going 24 That you suck breath like mileage? 25 Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream. 26 Cold glass, how you insert yourself 27 Between myself and myself. 28 I scratch like a cat. 29 The blood that runs is dark fruit – 30 An effect, a cosmetic. 31 You smile. 32 No, it is not fatal. (Plath 1981, 201–202).

The three main characters can be construed in the following manner. The husband is referred to by the pronoun “you” in ll. 1, 7, 23, 24 as well as by the possessive “his” in l. 6. The other woman, the rival, is alluded to in the title and also by the pronoun “you” in ll. 13, 14 and 16. That the underlying relation between speaker and male addressee (“you”) is that of wife and husband is made clear by the word “adultery” (25) and by the opening phrase “You come in late”, meaning to come home and thus presupposing a joint household. The sexual nature of the husband’s affair and the other woman’s involvement are shown on the one hand by mentioning “his [private] parts” (6), the explicit terms “fornications” (21) and “adulteries” (25) as well as the allusions to the wife’s hurt sexuality (18, 19, 22). The sexual nature is also indicated by allusion to the seductive behavior of the husband’s lover: “bad smell”, “knitting”, “hooking”, “sticky candies” (13–16). The speaker finds herself entangled in a triangular conflict with her husband and the other woman, involving an unfavorable contrast with that woman and, as a consequence of the adultery, a progressive split within herself (“insert yourself / Between myself and myself”, 26–27). The sudden discovery of the husband’s unfaithfulness and her reaction to it form the basic story-level (histoire) of the text. But the underlying coherence is deliberately undermined and veiled on the discourse-level by the intermittent insertion of incoherent, discrepant and discontinuous images. A simple coherent plot is thereby presented in a conspicuously incoherent way. The speaker perceives the adultery and at the same time suppresses its clear perception as a strategy of coping with the shattering experience (see below).97

97 This strategy may be compared to what Hélène Cixous – metaphorically – calls “feminine writing” (écriture féminine). Such texts are governed by an economy of giving-away, of exhaust-



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In order to construe the story and its obfuscation in more concrete detail, one can start by distinguishing three subordinate narrative sequences, each linked to one of the three characters involved, who in their interaction constitute the underlying story of adultery (for husband and rival) and loss (for the wife). The husband’s behavior and movement form the first sequence, which structures the development in the major part of the poem (1–24) – from his coming home (1) to his going out again (23–24), possibly leaving for good: You come in late, wiping your lips.

(1)

Smilingly, blue lighting Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts.

(5–6)

The stolen horses, the fornications Circle a womb of marble. […]

(21–22)

Where are you going That you suck breath like mileage?

(23–24)

When the husband comes home late, wiping his lips (1), that is, metaphorically removing traces of what he had been doing (of the pleasures he had enjoyed outside), the speaker immediately suspects an extramarital affair. Two phrases evoke such a familiar and almost melodramatic situation: The husband “comes in late” and, when he leaves, the wife asks him “where are you going?” – stocklines indicating a wife’s aroused suspicion about her husband’s unfaithfulness. The evocation of this dramatic context makes it plausible to interpret some of the seemingly incongruous phrases as further – oblique – contributions to this story-line. These references work primarily through association and indirection, on the level of isotopies. “The police love you, you confess everything” (7) sarcastically circumscribes the obviousness of the husband’s betrayal: In his behavior he involuntarily admits what he has been doing. His smiles (“Smilingly, blue light-

ing oneself in a literal meaning of the word. Such a discourse attempts not to establish order and stability by way of reduction and signification, but it opens up the meaning of the words, unleashes their evocative overtones and thus cryptifies their definitions. Such a ‘feminine’ text brings forth the others of the self, the not-I/s, which are not restricted to biological sex or gender roles, but to an infinite circulation of the libido showing itself in a given text. These strategies directly fit in with the obfuscation of narrative cohesion in “The Other”. The voice and the images of such a text are at odds with each other; there is conflict, upheaval and constant shifting between the function of the author and the meaning of the images in the text. Feminine writing subscribes to the poetics of the indécidable. This is why these texts become so difficult to read (cf. Cixous 1977, 40–43; 1980, 70–72, 76, 82).

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ning”, 5) suddenly reveal to the wife his aggressive sexuality as the crude driving force behind his affair: “like a meathook, the burden of his parts” (6). A second sequence evokes the activities of the other woman, the speaker’s rival, and her active involvement in the affair: Open your handbag. What is that bad smell? It is your knitting, busily Hooking itself to itself, It is your sticky candies.

(13–16)

The imperative “Open your handbag” and the question “What is that bad smell?” (13) identify the other as a woman – by her handbag –, who tries to conceal something odious. “Knitting”, “hooking” and “sticky candies” (13–16) attribute insidious machinations of temptation and seduction to the husband’s lover. The third and final sequence concerns the speaker herself: What did I leave untouched on the doorstep – White Nike, Streaming between my walls? 

(2–4)

Is my life so intriguing? 

(9)

Navel-cords, blue-red and lucent, Shriek from my belly like arrows, and these I ride. 

(18–19)

Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream. Cold glass, how you insert yourself Between myself and myself. I scratch like a cat. The blood that runs is dark fruit – An effect, a cosmetic. You smile. No, it is not fatal. 

(25–32)

This sequence presents the speaker’s observations of the unfolding situation and her reactions to it. Her husband’s adultery deprives her of her vitality, wounds her sexuality, even petrifies it: “The stolen horses, fornications / Circle a womb of marble” (21–22). Ultimately, the attack strikes her in the center of her self, and distorts her identity as a woman. It destroys her sexual life and questions, even endangers her own fertility. In this respect the image of “white Nike / Streaming between my walls” (3–4) arguably symbolizes the victory of the rival’s erotic



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attractiveness over her own sexuality. The rival woman has been ‘fertilized’, as it were, by the husband, who wipes her lipstick off his mouth, having enjoyed her, and comes in satisfied, while the speaker is left with a sterile womb.98 The image of “the stolen horses” (21) signifies that the speaker has been robbed of something vital by her husband’s “fornications”. Accordingly she experiences the betrayal as a serious assault on the very foundations of her life  – a defeat which triggers an aggressive stance against him: “Navel cords […] / Shriek from my belly like arrows, and these I ride” (18–19). In the concluding part of the poem, after her husband’s departure (23–24), the speaker finally spells out and sums up her subsequent reactions to her experience of loss. The husband’s betrayal keeps haunting her painfully (“Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream”, 25). In her acute self-awareness, as if observing herself in a mirror, she is conscious of having been shattered in her center and split in two: “Cold glass, how you insert yourself / Between myself and myself” (26–27). Moreover, her aggressiveness, caused by her hurting, now becomes ambivalent. The aggressive violence seems aimed at the husband and the rival (“I scratch like a cat”, 28), but may also be re-directed, in the form of auto-aggression, against herself (“The blood that runs is dark fruit – / An effect, a cosmetic”, 29–30). Sarcastically, the effect of the scratching is dismissed as merely “cosmetic”, just an outward effect. This concluding accumulation of references to the severity of the blow to her integrity and stability define the speaker’s experience of her husband’s unfaithfulness as a negative event. In her attempt to cope with the shattering awareness of her husband’s adultery, the speaker can be seen to employ two – paradoxical – strategies. On the one hand she seems to be instinctively intent on downplaying the awareness of what has actually happened, of the severe event that has occurred, and on the other she seeks to find an appropriate, self-confident attitude to confront the severity of the event. As to the first strategy, the speaker simultaneously reveals and obfuscates her shattering experience. She recapitulates the discovery of her husband’s unfaithfulness together with her reactions to it as an ongoing immediate process in the present tense, constituting a basically coherent narrative sequence, as re-constructed in detail above. But at the same time she effectively blurs the clarity

98 The phrase “white Nike” (3) hearkens back to Plath’s poem “Barren Woman”: “I imagine myself with a great public, / Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos” (Plath 1981, 157). Whereas in that text the speaker overcomes her anxieties of being unable to give birth and prove a loving mother, “The Other” integrates this phrase into a counter-narrative. The rival becomes a “Nike” – defeating the speaker and making her infertile (“a womb of marble”).

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and the significance of what is happening by inserting a continuous string of incongruous and incoherent references and elements. These include the confusing ambivalence of the pronouns: The reference of “you” seems to shift among husband, rival and speaker; moreover, the husband is referred to both by “you” and “his”. Furthermore, a number of images or remarks remain obscure and resist integration into the context, for example “What did I leave untouched on the doorstep” (2), “blue lightning” (5), “Bright hair, shoe-black, old plastic, / Is my life so intriguing?” (8–9), “Is it for this the air motes depart? / They are not air motes, they are corpuscles” (11–12), “I have your head on my wall” (17), “O moonglow, o sick one” (20). These elements appear to be inserted as deliberately incongruous and do not hide a secret meaning which requires deciphering. In other words, the speaker narrates her experience and at the same time undermines and dismantles her own narration by making it incoherent. This paradoxical, self-destroying mode of narration seems to serve the purpose – and the effect – of enabling the speaker to distance herself from and protect herself against the full, direct impact of the adultery, thus helping her to cope with the situation by mentally veiling, blurring and displacing its full impact. The second strategy is developed towards the end of the poem concluding the speaker’s recapitulation of her experience. She forces herself to abandon the role of victim and regain control of herself and her stable attitude. She declares her emotional reaction as superficial and not serious: “An effect, a cosmetic” (30). And she finally adopts – or pretends to adopt – a self-confident posture of secure detachment: “You smile. / No, it is not fatal” (31–32) – a posture of firm self-confidence which is corroborated by the distancing gesture of addressing herself in the second person (“you smile”) and rejecting the implication of having been seriously hurt (“No, it is not fatal”). Her smile is meant to counter and undo the cynically brutal smile of her adulterous husband (“smilingly […], like a meathook, the burden of his parts”, 5–6). This attitude of self-reassurance – in conjunction with obfuscating her fatal story  – turns out as the positive event through which the speaker claims to have finally overcome her traumatic experience. In construing what has happened as not fatal she seems to say to herself: “Let go and move on – it will not kill you.” But this decisive turn amounts to no more than a mental re-adjustment to a fundamentally unchangeable situation. It is not the result of any concrete action or change of behavior on her part. Moreover, the manner in which both coping strategies are enacted as conscious moves throws their effectiveness in doubt, exposing their precariously ‘willed’, merely postulated force vis-à-vis the severity of the trauma as spelt out and narrated in the preceding part of the utterance, only insufficiently veiled by narrative incoherence. What has happened is fatal: The speaker will not come out of this experience undamaged.



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Like a large proportion of Plath’s later poems, “The Other” seems to be deeply rooted in her own personal experiences, anxieties and desires, specifically during the crisis of her marriage with Ted Hughes.99 This is not to say that they should exclusively be interpreted with respect to their biographical content,100 but it is illuminating to read these texts as fragmented episodes of a longer sequence.101 “The Other” highlights a particular moment within a series of crises which develop from “Little Fugue” and “The Rabbit Catcher” to “Event” (Plath 1981, 187– 189, 193–194, 194–195). It is in “The Other” that the speaker’s suspicions solidify, perceiving signs of being betrayed by her husband. A kind of proof is forwarded in the poem Plath wrote next, “Words heard, by accident, over the phone” (Plath 1981, 202–201), where the speaker has a concrete encounter with the “other” woman. Loss seems inevitable, and the subsequent poems’ titles speak for themselves: “Burning the Letters” and “For a Fatherless Son” (Plath 1981, 204–206). Although the speaker of Plath’s poems tries to cope with the consequences for her family life, the crisis continues and culminates in “Fever 103°” (Plath 1981, 231–232). This poem refers back to “The Other” and presents her pain in the cruellest conceivable way: “Greasing the bodies of adulterers / Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. / The sin. The sin” (25–27). In this poem, the speaker is, much like in “The Other”, fighting back, but she also gives indications of the dreadful end. Her fever is a sickness which, in the end, devours her. Ultimately, there seems to be only one outcome for the betrayed woman: total annihilation.

99 “The Other” was apparently completed on 2 July 1962 (Plath 1981, 201). In this year, Plath had discovered that Hughes was having an affair with Assia Wevill. She reacted with fits of violent jealousy and threw him out of her life. Details of this experience were transformed and integrated into her personal mythographic poetical construction. Perloff (1990, 182) comments that in 1962 Plath embarked on her final self-destructive journey; the precipitating fact was her feeling of having been completely abandoned. She points out that her perception of the goings-on was discrepant with the perceptions of the other persons involved. 100 Cf. Perloff (1990, 191) interprets the poem as “nightmare vision” and “more explicitly addressed to Assia”. 101 Bedient (1979, 10–15) constructs an internal drama within Plath’s works from Colossus to Words. Cf. also Saldívar (1992), who paraphrases the narrative progression in Plath’s poetical works and connects these outlines into the development of her fictionalized self in the texts. – For general information, see also Malcolm (1995) and Middlebrook (2005).

3.7 Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters (1998) While the speaker in the first part of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (3.1.) tries to ward off the threatening (imminent) loss of his young friend’s love and Wordsworth’s speaker in the Lucy sequence (3.3) reacts to the currently ongoing experience of losing his beloved (narrated in retrospection), Ted Hughes in Birthday Letters attempts to come to terms with the failure of his marriage with Sylvia Plath and with her loss (through suicide) decades after the fact. The sequence presents the husband’s attempts to recapitulate, understand, explain and thus ultimately cope with this catastrophic loss in the extensive process of narrating, recollecting, and imaginatively reliving the past. However, the situation is much more complex than in the other two cases in that here the speaker seems to become aware of his own  – partly unwitting, but also, presumably, partly conscious  – responsibility for bringing about the loss, and he thus subsequently begins to face his active personal involvement in causing the catastrophe. Although the final loss as a decisive negative event in the speaker’s life is not explicitly mentioned at the beginning nor during the first part of Birthday Letters, its impact underlies the progression of the sequence from the very start and is openly addressed in some of the later poems. One important feature by which Birthday Letters is set apart from Shakespeare’s and Wordsworth’s sequences is its openly, even blatantly autobiographical nature. The poems contain a large number of undisguisedly factual references to Hughes’s and Plath’s lives – various home addresses, memorable experiences during their travels, episodes from their marriage, relation to friends and parents. When Sylvia Plath’s suicide and details of their marriage were publicized some time after her death, hostile reactions and personal accusations were voiced in some (notably feminist) circles,102 which Hughes at that time and later had always refused to respond to or comment on. The publication of the obviously autobiographical Birthday Letters 35 years after Plath’s suicide may basically be framed in two ways. These poems can be (and have in fact been) interpreted against this background as Hughes’s belated public statement in reaction to these accusations, as his final attempt at setting the record straight from his subjective perspective with the aim of justifying his behavior and exculpating himself.103 Birthday Letters can thus be read as an attempt to construct the definitive picture

102 See, for instance, Kruse (2000) and Myers (2011, 73–89). Hughes himself refers to this controversy in Birthday Letters, in “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother” (195–196). 103 See especially the detailed overview of reactions in Clark (2011, 223) and the extended discussion in Kruse (2000); cf. also the brief references in Feinstein (2001, 233–236).



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of his and Plath’s marriage for posterity. Indeed, Ted Hughes is here effectively in complete control of their past history, presenting and judging their actions, their behavior, their feelings exclusively from his own perspective and guided by his personal interests, even when he seems (or pretends) to adopt Plath’s viewpoint. Read within this factual, autobiographical context, the speaker’s reliability is highly questionable. However, Birthday Letters can also be viewed, neutrally as it were, as a means and a strategy on Hughes’s part of belatedly clarifying the development for himself in order to come to terms with the catastrophic turn of events and finally lay the experience of death and loss to rest – irrespective of moral questions of personal guilt and culpability and disregarding questions of factual truthfulness and reliability. This is the aim of the following analyses. To be sure, even if one rejects a strictly moralistic frame and brackets the problem of reliability, the awareness of the ongoing public controversy as a context for the composition and publication of the poems is apt to sharpen the awareness of and focus on the rhetorical strategies and the indications of knowledge, agency and responsibility. On account of the openly autobiographical gesture informing these poems, the following analyses will always refer to the speaker and his wife as Hughes and Plath, although it is understood that these are no private letters but poems only purporting to be private utterances and that the artistic status in principle presupposes a difference between speaker and author – the author stages himself as a private person at the same time viewing himself from a distance. This gesture of self-distancing is an essential aspect of the coping strategy adopted in these poems. Like Shakespeare’s and Wordsworth’s sequences, Birthday Letters possesses a narrative organization on two levels. On the one hand the series of the 88 poems in its entirety trace the progress of Hughes’s and Plath’s love and marriage story more or less chronologically from their first encounter to the disastrous ending in Plath’s suicide and beyond; on the other hand, each poem selects one particular episode or incident presenting its internal development in detail, which very often mirrors the overall development. The sequence does not result in a final positive event in any one poem which might provide mental consolation and retrospectively overcome the crisis. Rather, the sequence as a whole, in its internal formation and formulation as well as in its very existence, constitutes such a resolution, as will be argued. To this end, Hughes employs various devices, mainly myths104 functioning as cognitive semantic schemata or scripts, which serve to

104 See Twiddy’s (2010) discussion of Hughes’s use of mythological narratives. However, against Twiddy’s contention that these myths represent “communal forms” enabling the “interaction

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make the development ultimately coherent and basically meaningful thereby integrating the failure and loss into his life-story and that of Plath. Two such mythic schemata are particularly significant since they recur repeatedly in the form of brief allusive hints in a number of poems throughout the series as a whole but are, in addition, specifically elaborated in more detail in individual poems. The most pervasive of these devices is the fatalistic notion of a superior force governing human life and destiny (through stars, dreams, portents, premonitions etc.) leading to disaster, conveying the force of tragic inevitability after the model of the classical Greek tragedy.105 This schema is supported or corroborated by various indications of a fatal flaw, as it were, attributed to Plath’s personality in numerous poems, namely her (alleged) self-destructive, suicidal tendencies.106 The second device, linked to the presentation of Plath’s situation, is the Cretan myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur signifying the experience of being helplessly trapped in a chaotic, utterly confusing situation without orientation and threatened by some evil demon or monster, from which the only escape seems to be death (that is, suicide).107 These schemata function as a general indication of the overall coping strategy employed in Birthday Letters.108 The two schemata are typically mediated from a contrastive combination of two discrepant perspectives: the perspective of the narrated self (from within ongoing life, in ignorance of what is to happen) and that of the narrating self (with hindsight and thus knowledgeable of what eventually did happen). This pervasive contrast highlights the difference between the ignorance and uncertainty of living and the

with a community” (65) it has to be stressed that some of these myths are archaic structures, mostly of ancient Greek origin, lacking general validity in contemporary British society. They are indicative of Hughes’s own idiosyncratic poetological concept and worldview. See Hughes (1994, 310–319). 105 See the extensive documentation and discussion of Hughes’s use of this script (under the terms of “myth” and “fate”) in Kruse (2000, 52–71) and in Twiddy (2010). – Allusions or references to this mythic schema or script occur in a great number of his poems: “St Botolph’s” (14), “11 Rugby Street” (20), “Fate Playing” (31–32), “Ouija” (53–56), “Horoscope” (64), “Flounders” (65), “The Blue Flannel Suit” (67), “9 Willow Street” (71–74), “A Dream” (118–119), “The Pan” (121), “Dreamers” (157–158), “Telos” (176), “The Hands” (184). 106 For example “The Shot” (16–17), “God Help the Wolf after Whom the Dogs Do Not Bark” (26–27), “Fever” (46–48), “The Blue Flannel Suit” (67–68), “The Badlands” (82–86), “The Minotaur” (120), “The Table” (138–139), “Dream Life” (141–142), “Suttee” (147–149), ”The Bee God” (150–152). Most of these poems refer to Plath’s fixation on her father. See Kruse (2000, 54–62). 107 “18 Rugby Street” (20–24), “Your Paris” (36–38), “Fishing Bridge” (88), “Error” (122–123), “Setebos” (132–133) and especially “Minotaur” (120). 108 If one were to read the poems within a moralistic frame, these schemata, especially the first one, would be judged as serving an exonerating purpose.



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superior understanding and insight of retrospection. Both devices – the impersonal operation of the mythic schemata and the structural differentiation of the position-bound ignorance of the narrated experiencing self from the retrospective insight of the narrating self – serve to reduce the possible responsibility on the part of the speaker. To exemplify the process and strategy of recapitulating the past crisis and finally (belatedly) coping with the loss it entailed in retrospect four significant poems are selected for detailed analysis: “Error”, “Dreamers”, “Life after Death” and “The Prism”.

3.7.1 “Error” The episode narrated in “Error” concerns the move of the couple from London to the village of North Tawton in Devon, into an old vicarage (Court Green), in August 1961, with the intention of gaining more time and quiet opportunity for writing. This move and the effects it has on the life of the couple, especially on Plath, constitute the basic narrative sequence underlying “Error”109 – presented, of course, as in all poems, ultimately from the interested perspective of Ted Hughes. Error 1 I brought you to Devon. I brought you into my dreamland. 2 I sleepwalked you 3 Into my land of totems. Never-never land: 4 The orchard in the West. I wrestled 5 With the blankets, the caul and the cord, 6 And you stayed with me 7 Gallant and desperate and hopeful, 8 Listening for different gods, stripping off 9 Your American royalty, garment by garment – 10 Till you stepped out soul-naked and stricken 11 Into this cobbled, pictureless corridor 12 Aimed at a graveyard. What had happened 13 To the Italian sun? 14 Had it escaped our snatch 15 Like a butterfly off a nettle? The flashing trajectory, 16 The trans-continental dream-express

109 Cf. the brief references in Wagner (2000, 132–137).

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17 Of your adolescence – had it 18 Slammed to a dead-end, crushing halt, fatal, 19 In this red-soil tunnel? Was this why 20 We could not wake – our fingers tearing numbly 21 At the mesh of nettle-roots. What wrong fork 22 Had we taken? In a gloom orchard 23 Under drumming thatch, we lay listening 24 To our vicarage rotting like a coffin, 25 Foundering under its weeds. What did you make of it 26 When you sat at your elm table alone 27 Staring at the blank sheet of white paper, 28 Silent at your typewriter, listening 29 To the leaking thatch drip, the murmur of rain, 30 And staring at that sunken church, and the black 31 Slate roofs in the mist of rain, low tide, 32 Gleaming awash. This was Lyonnesse. 33 Inaccessible clouds, submarine trees. 34 The labyrinth 35 Of brambly burrow lanes. Bundled women – 36 Stump-warts, you called them – 37 Sniffing at your strangeness in wet shops. 38 Their eyes followed you everywhere, loamy badgers, 39 Dug you out of your sleep and pawed at your dreams, 40 Jabbered hedge-bank judgements, a dark-age dialect, 41 Peered from every burrow-mouth. The world 42 Came to an end at bullocks 43 Huddled behind gates, knee-deep in quag, 44 Under the huddled, rainy hills. A bellow 45 Shaking the soaked oak-woods tested the limits. 46 And, beside the boots, the throbbing gutter – 47 A thin squandering of blood-water – 48 Searched for the river and the sea. 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

And this was what we had chosen finally. Remembering it, I see it all in a bubble: Strange people, in a closed brilliance, Laughing and crying soundlessly, Gazing out of the transparency At a desolation. A rainy wedding picture On a foreign grave, among lilies – And just beneath it, unseen, the real bones Still undergoing everything. (Hughes 1998, 122–123).



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Hughes opens the poem recapitulating the original intention which motivated this move – transfer to an ideal, paradisiacal country. The destination in southwest England is imaginatively endowed with mythic, dream-like qualities associating it with the garden of the Hesperides in ancient Greek mythology (“the orchard in the West”, 4), with an idealized Italy (“the Italian sun”, 13) and with the country of ever-lasting youth and easy living (“[n]ever-never land”110, 3). Thus what had originally been intended was a (positive) “boundary crossing”, the fundamental transition from an unsatisfactory situation to a significantly more satisfactory state of life. With hindsight, this expected decisive change of their existence is now revealed as an illusion – a retrospective insight which informs the present recollection of the past episode in the form of ironic references to their former illusory expectations, for example in the phrases “[t]he flashing trajectory, / The trans-continental dream-express” (16) and “[n]ever-never land” (3). What they actually encountered after the move turned out to be the opposite of what had been expected: “a gloom orchard” (22) with perpetual bleak rain and fog instead of sun and warmth (“drumming thatch”, 23; “leaking thatch drip”, 29; “the black / Slate roofs in the mist of rain”, 30  f.). The hoped-for fulfillment “escaped [their] snatch” (14). The transition across the boundary to a perfect state “slammed to a dead end, crushing halt, fatal” (18). Plath’s later suicide as the ultimate catastrophic consequence of this move to an illusory paradise is foreshadowed by the propinquity of vicarage and graveyard (“you stepped out soul-naked and stricken / Into this cobbled, pictureless corridor / Aimed at a graveyard”, 10–12) and by the comparison of their new home with a coffin (“our vicarage rotting like a coffin”, 24). The intended positive event of a boundary crossing tragically leads to its opposite, the negative event of failure and death. In unfolding the subsequent effects on Plath the poem narrates what went wrong for her and explores the reasons for it, ascribing the cause of the failure to what the title names an “Error”, an error of judgment, a mistaken decision. In the first four sections of the poem the speaker acknowledges that it was primarily his own decision to move to this area (“I brought you to Devon”, 1; “I sleepwalked you”, 2) and that the disastrous consequences for Plath were attributable to fundamental dispositional differences between husband and wife, brought out by the diametrically opposed effects of Devon on them. While he has a profound affinity for this country, it is alien and destructive for her. In describing this landscape Hughes characterizes himself and his own poetic concept: his interest in

110 This is an allusion to the setting of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan stories, especially his stage play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904).

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the irrational and the subconscious, in archaic and mythic forces (“my dreamland”, 1; “my land of totems”, 3). Although she loyally stayed with him (6–7), this environment, as he now, from a temporal distance, claims to realize, deprived her of her protection, destroyed her in her nature and her (American) identity and ultimately led to her death: Listening for different gods, stripping off Your American royalty, garment by garment – Till you stepped out soul-naked and stricken Into this cobbled, pictureless corridor Aimed at a graveyard. 

(8–12)

Particularly grave is the destructive effect on her poetic creativity: […] you sat at your elm table alone Staring at the blank sheet of white paper, Silent at your typewriter, listening To the leaking thatch drip, the murmur of rain, And staring at that sunken church […] 

(26–30)

The move which had been intended to inspire her to write and liberate her poetic productivity, tragically and perversely prevents precisely this. The destructive effect on Plath is rendered from her perspective by an intertextual allusion to a poem of hers, “Lyonesse” (32), the title of which refers to the birth place of Tristram in the mythic world of King Arthur, later sunk into the sea off the coast of Cornwall. In the claustrophobic underwater existence of the inhabitants of Lyonesse depicted in the poem Hughes recognizes Plath’s metaphorical rendering of her experience of being trapped and cut off from life and freedom. This sense of entrapment is further stressed by the metaphor of the labyrinth (34) and the Minotaur (“bullocks”, 42):111 Bulls (“The world / Came to an end at bullocks”, 41–42) and mud as well as rain (“quag”, 43; “rainy hills”, 44) represent the impassable boundary of the village. Plath’s only way out of this labyrinth, her “Ariadne’s thread”, as it were, ultimately consists in death: “And, beside the boots, the throbbing gutter – / A thin squandering of blood-water – / Searched for the river and the sea” (46–48). This implication is conveyed through the water and sea imagery associated with Plath in Birthday Letters. She spent her childhood with her beloved father at the New England coast and had a deep affinity to the open sunny ocean as her vital element. This affinity is thematized

111 As mentioned above, this mythological allusion also occurs in other poems in Birthday Letters.



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by Hughes in “The Beach” (Hughes 1998, 154–156): “You needed the sea” (2), and placed in direct opposition to rural England: “England was so filthy! Only the sea / Could scour it. Your ocean salts would scour you” 11–12). In Devon, this element is only present in the perverted and contaminated form of rain water in the gutter, “blood-water”, associated with her arterial blood (“throbbing”), signifying death instead of life. The “search […] for river and sea” (48) thus expresses her longing for release and escape through self-dissolution and self-annihilation, again pointing towards suicide as the ultimate consequence of the move to Devon. The first 48 lines of “Error” thus re-construe in retrospect the development of their relationship with the focus on the move from London to Devon as an attempted boundary crossing to happiness and fulfillment but at the same time proleptically pointing to fatal failure and loss in the form of Plath’s suicide, thereby reflecting the narrative structure of the entire collection. The narrative recapitulation of this particular episode (like all the others in the collection as well as Birthday Letters as a whole) functions as a means of retrospectively coping with the experience of failure and loss. What is specifically significant about this narrative reconstruction is that the coping strategy mainly consists in explaining and understanding the disastrous development and outcome, not in lamenting the death or expressing personal grief. One aspect of the attempt at an explanation concerns the question of causality and responsibility on the part of the two protagonists, as conveyed through the use of personal pronouns and the attribution of activity and passivity. The sequence starts with stressing Hughes’s active initiative (“I brought you […]”, 1), though already half taken back in “I sleepwalked you […]” (2), and Plath’s passive compliance (“you stayed with me […]”, 6), attributing the initial responsibility to himself. But the unequal distribution soon gives way to their acting together, as a couple, expressed by the plural pronouns “we” and “us” (20–49). This collective agency is likewise marked by lack of orientation and control; neither individually nor collectively were they masters of their acting: “Had it escaped our snatch […]?” (14), “we could not wake” (20), “our fingers tearing numbly” (20), “What wrong fork / Had we taken?” (21–22). The essential device in highlighting the fatal development caused by the move from London to Devon is the double perspective underlying the narrative reconstruction of the episode, the combination of the perspectives of the narrated self and the narrating self, the perspectives of ignorance (of what is going to happen) and knowledge (of what eventually did happen). As mentioned above, this doubleness is characteristic of Birthday Letters as a whole, entailed by the project of recollecting past happenings with hindsight, looking at the past with the superior knowledge of what ensued. After the detailed recollection, in the past tense, of this liminal episode and the foreshadowing of its consequences (1–48), Hughes draws a final conclusion

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to clarify his reaction and his assessment from his present perspective (49–57). Through the brief period of this transitional episode the focus is widened to comprise the entire development of the married life of the couple, summed up in naming beginning and end: “A rainy wedding picture / On a foreign grave, among lilies” (54–55). Hughes opens his present assessment by acknowledging their collective responsibility for what came of it, at the same time ironically, even sarcastically undercutting it by the implication that they were merely passive and ignorant objects of forces beyond their control: “And this was what we had chosen finally” (49). Similarly ambivalent is the perspective on the reality of their past experience, on their past happiness and suffering. On the one hand, the actual experience is now no longer accessible: he can only remember it from an unbridgeable distance, as enclosed in a “bubble” (50), without sounds (“soundlessly”, 52). On the other hand, he succeeds – in the end – in imaginatively revivifying, in spite of its sensory inaccessibility (“unseen”, 56; “soundlessly”, 52), the actuality of suffering and the painfulness and finality of death: “the real bones / Still undergoing everything” (56–57). Hughes’s strategy of coping with the failure of the marriage and Plath’s death is characterized by ambivalence: on the one hand, he ascribes the fatal development to his individual initiative and to the profound differences in their dispositions, on the other, he stresses the fatal, tragic progression beyond their control and their awareness.112 In spite of the ambivalence in terms of causality and personal responsibility the basic coping strategy manages to make the sequence of the happenings in their lives, or rather: Plath’s life, coherent, to integrate her suicide into the development of her life. In another respect, however, the presentation of this episode results in revivifying – for Hughes – the negative event in its severity and actuality despite its pastness (“grave”, “bones”, 55, 56). He ends by stressing the still relevant reality of Plath’s death for him. The impression of the persevering actuality of the death, of what happened, goes counter to the attempt to explain and understand why this happened. Thus at the very end of the poem the focus is shifted from the insight into the (alleged) unforeseeable inevitability of her death to its finality and painfulness, constituting another instance of ambivalence.

112 Twiddy (2010), too, refers to this ambivalence: “Hughes balances the idea of agency and lack of agency throughout Birthday Letters” (71 and passim).

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3.7.2 “Dreamers” “Dreamers” thematizes the beginning of one specific development which resulted from the episode narrated in “Error” and which eventually caused the disruption of the marriage and was presumably one crucial factor leading to Plath’s suicide: Hughes’s extra-marital affair with Assia Wevill, who is clearly referred to here (if not by name). Although the eventual catastrophe itself is not mentioned nor even hinted at, the poem addresses the question of responsibility and innocence, knowledge and ignorance regarding the behavior of the characters involved that later was to have this effect. The following analysis will focus on these aspects only. Dreamers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

We didn’t find her – she found us. She sniffed us out. The Fate she carried Sniffed us out And assembled us, inert ingredients For its experiment. The Fable she carried Requisitioned you and me and her, Puppets for its performance.

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

She fascinated you. Her eyes caressed you, Melted a weeping glitter at you. Her German the dark undercurrent In her Kensington jeweller’s elocution Was your ancestral Black Forest whisper – Edged with a greasy, death-camp, soot-softness. When she suddenly rounded her eyeballs, Popped them, strangled, she shocked you. lt was her mock surprise. But you saw hanged women choke, dumb, through her, And when she listened, watching you, through smoke, Her black-ringed grey iris, slightly unnatural, Was Black Forest wolf, a witch’s daughter Out of Grimm.

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Warily you cultivated her, Her Jewishness, her many-blooded beauty, As if your dream of your dream-self stood there, A glittering blackness, Europe’s mystical jewel. A creature from beyond the fringe of your desk-lamp. Who was this Lilith of abortions Touching the hair of your children With tiger-painted nails?

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30 31 32 33

Her speech Harrods, Hitler’s mutilations Kept you company, weeding the onions. An ex-Nazi Youth Sabra. Her father Doctor to the Bolshoi Ballet.

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

She was helpless too. None of us could wake up. Nightmare looked out at the poppies. She sat there, in her soot-wet mascara, In flame-orange silks, in gold bracelets, Slightly filthy with erotic mystery – A German Russian Israeli with the gaze of a demon Between curtains of black Mongolian hair.

43 44 45 46 47

After a single night under our roof She told her dream. A giant fish, a pike Had a globed, golden eye, and in that eye A throbbing human foetus – You were astonished, maybe envious.

48 49 50 51 52

I refused to interpret. I saw The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her, and I knew it. (Hughes 1998, 157–158).

The poem’s first section (1–7) heavily stresses the (alleged) fatality of the development of which the other woman (“she”) is the active initiator: she “carries” (like an infection) the “fate” (the driving force), the “fable” (the story they are intended to perform); and she deliberately seeks them out (like a tracking dog its victim). The external directedness of the development is suggested through two analogous schemata: the notion of Fate conducting an experiment with them as its “inert ingredients” (4); and a stage play performed in the theater, for which the three – Hughes, Plath and the other woman – are “requisitioned” (6) as mere “puppets” for the plot. In both cases the persons are declared powerless and ignorant of what they are doing. The subsequent two sections develop the constellation of Plath and the other woman as similar and essentially as rivals: they are fascinated with each other, both have German origins.113 For Plath the other is said to be an ideal self, a “dream-self” (24). The stress on this affinity between the two women in the last

113 One might add: Like Eve and Lilith (27) they are alternative wives to Adam.

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analysis implies that for the man’s, Hughes’s affection, the new-comer can and eventually will replace his wife, with destructive consequences for her happiness, her selfhood and finally her life. The last section of “Dreamers” (48–52) explicitly takes up the problem of knowledge and responsibility: The new woman and Hughes fall in love with each other. This is not rendered as an intentional act on their part so that they cannot be held responsible for that. But there is a difference in awareness between them. While the other woman “[does] not know it” (50), the speaker does: Not only does he see that she has fallen in love with him, he also knows that he himself has fallen in love with her. The implication could be: With a clear knowledge of what has happened, one still has the possibility of acting against it (however difficult this might be), without such an awareness one is completely helpless (see 34). The end of “Dreamers” seems to imply that Hughes exonerates the two women, especially the intruder, from responsibility for what was to happen and takes over at least some of the responsibility for himself, admitting a superior awareness of the situation on his part. The picture is again, like in “Error”, generally characterized by ambivalence: Although the development is purported to be dominated by fatality and inevitability, within that general tendency Hughes acknowledges to having had a little more knowledge and scope for becoming active – an opportunity which he, however, failed to grasp.

3.7.3 “Life after Death” Among the 88 poems making up Birthday Letters and reconstructing episodes from their lives together only very few deal explicitly with Plath’s death, especially “Night-Ride on Ariel” and “Telos”, without, however, addressing Hughes’s personal reaction to it. The only poem in which he directly deals with his own feelings (and those of his children) about the loss of Plath is “Life after Death”.

Life after Death

1 2

What can I tell you that you do not know Of the life after death?

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled us With your Slavic Asiatic Epicanthic fold, but would become So perfectly your eyes, Became wet jewels, The hardest substance of the purest pain As I fed him in his high white chair.

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10 11 12 13 14

Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears. But his mouth betrayed you – it accepted The spoon in my disembodied hand That reached through from the life that had survived you.

15 16 17 18

Day by day his sister grew Paler with the wound She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it Each day with her blue Breton jacket.

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

By night I lay awake in my body The Hanged Man My neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon Which fastened the base of my skull To my left shoulder Torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots – I fancied the pain could be explained If I were hanging in the spirit From a hook under my neck-muscle.

28 Dropped from life 29 We three made a deep silence 30 In our separate cots. 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

We were comforted by wolves. Under that February moon and the moon of March The Zoo had come close. And in spite of the city Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night For minutes on end They sang. They had found where we lay. And the dingos, and the Brazilian-maned wolves – All lifted their voices together With the grey Northern pack.

41 42 43 44 45

The wolves lifted us in their long voices. They wound us and enmeshed us In their wailing for you, their mourning for us, They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death, In the fallen snow, under falling snow.

46 47 48 49 50

As my body sank into the folk-tale Where the wolves are singing in the forest For two babes, who have turned, in their sleep, Into orphans Beside the corpse of their mother. (Hughes 1998, 182–183).



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This poem is a narrative report about the reaction of the remaining members of the Hughes’s family in the immediate aftermath of the mother’s / wife’s death (in their flat in Primrose Hill near the London Zoo): first individually mentioning son (3–14), daughter (15–18), husband (19–28) and finally referring to all three of them collectively (“we”). The narrative of their reactions is preceded by a (posthumous) rhetorical question to Plath: for her this communication will not be new, an ambivalent question, which might presuppose superior knowledge (after her own death) or imply blame (this is what she caused by taking her own life). The painfulness of the loss for the two little children is intense and obvious, described in greater detail for the younger of the two, the son (“the purest pain”, 8; “grief”, 10; “tears”, 11) than for the older daughter (“paler with the wound”, 16). For both of them, however, the grief is a little reduced in a rather childlike (and partly gender-specific) manner – by food for him (12–13), a favorite garment for her (18). Hughes’s own reaction to the loss is expressed less directly and less openly. The first reference (“my disembodied hand / That reached through from the life that had survived you”, 13–14) only vaguely hints at his being affected in his physical integrity. This aspect is then taken up at greater length metaphorically in the self-identification with the image of the “Hanged Man”, one of the cards of the Tarot pack, testifying to Hughes’s esoteric, irrational, mythical interests. Again he describes his pain in physical (orthopedic) terms (“in my body”, 19), indicating subsequently and briefly a psychological interpretation: “hanging in the spirit / From a hook under my neck-muscle” (26–27). This self-description, which – by the way – reverses the position of the body (the Tarot picture shows the hanged man suspended upside down), implies punishment and thereby the acknowledgement of guilt. This aspect is played down, however, by the curiously elaborate and technically precise description of the manner of suspension. All these devices combine to produce a distancing effect of the feeling of pain for his wife’s loss on Hughes’s part. This distancing effect is repeated and continued in the next section (31–45) in the form of the howling of wolves (from the nearby zoo): “We were comforted by wolves […]” (31). The howling of the wolves at the wintry moon is taken as a vicarious act of mourning for Plath (“their wailing for you, their mourning for us114”, 43), while they themselves had remained silent (“deep silence”, 29). And this loud expression of grief is experienced as consoling (31, 35, 41), as alleviating the pain thereby beginning to cope with the loss. That the act of mourning is vicariously performed by ferocious beasts (though in captivity) points again to Hughes’s deep dispositional affinity to the wild, to the vitality of animals, to

114 That is, performing the ritual of mourning for them, on their behalf.

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life outside human civilization. The soothing, alleviating effect of this mourning ritual is metaphorically described as being raised from a fallen position (“lifted us”, 41, versus “We lay in your death, / In the fallen snow, under falling snow”, 44–45) and being wrapped protectively (“wound us and enmeshed us”, 42, “wove us into […]”, 44). In the closing section of the poem the reference to wolves is functionalized in another respect, in an allusion to the Roman legend (“the folk-tale”, 46) of Romulus and Remus, two infants raised by a wolf after the loss of their mother, Rhea Silvia: “two babes, who have turned, in their sleep, / Into orphans / Beside the corpse of their mother” (48–50). This association is apparently triggered by the mother’s name, the two children’s helpless situation and the (as it were) “sympathetic” howling wolves, which Hughes vaguely identifies himself with – once again stressing his physical rather than psychological involvement (“My body sank into the folk-tale”, 46). On the whole, Hughes again does not express intense grief about the failure of the marriage and the loss of his wife. Though his painful reaction seems to be implied in this poem (much more so than in any other one), it is muted, shifted to others (the children, the wolves), transformed or hidden (in projecting it onto a playing card image and shifting the focus from the psychological to the physical dimension) and ultimately betrayed not to be very strong in itself. The coping strategy consists mainly in explaining, reconstructing and tracing the development, in general: making the recollection of what happened and why coherent – a more distancing technique of coping, which may be due to the long time gap since the loss. In the process of reconstructing the past and trying to explain what happened, one has to acknowledge that, Hughes seems to take over some responsibility for himself, but in addition he again attributes the fatal catastrophe to their dispositional differences.

3.7.4 “The Prism” Of the poems dealing with the Hughes’ situation and life after Plath’s death “The Prism” summarily and comprehensively deals with his retrospective view of and attitude towards her person, her self and the loss of her – a concluding picture seen from a great temporal distance, summing up her existence in the prismatic doubleness of potentiality and actuality, of what might have been and what eventually came to pass, which is basically the narrative development of her life, the two essential phases of her life-story.

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The Prism 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

The waters off beautiful Nauset Were the ocean sun, the sea-poured crystal Behind your efforts. They were your self’s cradle. What happened to it all that winter you went Into your snowed-on grave, in the Pennines? It goes with me, your seer’s vision-stone. Like a lucky stone, my unlucky stone. I can look into it and still see That salty globe of blue, its gull-sparkle, Its path of surf-groomed sand Roaming away north Like the path of the Israelites Under the hanging, arrested hollow of thunder Into promise, and you walking it Your sloped brown shoulders, your black swim-suit, Towards that sea-lit sky.                  Wherever you went It was your periscope lens, Between your earthenware earrings, Behind your eye-brightness, so lucidly balanced, Such a flawless crystal, so worshipped. I still have it. I hold it – ‘The waters off beautiful Nauset’. Your intact childhood, your Paradise With its pre-Adamite horse-shoe crab in the shallows As a guarantee, God’s own trademark. I turn it, a prism, this way and that. That way I see the filmy surf-wind flicker Of your ecstasies, your visions in the crystal. This way the irreparably-crushed lamp In my crypt of dream, totally dark, Under your gravestone. (Hughes 1998, 186–187).

The prism through which Hughes sees Plath is his memory of her, which is loosely equated with her own changing self-concepts in life: “your seer’s vision-stone” (6). He thus imaginatively takes over her perspective on herself combining it with his own in naming the crucial phases in the declining course of her life – from her youthful “self’s cradle” (3) on the warm sunny New England coast to her “snowed-on grave in the Pennines” (5), from her “intact childhood”, her “Paradise” (23) to his “crypt of dream, totally dark, / Under [her] gravestone” (­ 30–31). This is also a shift from “a lucky stone” to “my unlucky stone” (7), which  – through the possessive pronoun (“my”) – implies that his personal connection is rather with the latter than the former phase of her life, presumably on account

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of his own involvement in what happened in the end. The same implication is conveyed at the end of the poem, when he contrasts the two alternative perspectives visible through the prism  – the remote one (“that way”, 27) of “the filmy surf-wind”, her “ecstasies”, her “visions” (27–28) in opposition to the closer one (“[t]his way”, 29): “the irreparably-crushed lamp / In my crypt of dream, totally dark, / Under your gravestone” (30–31). Again, the fatal aspect comes second and, moreover, the poem ends with a reference to it. And even more than in the former instance, the speaker appears to imply his own involvement in this development, the actual extent and form of which is only darkly and mysteriously hinted at in the closing images (“irreparably-crushed lamp”, “crypt of dream”, 29–30) and therefore somewhat played down. The main emphasis in this poem is on the permanent preservation of the condensed double image of Plath by Hughes: “It goes with me” (6), “I still have it. I hold it” (21). The ambivalence which characterizes Hughes’s presentation of the loss of his wife in other poems, seems to underlie the memory of her here, too. On the one hand he gives prominence to her youthful, hopeful and joyful self – to judge by the greater length of the description; on the other hand this aspect is twice superseded by the reference to the fatal ending. On the one hand he hints at his possible involvement in this ending, on the other he does not really clarify the concrete nature and extent of that involvement, thus distancing and detaching himself from it. * Throughout the entire sequence Hughes is constantly concerned with recapitulating and recollecting Plath’s life and her personality as well as their relationship and marriage115 but he does so quite detachedly, never expressing or betraying intense emotions like pain, grief or feelings of loss. This special attitude can be highlighted by a comparison with Hardy’s painful recollection of his wife in “The Voice”116. Hughes’s reticence might be due to emotional detachment, to the reluctance to reveal his emotional attachment or to the length of time that had elapsed since the events themselves. On the whole, Birthday Letters presents an ambivalent achievement as a result of Hughes’s project of recollection and recapitulation. By mediating the remembered experiences in the form of poetic texts

115 Whitehead (1999) sees Birthday Letters as written within the crisis of bereavement. But her intention to demonstrate that “the past is no longer an object of possession” (229) is too narrow for a clear analysis of Hughes’s attempts at coping with loss and death. 116 See Chapter 3.5.



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and successfully transforming the details into some kind of coherent narrative he achieves self-distancing and detachment. But at the same time these narrative attempts are informed by the  – apparently somewhat remote  – awareness and acknowledgement of his own partial involvement and responsibility. There is clear evidence – in private utterances such as letters117 – that Ted Hughes experienced the composition and publication of Birthday Letters as a successful means of finally coping with the severe long lasting trauma of the catastrophic failure of his marriage and the loss of Sylvia Plath (Twiddy 2010). Writing and publishing these poems gave him “the sensation of inner liberation – a huge, sudden possibility of new inner experience”.118 In a letter of thanks for being awarded the 1998 Forward Poetry Prize for Birthday Letters he wrote: “My book is a gathering of the occasions  – written with no plan over about 25 years – in which I tried to open a direct, private, inner contact with my first wife  […] thinking mainly to evoke her presence to myself and to feel her there listening.”119 He confessed that he experienced “a freedom of imagination I’ve not felt since 1962”.120 The whole collection has been described as an instance of healthy mourning.121 (One might critically add that this result is achieved partly at least at the cost of possibly distorting and manipulating the memory of Sylvia Plath’s own problems and suffering.) Thus, although no single individual poem presents the positive event of a boundary crossing, of “consolation”, the collection as a whole (and the fact that it was published at all) constitutes this eventful achievement. With regard to this eventful achievement, one may interpret the enigmatic title Birthday Letters as signifying both the author’s eventual re-birth as a result of understanding, integrating and acknowledging the story of his loss and the imaginary recovery of his wife’s fate and personality.

117 As quoted from unpublished material in Clark (2011, 222–223). 118 A letter to Kathleen Raine, quoted in Clark (2011, 222, footnote 4). 119 Quoted in Kruse (2000, 47–48) and Wagner (2000, 22). 120 In a letter (of 20 February 1998) to his son Nicholas (Reid 2007, 713). In this letter, he also describes his long-lasting psychological blockage before the publication of this collection as a “logjam” and “That thickening thickening glass window between me and that real self of mine which was trapped in the unmanageable experience of what had happened with her and me.” (712) 121 This is Clark’s (2011, 228) assessment, drawing on Peter Sacks’s (1987) notion of what constitutes healthy mourning. However, Clark’s main focus is not so much on Hughes’s problem of coping with loss as on his artistic rivalry with Sylvia Plath under the aspect of influence and independence, what he calls “combative struggles for inheritance” (224).

3.8 Summary The negative event, the loss of a beloved person, which functions as the initiating impulse for the reflections and reactions of the speakers in the selected poems and sequences, is presented in two different varieties – either as a manifest or as a threatened loss. The majority of the examples feature a wide variety of reactions to manifest loss, ranging from the reaction to an unspecified shattering experience, on a highly abstract level, in Dickinson’s “After Great Pain” to the husband’s apparent betrayal and desertion in Plath’s “The Other”, from the formerly beloved wife’s recent death after a long period of estrangement in Hardy’s “The Voice” and, in a highly ambivalent, partly self-exonerating manner, in Hughes’s Birthday Letters to the progression from the beloved’s foreshadowed death towards its actual occurrence in Wordsworth’s Lucy poems. In the remaining examples the speakers are confronted by different forms of threatened loss  – the suspected withdrawal of the beloved’s affection in the young-man section of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the dreaded estrangement from the beloved during an imminent period of absence in Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”. Dickinson focuses on the psychological process of experiencing deadening pain as the result of a vital loss, radically abstracting it from all circumstantial details of person, situation and social context, including the precise nature or cause of the loss. The resulting positive event emerges in the implicit form of an eventual release through resignation or exhaustion, apparently supported or prepared for, by the emotional detachment through the pervasive level of extreme abstraction and self-distancing. Hardy, too, concentrates on the internal dimension, including, however, details about the speaker’s personal circumstances both in the past and at present; but here the recollection of the past loss of a formerly happy love results in a final event in that the experience of loss is renewed and intensified, seemingly without the prospect of eventual release, which, however, is finally made ambivalent through certain distancing devices. On account of the relentless, spiritually unrelieved intensity the eventful turn in both poems might be said to display modern tendencies. By contrast, Wordsworth’s Lucy poems place the progress towards the beloved’s death and the reaction to it into a basically social context, albeit in clear departure from and opposition to established social values and conventions. Love and death are exclusively situated in a natural environment, therefore by implication remote from society. And the speaker’s feeling of loss is rather painlessly – but eventfully – overcome by the transformation of the dead beloved into a natural thing, by her preservation as a part of nature, implying that the speaker’s love of wild nature is the continuation and indeed fulfillment of his love for

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Lucy. The emphasis on the self’s imaginative power and the recourse to nature – away from human society – can be classified as Romantic. In Shakespeare’s and Donne’s poems the loss has not occurred yet but is at present only threatened so that the speakers are trying to forestall or prevent the negative event by arguing with the beloved, employing elaborate rhetorical devices to persuade and urge or else re-assure him or her. Thereby they are deliberately aiming at preserving, securing or recovering the intimate relationship and thus  – in the last analysis  – striving for the constitution of a “non-event”, the non-occurrence of a (dreaded) definitive negative event of final loss. In Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” the lover tries to establish a re-assuring imaginative binding and bonding link to the beloved to preclude the fear of estrangement on her part, not on his own. Shakespeare’s sonnets addressed to the speaker’s male friend employ particularly complex rhetorical strategies in that they usually function at two levels and in two respects at the same time. On the one hand, the speaker is motivated by an intimately emotional, latently erotic attachment to his friend, which, however, is never fully acknowledged; on the other hand, he embeds his utterances in a dramatic constellation, directly addressing his friend under changing external conditions. This constellation produces a wide spectrum of intricate, underhand or indirect rhetorical ploys to influence and put emotional or moral pressure on his friend or rouse his pity and thereby re-activate his affection. The large variety of rhetorical manoeuvres disguise the underlying unchanged desire for the preservation or re-constitution of the friend’s love, for instance, when the declaration of a voluntary termination of the relationship implies the direct opposite, the plea for its continuation (as in sonnets 71 and 87) and when the recollection of his friend’s former love or the abstract definition of love aim at the renewal of affection (as in sonnets 29 and 116). Both Donne’s and Shakespeare’s speakers rely on openly rhetorical and argumentative strategies for coping with the fear of loss, whereas the speakers in the Romantic as well as proto-modern examples stress the existential relevance and immediacy of the utterances. While Shakespeare’s, Donne’s and Wordsworth’s speakers are confronted with the threatening or imminent loss of a beloved person, Hughes in Birthday Letters is concerned with a loss which has already occurred a long time ago and to which he himself, unlike the speakers in all the other poems, in some way may have contributed through his behavior and/or disposition, as he admits. Accordingly, his strategy of coping takes both factors into account. Somewhat like Hardy, but in much greater detail, Hughes reconstructs the past story of his relationship to his wife and places her loss into a wider concrete context recollecting and intensely revivifying the development and its circumstances which led to the catastrophic event. But at the same time he employs various devices

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to control and reduce the emotional impact: explaining the drift towards the event as inevitable, notably on the basis of the schemata of tragic fate and, as it were, tragic character flaw as well as labyrinthine entanglement. These schemata surreptitiously serve the effect of reducing personal responsibility for the fatal consequences, only partly balanced by intermittent acknowledgements of his involvement as an agent. The coping strategy thus consists in the combination of the narrative reconstruction and quasi-causal explanation of the course of development with the ambivalent indications of personal responsibility and tragic fatality. That he has ultimately succeeded in coming to terms with the experience of loss is signaled by the very detached tone and attitude underlying the sequence. The recourse to archaic mythic schemata underlying Hughes’s strategy constitutes a modernist feature (as frequently in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence). Plath’s attempt, in “The Other”, to cope with a suddenly discovered loss, her husband’s unfaithfulness with another woman, is blatantly modernist in its fragmented and willfully “obscure” manner of presentation – telling and simultaneously hiding the story. The coping strategy consists in two moves on different levels. On the level of its poetic form, the poem mediates the experience of loss only obliquely through connotations, isotopies and images, thereby largely obscuring it. On the level of the propositional content, the process of tackling the loss results in a negated negation (“No, it is not fatal”) meant to function as the positive event of having survived the impact – not very convincingly. So, of the seven examples discussed in this chapter only two seem to end with some kind of positive event, successfully coping with loss: Wordsworth by way of transforming the lost beloved and Dickinson by way of resignation and acceptance. In Shakespeare and Donne the result of the (elaborate) rhetorical strategies is not yet apparent – owing to the fact that the loss is so far only threatened, but the situation is much more precarious in Shakespeare than in Donne. Hardy and Hughes present diametrically opposite reactions to a long-past death: the unrelievedly painful revivification of the loss in the first case, the partly exonerating, partly rationalizing explanation of the catastrophic development in the second. Plath’s poem shows the deliberate and deliberately disguised effort to face the loss and come to terms with it, particularly precarious and partially failing.

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Myers, Lucas. 2011. An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. A Memoir. Nottingham: Richard Hollis. Ong, Walter J. 1967. “Humanism.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. VII, 215–224. New York: McGraw-Hill. Parker, David. 1969. “Verbal Moods in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Modern Language Quarterly 30(3):331–339. Paulin, Tom. 1986. Thomas Hardy. The Poetry of Perception. London: Macmillan. Perloff, Marjorie. 1990. Poetic License. Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Plath, Sylvia. 1981. Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes. London: Faber. Puttenham, George. 1936 [1589]. The Arte of English Poesie, edited by G. D. Wilcock and A. Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramazani, Jahan. 1991. “Hardy and the Poetics of Melancholia. Poems of 1912–13 and Other Elegies for Emma.” English Literary History 58(4):957–977. Ray, Robert H. 1990. A John Donne Companion. London/New York: Garland. Reid, Christopher, ed. 2007. Letters of Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber. Reiman, Donald. 1978. “Poetry of Familiarity: Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Mary Hutchinson.” In Donald Reiman et al. eds. The Evidence of Imagination: Studies of Interactions of Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, 142–177. New York: New York University Press. Ricœur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricœur, Paul. 1991. “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator.” In Mario Valdés, ed. A Ricœur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, 425–437. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sacks, Peter M. 1985. The English Elegy. Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Saldívar, Toni. 1992. Sylvia Plath: Confessing the Fictive Self. New York etc.: Lang. Schalkwyk, David. 2002. Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schoenfeldt, Michael. 2010. The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sexton, Melanie. 1991. “Phantoms of His Own Figuring: The Movement Toward Recovery in Hardy’s ‘Poems of 1912–13’.” Victorian Poetry 29(3):209–226. Sheats, Paul D., ed. 1982. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Cambridge Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stevenson, Anne. 1989. Bitter Fame. A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Mifflin. Tomalin, Claire. 2006. Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man. London: Viking. Twiddy, Iain. 2010. “Myth and Public Mourning: Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters.” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 14:63–80. Van der Merwe, Chris N. and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. 2007. Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Vendler, Helen. 1997. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Belknap / Harvard University Press. Wagner, Erica. 2000. Ariel’s Gift: A Commentary on ‘Birthday Letters’ by Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber. West, David. ed. 2007. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: Duckworth. Whitehead, Anne. 1999. “Refiguring Orpheus: The possession of the past in Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters.” Textual Practice 13(2): 227–241.

4 Confronting One’s Own Death

4.0 Introduction The most serious threat to one’s existence with which man has to cope is the loss of his life. The experience of having to confront one’s own death differs from other forms of loss in two respects. The moment of death is an event that has not yet occurred but will inevitably come about sometime in the future; it is, however, only experienced acutely as a threat if it is imminent. And though the loss of one’s life is by its nature an absolute and definitive ending of one’s biological existence, its precise meaning and consequence as well as the attitude towards it will presumably be influenced by the cultural context, especially the impact of religious or philosophical belief systems. Accordingly, the threat posed by imminent death may consist in the anticipation of various degrees and forms of radical change, for instance extinction, punishment in the afterlife or, conversely, salvation and resurrection or exposure to the unknown or deprival of fulfillment, achievement and happiness. There are specific occasions on which persons face imminent death with particular urgency, for instance vis-à-vis impending execution, lethal illness or war, but the frightening prospect of dying and death may also come up without such immediate concrete causes on account of the acute awareness of one’s fundamentally precarious situation in the world. The essential ambiguity of lyric poetry between fictionality and factuality – as mentioned in the introduction (Chapter 1)  – applies with particular significance to poems thematizing the confrontation with one’s own death. In almost all poems selected in this chapter, there is clear evidence of, or even explicit reference to, the autobiographical relevance of this serious existential threat for the authors themselves. Thus the poem in question deliberately invites the reader to read it as a personal utterance by the author, in fact, as a text in and through which the author presents him- or herself as trying to come to terms with the imminent fundamental disruption of his or her existence. And by performing and modeling this confrontation in the medium of a work of art he or she both generalizes this experience and to a certain extent distances him- or herself from it. Confronting one’s own death possesses a specific relevance as a topic of poems in that it is closely linked to the conventional focus within the genre of lyrical poetry on the constitution, exploration and expression of subjectivity and selfhood. The examples analyzed below feature attempts at coping with death under a wide variety of circumstances: impending execution (4.1: Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Verses Made the Night before He Died” and Chidiock Tichborne’s “Elegy”), the frightful anticipation of transcendental judgment after death and the end of the world (4.2: John Donne’s “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night”; 4.3: William Cowper’s “The Castaway”), death cutting life off too soon before per-

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sonal fulfillment and achievement (4.4.1: John Keats’s “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be”) or coming at a later stage as a welcome closure after life has spent itself (4.4.2: Lord Byron’s “On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year”) or happening unexpectedly but essentially having been inherent in one’s life all along (4.5: Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could not Stop for Death”), death in war (4.6.1: Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”; 4.6.2: Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”) and the process of dying negotiated as a ritual crossing of a boundary (4.7: D. H. Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians”).

4.1 Sir Walter Raleigh: “Verses Made the Night before He Died” (1618) and Chidiock Tichborne: “Elegy” (1586) There are two poems from the early modern period which poets are known to have composed immediately before their execution, one by Sir Walter Raleigh, the other by Chidiock Tichborne. In both cases, the composition of the poem obviously functioned for the author as a means of coming to terms with the imminence of certain death by analyzing, defining and accommodating its significance to one’s self-concept and world view in order to make it meaningful, bearable or even acceptable. Raleigh’s poem, though the later text, will be discussed first because it is the more conventional one and can serve as a foil to highlight the unusual strategy of Tichborne’s “Elegy”.

4.1.1 Sir Walter Raleigh: “Verses Made the Night before He Died” The author of the first example, “Verses Made the Night before he Died” (1618), is the courtier, navigator, colonizer and writer Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618).122 After returning from an unsuccessful expedition in search of gold in the West Indies in 1618, Raleigh was arrested for the ransacking of a Spanish fort by his men, accused of endangering the peace between England and Spain and executed to appease the Spanish. It is assumed that he wrote this poem the night before his execution.

Verses made the night before he died

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Even such is Time, which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust; Who in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days: But from which earth, and grave, and dust, The Lord shall raise me up, I trust. (Jones 1991, 390).123

122 See Nicholls & Williams (2008). The name is also spelt Ralegh. 123 This version differs slightly from the one printed in Rudick (1999, 80).

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In the first six lines, the speaker ponders his previous life, in complete conformity with man’s common destiny on earth (indicated by the pervasive use of the first-person-plural pronoun  – “we”, “our”, “us”), as a “story” (6) written, that is, conducted and determined by Time (1), the personified narrative schema of the inevitable transitoriness and final decay of all things on earth. The life story is metaphorically characterized as – that is, modeled on the script of – a deceitful financial transaction, in which “Time”, in the role of pawnbroker or banker, accepts a loan (“takes in trust”, 1) and later pays it back with nothing but worthless things (“age and dust”, 3). Syntactically, the course of life is rendered in two narrative sequences predicated (as two relative clauses, 1 and 4) on Time as the controlling agent of man’s life-story and structured as a declining succession of two phases, from “youth” and “joys” to “age and dust” (2–3), from “days” to “the dark and silent grave” (4, 6). The evaluation implied by the references to unreliableness, worthlessness, deceit, decline and “dust” are indicative of the conventional Christian devaluation and denigration of secular life, its joys and achievements. Another conventional schema loosely related to this view is the narrative image of life as a journey (5). In the concluding two lines, this latently Christian perspective is explicitly turned into the prospective narrative of resurrection in eternity, which is expected to reverse the progression towards decline and decay into an upward movement towards new life, based on the Christian script of redemption. Time is replaced by God (“the Lord”) as the guiding power and agent of one’s existence. But man’s passivity in the development of his life remains unchanged; he has still to rely on and trust in a superior power, which is indicative of his powerlessness, but here the trust (8) is no longer misplaced. This prospective narrative is the direct opposite and reversal of the previous (predominantly) retrospective story (“but”, 7). And the speaker now turns from the common lot to his own individual existence by using the first-person singular (“me”, “I”). This trust in the prospective story of salvation and resurrection constitutes the eventful turn in the poem – quite predictable within the contemporary religious context and therefore not of a high degree. That the poem, which so far had been spoken rather neutrally and unemotionally, ends with an emphatic personal reference to this confidence (“I trust”) seems to reveal the speaker’s anxiety and hope of relieving his anxiety through belief in God’s help. Raleigh conceptualizes death as utter extinction and counters this threat by trust in the resurrection promised by Christ – or tries to.



4.1 Sir Walter Raleigh (1618) and Chidiock Tichborne (1586) 

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4.1.2 Chidiock Tichborne: “Elegy” The second, earlier, example is by Chidiock Tichborne124, a Roman Catholic, who participated in the Babington plot of 1586 to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and replace her with Catholic Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. The plans for this plot were betrayed and the conspirators arrested, tried and sentenced to death for high treason. On the day before his execution Tichborne is said to have written this elegy in the Tower.

Tichborne’s Elegy

1 2 3 4 5 6

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, My feast of joy is but a dish of pain, My crop of corn is but a field of tares, And all my good is but vain hope of gain. The day is past, and yet I saw no sun, And now I live, and now my life is done.

7 8 9 10 11 12

My tale was heard and yet it was not told, My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green; My youth is spent and yet I am not old, I saw the world and yet I was not seen. My thread is cut and yet it is not spun, And now I live, and now my life is done.

13 14 15 16 17 18

I sought my death and found it in my womb, I looked for life and saw it was a shade; I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb, And now I die, and now I was but made. My glass is full, and now my glass is run, And now I live, and now my life is done. (Jones 1991, 393).125

Looking at his past and present life, the speaker sees everything changed into its opposite and radically devalued from good to bad, an assessment which he repeats from line to line in the (rhetorical and logical) form of antithetically or even contradictorily coupled statements. The semantic or logical opposition of the two contradictory statements in each line is made explicit by the repetitive use of adversative conjunctions: “but” in the first, “and yet” in the second,

124 See Seccombe (1898, 374–375), the entry on “Tichborne, Chidiock” in Williams (2004), and Hirsch (1986, 303–318). 125 This is the most widely anthologized version of the poem, also included in Hirsch (1986, 317–318). Hirsch also prints another version found among the numerous manuscripts, which he claims to have greater authority (309–310).

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“and”, used adversatively, in the third stanza, “and now” in the last line of each stanza (as well as in the two preceding lines of the last stanza). In most if not all lines, these oppositional statements signify two successive phases in a temporal sequence, thereby forming parallel micro-narratives featuring radical reversals in the development of life but with various distortions of the natural chronological order. These micro-narratives are based on a variety of general schematic changes – referring to the year (1) or the day (5), vegetation or agriculture (3, 8), emotional experience (2, 4) and especially the course of human life (6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18). The predicates with which these condensed narrative reversals are expressed change in the course of the poem, from the copula (“is but”) in the first stanza to the passive voice with past participles in the second stanza (already before in l. 5 and again in ll. 16–17) and the active voice, mostly in the past tense, in the third stanza (ll. 13–15 and already before in l. 9). The first stanza presents negative re-definitions of the positive features of the speaker’s existence, which imply a sudden radical change and reversal, from the spring of life to winter (from “prime” to “frost”, 1), from joy to pain (2), from expectation of “crop” to disappointment (3), from certainty to disillusionment (4). The second stanza exemplifies the premature curtailing of his life story in the form of numerous images: failing to make himself known to the world through personal achievements (10) and not, as is implied, through the public event of his execution (7), coming to an end at the very beginning of his life without bearing fruit (8, 9, 11). The third stanza emphasizes the perverse prematurity of his death even further, by paradoxically collapsing beginning and end – death and birth (13), living and dying (15, implied in 14). The speaker finally sums up the fact of the abrupt, premature ending of his life in the refrain of each stanza as well as in the preceding two lines within the last stanza (16–17) by radically contracting the story of his life at the present moment (“now”). That is to say, what is happening is experienced as the immediate radical reversal of the present state of affairs. The imminence of the speaker’s impending death is so overwhelming that it seems already to be happening at present: living and dying are practically simultaneous, life has already been ended. This overwhelming and threatening awareness appears to have caused the revaluation of everything in the preceding lines. Furthermore, one may construe the progression of each stanza as the – ritualized and stylized  – succession (and enumeration) of the speaker’s mental observations, narrative recapitulations and comprehensive reflections about the various aspects of his past and present life, which then culminate in the concluding realization of his approaching death as an increase in awareness which underlies these details. In temporal respects, however, the constellation is paradoxical and actually the reversal of the sequence indicated: the reference in the refrain of each stanza is ultimately not the result of the preceding but its cause.



4.1 Sir Walter Raleigh (1618) and Chidiock Tichborne (1586) 

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The heightened painful awareness inherent in the reference to imminent death in the refrain can be identified as the event of this poem. In its propositional content this statement is not surprising and unexpected, but its significance and irrepressible sense of devastating reality are underscored both by the highly paradoxical formulation, the direct identification of life and death at the moment of speaking and by being identically repeated at the end of each stanza. This repetition progressively increases the existential and emotional weight of the eventful realization of imminent extinction. The degree of eventfulness is further raised by two contextual features. First, the focus is excessively concentrated on the speaker as an (isolated, self-contained, powerless) individual. All statements are explicitly and emphatically referred to his self, as expressed by the use, without exception, frequently even twice, of the first-person-singular pronoun in every single line of the poem (“I”, “my”). Second, all statements are exclusively restricted to this earthly world – without any mention at all of a transcendent realm, without any religious reference whatsoever, which is particularly notable in view not only of the religious orientation of most people at that time but especially in view of the biographical facts that Tichborne’s motive for joining the conspiracy was obviously religious, his active support of the cause of Roman Catholicism, and that he expressed hope in redemption both in the last letter to his wife and in the public speech immediately before his execution126. These two features add considerable weight to the concluding – eventful – awareness of imminent death by emphasizing its finality and gravity. Death is understood to be equivalent to the complete annihilation of life and the end of everything – a view which is to be considered a decidedly modern aspect in this poem. While Raleigh’s speaker strives for consolation and reassurance in his confrontation with his imminent execution, Tichborne seems to aim at increasing the understanding of his fate and heightening his awareness, at exposing himself more and more acutely to its grave significance. Ultimately, the speaker’s eventfully heightened awareness of the imminent end of his life might be said to have another dimension still, which is potentially present in all utterances in poetry: the success of rendering the insight in a satisfying, perfect poetic form. This shift to the level of artistic composition would then in fact offer some kind of (artistic) achievement and satisfaction rather than (emotional) consolation.

126 See the texts printed in Hirsch (1986, 311–313). – One can, of course, only speculate about the reasons for this discrepancy. It may have to do with the fact that letter and speech were embedded in a social, inter-personal situation and thus drew on the prevalent valid meaning system, whereas in the poem the speaker confronted the crisis alone and therefore more radically.

4.2 John Donne: “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night” (1609/1611) In his “Holy Sonnets” or “Divine Meditations”, published in 1633, presumably written in 1609–1611 (Zunder 1982, 89), John Donne addresses central aspects of human existence from a radically Christian perspective in an innovative and unconventional style. The very fact that Donne is the first to use the sonnet, traditionally reserved for love poetry, for religious themes is highly innovative and daring in itself. Both his secular and his religious poems explore personal orientation and self-definition through reference to an existentially essential other, which is the beloved woman in his love poetry and God in his religious poetry. In the Holy Sonnet127 “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night?” the speaker is confronted with the expectation of his own imminent death within the broader context of the hypothetically imagined end of the world and tries to deal with these frightening prospects for his personal existence. The specifically Christian context is reflected in the precise nature of his fear. As against both Raleigh and especially Tichborne, where death signified annihilation of physical existence on earth, Donne’s speaker fears death not because it will mean personal extinction but because it entails judgment and consequently, since man inevitably becomes guilty of sins during his life on earth, painful punishment. Such a shift in the meaning of death for the self in this sonnet is due to the specific frame introduced by the first line, the narrative of the end of world on doomsday (“the world’s last night”) and the concomitant “second coming”, the return of Christ in order to judge the living and the dead.

What if this Present were the World’s Last Night

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

What if this present were the world’s last night? Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell, The picture of Christ crucified, and tell Whether that countenance can thee affright, Tears in his eyes quench the amazing light, Blood fills his frowns, which from his pierced head fell, And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell, Which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite? No, no; but as in my idolatry I said to all my profane mistresses, Beauty, of pity, foulness only is

127 In the first printed edition of 1633 this sonnet is numbered 9: See Gardner (1978, xxxix, 10). In some modern editions it is numbered 13, for instance in Smith (1986, 314).



4.2 John Donne: “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night” (1609/1611) 

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12 A sign of rigour: so I say to thee, 13 To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned, 14 This beauteous form assures a piteous mind. (Smith 1986, 314).

This hypothetical  – prospective  – narrative of the coming judgment obviously arouses the fear of future severe punishment (“can thee affright”, 4; “adjudge thee unto hell”, 7). However, the anxiety is not articulated immediately but mentioned only later, embedded within the reassuring retrospective story of Christ’s sacrificial suffering on the cross for the redemption of sinful mankind (3–8). Thus it is already somewhat alleviated  – a first sign of allaying the fear through an implied appeal to Christ’s compassion. This retrospective narrative is present as a “picture” in the speaker’s imagination, preserved in his heart like the lady’s picture in a Petrarchist lover’s heart (Smith 1986, 632). The speaker enumerates (re-tells) in a condensed form essential stages of Christ’s story of suffering – being crucified, weeping in pain, bleeding from wounds caused by the crown of thorns and forgiving his tormentors (“tears in his eyes”, 5; “[b]lood fills his frowns, which from his pierced head fell”, 6; ”prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite”, 8)128. These references evoke the authoritative, eventful narrative, essentially the master-narrative in the Christian world, Christ’s human birth, life and sacrificial death. The re-assuring effect is created by the intimation that what the speaker fears – being condemned to hell – would not at all be compatible with the narrative sequence of Christ’s story and would not be in keeping with Christ’s character as the protagonist of that story. This intimation is particularly emphasized by being formulated as a rhetorical question: “can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell / Which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite?” (8; similarly in l. 4). So the octave of the sonnet ends with this rather conventional trust in Christ’s mercy and loving forgiveness. The sestet abruptly continues with an emphatic negation (“No, no”) of the rhetorical question, which by its nature normally does not require an answer at all, betraying still lingering anxieties and doubts. These the speaker now proceeds to alleviate by a new and highly daring rhetorical move. Referring to his own personal, not only secular but clearly also sinful past story as lover and love poet (“my idolatry”, 9; “my profane mistresses”, 10), he succinctly recounts his former seductive activities towards his mistresses. The mention of mistresses in the plural underlines his purely erotic  – that is, secular  – motivation: He attempted to get them to comply with his desires by flattering them and appealing to their beauty as a guarantee (“a sign”) of their “pity”, that is to say, of their

128 Luke 23: 34: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

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willingness to relent, apparently with success. This private (sinful) tale of his former successful seductions is now applied to the speaker’s present situation vis-à-vis Christ as judge of the world – a close association of the religious and the secular dimensions129, which has been prepared for by the motif of the lover’s heart harboring the beloved’s picture (2–3) and which relies on notions of Christ’s physical (and human) beauty. The speaker then explicitly draws on this personal recollection as a guarantee to assure the soul of its future salvation (“so I say to thee”, 12). Rhetorically, this move is a typical metaphysical conceit (cf. Ray 1990, 356–358) and a particularly daring one in that it equates an effective seductive device in erotic love with the hope for spiritual redemption and thus identifies the erotic with the sacred. In the last analysis, the speaker paradoxically utilizes his former sinful practice to justify his hope of forgiveness for his sins. This conceit constitutes the (envisaged) event of this sonnet – an event which basically consists in the emphatic re-confirmation and re-novation of the familiar promise of Christian redemption as viewed from a shocking, provocative, unheard-of perspective, therefore ranking high on the scale of eventfulness. The event as such is conventional and traditional, but the means of presenting it and bringing it about are new and make the event new. Similar strategies of making Christian truths, which as content of the canonized teachings of the Church are basically conventional and familiar, new, strange and striking, are characteristic of all metaphysical poets, from John Donne and George Herbert to Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne. A highly significant further aspect of this eventful rhetorical strategem concerns the speaker’s own personal identity. The details of the speaker’s past and present attitudes as mentioned here contain clear autobiographical references to John Donne’s life – his youthful secular and “sinful” period and his later spiritual, religious re-orientation. In drawing on his former concerns and activities as lover and love poet he joins the two seemingly heterogeneous or even contradictory phases of his life into one integrated whole, creating coherence and continuity in his self. This self represents the worldly dimension of the speaker’s existence, signified by first-person pronouns (“my”, 2, 9, 10; “I”, 10, 12), distinguished from the “soul” (2) as the dimension connected with the transcendental realm. Significantly, it is the secular part which re-assures the transcendental part, addressing the soul throughout and drawing on his eminently secular past as a script for

129 This close association of the erotic and the sacred can also be found in Donne’s love poetry, for example in “The Canonization”. The conflation of the sacred and the erotic, of the religious and the love discourse in poetry is also signaled by the fact that Donne re-functionalizes the sonnet-genre, conventionally devoted to love, for addressing religious problems.



4.2 John Donne: “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night” (1609/1611) 

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spiritual consolation, that is, the speaker speaks from the position of a human being in this world. Thus he constitutes himself in his secular and spiritual, his sinful and purified attitude as a continuous existence and a unified self.130 This strong self-conscious emphasis on personal identity and on its coherent integration into one comprehensive entity is one prominent feature of the early modern period, as is the strong focus on this world in spite of the ultimately religious focus. Another modern feature is the application of the daring devices of making the familiar new.

130 The straight-forward reading of the sonnet‘s reflections advanced in this analysis is rejected by Oliver (1997, 113–119), who declares this poem to be parodic and a mock-meditation, without really advancing convincing reasons for his approach. He takes the rhetorical strategy naively literally and thus misses the metaphysical wit in Donne’s arguments.

4.3 William Cowper: “The Castaway” (1799/1800) William Cowper’s “The Castaway” consists of two clearly separated sequences: the first (stanzas I–VIII) comprises the tale of an event in the past, the second (IX–XI), the speaker’s self-reflective narrative told mainly simultaneously. A first-person narrator re-tells a “true story” he has read, explains his motives and ends with dramatic hints at his own life. A first-person narrator is by nature overt; here, in addition, he markedly points to himself by linking his own person to the story he is about to tell (3). His overt presence in the last stanzas culminates in a striking turn in the narrative development, running counter to the reader’s expectations. Based on the report of a voyage half a century ago, the narrator relates how a sailor met a tragic death after having fallen overboard. Other persons involved are his comrades on board ship and the captain, Lord George Anson (the homodiegetic narrator of the underlying tale). Finally, there is the narrator himself, telling the story and thematizing his own activity (making poem and writing process into additonal story elements). The poem begins with an ulterior narration by a heterodiegetic narrator. The poem’s second sequence begins with stanza IX. The time shifts from the past tale to the present and the narrator gets deeply involved towards the end, where he has to be classified as homodiegetic.

The Castaway

I 1 2 3 4 5 6

Obscurest night involv’d the sky, Th’ Atlantic billows roar’d, When such a destin’d wretch as I, Wash’d headlong from on board, Of friends, of hope, of all bereft, His floating home for ever left.

II 7 8 9 10 11 12

No braver chief could Albion boast Than he with whom he went, Nor ever ship left Albion’s coast, With warmer wishes sent. He lov’d them both, but both in vain, Nor him beheld, nor her again.

III 13 14 15 16 17 18

Not long beneath the whelming brine, Expert to swim, he lay; Nor soon he felt his strength decline, Or courage die away; But wag’d with death a lasting strife, Supported by despair of life.



4.3 William Cowper: “The Castaway” (1799/1800) 

IV 19 20 21 22 23 24

He shouted: nor his friends had fail’d To check the vessel’s course, But so the furious blast prevail’d, That, pitiless perforce, They left their outcast mate behind, And scudded still before the wind.

V 25 26 27 28 29 30

Some succour yet they could afford; And, such as storms allow, The cask, the coop, the floated cord, Delay’d not to bestow. But he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore, Whate’er they gave, should visit more.

VI 31 32 33 34 35 36

Nor, cruel as it seem’d, could he Their haste himself condemn, Aware that flight, in such a sea, Alone could rescue them; Yet bitter felt it still to die Deserted, and his friends so nigh.

VII 37 38 39 40 41 42

He long survives, who lives an hour In ocean, self-upheld; And so long he, with unspent pow’r, His destiny repell’d; And ever, as the minutes flew, Entreated help, or cried – Adieu!

VIII 43 44 45 46 47 48

At length, his transient respite past, His comrades, who before Had heard his voice in ev’ry blast, Could catch the sound no more. For then, by toil subdued, he drank The stifling wave, and then he sank.

IX 49 50 51 52 53 54

No poet wept him: but the page Of narrative sincere, That tells his name, his worth, his age, Is wet with Anson’s tear. And tears by bards or heroes shed Alike immortalize the dead.

 153

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 Britta Goerke

X 55 56 57 58 59 60

I therefore purpose not, or dream, Descanting on his fate, To give the melancholy theme A more enduring date: But misery still delights to trace Its semblance in another’s case.

XI 61 62 63 64 65 66

No voice divine the storm allay’d, No light propitious shone; When, snatch’d from all effectual aid, We perish’d, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he. (Cowper 1967, 431–432).

In sequence I, the narrator – starting in medias res – vividly recounts a sailor’s dramatic death by drowning: Due to the force of the storm, the captain has no option but to leave the drowning man behind. The narration, a linear, chronological tale centered around the sailor as protagonist, proceeds in a step-by-stepmanner – apart from the second and third stanzas, which contain a summary of the whole story. The narrator casts a glance back upon the beginnings, praises the ship and its chief (II) and envisages the sailor’s tragic death. The first-person narrator is heterodiegetic. In spite of the tale’s homogeneity and overall linearity, the perspective varies. It begins with narratorial focalization. Stanzas II to III change to figural focalization, and whereas IV depicts the sailor’s battle in a seemingly neutral manner, V gives an insight into his mates’ thoughts, feelings, and knowledge about his impending death. Stanza VI then switches back again to an intimate exploration of the sailor’s situation, giving an account of his ambivalent feelings (figural focalization). As this first sequence nears its culmination, the narrative stance becomes “neutral” and “detached” once again: stanza VII recounts his battle from an external standpoint. Stanza VIII blends two stances and first states the sailor’s drowning “from the outside”, adopting his comrades’ perspective; the last words are uttered by a detached, omniscient narrator’s voice again, heterodiegetic, ulterior, from without (“For then, by toil subdued, he drank / The stifling wave, and then he sank”, 47–48). The second sequence changes voice, content, attitude, time and perspective. The narrator’s exploration of his motivation for re-telling this tale culminates in his surprising explanation (“misery […] delights to trace / its semblance in another´s case”, 59–60) drawn out in the last stanza, where the speaker claims that his own destiny is even more dreadful.



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Although the narrator looks back upon Anson’s historical report, his own reasoning pointedly focuses on the present and on his intention of composing the poem: “I therefore purpose not, or dream” (55). Focalization from within occurs more than once: First Anson’s feelings are imagined, then the narrator grants insight into his own psyche. The frames and scripts of the two sequences differ, although there is a certain intersection. The script of a sea voyage obviously shapes the first sequence, but also continues throughout the second one.131 The pattern of a ship fighting a storm, a man falling overboard and drowning is pertinent to both sequences (for instance: “the storm”, 61; “beneath a rougher sea”, 65; “whelmed in […] gulphs”, 66). Employing a widened frame, one may add “death” to the schemata: A tragic accident is “about” dying. Apart from these two frames taken from human life and experience in general, stanzas IX to XI introduce a further – literary – schema: the lamentation of the dead. By this “immortalization theme” the poetic medium as such is thematized. The script of writing a poem is a prerequisite for understanding this text. Various isotopies help to accentuate the narrative further. Stressed throughout is the aggressive danger, the mysterious inevitability lending a tragic note to the sailor’s perishing (for instance “destin’d wretch”, 3; “furious blast”, 21; “pitiless perforce”, 22) and preparing the ground for the final turn. Two contrastive isotopies are added: that of friendship/comradeship/mutual connection/ solidarity/protection132 (for example “friends”, 5/9/36; “home”, 6; “with warmer wishes”, 10; “lov’d”, 11; “comrades”, 44) and that of loneliness/isolation/separation/inability to help (for example “of all bereft” 5, “for ever left”, 5; “lov’d […] in vain”, 11; “outcast mate”, 23; “deserted”, 36). The choice of aspects foregrounds not “only” death, but the utter, unbearable loneliness of this death, watched by friends unable to help and forced to turn away from the dying man. The first distinctive trait of the plot is the dramatic contrast between enormous vitality and consciousness versus the inevitability of his tragic death. The protagonist is not one to surrender easily, yet he is torn out of a full life and forced to observe himself in this tragic, unequal fight – fully aware of the hopeless situation – until the horrible end. His enormous vitality also means a long battle (17).

131 Hutchings points out that the storm image “for the ills of life” (a literary topos, of course) can be found not only in Lucretius, but is also “ubiquitous in evangelical writing” (1983, 143). Evangelical literature played an important role for Cowper, especially at times of desperation and depression. 132 This transcends normal expectations: Not every fellow sailor necessarily turns into a “friend”; a ship at that time was a place of merciless and often cruel labor, and certainly not always a “home”.

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The lost man fighting to survive, forlornly “upheld” in a vast and threatening ocean, (“He long survives, who lives an hour / In ocean, self-upheld”, 37–38) points towards the modern subject. The desperate struggle in full view of his helpless comrades equals a brutal reduction to himself. Such a struggle of the self was widespread in the Romantic age, when living “self-upheld” came to be seen as the great challenge of modern times. Eventfulness in this sequence is not due to deviation. One might say that all the usual “schematic” expectations of a voyage are fulfilled: Stormy weather, a ship battling against the storm and a man falling overboard – all this is conventional. Furthermore, the narrator obviates the possibility of suspense by revealing from the start that the sailor will die. All the same, the narrative is apt to captivate the reader in spite of its “foreseeableness”. The traditional pattern comes alive again via sheer intensity, achieved by a sophisticated and artful use of perspective. As a result, the reader is drawn into the narrative and forced into the mental and emotional “gulphs” depicted.133 It is here – in this intensity and vividness – that the eventfulness of this sequence is to be found, not in a frustration or surprising twist with regard to expected patterns. A small detail serves as a semantically multi-layered bridge between the poem’s two parts. With the sailor’s death (which is tantamount to the end of his “story”), a new topic becomes central: that of voice. Once again, there is a switch with regard to focalization (in this case, the survivors’ perception is acoustic): “[…] His comrades, who before / Had heard his voice in ev’ry blast, / Could catch the sound no more” (44–46). The drowning man’s voice is silent; now it is the narrator himself who takes over. Although the poem’s second sequence is much shorter than the first one, it carries another sort of weight, differing from the first in many respects. With stanza VIII, a caesura is reached; the presentation switches from diegetic to mimetic mode. From now on, the protagonist is the narrator himself – commenting upon Anson’s tale and, finally, his own life. The poem takes an abrupt turn towards the self-reflective. Poetry in general and elegies in particular are thematized, and with the newly introduced script of writing poetry the narrator turns around and looks at himself, as it were. The “immortalization theme” shapes the first two of the sequence’s three stanzas. The narrator justifies his own writing in two steps. Though he states that the tradi-

133 In striking parallel to pictures by Romantic painters who set about to draw the beholder into the landscape, as it were, – taking away all possibilities of distancing oneself – the narrator pulls the reader into the situation and does not allow any detachment, but rather enforces the dramatic fatality upon the reader´s mind with merciless vehemence.



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tional procedure of a poet “beweeping” a tragic death did not take place in this case, this statement is instantly refuted: The dead man’s chief did mourn him, even in writing. “And tears by bards or heroes shed / Alike immortalize the dead” (53–54). Thus his own justification seems to dissolve again. These reflections only lay the groundwork for the following turn towards the narrator’s own destiny. This equals a shift in the poem’s center of gravity. The motivating force was not the wish to deplore and “honour” the sailor’s fate, but his own. In connection with the change from diegetic to mimetic presentation and the shift in terms of center and protagonist, the topic of sea voyage and accident undergoes a significant change. After a literal reading, it now turns into a vehicle and functions on a metaphorical level: In the second sequence it serves as an image of life, especially its perils. This new reading is introduced in the context of the narrator’s comparison between himself and the sailor in the last stanza. After the surprising mention of a similarity (60) he states: “No voice divine the storm allay’d, / No light propitious shone; / When, snatch’d from all effectual aid, / We perish’d, each alone” (61–64). The (now metaphoric) accident at sea134 turns even more dramatic, due to a minute hint that carries the poem’s drama still further. This enhanced intensity is related to the core of the second sequence: The narrator peremptorily and surprisingly states that his destiny is the more dreadful one. Although the sailor’s experience seems hard to exceed, the narrator claims just that: “We perish’d, each alone: / But I beneath a rougher sea, / And whelmed in deeper gulphs than he” (64–66). After such a prelude, this statement sounds almost presumptuous, which is underlined by its authoritative brevity. At this point the narrator does what his first protagonist did for different reasons: he falls silent. His silence is less understandable and, in a way, more dramatic. He seems content to draw the parallel, not only talking figuratively, but also leaving the deciphering task completely to the reader, who – being denied any further help and having reached the end of the poem – is left alone with his conjectures. The poem is organized around a silent middle. In spite of the authoritative gesture and formal closure of its extremely regular meter, rhyme scheme and stanza pattern, the text moves towards an open ending; in addition, there is the question of why the narrator introduces himself in this curiously frustrating manner. He seems to be referring to something deeply disturbing, maybe even traumatizing. Cowper, who suffered from bouts of insanity and long periods of

134 With regard to the storm imagery, Hutchings points out that these verses are a complete reversal of the famous lines from the Olney Hymns (1983, 145): “God moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform; / He plants His footsteps in the sea / And rides upon the storm”.

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depression135, was convinced that he was predestined to eternal damnation (see Cecil 1947 and Thomas 1948), this aspect is clearly part of the narrator’s story (“destin’d wretch”, 3; “destiny”, 40). If such inner experiences block articulation, a roundabout method may be a way out. Talking about himself via talking about someone else allows the narrator to “insert” his own story and, at the same time, partly hide himself. It has to be stressed that the shift from narrator to protagonist, from heterodiegetic to homodiegetic narrative is not only a switching of modes. Moving into the center of the tale, the narrator makes it clear that this was the real, the “secret” constellation from the beginning. Rather than a simple change, this is a sort of paring down, of a funnel-like approximation to the core – and thus central to the understanding of the whole text that hinges on this turn. While this core becomes clear, however, the naval story necessarily loses some of its impact – due not only to its vehicle-like status, but also to the evaluation in stanza XI. Entering the narrative, the reader will soon be completely absorbed by the sailor’s fate. Much of this, however, is taken back, curbed, by the following “commentary” (stanzas IX–XI). There is yet another sort of readjustment. The second sequence changes the meaning of the first one.136 Via isotopy and/or via frame and script the first narration can be related to and integrated into the second, self-referential one in more than the obvious way already mentioned. Traits of the first story may be applicable to the second, too. The gulfs the narrator refers to, his perils and suffering can be related to experiences of a similar nature. In spite of the laconically introduced “semblance”, this is not a case of one story twice told. Although only one of the stories is known in detail and the other one more or less hidden, some distinctions are worth mentioning. There is, first, the striking assertion that the narrator suffered even more. That this is central is stressed not only by the weight of the declaration as such. This is the final remark: When the speaker has reached this point, he seems to have achieved what he set out to convey. In a sort of chiasmic constellation, the gravity of his suffering corresponds to the fact that he has not found a narrator of his story (the second point of difference). In contrast to the detailed, emotional account of the sailor’s fate the narrator’s misery is private. A public tale is yoked together with a “secret”, hitherto unknown one. The sailor

135 In Newey’s words, Cowper was engaged in a “lifelong project in self-stabilization” (1991, 133). 136 According to – for example – Brooks (1983), the process of reading is a mobile and dynamic one, continually shifting and changing in the attempt to integrate every detail according to the pattern emerging towards the end.



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found his narrator – two, in fact. The poem’s speaker did not, and so he has to act as narrator on his own behalf and does so by borrowing another tale and another voice. Although the happenings as such follow an established pattern, eventfulness is fairly high – due to the haunting urgency reached by the skilful handling of narratorial stance and focalization. A haunting atmosphere of isolation and utter abandonment and the reader’s involvement radiate beyond the enclosed tale; the narrator, drawing upon its imagery, profits from the shocking intensity of the beginning. The maritime tale dwindles (in comparison) as the reader learns about the narrator’s fate and is left with its riddle and the cryptic final statement. The placement in time is surprising, too. In spite of his “simultaneous” narrative stand-point, the speaker seems to look back upon himself. In uniting the two experiences syntactically, he places them in the same chronological dimension and manages to convey a picture of himself as a dead man. This attitude of seeming to talk from beyond his own grave has to be seen in connection with the conviction of being predestined to eternal damnation. In the face of the downfall and condemnation the narrator takes for certain, narration functions as a coping strategy: Narration helps him to sort and structure and finally understand his emotions and experiences and integrate them into his life and character. The speaker’s need to thematize his own fate is the poem’s central issue. His reflections on immortalization prove how much this topic absorbs him. He expresses his own feelings of desperation and forlornness by “borrowing” another man’s story, claims attention for his own suffering, gives an enduring shape to it and – strangely enough – seems to sing his own elegy. The method employed also enables him to approach his horrible experiences while at the same time keeping them at arm’s length. His roundabout way of presenting his own drama as a sort of footnote and hiding rather than exposing it is his way of coming as close to this emotional abyss as he can bear.137 The ambivalence between triggering the personal, abysmal remembrances and the shielding function of the first sequence is mirrored in the intricate quality of eventfulness. Eventfulness can be found on all levels. As stated above, the “stereotypical” narrative of the seaman’s death gains a remarkable degree of eventfulness (on the level of the happenings) via sheer intensity, that is, by the gripping way it is rendered. With the beginning of the second sequence, another event is added: the surprising realization that all this is not about the seaman at all, but about

137 Thomas offers a reading that is basically optimistic, stating that although Cowper’s “brain gave the poem the superficial colour of despair”, he “overflowed with compassion for Anson’s sailor […] and, where love is, peace […] remains” (1948, 334). In order to uphold such an optimistic view one has to ignore integral elements of this text.

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the narrator himself. The turn as such functions as a presentation event. Another unexpected (eventful) revelation is related to this: namely the fact that the narrator’s (hitherto unknown) affliction is even greater than the seaman’s. Finally, a negative event can be seen in the fact that the speaker’s own misfortune remains opaque. The speaker himself remains silent; in this respect the poem may be said to “break off”, leaving the reader with an unsolved mystery. This break can be categorized as a reception event. The characteristically lyrical in this poem is closely linked to the point of eventfulness. A caesura such as the one between the first and second sequence, accompanied by a shift with regard to protagonist, time, focalization, narrative level and “center of gravity” all at once, would be almost impossible outside the lyrical genre. Cowper’s poetry, shaped by a time of transition, combines traits of Classicism, the Age of Sentiment and Romanticism; what will come to be thought of as the Romantic predicament is already taking shape. Several of the aspects discussed above are key-words in defining Romanticism. Borrowing a phrase coined by Georg Lukacs, “transcendental homelessness” became an issue; the loss of familiar securities led to anxiety, nostalgia and escapism. People suffered from the experience of transitoriness and loss; with rapid changes in every sphere of life, it became ever more difficult to face the future with optimism and trust. Individual possibilities seemed to shrink. Doubts concerning the capacity to act and to influence a world undergoing a vast transformation resulted in feelings of isolation, desolation and ineffectiveness. A feeling of being “castaway” was widespread. Coping with this feeling was one of the most urgent tasks of Romanticism. The corresponding literary attitude, an elegiac tone, gained a new importance. All this may be traced in Cowper’s very personal, individual narrative.138 The Romantics experimented with diverse coping strategies. One was to turn to nature in an attempt to find solace, to recover lost faith and feelings of unity, thereby raising nature to transcendent heights. It is striking, therefore, that “nature” is nothing but threatening and hostile in Cowper’s poem. This is much nearer to the eighteenth century than to the ersatz religion of the Romantics. But

138 Newey sets out to show that “the contemplative, self-oriented dimension” associated with Cowper had a counterpart in his political awareness and outward-looking attitude: “The looking-out and the turning-in are both important, and by no means unconnected” (1991, 121). With the years, the latter part won, although the awareness was still acute: “He has his finger very sensitively on the quickening pace of change, but can experience it only as retrograde” (131). Feingold, though admitting the importance of taking into account Cowper’s “peculiar biography”, decidedly turns to the “public” segments of his work (1978, 121) in order to strengthen the aspect of the above-mentioned outward-looking attitude.



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with its focus on utter isolation, inner “gulphs” (66) and the experience of utmost anxiety surrounded by emptiness the poem clearly points towards the urgent questions of the Romantic Age.

4.4 John Keats: “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be” (1818) and Lord Byron: “On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year” (1824) Keats’s “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be” and Lord Byron’s “On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year” express directly opposed attitudes towards the prospect of personal extinction mainly owing to the different positions in life from which death is viewed in each poem: in Keats’s case from an early stage before life has really begun, in Byron’s case from a late stage when life has effectively spent itself.

4.4.1 John Keats: “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be” Keats’s sonnet “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be” is obviously modeled on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Elliott 1979, 5), both in its sequential structure, Shakespeare’s favorite “when – then” sequence,139 and in its rhyme scheme (three quatrains and a concluding couplet). Like Shakespeare’s model, for example sonnets 29, 30 and 64, Keats’s poem presents a temporal – narrative – succession of reflections leading from an initial thought (which occurs in three parallel variants) to a final mental conclusion. Thematically, Keats’s speaker (who acts as the author himself) confronts the threatening possibility of dying young without having achieved and experienced anything great or important.

When I have Fears that I May Cease to be

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the fairy power

139 In ten sonnets altogether: nos. 2, 12, 15, 29, 30, 43, 64, 88, 106, 138.



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12 Of unreflecting love; then on the shore 13 Of the wide world I stand alone and think 14 Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. (Allott 1970, 297–298).

The repeated vivid anticipation of premature death (one example presented in each of the three quatrains) lends particular emotional force and existential weight to the sad future prospect of unfulfilled life. The threatened frustration of hopes and desires is envisaged within three spheres or dimensions of life: the production of literature or poetry, the encounter with the mystery (“romance”, 6) of the world and the experience of love. Each of these spheres implies a particular narrative schema or progressive line of development which a poet’s life would follow if he were granted fulfillment. These three achievements or experiences are presented here not as stories of fulfillment but in the form of compact prospective disnarrated (see Prince 1988) stories, that is, condensed narratives of what the speaker will not experience in these spheres: “I may cease to be / Before my pen has gleaned […]” (1–2), “I may never live to trace / Their shadows […]” (7–8), “I shall never look upon thee more, / Never have relish in the fairy power […]” (10–11). Producing literary works (“my pen”, “books”, 2–3) is described in agricultural metaphors as a natural, organic process (“full ripened grain”, 4)  – as harvesting the speaker’s creative talents (“teeming brain”, 2). The encounter with the world’s mystery is presented as the discovery of, and insight into, the world’s inner meaning (the “shadows” of the “symbols” “upon the night’s starred face”, associated with “high romance”, 5–8), possibly as inspiration for and subject matter of literature (Elliott 1979, 4, 7–8). Love kindled by the momentary, fleeting perception of a beautiful woman is characterized as fulfilled sensuality (“relish in the fairy power / Of unreflecting love”, 11–12). The three desired experiences of life’s fulfillment, which, however, will be denied to the speaker by his envisaged future premature death, are thus rendered in images which all convey a fully natural and at the same time superior significance. In the couplet the speaker then shifts the focus from the future to the present, describing the effect these fears of future non-achievements have on his present self and his self-concept – a conclusion which functions as the eventful turn in this sonnet. But this conclusion is highly ambivalent and can be read on two levels, accordingly signaling two different forms and qualities of eventfulness. Read as a straightforward statement, the ending constitutes a negative event, the confirmation of the eventual occurrence of the threatened loss. Metaphorically imagining himself as standing “alone” “on the shore / Of the wide world” (12–13) and reflecting on his position (again a compact narrative), the speaker sees himself isolated, unfulfilled and exposed vis-à-vis the whole world, which like an ocean (implied by “shore”) fails to provide a firm hold, although he views

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it from the (presumably firm) shore. He considers his ambitions and desires as ‘drowned’, as it were, and annihilated to “nothingness” (“sink”, l. 14, takes up the ocean image). His self lacks internal stability and firmness, which he could only have acquired in his future life through experience and achievement (“love and fame”, 14), through living and doing, through attaching himself to another person and producing enduring works of art (possibly on the mystery of the world). Thus the anticipation of the future frustration of all his desires, which the speaker has presented in disnarrated developments in each quatrain, culminates in his confrontation with nothingness in the couplet. The sense of lacking inner strength and stabilizing form is so powerful that the very imagination of dying prematurely is enough to crush him even now in his present situation. This conclusion is remarkable (and in a negative sense eventful) for the absence of any reliance on traditional Christian concepts of the immortality of the soul or the Romantic notion of nature as a source of strength and vitality. The speaker’s lament implies that man is nothing unless he is productive, unless he creates himself (and art) in the course of his life within the world. Early death will preclude such creative achievement – a precarious and decidedly modern view.140 But this concluding constellation of self and anticipated loss can also – more plausibly and more specifically – be read as a positive event in the form of sublime self-assertion (Elliott 1979, 4, 7–8). In an act of (poetic) imagination, the individual self, preserving a firm position on the margins (“on the shore”), posits himself in the face of the amorphous vastness of the world and the anticipated fundamental loss of personal fulfillment.141 The absence of any kind of extraneous hold or positive support, even without the support of artistic and emotional fulfillment, presupposes an inherent inner strength, which may be connected with Keats’s concept of Negative Capability, as defining the quality of poets: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”142. This confirmation of the speaker’s inherent creative strength can be called “exultingly Romantic” (Elliott 1979, 10) in its fundamental recourse to the ego and his imagination.143 This eventful self-confirmation of the self’s inherent strength is further corroborated on the level of the poetic form of the poem. The author, if not the speaker, conspicuously draws on Shakespeare’s

140 This is basically the interpretation suggested by Elliott (1979: 9–10). 141 When Bode (1996, 33) reads the ending of this sonnet as the speaker’s experience of the “sublimity of his self” (“Erhabenheit seiner selbst”), he seems to refer to this confrontation with the overwhelming vastness of the world and the extent of threatened loss. 142 Keats’s letter of 21/27 December 1817 to his brothers George and Thomas (Rollins 1958, 193). 143 The centrality of the self in Romanticism has variously been described: cf. for example Abrams (1953), Rzepka (1986), Hall (1991).

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sonnets (as outlined above) and thereby ambitiously claims to continue and maybe emulate the achievement of his great model (Elliott 1996, 34–35). And in this manner he successfully “glean[s] [his] teeming brain” (2) – at least with this poem. Although Keats modeled this poem on Shakespeare’s sonnets, especially on nos. 29 and 30, the two authors’ reactions to the threat of loss are characteristically different144. While in Shakespeare’s case the sequence of the speaker’s reflections on his present miseries results in the re-stabilization of his self through the support of the – remembered, claimed or anticipated – love of his friend, Keats’s speaker re-defines his confrontation with the anticipated disappointment of all his desires as a positive self-assertion out of itself alone.

4.4.2 Lord Byron: “On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year” A comparison with Lord Byron’s poem on his 36th birthday is apt to highlight Keats’s characteristic concepts of life, self and death in his sonnet “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be” as well as to pinpoint the difference of Byron’s views and position in life. Byron wrote this poem three months before he died, while waiting in Greece to take up his fight for the cause of the Greek rebellion against the Turkish occupation.

On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year

1 2 3 4

‘Tis time this heart should be unmoved, Since others it has ceased to move, Yet though I cannot be beloved, Still let me love!

5 6 7 8

My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone!

9 10 11 12

The fire that on my bosom preys Is lone as some volcanic isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze— A funeral pile!

144 See the above analysis of sonnet 29 in Chapter 3.1.1.

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13 14 15 16

The hope, the fear, the jealous care, The exalted portion of the pain And power of Love I cannot share, But wear the chain.

17 18 19 20

But ‘tis not thus — and ‘tis not here Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now, Where Glory decks the hero’s bier Or binds his brow.

21 22 23 24

The Sword – the Banner – and the Field – Glory and Greece around us see! The Spartan borne upon his shield Was not more free!

25 26 27 28

Awake! (not Greece— she is awake!) Awake, my Spirit! Think through whom Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake, And then strike home!

29 30 31 32

Tread those reviving passions down, Unworthy Manhood; — unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of Beauty be.

33 34 35 36

If thou regret’st thy youth, why live? The land of honourable Death Is here: — up to the Field! and give Away thy Breath!

37 38 39 40

Seek out — less often sought than found — A Soldier’s Grave, for thee the best; Then look around, and choose thy ground And take thy Rest.           Messalonghi. January 22, 1824 (Levine 2010, 714–716).

While Keats’s speaker is looking towards the future from the perspective of youthful immaturity (Keats was 23 at the time of writing that sonnet in 1818), Byron (who, even more expressly than Keats, dramatizes himself as speaking in his own person) sees himself at the end of his youth and considers his life as essentially spent and ended. From this position he thinks of his own death in completely different terms from Keats. While Keats laments the loss he will suffer because his death may be coming too soon, Byron is filled with the sense of an ending and, moreover, a longing for the end. This attitude is particularly (and paradoxically) highlighted by the title specifying his birthday as the occasion for writing



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this poem, the day on which he commemorates the beginning of his life and now desires its termination. Byron’s speaker views death in the light of his previous life: He recollects his successful achievements and fulfilled experiences in the past, but foresees no meaningful continuation for the future and therefore longs for death as the appropriate closure. The two poets’ concepts of self, identity and orientation in life are directly opposite to each other. The narrative sequence which underlies the poem is made up by the ongoing succession of phases in the speaker’s reflections aiming at self-assessment, self-clarification and re-orientation. This chronological development of thoughts is marked by a decisive turn in his attitude towards life after the fourth stanza. What initiates these reflections is the acute awareness of a present conflict of impulses and perceptions within his psyche, the conflict between the painful realization that he no longer attracts love on the one hand and his persistent desire for love on the other: “Yet though I cannot be beloved, / Still let me love” (3–4). The speaker proceeds to deal with this conflict through reflection and self-analysis  – in two successive attempts. He first intensifies his awareness of the present stagnation and even decline in his vitality to justify his painful lamentation of what he has lost (5–16)  – pointing to his advancing age (“My days are in the yellow leaf”, 5), the frustration of his love and the lack of response from others to his passion and desire (“No torch is kindled at its blaze”, 11), his situation of isolation and confinement within himself (“[…] power of Love I cannot share, / But wear the chain”, 15–16). But then he abruptly tears himself away from these depressing laments and energetically turns his thoughts towards the present moment, the place where he is, his personal situation, position and plans (“thus”, “here”, “now”, 17–18), namely the current political and military situation in Greece and his decision to come here and join the Greek fight for freedom. He foresees two possible outcomes: heroic death and defeat or heroic triumph and victory (“[…] Where Glory decks the hero’s bier  / Or binds his brow” [namely with laurel], 19–20), that is to say, he envisages war and glory, irrespective of success or failure, as the solution to his personal crisis. In the second part of the poem (from l. 17, the fifth stanza, onwards), the speaker  – in an explicit self-address  – goes on to persuade himself to actually embrace this solution and deliberately act on it. The drawn-out length of these attempts at self-persuasion shows how strong his adherence to his former life and its pursuits still is and how hard the resistance to a radical re-orientation. He appeals to several traditional (aristocratic and stoical) male values, which entail scripts for action, such as honor, freedom and manliness (24, 30, 31, 34). And in addition he activates his consciousness of having his spiritual and cultural roots in ancient Greece (“Think through whom / Thy life-blood tracks its parent

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lake”, 26–27)145, the country whose contemporary descendants he intends to help in their fight for liberty. But the chain of successive arguments leads the speaker to only one of the two options, glory or death, namely to the decision to seek a ground for his “Soldier’s Grave” (37–40). That is to say, the re-orientation is finally narrowed down to death alone and the heroic aspect of fight and victory is no more dwelt upon. Dying is chosen as the fitting personal conclusion to a life no longer worth living according to the old values: “for thee the best”, “choose thy ground” and “take thy Rest” (38–40). However, although the speaker longs for his extinction (“If thou regret’st thy youth, why live?”, 33), he cannot think of death as the complete and definitive annihilation of his self – as revealed by using the term “rest” (against “nothingness” in Keats) and especially by stressing the personal self-reference of the search for his grave (pronouns referring to himself conspicuously occur in each of the last three lines: “thee”, “thy”, “thy”). Moreover, he makes death his own achievement by deliberately and actively seeking it (37–38). This final resolution – welcoming death as the closure to his exhausted and spent life and therein imaginatively preserving his personal self – functions as the eventful final turn in the speaker’s on-going reflections about his present crisis, which had been prepared for in the course of the poem and here finds its appropriate and  – for the speaker’s self-concept  – satisfying conclusion. In Byron’s poem the speaker’s attempt  – in a severe crisis to preserve his self in some, if indirect and imaginative form – is indicative of the centrally Romantic recourse to the self as the source of meaning, stability and creativity and basically resembles the underlying self-assertion in Keats’s sonnet “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be”, however, with a significant difference in degree and intensity. In comparison to Keats’s implied powerful self-assertion in the face of coming failure and loss, Byron’s rudimentary preservation of the self in death appears feeble and weary. This difference is also manifest on the higher level of the poetic composition of the text. While Keats’s sonnet shows the ambition of competing with or even surpassing a masterful model, Byron’s poem is characterized by conventional tropes and even clichés146 indicative of exhaustion and stalemate.

145 This phrase also seems to allude to Byron’s passionate interest in a young Greek in his company (Marchand 1965, 131). That allusion would imply an attempt on the speaker’s part to combine the old adherence (passionate love) with the new orientation (towards honor and heroism). 146 Cf. Blackstone’s (1975, 164–169) scathing critique of Byron’s style in this poem, without, however, considering the possible function of this phenomenon for the meaning of the text.

4.5 Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could not Stop for Death” (ca. 1863) Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could not Stop for Death” enacts the speaker’s confrontation with her own death in the form of an allegorical narrative in the past tense, featuring death as a personification. Two universal cognitive schemata underlie the sequential development of the poem, namely those of the journey on the one hand and dying and death on the other. In their intimate combination these two schemata constitute the narrative sequentiality of the poem.

Because I Could not Stop for Death

1 2 3 4

Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.

5 6 7 8

We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility –

9 10 11 12

We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun –

13 14 15 16

Or rather – He passed Us – The Dews drew quivering and chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle –

17 18 19 20

We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground –

21 22 23 24

Since then – ’tis Centuries  – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity – (Johnson 1960, 350).

A journey inevitably involves change and progression and usually leads towards a destination (cf. Elsbree 1982, 5–15). In “Because I Could not Stop for Death” the speaker narrates the consecutive stages of a journey which metaphorically

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represents the course of her life towards death. She looks back on this journey of her life, as if from a position in eternity. A specific view of death underlies this representation of life, determined by cultural and historical frames of Dickinson’s time (see Ariès 1974). In line with Christian beliefs prevalent in contemporary America and relevant for Emily Dickinson herself, death is regarded as a companion of life. Introduced by a reference to a preceding situation (“Because I could not stop for Death”), the narrative in the poem begins in medias res without providing a concrete context. The focus is next shifted to an impulse from the outside: “[Death] kindly stopped for me”. The second stanza then indicates what had occupied the speaker to such an extent as to exclude death from her thoughts: “labor” and “leisure”, the ordinary concerns of life – working and playing or just living. The narratologically salient aspect of these two lines is that the speaker is approached by death as the active agent, who takes the initiative and thereby brings about change in the poem and in the story of her life. By joining death in his carriage, the speaker-narrator suggests that she willingly accepts his invitation, since there is no suggestion of hesitancy or fear on her side. Frame and script of a journey are implied, but this schema becomes defamiliarized by the extraordinary  – allegorical  – travel companions and by the concrete circumstances of the journey described in the following stanzas. Death’s actions (stopping for her, accompanied by immortality) and the speaker-narrator’s response (the acceptance of the offer of a ride) lead up to the eventual outcome of the poem – a climax which is prospectively suggested from the beginning through the allegorical dimension of the two travelling companions and their paradoxical combination – death (that is, mortality) and immortality. The reassuring effect of this combination clearly rests on contemporary religious beliefs of Dickinson’s day (see Wheeler 1990). In the next three stanzas the consecutive stages of the journey are presented metaphorically as a personal life course, which is achieved by the use of three cyclical metaphors. The phases of individual development (the children in the school grounds, 9–10), the seasons of the year (the gazing fields, 11) and the times of day (the setting sun, 12) stand for three phases of life. The school where children play and compete during their recess is an image of youth and innocence but also of the life force in children, who play and compete against one another, reaching out towards the future as if life will continue indefinitely. The grain fields link the ripening grain of the vegetation cycle to maturity and ripeness in adult life, with the implicit suggestion that the “Fields of Gazing Grain” (11) seem to have no awareness of the transience of their existence. The repetition of the innocence and ignorance about the transitory nature of life in the children and the grain can be read as a subtle reminder that the speaker no longer shares this ignorance. The



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next metaphor describes the travellers passing the setting sun, which is qualified by reversing the direction of the movement (“Or rather – He passed Us –”, 13). From each of these three metaphoric cycles, the human life cycle, the vegetation cycle, and the daily solar cycle, the poet chooses one phase to stand for the stages of the journey with death. Taken from the life cycle, the image of the children refers to the first phase of life and the beginning of the life journey. The ripening grain represents the middle phase of the vegetation cycle between the planting and the final reaping, and in the poem this stands for the middle stage of the journey. The setting of the sun, after having risen and moved through the zenith of the sky, signifies the final phase of the daily cycle and represents the end of the life journey. More emphatically than before, the speaker-narrator appears as a passive figure: What happens to her is determined by forces from the outside. She is carried along until she enters an unkown domain, a cold and chilly place, for which her thin clothing is inadequate or inappropriate, emphasising her physical vulnerability and frailty and demonstrating that she is part of a process that is relentlessly going its way. Together the stages of the journey correlate with the consecutive phases of personal existence: youth, working life, the aging process and approaching death as the travellers eventually pause at a grave which is described in terms of a house. One might expect the journey to end here, at the grave, considered perhaps as the eternal dwelling place, a permanent home. However, the poem does not end yet and the actual destination of the narrative is not the arrival at this ambiguous place. The carriage merely pauses here, implying the coming of some weightier change. The narrative up to this point consists of a chronological account of the consecutive stages of a journey, the departure, the journey itself, which includes references to the places passed along the way and the progression of the journey in terms of time and destination, told in the past tense. On the story level this sequence creates a simple narrative structure with chronological, logical and causal information, but, as indicated above, these aspects are undermined and relativized in subtle ways which point towards another conclusion. The final stanza contains the central event of the poem: the insight into the purpose and destination of the journey – eternity, that is, immortality through death. The constellation of the two (allegorical) fellow passengers in the carriage had clearly suggested that destination all along – at least to the reader, but apparently not to the speaker, whose limited mental perspective (internal focalization) is rendered throughout the poem. The crucial point here is an abrupt radical shift in the focalization of the speaker, her sudden realization of her ultimate destination at a later – unspecified – point of the journey: “Since then – ’tis Centuries  – and yet / Feels shorter than the Day / I first surmised the Horses’

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Heads / Were toward Eternity –” (21–24). The eventfulness of this insight (and the fact of this final destination itself) is confirmed by the very position from which the emergence of this insight is recollected: The speaker apparently voices this insight from inside eternity, which is indicated in its timelessness by the impossibility and irrelevance of measuring time: That happened centuries ago and this immense time-span feels shorter than a day. Thus Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” effectively narrates – in the figural medium of an allegorical journey  – the story of the speaker’s life course and final death, which is concluded by the positive event of her ultimate eternal preservation. This conclusion is imaginatively presented as a fact that already has occurred, although one would conventionally take the speaker of the poem to be still alive. The positive conclusion has therefore a re-assuring effect for the speaker, alleviating her possible anxieties about her coming death.147 Every period has specific ways of viewing death and although scientific developments in the nineteenth century led to the demystifying of the world, human existence and death, Romantic ideas about death still prevailed (Barry 2007, 42–44). But the romantic tendency to endow death with mystical meaning did not completely ease the prevalent discomfort. Death and death cults were omnipresent in Dickinson’s age, and philosophers detect a hovering between the idea of death as something natural, as it had been for ages, and the modern (and later postmodern) view of death as something strange and wild.148 Emily Dickinson was clearly fascinated by death and called “the secret of death” her central preoccupation during her last years (Farr 1992, 4). Though she wrote many poems about eternity as “the divine country”, what interested her most was “the soul’s passage there” (Farr 1992, 6). The rational and clearly well thought-out plot structure of the poem carries Dickinson’s apparent aim to create an image of death which is at the same time reassuring and deeply mysterious. Echoes of romantic ideas about death by depicting life as a journey and picturing death as a guardian angel and kind

147 The experience described in this poem was a major concern of Dickinson’s in her private life (see Farr 1992). She saw life as a “voyage of the soul on the seas of life and eternity” (68) and wrote numerous other poems on this theme (78). She was almost obsessed by the notion of eternity and infinity. Other examples include “Adrift! A little boat adrift!” and “Will there be a morning?”. 148 Ariès (1974, 106) describes the attitude towards death in this period as a weakening of old familiarities: “Death was no longer familiar and tame, as in traditional societies, but neither was it absolutely wild. It had become moving and beautiful like nature, like the immensity of nature, the sea or the moors. The compromise of beauty was the last obstacle invented to channel an immoderate emotion that had swept away the old barriers.”



4.5 Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could not Stop for Death” (ca. 1863) 

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escort, therefore co-exist in the poem with Dickinson’s usual economic and almost objectified style and structure, characteristics which point towards her later poetic development which can be associated with early Modernism. This attests to Emily Dickinson as a poet in whose work various styles and traditions resonate.

4.6 Rupert Brooke: “The Soldier” (1914) and Wilfred Owen: “Strange Meeting” (1918) Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” and Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” represent characteristically diverse reactions by the speakers to the possibility or anticipation of their own deaths in war, within the context of the First World War. Brooke’s poem was written in 1914 at the beginning of the war, Owen’s in 1918 at the end, both in fact not long before their deaths: Brooke died of an infection in a hospital ship, Owen was killed in action.

4.6.1 Rupert Brooke: “The Soldier” The speaker reflects on his possible death and burial as a soldier somewhere in a foreign country as the result, by implication, of being killed in action during the war. He starts his reflections, in the first quatrain, by envisaging the possible event of his death in a conditional phrase (“If I should die”) and suggesting to the readers how he wishes to be seen in future: “think only this of me”. The self-definition of himself in death which he then spells out amounts to the identification of his remains (“dust”, 4, 5) and his grave with his nation. What he envisages in the next line functions, in fact, as a condensed (prospective) story of what will happen to him when he dies, a change in the guise of a transformation resulting in a permanent, unchanging state: “some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England” (2–3).

The Soldier

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

9 10 11 12 13 14

And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. (Keynes 1970, 23).149



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In the second stanza, the speaker’s (future) self-identification with his nation is backed up by a detailed narrative of his past life as born, shaped and guided by England: “A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware / […] / A body of England’s, breathing English air, / […] ”, 5–8). England is presented both as an allegorical (mother) figure and as a natural, geographical environment. Having been created entirely by his nation, the speaker will retain this identity for ever, independent of his whereabouts. The emphasis lies on the physical and psychological vitality of the speaker’s existence (see for example “bore”, “love”, body”, “breathing”, “blest”), which is said to be – paradoxically – preserved in death. The speaker’s self-presentation as the embodiment of England is taken up in the sestet (see the repeated address to the readers in “and think”, 9) and drawn out into the future. This is a compact prospective narrative sequence, the continuing process of giving back or passing on all those elements which he had received from his country and which had contributed to the making of his identity: “the thoughts by England given”, “[her] sights and sounds”, “dreams”, “laughter” and “gentleness” (11–13). Although the poem is clearly meant to be understood within the context of the war (as indicated by the title “The Soldier”), all association with violence, destruction or hatred is explicitly excluded: “this heart, all evil shed away” (9) and “hearts at peace” (14). The speaker confronts the threatening eventuality of his own death by re-defining this envisaged negative event as an eminently positive one. The unavoidable negative circumstances and consequences of modern war, such as violence, destruction, mutilation, pain and suffering, are deliberately suppressed and replaced by an emphasis on the idyllic, on the peaceful, gentle and joyful. Against the threat of exclusion from life and personal annihilation the speaker postulates preservation, permanence and integration into a greater entity, his country. To put it critically, the speaker manages to cope with the eventuality of his soldier’s death only by radically repressing all the sordid, destructive and inhumane circumstances of modern war-fare and supplanting these by an idyllic rural scene. In the concrete terms of the poem’s imagery the speaker’s future existence is associated with his prospective grave in a foreign country, but by implication this statement also applies to the sonnet itself: The speaker effectively creates his own permanent memorial in the form of this very poem.

149 This is the last of a sequence of five war sonnets with the overall title “1914”.

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4.6.2 Wilfred Owen: “Strange Meeting” Owen’s “Strange Meeting”, like that of Brooke’s poem, is framed as the situation of a soldier in the present war: “It seemed that out of battle I escaped […]” (1). But while the speaker of Brooke’s poem directly thematizes his own threatening death and advances a clearly pre-meditated and well formulated solution to this problem addressing it to the reader: “If I should die, think only this of me”, Owen’s speaker is unexpectedly and inadvertently confronted with death explicitly in the brutal context of the war and forced (against his inclination and his prejudices) to face and understand the reality of such a death (implicitly including his own). The poem’s reflections are not based on a conscious, pre-meditated strategy as in Brooke’s sonnet but represent a process of groping understanding and discovery in the course of a dream-vision, which emerges, apparently, from some unconscious region of the mind.

Strange Meeting

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which Titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands as if to bless. And by his smile I knew that sullen hall, By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. With a thousand pains that vision’s face was grained; Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. “Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” “None,” said the other, “save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. For by my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity war distilled. Now men will go content with what we spoiled, Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.



29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

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None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. Courage was mine, and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled. Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now …” (Day Lewis 1964, 35–36).

The poem as a whole consists of a continuous dream narrative (1–44), set in a subterranean tunnel beneath a battle field and told in the past tense, in which the speaker recounts a “strange meeting” with an apparently dead soldier, his consoling remark to him and the stranger’s lengthy reply.150 This reply, embedded in the dream narrative, consists of various further – embedded – narrative sequences. The first such sequence, in the form of a rejection of the speaker’s consoling remark, succinctly correlates speaker and stranger and their two life stories: “Here is no cause to mourn […] Save the undone years, / The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, / Was my life also” (14–17). The stranger declares his future life story as wiped out beforehand – with regard both to the extended future life span (“years”) and the expectation of what is to come (“hopelessness”). He then equates his own past life up to this point, now ended (“Was my life”, emphasis added), with the speaker’s present and presently still realizable future life (“Whatever hope is yours”). So far, there seems to be a contrast between a future life undone and a future life yet to be lived. What these prematurely wiped out years would have brought in continuation of his past life is subsequently spelt out in more detail (17–25): the intense experience of hunting for beauty and grieving for loss or lack. He first describes

150 The title and motif are taken from Shelley’s poem The Revolt of Islam (Canto V, ll. 1828– 1836). See Stallworth (1974: 256). This borrowing shows Owen’s indebtedness to Romanticism. But Owen’s treatment of the motif is much more radical and pessimistic than Shelley’s; it is, in fact, more modern (see below).

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these activities in general terms before applying them, obviously, to the writing of poetry and specifying the enlivening impact of his writings on society: “by my glee might many men have laughed, / And by my weeping something has been left” (22–23). This part of the narrative sequence, which refers to what now will never be realized, is told in the form of disnarration  – naming what he might have done and now never will: “might […] have laughed” (22), “been left, / Which must die now” (23–24), “the truth untold […]” (24). The speaker concludes this sequence by linking the “truth untold” to the present experience of the war, the sympathetic perception of human suffering and the desire to arouse pity with the suffering people: “the pity of war, the pity war distilled” (25). After thus focusing primarily on his personal past and especially on his now unrealizable future achievements, the speaker turns to the future history of his society (26–39)  – foreseeing a disastrous development, which he, in spite of appropriate knowledge and potential talent on his part as a poet, will now not be able to interfere with because of his death. This sequence consists of two phases: a prospective narrative predicting what will happen (26–29; for example “Now men will go content with what we spoiled”, 26; “None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress”, 29) and a disnarrated passage telling what might have happened (30–39; for example “I would go up and wash them [the bloodclogged chariot wheels] from sweet wells151”, 35). In both sequences the stranger strongly (and self-confidently) emphasizes his potential power as a poet to exert a beneficial and humane influence on people’s lives and prevent catastrophic aberrations (for example “I would have poured my spirit without stint / But not through wounds”, 37–38) – an influence which by his death will now not be realized. Instead, he can only foresee the uninterrupted continuation of violence and destruction to which people contributed through participating in the war: “Now men will go content with what we spoiled, / Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled” (26–27). The stranger ends his lengthy utterance (and the poem) with a final narrative sequence (40–43), in which he identifies himself as an enemy soldier and narrates how he was killed by the speaker the day before: “I am the enemy you killed […] / […] so you frowned / Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.” His reaction is, however, not revengeful but characterized by resignation and acceptance: He addresses the speaker as “my friend” and suggests eternal rest for both of them: “Let us sleep now …” (44). Although the stranger explicitly distinguishes himself from the speaker as the enemy killed by him, he can ultimately be interpreted as a representation

151 This is an allusion to the Muses’ fountain (Hippocrene) and divine inspiration.



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of the speaker himself:152 in his role as a soldier, who by killing a fellow human being effectively destroys his own humanity, as well as in his role as a poet, who tells the truth about the war and arouses pity153. In addition, both are intimately associated or even identified with each other both in the beginning (“Whatever hope is yours, / Was my life also”, 16–17) and in the end (“Let us sleep now”). Thus, in the last analysis, “Strange Meeting” inadvertently and implicitly confronts the speaker with his own death, forcing on him sudden new insights into the far-reaching destructive effects of the present war, including his own participation in it as a soldier: the perpetuation of violence, the lasting contamination of people’s future lives, the continuing aggressive politics of nations and the general waste of human potential. The poem’s main concern is defining the appropriate reaction to death in war, and more particularly the speaker’s latent desire to find a way of coping with his own potential death. That this is the underlying concern which drives the dynamic movement of the poem’s utterance is made clear by the development of the interchange between speaker and stranger. The speaker, under the impression of addressing a dead comrade, offers a consoling remark: “Here is no cause to mourn” (14), apparently meaning to re-assure him that the worst is now over and nothing more is to be feared. The stranger, however, sarcastically rejects this facile consolation and after revealing in detail the full extent of destruction, loss and waste inherent in death (as outlined above) ends by summing up his reaction: “Let us sleep now …” (44). This characterization of death is ambivalent. On the one hand, equating death with sleep is a conventional metaphorical notion, stressing quietness and rest – peaceful qualities which are underscored here by addressing the enemy soldier as “my friend” (44; also at the beginning of the interchange, 14) and by suggesting companionship and solidarity in death (“Let us […]”, emphasis added). On the other hand, however, the final state is characterized by oblivion, inactivity and, ultimately, extinction. This aspect is clearly given prominence by the emphasis on the undone years and unrealized opportunities in the preceding sequences. The emphasis on the unrelieved extinction of life and happiness in death functions as the event in “Strange Meeting”. The radically disillusioning charac-

152 Several critics interpret the stranger as Owen’s double or alter ego, see, for example, Hibberd (1986, 177) and Welland (1978, 100–101). The motif of the encounter between man and his other self is ultimately of Romantic origin (Hibberd 1986, 177). 153 See Owen’s programmatic statement about the role of war poetry in the intended Preface for a collection of his poems: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity” (Blunden 1955, 40).

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terization of the effects of war on the individual’s life and death, including – by implication – that of the speaker, is developed as an unexpected, disturbing perspective in the stranger’s utterance, obviously coming as a new shattering insight for the speaker. This insight does not offer any consolation whatsoever (apart, perhaps, from the prospects of quiet rest and final oblivion) – and presents the crass opposite to Brooke’s unquestioned confidence in collective integration, personal preservation and permanent heroic remembrance. The shattering experience of the sordid inhumane destructiveness of war, which is suppressed in Brooke’s “The Soldier”, suddenly erupts as a profoundly disillusioning insight in Owen’s “Strange Meeting”. While Brooke’s speaker can still feel integrated into a stable whole, the nation, Owen’s speaker loses substance and relation to any meaningful super-personal entity. Brooke’s concept is eminently traditional, whereas Owen’s is radically modern154.

154 Kerr (1993, 265) locates the modernity of the stranger’s attitude in his radical distance from majority positions and common notions.

4.7 D. H. Lawrence: “Bavarian Gentians” (1932) “Bavarian Gentians”, probably written shortly before Lawrence’s death in 1930 and published posthumously in 1932, is to be understood as the speaker’s confrontation with his own imminent death. This thematic focus is clearly indicated by the reference to the myth of Pluto and Persephone in conjunction with the pervasive visual imagery of darkness and the spatial script of downward movement (13). The speaker proleptically envisages his coming death as a mythic descent into the underworld.

Bavarian Gentians

1 2

Not every man has gentians in his house in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark darkening the day-time, torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom, ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze, black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue, giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off light, lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark and Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom. (1932) (Lawrence 1967, 697). 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

The progression of the poem reflects the shift of the speaker’s attention and concern away from his life on earth towards his death as a passage into Hades, suggesting the willing acceptance of and even active participation in the coming end of his life. In the first two lines he starts off by setting himself apart from others (“Not every man […]”, 1) and aligning himself with the vegetational cycle of nature: Michaelmas, celebrated on 29 September, traditionally marks the beginning of autumn and the decline of the year (corroborated later by the association with the coming winter in “frosted September”, 14).

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In the main body of his utterance the speaker then bases the anticipation of his death on a mythic narrative script, Persephone’s descent into the underworld in order to be united with Pluto as her husband. It is significant that in drawing on this myth the speaker identifies with the human “victim” and also partly modifies the circumstances of the original story.155 In the Greek myth Persephone did not at all descend voluntarily but was violently abducted and raped. Though playing down the violence and involuntariness of the happenings, the speaker does obliquely allude to Pluto’s use of force in the phrase “pierced with the passion of dense gloom” (18). This soothing modification of the script is meant to highlight the speaker’s willingness to accept his death, although it is ultimately forced on him. His unreserved acceptance of his fate takes a ritualistic form in that it starts with an elaborate apostrophe to the dark-blue gentians (3–9) and the evocation of their blue darkness as intimately associated with and prefiguring the shades of Hades: In these seven lines the quality of darkness is mentioned as many as 20 times (in a variety of words or lexical elements such as “blue”, “dark”, “black”, “smoke”, “gloom” etc.), intensely – sensuously – evoking the atmosphere of the underworld and already extinguishing the opposite feature of day-light (“darkening the day-time”, 4). This apostrophe, furthermore, prefigures the subsequent narrative sequence, the envisaged descent into darkness, by a strong, albeit latent dynamic element in its evocation: These lines contain a large number of (present and past) participles signifying ongoing or completed processes and movements (“darkening”, “smoking”, “flattening”, “ribbed”, “spread” etc.). Darkness is not a stagnant and static condition but characterized by inherent changes. And the gentians are not only associated with Hades, they are metaphorically addressed as the means of leading the speaker there, paradoxically described as black, dark torches “lead[ing] the way” (10). The flowers thus serve the function of linking this world with the underworld and of leading from one to the other – a device which on account of its paradoxical nature resembles a metaphysical conceit. This function is expressed syntactically by concluding the elaborate apostrophe with a brief imperative: “lead me then, lead the way” (10). This imperative is repeated and modulated in the next two lines to “Reach me a gentian, give me a torch” (11) and “let me guide myself with the […] torch of this flower” (15). What is significant about this modulation is the gradual shift from passivity (“lead me”, 10) to activity on the speaker’s part (“guide myself”). And this shift is linked to the increasing elaboration of the future development or movement in the form of a condensed prospective narra-

155 Cf. Sword (2001, 133–134), who mentions the modification of the myth and points out that the speaker identifies with the woman rather than the man in the myth.



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tive: “[…] guide myself […] / down the darker and darker stairs […]” (12–13), a progressive movement which is then coupled to, and compared, with Persephone’s simultaneous movement in the same direction: “even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September / to the sightless realm where darkness is awake […] […] enfolded in the deeper dark / of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom” (14–18). This prospective narrative is modeled on an archaic rite of passage as a script, the ritualistic transition or boundary crossing from one stage of life to another.156 In this sense Persephone functions as a prefiguring model and guide and the blue flowers – repeatedly compared to “torches” or “lamps” (4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 19) – are employed as the guiding and orienting instrument: “Reach me a gentian, give me a torch” (11). The special condition of this existential transition from life to death is sensuously accentuated by the extensive use of darkness-versus-brightness imagery, culminating in the paradoxical picture of a dark torch and in paradoxical formulations such as “blaze of darkness” (5), “splendour of torches of darkness” and “shedding darkness on […]” (19). The crossing of the boundary from life to death is the event envisaged in the poem. As is the case with all ritualistic transitions (in archaic societies) including the process of dying as the final and most serious change of state in every individual’s existence, the eventfulness is of a high degree for the person involved, since for him it is new (though in general terms predictable), but for outside superior observers, who are aware of the repetitiveness and ordinariness of this experience, it possesses only a relatively low degree. What the speaker’s utterance aims at is preparing himself for this grave experience and apparently reducing his anxiety, which is not directly acknowledged but may be inferred from the excessive emphasis on darkness and gloom. He negotiates this secretly dreaded departure by implying through the imagery used and the mythic script drawn upon that the experience of dying does not result in the destruction and annihilation of the self but, on the contrary, in its integration into and unification with a greater state and a fundamental reality. This new unity is pictured in two supplementary ways, as profound universal darkness and at the same time as the passionate union in love making (Cf. Marshall (1970, 203–204): “Persephone herself is but a voice / or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark / of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of gloom” (16–18). When the poem ends with the reference to “the lost bride and her groom”, another reassuring aspect is thematized: Dying is ultimately presented as a home-coming. The intense, entrancing emphasis on the sensuous as well as sensual quality of

156 See Van Gennep (1960), Turner (1969) and Elsbree (1991).

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pervasive dense darkness is apparently intended to allay anxiety and create a profoundly consoling effect for the proleptically projected story. Formally, this consoling anticipation is underpinned throughout by the incantatory, enchanting repetition of synonyms of dark and finally by a closing rhyme linking darkness and union (“passion of dense gloom” / “shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom”), a rhyme which is the more conspicuous as the rest of the poem is rhymeless.157 The strategy employed by Lawrence in this poem in the confrontation with death is characteristically modernist in its reliance on archaic and mythic concepts, both the anthropological rite of passage and the ancient Greek myth of Persephone’s descent into Hades. Allusions to archaic myths  – as a means of coping with the modern experience of disintegrating orders and erosion of values  – are ubiquitous in modernist literature. Examples can be found in all major modernists, from T. S. Eliot to W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. Whereas Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, confront archaic structures with the disruptive conditions of modern life, thereby expressing both a desire for traditional stability and meaning and an awareness of their loss in the contemporary world, D. H. Lawrence’s recourse to myth and ancient rites seems to be largely unqualified and trustworthy in this poem. This confident attitude is probably linked to his vitalistic belief in and emphasis on the essential reality of the life of the senses and the body but it may also be seen as a successful device for alleviating or hiding lingering anxieties.

157 Most critics comment only briefly on this poem, usually placing it in the final phase of Lawrence’s poetry and paraphrasing the obvious meaning. Cf. for example Murfin (1983, 235–238), Chadhuri (2003, 25–27).

4.8 Summary The threat of one’s own death is experienced as the frightening anticipation of an extreme negative event – personal extinction. The extremely high degree of the eventfulness of one’s extinction rests in the severity of the change and not in a surprising deviation from the normal and expected. As such, this event is of course highly predictable and absolutely certain to occur, though usually only at some unknown, possibly remote time in the future. But if death is imminent, the absolute severity of the looming change forces the person to react in some way, trying to come to terms with it and relate it to his present existence. The selected poems offer a great variety of strategies, which typically conceptualize death within the sequence of a (condensed) narrative of one’s life, ranging from some mode of continuity and thus consolation to various forms of disruption and discontinuity. The conceptualization depends on the frame into which death is placed. One prominent frame, especially with earlier poems, is the Christian religion, the grand narrative (in various denominations) representing the dominant meaning system through long periods of English (and European) history. This frame ascribes meaning to death, though not necessarily in the sense of reassurance or consolation. The most conventional reassuring example is Raleigh’s “Verses Made the Night before he Died”, which sets out to recapitulate the process of earthly decline towards disintegration in the grave only to continue and complete this story with the prospective reversed narrative movement of personal resurrection as the closing event. This narrative continuation across the dividing boundary of physical death is guaranteed by a shift in the controlling agency from Time, that is, temporality and transitoriness, to God and eternity. While Raleigh envisages death as a disruptive event which is then integrated into a wider frame, Dickinson’s “Because I Could not Stop for Death” stresses the continuity of existence across this divide. Death presents itself/himself already during earthly life and accompanies or, rather, guides the person through life and into the afterlife, which is equated with eternity. The re-assuring effect is created by characterizing death as kind and as a destiny already inherent in life, by blurring the possibly frightening moment of transition and, especially, by highlighting the speaker’s sudden – eventful – recognition of death’s orientation towards eternity. The continuity of life into death, which Dickinson’s poem presents as apparently effortless and free of latent anxiety, is purposefully contrived in Donne’s sonnet “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night” as a means of overcoming the fear of punishment after death, a fear caused by activating another aspect of the religious, Christian frame, the notion of God subsequently judging a person’s conduct of life. The attempt to convey the re-assurance of painless continuity after death in Donne’s poem is made conspicuous as a rhetorical

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and paradoxical contrivance by drawing on his sinful behavior in the past as a guarantee for being forgiven in the future. The most extreme example of a religious framing of death – without, however, the effect of consolation – is Cowper’s “The Castaway”, in which the speaker traces his own future destiny in the case of a sailor dying a desolate, solitary death by drowning and finally arrives at the – highly eventful – certain knowledge that his own living and ending will even be worse, that he is one of the predestined eternally condemned. Another type of overarching frame is drawn on by Brooke’s “The Soldier” to confront and integrate personal death: the nation as a general point of reference for the definition of self and for orientation in life, a specifically modern (post-romantic) phenomenon. Within this frame, particularly in the contemporary situation of an ongoing international war, the soldier is enabled to identify himself as a representative, even embodiment of his nation and define his grave as its (territorial) extension – associating his death consolingly with personal preservation and integration into a significant whole. Of the poems placing death in a decidedly this-worldly frame, Tichborne’s “Elegy”, Keats’s “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be” and Owen’s “Strange Meeting” are similar and similarly extreme in that they all lament the end as premature, as closing life before it could be lived, precluding achievement, experience, love, and fulfillment. This eventfully desolate prospect is not relieved by any comforting thought in Tichborne (although other documents indicate his profoundly religious orientation in life) and even less so in Owen (who envisages his death as part of an accelerating catastrophic development in the world, caused by human blindness and destructiveness), whereas Keats contrives to re-function this negative insight surreptitiously – on a higher level – into a sublime self-assertion in the face of future annihilation, thus converting the negative into a kind of positive event. In direct contrast to these three examples of confrontation with premature death, Byron’s “On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year” and Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians” both accept death as a timely or even welcome end of life, although for different reasons. While for Byron death will close a life already fulfilled, spent and not worth continuing, Lawrence anticipates the process of dying as a return to and re-integration into a primordial fundamental reality, mythically conceptualized as universal darkness, but not separated from the world as a transcendent realm. In both cases death is anticipated (seemingly) without anxiety or fear and viewed as a positive event, which the speaker explicitly takes the initiative to bring about  – by choosing death in battle (Byron) or asking for guidance to the realm of darkness (Lawrence). But the very fact that the speaker needs to refer to these concepts has nevertheless to be taken as a sign of latent anxiety. The return in Lawrence’s poem to a primordial darkness entails

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the dissolution of individuality and identity, whereas Byron envisages for himself some preservation of the individual self, less self-confidently and imaginatively, however, than Keats in his sonnet. One important aspect of all poems addressing the prospect of imminent personal death concerns the question of individual identity, the manner of how the self is defined and how it is affected. The most forceful insistence on the notion of (secular) selfhood can be seen in Donne, Keats and, to a lesser degree, Byron, also in Brooke, though in relation to an overarching entity. For Tichborne and, to a lesser degree, for Lawrence the self will be dissolved in death, through extinction and re-integration, respectively, although Lawrence’s mythic apparatus presupposes some – at least shadowy – continued existence. Only Raleigh as well as Dickinson on the one hand and Cowper on the other envisage a transcendent self: as eternally saved, in the former two cases, or as eternally condemned, in the latter. More radically than with the confrontation with death or loss in the examples of the other chapters, the imminence of the speakers’ own death induces them urgently or desperately to come to terms with this prospective disruption. The analyses have shown that the result is either some kind of re-assurance or consolation (Raleigh, Donne, Byron, Dickinson, Brooke, Lawrence) or, failing that, at least self-assertion or self-clarification (Keats, Tichborne, ultimately also Cowper, though with respect to a tragic fate). In addition, the formulation of crisis and meaning in the artistic form of a poem will probably also have helped the authors to come to terms with the disruptive experience. Interestingly, the exact shape of the final event does not seem to be predetermined by the epoch or contextual frame (religious or secular): So Donne draws on the pre-eminence of his earthly self within a Christian frame and Tichborne does not draw on the Christian frame at all in spite of its relevance for his biographical life as well as for the general orientation of the period.

References Abrams, Meyer H. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. Allott, Miriam, ed. 1970. The Complete Poems of John Keats. London: Longman. Ariès, Philippe. 1974. Western Attitudes Toward Death. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Barry, Vincent. 2007. Philosophical Thinking about Death and Dying. Wadsworth: Thomson. Blackstone, Bernard. 1975. Byron: A Survey. London: Longman. Blunden, Edmund, ed. 1955. The Poems of Wilfred Owen. London: Chatto and Windus.

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Bode, Christoph. 1996. John Keats: Play On. Heidelberg: Winter. Brooks, Peter. 1983. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf. Cecil, David. 1947 [1929]. The Stricken Deer or The Life of Cowper. London: Constable and Company. Chaudhuri, Amit. 2003. D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’. Oxford: Clarendon. Cowper [William]. 1967. Poetical Works, edited by H. S. Milford. London: Oxford University Press. Day Lewis, C., ed. 1964. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. London: Chatto and Windus. Elliott, Nathaniel. 1979. “Keats’s When I Have Fear.” Ariel 10:3–10. Elsbree, Langdon. 1982. The Rituals of Life: Patterns in Narrative. New York: Kennikat Press. Elsbree, Langdon. 1991. Ritual Passages and Narrative Structures. New York etc.: Peter Lang. Farr, Judith. 1992. The Passion of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Feingold, Richard. 1978. Nature and Society. Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic. Hassocks: Harvester Press. Gardner, Helen, ed. 1978. John Donne: The Divine Poems. Second edition. Oxford: Clarendon. Hall, Jean. 1991. A Mind that Feeds Upon Infinity: The Deep Self in English Romantic Poetry. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Hibberd, Dominic. 1986. Owen the Poet. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hirsch, Richard S. M. 1986. “The Works of Chidiock Tichborne (text).” English Literary Renaissance 16(2):303–318. Hutchings, Bill. 1983. The Poetry of William Cowper. London/Canberra: Croom Helm. Johnson, Thomas H., ed. 1960. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Jones, Emrys, ed. 1991. The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kerr, Douglas. 1993. Wilfred Owen’s Voices: Language and Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. 1970. The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke. London: Faber and Faber. Lawrence, D. H. 1967. The Complete Poems, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, Vol. II. London: Heinemann. Levine, Alice, ed. 2010. Byron’s Poetry and Prose. A Norton Critical Edition. New York/London: Norton. Marchand, Leslie A. 1965. Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Marshall, Tom. 1970. The Psychic Mariner: A Reading of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Viking Press. Murfin, Ross C. 1983. The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence: Texts and Contexts. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. Newey, Vincent.1991. “William Cowper and the Condition of England.” In Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson, eds. Literature and Nationalism, 120–139. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Nicholls, Mark and Penry Williams. 2008. “Ralegh, Sir Walter (1554–1618).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition, [http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/23039. Accessed 6 February 2016]. Oliver, P. M. 1997. Donne’s Religious Writing: A Discourse of Feigned Devotion. London/New York: Longman. Prince, Gerald. 1988. “The Disnarrated.” Style 22, 1–8. Ray, Robert H. 1990. A John Donne Companion. New York/London: Garland.

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Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. 1958. The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, Vol. I: 1814–1818. Cambridge: At the University Press. Rudick, Michael, ed. 1999. The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Rzepka, Charles J. 1986. The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Seccombe, Thomas. 1898. “Tichborne, Chidiock”. Dictionary of National Biography 1895–1900. Vol. 56, 374–375. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Smith, A. J., ed. 1986. John Donne: The Complete English Poems. London: Penguin. Stallworthy, Jon. 1974. Wilfred Owen. Oxford: Oxford University Press / London: Chatto and Windus. Sword, Helen. 2001. “Lawrence’s Poetry.” In The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, edited by A. Fernihough, 119–135. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Thomas, Gilbert. 1948. William Cowper and the Eighteenth Century. London: Allen and Unwin. Turner, Victor W. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. van Gennep, Arnold. 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage, translated by M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Welland, Dennis. 1978. Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study. London: Chatto and Windus. Wheeler, Michael. 1990. Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Penry. 2004. “Babington, Anthony (1561–1586)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/967. Accessed 6 February 2016] Zunder, William. 1982. The Poetry of John Donne: Literature and Culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Period. Brighton: Harvester/Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble.

5 Lamenting the Death of Poets

5.0 Introduction As mentioned in the introduction to Chapter 2: “Mourning the Death of a Beloved Person” (2.0), elegies about the death of a beloved, admired or revered person form a distinct lyric sub-genre with fairly well-defined conventions, notably during earlier periods. Elegies typically comprise three topics: leading from lament and praise finally to consolation as some kind of positive event. Within this broad genre, elegies on poets represent a specific sub-group. Whereas the loss of a beloved person is an essentially private affair, the mourning of a poet’s death also possesses a public dimension. Poets are basically public figures since their work is inherently addressed to and intended for an audience (however small in actual reality) and the relevance of their work derives from its perceptive reaction to the contemporary situation and general problems of wider significance. This public dimension features in elegies on poets in that the speaker will typically thematize two topics in the course of his commemoration: the status of the poet in contemporary society as well as the function and power of poetry. In addition, the fact that the deceased fellow-poet shared the speaker’s artistic pursuit and thus functions as an alter ego seems to have ambivalent implications for the speaker’s psychological condition. On the one hand, the death of his alter ego deeply affects him emotionally,158 somehow prefiguring his own death and the future fate of his own poetry; on the other hand, sharing the fellow-poet’s artistic pursuit may create a latently competitive constellation of the two poets, which is liable to induce the elegist to attempt to emulate or possibly surpass the deceased model. And even more than elegies on beloved persons, such poems tend to stress the factual basis of the lament by mentioning the name of the deceased poet in the title or in the text. Of the examples selected for analysis in this chapter, the Earl of Surrey’s “An Excellent Epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt” (5.1) presents a largely conventional  – as it were, prototypical  – elegy in his praise of the general exemplariness of the deceased poet as a public figure without dwelling specifically on his poetic achievement, whereas Thomas Carew’s elegy on John Donne, “An Elegie upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr John Donne” (5.2), focuses exclusively on his poetic genius, particularly stressing the highly innovative quality of his poetry – two different aspects of the status of the poet and of poetry in the historical context of the early modern period. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s mourning of the death of John Keats in “Adonais” (5.3) features the typically Romantic pre-

158 In almost all the examples selected the speaker had been intimately acquainted with the deceased poet, looking upon him as an admired model.

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dicament of the genius as a marginal figure isolated, rejected and remote from society, typical also in the speaker’s strategy of eventful compensation for this fate. The two modernist examples are unique in their explicit connection. Seamus Heaney models his elegy on Joseph Brodsky, “Audenesque: in memory of Joseph Brodsky” (5.5), on W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (5.4). Though both highlight the marginality of the poet and his poetry in modern society  – more severely than Shelley in his poem – their reactions differ significantly from each other, contrasting an ultimately optimistic or hopeful and a precarious or ambivalent view.

5.1 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: “An Excellent Epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt” (1542) Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, imported the latest lyric convention from the continent, especially Italy, namely Petrarchan love poetry, adapting it to the English language and mentality. They thus became the first great poets in early modern Britain. Surrey’s elegy on Wyatt’s untimely death at the age of 39 closely conforms to the conventional pattern of the genre of the elegy by combining panegyric praise with the lament of loss and finally providing some kind of consolation. In addition, the elegy – again, conventionally – functions as a written memorial of Wyatt, metaphorically purporting to be the epitaph engraved on his tomb-stone: “Wyatt resteth here” or, rather, offering the poem as the tomb in which Wyatt as a person now rests and is preserved. The personal reference in this epitaph is corroborated by a number game underlying the poem: Together with “amen” as a last line (Sessions 1999, 259; Kirschner 1991, 124), normally omitted in modern editions, the text comprises 39 lines signifying the age at which Wyatt died.

An Excellent Epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt

1 2 3 4

Wyatt resteth here, that quick159 could never rest, Whose heavenly gifts, increased by disdain And virtue, sank the deeper in his breast, Such profit he by envy160 could obtain.

5 6 7 8

A head, where wisdom mysteries161 did frame, Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain As on a stithy where that some work of fame Was daily wrought to turn to Britain’s gain.

9 10 11 12

A visage stern and mild, where both did grow Vice to contemn, in virtue to rejoice; Amid great storms whom grace assured so To live upright and smile at fortune’s choice.

159 Alive. 160 Malice. 161 Profound thoughts.

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13 14 15 16

A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme, That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit; A mark the which, unparfited for time162, Some may approach but never none shall hit.

17 18 19 20

A tongue that served in foreign realms his king; Whose courteous talk to virtue did enflame Each noble heart, a worthy guide to bring Our English youth by travail unto fame.

21 22 23 24

An eye whose judgment none affect163 could blind Friends to allure and foes to reconcile, Whose piercing look did represent a mind With virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile.

25 26 27 28

A heart where dread was never so impressed To hide the thought that might the truth advance; In neither fortune loft164 nor yet repressed To swell in wealth or yield unto mischance.

29 30 31 32

A valiant corps where force and beauty met; Happy, alas, too happy but for foes; Lived, and ran the race that Nature set, Of manhood’s shape where she the mould did lose.

33 34 35 36

But to the heavens that simple soul is fled, Which left with such as covet Christ to know Witness of faith that never shall be dead, Sent for our health, but not received so.

37 Thus for our guilt this jewel have we lost. 38 The earth his bones, the heavens possess his ghost. (Jones 1991, 111–112).165

The major part of Surrey’s elegy (1–32) is devoted to the praise of the exemplary status of Wyatt’s personality and the greatness of his achievements.166 These achievements, which in their sum make up Wyatt’s life, are enumerated as a

162 Unfinished through want of time. 163 Passion, feelings. 164 Proudly overweening. 165 The explanatory notes on archaic words are taken from that edition. Cf. the original spelling edition in Emrys (1964, 27–28) and in Kirschner (1991, 122–125). 166 For a detailed contextualized commentary on the structure and meaning of this poem, see Sessions (1999, 251–259).



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series of brief compact narratives linked to the various parts of his body and mind, a structuring principle which on account of the emphasis on the body and its anatomy has to be seen as a decidedly novel perspective and thereby points to Wyatt’s early modern stature. The individual parts are integrated by a preceding comprehensive reference to him as a unified person, who during his life-time was constantly active (1–4). His propensity for beneficial restlessness is then spelt out by detailing the activities associated with his head (5–8): devising his service for society (“mysteries”167) and achieving “some work of fame” for Britain, face (9–12): publicly expressing his moral fortitude and his determination to live up to it, hand (13–16): composing outstanding poetry, which served as a model for others, tongue (17–20): working as an envoy for the king and teaching the young generation to strive for excellence, eye (21–24): judging people fairly and bringing about unity among men, heart (25–28): courageously striving for truth, body (29–32): leading an exemplary life.

The script (or “plan”) underlying these various compact narrative sequences and thus informing the dynamic course of his entire life is always the same: a will to act which ultimately leads towards and results in successful achievement. The tone of the elegy implies the public gesture of addressing a courtly audience (see “our”, 20, 36, 37; “we”, 37). Correspondingly, all the enumerated personality traits present Wyatt as a public figure, a person living and acting within his social environment and working for the benefit of the community. In this picture Wyatt embodies the new (Protestant) values of Britain after the Reformation (Sessions 1999, 252–253). Private aspects are not mentioned. Selection and arrangement of these traits, presented in the form of a catalogue, indicate the ideal personality concept of the Renaissance: the worldly perfection of man as a self-guided social being, possessing physical strength and beauty, moral integrity, stoical self-dependence, intelligence, clear judgement, poetic creativity, diplomatic talent and the will to public service – the model courtier. His poetic talent is merely one of his numerous outstanding features, wholly integrated into his personality and of no particular significance for the speaker but, nevertheless, an essential and influential part of his stature as an exemplary public figure. A special feature of this public characterisation is the stress on the national aspect of Wyatt’s achievements (“Britain’s gain”, 8; “Our English youth”, 20) and on his

167 See Sessions (1999: 255), meaning social service and activity, derived from Latin “ministerium”.

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modernity (his poetry is considered superior to that of Chaucer, the greatest poet of the past, 13–16). But the clear focus on Wyatt’s existence in this world is framed by firm links to the overarching transcendence: the mention of his “heavenly gifts” (2) at the beginning and, at the end, the connection of his soul to the “heavens” (33, also 38) as well as the stress on his role as a “witness of faith” (35), which refers both to his general attitude and to his religious poetry, his “penitential psalms” (Emrys 1964, 124). Thus, the presentation of Wyatt’s life-long achievements is concluded by the reference to his death, which is seen as the natural consequence of earthly existence (“ran the race that Nature set”, 31) and which for himself constitutes a gain, since his soul is “fled” to the “heavens” (33). For the speaker and his audience, however, his death presents a loss, interpreted as punishment for their “guilt”, that is, their sinfulness and corruption (37), implying a severe blame on contemporary society (Heale 1998, 20–21). This conclusion counts as the event of the elegy, an event in the happenings, which comprises three different aspects within three frames or respects – redemption with respect to Wyatt, criticism with respect to the community and continued encouragement and spiritual support with respect to the faithful. The relatively low degree of eventfulness of Wyatt’s death (on account of its naturalness) is on the one hand heightened by the stress on his stature as a model of excellence, of which the community is now bereft, and by the reference to the community’s implied guilt for his death. In spite of the modern stature of Wyatt’s achievements, Surrey’s poem is a conventional elegy, which generally concentrates on the deceased person’s multifarious merits (without singling out his poetic genius), briefly states the loss but betrays no personal (emotional) involvement on the part of the speaker nor does it reflect on the fact that the speaker himself is a poet. The lament for the loss of Wyatt’s earthly presence and the implied blame on society are balanced by the consoling focus on traditional religious values, Wyatt’s redemption and his role as a model. On account of its straightforward generic structure as a poetic lament as well as its foregrounded achievement of commemorating and preserving the deceased person in the form of a poem, this elegy can function as a prototypical foil for the analysis of later elegies on the death of poets.

5.2 Thomas Carew: “An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne” (1633) Thomas Carew’s elegy on John Donne, the creator and foremost practitioner of what later came to be called “metaphysical poetry”, the first genuinely innovative movement in modern English poetry, highlights the experience of loss explicitly in connection with the speaker’s – and ultimately, the author’s – own role as a poet and his present project of writing an elegy. In fact, the speaker makes it his main task to render the magnitude of the loss as vividly and painfully as possible in its severe negative eventfulness. This negative event, which forms the point of departure for the present poem, does not so much consist in the physical death of the person of John Donne as such as in the concomitant absence and lack of the inspiring poet on whose fruitful creativity the continued production of poetry is said to depend – expressed by the (procreative) metaphor of “widow’d poetry”. To underline the severity of the eventful loss the speaker adduces the fact of his own apparent inability to write an adequate elegy on Donne.

An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Can we not force from widow’d poetry, Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust Though with unkneaded dough-bak’d prose thy dust, Such as th’ unscissor’d churchman from the flower Of fading rhetoric, short-liv’d as his hour, Dry as the sand that measures it, should lay Upon thy ashes, on the funeral day? Have we no voice, no tune? Didst thou dispense Through all our language, both the words and sense? ‘Tis a sad truth; the pulpit may her plain And sober Christian precepts still retain, Doctrines it may, and wholesome uses frame, Grave homilies, and lectures, but the flame Of thy brave soul, (that shot such heat and light, As burnt our earth, and made our darkness bright, Committed holy rapes upon our will, Did through the eye the melting heart distil; And the deep knowledge of dark truths so teach, As sense might judge, what fancy could not reach;) Must be desir’d forever. So the fire, That fills with spirit and heat the Delphic choir, Which kindled first by thy Promethean breath, Glow’d here a while, lies quench’d now in thy death; The Muses’ garden, with pedantic weeds

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

O’erspread, was purg’d by thee; the lazy seeds Of servile imitation thrown away; And fresh invention planted, thou didst pay The debts of our penurious bankrupt age; Licentious thefts, that make poetic rage A mimic fury, when our souls must be Possess’d, or with Anacreon’s ecstasy, Or Pindar’s, not their own; the subtle cheat Of sly exchanges, and the juggling feat Of two-edg’d words, or whatsoever wrong By ours was done the Greek, or Latin tongue, Thou hast redeem’d, and open’d us a mine Of rich and pregnant fancy; drawn a line Of masculine expression, which had good Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood Our superstitious fools admire, and hold Their lead more precious than thy burnish’d gold, Thou hadst been their exchequer, and no more They each in other’s dust, had rak’d for ore. Thou shalt yield no precedence, but of time, And the blind fate of language, whose tun’d chime More charms the outward sense; yet thou mayst claim From so great disadvantage greater fame, Since to the awe of thy imperious wit Our stubborn language bends, made only fit With her tough thick-ribb’d hoops to gird about Thy giant fancy, which had prov’d too stout For their soft melting phrases. As in time They had the start, so did they cull the prime Buds of invention many a hundred year, And left the rifled fields, besides the fear To touch their harvest, yet from those bare lands Of what is purely thine, thy only hands (And that thy smallest work) have gleaned more Than all those times, and tongues could reap before;

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

But thou art gone, and thy strict laws will be Too hard for libertines in poetry. They will repeal the goodly exil’d train Of gods and goddesses, which in thy just reign Were banish’d nobler poems, now, with these The silenc’d tales o’ th’ Metamorphoses Shall stuff their lines, and swell the windy page, Till verse refin’d by thee, in this last age Turn ballad rhyme, or those old idols be Ador’d again, with new apostasy;



5.2 Thomas Carew (1633) 

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Oh, pardon me, that break with untun’d verse The reverend silence that attends thy hearse, Whose awful solemn murmurs were to thee More than these faint lines, a loud elegy, That did proclaim in a dumb eloquence The death of all the arts, whose influence Grown feeble, in these panting numbers lies Gasping short-winded accents, and so dies: So doth the swiftly turning wheel not stand In th’ instant we withdraw the moving hand, But some small time maintain a faint weak course By virtue of the first impulsive force: And so whilst I cast on thy funeral pile Thy crown of bays, oh, let it crack awhile, And spit disdain, till the devouring flashes Suck all the moisture up, then turn to ashes.

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

I will not draw the envy to engross All thy perfections, or weep all our loss; Those are too numerous for an elegy, And this too great, to be express’d by me. Though every pen should share a distinct part, Yet art thou theme enough to tire all art; Let others carve the rest, it shall suffice I on thy tomb this epitaph incise:

95 96 97 98

Here lies a king, that rul’d as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit; Here lie two flamens, and both those, the best, Apollo’s first, at last, the true God’s priest. (Dunlap 1949, 71–74).168

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The speaker starts off by describing the detrimental effects of Donne’s death on the state of poetry, the creative capacity of poets in general (as indicated by the collective “we”): Poetic creativity died with him, which has blocked even the writing of an elegy for him (1–11). This “sad truth” (11) is conveyed by negated questions, which – in brief condensed narrative sequences – tell (“disnarrate”169, as it were) that the surviving poets are now unable to write any more and that this incapacity was caused by Donne’s death (who thus “dispensed”, that is, took

168 The spelling has been modernized. See also Grieson (1960, 346–349), where Carew’s elegy is printed together with other elegies on Donne. 169 See Prince (1988).

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away, the “words and sense”, 9–10). Their silence thus paradoxically pays indirect homage to Donne’s poetic genius. The next section (11–24) re-states this detrimental effect of Donne’s death with special regard to his role as a Christian preacher (“the pulpit”, 11), by contrasting the “sober”, that is, conventional, manner of communicating religious doctrines, with Donne’s poetically inspired, “fiery” style of preaching (“the flame / Of thy brave soul”, 14–15), now extinct. The powerful impact of his preaching on the audience is evoked and celebrated in the form of narrative cause-and-effect chains in the past tense, such as “the flame / Of thy brave soul […] Committed holy rapes upon the will” (14–17)170, but finally declared, in the closing predicate of this sentence, to be extinguished definitively after his death: “The flame […] / Must be desired for ever” (14 / 21), which highlights the exceptional quality of what was lost and underscores the severity of the loss. Both the narration of Donne’s achievements, while alive, and the statement about their present lack are repeated at greater length and in reverse order in the next section (25–60), now, however, with respect to his secular poetry (as implied by the reference to the “Delphic choir” and Apollo, 22). The analogous high quality of his secular and religious achievements is underlined by their explicit equation with each other (“so”) and the use of similar images: “the flame” (14) – “the fire” (21), both expressing the dynamic strength and vitality of his talent. Although this section starts with the negative description of the present desolation (“the fire […] lies quench’d now in thy death”, 21/24), the subsequent vivid enumeration of Donne’s productive activities (in the condensed narrative form of garden [25–26], banking [28–29] and mining [37–38] metaphors) – momentarily and imaginatively resurrects Donne’s poetic genius. But these activities are told in the past tense as something in fact now gone for ever. The high degree of his original achievement is underscored further when its narrative recapitulation is followed by a reference to the historical context. In spite of being a late-comer in the history of poetry, succeeding so many brilliant predecessors (the ancients etc.) and writing in a “troublesome language” (uncouth English as against polished Greek and Latin), Donne managed to surpass them all: “thy only hands / […] have gleaned more  / Than all those times and tongues could reap before” (58–60). This hyperbolic praise emphasizes the originality and, as it were, modernity of Donne’s poems, ascribing to him the feat of effecting a new turn in the historical development of poetry. The next section (61–70) shifts the focus from the past to the future, predicting or, in other words, prospectively telling the return of the unoriginal, imitative

170 This is an allusion to the holy sonnet “Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God”.



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conventions of writing which Donne had overcome, described with religious metaphors: “libertines in poetry / […] will recall the goodly exiled train / Of gods and goddesses” (that is, derivative mythological themes), “those old idols be / Adored again with new apostasy” (69–70). This passage, likewise, spells out the consequences of the loss (“thou art gone”, 61) caused by Donne’s death for the present and future state of poetry. In the concluding sections the speaker – self-reflectively – turns to his own present attempts to mourn Donne’s death, paradoxically comparing his own writing of this very elegy with the fact of Donne’s inability to write anymore ­(71–86): “[break] with untuned verse / The reverend silence that attends thy hearse” (71–72) versus “[this silence is] a loud elegy, / That did proclaim in dumb eloquence / The death of all the arts” (74–76). With what has to be considered a “metaphysical” argument, a “conceit”, the speaker presents dead Donne’s silence as more expressive (“in a dumb eloquence”, 75) than his own verbal composition, juxtaposing two narrative sequences: his ritual celebration of Donne’s genius (“I cast on thy funeral pile / Thy crown of bays”, 83–84) and the latter’s decreasing influence on his own writing (“let [thy crown of bays] crack awhile, / And spit disdain, till the devouring flashes / Suck all the moisture up, then turn to ashes”, 84–86). Thus the speaker combines an excuse for possible poetic deficits with another tribute to the great poet. A further statement of the inexpressible greatness of Donne concludes the elegy (87–94), resulting in the final formulation of an epitaph, which sums up Donne’s life and achievement in the form of two compact narratives, both metaphorical. First, quality and status of his perfect poetic practice are compared to the competent rule of a king. Second, his thematic orientation is described as a priestly service (“flamens”171), which was shifted in the course of his biography from the role of secular to religious poet. Donne’s status is thus figuratively identified with the two highest positions in contemporary society – the supreme authority in the political and religious fields. As for the loss occasioned by Donne’s death as an original model poet, the speaker does not at all try to retrieve or replace it in any way, neither by reference to the permanence and eternising power of his work (in the manner of Horace, Ovid or Shakespeare in their claims of achieving lasting fame through their poetry172) nor by a belief in the continuing effect on the audience. Rather, the elegy conspicuously makes it its central task to foreground the loss and its

171 From Latin “flamen” meaning priest. 172 See Horace’s ode III 30, Ovid’s postscript to his Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (for example 18, 55, 60, 65, 107).

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finality with varying devices and with increasing intensity, exacerbated by references to Donne’s lost unique greatness. What the speaker thus keeps focusing on throughout the poem is the loss as a negative event – an event in the happenings which on the level of the happenings, of what is being narrated and described, is not compensated for in any way and not relieved by any consolation. A positive event does, however, occur on the level of presentation, as a presentation event. Carew’s poetic style can be seen congenially to reproduce Donne’s characteristic manner, even to compete with him and attempt to surpass him, both prosodically and rhetorically, which is the more remarkable and unexpected as Carew was not one of Donne’s followers but rather belonged to the “sons of Ben”, Donne’s rival Ben Jonson.173 With respect to prosody Carew’s elegy creatively displays features of Donne’s “strong lines” – the tone of dramatic speech in addressing the deceased poet, the frequency of run-on lines and the rough tension between syntax and meter (for example in ll. 1–10 or 14–24). Rhetorically, Carew impressively uses figures of speech, paradoxes and conceits in Donne’s innovative and forceful manner (Lyon 1997, 103), for example the daring coupling of the erotic and the sacred in “committed holy rapes upon our will” (17), the metaphors of the “Promethean breath” (21–24), of purging the “Muses’ garden” (25–28), of paying debts (28–30) or of mining (37–38) as well as the paradoxical notion that the silence at Donne’s hearse presents a “loud elegy” in the manner of “dumb eloquence” (71–75). By surreptitiously practising Donne’s “metaphysical” style Carew’s poetic form does actually disprove his lament about the decline of poetry after Donne’s death and provides  – eventful  – consolation of a surprising kind. In Nixon’s (1999, 105) words: “you might have lost Donne, but you still have me.” Moreover, Carew even manages subtly to convey the sense of Donne’s declining influence on the level of discourse, when, towards the end of his elegy (87–98), he replaces Donne’s strong-lined verse with smooth end-stopped couplets, demonstrating that he is able  – after mastering Donne’s style  – even to move beyond it (Nixon 1999, 102–103; also Lyon 1997, 110–111). Strategy, conception and value system in this elegy exemplify the cultural and historical context of the early modern age: the shift of orientation from the transcendent realm to the secular world, the concomitant increased awareness of the power of time and a strong sense of transitoriness as well as the notion, in a general sense, of modernity, the need to outgrow the imitation of past models and overcome conventions and restrictions, and especially the valorisation of originality, which is usually associated only with the later Romantic period. The com-

173 Cf. the brief remarks in Lyon (2003, 271–273) and see, especially, the detailed, comprehensive and profound analysis in Nixon (1999).



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pensatory shift from a negative event in the happenings to a positive presentation event is a specifically lyrical strategy, which is frequently found in Romantic poetry, for example in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”. In contrast to Surrey, Carew does not explicitly discuss the poet’s position in society. But in his use of metaphors, especially in his designation as a king in the concluding epitaph, Donne is said to have embodied the supreme values of contemporary society, somewhat comparable to Wyatt (Lyon 1997, 107).

5.3 Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” (1821) While Carew seeks to break away from conventional models, Shelley places his “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” (Hutchinson 1960, 430–444)174 explicitly into the frame of an old, traditional genre, the pastoral elegy as invented and practised during the Hellenistic period, exemplified especially by Bion’s “Lament for Adonis” and Moschus’s “Lament for Bion” (both ca. 100 B. C.) and later by John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1637). Shelley draws on this model as a script for his elegy on Keats, utilizing the conventional setting of shepherds and shepherd-poet as well as alluding to these pastoral pre-texts especially in connection with the myth of Adonis.175 The figure of Adonis is explicitly referred to in the name of Adonais for Keats.176 The first part of the poem (up to l. 333 / stanza xxxvii) is wholly dominated by two interwoven compact sequence patterns or narrative schemata borrowed from the ancient Greek models of Bion and Moschus. The first sequence pattern consists of the ritual act of mourning for the poet’s death, which is presented as being performed by someone, some human or non-human figure, at the moment of speaking or which the speaker urges someone to perform; the second narrative pattern sketches, in the past tense, the cause of his death and the process of his dying. As for the first schema, acts of mourning are ascribed to numerous agents, persons or allegorical personifications, in a heterogeneous succession of instances, which in themselves are mostly narrative. The series starts with the speaker himself (“I weep for Adonais – he is dead!”, 1); he is followed by –– Urania, the “mighty mother” of Adonis,177 who is repeatedly called upon to weep for her son (10–54; for example “Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and

174 On account of its great length the poem cannot be quoted here in full. An easily accessible reliable source for the entire text (together with annotations) is the following website (of the University of Toronto): //rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1879.html (accessed on 6 February 2016). – For an overview of connections to the pastoral tradition, see Miles (1999), especially 204–210. 175 For a general overview of the relation of “Adonais” to the history and convention of the elegy, see Wasserman (1971, 462–502). 176 Wasserman (1971, 464–465) interprets “Adonais” as a combination of the name of the Greek mythic figure with the Hebrew word “adonai” for Lord or God, whereas Everest (2007, 258) sees here a pun on the Greek word for nightingale (aedon). 177 She replaces Aphrodite, Adonis’s lover in the ancient myth, after the model of Milton’s “heavenly muse” from Paradise Lost, indication of a shift in Shelley’s elegy from the erotic to the poetological context. See, for example, Everest (2007, 239–242).

 5.3 Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” (1821) 

–– –– –– ––

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weep!”, 20)178 and who subsequently does in fact bewail his loss (190–261; for example “‘Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless’”, 222), the dead poet’s own poetic thoughts and ideas (“dreams”, 73–120), nature in various manifestations such as morning, echo (with a reference to the myth of Echo and Narcissus), spring, winter and also Albion (120–62), fellow-poets (in the pastoral disguise of “mountain shepherds”, 262–263) such as Byron and Thomas Moore (262–270) and Leigh Hunt (307–315), Shelley himself (271–306; for example “one frail Form”, 271).

In keeping with the conventional pastoral setting the personal references to other poets are highly allusive, particularly the one to the author Shelley himself, who presents his person in a very distancing and alienating manner, apparently associating his figure with Dionysos and even Christ (280–305). Especially significant in this respect is the indication of the poet-speaker’s motivation for mourning: “[he] in another’s fate now wept his own” (300). This implies the perception of a close affinity between the elegist and his subject, an affinity which consists in the comparable experience of being outcast, neglected and mentally wounded (for example “of that crew / He came the last, neglected and apart; / A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter’s dart”, 295–297). The second schema, the story of Adonais-Keats’s dying and death as the violent abrupt ending of his life as a creative artist, is intermittently inserted into the instances of mourning in a condensed form, for instance: But now, thy youngest, dearest one, has perished – The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew, Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished, And fed with true-love tears, instead of dew; Most musical of mourners, weep anew! Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last, The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste; The broken lily lies – the storm is overpast. (46–54)

This is a story of murder allegedly committed by an anonymous critic through his hostile review of his poetry (151–153, 236–240, 244–248, 316–333; for example “Our Adonais has drunk poison – oh! / What deaf and viperous murderer could

178 The speaker reminds Urania of her earlier laments for older deceased important poets, obliquely alluded to and told in the past tense, namely Milton, Homer and Dante (39–45).

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crown / Life’s early cup with such a draught of woe?”, 316–319)179, a motif ultimately taken over from the script underlying the pre-texts by Bion, Moschus and Milton: Adonis was mortally wounded by a boar, Bion died of poison and Lycidas was drowned at sea. Although intertwined with each other in the course of the first 37 stanzas, the two schemata in fact form a temporal and causal sequence, the succession of two happenings predicated on two different agents, Adonais’s violent death (in the past tense) preceding and inducing the acts of mourning (in the present tense or in the imperative mood) on the part of various persons or personifications, including the speaker himself. At the present moment, the sequence has definitively come to an end and cannot progress any further. The pervasive feature is a strong emphasis on finality, stagnation and permanent loss: “Death feeds on [Adonais’] mute voice, and laughs at our despair” (27); “He will awake no more, oh, never more!” (64, see also 65–72 and 190); “grief itself be mortal” (183). Paradoxically not even his divine mother Urania can propitiate death (225); she is unable to help or accompany her mortal son, because of her superhuman, divine status (225, 232–234). A contrastive reference to the eternal cycle of decay and renewal in nature merely serves to point to the fact that Adonais (and the human race in general) does not participate in such permanent cyclical movement and change (163–189). After this emphatic and prolonged mourning for the permanent loss of Adonais-Keats, the poem abruptly alters its course. Starting in stanza xxxviii, an unexpected and radical – highly eventful – change in each of the two narrative sequences occurs, both of which, in the first part, had seemed to have come to a definitive stop. The two changes are closely and causally linked, like the two narrative sequences themselves, the mourning ritual and the story of Keats’s dying and death. The speaker suddenly urges himself and others to desist from mourning: “Nor let us weep that our delight is fled” (334), “Peace, peace!” (343), “Mourn not for Adonais” (362). And he justifies this abrupt change of attitude by disclosing Adonais’s continuing if transformed existence: “He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead” (336); he is transformed into the “pure spirit” (338) that he originally was; “he is not dead, he doth not sleep – / He hath awakened from the dream of life” (343–344); “He lives, he wakes  – ‘tis Death is dead, not he” (361). The relation of life and death is now reversed: “We decay / Like corpses in a charnel” (348–349). In the remaining stanzas these changes are then developed and further elaborated on, now described in the present tense, as developments

179 This allegation, which is based on information by Leigh Hunt, is not borne out by biographical facts; Keats actually died of tuberculosis.

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happening at the present moment. With regard to Adonais’s narrative, he is said to be “made one with Nature” (370), to become “a portion of the loveliness / Which once he made more lovely” (379–380), the world of imagination and poetry, “an Heaven of Song” (413), to be welcomed into the community of the eternalized dead young poets (for example Chatterton, Sidney, Lucan) as their most prominent member (397–414) and to be “gathered to the kings of thought” (430). Equally pronounced is the change of the speaker’s own involvement in both narrative sequences. While in the first part of the elegy the speaker mentions himself as only one among several other mourners and in a highly distancing and alienating manner at that, the second part is primarily and in increasing explicitness focused on himself and his own present and future position. He starts with oblique pronominal references in the first person plural (334, 348, 459), then switches to the second person singular (“thou” / “thy”, obviously self-addresses: 416–458, 465) and finally speaks directly in his own person (“my Heart”, 470) in the very last stanza, describing – narrating – his movement (in the image of a sea-voyage) from this imperfect world to Adonais’s transcendental realm of immortality and perfection: The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven, Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven! I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. 

(487–495)

The reversal in both narratives with respect to Adonais – as well as, increasingly, to the speaker himself  – is complete: the transformation of the cruelly killed poet into a star-like eternal living soul (on the histoire level) and the shift from mourning Adonais’s death to aspiring to his condition as a model (on the discourse level). This change represents an event of a high degree in both respects: first, a radical change in the existence, situation and status of the lamented poet, constituting an event in the happenings, already completed for Adonais-Keats and envisaged for the speaker himself to be completed in future; and, second, a radical reversal in the perception and attitude of the speaker (and others), signifying a presentation event. The high degree of eventfulness is constituted not just intra-textually by the abrupt break in the second part from the expectation raised in the first part but also inter-textually by the deviation from the generic pattern of the pastoral elegy as induced by the allusions to Bion and Moschus. Although

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the double eventful turn occurs abruptly (in stanza xxxviii), the length of the prolonged mournful reflections leading up to this point indicates that the change is the result of a painful dynamic process of coping with loss, a work of mourning, as it were, which is basically motivated by the speaker’s perception of a latent affinity between himself and Adonais-Keats. The degree of eventfulness appears to be somewhat reduced if one takes into consideration that a comparable turn already occurs in a famous earlier English model, in Milton’s “Lycidas”180. Milton also adopts the pastoral elegy in his lament on the death by drowning of his friend (priest and minor poet) Edward King and enacts a similar eventful change: “Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, / For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead” (165–166) and “So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high / Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves [that is, Jesus]” (172–173). The difference in the event-structure between Shelley’s and Milton’s elegies concerns, on the one hand, the nature of the transformation (Christian in Milton, quasi-Neo-Platonic in Shelley) and, on the other, the affinity between the speaker and his subject (there is no equivalent to the speaker’s own desolation and suffering in Milton’s poem). The meter – the Spenserian stanza – is another intertextual reference, namely to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, especially to Book III, Cantos 1 and 6, where the garden of Adonis is described as the abode of eternal love and the source of life and joy. Thus, Shelley’s “Adonais” is doubly eventful: With respect to Keats, the poem describes an eventful change which has already been completed; with respect to the speaker himself, the event is as yet merely desired and aspired to but has not been realized so far. In the course of his lament for Adonais-Keats the speaker becomes increasingly aware of his own desolate and outcast state; and the narration of the (imagined) transformation of his fellow-poet offers him the notion and hope of a way out of his miserable existence, suggesting a similar redemption for himself. The status of this eventful eternizing of the poet in a transcendental realm is ultimately precarious and profoundly ambivalent181, signifying on the one hand preservation and continuity (apparently in the form of hope for lasting fame182) and, on the other, annihilation and death. This ambivalence applies particularly

180 Carey and Fowler (1968, 239–254). An easily accessible source for the entire text (together with annotations) is the following website (of the University of Toronto): //rpo.library.utoronto. ca/poem/1440.html (accessed on 6 February 2016). 181 See the overview of the controversial interpretations by critics in Ulmer (1993, 427–428, footnotes 6, 7, 8). 182 Cf. Scrivener (1982, 275, 280).



5.3 Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” (1821) 

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to the speaker’s (and Shelley’s) concluding vision of being ferried to the “abode where the Eternal are”, that is, the anticipation of a boundary crossing: But it can reasonably be suspected that the joyful aspiration to eternal life is no more than a desperate attempt to escape from marginalization, failure and misery in life on earth.183 In the final analysis, therefore, the eventful change appears to be counterfactual, a defiant insistence on the existence, permanence and superiority of a world of the spirit and poetic imagination.184 This gesture of defiance is also supported formally, in the prosody, imagery and style of the elegy: the allusions to ancient literary models (Bion, Moschus), to Milton’s “Lycidas” and, in the Spenserian stanza, to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, have to be read as an implicit rebuke of the conservative critics’ polemic attacks on Keats’s alleged Cockney style (Everest 2007, 237–238). A similar counterfactual gesture  – in its precarious status  – is characteristic of certain versions of romanticism, exemplified, for example, by Keats in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, where the silent work of art finally seems to utter a reassuring message, or the “Ode on Melancholy”, which envisages the ultimate preservation of the soul as a “trophy” in Melancholy’s temple, and by Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry” with its famous concluding dictum: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.

183 Cf., for example, Smith’s (1977, 77) ‘dramatic’ reading, which identifies speaker with author and interprets the artist’s isolation as the cause of Adonais’s death. See also Ulmer’s (1993, 428 et passim) emphasis on “the poem’s turn deathward” and the deathliness of what the elegy leads to. Weisman (2006, 56–59) sees in this ending neither escape nor salvation for the poet but rather the notion of art’s continuity in its function of giving shape to deprivation and decay in life. 184 Cf. Scrivener (1982, 273): “a poetically useful fiction”.

5.4 W. H. Auden: “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) Form and conception underlying W. H. Auden’s elegy on Yeats – as well as that by Heaney on Brodsky, analyzed in the next chapter – are different from Carew’s and Shelley’s examples. Auden writes a decidedly modern poem, set in the contemporary world. Formally, he starts off with a modernist first section but then continues, in the second and third parts, by modulating the metrical schema from the unconventional to the conspicuously conventional. Heaney’s poem is closely linked to Auden’s elegy, motivated inter alia by the identical date of death of their subjects (28 January), radically differing, however, from it in its conception by altering his model’s “story”.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

I 1 He disappeared in the dead of winter: 2 The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, 3 And snow disfigured the public statues; 4 The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. 5 What instruments we have agree 6 The day of his death was a dark cold day. 7 8 9 10 11

Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

12 13 14 15 16 17

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

18 19 20 21 22 23

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.



24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

5.4 W. H. Auden: “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) 

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. II 1 You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: 2 The parish of rich women, physical decay, 3 Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. 4 Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, 5 For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives 6 In the valley of its making where executives 7 Would never want to tamper, flows on south 8 From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, 9 Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, 10 A way of happening, a mouth. III 1 Earth, receive an honoured guest: 2 William Yeats is laid to rest. 3 Let the Irish vessel lie 4 Emptied of its poetry. 5 6 7 8

In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate;

9 10 11 12

Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.

13 14 15 16

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice;

17 18 19 20

With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress;

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21 In the deserts of the heart 22 Let the healing fountain start, 23 In the prison of his days 24 Teach the free man how to praise. February 1939 (Mendelson 1976, 197–98).

In Part I of his elegy Auden contrasts two (compact) narrative sequences with two different “protagonists”, one sequence linked to the poet, the other to his work. The process of the poet’s illness and death (the first narrative sequence) is associated with, or presented as, various compact developments towards an ending: end of the year, end of the day, terminal illness, military rebellion – signifying disappearance, collapse, disintegration, failure or defeat, all of them constituting negative changes which imply loss of control and of power as well as final dissolution (1–17). This narrative of an ending (told in the past tense) with regard to Yeats’s personal physical existence is then ambivalently repeated (in the present tense) in further images of dissolving and losing control (“scattered among”, “wholly given over to”, “punished under a foreign code”, 18–21), ostensibly still predicated on Yeats the person, but obviously meant as a metonymy for his poetry (the second narrative sequence). In this respect the loss of self-control increasingly assumes the sense less of dissolution than of transformation and preservation in different shapes (deviating from the poet’s original intentions), most clearly in the generalizing final statement: “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living” (22–23). So, the two narratives are contrasted with each other, the fate of Yeats’s poetry being presented as a counter-narrative to his life: While the author’s existence comes to an end, his poetry survives and continues to exist albeit subject to his readers and their individual needs and views. The focus shifts from the side of the author to that of his work and especially to that of the audience. The scripts underlying these two narrative sequences can be identified as the two most fundamental forms of change occurring in life: the inevitable decline of the individual organism and the transformation of all organic matter in the course of the processes of life. From this perspective each of the two narrative sequences, author and work, is concluded with an event of sorts. That Yeats’s work survives is presented as eventful vis-à-vis the author’s death, though to a considerably reduced degree in comparison with the traditional notion of poetry’s triumphant permanence (Horace, Ovid, Shakespeare185) as highlighted by the stress on the modification of originally intended meanings and especially by the irreverent, unceremonious,

185 See above Chapter 5.2, footnote 172.



5.4 W. H. Auden: “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) 

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deliberately colloquial tone (“guts”). However, downplaying and depreciating the effect of poetry in this manner may be taken as a means of making the event of its survival all the more credible within the skeptical modern world. A similar device of emphasis through understatement is employed at the end of the subsequent paragraph with respect to the poet himself as a person. The anticipation of the future recollection of his death (“A few thousand will think of this day / As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual”, 28–29) indirectly underscores his continued relevance for his readers, particularly by formulating this relevance as a deliberate act on their part, which deviates from the ordinary notion of the reader’s passive receptivity. The indirect device of establishing eventfulness through downplaying both significance and tone is supported by the prosody in this part of the elegy, which conspicuously avoids conventional poetic patterns and rhymes. Part II shifts the emphasis rigorously from the first to the second narrative sequence, from the poet’s person (his specific environment and condition) to his work, metonymically called his “gift”, thereby disengaging the poetry from its biographical, individual source and presenting it as an independent self-contained entity. This movement is emphatically narrated as a story of progressive survival (5, 9), in contrast both to things changing (“physical decay”, 2) and things unchanging (Ireland’s “madness”, 4), visualized in the form of an extensive geographical allegory  – the course of a river from its source to its mouth, signifying the trajectory through the development of human life (“isolation”, “griefs”, “believe”, “die”, 8–9). The event in this allegorical narrative consists in the fact and manifestation of poetry’s survival, against obstacles, restrictions, possible interferences, also against doubts about its effectiveness (“poetry makes nothing happen”, 5). The eventfulness is confirmed by accumulating three significant statements in the last two lines of this section: about the very fact of its continued existence (“it survives”), its manifest effectiveness (“a way of happening”) and its communicative power (“a mouth”), ambivalently referring both to the river allegory and to literature. The insistence on eventfulness in poetry’s story is more pronounced as well as more self-assured than in Part I, which is also reflected in the elaborate use of conventional poetic structures (the morphological repetitions or variations in the words “survival” and “happening”; rhymes, both impure: “all” – “still”, “decay” – “poetry”, “survives” – “executives” – “griefs” – “survives” and finally pure: “south” – “mouth”) – structures which highlight the fact that this text is emphatically a poem. In Part III the speaker briefly takes up and concludes the narrative of Yeats the poet as a living human being (his interment, 1–4) only to pursue the story of his poetry further, now placed within the context of the contemporary global situation (hostile tensions in Europe) as characterized by stagnation, separation and

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aggression. The second half of this part (13–24) is an address to poets in general to make poetry do what it can achieve (after Yeats’s model), thus taking up and pursuing the progressing story of poetry’s function and effectiveness as introduced in Parts I and II (as the second narrative sequence). Like the initial reference to Yeats’s interment this is an adhortative narrative, recommending or encouraging a specific line of action. The conspicuousness and conventionality of poetic devices are increased further (trochees, rhyming couplets), deliberately drawing attention to the poetic status of the present elegy, which as a poem tries to achieve what the speaker describes and admonishes fellow poets to strive towards. The effect that poetry (“singing”) can have is spelled out in a number of images: “follow … / to the bottom of the night” (113–114), “farming” (17), “[l]et the […] fountain start” (22) – metaphorical activities which induce healing and joy against all odds and in a situation of defeat and “unsuccess”,186 activities which strive towards humane, happy, curative results, against the background of inhumane European politics. The event, when realized, will consist in poetry practically achieving these aims and improving individual lives and human relations, thus fulfilling an essential social and psychological function. It is typical of poetry that a poem presents a particular as yet incomplete narrative development attempting to induce the reader or the addressee to bring about its eventful ending. In this sense the speaker here addresses present or future poets to follow Yeats’s model and effectively achieve this aim – in the form of a reception event. Thus, this poem is not only an elegy on a poet by a poet but also an address of a poet to other poets and ultimately also or even predominantly a self-address (cf. O’Neill 2013, 282; Wasley 2013, 48). The negative event of Yeats’s death (first narrative sequence) is eventually overcome by the self-assured belief in the social relevance and efficacy of poetry (second narrative sequence).187

186 This emphasis on “rejoice” and the rhyme word “voice” seem to be alluding to Yeats’s late poems “The Gyres” and “Lapis Lazuli” – cf. O’Neill (2013, 282). See the analysis of “Lapis Lazuli” in Chapter 6.6. 187 Cf. the insightful analysis of Auden’s elegy by McDiarmid (1977), who construes the movement of the poem as a gradual shift of perspective and dominance within the underlying tension between two worlds and forces, the social, political world and the world of imagination – a shift from the superiority of the external world to the confirmation of poetry’s ability “to face [the inimical forces] and act in spite of them” (175). The analysis provides a detailed structuralist reconstruction of the shift mainly on the level of imagery but lacks a further discussion of the specific relevance of this change.

5.5 Seamus Heaney: “Audenesque: in memory of Joseph Brodsky” (1996) Through his title and numerous allusions especially in the five opening stanzas, Seamus Heaney’s elegy on Joseph Brodsky explicitly refers to Auden’s poem on Yeats’s death as its foil and as a prototypical model elegy.188 One motive for the close intertextual reference of Heaney’s elegy is the coincidence that Brodsky died on the anniversary of Yeats’s death, on 28 January (1996 and 1939, respectively; 5–8)189. Heaney thus repeats Auden’s elegy, likewise taking the event of a fellow poet’s (and in this case, also a friend’s) death as his subject matter as well as thematizing the nature, function and potential effectiveness of poetry, in the end, however, radically altering the earlier poet’s “story” and its eventfulness. Audenesque in memory of Joseph Brodsky 1 2 3 4

Joseph, yes, you know the beat. Wystan Auden’s metric feet Marched to it, unstressed and stressed, Laying William Yeats to rest.

5 6 7 8

Therefore, Joseph, on this day, Yeats’s anniversary, (Double-crossed and death-marched date, January twenty-eight),

9 10 11 12

Its measured ways I tread again Quatrain by constrained quatrain, Meting grief and reason out As you said a poem ought.

13 14 15 16

Trochee, trochee, falling: thus Grief and metre order us. Repetition is the rule, Spins on lines we learnt at school.

17 Repetition, too, of cold 18 In the poet and the world,

188 Cf. the brief discussion of the relationship between the two poems in Hardy (2007, 195–196). 189 In addition, Brodsky’s association with the admired great Irish poet heightens his significance and status for Heaney.

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19 Dublin Airport locked in frost, 20 Rigor mortis in your breast. 21 22 23 24

Ice no axe or book will break, No Horatian ode unlock, No poetic foot imprint, Quatrain shift or couplet dint,

25 26 27 28

Ice of Archangelic strength, Ice of this hard two-faced month, Ice like Dante’s in deep hell Makes your heart a frozen well.

29 30 31 32

Pepper vodka you produced Once in Western Massachusetts With the reading due to start Warmed my spirits and my heart

33 34 35 38

But no vodka, cold or hot, Aquavit or uisquebaugh, Brings the blood back to your cheeks Or the colour to your jokes,

37 38 39 40

Politically incorrect Jokes involving sex and sect, Everything against the grain, Drinking, smoking like a train.

41 42 43 44

In a train in Finland we Talked last summer happily, Swapping manuscripts and quips, Both of us like cracking whips

45 46 47 48

Sharpened up and making free, Heading west for Tampere (West that meant for you, of course, Lenin’s train-trip in reverse).

49 50 51 52

Nevermore that wild speed-read, Nevermore your tilted head Like a deck where mind took off With a mind-flash and a laugh.

53 54 55 56

Nevermore that rush to pun Or to hurry through all yon Jammed enjambements piling up As you went above the top,



5.5 Seamus Heaney: “Audenesque: in memory of Joseph Brodsky” (1996) 

57 58 59 60

Nose in air, foot to the floor, Revving English like a car Hijacked when you robbed its bank (Russian was your reserve tank).

61 62 63 64

Worshipped language can’t undo Damage time has done to you: Even your peremptory trust In words alone here bites the dust.

65 66 67 68

Dust-cakes, still – see Gilgamesh – Feed the dead. So be their guest. Do again what Auden said Good poets do: bite, break their bread. (Heaney 2001, 64–66).

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While Auden’s elegy extensively employs narrative elements (linked to man and work: on the one hand, Yeats’s terminal illness and death and, on the other, his poetry’s reception and continued effects), Heaney seems less consistently narrative, apparently finding it difficult to turn the poet’s death into a story of survival. This difficulty is deliberately highlighted by the fact that Heaney openly takes Auden’s elegy with its two narrative sequences as his model and point of departure (named in the adjective “Audenesque” as the title), thereby not only foregrounding the similarities but also emphatically making the differences more perceptible. Heaney’s utterances about Brodsky’s personality and poetic activities (structurally analogous to those by Auden about Yeats’s life and poetry) are introduced by a narrative sequence which has no equivalent in his model: In the first four stanzas Heaney describes (“narrates”), in the present tense, the operation of composing his elegy in the vein and meter of Auden’s poem (drawing specifically on Part III), thus self-referentially emphasizing the poetic status of the present text as well as its unreservedly imitative and highly conventional nature (“Spins on lines we learnt at school”, 16). As to the poet’s personal existence (the first narrative sequence in Auden’s elegy), Heaney recounts neither any details of Brodsky’s life nor the circumstances of his dying. Instead, he recalls Brodsky’s personality and his own personal acquaintance with him in two isolated narrative – private – episodes, one about drinking “pepper vodka” before a reading in Western Massachusetts ­(29–32), the other about a train journey to Finland (41–48). But he calls back these past encounters only to intensify their irretrievable pastness and sharpen his awareness that Brodsky has gone forever. This sense of the finality of Brodsky’s death is corroborated by two additional means: first, by the elaboration of the notion of rigor mortis in the poet by means of extended ice imagery (17–28), and,

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second, especially in the form of “disnarrating”, that is, narrating what will never happen again  – Brodsky’s habit of joking, drinking, going against the grain (33–40), speed reading, talking, laughing, punning (49–60). Each of these two disnarrated passages follows on from a recollected episode of a former encounter, explicitly denying them continuation and even continued relevance. The emphatically repeated “nevermore” (49, 50, 53) lays further stress on this fact.190 Almost all of these recollected or disnarrated activities have to do with Brodsky’s way of handling language and composing poems (and can thus be compared to the second narrative sequence in Auden’s elegy, the production, reception and effect of poetry). The point of these “disnarrated” anecdotes (in addition to obliquely visualizing Brodsky’s personality) is summed up in the penultimate stanza (61–64): “Worshipped language can’t undo / Damage time has done to you”. Poetry is powerless against time, transitoriness and death; it cannot guarantee the poet’s preservation through his work. This statement explicitly refutes Brodsky’s personally cherished “trust / in words alone” (as well as the traditional notion, famously pronounced, for instance, by Horace, Ovid and Shakespeare191, that poetry assures immortality through fame). A similar insistence on the powerlessness of poetic language was expressed earlier in the poem (21–28), corroborating the absolute and irreversible fact of Brodsky’s death (and, by mentioning Horace, already rejecting his proud notion of poetry’s eternizing power). These two stanzas (21–24, 61–64) are likewise instances of disnarrating: Heaney disnarrates what Auden still found possible to narrate and turn into a story. While Auden hoped for poetry to start the healing fountain in people’s frozen hearts, Heaney emphatically denies such possibility for Brodsky (“Ice […] / Makes your heart a frozen well”, 27–28). Thus, Heaney directly counters Auden’s belief in the survival of poetry as “a way of happening” (Part II, l. 10). Here poetry in fact “makes nothing happen” – with a vengeance. Heaney underlines his rejection of Auden’s optimistic notion about poetry’s impact by choosing the meter of the third part of the older poet’s elegy, in which he is most outspoken about this confidence. The elegy ends with two events, one in each of the two narrative sequences linked to poetic work and poet, the second modifying or complementing the first. The penultimate stanza stresses the ineffectualness of poetry against death, in the form of a compact narrative: The trust in words dies, a statement which is to be considered eventful in that it deviates from the expectation raised by the title “Audenesque” and the frame established by the imitation and repetition of

190 Presumably an allusion to Poe’s “The Raven”, where the repetition of this word also stresses the finality of the loss. 191 See above Chapter 5.2, footnote 172.



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Auden’s Yeats elegy – an eventfulness not very high since all the preceding disnarrated episodes have prepared the reader for it. But the last stanza again deviates from this statement, if somewhat enigmatically. Brodsky is asked to join the company of the dead as “their guest” (which repeats the introductory phrase in Part III of Auden’s poem: “Earth, receive an honoured guest”) and “live” with them, which would count as a survival of sorts, in another mode of existence. The reference to mankind’s oldest epic (Gilgamesh)192 creates the notion of a vast enduring community of the dead now receiving another member to participate in their “life”, the “nourishment” (“dust-cakes”, 65) of which – by an allusion to Auden193 – is associated with good poets’ customary activity.194 This is a kind of shade-like existence which resembles the Greek notion of “Hades”. Although they do not completely disappear, they are not really there anymore either – in radical contrast to Shelley’s notion in “Adonais” of the dead poet’s awakening to a superior state of existence. But this archaic shadowy continuity is conspicuously presented as a contrived, literary imagination. One may connect this kind of shadowy continued existence with the circumstance that by disnarrating Brodsky’s former personality and activities Heaney in fact paradoxically evokes his presence and preserves his picture in this elegy, the poet as a person rather than his work, thus constituting an event after all – in contradiction of the preceding radically negative statements. This is a self-consciously precarious and ambivalent form of eventfulness, which in its highly skeptical attitude and tentative reliance on archaic concepts can be called modern. The precarious quality of this move to cope with the fellow-poet’s loss in Heaney’s elegy is especially apparent against the background of Shelley’s defiant postulation of transcendent personal preservation and Auden’s self-assured hope in poetry’s healing power. Although the speaker self-referentially thematizes the act of writing this elegy, he is not personally involved in the problem of the future fate of poet and work.

192 The allusion is to a passage on the seventh tablet of the epic. Here Gilgamesh’s brother Engidu, who is about to die, describes the existence of the dead in the house of darkness, where earthly dust and clay serve as food. See George (2003). 193 The phrase “Do again what Auden said / Good poets do” (67–68) may tentatively be taken to allude to Auden’s optimistic description of the healing effects of poetry in Part III, though this is not clear. 194 What exactly is meant by “bite, break their bread” remains somewhat shady.

5.6 Summary In different, historically specific ways, the five elegies attempt to cope with, and compensate for, the negative event of a revered poet’s death by variously shaping and combining references to the deceased poet, his poetic work and the speaker himself. Surrey’s conventional elegy on Wyatt provides a kind of prototypical foil, which defines the loss caused by the poet’s death in its significant eventfulness but to a muted degree, because still placed in a religious frame: While death is accepted as the natural consequence of his earthly life, salvation can be expected for his soul. Neither the possible permanence of his poetry nor the speaker’s own role as a poet is mentioned. What survives is the memory of Wyatt’s model stature as a public figure and his religious writings. The most radical versions of loss are presented by the elegies of Carew on Donne and Heaney on Brodsky. At first sight, neither of them seems to replace the negative event by any kind of positive compensation or consolation. Both view the poet’s loss as final and deny the survival of poetry as well as its power of transcending time on the histoire level. But surreptitiously, both poems partly undercut this radical position on the discourse level (as a presentation event), Carew by proving in the composition of his elegy the continuing vitality of Donne’s poetic model, Heaney by vividly catching and commemorating Brodsky’s personality in the composition of his lament and, in addition, providing him with an at least shade-like, conspicuously contrived, consolingly imagined personal continuation in some kind of imaginative Hades of the dead. Shelley on Keats and Auden on Yeats, on the other hand, start off from a similarly negative state regarding their respective subjects, yet in the end surprisingly turn round to postulate a positive event, in both cases on the histoire-level (as events in the happenings)  – the continued existence of Keats in a superior transcendent state and the continuing effectiveness of Yeats’s poetry, respectively. One may interpret this envisaged solution as a desperate counterfactual attempt to overcome the painful experience of loss: Auden, however, is more cautious in his formulations (in qualifying the effect as desired and hoped for – also as a reception event), Shelley more apodictic (in postulating his vision as a fact). What both elegies have in common and what sets them apart from the other two poems is that they perform an extended process which results in a fundamental change, a reversal from the lament about the initial negative event of loss to a final positive eventfulness (and consolation), the transcendent survival of the poet and the practical survival of his poetry, respectively. The speaker’s own position as a poet is involved in these presentations in different degrees. This subjective involvement is most pronounced in Shelley’s elegy: Here the speaker sees himself in an equally outcast and wounded situation

5.6 Summary 

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like Keats, lamenting his own fate and desiring a similar transcendent transformation for himself. Carew presents his speaker (that is, ultimately himself, as the author) as Donne’s disciple, who feels unable to emulate the master’s talent but inadvertently achieves something comparable after all. Both Auden and Heaney (and to an even greater degree, Surrey) appear personally rather detached from their subjects and do not (explicitly) thematize their own emotional positions, in clear contrast to Shelley. As for the relation to the historical context, Surrey sees the contemporary Renaissance ideal of a cultured courtier in his public presence embodied by Wyatt, combining worldly achievements with a traditional (medieval) religious interpretation of life. Carew combines traditional with modern features in the concept of poetic composition, namely the medieval master-disciple relationship with the innovative notion of originality. In other respects, his rigorous focus on this world and his insistence on the pervasive transitoriness of everything in the world place him in the early modern period. Shelley’s emphatic attention to the precarious position of the (self-conscious) individual (Keats as well as Shelley himself) isolated from society is characteristic of certain tendencies in Romanticism as is the attempt to escape into an imagined perfect world, primarily nature or, typical for Shelley, some ideal transcendent realm. The speaker’s personal detachment, his skepticism about the inherent stability of the self and about the relevance of poetry in the contemporary world, which pervades Heaney’s entire elegy and is expressed in the first part of Auden’s elegy, can be classified as modernist – a skepticism which is overcome through the shift in Auden’s second and (especially) the third part to a greater confidence in poetry’s impact on the individual, set in the contemporary political scene of conflict and threatening war in Europe. Finally, the events in these elegies are in different degrees and manners to be described as typical of lyrical poetry. Surrey presents his elegy as the poetic grave where Wyatt is buried but also preserved as a memory. Carew employs poetic structures (imagery and prosody) to highlight his affinity to Donne. Shelley draws on a poetic convention (pastoral poetry) in order to deviate from it. Heaney does something similar with the intertext of Auden’s poem, foregrounded by borrowing the specific stanza of his elegy’s third part. Both Auden and Shelley, in their elegies, only lead up to a possible event (poetry exerting a healing influence on readers and the speaker joining Keats in his transcendental existence, respectively) leaving the actual realization of the change as yet open and expecting it only for the future. Typically lyrical is finally the move, in various forms and degrees undertaken by all the elegists discussed here, to offer poetry and art as a compensation for loss.

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References Carey, John and Alastair Fowler, eds. 1968. The Poems of John Milton. London: Longman / New York: Norton. Dunlap, Rhodes, ed. 1949. The Poems of Thomas Carew with His Masque Coelum Britannicum. Oxford: Clarendon. Everest, Kelvin. 2007. “Shelley’s Adonais and John Keats.” Essays in Criticism 57(3): 237–264. George, A. R. 2003. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts. Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grierson, Herbert, ed. 1960. The Poems of John Donne. London: Oxford University Press. Hardy, Barbara. 2007. “Literary Allusions, Appropriations and Assimilations.” In Ashby Bland Crowder and Jason David Hall, eds. Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator, 189–209. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heale, Elizabeth. 1998. Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry. London/New York: Longman. Heaney, Seamus. 2001. Electric Light. London: Faber and Faber. Hutchinson, Thomas, ed. 1960. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Oxford University Press. Jones, Emrys, ed. 1964. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: Poems. Oxford: Clarendon. Jones, Emrys, ed. 1991. The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirschner, Teresa, ed. 1991. The Poems of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey. Dissertation: Universität Regensburg. Lyon, John. 1997. “Jonson and Carew on Donne: Censure into Praise.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 37:97–118. Lyon, John. 2003. “The Critical Elegy.” In Michael Hattaway, ed. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, 267–275. Oxford: Blackwell. McDiarmid, Lucy. 1977. “Poetry’s Landscape in Auden’s Elegy for Yeats.” Modern Language Quarterly 38: 167–177. Mendelson, Edward, ed. 1976. W. H. Auden: Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. Miles, Geoffrey, ed. 1999. Classical Mythology in English Literature: A Critical Anthology. London/New York: Routledge. Nixon, Scott. 1999. “Carew’s Response to Jonson and Donne.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 39:89–109. O’Neill, Michael. 2013. “Yeats.” In Tony Sharpe, ed. W. H. Auden in Context, 276–285. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prince, Gerald. 1988. “The Disnarrated.” Style, 22:1–8. Scrivener, Michael Henry. 1982. Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sessions, W. A. 1999. Henry Howard: The Poet Earl of Surrey. A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Eric. 1977. By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy. Ipswich: Boydell / Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield. Ulmer, William A. 2004. “Adonais and the Death of Poetry.” Studies in Romanticism 32(3):425–451. Wasley, Aidan. 2013. “Ideas of America.” In Tony Sharpe, ed. W. H. Auden in Context, 47–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Wasserman, Earl R. 1971. Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Weisman, Karen. 2008. “The lyricist.” In Timothy Morton, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, 45–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6 Thematizing the Loss of an Old Order

6.0 Introduction The poems selected and discussed in the preceding chapters all deal with the loss or threatened loss of an individual person of essential relevance to the speaker’s existence or with the imminent extinction of the speaker’s own self. But loss can also concern a non-personal entity, as Freud remarked in his essay on “Mourning and Melancholia” of 1917: “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (Freud 1957, 243). What this non-personal loss has in common with the loss of a loved person is the existential significance of the lost entity for the person’s identity and selfhood, for his stability, orientation and happiness. The total of twelve examples discussed in this chapter represent a wide and diverse variety of non-personal entities of vital importance for the speaker, ranging from (Christian) religion in different forms to general belief systems and notions of a fundamental order of reality and from nature to art as sustaining foundations. As in the various types of personal relationship disrupted by a beloved person’s death or withdrawal, loss in these non-personal cases is occasioned by the disruption of the stabilizing contact to, firm reliance on or undisturbed belief in the abstract entity, which deprives the individual (the speaker) of meaning and assurance. These various abstract entities are summarily termed “order” by the title of this chapter and moreover specified as an “old order” since its existence tends to become noticeable and problematical only if and when it is threatened and loses its previously unquestioned validity. While the loss of a beloved person is due to concrete individual, singular and local circumstances and some coincidental cause such as disease, accident, alteration of attitude or shift in emotional attachment, the non-personal or super-personal entities are predominantly subject to and dependent on historical collective changes, as for instance social and economic developments, scientific discoveries, shifts in prevalent mentalities, basic assumptions about, or established concepts of, reality. For that reason, the loss of such an old order or foundation of reality is likely to be experienced specifically in transitional periods such as those chosen for the selection of poems in this study: the early modern, the Romantic and the modernist period. The ultimately mental status of loss as emphasized in the general introduction (Chapter 1) is particularly pertinent to the loss of an old order. Although the traumatic experience may refer to and be partly prompted by some kind of change or changes in the world outside the person’s mind, the relevance and effect of the impact is essentially mental, constituting a mental event, ultimately conditioned by internal changes in perception, perspective and consciousness. The distinction between absence or lack and loss, which DaCapra proposes as a basis for the

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analysis of trauma,195 does not centrally apply here. A “general” lack, like uncertainty about the ontological substance of the world and reality or the benevolence of nature, which was not felt in the past but is suddenly “perceived”, is for that reason experienced as a loss. As for the selection of poems, the two examples from the early modern period (6.1) thematize in different ways and degrees of explicitness the loss of belief in the notion of a pre-existing perfect and stable order of values. John Donne’s An Anatomy of the World (6.1.1) addresses the general loss of human perfection through the fall, exacerbated by a young girl’s recent premature death and the uncertainties caused by recent scientific developments. In William Shakespeare’s The Sonnets (6.1.2) the fundamental doubts about the traditional system of values indirectly motivates the search for a compensating stability on the basis of an intimate personal relationship, a friendship of great emotional intensity. The Romantic period is represented by two pairs of poems (6.2 and 6.3). The erosion and loss of nature as a sustaining vital source of meaning in William Wordsworth’s “The World is too Much with Us” (6.2.1) can be compared to the loss of the tradition as a source of artistic creativity in the late-Romantic and at the same time modernist poem “High Talk” by W. B. Yeats (6.2.2), in both cases said to be caused by modern commercialization. Comparable is also the resolution of this crisis through the inadvertent spontaneous recovery and replacement of what was lost. The other pair of Romantic poems (6.3) present two completely opposed manners of coming to terms with the experience of loss: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet “Lift not the Painted Veil” (6.3.1) faces the radical disillusionment of an established world view and derives strength from accepting the isolated stance of disillusioned insight, whereas “The Cloud” by the same poet (6.3.2) implicitly views the experience of lack from the imagined opposite existence of humanly impossible plenitude. Two poems from the post-Romantic Victorian era enact two different reactions to the loss of religious faith (6.4): Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (6.4.1) replaces faith with the interpersonal fulfillment of love, while in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet “No Worst, there is None” (6.4.2) the speaker fails in his attempts to overcome the crisis of his religious belief. The foremost modernist poets T. S. Eliot (6.5) and W. B. Yeats (6.6) present characteristically different perceptions of and attitudes towards a fundamental crisis. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (6.5.1) can be read as an extremely elaborate and comprehensive picture of a collective and at the same time personal experience of loss in a contemporary context without a clear prospect of resolution or compensation other than through an artistic gesture.

195 DaCapra discusses the response to objective historical collective traumata like the Shoah in Germany and the apartheid in South Africa (2001, 43–85).

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“Journey of the Magi” (6.5.2) places a similar experience precariously into the historical beginning of the Christian era, when the advent of a new dispensation is experienced as the erosion and loss of the old order without a clear awareness of the coming new dispensation. W. B. Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” (6.6) counters and supersedes the repeated destruction of the old and of old certainties by means of the unbroken joyful impetus and strength of ever again creating the new and a new order, described in artistic terms. In a somewhat comparable approach Tony Harrison’s “A Kumquat for John Keats” (6.7) counters the experience of continuous destruction, transience and loss by accepting the integration of opposites as the vitalistic essence of life, described as an eventful insight, which repeats, refocuses and renews the attitude of the Romantic predecessor.

6.1 John Donne: An Anatomy of the World (1611) and William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (1609) The early modern period in England, a time of far-reaching new developments and changes in politics, religion, society and science, not only opened fresh perspectives and innovative and liberating possibilities for the individual but induced also painful experiences of loss, disorientation and transience, which seem to have expressed themselves in a widespread mood of melancholy and a preoccupation with transitoriness and mutability. The dominant literary form to thematize such experiences of the loss of traditional certainties and old orders of meaning and value is certainly the tragedy in the dramatic genre.196 In poetry, clear examples of this experience appear to be rare during this period, possibly because the individual consciousness of this new and fundamental kind of loss was developing only slowly. Nevertheless, two prominent texts can be adduced, which arguably address such a loss as a negative event, though in differing degrees of explicitness. The first example is John Donne’s An Anatomy of the World, which thematizes this problem within the frame of a commemorative funeral poem, in one famous passage reaching a high level of directness. The second example is The Sonnets by William Shakespeare, which expresses the experience of such a fundamental loss more obliquely within the frame of (anti-) Petrarchan love poetry.

6.1.1 John Donne: An Anatomy of the World John Donne’s An Anatomy of the World197 (with the explanatory subtitle: “Wherein, by Occasion of the Untimely Death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the Frailty and the Decay of this Whole World is Represented”) consists of a long meditation or reflection on the occasion of a young girl’s death, presumably commissioned by and written for her parents. The shaping idea underlying these reflections is that a young girl, and especially the subject of this poem, Elizabeth Drury, ideally embodies all those perfections which mankind forfeited with their innocence at the fall (Lewalski 1973, 225–263, especially 247; Smith 1986, 593). This idea is expressed – in an extravagantly hyperbolic form – as a lamentation

196 Gelfert (1995). 197 Smith (1986, 270–283). For the reprint in 1612, this title was prefixed by the heading “The First Anniversary” and “The Second Anniversary” added: see Robbins (2010, 811). On account of the length of this poem, the entire text cannot be printed here.



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about the severe loss of a perfect order, a loss which is presented as the result of two narrative sequences with different temporal extensions, both tracing a continuous change towards decline, degeneration, decay and ultimately death. The most general narrative sequence comprises the entire development of mankind (and the world) since the Biblical fall and as the consequence of the fall: […] as mankind, so is the world’s whole frame Quite out of joint, almost created lame: For, before God had made up all the rest, Corruption entered, and depraved the best: It seized the angels, and then first of all The world did in her cradle take a fall […] The noblest part, man, felt it first; and then Both beasts and plants, cursed in the curse of man. So did the world from the first hour decay […] (191–196, 199–201)

The second – very condensed – sequence concerns the life and recent death of Elizabeth Drury: She, she is dead; she’s dead; when thou know’st this, Thou know’st how lame a cripple this world is. And learn’st thus much by our anatomy, That this world’s general sickness doth not lie In any humour, or one certain part; But as thou sawest it rotten at the heart, Thou seest a hectic fever hath got hold Of the whole substance […] (237–244)

Thus, this young girl’s individual fate is taken to evoke and parallel the collective human narrative, more precisely, to sharpen and exacerbate the speaker’s awareness of the general decline and degeneration of an originally perfect order and make its loss more acutely and painfully felt. The narrative of this loss is predominantly mediated in the form of images, mostly by medical metaphors of disease and physical decay, which thus function as a general script. Examples in the above passage (“how lame a cripple this world is”, “this world’s general sickness”, “rotten at the heart”, “a hectic fever”) can be supplemented by instances from other parts of the poem: “sick world” (23, 56, 240), “world’s carcase” (439), “no health” (91), “new diseases”198 (159). The medical term “anatomy” (dissection of the body), which features as the title and is repeatedly mentioned in the

198 This is also an allusion to a real (non-metaphorical) disease: syphilis.

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meditations (185, 239, 327, 371, 429, 440), pervasively foregrounds this metaphoric script. The medical metaphor is supplemented by other metaphorical references, especially references to the decline of beauty and harmony (for example 249, 285, 306, 323–340) and stature and size (143–144, 153, 170–171).199 In addition, the speaker explicitly defines his purpose in this poem likewise in medical terms: “I (since no man can make thee [that is, “sick world”] live) will try, / What we may gain by thy anatomy” (59–60). This intention is repeated four times together with the ritual and formulaic lament for Elizabeth Drury, with variation of the metaphoric link between her death and the world’s decline (237–244, as quoted above; 325–368, 369–426, 427–440). The aim of the poem is to use the occasion of the girl’s untimely death to call to mind and analyze with increasing clarity the general human condition. One special aspect exacerbating the experience of losing confidence in an old stable order is caused by recent scientific developments, apparently in particular the astronomic theories of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe and Galileo Galilei, which established and substantiated the heliocentric worldview refuting the geocentric conception200 of placing the earth and mankind at the center of the universe: A new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and th’earth,201 and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world’s spent, […] ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got

199 Cf. the subdivision of the poem according to various dimensions of decay and decline (physical, aesthetic, spiritual etc. or microcosm, macrocosm, world’s beauty, body of the cosmos) in Hardison (1994) and Lewalski (1973), respectively. 200 There is evidence that personally Donne and his contemporaries were not seriously affected in their attitude to life and religion by the recent astronomical theories about the heliocentric structure of the universe: see Robbins (2010, 835) and especially Korninger (1956, 6–11). However, this biographical information is irrelevant for an understanding of An Anatomy of the World. For the speaker of this poem, these new scientific insights clearly do contribute to, and exacerbate, the painful modern experience of loss of a stable order. 201 The traditional view of the relative constellation of sun and earth together with the notion of concentric spheres encircling the earth (the outmost one consisting of fire) has been thoroughly undermined.



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To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he. This is the world’s condition now […] (205–209, 213–219)

The central features of the new – decidedly modern – situation are specified as general uncertainty (“doubt”, ignorance: “no man’s wit / Can well direct him”), incoherence and fragmentation (“all in pieces”, “coherence” / “just supply” [proportion / distribution] / “relation […] gone”), social disintegration (“Prince, subject […] forgot”) and personal isolation together with individual presumptuous pride and hubris (“every man alone […] a phoenix”), that is, the erosion of traditional structures and ordering systems in the universe as well as in society and in individual life. The speaker paints an unrelievedly negative picture of the contemporary world foregrounding decay, degeneration and disorder. Ultimately, the negative event underlying the lament in An Anatomy of the World, the severe loss of a firm old order, is, of course, quite traditional, being based on the Christian interpretation of the world and of the history of mankind, but it is given here a fresh intensity, an acute new awareness and sharp edge, primarily by the reference to the latest scientific discoveries, but in addition – in another respect – by the unusual (forced) close link with the death of a young girl. This negative event, which the poem in the course of its extensive meditations and reflections keeps elaborating on, is finally compensated for, and transformed into, an equally traditional positive event, likewise based on the unquestioned Christian doctrine and the Bible. As for Elizabeth Drury, her death is declared to be actually her “second birth” (450), her acceptance into the presence of God in heaven, which is adduced as an indication of what is promised to every human being, to mankind in general, including the speaker. This promise functions as the eventful consolation of the lament: […]                           For though the soul of man Be got when man is made, ‘tis born but then When man doth die. Our body’s as the womb, And as a midwife death directs it home. And you her creatures, whom she works upon And have your last, and best concoction From her example, and her virtue, if you In reverence to her, do think it due, That no one should her praises thus rehearse, As matter fit for chronicle, not verse, Vouchsafe to call to mind, that God did make A last, and lasting’st piece, a song. He spake To Moses, to deliver unto all, That song […]                                                 (451–464)

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The imagery (and the script) repeats and continues the medical and physical metaphor used before (birth, death, re-birth). Alluding to a passage in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy xxxi 19 and xxxii 1–43), where God told Moses to write a song to remind his people of God’s mercy and warn them against abandoning him, the speaker adopts that prophetic task for the present in writing this very poem: “Such an opinion (in due measure) made / Me this great office boldly to invade.” (467–468) Therefore, although the erosion of confidence in a traditional order and meaning system is partly of modern origin, the solution and consolation are totally traditional and emphatically as well as explicitly so. But seen in relation to the dominant tendencies of pervasive loss and decay in the “anatomy of the world” that traditional solution looks disproportionate, forced and defiant rather than convincingly consoling. This discrepancy is thus apt to highlight the profound experience of loss rather than relieve it.

6.1.2 William Shakespeare: The Sonnets Shakespeare’s The Sonnets202 intermittently and more indirectly exposes the speaker to an analogous experience of destabilization specifically within the context of the speaker’s two relationships of friendship and love, without, however, compensating for the loss in any comparable way. The psychological premise underlying these constellations is that the relationship to friend and mistress constitute – in different but complementary ways – essential points of reference and emotional foundations for the speaker’s self and his individual existence. The loss or threatened loss of that stable relationship through changes in the beloved person’s attitude or behavior – as shown in the analyses – causes distress and unhappiness in the speaker and severely undermines his stable existence. To be sure, this is a common phenomenon in love relationships and in love poetry in general, but in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence the stabilizing function of love and friendship seems to have attained a new, significantly high level of relevance to the speaker’s self – especially in view of the total absence of religious orientations (with the sole exception of sonnet 146). This function is programmatically spelt out in sonnet 116 with particularly clear metaphors and terms (Kerrigan 1986, 134).203 Two related aspects are stressed. One is the need for a firm point of orientation in life’s changing course,

202 See the analyses above, in Chapter 3.1 from a different perspective. 203 See the analysis above, Chapter 3.1.6.



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as depicted in the form of a fixed sea-mark (5) and the polar star (7) within the nautical or navigational imagery of sea-travel: [love] is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

(5–8)

The other aspect of the stabilizing function of love for the individual is the pre­ requisite that it is exempt from change, that is, not subject to time: Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come, Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 

(9–12)

The stabilizing power of love is put forward less as a fact of existing reality than as a postulate, a claim. This status of the description is insinuated both by the opening imperative: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” and by the closing couplet, which defines reliable changelessness as a pre-condition of love and of the speaker’s existence in his central role as poet (and love poet): If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

The general postulate in this sonnet may be taken as a kind of programmatic expectation and premise underlying the various turns in the speaker’s relationship especially with the young man in the first part of the sequence, but in the last analysis also in that with the “dark lady” in the second part. Seen against this background, certain of Shakespeare’s sonnets indicate an experience of loss that goes beyond the normal disturbance of a personal relationship and represents a more general and fundamental disruption of a traditional stable order entailing serious disorientation and destabilization. In sonnet 129 (Kerrigan 1986, 141), for instance, the disruptive effect consists in the experience of the never-ending story, the unstoppable alternation between desire and disgust, summarized in the couplet: All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

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The experience is relevant in two respects. First, the interminable succession of these two antithetical attitudes betrays an utter lack of voluntary control over one’s own behavior and actions and thus undermines the notion of man as a rational, morally responsible and self-directing being which underlies the old Christian and more particularly the newer humanistic concept of human nature. Man is shown here to be powerlessly subjected to his animal drives, like a beast, which is further underlined by the (partly metaphorical) expressions employed (“past reason”, 6–7; “mad”, 8; “swallowed bait”, 7) as well as highlighted by the fact that the speaker is fully aware of what is happening (“All this the world well knows”). Second, the specific use of the terms “heaven” and “hell” undermines the clear moral and theological opposition of right and wrong (reward and punishment), since heaven is said to lead to hell. That is, the traditional unambiguous dichotomous order of moral values, here expressed by Christian metaphors, is thoroughly perverted when applied to man’s sensual stirrings and activities and loses its stable, reliable function of providing firm orientation and clear judgement. The moral erosion is exacerbated by man’s inability to find a way out of this perverse development in spite of his basic awareness. As the analysis has pointed out, the never-ending narrative of continuous alternations between sexual desire and disgust, the uncontrollable and unstoppable succession of fundamental changes lacks eventful closure or exit. From another perspective, the couplet can be described as a shift from narrating the interminable chain of alternations to abstracting and formulating some kind of conclusion, the recognition of the collapse of moral judgment and the insight into the perversity of one’s behavior as well as the awareness that this insight has no effect. Thus, the sonnet thematizes the collapse of an old order of meaning but cannot be seen to formulate a reaction to this collapse. Rather, the collapse of the order results from, and comes at the end of, the narration of a particular experience – as a kind of eventful recognition, a presentation event. Sonnet 144 is similarly structured (Kerrigan 1986, 148). The narration of the suspected affair between friend and mistress increasingly leads to a collapse of moral distinctions for the speaker. The traditional opposition of good and bad angel (the old concept of psychomachia), from the start associated here with the constellation of male friendship and sexual love, is irreparably eroded through the suspicion of clandestine intercourse between friend and mistress. In addition to the loss of the validity of moral judgments the narrated experience produces a fundamental situation of doubt regarding the actual state of affairs: “Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt, / Till my bad angel fire my good one out”. The speaker thus finds himself in a condition of severe uncertainty and disorientation both in moral and cognitive respects. As in sonnet 129, this destabilization of old certainties is thematized by way of conclusion, as the final result from the



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preceding experience. This summary forms the concluding statement within this poem – and, as far as the triangular constellation is concerned, also within the entire sonnet sequence as it stands. The speaker of this poem does not proceed to react to, and come to terms with, this fundamental loss. Again, the sonnet results merely in the statement of moral and cognitive destabilization without finding and offering a solution. These two sonnets thematize – in different ways – the threatened loss of stability on account of psychological, personal mutability in love. The other aspect (as programmatically mentioned in sonnet 116) is the serious threat posed by time, the instability caused by the pervasive changeability and transience of everything in this world – a major concern with numerous contemporary writers (for example Spenser and Donne). This aspect is addressed in a great number of Shakespeare’s sonnets, with particularly clear emphasis on the universality of time’s destructive effects in sonnet 64: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age, When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed, And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay, Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate – That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose. (Kerrigan 1986, 108).

After narrating various (parallel) instances of change and decay as the unavoidable manifestation of time in the first ten lines, the speaker finally – by way of conclusion – applies this insight to his love relationship: “Time will come and take my love away”, where “love” primarily refers to the beloved but as a consequence also to the speaker’s love as such. The anticipated shattering effect this will have on his existence is spelt out in drastic terms in the couplet: “as a death” and “weep to have that which it fears to lose”. Other than naming this insight, sonnet 64 does not attempt to overcome or oppose this coming negative event. This is undertaken, however, in the following poem, sonnet 65 (Kerrigan 1986, 109). Again repeatedly narrating time’s destructive work, the speaker now searches for a remedy (for example “what strong hand can hold [Time’s] swift foot back?”, 11) and in the end comes up with what is proposed as the only possible solution:

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[…] unless this miracle have might, That in black ink my love may still shine bright. (13–14)

Writing poems and preserving in them their subject (such as the friend and his love) is considered as a means of overcoming time, since poetry will be protected against transience by future readers (see sonnet 18). Writing, thus, constitutes a positive event in coping with fundamental loss, which is a kind of presentation event – the poem as such (including the present one) functions as a counter-measure to loss. In the last analysis, the solution consists in a shift in the speaker’s self-orientation: from lover to poet, from using love as the basis of his self-definition to poetry, artistic creation. This shift is more clearly performed in sonnet 107204. Especially as far as the first part of the sonnet is concerned, threats to the speaker’s firm frame of reference, constituted by the friend’s perfection (his beauty and his moral integrity), are twofold: on the one hand, decay and decline on account of time and transitoriness, and on the other, moral corruption and change of attitude. The former, the speaker counters by writing immortalizing poetry and asserting himself as a poet, the latter, by attempting to manipulate, pressurize, flatter or implore the friend, as analyzed above. These sporadic cases of fundamental erosion of traditional certainties and old systems of order and meaning may be considered as early, if sporadic intimations of modern views. The disruptions of old (religious and moral) stabilities are balanced, or so it seems, by sonnet 146, the only sonnet in the entire series which has recourse to traditional religious (Christian) concepts by opposing stable and eternal transcendental values to the changeable and transitory worldly existence: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, [              ] these rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end? Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss, And let that pine to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; Within be fed, without be rich no more: So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead there’s no more dying then. (Kerrigan 1986, 149).

204 See the analysis of this sonnet above in Chapter 3.1.5.



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Quite traditionally, this sonnet juxtaposes soul and body, inside and outside, renouncing the outward bodily surface in favor of the potentially immortal center of a person’s worldly shape. In this perspective this sonnet basically resembles Donne’s An Anatomy of the World. The antithetical value system is fully intact in this poem as is the clear opposition between this world and the next. No other sonnet in the series refers to a transcendental world in Christian terms. It is not clear how sonnet 146 is to be interpreted. Should it be interpreted as a revocation of the purely secular orientation in the preceding as well as subsequent poems? Such a return to traditional religious concepts, meanings and certainties would then count as a positive event, as a strategy of coping with the threat of fundamental loss of firm stability and clear orientation. Or should this sonnet not rather be taken as a reminder of a traditional (no longer valid) meaning system which then serves as a means of better throwing into relief the more complex and inconclusive “modern” experiences of instability and loss? The differences between Donne’s and Shakespeare’s reaction to the experience of a general loss of stability and orientation are significant. While Donne explicitly and directly addresses this predicament as a collective, transpersonal experience, Shakespeare’s speaker struggles more indirectly, obliquely, gropingly with a comparably fundamental loss of stable orientation in life on a decidedly personal, private level. Significant differences are also apparent in the indicated results of both authors’ attempts to come to terms with loss. Donne ultimately finds eventful compensation and consolation in the traditional Christian – transcendental – meaning system, whereas Shakespeare’s speaker – more radically – has to face loss without any stabilizing recourse to a transcendental compensation. Thus, although Donne’s explicit statement of the problem seems to be the more modern of the two, it is Shakespeare’s predicament in its restriction to the secular realm and it its lack of eventful resolution that in the last analysis has to be called more radical.

6.2 William Wordsworth: “The World is too Much with Us” (1807) and W. B. Yeats: “High Talk” (1939) William Wordsorth’s sonnet “The World is too Much with Us” and Yeats’s sonnet-like poem “High Talk” feature an analogous event-structure in spite of their thematic difference, and thus a comparison between them affords a good opportunity to highlight similarity and contrast between a Romantic and a modernist reaction to the loss of a stabilizing traditional order of meaning.

6.2.1 William Wordsworth: “The World is too Much with Us” Wordsworth’s “The World is too Much with Us” explicitly addresses both a fundamental crisis of meaning and orientation and its socio-historical causes, and it does so within the frame of man’s attitude to, and perception of, his natural environment, what the Romantics, notably Wordsworth, frequently referred to by the comprehensive term “nature”.

The World is too Much with Us

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. – Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. (Sheats 1982, 349).

The first part of the poem, basically the octave (1–9), laments the loss of close, meaningful and stabilizing contact with extra-human nature (“Little we see in Nature that is ours”, 3; “we are out of tune”, 8; “It moves us not”, 9) – the powerful order of nature, which used to be experienced as re-vitalizing, strengthening and providing essential emotional support (see references to “our powers”, 2; “our hearts”, 4). This loss of a formerly valid order, the function of nature as the



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quasi-religious source of meaning and orientation, is presented in the condensed narrative form of sentences in the active mood signifying courses of action performed by the human collective (“we”), for example “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” (2) and “We have given our hearts away” (4). After having first actively brought this loss about, the collective then has to suffer the consequences: “it moves us not” (9). That this is a collective phenomenon is stressed by the consistent use of the pronoun for the first-person plural (“we”, “our”, “us”). The causes leading to this loss are also clearly collective: they consist in the contemporary socio-economic changes (the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of the market principle), the growing commercialization of life and the development of materialistic tendencies, which reduce life (“world”, l. 1, obviously means the public economic world) to the activities of earning and spending money (“getting and spending”, 2). What here is lamented in abstract terms as lacking is then exemplified in the intermediate lines (5–7) by concrete natural phenomena, which are rendered, again in compact narratives, by way of metaphors or similes associated with woman (representing the sea in moon-light, 5), animal (representing the howling wind, 6) and flower (representing the calm after a storm, 7) and which all present nature as full of life. This figurative, poetical manner of lamenting what modern man has lost produces, however, a paradox inasmuch as hereby nature is inadvertently revivified as still being alive and meaningful after all. Through this very lament the speaker implicitly starts distinguishing himself from the deadened senses of the collective “we”. These implications prefigure the explicit reversal of perspective and attitude which then emerges in the sestet: in the shift to the individual first-person singular (9, 11), in the emphatic appeal “Great God!” (9), which despite its obvious conventionality surreptitiously introduces a serious religious note, and in the expression of longing for the lost meaningfulness of nature (“I’d rather […] So might I […]”, 9–11, 12). This reversal of attitude finally culminates in the mythical incarnation of nature (specifically of the natural sea-scape described before) in the shape of two Greek gods, Proteus and Triton, whose functions – agitating and calming the sea – are performed in the acts of rising out of the sea and blowing a horn. The pervasive religious connotations (inherent also in “Pagan” and “creed”, 10) point to the profound transcendent significance ascribed to natural phenomena, a significance which – as the verbs indicate – is the result of perception and, ultimately, imagination: “have glimpses”, “have sight”, “hear” (12–14). This change is expected also to resolve the individual’s isolation: “glimpses that would make me less forlorn” (12), that is, achieve his integration into a larger, meaningful order.205

205 A completely different  – new-historicist  – reading of this sonnet is offered by Levinson

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The sonnet as a whole thus enacts a mental process, the gradual change of the speaker’s consciousness, the succession of these thoughts, from the awareness of loss via the lament about what was lost to the imagination and re-presentation of what a retrieval of that loss would – and in fact: does – look like. Stylistically, the rendering of this process is characterized by an increased seriousness in tone and impression of reality. The mythological terms used to describe the loss of meaning are introduced as something obsolete and childish (“outworn”, “suckled”, 10)206, but this pejorative note disappears in the evocation of the two gods. At the same time the modal verbs which first underline the hypothetical status of the longedfor meaningfulness of nature (“might”, “would”, 11, 12) finally disappear when Proteus and Triton are imagined as being immediately present.207 The narrative sequence culminates in the virtual re-imagination and re-animation of an old myth, the two Greek sea gods, as a kind of retrieval of the lost meaningfulness of nature. This mental process, which reaches its completion and conclusion in the couplet, results in the event of this sonnet. The inadvertent change is ascribed to the level of the happenings, but this is essentially a presentation event, since not nature, but man’s perception of nature has changed. As the final completion of an ongoing gradual mental development instead of a sudden, unexpected reversal, the eventfulness is not of high degree. But it is considerably enhanced by the fact that the event status of the final imagination is not apparent at first sight, as on the surface it merely seems to be the formulation of the lamented loss. It is only belatedly after subsequent reflection that the reader

(1989, 35–49), who frames the interpretation in blatantly political and ideological terms: In the speaker’s desire for “having” glimpses of the gods Levinson detects a similar acquisitive materialism as the one rejected in the beginning of the poem and he reads the preference for the Greek “creed” as a rejection of the Roman, that is, French-Revolutionary position. On the basis of this idiosyncratic framing she arrives at postulating a reactionary and contradictory event-structure for the development of the sonnet. This is highly arbitrary because no rejection of the “Roman creed” is expressed in the poem and the identification of the (absent) Roman creed with the French revolution is purely speculative. 206 The pejorative tone regarding these concepts ironically presupposes a modern and adult (and therefore seemingly superior) attitude, which before  – in connection with contemporary economic concepts and practices (“getting and spending”) – was disclosed as the cause of the present loss of meaning. 207 Fox and Kallich (1977) accuse Wordsworth of unresolved contradictions between pagan and monotheistic images, between male and female allusions in nature and of cultural primitivism. But like Levinson’s arbitrary insinuation (see footnote 205) this critique misses the point: These parameters are clearly less relevant than the foregrounded opposition between meaningful revitalization of natural phenomena, irrespective of gender and religious creed, on the one hand, and a commercialized, materialist attitude to life, on the other.



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(and presumably the speaker) can recognize the significance of what unwittingly has been achieved. This mode of coping with a fundamental loss – the seemingly spontaneous recovery without conscious effort, brought about, as it were, behind the speaker’s back  – is specifically Romantic. It can be described as a particular strategy of circumventing – “outwitting” – heightened consciousness and acute self-observation by inadvertently shifting the attention away from the problem itself and secretly relying on the strength of one’s inner nature or some unspecified creative power. Other examples are Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”: loneliness is overcome through unforeseen companionship with flowers, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”: the prayer for creative endowment with nature’s power is inadvertently fulfilled, Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”: the missed joy of nature in company with his absent friends is imaginatively granted to the confined, excluded speaker, and Keats’s “Sonnet on the Sea”: the wish for the invigorating experience of the sea is surreptitiously fulfilled. The stance of this sonnet is characterized by a peculiar intermediacy between modernity and tradition  – the re-animation and re-appropriation of a traditional, even archaic meaning system from the position of a particularly clearsighted perception of the modern condition, of its causes as well as its disruptive effects on old established cultural orders of meaning. The experience of loss in Wordsworth’s poem, its implied causes and its resolution may be contrasted with, and compared to, a structurally very similar, but thematically different process in W. B. Yeats’s “High Talk”. While Wordsworth is concerned with the perception of nature, Yeats’s thematic frame is art, the concept and basis of artistic creation.

6.2.2 W. B. Yeats: “High Talk” Like Wordsworth, Yeats refers to the modern condition, the highly commercialized contemporary world, as the cause of fundamental changes in human life, a development which tends to subject everything to the aspect of its practical usability, to its market value.208

208 This attitude is obliquely alluded to in the reference to the “rogue of the world” (4), who stole the artist’s devices for practical purposes (fire, fence) – see the analysis below. Cf. Wordsworth’s use of the term “world” for commercialization.

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High Talk

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye. What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher, Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire. Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows, Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes, Because women in the upper stories demand a face at the pane That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.

9 10 11 12 13 14

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild, From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child. All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose; I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on; Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn. (Finneran 1983, 343).

In this poem the focus is not on man’s general existential orientation but on the artist’s role in society, his function and the basis of his artistic creativity. The speaker presents art in the image of a circus touring the countryside (“processions”, 1), self-ironically introducing himself as a circus acrobat, more precisely: a stilt-walker, thereby stressing both the artificiality of art and its entertainment value. The artificiality is measured in terms of distance in feet from the groundlevel, that is, from normal everyday life: the higher the stilts, the greater the artistic quality. In the same sense, stilt-walking is considered more artistic than domesticating, controlling and exhibiting wild animals (“led bears”, “caged lions”, 5). Furthermore, the circus imagery, and within it the image of the stiltwalker, defines art as intended to provide crude and primitive entertainment for simple people such as children (6) and old women darning socks (7–8). In the first part of the poem (1–8), the speaker traces (in a sketchy narrative) the historical development of art through the generations up to the present moment, from the peak at his great-grandfather’s time to the present decay under the conditions of the modern world (the word is used here in the same – commercial – sense as in Wordsworth’s sonnet). His own position as a late-comer, though basically also affected by the general decline, had initially still been above that of his contemporaries: “[…] mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher” (3), but this superiority has subsequently been destroyed by the theft of his stilts by “[s]ome rogue of the world” (4). That is, his specifically artistic tools have been expropriated and utilized by the modern commercialized world for every-day, mundane purposes (maybe in advertising or propaganda), and thus he was deprived of art’s power to surprise, astonish, provoke or shock. Since only dedicated artists, but not “trained animals” (5), are suited to achieve these effects



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the speaker has decided to manufacture for himself new stilts (“I take to chisel and plane”, 8). The speaker opens the second part, belatedly introducing himself by name (“Malachi Stilt-Jack”) and recapitulating his highly precarious situation as a modern artist, which now, however, is exacerbated as a complete break with the tradition: The established forms and techniques are no longer valid (“whatever I learned has run wild”, 9) and can no longer be handed down from one generation to the next (“from father to child”). The critical position of the modern artist is moreover highlighted by his chosen name: Malachi refers to the last prophet and the last book of the Old Testament thereby conveying the sense of an ending, the demise of art in the contemporary world – the impossibility for the late-comer to go on producing works of art. This statement is abruptly followed by the identification of the ultimate cause for the end of art: “All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all” (11). The speaker suddenly sees through the entire imagery so far used in this poem as merely metaphorical, thus also unmasking the devices of art as nothing but illusion techniques. Art is no longer credible, its function is invalidated, artistic imagination uncovered and denounced as a trick – a thorough disillusionment which results from heightened self-observation and acute self-reflection and which as such is an eminent sign of modernity. Style and tone of the utterances up to this point in the poem parallel the mental process of growing self-distancing and final disillusionment: The self-irony in the speaker’s description of his position and role as an artist finally culminates in the sarcastic or even contemptuous dismissal of the whole project of art, including his decision to renovate the artistic tools as announced at the end of the first part. Yet, despite the impression of having arrived at an impasse where nothing can follow, the speaker’s reflections continue with the abrupt unmotivated and unprepared-for intrusion of a new image: “A barnacle goose / Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose” (11–12). The significance of this image and its (antithetical) connection with the circus imagery become apparent when one compares the two. In contrast to the trained and caged circus animals, the barnacle goose is a wild bird and free, flying at a far greater height than the stilt-walker had moved. Furthermore, this goose is solitary, not watched by anyone; its activity rests in itself (it is not intended for a public). However, in the next line this new image is explicitly linked back to the old one: “I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on” (13), revealing the identity of the two protagonists. By using the same verb (“stalk”, see l. 3), the speaker ascribes the barnacle goose’s flight to himself as the continuation of his former walking (“stalk on, stalk on”, emphasis added), though in a radically changed manner and in a completely different environment. The explicit link serves to highlight the fundamentally new quality of this experience: “the terrible novelty of light” –

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its terrifying effect (exceeding the mildly shocking surprise associated with acrobatic feats), its clarity and its unprecedented novelty. Moreover, the artist himself is essentially affected by this perception (not just the audience, as previously). In conclusion to this image complex, the reference in the last line to the agitated sea (the “seahorses” metaphor standing for the breaking waves) underlines the vitality, elemental energy and eruptive wild joy of nature of which the flying barnacle goose is likewise a part. The sudden emergence of this image signals the renewal of art with an invigorating and revitalizing effect, which is inherent in the spontaneous joy, expressed by laughing – a joy which can be associated with the creative joy of the Romantics209 and also with Yeats’s concept of gaiety (elaborated in several of his poems written during this period, for example “Lapis Lazuli”210). The reversal on the level of imagery is accentuated and supported by a radical change in style: from the ironical, pejorative condescending tone connected with the circus imagery to the serious unqualified presentation of barnacle goose and sea. And finally, the energetic and joyful quality of the new concept of art may be linked with the dancing, dactylic rhythm of the hexameter lines, in which the entire poem is written. This sudden and unexpected emergence of the new constitutes the event of “High Talk” with a high degree of eventfulness. Like in Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World is too Much with Us”, the eventful change in Yeats’s poem consists in the unforeseen and unplanned recovery of a lost and lacking meaning or meaningful order. Although both poems connect this meaning with extra-human nature (the sea), the significance is different: in Wordsworth’s case the image, in fact, primarily refers to natural phenomena as such, whereas Yeats clearly uses it as a (metaphorical) representation of art. The major difference, however, concerns the temporal dimension of the recovered loss. The focus of the event in Wordsworth’s “The World is too Much with Us” is directed towards the past (revivifying the archaic and mythic or rather mythological), something formerly familiar and known, whereas in Yeats’s “High Talk”, by contrast, it turns towards the future, the coming of the new (the dawning of a fresh day), something unknown, possibly terrifying.211 One may see in this contrast the difference between Romantic and modernist concepts and attitudes.

209 As thematized in numerous poems, for example in Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”, “Kubla Khan”, Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, “Surprised by Joy”, “The Cuckoo”. 210 See the analysis, below, in Chapter 6.6. 211 This emphatic quality of newness is highlighted by the difference from making new by reparation, as mentioned in two instances: “patch up a fence or a fire” (4), “patch old heels” (8) and also “I take to chisel and plane” (8). Two different scripts can be seen to underlie these two patterns of making new: renovation and repair versus emergence.



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More than Wordsworth, Yeats implicitly qualifies the eventful resolution of the crisis with a relatively high degree of ambivalence. While in Wordsworth’s poem the event emerges from the articulated lament about the loss and syntactically retains (but hides) its hypothetical and wishful quality, Yeats’s text at first sight seems to cut all connection between the event and what went before, but with hindsight one can recognize two links. The decision to “take to chisel and plane” (8) in order to make new stilts in the end turns out to have been put into action after all, but in a totally unexpected manner: “I […] stalk on, stalk on” (13). Only the results can be perceived, but the process of implementation as such is hidden and by necessity has to be hidden, since its conscious observation would undermine and invalidate the result, as it undermined the former artistic working concept of the circus imagery as a self-created illusion (“all metaphor”, 11). The precarious status of the eventful recovery, between unconscious spontaneity and conscious intentionality, is exposed by the title “High Talk”, which reads like an ironic, distancing comment on the high-flying concept seemingly spontaneously emerging in the second part of the poem but cannot effectively destroy the impression conveyed in the reading of the poem itself. However, the high self-consciousness is also part of the attitude underlying modernism.

6.3 Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Lift not the Painted Veil” (1818/1824) and “The Cloud” (1819/1820) Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet “Lift not the Painted Veil” clearly presents a confrontation with a fundamental loss of personal stability and meaningful orientation in life, a confrontation, however, which the poem enacts in a particularly complex manner, both directly and indirectly, and on two different levels of the text. This overt example of coping with fundamental loss will subsequently be juxtaposed to another poem by the same author, “The Cloud”, which seems to be concerned with the direct opposite of loss – the experience of plenitude and abundance, continuity and permanence. But as the analysis will show, “The Cloud” can revealingly be read as another, more intricate form of coping with human loss or lack. Seen in this light, “The Cloud” constitutes a kind of counterpart and inverse companion piece to “Lift not the Painted Veil”.

6.3.1 Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Lift not the Painted Veil” Shelley’s sonnet “Lift not the Painted Veil” contains two compact narrative sequences (ll. 1–6 and 7–14), which by way of different modes of representation successively lead to the same experience of profound disillusionment – an insight into the ultimate lack of substance and foundation in the world, the recognition that the solid reality of life is merely an illusion concealing the underlying fundamental nothingness of all that exists.212 This illusion is conveyed by the metaphor of the “painted veil” woven and spread over the essential void.213

Lift not the Painted Veil

1 2 3 4 5 6

Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there, And it but mimic all we would believe With colours idly spread, – behind, lurk Fear And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.

212 Cf. the general interpretation of this poem in Welburn (1986, 1–7), one of the few discussions of this sonnet to be found in Shelley criticism. 213 The image and the concept resemble the veil of Maya, often translated as illusion, from Hindu mythology and philosophy (Vedanta).



7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

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I knew one who had lifted it – he sought, For his lost heart was tender, things to love, But found them not, alas! nor was there aught The world contains, the which he could approve. Through the unheeding many he did move, A splendour among shadows, a bright blot Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove For truth, and like the Preacher found it not. (Hutchinson 1960, 569).214

The first six lines present this experience mainly through descriptive statements about the unreality of all shapes and things (“unreal shapes [are] pictured there”, 2) and through the radical dissolution of all cherished beliefs and notions (“it but mimic all we would believe”, 3). These descriptions are supplemented and concluded by a causal explanation as to why this condition is brought about and persists: Human needs and feelings – of aversion as well as desire (“Fear” and “Hope”, respectively)  – project illusory, baseless substance onto or across the void (“chasm”), an ongoing process (“ever”), which is rendered as a compact narrative with the impersonated, allegorical feelings acting as seemingly independent, super-human agents (“Destinies”), who change the state of affairs, or rather: its perception, by producing the painted veil (“weave”) in the first place and thus cover the void. The speaker states this insight by uttering a warning  – presumably to the reader – against exposing oneself to this true state of affairs, the bottomless unreality of existence. The remaining eight lines then relate what will happen if one does not heed this warning. Not only is this revelation itself presented as a narrative (in the past tense) on the part of the poem’s speaker (“I knew one who […]”), that is, the personal story of encountering a witness who apparently told him of his experiences, but the act of “lifting the veil” is narrated, too, namely in the form of three attempts by this witness and protagonist (also in the past tense) to find something substantial in life, which each time ended in failure: trying to find something truly lovable (7–9), something truly valuable (9–10) and something really true (“truth”, 13–14)  – a search for absolutes in emotional, ethical and epistemological terms. These three parallel courses of action, whose two successive phases  – search and subsequent failure  – are either explicitly spelt out or clearly implied, represent concrete versions of what metaphorically was comprised as “lifting the veil”. Against such unconditional demands for something absolutely perfect and ideal the imperfect and transitory things on earth

214 The poem was written in 1818 and published in 1824. The text is that of the edition of the Poetical Works of 1839.

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seem to lose the substance, stability and permanence of a reliable firm order and foundation for human desire, knowledge and emotion to orient themselves by and ground themselves in. The reference to the “Preacher” in the last line, an allusion to Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher in the Old Testament, evokes a similar disillusioning experience: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” (1: 2) “I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and I have gotten more wisdom than all they have that have been before me in Jerusalem; yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. – And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of the spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” (1: 16–18).

However, for Solomon, the Preacher, the experience of “vanity” (literally, “emptiness”) was ultimately overcome by the recourse to a firm old order of meaning, which consisted in the religious belief in God as the absolute point of reference. Thus, although the allusion seems to imply the similarity of these experiences (“[…] like the Preacher found it not”), the inter-text in point of fact highlights the opposite – the unquestioned reliable stability of an overarching traditional order (Jewish and, by implication, Christian religion), which in consequence throws its present loss for the poem into relief. So far Shelley’s sonnet emphatically presents a negative event with respect to the protagonist’s life and experience – the loss of an old personally stabilizing order, with a high degree of eventfulness, emphasized by the warning in the first line and the (suggested) counter-example of the Preacher in the last. The degree of eventfulness is further increased by the implication that the protagonist, from whom the speaker claims to have received these narrated experiences, is none other than the speaker himself. That can be inferred from the paradoxical nature of the initial warning. Uttering such a warning presupposes  – in the first place  – a personal knowledge of the disillusioning consequences of not heeding it. Thus the insight underlying the warning is identical with that gained by the protagonist in the mediated three narratives of his. That the speaker himself – and not only some chance acquaintance – has undergone this destabilizing experience makes it more significant and considerably raises its eventfulness. Technically, the identity of speaker and witness-protagonist is concealed by the distancing manipulation of the narrative voice in the mediation of the narrated experiences. While the speaker takes direct responsibility only for the frame narrative (as autodiegetic narrator, by using the first-person pronoun: “I knew one who […]”), the protagonist’s three sub-ordinate (hypodiegetic) narratives are



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not quoted in the protagonist’s voice (that is, autodiegetically) but as reported speech (heterodiegetically), formulated with third-person pronouns. Thus, the difference between speaker and protagonist is emphasized. However, the underlying perspective (the internal focalization of the disillusioning experience) is the same in all instances.215 This distancing device of presenting and confronting such disillusionment is in itself one way of coping with its disruptive effects on one’s existence. By viewing and relaying it from an outside and seemingly remote position and, in addition, by looking back at it as a past experience (recollected in the past tense) one can to a certain degree separate oneself cognitively from it. Such a distancing device also informs still another micro-narrative, which is inserted among the three compact narratives of disillusionment and which describes the protagonist’s (and consequently, the speaker’s) solitary movement in society, viewed from a distance, from the outside and from the present: “Through the unheeding many he did move, / A splendour among shadows, a bright blot / Upon this gloomy scene” (11–13). From such an external standpoint, the devastating disillusionment is re-evaluated as a positive insight, the enlightening recognition of the true nature of reality, as is made clear by the use of metaphors of light in contrast to those of darkness: “splendour” versus “shadows” and “bright” versus “gloomy”. This is central to the event-structure of Shelley’s sonnet: By this narrated episode the disillusioning experience is glorified as a heroic, ennobling achievement and the protagonist’s, that is, the speaker’s, individual personality is marked out as unique, outstanding and superior, set off from the indifferent, benighted and indistinct crowd of the others, ironically highlighted by the oxymoron “bright blot”.216 This personal stance can be said to be profoundly and typically romantic. The negative event of the loss of an old certainty is thus finally overcome by being transformed into the positive event of gaining superior, if painful knowledge, the insight into the ultimate hollowness of reality, and being able to confront this devastating experience and detach oneself from one’s narrowly conventional, socially determined identity constituting oneself as a solitary, exceptionally sensitive and imaginative consciousness. The negative event of disillusionment is irreversible on the cognitive level: It cannot be undone. It

215 The paradoxical identification of the two figures or positions in the sonnet is mentioned by Welburn (1986, 3, 7) and O’Neill (2013, 331). 216 Cf. the reference to the “enlightened man” in Hodgart (1985, 83) and to the exhalted stature of the “quester” in O’Neill (2013, 331).

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can only be overcome by being re-valued in its relevance: from a loss in stable orientation to a gain in knowledge and insight.217 The overall historical and cultural context consists in the contemporary developments of enlightenment, rationalism and secularization, which had ambivalent consequences, on the one hand encouraging notions of progress, gradual social and personal perfection and individual freedom or, on the other, eroding familiar certainties, weakening social ties and leading to the isolation and estrangement of the individual. The experience of the sonnet’s speaker is thus indeed of fundamental ambivalence, both an example of the negative effect of destabilization and disruption and, at the same time, of insight and clarification, of heightened self-reflection, which in spite of being at first experienced as a painful loss can ultimately also be recognized as a distinction and as a gain, in fact, as an – unexpected and therefore particularly powerful – positive event. The prosodic and poetic features accentuate this development. The rhyme structure of the poem – ababab / cdcd dcdc – reverses the conventional arrangement of parts in sonnets: In “Lift not the Painted Veil” the sestet precedes the octave. Whereas normally a sonnet begins with the description or narration of an experience in the octave and proceeds, after the volta, in the sestet, to some kind of conclusion, interpretation or insight, this sonnet is unusual in starting with the final result, a warning and a reflection, followed (and backed up) by the experience which underlies and results in this warning and which through its narration in the last analysis constitutes a three-fold act of (self-)reflection on the part of the speaker. At the same time, as shown above, the close link between experience and (self-)reflection is hidden through a shift of narrative stance (from autodiegetic to heterodiegetic narration), a typically romantic strategy of coping with the problem of heightened self-reflexivity by inadvertently transgressing the subjective position.

217 This positive evaluation of the process and result of disillusionment can be supported by a reference to Shelley’s politically radical drama Prometheus Unbound (publ. 1820), where several passages from the sonnet are used to describe the liberation of man from oppression through the debunking of religious, political and social doctrines: “The painted veil, by those who were, called life, / Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, / All men believed or hoped, is torn aside; The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains / Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man / Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, / Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king / Over himself […]” (III, iv, 190–197, emphasis added) (Hutchinson 1960, 253).



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6.3.2 Percy Bysshe Shelley: “The Cloud” Shelley’s “Lift not the Painted Veil” as a poem overtly and directly addressing the experience of loss can revealingly be compared with “The Cloud” by the same author, which on the surface seems to be triumphantly celebrating the opposite of loss – the possession of plenitude and permanence. But, as the analysis will argue, this celebration of plenitude can be read as a covert strategy of thematizing and coping with loss, indication that coping with traumatic experiences can take different and widely varying shapes. Escapism, suppression, masking and concealment may be as revealing as overt words; the same initial situation may lead to multiple reactions. The analysis will demonstrate how this poem’s joyful and triumphant surface is linked to Shelley’s gloomy sonnet as its inverse companion piece.

The Cloud

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night ‘tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits; In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, It struggles and howls at fits; Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, The Spirit he loves remains;

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29 And I all the while bask in Heaven’s blue smile, 30 Whilst he is dissolving in rains. 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead; As on the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings. And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of Heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine aëry nest, As still as a brooding dove.

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

That orbèd maiden with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the Moon, Glides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floor, By the midnight breezes strewn; And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, Which only the angels hear, May have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof, The stars peep behind her and peer; And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, Are each paved with the moon and these.

59 50 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

I bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone, And the Moon’s with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, – The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-coloured bow; The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, While the moist Earth was laughing below.



73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

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I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. (Hutchinson 1960, 600–602).218

The narrative set-up of “The Cloud” can be summed up as follows. The speaker – identified by the title – gives a picture of the world as seen by a cloud. First-person singular and present tense enhance the vibrancy and directness of the narrative. The poem begins with a simple enumeration of characteristic, recurrent “activities” of the cloud (watering the flowers, 1, 2; bringing dewdrops, 5, 6, hail, 9, 10, and rain, 11, etc.).219 The following sequence (18–30) thematizes the cloud’s “pilot” (that is, lightning), the “division of labor” and the respective tasks of nature’s various agents; after this, the cloud-speaker turns to sun (31–44), moon and stars (45–58) and finally describes himself again, surrounded by all these powers of the skies, moving through the arch of a rainbow (67–70). The last stanza concludes the poem, but reopens the narrative with a view into the future: having summarized how thunderstorm and rain have succeeded in clearing the skies (77–80), the “subverting” cloud unbuilds (84) the “blue dome of air” (80) again: the narrative comes full circle, and everything will repeat itself. As opposed to “Lift not the Painted Veil”, the existence depicted in this poem  – the cloud personified and endowed with quasi-human traits  – is thoroughly fulfilled: there is no lack, no deficit, no deprivation at all. Linked to this fact are several aspects of equally constitutive importance with regard to the whole set-up: In striking contrast to the situation in the sonnet, this is a case of unbroken, unshaken self-assurance and self-expression, of unquestioned self-approval. This confident attitude is connected to the “position in time”. Whereas the speaker of the sonnet chooses to place the happenings in the past, “The Cloud” is firmly grounded in the present: the present tense is used throughout.

218 The poem was written in 1819 and published in 1820. 219 It has been shown that “the meteorology of ‘The Cloud’ is accurate and knowledgeable” (Welburn 1986, 67) and that “behind this delightfully fresh and energetic celebration there is a solid basis of scientific fact” (Webb 1977,:246). See also Hodgart (1985, 113–126).

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 Britta Goerke

The place and time of this utterance is “here and now”: the position of a self-reliant subject having “presence”. Accordingly, the whole text is characterized by a strong directedness towards the surroundings, an extroversion that does not even seem to know any kind of “inner space”. Whereas the sonnet presents a picture of the deepest introversion, almost on the brink of autistic reclusion, here is the counter-image of a life led with and in the “outer” world. Furthermore, in contrast to the deeply pensive speaker in “Lift not the Painted Veil”, who shows no purposeful activity at all, “The Cloud” is filled to the brim with exuberant action. There is no inhibition, no blocking and  – notably  – no paralysis by reflection. Whereas the whole sonnet centers around questions concerning the deeper meaning of life, such a search for meaning is irrelevant here. This absence is explained as well as camouflaged by the fact that all activity is of unquestioned, unquestionable utility: natural processes are beyond questions of meaning. This is the exact opposite of the situation in “Lift not the Painted Veil”, with the speaker’s “insight into the ultimate lack of substance and foundation in the world”, the “bottomless unreality of existence”220. The semantic layer of goal-oriented, purposeful activity in “The Cloud” (see, for example, 1–14), too, is deeply connected with the negative foil of the sonnet’s arduous probing. This is a hymn to autonomy and self-determination, to power and dominance (see, for example, 59–70). Whereas the speaker of the sonnet is completely isolated and forlorn, burdened with a search for meaning that almost renders any action at all impossible, here there is a speaker enjoying and celebrating his power to rule, to control and to dominate. Yet another point in obvious connection with the aforementioned is the aspect of motion. There is constant and ongoing movement and, with it, constant and ongoing change, change not merely caused by the cycle of natural processes (the cycles of day and night and of the seasons) but also as general mutability and continuous changeability: The cloud itself functions as a symbol of eternal change (of form and “aggregate state”). It is important that this constant change is not perceived as threatening but as wholly positive. An additional trait running threadlike through the text concerns joy. Like unhindered activity and unbroken self-assurance, gaiety and cheerfulness are integral elements of this poem’s setup. The primordial lust for life can serve as a striking counter-illustration to the sombre atmosphere of deprivation in the sonnet. A feature that seems unthinkable in that poem is of integral importance

220 See above Chapter 6.3.1.



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in “The Cloud”: the speaker’s laughter (12, 81). More than just an expression of joie de vivre, laughter links up with several semantic levels.221 The last point in this list of significant semantic aspects linking the text with Shelley’s sonnet is temporality. Whereas the sonnet is characterized by a look back upon a restless search seemingly placed in the past, the very decided presence, the “presentness” of “The Cloud” is based upon a nature-like rhythm of powerful activity versus beneficent and well-earned rest and leisure (16, 43–44). The temporal pattern is that of nature’s cycle. This natural cyclical time is crucial in more than one respect. The repetitive rhythms of nature evoke the mythical, circular time pattern characterized by a sort of eternal return222. Basically, such a circular concept is premodern; it is a-historic. Keeping the foil of the sonnet with its linear construction and its stress upon a look back into the past (and, presumably, deep anxiety concerning the future) in mind, we have a polarity of premodern versus modern time. “Modern” anxieties and challenges (as, for example, an open future, contingency, the need for decision, for an active part in “moulding” history) are completely absent. Here, there is no free space, neither need nor scope for active, individual creativity and development. Instead, there is an affinity to myth and a “course of events” that is a pseudo-course: strictly speaking, there is no linear development at all (and no real “end” either), and what is narrated here is nothing but a segment of an ever-repeated cyclical rhythm.223 With respect to eventfulness, the analysis of the story level leads to the conclusion that there is no “event” – in spite of the poem’s vivid turbulence and witty, ironic end that make this outcome seem surprising. Strictly speaking, the circular structure, the cycle of a natural course repeated over and over again is opposed to even the possibility of an event on this level. On a meta-level, however, on the discourse level, there is a sort of shift bringing with it some sort of eventfulness.

221 As Webb (1977; 1992) has shown, Shelley’s attitude towards laughter is ambivalent: Besides pure joy and self-contentment, it may also signifiy caprice, triumph, rebelliousness and mischievous delight (1977, 249–251). Although “The Cloud” stresses the positive aspects of laughter (1992, 45), there is an undercurrent of a sort of dramatic wildness that is not wholly pleasant and beneficent; the eruptive power of irrationality is not without threatening aspects. 222 Cf. Nietzsche’s coinage and concept of eternal recurrence (“ewige Wiederkunft”) as first sketched in The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [1882]) and developed and expanded in Thus Spake Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra [1883–1885]). 223 This tendency is corroborated by the stress laid on the unpredictable, irregular aspects of continuous change (in contrast to the never-ending chain of well-defined returning seasons and day and night), which may be seen as an anticipation of the modern era, where change itself becomes an issue. This hint towards Modernism creates a subtle counterbalance to the Romantic nostalgia for past times and an archaic, “natural” life.

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It has already been shown how the natural processes depicted are linked up with a quasi-mythical time concept. The cloud thus becomes associated with an eternal existence. Eternity and immortality, however, taken together with the aforementioned power, create a semantic affinity to the divine. The speaker appears to be “almighty”, that is: a god. This godlike persona is created in the course of the poem, established in his marked presence by the abundance of first-person pronouns, which often introduce the sentence (and line); the whole poem’s syntax is thus centered upon a strong, active subject. The contours of this subject, however, undergo a change. Whereas the first sixteen lines are a simple enumeration of the cloud’s “natural” activities, the second stanza comes up with a sort of internal differentiation. The cloud is no amorphous, simple entity, but is guided by a “pilot”, that is, lightning (an important addition as it takes the speaker one step further towards a “subject”). The third stanza introduces a further nuance: that of subordination. That the sunrise leaps on the cloud’s back (33) is a poetic description of the way the rising sun colors the rim of a cloud, but the isotopy is that of leadership and dominance. The fourth stanza presents something similar, the subordination of the stars, their shying away from the cloud, possibly out of fear (52–55). These tendencies reach a sort of peak in the fifth stanza, which describes the cloud moving among sun, moon and stars and ends up with the image of a rainbow  – all, it seems, in harmless continuation of the chain of natural phenomena described at the beginning. The isotopies, however, indicate something else. Here is a speaker stylizing him(her)self into a phantasmagoric vision of omnipotence and supremacy – until “the Powers of the air are chained to my chair” (69). The cloud “binding” (59) even the sun and the moon, dimming volcanoes and overpowering the stars (61), bridging a whole sea and finally marching through a “triumphal arch” (67) (the rainbow, seemingly erected for the cloud’s benefit only) with all the elements in tow (68) – this ecstatic vision has moved very far from the innocent, simple enumeration of the beginning. This decisive shift may be seen to establish a degree of eventfulness. The analysis can be taken one step further. As a speaker’s subjective utterances are only one (limited) level and must never be taken as absolute, this self-assured positioning on the part of the cloud has to be questioned. Although the syntactic structure (mainly active sentences in the first person singular) supports the omnipotent self-image, a critical investigation reveals how completely illusionary it is. Strictly speaking, a cloud is nothing but one weather phenomenon among others. A hierarchy would be difficult to construct; sun and moon cannot be influenced by a cloud (any possible influence would have to be conceived the other way round) and the vision of all the elements “following” it is nothing but blindness to reality and utter delusion. The real circumstances are misjudged and turned around; this is a clear case of extreme self-stylization. As



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mentioned before, this self-enhancement and delusion of grandeur continually increase. Thus a sort of eventfulness can be seen on a meta-level in spite of the “eternal recurrence” described on the story-level. On the one hand, the accentuation of the beginning slowly changes from the description of natural, life-engendering activities to the picture of a sort of hierarchy of the sky, a celestial court, clad in aristocratic metaphors.224 On the other hand we can watch the speaker growing ever more intoxicated with his self-developed, delusional scenario.225 It is here that eventfulness may be construed. That the reader watches all this, furthermore constitutes a reception event. On the level of nature and weather, there are merely pseudo-events; a positive event can only take place in an imperfect state. Eventfulness is not based upon the last lines of the poem, which, though strikingly and memorably put226, merely utter what has been thematic throughout: eternal repetition. On the surface, “The Cloud” seems to be a text full of vitality, positive energy and exuberant joy. Underneath, however, it is a symptom, a sort of ex negativo-expression of the epoch’s anxiety  – and a compact catalogue of possible coping strategies. The first strategy deserving attention is the poem’s “escapism”: the contemporary situation as well as its problems are never mentioned.227 The reader finds himself in a time- and contextless sphere, which is only partly explained by the fact that this is a poem about natural phenomena. Especially in Romantic poetry nature fulfilled the function of a sort of ersatz religion; turning to nature in the quest for meaning and in search of solace is one of the characteristic traits of Romanticism.228 In Shelley’s poem this strategy is complex. It is not only the

224 The whole “vision” is interspersed with royal, sovereignly terms: “throne” (59), “banner” (62), “columns” (66; reminiscent of representative buildings), “triumphal arch” (67), “march” (67) etc. 225 “Lift not the Painted Veil” uncovers how “human needs and emotions […] project illusory, baseless substance onto or across the void […]” (Chapter 6.3.1). It is interesting to note that the speaker of a poem that seems to be highly different in tone and atmosphere serves to illustrate exactly this phenomenon of projection. 226 Webb, analyzing Shelley’s “extraordinary predilection for the negative” (1983, 37), cites this last line as one example of the astonishing abundance of negations in Shelley’s work (1983, 38). It may be argued that negations – especially in a basically positive context – serve the purpose of questioning the optimism and exuberance on the surface. 227 For an example of a completely opposed attitude, see the analysis of Wordsworth’s “The World is too Much with Us” in Chapter 6.2.1. 228 Nature achieved this importance exactly at a time when it ceased to be “natural” and understood, and quite in accordance with this new consciousness of something no longer understood Shelley was strongly interested in scientific writings. King-Hele, analysing in how far Shelley was

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search for meaning and wholeness, not only the “escapism” into a sphere that is far removed from contemporary problems, not only the solace of nature where the threat of linear time229 is disarmed by the consoling idea of eternal becoming and passing away. In addition, this “realm of nature” enables the poet to create a poetic persona embodying, enjoying and articulating all those aspects of a life that has become near to impossible in (contemporary) reality. Keeping “Lift not the Painted Veil” in mind, it is intriguing to see how complete a mirror image this counterpart turns out to be. A life unhampered by a search for meaning or the abyss of reflection, a being enjoying a thoroughly fulfilled existence characterized by a natural rhythm of purposeful activity and power-restoring rest, an existence thoroughly “in the open” and in harmony with its environment, not feeling the burden of time because it is eternal230 – nothing could be farther removed from the “split”, opaque speaker of the sorrow-laden sonnet in his isolation and backwards-oriented stagnation. “The Cloud”, too, reacts to the “loss of an old order”: it articulates in a nutshell the paralysing anxiety and the contemporary problems bordering on aporia, and it does so by raising a counter-image in every single respect. That the harmless beginnings develop into a phantasmagoric dream of omnipotence and supremacy can not only be seen as the eventful aspect of the poem but also as an impressive illustration of the enormous sensation of lack and loss underlying and causing such a projection. That this megalomania can be linked to the feelings of superiority to be found in “Lift not the Painted Veil” underlines the underlying affinity. The poetic features express this content as perfectly as they do in “Lift not the Painted Veil”. The ballad meter (even if it is not iambic, but dactylic) underlines the feature of continuity; this unhindered, carefree rhythm could go on indefinitely. Whereas the sonnet stands for the self’s confrontation with its own complex thought processes and subjectivity, the pattern of “The Cloud” is entrancing in its easy-going musical rhythm; it is rather thought-preventing than inducing and enforcing reflection (as the sonnet). The sonnet with its well-defined beginning

influenced by Erasmus Darwin, states: “the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, ‘The Cloud’ and ‘The Ode to the West Wind’ marry science and poetry in a way that few if any other poets have achieved” (1983, 137–138). 229 Hodgart subsumes the poem under the Romantic (and Shelleyan) “denial of death and […] proclamation of the power of beauty to survive” (1985, 119). However, here it is not art that “survives” (as, for example, in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), but nature. 230 Besides, the constant change – one of the most haunting threats on the threshold of modernity – can be conceived of as wholly positive (because “natural”). Furthermore, a sort of “blending” of life and death (the view that destroying and building are the same, that there is no real distinction between birth and death) may also be taken as a solacing thought.



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and climactic end is diametrically opposed to this loosely-woven, endless band of the cloud’s joyful utterance; the additional unstressed syllables the author added to the traditional ballad meter only enhance the effect of a natural dance of the elements. In a book filled with lament, unbearable grief and desolation, the inclusion of Shelley’s “joyful” poem is meant to illustrate how dark and threatening emotions can assume widely varying shapes. Not only sorrowful exclamations express anxiety and grief, and coping strategies may reach to the point of light and cheerful forms. Thus even one of the most dancing, laughing, colorful poems may be read as an expression of the deep anxiety of its age.

6.4 Matthew Arnold: “Dover Beach” (1851) and Gerard Manley Hopkins: “No Worst, there is None” (ca. 1885) A wide-spread experience of loss in the nineteenth century concerned the Christian religion as a traditional basic order of meaning, which for centuries had provided existential, moral and cognitive orientation and guidance in life for individuals and which now for more and more people tended to lose this function. This phenomenon is conditioned by the general cultural and intellectual context of the Victorian period, which in spite of the consolidation of middle-class society and its mentality experienced an increasing secularization of life and spreading attitudes of skepticism or agnosticism – a development which, in continuation of eighteenth-century enlightenment, was strengthened by a number of further pervasive tendencies: the growing awareness of the historical changeability of existing institutions and phenomena (including Christianity and the church), the progress in the natural sciences (for example paleontology), technology and, generally, rationalism. All of these changes affected the notions of reality and truth reducing them to the empirically manifest and replacing unquestioned belief by skeptical and incomplete knowledge and understanding. Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins represent very different forms of, and reactions to, the loss or crisis of faith in their poetry. Although both poets lived and wrote during the Victorian period (they died in 1888 and 1889, respectively), the loss of faith which they experienced can be called a decidedly modern phenomenon.231 The significance of dwindling belief and growing doubt which their poems enact becomes particularly apparent if placed against the background of seventeenth-century religious poetry in England (by John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and others). In a comparable period of profound, disquieting changes the speakers in those poems attempt to re-assure themselves in their essential orientation to God, re-establishing or re-confirming their faith as the basis of their selves.

231 For the general context of the erosion of faith in the nineteenth century as well as for the positions and attitudes of Arnold and Hopkins, see Miller (1963).



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6.4.1 Matthew Arnold: “Dover Beach” In Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” the speaker addresses the loss of faith directly and explicitly as his theme, both as the result of a collective historical development and as a personal private experience, and he then goes on to propose, again explicitly, a compensating reaction to it, replacing the eroded old order with a new stabilizing orientation. And he enacts this re-orientation within an ongoing process of perceptions and reflections, addressed to his beloved.

Dover Beach

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

15 16 17 18 19 20

Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

29 30 31 32

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new,

266  33 34 35 36 37

 Peter Hühn

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. (Allott 1987, 253–257).232

In the poem’s first three sections (1–28), the speaker performs – mimetically – an on-going mental process of alternating perception and reflection,233 which within the first section (1–14) is triggered by his observation of the nocturnal moonlit panorama of coast and sea at Dover beach. In this observation he initially perceives the world as full of peace (“calm”, 1; “tranquil”, 5), beauty (“fair”, 2), stability (“the cliffs of England stand”, 4) and clarity (“the moon lies fair / Upon the straits”, 2–3) only to discover subsequently that this harmonious order is internally disrupted by tension and discrepancy, which results in change. This discrepancy manifests itself in various oppositions (marked by the adversative particle “only”, 7): between the static distant scene as a whole and the constantly changing details nearby, between stability and instability, between harmony and disharmony (“the grating roar”, 9), between permanence and repetitive vacillation (“the waves draw back, and fling […]”, 10), between happiness (“sweet is the night-air”, 6) and sadness (“eternal note of sadness”, 14). Rhetorically, this discrepancy is rendered by the opposition between description (of static phenomena, 1–6) and compact narration, where narration increasingly emphasizes the aspects of instability and changeability, finally concretized in the specific form of deteriorating change, in the sense of decay, decline and fall (“tremulous cadence234 slow”, 13). These sensory perceptions are then given a metaphorical – emotional – interpretation (“the eternal note of sadness”, 14), whose potentially threatening implications are, however, as yet muted by the musical connotations (“note”, “cadence”). In the next two sections, the alternation between the literal and the metaphorical meaning of the perceptions is continued and intensified as well as geographically and historically extended and universalized – from the example of Sophocles in ancient Greece (“Sophocles long ago / Heard it on the Ægæan”, 15–16) to the speaker and his beloved in contemporary England (“We […] / Hearing it by this distant northern sea”, 18–20). This reflective process results in an insight on

232 The poem was written in 1851, but published only in 1867. 233 Cf. Freeman’s (2011, 735–748) detailed analysis of this poem in terms of what she calls “minding” (725, 735), the process of perception, feeling and rational reflection on the part of the speaker. 234 “Cadence” is derived from Latin cadentia, also meaning “fall”.



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the speaker’s part into his own psychological, cognitive condition as well as his historical situation so that he finally becomes acutely aware that faith has disappeared (“The Sea of Faith […] / Retreating […]”, 21 / 26) and left the world devoid of meaning (“naked shingles of the world”, 28) – a process which is described both as a personal and a collective (historical) development (“The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full […] But now I only hear […]”, 21–22, 24; emphasis added). This insight is formulated as a profound disillusionment about the harmonious order and meaning of the world, which the speaker had so far relied upon for his orientation and happiness. The disillusionment is all the more devastating because the speaker suddenly realizes that what he now experiences is not so much the recent loss of something substantial as the recognition that the world never possessed meaning in the first place, that stability and order as guaranteed by faith were nothing but a projection, which is revealed by the garment simile: “The Sea of Faith […] / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled” (21/23). The belief in meaning merely covers and conceals the essential – the “naked”, as it were – desolation of the world (“the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world”, 27–28)235. The disillusioning insight and the concomitant loss of stable meaningful orientation thus constitute an eventful turn, a severe negative event, in the course of the speaker’s perception and thought process as performed in the first three sections of the poem. In an as yet muted form this turn has been prepared for in the “eternal note of sadness” (14), which the speaker has heard in the sound of the receding waves – an expression of melancholy or mourning, the typical emotional reaction236 to the experience of loss. By implication, this negative event is also placed into the course of the speaker’s individual life-story as well as into the historical course of Western culture since classical antiquity.237 The negative eventful turn in cognitive terms is immediately followed by a positive eventful move from the cognitive to the emotional, social level: “Ah, love,

235 This experience closely resembles the one rendered in Shelley’s sonnet “Lift not the Painted Veil”, where the notion is also expressed by garment imagery. See the analysis above in Chapter 6.3.1. 236 In terms of Freud’s (1957) essay “Mourning and Melancholia” this emotion would have to be called “mourning”. Freud distinguishes between “mourning”, as a normal reaction to the loss of a beloved person, from “melancholia”, as a pathological attitude towards loss. While mourning is ultimately overcome (through the work of mourning) and the person’s love re-attached to some other object, the melancholic is unable to give up his attachment to the love object usually turning it into self-hatred. “Dover Beach” is a good example of mourning in this sense as the speaker in the course of the poem re-directs his attachment to another object, his beloved. 237 Freeman (2011, 736–738) points to a parallel in the stages of this experience with Giambattista Vico’s historical cycles of Western thought (in The New Science).

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let us be true / To one another!” (29–30). Thus the collapse of an old meaning order (of a collective validity) is compensated for by the recourse to an intimate interpersonal love-relationship (valid for these individuals only). In other words, one form of truth, as it were, is replaced by another one – stabilizing belief by stabilizing love. This turn from the wide world to close personal intimacy has been prepared for by the speaker’s repeated references to his present beloved throughout the three sections: “Come to the window”, 6; “Listen! you hear […]”, 9; “we”, 18). And, throughout the final section of the poem, the positive eventful turn is further strengthened and upgraded in its significance by a detailed elaboration of the negative eventful insight into the lack of order and meaning in the world: “for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams […] / Hath really neither joy, nor love […]” (30–33; emphasis added). All the elements of a meaningful stable order, which had erroneously been attributed to the world in the beginning, are now explicitly enumerated as lacking: “joy”, “love”, “light”, “certitude”, “peace”, “help for pain”. And the eventfulness of mutual love is finally corroborated further by summarizing the world’s lack of order and peace in the image of a nocturnal battle of ignorant armies, which lack knowledge of their situation and, maybe, each other. The concluding presentation of the lovers in a confusing, precarious situation (“we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight […]”, 35–36) stands in stark (disillusioning) contrast to the seemingly peaceful scene at Dover Beach, highlighting and intensifying the eventfulness of the recourse to personal love. However, the strength of the positive event is considerably qualified. On the one hand, the speaker refers to mutually faithful love not as a realized fact but merely as an invitation and a request. Moreover, offering love as a remedy for something else rather than justifying it as a value in itself can be seen to degrade its status. On the other hand, the positively eventful appeal to love as a remedy is reduced in strength by being embedded, as a brief phrase of just one and a half lines, within a very detailed, overwhelming elaboration of the negatively eventful insight into the desolate state of the “world”, its instability, emptiness, confusion and threatening hostility and violence. Thus the eventful attempt at emotional stabilization on the basis of intimate love appears as a rather desperate move against overpowering disillusionment. The precarious status of the eventful positive compensation in the face of the overpowering force of the negative event is underlined by the respective positions of their references within the stanzaic structure of the poem. “Dover Beach” is – rather inconspicuously – made up of three sonnets238: a regular sonnet (1–14), a

238 See Freeman (2011, 737–738). This structure is recognizable in spite of slight deviations from the conventional rhyme scheme.



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reversed sonnet (15–28) and a truncated sonnet (29–37, breaking off after the first line of the sestet). Within the initial sonnet structure, the negative event of decline and loss is first indicated after the volta (9) and spelt out – if in muted form – at the end (14). The reversed sonnet starts off with quoting an early instance of this negative insight (in the sestet) and ends with a clear – metaphorical – definition of the loss (at the end of the quatrain). The final sonnet begins with the emotionally urgent evocation of the positive turn, mutual love, but then abruptly switches to the disillusioned insight at the first line of the second quatrain (33) and breaks off after the powerful illustration of the lost stability and order in the image of the night battle. Two aspects of Arnold’s strategy in “Dover Beach” of confronting the loss of a traditional order of meaning are significant. First, the poem stresses the historical dimension of the phenomenon by implying that this loss is caused by or connected with the general development of history, which brings about profound changes in culture and destroys traditional certainties for good, making them obsolete. This sense of historical change beyond an individual’s control, which is a general phenomenon of the nineteenth century in England, is expressed in special clarity in Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (1855), another poem of his dealing with the erosion of traditional values and meanings: Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, […] on earth I wait forlorn. (Allott 1987, 301–11; ll. 85–88).

“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” stresses the unresolved insecure situation between the dead past and the as yet unrealized future. The speaker sees himself in limbo, in a “liminal” (or in-between) position; the eventful re-establishment of a new stabilizing order has not occurred yet. “Dover Beach”, however, finds such an alternative point of reference in the recourse to personal love. Second, Arnold’s speaker thematizes, analyzes and overcomes the crisis assuming a distanced, intellectual stance: He appears able to view the situation clearly and systematically, as it were, from afar, detach himself emotionally and offer a solution almost in the form of an argument. Seeing his own situation in a historical dimension particularly testifies to a high degree of self-detachment. The entire process of perception and reflection is rhetorically and logically well ordered, as shown in the employment of logical particles such as “only” (7, 24), “also” (19), “too” (22), “but” (24), “for” (30).

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6.4.2 Gerard Manley Hopkins: “No Worst, there is None” Arnold’s intellectualized strategy and precarious solution in confronting the fundamental loss of religious certainty contrasts radically with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s attitude and approach in his six so-called terrible sonnets, which represent a variety of ways of coping – “wrestling” – with a life-shattering crisis by a profoundly religious person. The sonnet “No Worst, there is None” may serve as a characteristic example.239

No Worst, there is None

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chiefWoe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing— Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No lingering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

9 10 11 12 13 14

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. (Gardner and Mackenzie 1967, 100).

That this poem deals with the loss of confidence in God’s accessibility, love and redeeming support and thus with a severe crisis of faith is clearly implied, though not made explicit, by the lament about the lack of comfort from the “comforter” (3) and relief from “Mary” (4). In Catholicism, both the “comforter”, that is, the paraclete, namely the Holy Spirit or Jesus Christ in his role as helper, and Mary, Mother of God, function as intercessors for the sinner before God. Here God appears to be completely silent and absent, so much so that he is not even named, and the prime intercessors themselves are absent and obviously refuse to help, causing profound despair and agony in the speaker. This interpretation can be confirmed by a comparison with the explicit reference to God’s withdrawal or inaccessibility in another of the six terrible sonnets (all of which were apparently written at the same time), namely in “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark” (Gardner and Mackenzie

239 For factual explanations, see MacKenzie (2008, 175–178); for a comprehensive discussion of this sonnet in the context of all terrible sonnets, see Harris (1982).



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1967, 101): “And my lament / […] cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away” (6–8). The intensity of suffering which pervades the sonnet “No Worst, there is None” therefore has similarly to be understood as an emotional reaction to the religious crisis. In accordance with the conventional organization of the Italian sonnet form, the process of addressing the crisis proceeds in two successive sequences, both predominantly narrative in mediating an on-going experience, in the present tense, of never-ending suffering and unrelieved mental pain caused by the separation from God, by his absence and silence. While the octave refers to the psychological experience of pain in the more or less direct terms of “grief”, “pangs”, “cries”, “woe” and “sorrow”, the sestet renders this situation metaphorically by means of one particular concrete image, extreme mountain-climbing under hostile weather conditions. Both sequences stress the practically interminable continuation of suffering, which allows only for brief temporary interruptions. The speaker opens the octave with the assertion that his suffering will never reach an ultimate peak or limit which cannot be surpassed: There is “no worst”, that is to say, it will get worse all the time. This quality of having no ending is subsequently repeated and corroborated several times: “Pitched past pitch” (that is, thrown beyond the extreme height), “More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring” (that is, the pain tends to work itself up to ever higher intensities of hurt), “My cries heave, herds-long” (that is, multiply, grow in number), “huddle in a main, a chief / Woe, world-sorrow” (that is, accumulate and coalesce into the fundamental human condition of being thrown into the world240 and therefore separated from God), “on an age-old anvil wince and sing” (that is, being tormented and painfully hurt by constant beatings on account of man’s fallen state). The acceleration of suffering is highlighted and aggravated by the embedded laments about the denied help of the customary intercessors (3–4); and it is not relieved by a temporary remission of the pain (“lull”, “leave off”) as caused by the escalation of furious intensity (“Fury had shrieked”, “no ling-/ering”, “fell”), which needs some brief respite (“force241 I must be brief”) in order to gather new energy for a renewed onslaught (“lull” means a short period of diminished activity), so that this respite does not at all count as an eventful development. Nor does the sestet constitute an eventful change – merely a repetition in the guise of an extended metaphor, the image complex of mountain climbing, which recapitulates the speaker’s condition in spatial terms accentuating his precari-

240 The term “world-sorrow” is apparently a loan-translation of German “Weltschmerz”, but with a shift in meaning from “world-weariness” to suffering because being part of the world. 241 The adverb “force” stands for the archaic expression “perforce” (that is, “necessarily”).

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ously exposed position within a threatening, dangerous environment – desperately clinging to a sheer cliff above a fathomless abyss (“cliffs of fall / frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed”, 9–10; “Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there”, 10–11). Again, like in the octave, no eventful escape is envisaged, only a brief, temporary respite, described here as creeping into a temporary shelter (“Here! creep, / Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind”, 12–13). That this does not at all qualify as an eventful solution is specifically foregrounded by the ironic use of the word “comfort” for the shelter, which serves as a poor earthly substitute for the denied spiritual help by the Holy Spirit. The temporary superficial nature of this respite is preserved in the concluding translation of the metaphorical into the “literal”, physical meaning: “each day dies with sleep” (14) – “sleep” functions as a brief oblivion of the daily pains but does not essentially alter the basic condition of suffering, to which the sleeper returns after awakening. The preceding parallel in “all / Life death does end” shows that there is no (Christian) hope of life after death, no hope of redemption but merely of a cessation of being alive and having to suffer; sleep merely prefigures this general end.242 Thus, the poem ends without any eventful change: In the course of his reflections, the speaker does not find a new or alternative point of reference to compensate for his loss of orientation nor does he even look for one.243 Hopkins’s strategy of confronting a severe existential crisis differs significantly from Arnold’s in “Dover Beach” in several respects. Whereas Arnold’s speaker addresses the crisis from a distancing, intellectualized stance, placing it into a wider historical frame, assessing it as the result of a general long-term development and as a collective phenomenon, Hopkins enacts the experience without detachment and without a historical perspective, from a very close angle and with great emotional, existential intensity. This intensity is mediated through a highly unconventional style and meter: alliteration (“pitched past pitch”, 1; Mary, mother”, 4; “heave, herds-long; huddle”, 5); verbal repetitions or duplications (“pitch”, 1; “pangs”, 2; “where”, 3, “mind”, 9); figura etymologica (“death” / “dies”, 14), polyptoton (“comforter”  / ”comforting” / ”comfort”, 3, 13), internal rhyme (“steep”, “deep”, “creep”, 12), parallelism (3–4; 7; 13–14), extreme syntactical inversion (“Hold them cheap  /

242 See Miller’s (1963, 352–359) discussion of this sonnet – and the other “terrible sonnets” – in the context of the nineteenth-century experience of “spiritual desolation”. 243 A comparison with George Herbert’s poem “Denial” (1633) is apt to highlight the failure to reach an eventful solution to the crisis of faith in Hopkins’s sonnet as well as, possibly, point to the relevance of the cultural context of the historical period. The initial crisis is similar in both cases – the inaccessibility of God, his silence or absence. But whereas in Herbert’s poem God does finally answer after all and grant his grace: at the discourse level of the poem, by making its metrical form (rhyme) suddenly cohere, no response is forthcoming in Hopkins’s sonnet.



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May who ne’er hung there”, 10–11), violent line-break within a word (“ling- / ering”, 7–8). These intensifying techniques and their powerful expressiveness are good examples of what Hopkins in his own poetological concept called “inscape” (the essential quality, authenticity and uniqueness of objects or experiences) and “instress” (the force and energy within a being).244 The dominance of the poetic function in these lines, the high self-referentiality of the language is apt to intensify and authenticate the emotional attitude rendered, inducing the reader to make great efforts to understand and re-create in his mind the experience of suffering. Hopkins’s stylistically innovative, intense presentation of the crisis together with the high degree of affective involvement betrays an extremely close attachment to the lost spiritual order on the part of the speaker. Since the poem, in direct contrast to “Dover Beach”, lacks any reference to the contemporary cultural or intellectual situation, the context of the experience is constituted by the religious (Christian, or rather: Catholic) world view as such and accordingly man’s intermediate position within the tension between his earthly, creaturely existence and the transcendental realm, to which he meant to aspire. The only indirect implication of a modern phenomenon – the metaphorical use of mountain climbing, as a new sports activity – is employed here not at all to exemplify human ambition, individual achievement and modern progress but rather to visualize man’s precariously exposed creaturely existence between high and low, rise and fall, thereby stressing the archaic context. The specifically religious context is further corroborated by the allusion to an eminent Jesuitic text, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius de Loyola (1548), which, as has been shown, underlies this as others of the terrible sonnets.245 However, this possible allusion is apt to highlight the failure of the speaker to strive towards and attain the aim of the Exercises, namely the “discernment” to make a direct connection between man’s thought and action on the one hand and the grace of God, on the other. This failure as such  – placed against the traditional background of the Christian doctrine, especially in the form of the Exercises – constitutes a non-event, which can be interpreted as a decidedly modern feature, even though the text of the poem does not at all refer to the contemporary context. The interpretation of the modern feature of this non-event can be further supported by a comparison with the parallel sonnet “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark”, where the failure to achieve contact with God is traced back to the powerful resistance and obstacle of the self: “my taste was

244 See the succinct summary of these concepts in MacKenzie (2008, 243–245, 248–250). 245 See Gardner and Mackenzie (1967, 287–288). For the general relevance of the Spiritual Exercises to the terrible sonnets, see, for example, Mariani (1970, 219–220, 234–235).

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me” (10) and “selfyeast of spirit” (12).246 For the insistence on the value and right of the individual self had been a feature of the cultural development from the middle ages to the renaissance, the early modern age (Miller 1963, 351–357). The modern crisis of orientation and self-definition appears in different modes and degrees in these two poems. While Arnold adopts a detached stance with a wide-angle view and proves able to see the crisis in a historical perspective, though in a typical melancholy mood, Hopkins remains closely committed to the traditional religious belief and therefore reacts to the crisis with intense suffering bordering on self-torture. And while Arnold replaces his individual soul’s reference to God with an intimate interpersonal (that is, a basically social) bond, Hopkins finds himself in radically solitary isolation.247 Neither embraces the modern condition with self-confidence and joy,248 but Arnold attempts to replace the old order with something new, whereas Hopkins desperately clings to the old and does not envisage any development in the future.

246 With some caution one might see here an indication of what Freud (1957) calls melancholia, the emotional inability to give up the lost object of love and the pathological coercion to turn the disappointment into self-hatred. 247 At the risk of simplifying the psychological constellation of these two speakers, one might contrast the two poems – using Freud’s (1957) terms – as examples of mourning (successfully overcome) and melancholia. 248 This attitude contrasts strongly with Yeats’s attitude in “Lapis Lazuli” (see Chapter 6.6) and “High Talk” (see Chapter 6.2).

6.5 T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land (1922) and “Journey of the Magi” (1930) In one form or another, the majority of T. S. Eliot’s early poems confront and deal with the loss of a traditional stabilizing order. And it constitutes Eliot’s stature as an eminent modernist poet that he presents this experience of lack and loss in the context and as a result of modernized contemporary society and culture in the Western world. The most prominent representation of the modern experience of loss is, of course, The Waste Land. Other examples include “Gerontion”, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”, “Preludes”, “The Hollow Men”, “Ash Wednesday” and “Journey of the Magi”. This problem obviously also possesses a biographical relevance for Eliot: In 1927 he converted to Anglicanism, an indication that he had found stabilizing orientation in traditional religion. This conversion is also reflected in his later literary work. In the following analyses The Waste Land is compared to “Journey of the Magi”, a poem which places the modern experience of the loss of an old order (of an old faith) into a historically remote period, the time of the advent of the Christian era.

6.5.1 T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land The general overall impression of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (Eliot 1974, 61–86)249 is notoriously that of a text characterized by extreme heterogeneity, incoherence, fragmentation and lack of narrative or otherwise “logical” progression,250 which cause a strong resistance to a narrative reading of the poem.251 But within

249 On account of the length of this poem, the entire text cannot be printed her. 250 See Longenbach (2009), who emphasizes the radical heterogeneity and discontinuity of the poem as essential features of its modernity vis-à-vis attempts by critics to extract some underlying coherence. Cf. also, for example, the references in Kinney (1992, 165–179): “The Waste Land as Anti-Narrative”. 251 The narrative elements were much more pronounced in Eliot’s early draft. By cutting several lengthy narrative passages Ezra Pound’s editing of the poem deliberately de-narrativized the text further, beyond the state that was already realized in the original version (see Eliot 1971). The main narrative sequences which Eliot removed at Pound’s advice are: In Part I, an introductory narrative of drinking, singing and meeting prostitutes in a red-light district (54 lines); in Part III, a pastiche of Pope’s Rape of the Lock, featuring the prostitute Fresca (70 + 16 lines); Part IV, a sailor’s experiences in a port (12 lines) and on a sea voyage at the coast of North America, based on Dante’s tale of Ulysses in the “Inferno” (82 lines) as well as several pieces added to Part V: “The Death of Saint Narcissus”, “Song”, “The Death of the Duchess”, “Exequy”, “Dirge”.

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this conglomeration of juxtaposition and succession of heterogeneous images, scenes, utterances, actions, fragmentary quotations in various languages, styles, sound patterns and evocations of different historical contexts one can detect, at a closer look, scattered, intermittent, curtailed and heterogeneously grouped but recurrent references to a small number of narratives,252 what – on account of their condensed and allusive presentation – one might call micro-narratives.253 Extracting these micro-narratives is not intended to provide the key to an underlying coherence of The Waste Land; rather, identifying such narrative elements and foregrounding their inconclusiveness as well as their heterogeneous juxtaposition and succession is apt to pinpoint a central cause and function of the pervasive impression of heterogeneity and incoherence. As is typical of lyric poetry, narrative sequences are presented in The Waste Land by way of allusion to schemata, that is, frames and scripts, conventional or ritual meaningful courses of action (“stories”) in life or in literary works, with which the reader on account of his world knowledge is (or is presumed to be) already familiar and which he can complement and extrapolate to their entire length and understand as meaningful. Since Eliot came to suspect that some of these allusions are too elusive and esoteric for the general reader, he provided the notorious “Notes” to make some references explicit.254 The most pervasive and pertinent of these alluded-to narrative sequences is the script of the yearly vegetation cycle, which in its underlying abstract structure consists of the cyclical progression from decline and death to new birth, growth and fruition, ascribed to impersonal nature but metonymically or metaphorically also to human communities as well as to individuals and their personal lives. As concrete manifestations of this abstract schema, the “notes” point to the ancient vegetation ceremonies and fertility rites described in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (especially vols. 5 and 6 [1914]: Adonis, Attis and Osiris) and to their Christian transposition as the Grail legend in Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1919).255 Added to these allusions are various other related

252 See the summary and selective descriptions of what she calls “sub-narratives of loss and lack” in Kinney (1992, 168, 169, 172, 173); see also, for example, the remarks in Coyle (2009, ­158–159). 253 It has to be emphasized that the following analysis will focus on select aspects and passages of the poem which are relevant to the thematic frame of loss and coping with loss. 254 This function the notes were meant to have, even though they also had the practical purpose of filling up space in the volume on account of the shortness of the poem. Eliot later regretted that the notes induced readers to source hunting. See Rainey (2005, 37–38). 255 Thormählen (1978, 198–199) – like several other critics – has convincingly argued that the ancient vegetation myth does not constitute overall unity and coherence for the The Waste Land.



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concrete motifs within the poem, for instance an Indian regeneration myth (in Part V), frequent references to water as a prerequisite for vegetation and life in an arid environment and most particularly numerous examples of sexual relationships in the form of individual love stories. All of these motifs can be read as micro-narratives with a potentially dynamic development towards eventful completion and closure. Water makes plants germinate, sprout, grow, reach fruition and produce new seeds, thus enabling organic life, assuring continuity in nature and ultimately sustaining human life, too: impersonal vegetation and personal human existence are the two frames associated with this script. Love represents and aspires to progressive fulfillment in the course of persons’ lives, and fulfilled sexuality leads to new life. The title of the poem, The Waste Land, functions as an overall frame for the entire text indicating current stagnation and infertility as well as signifying the need for revivification and cultivation: “The Waste Land” alludes both to the ancient vegetation myth and to its Christian re-interpretation in the Grail legend, where the absence of the fertility goddess (Ceres/Demeter) and the sexual wounding of the fisher king (of Arthurian legend), respectively, cause the desiccation and desolation of nature. Three of the five section headings (I, IV, and V) can also be taken to allude to these scripts. “The Burial of the Dead” (Part I), “Death by Water” (Part IV) and “What the Thunder Said” (Part V) in various ways all apply the vegetation cycle to human existence: accepting the reality of dying and death as a prerequisite for healthy vitality and relying on the regenerative power of water (nature) for a revivification and realization of such vitality. Against these dynamic progressive implications of the various micro-narratives, the epigraph, a quotation from Petronius’ Satyricon, introduces a counter-force in the opposite direction: the death wish of the Cumean Sibyl, who is immortal but not forever young and desires to die in order to escape from the process of continuous aging and deterioration. In this counter-tale death does not figure as a necessary transitional state and prerequisite for the subsequent renewal and revival but for a definitive exit from existence. This negative development can be said to prefigure the failures of progressive movement throughout the poem. The text itself consists of a continuous chain of various, in their juxtaposition heterogeneous and fragmented references to the seasonal cycle, notably in

This is certainly true, but it does provide one broad script, which in various manifestations, intermittently and interspersed with other narrative schemata, occurs throughout the text. It thus contributes to the structure of juxtaposing, contrasting and comparing elements, characteristic of the poem (201).

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the form of the need for water to enable growth in allusion to ancient vegetation myths as well as to sexuality and love as a precondition of human fulfillment. The vegetational and sexual sequences or micro-narratives are closely associated with each other, especially in that both imply a dynamic progressive development towards completion. But in the end they all are aborted and come to nothing. Because each of these scripts by their very nature clearly implies and demands an appropriate eventful fulfillment the eventual failure of this event to occur appears all the more striking and is thus foregrounded. The opening statement (“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”) sets the theme and its (ambivalent) implications for the entire poem. This passage introduces the vegetation script, stressing its dynamic progressive force and at the same time already foreshadowing its eventual frustration and rejection. The script’s dynamic potential refers both to vegetation in the literal sense (the awakening of organic nature in spring: “April”, “breeding”, “roots”, “spring rain”) and in its metaphorical application to human development in psychological terms: “memory” points back to the past, “desire” forward to the future indicating the drive towards eventual fulfillment. However, from the very start a latent resistance to this progressive development is apparent, for approaching spring is not welcomed with joyful expectation but met with emotional rejection, inherent in the devaluating characterization of April as the “cruellest month”, betraying fear of life. Numerous further passages from all five parts of the poem reiterate and corroborate the tendency throughout the text of thematizing a potential narrative development only to indicate invariably that it eventually leads to nothing.256 The introductory allusion to spring is followed a little later by the sketch of a desert scene – again with human connotations – suggesting the impossibility of growth because of the destruction of the soil (that is, the enabling ground of life) and the lack of water: What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. (19–24)

256 A few select examples must suffice here to document this pervasive tendency.



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The affair of the hyacinth girl and her lover, one of several love relationships in the poem, ends in failure:                       […]                       I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.

(35–41)

The question addressed to Stetson: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (72–73) grotesquely applies the vegetation script literally to humans and thereby sarcastically flaunts its impossibility. The second part elaborately contrasts an upper-middle-class and a lower-class marriage both beset with grave emotional, psychological problems which preclude a fruitful, satisfying development or make it highly unlikely. In the first case, the relationship of man and woman suffers from a complete lack of communication and has obviously come to a dead end: “Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. What are you thinking of?  […]” I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.

(111–116)

In the second case, the woman’s aversion to more children, her ill-health and unattractiveness as the result of an unprofessional abortion seriously endanger the continuation of the relationship and its happy fulfillment in the generation of children: “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” (164). The third part features numerous instances of corrupt and inconclusive sexual affairs, starting off with a reference to past casual relationships between upper-class men and (presumably) lower-class girls, significantly set in a polluted autumnal environment:   […] The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors; Departed, have left no addresses. (179–181)

Allusions to a brothel visit in spring (197–201) and to a brief homosexual encounter in winter (208–214) follow. The most blatant example is the profoundly sordid and superficial encounter between the “young man carbuncular” and the typist (220–256) culminating and ending in the following manner:

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Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. […] Bestows one final patronizing kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit …

(237–249)

The corrupt nature of the affair is sarcastically highlighted by the prosodic form in which this narrative sequence is presented, namely the structure of a traditional love sonnet: A complete sonnet (215–248) narrates the man’s actions, the first part (two quatrains) of another one (249–256) tells of the woman’s vacant movements after he has departed. This contemporary lower-class instance of a corrupt affair is later followed by an allusion to a superficial dalliance between Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester (279–288), a historical example of a non-serious inconclusive love relationship. The fourth part presents an example of death (in sterile sea-water) without the prospect of later renewal, signifying, instead, regressive movement through the developmental cycle: “As he rose and fell / He passed the stages of age and youth” (316–317). Phlebas the Phoenician presents the reversal of and a counter-image to regeneration by water in the vegetational script. The fifth part elaborates both the motif of the desert devoid of water and hostile to the development of life (“Here is no water but only rock”, 331–358) and the motif of spring rain, here especially in the image of thunder promising rain (“thunder of spring over distant mountains”, 327) – a promise, however, almost immediately taken back (“dry sterile thunder without rain”, 342). Then, towards the end of this part as well as of the poem as a whole, the thunderstorm motif is introduced again, in two extensive sequences. The first sequence (385–394) depicts a desolate mountain scene featuring a “decayed hole”, “tumbled graves” and an “empty chapel”, surprisingly concluded by a propitious announcement of a crowing cock, a “flash of lightning” and “a damp gust / Bringing rain” ­(393–394). This passage functions as a preparation for the second more elaborate sequence, which – in allusion to an ancient Indian generation myth – represents the three-phase progression of an approaching storm: Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain, while the black clouds Gathered far distant, over Himavent. The jungle crouched, humped in silence. Then spoke the thunder DA    (395–400)



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This time, the seasonal and meteorological phenomenon is closely coupled and explicitly linked with human life. Parallel to the progression of the thunderstorm, as indicated by three successive thunderclaps (“DA”), the sequence sketches three attempts at establishing fruitful communication and meaningful contact between two persons and achieving existential fulfillment: […] what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed […]

(401–405).

Now finally, after all the various repetitive examples of frustrating failure and non-achievement in the course of the poem, this particularly extensive sequence seems to be leading to the climax of an eventful turning-point (Kinney 1992, ­178–179). However, in the third attempt, the ultimate success is phrased only in the conditional mood: […]  The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands     (418–422)

The use of the past tense (“would have”) indicates that the condition (“when invited”) was never fulfilled. Thus, the sequence breaks off, without a positive conclusion, petering out, as it were, without a punctuation mark (like the first two attempts before, in ll. 409 and 416), signifying a non sequitur and an open ending or, in the last analysis, just another implied failure. Instead of concluding this seemingly propitious sequence with an eventful closure, the poem ends by accumulating fragmentary and unconnected quotations in several different languages, emphasizing the non-occurrence of the desired achievement. These quotations are preceded by two statements which are not quoted from some other text but formulated by a speaker in his own voice, which metaphorically and thus indirectly recapitulate the basic dynamic impetus underlying the various vegetational (and, by implication, also the sexual) narrative sequences throughout the poem – the lack of something vital triggering the desire for and the attempt at fulfillment:                                           I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? 

(423–425)

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The lack is defined in vegetational terms (“arid”), the response in nutritional (“fishing”) and political (“set my lands in order”) terms. But the formulation of the response is already much reduced and ultimately taken back: The attempt is merely phrased as an undecided question and offered as an inadequate substitute (“at least”).257 The quality of helpless feeble makeshift reaction in lieu of successful fulfillment is then made explicit in the self-description of the speaker’s concluding action: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (430). The mere accumulation of fragments functions as a forced but inconclusive ending, which basically amounts to the ultimate frustration of the desire for, and expectation of, the vital event. It constitutes a non-event.258 Since the expectation of a final fulfillment in this last extended sequence has been raised considerably, the disappointment and thus the degree of non-eventfulness have been raised, too.259 The specific context of this non-eventfulness is clearly the modern condition of culture, society and generally everyday life in Europe, especially life in a big city, which prototypically functions as an epitome of modernity. It is a time of crisis, massive change, with the erosion or collapse of old orders and certainties and no clear new stabilities in sight. This cultural and historical context is foregrounded throughout the poem by the pervasive references to the contemporary situation, for example to the First World War (13, 139, 148), to life in early twentieth-century London (60–68, 173–311, 371–376), to upper-class (77–138) and lower-class marriages in present-day England (139–172), to a superficial sexual affair in a big city (215–256), to polluted rivers and canals (173–181, 207–214, 266–276), to modern art (Wagner: 31–34, 42, 277–278, 290–291; Baudelaire: 60, 76; Verlaine: 202) and so on. This context is further highlighted by the constant contrastive confrontation of such contemporary references with allusions to ancient history

257 The quality of reductive substitution is already apparent in the image used to indicate the lack: Instead of watering the plain for crops, the speaker seeks to gain alternative food from the water. 258 The repetitive instances of stasis and the lack of narrative conclusion and closure in the poem have very accurately been described by Coyle (2009, 163–164) as a pervasive attitude of waiting and lingering in a “liminal” space. The notion of liminality is particularly significant: all the characters stagnate in a position between the old and the new and prove unable to cross the threshold (limen) into a new state. Another indication of this stasis and inability to perform the transition is the high frequency of negative expressions (“nothing” and “not”), as Bakhtiarynia (2011, 113) has pointed out. 259 One may also ascribe a theological meaning to this closing passage. The poem ends inconclusively – neither with the positive event of personal or collective salvation nor with the negative event of general apocalyptic destruction and condemnation. This conspicuous inconclusiveness resembles that of the end of “The Hollow Men” (1925): “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper” (Eliot 1974, 92).



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(Punic war: 70; Elizabeth and Leicester: 279–289) and ancient myths (Philomel: 99–103, Tiresias: 218–230, 243–244, Sanscrit myth: 401–422) and the Bible (23, 182, 322, 359–365, 425) as well as traditional literary texts (Dante: 63–65, 411–414, 427, Middleton: title of Part II; Kyd: 431; Marvell: 185; Shakespeare: 125, 257, 416; Spenser: 176, 183–184; St Augustine: 307, 309).260 Although one can construe parallel tendencies and structures in the various micro-narratives and thus uncover – on a lower, less apparent level – an underlying thematic coherence in the poem, the mediation of this large number and great variety of implied or condensed narrative sequences is also characterized by multiplicity, heterogeneity and incoherence. A unifying voice is conspicuously lacking. There is no pervasive speaker (narrator) to whom all individual utterances can be ascribed. Tiresias is not given this central position either, although Eliot’s notes seem to suggest that (Eliot 1974, 82). But this is not borne out by the text: The perspectives and positions in the various utterances are extremely diverse. Some utterances are wholly or partly quotations in direct speech by completely different, more or less personalized speakers, for example the Lithuanian lady (Marie), the lover of the hyacinth girl, Madame Sosostris, the woman in the pub (in Part II), Tiresias. Other utterances appear as observations or reports by un-personalized narrators, who obviously cannot be identified with each other nor with any of the personalized speakers, for example the voices evoking the desert scene in Part I (19–30), describing the boudoir in Part II (77–110), responding to the three thunderclaps (401–422). In addition, the perspectives (focalizations) inherent in these utterances are divergent, too, implying different values and different attitudes: a desire for protection and a timid avoidance of risks in Marie’s utterance (8–18); a longing for intimacy and response in contrast to the awareness of pervading nothingness in the brief dialogue in the boudoir ­(111–138), Tiresias’s detached probing view of the encounter of the young man carbuncular and the typist (218–256) and so on. One function of these heterogeneous references from divergent view-points is the constant mutual mirroring of the present and the past. The heterogeneity and relativity of perspectives can be linked to the non-eventful development of the implied narratives. Both the heterogeneous and the relativist quality of the perspectives together underscore the lack of traditional order, stability, coherence and direction, which the poem presents as characteristic of the modern conditions of life, in their accumulation broadened and intensified to a high degree.

260 For a comprehensive summing up of the modernist features of The Waste Land, mostly in formal respect, see Pütz (2003): self-reflectivity, polyphony, heteroglossia, multiperspectivity, intertextuality and playful functionalization of myth.

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But though this constellation foregrounds the relativity and contingency of all individual perspectives, some of these oppositions seem to suggest that in the modern situation the contact to something vital has been lost, that processes which traditionally provided orientation and fulfillment do not function anymore and are lost.261 Although the references to the past do not at all picture an idyllic or paradisiacal world without violence and suffering, they evoke an existence that is still full of vitality. In so far the mutual mirroring of perspectives and narrative sequences implies some kind of evaluation and the indication of loss. This is especially valid for the pervasive laments about sterility or aridity and the lack of water as well as for the repeated references to failing love relationships. On the level of the happenings, the scripts underlying the experiences, actions and intentions that are mediated in the course of The Waste Land, the continuous and repeated lack of fulfillment and of eventful closure, constantly entail severe disappointment, frustration and emptiness. In two respects and on two levels, however, the poem attempts to cope with this failure to achieve eventful fulfillment, with the loss of a stable order and meaningful orientation, both on the story level and on the level of discourse. First, on the story level, at the very end of the poem, a speaker desperately – and paradoxically – tries to retrieve or extract some kind of stabilizing support from the very material, as it were, of the failures which have been enumerated throughout the poem: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (430). In other words, he acknowledges and accepts the loss of the old order and uses this very acknowledgement and consciousness to resume life and continue living, which can be called a decidedly modern attitude. Second, the failure of eventful achievement can also be said to be compensated for on the discourse level by the foregrounded sensual quality of the discourse itself, by the pronounced aestheticization of the language material262 – a strategy basically analogous to the one on the story level in that the failure itself is self-referentially utilized to cope with the disappointing experience. The aestheticization of language is apparent throughout the poem in various respects: quotations of other poets from different cultures, historical periods and foreign languages, prefigured by the epigraph in Latin, Greek and Italian; exotic images and names (Starnbergersee, 8; “hyacinth girl”, 36; “Madame Sosostris” and the

261 This can be highlighted by a comparison with Arnold’s “Dover Beach”, where the modern loss of old meaningful orientation (religion) can still be made up by the happy fulfillment of interpersonal love (see Chapter 6.4.1), a solution which in The Waste Land no longer proves viable. 262 This tendency is described by Coyle (2009, 163) without explicitly relating it to the failing narratives on the story level: “This is a poem where the most important things happen on the level of form.”



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tarot deck, 43–59; Phlebas, 313–321, etc.); intricate and intriguing metrical devices (blank verse: for example 60–76, 77–110; free verse: for example 266–311; rhymed lines: for example 292–299, 313–321; repetition of words or phrases: 111–122, 176 and 183–184, 308–311; sonnets: 235–257). This effect is corroborated by the technique of segmentation (“cuts”), the usually abrupt juxtaposition and concatenation of quasi-narrative motifs in conjunction with (and in tension to) their recurrence in variation, an arrangement in the sequentiality which clearly resembles musical structures (for example the juxtaposition of the scenes in Munich and the desert: 8–18 versus 19–30; the passages from Tristan und Isolde and about the hyacinth girl: 30–42; the scenes on the canal bank and with Sweeney, Mrs. Porter and her daughter: 187–202). This aestheticization of the discourse level of the poem constitutes a presentation event which overrides the non-events on the level of the happenings and makes it possible for readers to enjoy sensually the presentation of the numerous failures and frustrations and distance themselves from the immediate painful experience conveyed.

6.5.2 “Journey of the Magi” T. S. Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi”, written in 1927 and published in 1930, has to be seen in close connection with the poet’s conversion (Spurr 2010, 111; Cooper 2006, 80; Ward 1978, 240) in the same year – at a time of severe personal crisis.263 This link with the poet’s own search for support and (re-)orientation264 has to be kept in mind, although this is not intended as a “biographical” reading of the text.

Journey of the Magi

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

‘A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.’ And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted

263 Important factors in this were T. S. Eliot’s extremely difficult and unhappy marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood as well as his financial situation. See Cooper (2006, 80); Pinion (1986, 27–42); Dickens (1989, 188); Ward (1978, 240). 264 A few months after his conversion Eliot became a British citizen (Pinion 1986, 36).

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 Britta Goerke

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling And running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly.

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation, With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky. And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. But there was no information, so we continued And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. (Eliot 1974, 109–110).

The whole text resembles a dramatic monologue265 and has to be understood as the utterance of one single speaker, one of the “magi”, the legendary kings/magi-

265 Cooper calls it a dramatic monologue (2006, 80), although the text lacks the necessary implicit addressee and well-defined situation of utterance. The dramatic aspect, in the form of an “attitude of self-dramatization”, is stressed by Matthews (2013, 135). See also Atkins (2014, 63–64).



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cians/priests who, coming from the East, undertook a long journey to worship the newborn Christ.266 The first two parts (1–31) are dedicated to the narration of the journey to Bethlehem or rather: its difficulties. There is an (inner and outer) caesura in this long sequence. Lines 1–20 present a sort of general picture of the greater part of the journey, whereas l. 21 introduces a certain acceleration, a heightened density of concrete happenings (coming first to a valley, then to a tavern; an encounter with some people; the final arrival in Bethlehem). Whereas the first part is a broad outline enumerating general traits of the journey, the second part is much more differentiated in terms of chronology and individual happenings. Taken together, ll. 1–31 cover the whole journey – a narrative by one speaker, centered around the same protagonists, covering one clearly marked period in time – and can be seen as one sequence. Inserted into this sequence is another, shorter one, a flashback encapsulating the magi’s former life, the luxurious, sorrow-free existence they left behind (8–10).267 This minute sequence serves as an important foil for the whole undertaking. The third clearly marked part (32–43) is of a different character. It focusses on the speaker’s doubts and questions connected with the whole undertaking. After having looked back on his younger self and his past experience, re-living it in his recollection, in ll. 1–31, he now tries to formulate what occupies his mind at the present moment (and, as soon becomes clear, has been doing so for a long time) with regard to the past experience. He formulates the reactions to it and the ensuing, unforeseen consequences: alienation, estrangement and a feeling of loss so severe that it results in a death wish. With this wish – and its last word “death” (43) – his account of the birth of Christ ends. As for the frames and scripts, there is, first, the everyday as well as highly symbolical script of a journey.268 As this is a journey with a mission, a more specific frame is that of a quest. Furthermore, the text is “telling an old story anew”, so this “old story” – the story of the “adoration of the Magi”, the legendary embellishment of the brief biblical reference – forms another script. Apart from this religious script in the narrow sense, there is the religious script in a broader sense:

266 Matthew 2.1–11. The first five lines are a loose quote from Lancelot Andrewes’s “Nativity Sermon” of 1622. See Spurr (2010, 213–214); Atkins (2014: vi–vii; 13–16). Eliot had written an essay on Andrewes and his sermons: For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928). 267 Here Eliot loosely quotes from another text, “Anabase” by Saint John Perse, which he had just translated. See Dickens (1989, 197); Timmerman (1994, 69–70). 268 Cf. Chapters 4.3 (Cowper) and 4.5 (Dickinson).

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 Britta Goerke

the birth of Jesus Christ and its implications for mankind.269 What is narrated here is a story known already. Therefore, the questions are: What is the specificity of this narration? What makes this narration of a well-known story unique and meaningful in its particular way and where does its eventfulness lie? Considering the fact that the birth of Christ is the extraordinary, exceptional event par excellence, it strikes the reader at once how trivial an atmosphere is evoked here. The narrative underlines the sordid, prosaic elements and stresses the banality to a degree seldom found in narratives thematizing sacred, religious topics. This commonplace, humdrum side manifests itself in diverse forms. There is, for one thing, the hardship of the magi’s undertaking. The speaker pertinaciously points out how laborious and plodding a journey this was. Not only are the usual connotations decidedly not evoked, but far from delivering a sober, “neutral” narrative,270 the emphasis is pushed in the direction of negative connotations. The main focus consistently gravitates towards this; the beginning (1  f.) sets the tone for everything that follows. The hardship is stated repeatedly (1, 16), whereas hardly a word is spared for the remarkable end of the journey. It is only in the last line of the sequence that the narrator admits, grudgingly, that there was some kind of reward (31). The labor dominates, not what could be expected to outweigh it. One of the ways in which this hardship manifests itself is that of hindering the men’s progress. The journey as remembered by the narrator was full of obstacles; his narration seems to be a list of hindering and adverse circumstances.271 It is not a narrative of insurmountable obstacles, but rather the evocation of trivial things that make up one frustrating, irritating, negative whole. This accumulation even has its absurd and grotesque side: between refractory camels lying down and camel men running away, it seems quite an achievement that the journey’s end is reached at all. The world as encountered by the travelers is unwelcoming and frustratingly adverse in a petty, sordid way. A further significant aspect of the hardship is loneliness: utter isolation and a sort of exposedness characterize the whole undertaking. A journey in a strange

269 The context of the New Testament, the further history of Christ, is referred to by numerous cryptic allusions in the second part: “three trees on the low sky” (24), “an old white horse” (25), “vine-leaves” (26), “six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver” (27) and “wine-skins” (28) all call forth biblical resonances. See Jain (1991, 234–235). Interestingly, it is the beginning of an epoch that is thematized here – in contrast to many poems of loss focusing mainly on the end of an era. 270 Hargrove calls the poem “a starkly realistic view of the story of the wise men” (1978, 106). 271 Cf. “The camels galled”, 6; “refractory”, 6, “the camel men cursing and grumbling / And running away”, 11–12; “hostile”, 14; “unfriendly”, 14; “charging high prices”, 15.



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country can take many shapes (be experienced as an adventure, as exotic, mind-enlarging etc.). In this case, being a foreigner means basically estrangement, alienation and isolation. The men are not lost (they do reach their destination), but the experience of being foreign is clearly negative.272 Connected with this there is the pervading silence: a sort of stubborn muteness, a resigned lack of communication. The whole first sequence comes up with only one instance of human utterances, significantly those of the natives: “the camel men cursing and grumbling […] and wanting their liquor and women” (11–12) There is no speech on the side of the magi and no communication between the visitors and those around them. The general impression in this regard, as conveyed in the first twenty lines, gains contour in the second part when the narrator explicitly states how their group failed to find answers to their questions even when reaching a tavern near their destination (29). The impression of a complete lack of human encounter is underlined by the “fragmented” representation of the people at the tavern.273 Neither do the magi seem to be communicating with each other, which is all the more astonishing as this is a highly unusual and frustrating venture, calling forth feelings one would expect to search for expression in such a close-knit group. The impression is that of a wordless, contactless, almost “mechanical” undertaking. The muffled, hardly articulated impression of this sequence then comes to the strange (and equally reduced) end: After calling Bethlehem (and what it stands for) “satisfactory” (31), the narration breaks off. The lack of communication encountered in the first sequence foreshadows the aspects informing the second part of the poem. In an abrupt about-turn, the narrator now ponders his own situation in the light of the past experience: He questions the quality of this experience and the impact it has had on his and his travel companions’ lives. The aspects coming to his mind are, without exception, negative ones. The speaker is beset by nagging, agonizing doubts; his perplexity is pervasive and enduring. Whereas ll. 1–31 are a more or less linear narrative that comes to a temporary halt with the arrival at Bethlehem, what sets in with l. 32 is less a continuation of this narrative (until the present), but rather the attempt to formulate the questions and doubts that have been harrowing the narrator ever since. Clad in a singular appeal to his ­addressee(s), he tries to pinpoint this perplexity: “[…] but set down / This set

272 Timmerman points out: “No longer is there a corporate story of salvation; now only the individual quest remains.” (1994, 71) 273 “Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver / And feet kicking the empty wineskins.” 27–28. In addition, this is one of the allusions to Christ’s later story in the text of the Bible mentioned before.

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down / This: were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” (33–36). The formulation as a question is topical. What happened can be narrated as a “simple” narrative – so it seems. What remains are the questions. Clearly the journey, its consequences and implications constituted an overwhelming experience that exceeded the men’s powers by far. It is beyond the narrator’s capacity to grasp what has happened; what the men witnessed left them stranded and overburdened. The aspect of “asking too much” was already introduced in the first sequence, albeit on a more physical level. Now it becomes pertinent in another sense, in that of mental, emotional, spiritual strain that is due to excessive demands made on people not prepared for what they were thrown into. However, the experience of something beyond comprehension is merely one part of the whole picture. Even if the narrator does not know what he has won, he certainly knows what he has lost: The extreme loss is what is indicated by the negative pole of his question, “Death”. Something incomprehensible happens and destroys all former stability and order, all securities and beliefs. After their return, the travelers are sure of one thing: They no longer feel at home. In a sort of completing snippet of the first narrative sequence the narrator tries to formulate this (second) experience (40–42). Returned, they feel “no longer at ease” (“feeling at ease” being a sort of definition of home); with cold detachment he describes his own countrymen as “an alien people / clutching their [!] gods” (42). The gain may be dubious, but the loss is clearly felt. While away from home, this “home” dissolved. With regard to the epochal turn in terms of religious history the magi witnessed they are the lost ones of history. They seem to fall by the wayside: history moves on to a new era, whereas they – after having fulfilled their task – have to return to the “old world”, where they are no longer at home. They are left alone with their singular experience, no longer considered and soon forgotten.274 One consequence (and yet another variant of isolation) is that there is no one they can talk to about their experience, which is of some importance with regard to the situation of utterance. Considerable time is needed (31) before the speaker tries to formulate all this (it seems to be the first time he tries to confront and put into words his experience); the narrative situation is that of a retrospect after a long time has elapsed. The past tense in the first part already indicates this; the caesura of l. 32, then, brings a decisive change and clarification: The issue of the situation of utterance is explicitly addressed (32), the speaker “switches” to the present, and

274 In the Bible, the magi vanish after a brief mention that they did not return to Herod, but left the country not touching Jerusalem again (Matthew 2:1–12).



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the addressee(s) come(s) to the fore: the speaker directs an open appeal to his listeners:275 “but set down / This set down” (33–34). This striking appeal in all its urgency and emphasis underlines the degree to which the doubts and questions are keeping the speaker occupied: as if the mystery and nagging, agonizing doubts have grown ever more unbearable until they “spill over” into an appeal to the outside world. Intriguing, yet fitting the (to him) dubious, unfathomable happenings the speaker witnessed is the marked narrative gap in lieu of the expected event. In stark contrast to the detailed narrative of the journey stands the (near) break-off at the end: “[…] arrived at evening, not a moment too soon / Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.” (30–31) A transcendent event takes place, but he is unable to grasp this. The place of the climax and epochal event276 is taken by words of remarkable vagueness, questioning themselves, toned down to a sober expression that cannot wholly be dissolved into an ironic mode – too serious the rest of the utterance, too urgent what follows. The event of this first part thus remains a non-event: what was expected by the speaker is not (or hardly) narrated. It is true that the missing “snippet” is supplemented several lines later (36–37); but the phrasing (“There was a Birth, certainly, / We had evidence and no doubt”, 36–37) encapsulates less a rudimentary narrative that presupposes something already known. The narrative gap remains. One clear-cut perspective is underlaid with another one. Both the implied author and the poet can rely on their addressees: the “event” is a known one. The birth of Jesus Christ is not narrated in the proper sense (ll. 21–31 illustrate that the magus tells a story he does not understand), but rather hinted at and paraphrased. By “secret” signals interspersed within the text,277 a consciousness behind the back of the speaker’s consciousness becomes visible. The magus tries to formulate what he witnessed, but he is hardly able to do so. The reader, however, knows more – there is a sort of encrypted message apart from the magus’s story. By these pervasive hints and this parallel perspective the narrator’s view is shown in its limitedness.

275 An alternative reading would be an address of these lines to himself. 276 A birth signifies the beginning of something, but the speaker does not see this. Birth and death – the metaphors for beginning and end – are equated (36–39); this shows how problematic and diffuse the happenings appear to the magus. 277 Also the loose quotation from Lancelot Andrewes at the beginning belongs in this category: This is not something quoted by the narrator, of course; here the other instance, the implied author, becomes visible. It is uncharacteristic for T. S. Eliot that a quote is merged so “seamlessly” (Spurr 2010, 235) with the following text (see also Litz 1991, 145); this merging is related to the narrative stances: the difference between the speaker’s and (implied) author’s knowledge.

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With regard to script and frame, the whole poem performs a radical turn­ around. Reversals and turns characterize the text throughout; the deviation from the script is extreme. One major aspect is that of perspective. The “whole story” is narrated from a very unfamiliar perspective: that of one of the “minor characters”, one of those the traditional narrative drops without further mention. Thus this is also a continuation of a “storyline” of which only the beginning is briefly touched. The weight is shifted, and it is not simply (yet) another perspective. The main and minor characters change places, and the perspective is that of the “old people” confronted with the incomprehensible new. This change of perspective is accompanied by a re-evaluation of the most extreme kind. There are several pairs of opposites that might be named: positive/negative, certain/uncertain, gain/loss, closure/openness, clarity/ambivalence etc. The accepted reading, that of an event that is positive throughout, is undermined. Although the speaker finds it difficult to come to terms with what he witnessed, a phrasing like “this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death” (38–39) foregrounds the distressing character of the experience and the men’s loss  – a reversal with a high degree of eventfulness. Everything known is questioned and relativized. The traditional narrative and well-known script stress the wonder of the incarnation and coming of a new age. In this narrative, however, everything that was taken for granted is shaken. What remains is uncertainty and doubt. The whole attitude of the utterance is one of doubt; the central place is taken not by a celebration of the birth of Jesus, but by an urgent question (36). Not only is the event in itself distressing: On their return, the travelers understand that they have lost their home. Thoroughly alienated, they stand between the threatening insecurity of something new and unknown and the estranged feeling in their homeland, where they no longer really belong (40–42): The alienation and critical distance are tangible. “These Kingdoms”, “their gods”, “an alien people”: there is no way back. During the journey, the men lost their home and are now trapped in a limbo-like situation. With regard to script and frame, this reading is an about-turn. With respect to the persons concerned, this means a threatening, unsettling experience. This is highlighted by the situation of utterance or rather its reason. Apart from the need to come to terms with what happened, the speaker obviously wants to leave his legacy. The striking caesura after l. 31 is almost immediately followed by the lines that stand out for more than one reason278, the lines formulating his appeal and legacy. As one of the “forgotten” men, he is driven by

278 For the first time, there is a direct address, a surprising appeal to the reader, and there is a repetition of this appeal (“set down / This set down / This”); this repetition breaks up the syntax



T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land (1922) and “Journey of the Magi” (1930) 

 293

the wish to add the neglected part to historiography, to the master narrative. His utterance is propelled on by the need for clarification and the wish for a sort of public, “official” appreciation and recognition. Admittedly, the utterance is extremely subjective and the focalization is restricted to a point that turns the speaker into a sort of unreliable narrator. Seen against the background of the epochal impact and enormous significance of the event of the “master narrative”: the incarnation and the coming of a new age, the restricted subjective, plaintive character of the magus’ account might look like grotesque misjudgement. However, this account has its own, intangible dignity in spite of blindness and incomprehension. The pain, loss and disorientation, the haunting doubts and homelessness may be those of someone hardly aware of what he saw. But the immense urgency of the need to formulate this experience of utter bewilderment and alienation and the intensity of these overwhelming questions suffocate every “amusement” at a blind, obtuse old man. The analysis results in a complex picture. Against the foil of the scripts and frames outlined above, the narration of the journey to Bethlehem leads – first – to a non-event (for the magus the expected event did not take place) and – second – to something more than a “negative” event in the outcome: the expected and script-dictated joy and redemption are replaced by “hard and bitter agony”. In a similar contradiction to the positive script stands the additional, final event: the speaker states that his own, personal death would come as a release. At the same time, there is an underlying countercurrent to this surface and another minor event on the level of narration: In stressing the fact that he “would do it again” (33), the old man gives a hint that in spite of the burden he carried through life his task and what he witnessed were, in fact, meaningful. This results in an ambivalence that remains unresolved – a further contrast with regard to the script that knows no ambivalence. Furthermore, the non-event in this case is specific as the reader knows that an event did take place. Choosing a hitherto silent minor character for a speaker and spinning forth a story-line that is not pursued further by the Bible enables the poet to deliver an alternative reading, turning the script upside down, so to speak. Questioning the impact of the epochal event and refusing the expected joyous reaction means, on the one hand, a re-evaluation. Even more than a simple 180-degreechange, however, it also means a shift. The constellation of a relatively unimportant, merely instrumental journey culminating in an event of enormous significance (that puts a decisive, satisfying end to journey and narrative) is changed

in a way that – though by no means unknown in Eliot’s work – is singular in this poem and therefore even more striking than broken, fragmented sentences are in any case.

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 Britta Goerke

and reassessed; as a result, it is the journey itself (also in a figurative sense) that comes into focus. Without knowing it, the men had entered upon a journey into the open. During this journey, they would lose their home and remain in the open until the end; not reaching home – any home – ever again. Thus, the gravitational center shifts from the redemptive religious event to a metaphorical journey, to homelessness and a life informed by open questions and never-ending doubts. The teleological reading is – if not undermined – relativized by a radically telosless narrative focusing not on the progress towards a “new dispensation” that comes as an answer to all questions but rather on the difficult openness and ambivalence of a long journey with uncertain outcome: the old dispensation is replaced by a new isolation and alienation.279 The strange mid-position of the magus between two worlds serves as a vehicle to articulate this ambivalence. Furthermore, there is an ambivalence inherent in the two-layered construction of the text. The double perspective allows for two readings: the desolate, isolated, situation of (modern) mankind, devoid of meaning280 – and at the same time the solace of the Christian message. The informed reader can see both, which can be taken as a further illustration of the typical ambivalence of modernism.281 As regards coping with lack and loss, several strategies are applied, namely a sort of re-enactment and attempt to come to terms with the happenings via narrating (and thus ordering and evaluating) them and making one’s own story public – underlined by an urgent wish to leave a testimony. Apart from that, the poem also has to be understood as linked to the poet’s search for something to hold on to (Cooper, 2006:81–82). Written in the year of his own conversion, the choice of this unusual, “eccentric” narrative stance allows Eliot to articulate doubts, questions and the dark, forlorn side of the laborious way he himself had entered.

279 Hargrove sees “the agony of the magus’s irresolvable dilemma” as “the very essence of the poem’s meaning” (1978, 108). 280 Cooper sees the value of the poem in its capturing “the alienated state in which the Magus now finds himself” (2006, 82). 281 In view of this depiction of relentless isolation in a new world – after a shattering experience not understood – and of the poem’s striking ambivalence it is astonishing that Scofield reduces the poem to its “lower level of poetic intensity”, its “flatter style” (1988, 145) and a “lack of imaginative life” (147).

6.6 W. B. Yeats: “Lapis Lazuli” (1938) Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” explicitly and centrally addresses the loss of an established order as well as the problem of how to react to such a loss. Loss is thematized in the concrete form of the collapse – through violence and destruction, in particular the invasion of brutal alien forces from the outside – of a stable political regime and of outstanding cultural, especially artistic achievements. In its first section (1–8), the poem abruptly starts by juxtaposing two possible reactions to the threat of such a loss – either taking drastic counter-measures or being “gay” (joyful) and gayly producing works of art, paintings, music or poetry (“the palette and fiddle-bow”, “poets”, 2–3). The context for broaching this problem in the first place is the experience of contemporary and historical violence in Europe, especially the present threats of conflict and war, and similar incidents of massive destruction and disruption in various parts of the old world, as stressed by the allusions to recent or past violence and war fare: Aeroplane and Zeppelin (6) allude to the Great War of 1914–1918 as well as to present threats in the 1930s, King Billy (7) may refer either to the German Emperor William II during the Great War or to the English king William III during his campaign in Ireland and the battle of the Boyne in 1690. But the two possible alternative reactions  – either resistance or artistic creation – are evaluated differently from the very beginning. The option for violent counter-measures is provocatively discredited, ridiculed by being ascribed to “hysterical women” and thus implicitly rejected. Subsequently this option is not mentioned again, whereas the opposed attitude of creative gaiety is further elaborated throughout the rest of the poem.

Lapis Lazuli (for Harry Clifton)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow. Of poets that are always gay, For everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat.

9 10 11 12 13 14

All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play,

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 Peter Hühn

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. All men have aimed at, found and lost; Black out; Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard, Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back, Old civilisations put to the sword. Then they and their wisdom went to rack: No handiwork of Callimachus Who handled marble as if it were bronze, Made draperies that seemed to rise When sea-wind swept the corner, stands; His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem Of a slender palm, stood but a day; All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay.

37 38 39 40 41 42

Two Chinamen, behind them a third, Are carved in Lapis Lazuli, Over them flies a long-legged bird, A symbol of longevity; The third, doubtless a serving-man, Carries a musical instrument.

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Every discoloration of the stone, Every accidental crack or dent Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch Sweetens the little half-way house Those Chinamen climb towards, and I Delight to imagine them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay. (Finneran 1983, 294–295).



6.6 W. B. Yeats: “Lapis Lazuli” (1938) 

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Within three diverse contextual frames – tragic drama (9–24), political and cultural history (25–36), a Chinese stone carving (37–56) – the main body of the poem then exemplifies in detail, in brief compact narrative episodes, what is meant by creative gaiety in the face of loss and destruction. The first example concerns the behavior of the protagonists in Shakespeare’s tragedies (Hamlet and King Lear): They refrain from reacting emotionally to the violence and destruction they have to suffer in their “tragic play”. The choice of this genre as such is particularly appropriate for the theme of loss of an established order, since tragedies specifically thrive in periods of social, political and cultural transition or upheaval enacting the consequences of such profound changes for individuals and communities (Gelfert 1995), which is spelt out in clear words: “All men have aimed at, found and lost” (17). Significantly, the speaker does not primarily refer to the protagonists in their respective situations within the enacted story of the drama but to the actors of their roles on the stage, who are aware of being part of a play, a work of art, which they help to bring to perfection both by fully embodying the roles they play and by simultaneously distancing themselves personally and emotionally from them. Thus, the reaction to loss, failure, destruction and ultimately death is here characterized by committed artistic creativity in conjunction with personal detachment. It is important to note, however, that this artistic example is ultimately presented as a general model and metaphor for coping with tragic developments in life, as implied by the topical allusions in the opening section (1–8) and as indicated throughout this second section: “All perform their tragic play […]” (9), “All men have aimed at, found and lost” (18) and “Though […] / […] all the drop-scenes drop at once / Upon a hundred thousand stages” (21–23) (emphases added). The second example (25–36) specifically stresses the element of artistic creativity in supplanting the old with something new, without, however, associating this activity with the attitude of emotional distancing: “All things fall and are built again, / And those that build them again are gay” (35–36), now explicitly in the context of collective and individual human existence, in the history of successive civilizations. Although the beginning of this section narrates the endless chain of invasions and conquests in history in general terms, the concrete details mentioned in continuation of the argument concern, by way of example, the “handiworks” of one particular artist from the Hellenistic period, Callimachus (third century BC), which on account of their fragile perfection did not last and were – so one has to assume – later replaced by new works. In a complementary manner, the last example (37–56) focuses on the attitude of emotional detachment without mentioning artistic creativity.282 The poem

282 The usual interpretative approach to these three examples in “Lapis Lazuli” points to a con-

298 

 Peter Hühn

graphically visualizes this attitude in the (ekphrastic) description of a Chinese lapis lazuli carving by narrativizing the scene depicted there  – two Chinamen and a serving-man ascending the slope of a mountain and gaining an overview of the distant low-lying landscape: “on all the tragic scene they stare” (52). Their mood is characterized by gaiety: “Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay” (56). Their (ascribed) old age seems to imply that they have lived through tragic experiences without being broken and losing their vitality. An artistic element is finally introduced within the scene, but merely in the form of musical accompaniment (“mournful melodies”, 53). Gaiety – as suggested by these three examples and contextual frames – signifies unbroken vitality and creative energy, which find their fulfillment in the very act of making and completing things, most centrally in creating a work of art, and which are not affected or guided by narrowly personal concerns about one’s well-being, comfort or even life. Thus, this committed active confrontation of destruction and loss is intimately associated with emotional detachment.283 Such experience and expression of gaiety has an affinity with the Romantic notion of spontaneous creative joy, for example in Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (“gay”, 15; “pleasure”, 23), “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (“joy”, 48, 125), in Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” (“joy”, 109), “Dejection” (“gay fancy”, 133; “joy”, 64, 67, 71, 77, 134; “rejoice”, 72) as well as with the (equally Romantic) concept of the sublime (Ramazani 1989). There is also an affinity with Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same” (die ewige Wiederkunft) in The Gay Science (for example aphorism no. 341: “The heaviest burden”) and especially in Thus Spake Zarathustra (for example “The Convalescent”, 3rd Part), the notion of dynamically continuing and repeating the vicissitudes of life and actively embracing one’s fate.284 Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” not only exemplifies in three different frames how such an attitude of gaiety enables people practically to confront and overcome the fundamental experience of existential loss, but this poem also represents in itself such a work of art, which rejects highly emotionalized reactions and instead pre-

trast between Western and Eastern concepts, as, for example, in Ellmann (1964, 185–187) and O’Donnell (1982, 359–366). Such a difference seems to me less relevant than the underlying common attitude of coping with loss and destruction by means of creative energy and art. 283 Cf. von Reinersdorff-Paczensky und Tenczin (1996, 207–210), who stresses this element of detachment. 284 The affinity to Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same” is even more pronounced in Yeats’s description of the closely related notion of “tragic joy” in “The Gyres” (1938), which is something like a companion poem to “Lapis Lazuli”, immediately preceding it in the collection New Poems.



6.6 W. B. Yeats: “Lapis Lazuli” (1938) 

 299

sents a detached view both of loss and the gay, joyful acceptance of loss as well as compensation for loss in the form of a carefully and beautifully crafted poetic text. Furthermore, this shift from instances of actively confronting loss to a distancing view of it is in fact reproduced within the sequence of the three instances. After the compact narratives of the dramatic and the historical examples of loss and reaction to loss (on the level of the represented within the text) the poem narratively enacts (on the level of representation) the artistically detached look on the tragic scene in the reconstruction of the carved picture. This reconstruction is actively artistic in itself, since it is the work of creative imagination (or projection) on the part of the speaker, who creates a coherent meaningful “story” on the basis of the few inconclusive indications on the stone (see the mention of “discoloration[s]” and “accidental crack[s]”, 43–44). From this perspective, the lapis lazuli (which therefore appropriately provides the title of the poem) presents the eventful shift in the presentational mode of the text  – from the practical experience depicted in the poem to viewing and transforming the experience into a work of art, a shift from the histoire to the discours level. This artistic transformation is presented as a means of overcoming the threat of decline and decay, of transitoriness and changeability which lies at the bottom of the experience of loss. This solution to the problem of loss can be called eminently Romantic in that it resembles artistic compensations for loss and failure as performed in such examples as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and “Dejection”, Keats’s “Ode to Melancholy”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale” and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations of Immortality” (some of these examples in addition stress the creative power of gaiety and joy, as mentioned above). This affinity with Romanticism in Yeats’s poetry (who called himself one of the “last Romantics” in “Coole Park and Ballilee”, 1931) is coupled, however, with a decidedly modernist tendency to acknowledge (if not acquiesce to) modern disruption, disorientation, destruction and disorder, as shown in the dramatic and historical examples in the poem. In keeping with the emphasis on the impersonal, unemotional acceptance of loss the speaker downplays his own presence, referring to himself only in the beginning (“I have heard […]”) and especially towards the end (“I / Delight to imagine […]”, 49–50), where the delight can be associated with the “gaiety” described throughout and where he acknowledges his own creative (“imaginative”) and joyful (“delight”) power and activity. Thus, Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” presents art, the creation of works of art, as the conscious means of reacting to and coping with loss, somewhat similar to Eliot’s The Waste Land. But while Eliot’s poem insinuates this strategy more indirectly and as a final and somewhat desperate move, Yeats provocatively and triumphantly presents and enacts this solution explicitly from the very beginning and throughout the poem.

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 Peter Hühn

However, the solution of countering severe threat, destruction and loss through joyful creativity and artistic creation is problematical, controversial and apt to provoke objections. First of all, the postulated attitude of creative renewal is not substantiated by objective cases or instances but is itself the product of creative imagination and projection. Furthermore, artistic creation is, in fact, presented as problematical and provocative from the very beginning in the form of severe criticism by “hysterical women”. Though these objections are at the same time ridiculed, they have to be acknowledged as realistic and rational. “We know that history is on the side of [these] women […], but we are permitted by the power of this magnificent rhetorical poem to ignore their limited perspective and to adopt the gaiety of the others shown to us in the poem” (O’Donnell 1982: 367). That is to say, in a kind of self-immunizing move, the artistic achievement of this poem is designed to rouse in the reader this joyful, heroic, albeit illogical attitude.285

285 Kleinstück (1963, 201–211) defends this solution by a somewhat different argument: The poem is said to reject an overtly realistic, pragmatic concept of reality replacing it with a more complex one, where individual intention and agency are not the ultimate factors.

6.7 Tony Harrison: “A Kumquat for John Keats” (1981) “A Kumquat for John Keats” by Tony Harrison is modelled on “Ode on Melancholy” (1819) by John Keats – not in its metrical pattern or overall structure, but in its topic and event. Keats’s ode (Keats 1970, 538–541) envisages the threat of being overwhelmed by melancholy, coping with this by an all-encompassing acceptance of transitoriness, of the fact that “in the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine” (15–16). Keats’s concluding image – only one who had this insight can “burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” (18) – is taken up by Harrison in his openly autobiographical poem: a merciless probing and evaluation of his own life in a different, “darker” and more threatening epoch and at a point in time when his youth is past.

A Kumquat for John Keats

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Today I found the right fruit for my prime, not orange, not tangelo, and not lime, nor moon-like globes of grapefruit that now hang outside our bedroom, nor tart lemon’s tang (though last year full of bile and self-defeat I wanted to believe no life was sweet) nor the tangible sunshine of the tangerine, and no incongruous citrus ever seen at greengrocers’ in Newcastle or Leeds mis-spelt by the spuds and mud-caked swedes, a fruit an older poet might substitute for the grape John Keats thought fit to be Joy’s fruit, when, two years before he died, he tried to write how Melancholy dwelled inside Delight, and if he’d known the citrus that I mean that’s not orange, lemon, lime, or tangerine, I’m pretty sure that Keats, though he had heard ‘of candied apple, quince and plum and gourd’ instead of ‘grape against the palate fine’ would have, if he’d known it, plumped for mine, this Eastern citrus scarcely cherry size he’d bite just once and then apostrophize and pen one stanza how the fruit had all the qualities of fruit before the Fall, but in the next few lines be forced to write how Eve’s apple tasted at the second bite, and if John Keats had only lived to be, because of extra years, in need like me, at 42 he’d help me celebrate

302 

 Britta Goerke

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

that Micanopy kumquat that I ate whole, straight off the tree, sweet pulp and sour skin – or was it sweet outside, and sour within? For however many kumquats that I eat I’m not sure if it’s flesh or rind that’s sweet, and being a man of doubt at life’s mid-way I’d offer Keats some kumquats and I’d say: You’ll find that one part’s sweet and one part’s tart: say where the sweetness or the sourness start. I find I can’t, as if one couldn’t say exactly where the night became the day, which makes for me the kumquat taken whole best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul of one in Florida at 42 with Keats crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel, that this is how a full life ought to feel, its perishable relish prick the tongue, when the man who savours life’s no longer young, the fruits that were his futures far behind. Then it’s the kumquat fruit expresses best how days have darkness round them like a rind, life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

History, a life, the heart, the brain flow to the taste buds and flow back again. That decade or more past Keats’s span makes me an older not a wiser man, who knows that it’s too late for dying young, but since youth leaves some sweetnesses unsung, he’s granted days and kumquats to express Man’s Being ripened by his Nothingness. And it isn’t just the gap of sixteen years, a bigger crop of terrors, hopes and fears, but a century of history on this earth between John Keats’s death and my own birth – years like an open crater, gory, grim, with bloody bubbles leering at the rim; a thing no bigger than an urn explodes and ravishes all silence, and all odes, Flora asphyxiated by foul air unknown to either Keats or Lemprière, dehydrated Naiads, Dryad amputees dragging themselves through slagscapes with no trees, a shirt of Nessus fire that gnaws and eats children half the age of dying Keats …



6.7 Tony Harrison: “A Kumquat for John Keats” (1981) 

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Now were you twenty five or six years old when that fevered brow at last grew cold? I’ve got no books to hand to check the dates. My grudging but glad spirit celebrates that all I’ve got to hand’s the kumquats, John, the fruit I’d love to have your verdict on, but dead men don’t eat kumquats, or drink wine, they shiver in the arms of Proserpine, not warm in bed beside their Fanny Brawne, nor watch her pick ripe grapefruit in the dawn as I did, waking, when I saw her twist, with one deft movement of a sunburnt wrist, the moon, that feebly lit our last night’s walk past alligator swampland, off its stalk. I thought of moon-juice juleps when I saw, as if I’d never seen the moon before, the planet glow among the fruit, and its pale light make each citrus on the tree its satellite.

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Each evening when I reach to draw the blind stars seem the light zest squeezed through night’s black rind; the night’s peeled fruit the sun, juiced of its rays, first stains, then streaks, then floods the world with days, days, when the very sunlight made me weep, days, spent like the nights in deep, drugged sleep, days in Newcastle by my daughter’s bed, wondering if she, or I, weren’t better dead, days in Leeds, grey days, my first dark suit, my mother’s wreaths stacked next to Christmas fruit, and days, like this in Micanopy. Days!

104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

As strong sun burns away the dawn’s grey haze I pick a kumquat and the branches spray cold dew in my face to start the day. The dawn’s molasses make the citrus gleam still in the orchards of the groves of dream. The limes, like Galway after weeks of rain, glow with a greenness that is close to pain, the dew-cooled surfaces of fruit that spent all last night flaming in the firmament. The new day dawns. O days! My spirit greets the kumquat with the spirit of John Keats. O kumquat, comfort for not dying young, both sweet and bitter, bless the poet’s tongue! I burst the whole fruit chilled by morning dew against my palate. Fine, for 42!

 303

304  119 120 121 122 123 124

 Britta Goerke

I search for buzzards as the air grows clear and see them ride fresh thermals overhead. Their bleak cries were the first sound I could hear when I stepped at the start of sunrise out of doors, and a noise like last night’s bedsprings on our bed from Mr Fowler sharpening farmers’ saws. (Harrison 1987, 192–195).

The text combines narrative and non-narrative parts; it does not “accumulate” a narrative by adding sequence to sequence. In spite of the non-narrative parts, however, the whole composition involves a narrative development and is of unquestionable eventfulness. Interspersed within the text are a condensed narrative of the speaker’s life (paralleled by hints to the short life of John Keats), another one summing up the history of the twentieth century and a final one encompassing the last night and actual morning, thus linking up to the time of utterance. The poem, blending narratives in the past and present with a hypothetical one, is divided into six parts of varying length. There is a clear correspondence between these parts and the arrangement of narrative sequences. The first part (1–52) not only begins in medias res, but also underlines the present moment, drawing it into the poem with an intensity that succeeds in bringing this very moment to life decades later.286 Right at the start the “conceit” of the kumquat is introduced and developed. From the starting-point of a moment intensely felt, the speaker looks back upon his life  – the unexpected vehicle triggering his reflections being the eponymous fruit. Between these two poles – intense, sensual experience of the present moment versus self-reflection and awareness of time gone by, of the loss of youth – the utterance hangs suspended; in this space the poem’s dynamics develop. The speaker declares the fruit to be the perfect symbol of human life in its indistinguishable mixture of sweetness and bitterness, and he claims Keats as authority and ally. These 52 lines are partly made up of descriptive and argumentative passages exploring the kumquat symbol and partly of a short narrative sequence in the conditional: The speaker peremptorily narrates what Keats would have thought and done under completely fictive circumstances. This disnarrated passage of the speaker’s encounter with Keats and the latter’s actions takes up 24 lines (15–39) and is embedded in the contrasting passages described above. At the age of 42 (29, 43, 118), he reflects upon the “merits” of dying young and upon

286 The first word – “today” – is highly significant for the poem’s rootedness in its situation of utterance; this moment of articulation is “exhibited” repeatedly. The present is important in more than the obvious sense that every poem is located in time. The deictic introduces several semantic layers of importance.



6.7 Tony Harrison: “A Kumquat for John Keats” (1981) 

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the symbolic value of the kumquat that, as he sets off to show, can be seen as an image ideally suited to designate life. In looking back, comparing himself to Keats (and the kumquat to the grape) and pondering his loss of youth and “futures” (49), he intertwines several strands and layers. The first narrative (1–52) is the retrospective view upon his own life mentioned above. The background is autobiographic; it is “a” Tony Harrison who speaks here. He chooses the dark moments to assemble a collage-like picture of his life, a highly selective, fragmentary image of sorrow, pain, and death. Read thus, being “no longer young” also means: becoming ever more acquainted with loss. With the central statement and insight “[…] life has a skin of death that keeps its zest” (52), this part ends. The second part (53–74) contains the “history narrative”. After remarks upon the “gap of sixteen years” (between his 42 years and Keats’s age at death) and the conclusion that added years do not equal added wisdom: the loss of youth (57) is balanced by the paradoxical, enigmatic fact of “Man’s Being ripened by his Nothingness” (60), the speaker turns to the representation of the twentieth century. Taking his comparison with Keats as a point of departure, he points out that the time elapsed since Keats’s death in 1821 also means additional experiences and he gives a very condensed picture of this “century of history” (63). Again this image is extremely sombre. The method remains the same: By highlighting significant moments, assisted by forceful imagery, the twentieth century is represented as an assemblage of unspeakable horrors: “Years like an open crater, gory, grim / with bloody bubbles leering at the rim” (65–66) – history as Keats did not know it. As before, the speaker – in comparison – has to face a “loss of innocence”. The horrors of the twentieth century have created an unsurmountable gulf in minds and souls. Significantly, this is a linear view of history. The past is – irretrievably – temps perdu. In the manner of a musical counterpart and parallel to the linear narratives, the speaker also introduces another, contrasting semantic layer of equal weight. The poem is interspersed with references to nature or rather to natural processes, a cosmic order. The most frequent elements illustrating this contrasting, circular concept of time are the universe, the planets and the cycle of day and night  – “day” being one of the poem’s leitmotifs: “moon-like” (3); “the moon” (87, 90); “the planet” (9); “sun” (95, 104); “satellite” (92); “stars” (94); “firmament” (112); “day”/“days” (40, 51, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 106, 113). This motif introduces a new aspect: The cosmic order and the cycle of nature287 are time-transcending. These elements are all-pervasive, integrating and overarching. This cyclic movement

287 The fruit imagery characterizing the text to such a high degree also belongs here.

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counterbalances and transcends the linear concepts introduced by biographical and historical chronology and linearity. In this respect it is also significant that the whole utterance starts at dawn; the sun rising and the poem’s beginning coincide. This daybreak – together with related imagery – also shapes the text. (Apart from the cycle of nature, all the traditional symbolic implications of a rising sun are pertinent here: a new beginning, envisaging the future, a positive outlook and something “dawning”.) An abrupt change comes with the beginning of the third part (75). Still keeping to the coupling construction with regard to Keats and even clad in the rhetorical dress of addressing the dead poet (75, 79, 80), the speaker now focuses on his present situation. Images of lying in bed with his beloved, of her movements and her body as well as the remembrance of their walk the night before create a strong counter-balance to history and the past – the link being that all this is what “dead men” (81) can no longer experience. This introduces a short narrative of the speaker’s night and morning, highlighting sensual, bodily, present elements. The fourth part (93–103), although taking up the imagery of planets and fruits as well as the time of night, subtly widens this first into a generalization (93) and then, taking this one step further, returns to the topic of the narrator’s own life. The key word “days” (96) triggers an enumeration of important days in his life; he thus completes and fills up the narrative begun earlier (5–6, 28–29, 48–49, 61–62). This sequence, a dark, dramatic account, comes to an emphatic and abrupt end when the “key word” is taken up again, this time as a monosyllabic exclamation: “Days!” (103) Lines 104–124 make up the two final sequences and bring a marked change, even a break with the preceding. Turning not only to the present but also to the future, the speaker leaves behind his past and his reflections – leaves them behind not only in a figurative, but also in a literal sense. The “happenings” in this sequence are ordinary, but their impact is enormous. The (present) break of day is described vividly, almost celebrated. A curious act of mimicry (the speaker imitates the “Keatsian” action, 117–118) introduces a surprising caesura; stepping outside and glancing at the sky are the last happenings. The circle closes, and the poem ends where it began so forcefully: “today”. And yet, this sequel opens the door to something new. A preliminary summary shows that the poem, constituted in such a complex manner of widely varying parts, is a poem of contraries288: Life versus death, the past versus the present, youth versus a time beyond youth, night versus day, lack

288 Harrison’s whole work is characterized by polarities and oppositions; it seems that his way of thinking and seeing the world is based upon an according pattern.



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versus abundance. This oppositional structure engenders the poem’s dynamics, and the contraries have a common denominator: temporality and transitoriness. This is a poem about time. And with it, loss. Apart from the oppositions just enumerated, a sort of meta-opposition constitutes the center of the text: the contrast of oppositions versus synthesis of oppositions. Such a synthesis is the secret topic of the poem, and it is encapsulated in the symbol of the kumquat. This image of an indistinguishable mixture of opposites, a paradoxical and unexpected harmonization and unification, symbolizes what the whole narrative process is striving toward (see below). The comparison to and fictive dialogue with John Keats not only underlines Harrison’s emphatic self-placement as poet and author, but also introduces a foil that may serve to explain how sadness and loss are being coped with. In the last analysis there is no “argument” with Keats. On the surface, the speaker’s train of thought seems to be something like: In contrast to Keats, who died young, Harrison had additional experiences leading to the insight that “a whole life” is necessarily made up of sweet and bitter moments  – like a kumquat. Life is, however, exactly this combination of positive and negative feelings, the paradox that “Melancholy dwells inside Delight” (14), which Keats realized in spite of “dying young”. With regard to the necessarily mixed nature of life there is no disagreement with Keats’s view, with “Beauty that must die” (21). Addressing the Romantic poet obviously has a function other than the superficial one. Keats’s ode with the famous “grape” serves as a sort of vehicle to introduce what Harrison has in mind. The poem’s eventfulness is closely linked to the development and metamorphosis of the underlying system of oppositions and to their ultimate reconcilability. To a large extent this poem’s unexpected event is a sort of implosion of a constellation of binary oppositions. This “implosion” is the result of a process; the conflict is being worked out, as it were. This processing can be seen under various aspects. First, there is a subtle revaluation of the poles. Although the phrase “too old for dying young” seems to imply an immense contrast between the respective lives and experiences, a subversive voice is introduced very early on. Keats “would have […] plumped for mine” (20), that is, shared the narrator’s view. Although one of the poem’s central lines – “that this is how a full life ought to feel” (46) – seems to be qualified by the addition “when the man who savors life’s no longer young” (48), this qualification is strange and hardly convincing.289

289 The qualification is cut off from the sentence it refers to by the long-winded syntax and an inserted extra line; the modification is too late an afterthought to destroy this first impression completely.

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Even if this were the ideal case only for “one in Florida at 42” (43), the phrase in l. 46 implies a judgement, something to strive and wish for: It should be like this. The speaker goes on to explain why: The inevitability of death, bitter as it may be, gives life its intensity and joy and is not just an unpleasant necessity, but essential, the foundation for pleasure, love and desire. If the certainty of death lies behind everything, if it is the prerequisite of “a full life”, then the awareness of one’s mortality is no loss, but a gain. Furthermore, the negative experiences, pain, loss and sadness can then be integrated and are easier to bear. They are part of the whole cosmos of human life, the other side of the medal. However, not only is the evaluation turned around in a subtle and surprising manner, but also a sort of reconciliation is achieved after a long argument. The process gone through to the final “coming to terms” with loss and age can be traced as follows. After the initial exploration of the kumquat’s symbolic value, general thoughts and momentary impressions are interwoven with remembrances of the past. The latter culminate in the fourth sequence (93–103); this compact summary of the darkest moments in the speaker’s life not only brings his review to an end, but also functions as a sort of prerequisite and contrastive prelude for the turn to come. The last two sequences (104–124) really are “something completely different” in content and style. The past seems to be done with; the present and its impressions are dominant. Lines 104–108 center on the freshly picked kumquat. Starting from here, the next ten lines widen the perspective and turn into an emphatic salutation of the new day; there is a marked turn to the positive, bright side even in the imagery (“The limes, like Galway after weeks of rain, / glow”, 109–110). Likewise, the poem – after lines of sadness – begins to glow with joy and optimism.290 This development culminates in the surprising last part. All bitterness and remembrance of loss and pain seem to be healed and forgotten. After tasting the fruit (a private, “inner” experience) the speaker once again widens the scope. The last lines carry with them all the symbolic weight of a confident look into the future and a serene acceptance of life as it is and will be. The image of the buzzards he is searching for “as the air grows clear” is not only a vivid, realistic picture and stands for itself but underlines also what the speaker is experiencing at this very moment.291

290 That the poem’s ambiguity can be found in the last lines, too, is no counter-argument against this positive key tone: Harrison is too complex and skeptical a poet ever to offer pure, naive optimism. Barker comments: “The poem ends with Harrisons’s characteristically specific image of the workaday world of ‘Mr. Fowler sharpening farmers’ saws, and life goes on.’” (1991, 53) 291 An important element in this positive picture is the buzzards’ “riding fresh thermals”. This is a compact concentration of all the positive aspects mentioned before; it assembles isotopies



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The whole, then, consists of two processes in one. On the one hand, the polarities of the beginning turn out to be less irreconcilable than it seemed; the oppositions begin to crumble. On the other hand, the process of reflection and living through is healing in itself; re-living all this (with a pattern at hand that enables the speaker to integrate the dark elements292) leads to a turning-point – an event – that opens up new, fresh perspectives. The unique feature of this event is that it is not a “new” one: Keats formulated a similar experience before, and this experience is openly referred to. The eventfulness is due less to unexpectedness than to a new intensity, under more threatening and sinister circumstances. These are the two aspects that are of importance with regard to Keats: the parallel insight and the speaker’s comparison of himself to a younger poet living in another epoch, with devastating historical developments yet to come. As to function of narration, the speaker’s desire is to come to terms with the loss of youth, with possibilities gone to waste and chances passed up, with the fact of his “futures far behind” (49). The reference to John Keats also introduces a comparison to another, less threatening epoch; this stresses the fact that the speaker confronts a time of rapid, uncontrollable change, of a destructive potential hard to grasp or cope with. In addition to this general loss and intimately linked to the prevalent topic of mortality and transitoriness, one further aim becomes clear: the poet’s very own “immortalization” project. By facing the dark side of his past and integrating it into his idea of a “full life”, he not only manages to create a conciliatory view of his own life; he also preserves it and himself. Giving such a biographic account and evaluation is not only a process of gaining acceptance but also a way to become “less mortal”, to assure one’s immortality – another way to cope with the certainty of approaching death. “A Kumquat for John Keats” not only strives to celebrate life,293 but in doing so – in

such as new, upward, forward, movement, activity. Thermals equal “rising winds”; gliding birds search for these upward streams and “ride” upon them. This gracious, powerful upward movement more than balances prosaic notes such as “bleak cries”. 292 With regard to his lifelong fascination with Greek drama, Harrison explains “that love of Greek drama is even more passionate than it’s ever been because I feel that the Greek, what we can learn from the Greeks, is an ability to think the worst things that can be thought without giving up on life.” (Hoggart 1991, 42) 293 This celebration of life is apparent throughout, in the way the speaker lingers on intense, present, sensual impressions and is one of the elements of the comparison to Keats (81–83). Although individual readings differ, the positive note is stressed by most interpretations; Burton calls it a “celebratory poem” (1991, 29). Harrison himself described it “as being about ‘the rediscovery of love after a lot of bitter experiences’” (See Burton 1991, 22). In this context, it is significant that the poem belongs to Harrison’s “American poems”. Harrison pointed out how going to America helped him to write different poems (Haffenden 1991, 228).

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catching the present moment and re-capturing crucial moments in the past – the speaker also gives a form and shape to his life that will remain. One might draw a connection to Chapter 5 – there are elegiac aspects in Harrison’s poem294 in the unusual and touching way the poet addresses his Romantic colleague over the generations, in the reverent and tender way he makes Keats come alive again. The elegiac note also includes himself; the modern poet mourns his life passing away and leaves a portrait of himself behind. This “double elegy” creates a link between the two poets and tendentially evens out the differences; they are very subtly put on the same level. Apart from a coping strategy this levelling intimate address also implies something else: a self-assured claim regarding his rank as a poet. With respect to the epoch, Harrison’s ambivalence and ambiguity as well as the highly complex structure in which a variety of strands and layers are interwoven to a sometimes puzzling degree clearly mark him as a modern poet.295 As regards the specifically poetic, one may name the “musical” structure that bundles and integrates seemingly heterogeneous semantic fields as well as chronological layers without breaking apart. In addition to the direct address and the reference to Keats’s ode there is another element linking the poem to Keats’s work. “A Kumquat for John Keats” is strikingly sensual; this very tangible accentuation of sensory impressions, of taste, smell, colours and textures, of sunshine and nature in its over-abundance are evocative of Keats’s style – and hardly the sort of rhetoric and imagery generally found in Harrison’s poems. The intensity and detail with which sensual perceptions and delights are rendered move this poem towards Keats’s poetic realm.

294 Hoggart points out that a “strong elegiac note is typical of Tony Harrison’s poetry” (1991, 37). Burton argues that Harrison traces the pessimistic side of his character, his “sense of despondency”, back to his early childhood (1991, 17). 295 It is, therefore, astonishing to read that Dunn stresses – as a pre-modern element – “[Harrison’s] reliance on a hurtfully lucid narrative outline”. He also states that Harrison’s “narratives build up to decisive conclusions” (1991, 130). Likewise, Spencer does “not […] think that Tony Harrison leaves much for the reader to decide” (1994, 111). In contrast to this, I would argue that the poem analyzed here is characterized by both ambiguity and a narrative outline that stubbornly defies any expectations of simple lucidity.

6.8 Summary Form and status of loss as the initial negative event inducing the speaker to work through the shattering experience in the poems analyzed in Chapter 6 differ structurally from those in all preceding chapters. While the loss confronting the speaker in those poems is of one particular, personally defined type: the loss of a beloved or revered individual, the imminent or threatened loss of his own life, the situation underlying the poems discussed in the present chapter comprises a wide spectrum of diverse impersonal entities which function as the stabilizing point of reference for the speaker. A broad distinction can be made between religious and non-religious, secular entities. From the Middle Ages onwards the Christian religion has provided an important firm base for people’s concepts of self. Within the selection of poems for this chapter, the disruption of such a religion-based self-concept is represented by five examples in different constellations. The clearest instances of what can be classified as loss of faith are found in the Victorian period, pre-figuring or anticipating the subsequent modernist break with tradition and convention. Both Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and Hopkins’s “No Worst, there is None” explicitly name the erosion of firm religious orientation as the negative event, the withdrawal of the “Sea of Faith” and the disappearance of divine presence and support, respectively. Two examples from the early modern period indicate the religious aspects of destabilization more obliquely. Donne’s An Anatomy of the World traces the contemporary insecurity and the newly activated awareness of human imperfection and degeneration to the original fall of mankind exacerbated by the recent undermining of the traditional world-picture on account of scientific discoveries. Shakespeare’s The Sonnets implies the absence or collapse of religious values as prompting the search for an alternative hold, located here in an intimate friendship. A paradoxical constellation underlies the traumatic crisis of orientation in one of the specifically modernist poems, Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”, where the improperly understood advent of a new religious dispensation (the “birth” of Christianity) destroys old securities without yet providing a new certainty, leaving the speaker in a limbo of anomie and emptiness. This historically remote experience is re-constructed  – implicitly  – from a modern position, when this new dispensation in turn has widely lost its general acceptance. As to the non-religious, secular frames of reference which speakers rely on for self-definition and which they experience as threatened or shattered, loss can manifest itself in two opposite ways: as the collapse or failure of a sustaining order either through change or else through stagnation, that is to say, through the failure of necessary change and development. The majority of the respective poems are confronted with the traumatic experience – in one form or another –

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of general, continuous and radical change, transience and destruction. Since change is ineluctably inherent in the human condition, the absence of stability, firmness and permanence has to be classified as a lack, which, however, is perceived as a loss by a speaker who has only recently become acutely aware of it. Radical change and destruction can take various forms. Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” specifically narrates the continuous destruction of cultural and social achievements and artistic productions in the course of history caused by human violence. Harrison’s “A Kumquat for John Keats” exemplifies such an experience by the increasing scale of destructive tendencies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as by disturbing traumatic incidents in the author’s own personal life. Shelley refers to eventful loss in two radically different manners. “Lift not the Painted Veil” enacts the confrontation with lack and instability in its most extreme possible degree: explicitly as an insight into the ultimate bottomless void underlying reality and the world. By way of contrast, “The Cloud” can be read as hiding the utterly destabilizing experience of continuous change in one’s own self and in the world by paradoxically converting it into the humanly impossible opposite: rejoicing in continuous change as the vitalizing manifestation of indestructible powerful permanence. Eliot’s The Waste Land presents the most comprehensive picture of general decline, as a collective experience of the loss of traditional order, stability, vitality and energy as well as, more specifically, as an individual’s subjective experience of sterile stagnation, the lack of will and power for vital change and regeneration. Besides, two other poems feature a more particular kind of traumatic change: the collapse of the vital validity regarding a firm ground for fulfilled living or for artistic creativity. Wordsworth’s “The World is too Much with Us” laments the loss of nature as a source of meaning and orientation in life and Yeats’s “High Talk” deplores the invalidation and destruction of the traditional guidelines of artistic production. Both poems attribute this loss to modern economic developments: increasing commercialization. The poems succeed in different forms and to different degrees in working through and coping with the traumatic loss of a stable order. At one end of the spectrum, there is Donne’s An Anatomy of the World, which manages to conclude with the consoling re-confirmation of the traditional Christian belief in God’s presence and the promised redemption of the soul after death – a stabilization of the old order in the face of modern developments. At the other end of the spectrum, there are two poems which completely fail to overcome the negative event of loss. Both Hopkins’s “No Worst, there is None” and Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” end with a confirmation of the loss, the disappearance of God and the invalidation of a former creed, respectively, stating the impossibility of finding any compensation for the loss, a clear indication of the modern condition. Two

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other poems likewise fail to convert the experience of loss into some kind of positive event on the story level but prove capable of fully acknowledging and facing the loss as well as compensating for the lost stabilizing order by a shift to another level. Shelley’s “Lift not the Painted Veil” comes to terms with the nihilistic disillusionment by self-consciously treating this insight as a personal distinction, the distinction of enlightenment (“bright blot”). Eliot’s The Waste Land suggests a structurally comparable solution, paradoxically surmounting the collective and personal loss of the old order by acknowledging and accepting the ruins of the old as one’s new ground (“fragments shored against my ruins”) and adopting a distancing aesthetic attitude towards the collapse. A different kind of reacting to the fundamental loss of stability may be detected in Shelley’s “The Cloud” – coping with the profound anxiety about change by fantasizing oneself into the directly opposite existence of vital indestructability in spite of continuous change, a solution of sorts ultimately achieved through artistic imagination. The other poems enact various ways of replacing – or rather attempting to replace – the negative event of loss with some new stabilizing orientation functioning as a compensatory positive event. Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and Shakespeare’s The Sonnets present intimate personal relationships of love or intimate friendship as an alternative frame of reference, which is explicitly offered as a solution in Arnold’s case and underlies as a practical presupposition Shakespeare’s young-man section of the Sonnets, under threat  – as various sonnets indicate  – of failure. A type of practical compensation is effectively performed in Wordsworth’s “The World is too Much with Us” and Yeats’s “High Talk”: the inadvertent, surreptitious recovery of the lost source of stability – the vital significance of nature and the strength of artistic imagination, respectively. Both solutions can be classified as Romantic – the trust in the unbroken vitality and creativity of the unconscious spontaneous powers of the ego if protected against direct calculating, analytic consciousness. A more comprehensive, equally vitalistic solution is programmatically and emphatically expressed in Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” as well as in Harrison’s “A Kumquat for John Keats”: the acceptance of destruction and collapse of order as an integral part of a full life, the conscious celebration of continued joyful living and continued joyful artistic production – functioning as a positive event in reaction to the (implied) lament of loss. One specific question concerns the relevance of the historical context for the experience of losing the security of an old order and coping with it. While the negative event of loss in the poems discussed in the other chapters was essentially due to individual, singular circumstances and coincidental causes, the collapse of an old order underlying the examples in this chapter is typically caused by historical, collective changes, almost always explicitly reflected upon in the poems themselves. This goes for all examples  – with the possible exception of

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Shelley’s “Lift not the Painted Veil”, which does not clearly refer to the contemporary context. The resolution of the traumatic loss enacted in the poems is partly also period-specific. Donne’s continued adherence to the traditional faith in An Anatomy of the World is a sign of the still persistent strength of religion at the time. The lack of a clear positive solution in Eliot’s The Waste Land and “Journey of the Magi” can be attributed to pervasive mental – anti-traditional, “modern” – tendencies in contemporary culture. Hopkins’s “No Worst, there is None” is an early – radical – example of this experience, exacerbated by a strong desire for religious certainty, still widespread during the nineteenth century. Shelley’s “Lift not the Painted Veil”, Wordsworth’s “The World is too Much with Us” and Yeats’s “High Talk” exemplify the Romantic (or, in Yeats’s case, late-Romantic) recourse to the ego and its inherent, subconscious powers. Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” and Harrison’s “A Kumquat for John Keats” show vitalistic attitudes, which are also characteristic of other modernist poets, for example D. H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas. So almost all poems discussed in this chapter show  – partly  – period-specific features in their coping strategies vis-à-vis loss. It is interesting to see that in another respect most poems share a pervasive period-independent device in their confrontation with the traumatic experience of loss: The aesthetic-artistic aspect and thereby the role of the poet (in the last analysis, the identity of the author as a poet) are explicitly thematized, constituting a presentation event. In Donne’s An Anatomy of the World, Shelley’s “The Cloud”, Yeats’s “High Talk” and “Lapis Lazuli”, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Harrison’s “A Kumquat for John Keats” the poem as such in one way or another functions as part of their coping strategy. The medium of writing poetry  – the narrative process of working through the traumatic experience in the medium of a poem – is employed as a therapeutic means of coping with loss.

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Keats, John. 1970. The Poems of John Keats, edited by Miriam Allott. London: Longman. Kerrigan, John, ed. 1986. William Shakespeare. The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint [1609]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. King-Hele, Desmond. 1983. “Shelley and Erasmus Darwin.” In Kelvin Everest, ed. Shelley Revalued. Essays from the Gregynog Conference, 129–146. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Kinney, Clare Regan. 1992. Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kleinstück, Johannes. 1963. W. B. Yeats oder Der Dichter in der modernen Welt. Hamburg: Leibniz-Verlag. Korninger, Siegfried. 1956. Die Naturauffassung in der englischen Dichtung des 17. Jahrhunderts. Wien: Braumüller. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Levinson, Marjorie. 1989. “The New Historicism: Back to the Future.” In Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Butler, Jerome McGann, and Paul Hamilton. Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, 18–63. Oxford: Blackwell. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. 1973. Donne’s “Anniversaries” and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Litz, A. Walton. 1991. “The Allusive Poet: Eliot and His Sources.” In Ronald Bush, ed. T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, 137–151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Longenbach, James. 2009. “Radical Innovation and Pervasive Influence: The Waste Land.” In: David E. Chinitz, ed. A Companion to T. S. Eliot, 449–459. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. MacKenzie, Norman H. 2008. A Reader’s Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins. 2nd edition revised by N. H. MacKenzie and C. Phillips. Philadelphia: St. Joseph’s University Press. Mariani, Paul L. 1970. A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ithaca/ London: Cornell University Press. Matthews, Steven. 2013. T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, J. Hillis.1963. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. O’Donnell, William H. 1982. “The Art of Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’.” The Massachussetts Review 23:353–367. O’Neill, Michael. 2013. “Sonnets and Odes.” In O’Neill, Michael and Anthony Howe, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 325–340. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinion, F. B. 1986. A T. S. Eliot Companion: Life and Works. London: Macmillan. Pütz, Manfred. 2003. “T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land als Monument der Moderne.” In: Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, eds. Moderne / Postmoderne, 43–60. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Rainey, Lawrence. 2005. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Ramazani, R. Jahan. 1989. “Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime.” PMLA 104:163–177. Robbins, Robin, ed. 2010. The Complete Poems of John Donne. Harlow: Longman. Scofield, Martin. 1988. T. S. Eliot: The Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sheats, Paul D., ed. 1982. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Cambridge Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Smith, A. J., ed. 1986. John Donne: The Complete English Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spencer, Luke. 1994. The Poetry of Tony Harrison. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

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Spurr, Barry. 2010. ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’. T. S. Eliot and Christianity. Cambridge: Lutterworth. Thompson, N. S. 1997. “Book Ends: Public and Private in Tony Harrison’s Poetry.” In Sandie Byrns, ed. Tony Harrison. Loiner, 115–132. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thormählen, Marianne. 1978. “The Waste Land”: A Fragmentary Wholeness. Lund: Gleerup. Timmerman, John H. 1994. T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Von Reinersdorff-Paczensky und Tenczin, Uta. 1996. W B. Yeats’s Poetry and Drama between Late Romanticism and Modernism. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. Ward, David. 1978. “The Ariel Poems.” In B. C. Southam, ed. T. S. Eliot: ‘Prufrock’, ‘Gerontion’, ‘Ash Wednesday’ and other shorter poems. A Casebook, 240–247. London: Macmillan. Webb, Timothy. 1977. Shelley. A Voice not Understood. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Webb, Timothy. 1983. “The Unascended Heaven: Negatives in ‘Prometheus Unbound’.” In Kelvin Everest, ed. Shelley Revalued. Essays from the Gregynog Conference, 37–62. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Webb, Timothy. 1992. “Shelley and the Ambivalence of Laughter.“ In Kelvin Everest, ed. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bicentenary Essays, 43–62. Cambridge: Brewer. Welburn, Andrew J. 1986. Power and Self-Consciousness in the Poetry of Shelley. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

7 Conclusion: Summary and Results

The common theme of the poems selected for this study is the confrontation of an individual (the speaker as the central instance and consciousness) with loss and death. This confrontation constitutes a negative – traumatic – event which usually threatens to shatter the stability, integrity and happiness of the self. The text of the poem can be understood as representing and mediating the mental process in which the self reacts to the disturbing event attempting to cope with the traumatic experience and ward off the threat of destruction. The question guiding the analyses of the various types of loss in the preceding chapters concerns the strategies with which the speaker addresses and attempts to work through the traumatic experience. These strategies usually take a narrative form with the intention of achieving some kind of positive event overcoming and superseding the disruptive effects of the initial negative event. Thus, a basically narratological approach could be applied to the analysis of these poems to focus on narrative devices as a key element in coping with loss and death in poetry.296 Depending on the particular nature of loss, several general – prescriptive or descriptive or recommendatory  – schemata (“scripts”) have been proposed for the operation of such strategies: prescribed as a conventional procedure or plan for mourning in poetry, the progression from lament via praise to consolation (in the elegy); described as actual patterns of behavior in real people in psychology, the gradual emotional detachment from the lost object (the “work of mourning” as analyzed by Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia”) or the instinctive suppression of the awareness of the trauma and its repeated return in a disguised shape (“repetition compulsion” in Freud’s trauma theory in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”); recommended as a therapeutic device in the form of narrative meaning reconstruction (according to Neimeyer, Stroebe and others). As the analyses demonstrated, the literary and psychological schemata (elegy, Freud’s mourning and trauma theories) applied only to very few examples, while the psychiatric notion of narrative meaning reconstruction was in one way or other generally valid. From this perspective the process enacted in the poetic text may take on a therapeutic function for speaker and author – and vicariously for readers if and when they empathetically adopt the position of the speaker, possibly motivated by similar experiences of their own. One common feature of nearly all these poems is that they can be shown to make use of the author’s biographical background. Such a personal relevance of the poem for the author is usually made explicit in the title or elsewhere. On account of their pervasive biographical backgrounds these poems blur the dis-

296 For details of the narratological approach and psychological hypotheses, see the Introduction (Chapter 1).

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tinction between fictional and factual: Because of the motivating source in real life they claim factual reference and because of their status as works of art they distance themselves at the same time from pragmatic concerns. The poetic status in fact thus facilitates and supports the therapeutic function. The following overview of the results from the concrete analyses will focus – highlighting the dominant features – on four aspects: the forms and degrees of eventfulness and the organization of narrative strategies, the functionalization of the poetic medium and the impact of the historical context.

7.1 Types and degrees of eventfulness and the organization of narrative strategies What all the poems in one way or another have in common is that the speakers’ reflections are prompted by a negative event – an actual, imminent or potential traumatic loss: the death or estrangement of a beloved or revered person, the termination of one’s own life, the collapse of a firm cognitive, emotional or ideological hold in life. The questions guiding the analyses in the preceding five chapters concerned mainly two aspects of the speakers’ reactions to the negative event of loss: on the one hand, the narrative strategies employed as well as the schemata drawn on by speakers in working through the traumatic experience and, on the other, the extent to which speakers in their processes of reflection manage to cope with the traumatic crisis and overcome the initial negative event by formulating some kind of positive event. The examples analyzed represent a wide spectrum ranging from complete or partial success to various degrees of failure, the specific forms of which are dependent on the underlying constellation and the respective type of loss. The great majority of poems either fully or partially succeed in overcoming the initial traumatic crisis – which in itself is a significant phenomenon testifying to the therapeutic function of these poems. Both successes and failures in facing and working through the experience of loss manifest themselves as features and results of the narrative organization of the chronological sequentiality of the poems. These processes and their decisive turns can be construed and explicated with respect to the narrative components of the poetic texts: as the dominant story-line, the link of story-line to a protagonist, either speaker or beloved person, the constellation of protagonist and desired object or person, the location of the story-line within the narrative set-up of the text, on the story level or the (poetic) discourse level, or shifting from one level to another. These various narrative moves and the resultant forms and degrees of eventfulness can be grouped into different types and modes of narrative meaning reconstruction, as described by Neimeyer and others.



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In a number of poems the speakers focus primarily on their own mental development in reaction to the loss as the central narrative sequence. One first, rather simple, straightforward type is defined by the gradual subsidence and eventual withdrawal of emotional attachment to the lost object, roughly in conformity with Freud’s concept of “work of mourning”. This type is represented by Dickinson’s “After Great Pain”. A second type – the replacement of the loss with some gain for the speaker – occurs in a variety of forms and degrees of achievement: in Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems” the speaker’s love is eventually shifted from the lost girl to nature; in the same poet’s “The World is too Much with Us” as well as in Yeats’s “High Talk” the lamented loss itself is inadvertently restored in a renewed form, behind the speaker’s back, as it were; in Arnold’s “Dover Beach” lost faith is replaced by intimate interpersonal love; the speaker of Byron’s “On this Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” copes with the fear of death by re-defining it as the welcome termination of a fulfilled and spent life; in Brooke’s “The Soldier” the speaker envisages the transformation of his own death into winning a place in foreign soil for his country; the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnets seeks to compensate for fundamental existential loss by a stable love-like friendship, precariously and ultimately unsuccessfully. In a third type, the speaker resolves the traumatic crisis by explicitly acknowledging the loss and integrating lack, destruction and pain into some higher, more comprehensive concept of living, thus enlarging his life story, as in Byron’s “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe”, Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” and Harrison’s “A Kumquat for John Keats”. In a fourth, profoundly traditional type, the speaker – confronted with the threatened loss of his own life – draws on a religious schema (script) for alleviating his anxiety, especially the Christian belief in personal salvation and preservation by God in another dimension, as in Raleigh’s “Verses Made the Night before he Died”, Donne’s “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night” and An Anatomy of the World, Dickinson’s “Because I Could not Stop for Death”. Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians” also belongs in this category, based, however, on a non-Christian, mythic schema. A fifth type of solution consists in the shift of focus from the speaker’s own painful loss to the lost person and his or her (imagined or attributed) gain, that is from the speaker’s to the loved person’s story-line, as in Jonson’s “On My First Daughter” (and, partly, also in “On My First Son”), Byron’s “And Thou Art Dead”, Poe’s “Lenore”, Boland’s “The Blossom” and “The Pomegranate” and Surrey’s “An Excellent Epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt”. To a certain extent, this also goes for Shelley’s “Adonais” and Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”, which posit the preservation of the poet after his death in a transcendent realm

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or the survival of his poems with their beneficial effects among his readers, respectively. In a sixth type, loss is (inadvertently) partly compensated for by a decisive change through a shift to another dimension of the poetic text, primarily to the discourse level of the poem as a work of art or to the cognitive stance of the speaker-author: Jonson in “On My First Son” preserves his son in and as the present poem; Carew’s “Elegie upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr John Donne” demonstrates in its style the continued presence and vitality of the deceased poet’s genius as a model; Shelley’s “Lift not the Painted Veil” balances the loss of cognitive and emotional certainty with the solitary self-consciousness of the enlightened solitary individual; similarly, Keats, in “When I have Fears”, counters the shattering prospect of the premature ending of his unfulfilled life by a defiant act of sublime self-assertion; Heaney’s “Audenesque: in memory of Joseph Brodsky” manages to preserve something of Brodsky’s unique personality in the face of general transience. In another respect, poems which conspicuously employ elaborate rhetorical devices to ward off the threat to the self’s stability also belong in this category, such as Jonson’s “On My First Son”, Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and “Since She Whom I Loved” and Shakespeare’s sonnets addressed to the male friend. While the first five types present events in the happenings, that is, significant changes are located on the story level and concern the state of the speaker or the beloved person, the sixth type has to be classified as a presentation event, that is, significant changes consist in a shift from the story to the discourse level. This type usually occurs in combination with the five other types. A unique case, a seventh type, is constituted by Hughes’s Birthday Letters on account of special conditions of the experience of loss, namely the speaker’s large temporal and emotional distance from the loss of his wife and his own possible partial responsibility for it: he tries to come to terms with his wife’s death by the detailed recollection of her life and by a – possibly self-exonerating – explanation of her suicide (as quasi-predestined). This change is essentially linked to the state of Plath (and her particular condition) and would also count as an event in the happenings. As to the other (negative) end of the spectrum, only few poems fail to achieve a compensating positive event. Milton’s “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” and Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” both conclude with a heightened awareness of loss, an emphasis on the negative event instead of consolation. Both may be said to enact a delayed or repeated acknowledgement of and confrontation with the trauma of loss, to some degree exemplifying Freud’s trauma theory. In Plath’s “The Other” the speaker initially also seeks to repress the awareness of the negative event by obfuscating its true nature (adultery), but succeeds only



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partly at best and then tries to cope by playing down its seriousness. The speaker of Hardy’s “The Voice” is confronted with the intensified return of an old loss and ultimately proves unable to overcome his pain. Tichborne in his “Elegy” and Cowper in “The Castaway” find no relief in the face of imminent annihilation or eternal damnation. Owen’s “Strange Meeting” and Hopkins’ “No Worst, there is None” have in the end no more to offer than the feeble recourse to (temporary) oblivion, that is to say, briefly forgetting the loss in sleep. The speaker of Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” concludes with a structurally similar reaction: longing for his own death. The composite voice in The Waste Land can arrive at no other compensation for the general decline and disintegration than the paradoxical self-support by the very fragments of the former whole. Shelley’s “The Cloud” can count as a special case of (disguised) failure of compensation for lack: an emphatically positive counter-narrative, which because humanly impossible, points to the unrelievedly unstable condition of human existence, acutely experienced by the (implied and also the real) author. In both cases, however, one may detect a compensation of sorts in the conspicuously foregrounded aesthetic quality of the poetic text – reminiscent of presentation events.

7.2 The functionalization of the poetic medium The fact that the author-speaker makes use of a poem in order to address the trauma of loss or death and come to terms with this shattering experience is not a neutral circumstance. The poetic medium as such can be functionalized in various ways to support and conclude the process of coping. One specific function was mentioned above, classified as a sixth type of eventful strategy, in which the transformation of the speaker’s reflections into a finished work of art or into a sophisticated rhetorical argument is specifically utilized as a means of coping with the trauma. In these cases the disruptive and destructive effects of loss in life are countered and (partially) overcome by the aesthetic perfection and de-pragmatized quasi-autonomous status of the poem, an eventful resolution of the crisis achieved by a shift from the story to the discourse level – a presentation event. In the last analysis the author-speaker here comes to terms with loss through the recourse to his role and achievement as a poet. This therapeutic effect of the poetic medium for the treatment of trauma is to be assumed even in cases where the poem fails to reach any positive, consoling conclusion and ends on a note of despair, as in Hopkins’ “No Worst, there is None”, Cowper’s “The Castaway” or Hardy’s “The Voice”. The composition and formulation of the traumatic crisis as such may have a distancing and controlling function for the speaker-author and – vicariously – for the reader. The possibility

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of vicarious therapeutic experience on the part of readers is further facilitated by certain inherently poetic features, such as the tendency to generalize the presented situation, to leave out personal, social and circumstantial details. One particular feature of the narrative organization of lyric poetry in general, also in evidence in some of the examples analyzed, is the incomplete eventful closure of a poem, that is to say, the eventful resolution of the traumatic crisis is not yet achieved within the course of the speaker’s reflections but as yet only envisaged and expected to occur in the future. Prominent examples among the selected poems are Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night”, Dickinson’s “Because I Could not Stop for Death” and Raleigh’s “Verses Made the Night before he Died”. This specifically poetic structure highlights the therapeutic function of the reflection in the medium of a poem – to negotiate anxiety and trauma. The imminence of an eventful solution is in itself already consoling and thus helps to cope with the experience of loss. Another pervasive feature of poems, conditioned by the complex, multi-layered semantic structure of lyric texts (the interaction among the literal, figurative, symbolic and prosodic levels of meaning), is a marked tendency towards ambivalence and even multivalence. This feature is exemplified, for instance, by Jonson’s “On My First Son”, Hardy’s “The Voice” and Plath’s “The Other”. Poetic ambivalence may be functionalized for the coping strategy, as was demonstrated by Jonson’s “For My First Son”, where the dominant impression of consolation is undercut by the implication of continuing grief, testifying to the complex emotional position of the father.

7.3 The impact of the historical context By and large, the historical context seems to have an impact less on the experience of loss itself than on the coping strategy in reaction to loss. While the death of a beloved person, the fear of one’s own death and also, but to a lesser extent, the loss of a fundamental hold in life appear to be more or less universal experiences, the schemata and frames of reference (scripts, concepts, strategies, values, devices etc.) drawn on in the attempt to cope with these threats to the self’s integrity, stability and happiness tend to vary from period to period. One can distinguish among various such schemata which speakers use as a basis for their coping strategies. One type of schema are conventionalized plans or formulas available in certain periods for guiding the procedure of mourning and coping with loss in poetry – on the discourse level. Such a schema is the funeral elegy with the three-



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part sequence of lament, praise, consolation, which is specific to the early modern period, as in Jonson’s “On My Daughter” and “On My Son”, partly, Donne’s “Since She Whom I Loved” and, to a certain extent, Poe’s “Lenore” (with a historical setting in the same period). A second type comprises schemata which the speaker draws on for the narrative integration of the loss (on the story level) – in order to explain its occurrence and, especially, to make it meaningful, acceptable and bearable by linking it as a coherent part to a larger development. One important schema which serves this purpose is religious, namely the Christian “grand narrative” of salvation and eternal life, the promise of continued existence after death and happiness in an other-worldly beyond. A large number of poems make use of this consoling scheme, either partly or centrally. Examples are Jonson’s elegies on his daughter and his son, Donne’s “Since She Whom I Loved”, An Anatomy of the World and especially “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night”, Raleigh’s “Verses Made the Night before he Died”, Dickinson’s “Because I Could not Stop for Death” and Surrey’s elegy on Wyatt. As is apparent from the dates of these poems, this schema is particularly valid in the early modern period (and still in nineteenth-century America), when religion was a vital force in life. Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians” employs a structurally similar scheme, though on a mythic instead of a Christian basis. Schemata which are meant to explain the loss also have to be grouped with this type. This goes for Hughes’s Birthday Letters, which in various poems uses the Greek tragic concept of fatal character flaw and fatal destiny to make the loss of the wife by suicide understandable or even unavoidable. This recourse to an archaic and mythic schema, similar to that in Lawrence’s poem, is linked to certain pervasive tendencies in the modernist period to go back to pre-modern concepts in search of meaningful structures, also to be found for example in Eliot and Yeats. Another kind of general schemata which speakers in their coping strategies rely on in order to explain the loss, especially the loss of a fundamental (old) order, is the notion of the continuous decline and fall of all stable structures in the world. This is primarily a modern concept which underlies the experience rendered for instance in Eliot’s The Waste Land, Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” and Harrison’s “A Kumquat for John Keats”. Donne’s An Anatomy of the World is an example from the early modern period. A third type consists in the recourse to some vital source or ground of creativity such as the spontaneous vitality of nature or the extra-rational unconscious to be tapped for the recovery of loss and the satisfying continuation of life – on the story level. Examples are Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems and “The World is too Much with Us”, Yeats’s “High Talk”. One can also include here Brooke’s “The Soldier”,

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where the nation is understood as such a creative source of meaning. These are essentially Romantic concepts, which are revived by some modernist poets with late-Romantic leanings. Elegies for poets (Chapter 5) have to be categorized separately, as a fourth type, since they obviously have close links to the contemporary historical context. While the loss of a beloved person as addressed in the poems discussed in Chapters 2 to 4 is an essentially private affair, poets are public figures. They are defined by their (poetic) production, their reaction to the contemporary situation and the relevance of their writings for others, the readers and thus for society; therefore their death also acquires a public dimension. The period-specific features as such vary from case to case: Wyatt’s embodiment of the Renaissance ideal in his personality, without any reference to his work (Surrey), Donne’s innovative poetic practices vis-à-vis the preceding epoch, with an emphatic focus on his work (Carew), Keats’s fate exemplifying the isolation and expulsion of the exceptional individual (Shelley), the marginalization of the poet as person, illustrated by Yeats, in contemporary society, together, however, with an emphasis on the heightened social function of his work (Auden), the imitation and radical heightening of Auden’s qualified skepticism about poetry in the modern world with respect to Brodsky (Heaney). So the relevance of the historical context to the elegies on poets is mostly based on the changing status of poetry in the contemporary society and the coping strategy rests primarily on the possible survival of the poet, especially through the continuing effect of his work on his audience. In almost all cases the prospects are presented as precarious. So, with respect to the impact of the historical context there appears to be a difference in two respects. First, it is primarily in the cases of the death of poets (Chapter 5) and the loss of an old order (Chapter 6) that the experience of loss itself is affected by the context. Second, in these two as in all other cases the historical context proves relevant – in varying degrees – to the coping strategies with respect to the schemata drawn on. * The function of poetry and narrative in poems for confronting loss and death may be summed up by differentiating between authors and readers. As for authors, the use of narrative devices in the poetic medium serves as a means of formulating and clarifying the traumatic experience, working through the shattering impact on their identity and trying out ways to a resolution. The work of art as a medium provides the possibility of narrative self-distancing and even of self-control  – enabling various degrees and forms of coping through constituting presentation events. Poetry also offers a means to preserve both problem and coping strategy



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for retrospective self-observation and self-understanding. In addition, the public performance (through publication) of the act of working through the threatening experience affords the author an opportunity of proving his identity and his status as a poet. Readers, on the other side, are given the (rare) opportunity to observe – from the inside – the therapeutic strategy and the attempts to cope with trauma. This enables them to follow and understand the procedure and imaginatively to undergo these processes for similar experiences of their own, experiencing the solution as a reception event (see above, Introduction, Chapter 1).

Index (authors and titles) Arnold, Matthew – Dover Beach 265−269 Auden, W. H. – In Memory of W. B. Yeats 212−216 Boland, Eavan – The Blossom 45−48 – The Pomegranate 48−53 Brooke, Rupert – The Soldier 174−175 Byron, Lord – And Thou Art Dead 33−36 – Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe 30−32 – On this Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year 165−168 Carew, Thomas – An Elegie upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr John Donne 199−205 Cowper, William – The Castaway 152−161 Dickinson, Emily – After Great Pain 94−98 – Because I Could not Stop for Death  169−173 Donne, John – An Anatomy of the World 232−236 – Since She Whom I Loved 25−27 – Valediction: Forbidding Mourning 79−83 – What if this Present Night were the World’s Last Night 148−151 Eliot, T. S. – Journey of the Magi 285−294 – The Waste Land 275−285 Hardy, Thomas – The Voice 99−106 Harrison, Tony – A Kumquat for John Keats 301−310 Heaney, Seamus – Audenesque: in memory of Joseph Brodsky 217−221 – Mid-Term Break 41−44 Hopkins, Gerald Manley – No Worst, There is None 270−274 Hughes, Ted – Birthday Letters 114−131

– Dreamers 123−125 – Error 117−122 – Life after Death 125−128 – The Prism 128−130 Jonson, Ben – On My First Daughter 19−20 – On My First Son 20−24 Keats, John – When I have Fears that I may Cease to be 162−165 Lawrence, D. H. – Bavarian Gentians 181−184 Milton, John – Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint 27−29 Owen, Wilfred – Strange Meeting 176−180 Plath, Sylvia – The Other 107−113 Poe, E. A. – Lenore 37−40 Raleigh, Sir Walter – Verses Made the Night Before He Died  143−144 Shakespeare, William – The Sonnets 65−76; 236−241 – Sonnet 29 66−68 – Sonnet 64 239−240 – Sonnet 71 68−70 – Sonnet 87 70−71 – Sonnet 94 72−74 – Sonnet 107 74−75; 240 – Sonnet 116 75−76; 236−237 Sonnet 129 237−238 – Sonnet 144 238−239 – Sonnet 146 240−241 Shelley, Percy Bysshe – Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats 206−211 – Lift not the Painted Veil 250−254 – The Cloud 255−263 Surrey, Earl of – An Excellent Epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt  195−198

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 Index (authors and titles)

Tichborne, Chidiock – Tichborne’s Elegy 145−147 Wordsworth, William – A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal 91−93 – I Travelled among Unknown Men 88−89 – Lucy Poems 84−93 – She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways  86−87

– Strange Fits of Passion have I known 85−86 – Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower 89−91 – The World is too Much with Us 242−245 Yeats, W. B. – High Talk 245−249 – Lapis Lazuli 295−300