Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century : Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins [1 ed.] 9781317079514, 9781409404897

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Poetics of Luxury in the nineteenth century

the nineteenth century series General editors’ Preface

The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

Poetics of Luxury in the nineteenth century Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins

BeTSy WINaKuR ToNTIPLaPHoL Trinity University, Texas, USA

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol 2011 Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Tontiplaphol, Betsy Winakur. Poetics of luxury in the nineteenth century: Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins. – (the nineteenth century series) 1. english poetry – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. Luxury in literature. 3. Poetics – History – 19th century. 4. Literature and society – england – History – 19th century. 5. Senses and sensation in literature. 6. Keats, John, 1795–1821 – Criticism and interpretation. 7. Tennyson, alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892 – Criticism and interpretation. 8. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1844–1889 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title II. Series 821.8’09357-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tontiplaphol, Betsy Winakur. Poetics of luxury in the nineteenth century: Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins / by Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0489-7 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. english poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Luxury in literature. 3. Poetics—History—19th century. 4. Literature and society—england—History—19th century. 5. Senses and sensation in literature. 6. Keats, John, 1795–1821—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Tennyson, alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1844–1889—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR585.L89T66 2011 821’.8093557—dc22 2010048287

ISBN: 9781409404897 (hbk)

For my husband and son; For my parents and sister; and For Emma, who lived long life in little space.

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contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Pleasure in an age of Talkers: Material Sublimity and the nineteenth century

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1 Wherewith They Weave a Paradise: Keats and the Birth of the Luscious Poem

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2 out Flew the Web and Floated Wide: Tennyson and the Loose Luscious

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3 Where, Where Was a, Where Was a Place?: Hopkins and the Luscious Line

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epilogue: unweaving the Luscious: Decadence, Modernism, and Post-Victorian Poetics

187

Works Cited Index

195 203

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acknowledgements I am grateful to the institutions, mentors, colleagues, and friends who supported this project at various phases and in a variety of incarnations. Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century began as a doctoral dissertation at the university of Virginia, where I received valuable financial assistance (including a timely year-long fellowship from the Graduate School of arts and Sciences) and worked under the guidance of Paul Cantor, Jahan Ramazani, and especially Herbert Tucker, whose insightful and exceedingly generous responses to my drafts helped to shape this argument from its inception. I am also deeply thankful for the intellectual and emotional support provided by Sigrid anderson Cordell, Robin Field, and Carrie Lindley, fellow dissertators during my time in Charlottesville and cherished friends still. I am indebted, too, to the inspiring students and extraordinary colleagues I have found at Trinity university. My home institution has backed my work with travel stipends and research fellowships, and I want to offer particular thanks to Victoria aarons, Judith Fisher, and Claudia Stokes, all of whom provided priceless guidance during the period in which I worked to complete the substantial revision that transformed dissertation into book. In addition, I very much appreciate the effort, wisdom, and enthusiasm of ann Donahue and the others—including an exceptionally helpful anonymous reader—with whom I have worked at ashgate. Finally, since portions of this work were previously published in Romanticism on the Net, The Hopkins Quarterly, and the essay collection Romanticism and Pleasure: Disciplined Delights in British Literary Culture, 1780–1830 (Palgrave), I wish to thank the editors and publishers of those publications for their gracious permission to reprint that material here.

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introduction

Pleasure in an age of Talkers: Material Sublimity and the nineteenth century The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. —William Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age

When Hazlitt characterizes the historical moment subsequently christened Romantic as “an age of talkers,” he distinguishes talkers from “doers,” asserting that in this “world … growing old,” there ostensibly is little for would-be activists to accomplish: “We are so far advanced in the arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect and doat on past achievements. … What niche remains unoccupied? What path untried?” (38). For Hazlitt the unfazed radical, word unmoored from deed was surely disappointing, but for Hazlitt the portraitist, an age of talkers must also have seemed disorienting, bizarre. Indeed, even as he crafts vibrant prose sketches of influential Romantic-era writers, Hazlitt calls upon his training as a painter, upon a set of skills more closely associated with the hand and eye—with, in other words, sensation and active muscles—than with the intellect. Jeremy Bentham, for instance, “who … devoted his life to the pursuit of abstract and general truths” (9), is drawn in Hazlitt’s essay as a person of Milton-esque “appearance”: “… the same silvery tone, a few disheveled hairs, a peevish, yet puritanical expression” (11). Hazlitt relies on verbal signifiers, but his medium somehow seems closer to crayon; if the sketch successfully evokes a foul-tempered elder, it does so with color (“silvery tone”), texture (“disheveled hairs”), and line (the facial creases that produce a “puritanical expression”). But what of pleasure in an age of talkers? What becomes of sensual gratification in a culture whose intellectual leaders prize abstraction, whose literary artists cherish, like Wordsworth, “the simplest elements of nature and of the human mind, the mere abstract conditions inseparable from our being, and [try] to compound a new system of poetry from them” (Hazlitt 111)? Pleasure is not a prominent theme in The Spirit of the Age, but the essay on Bentham that opens the collection (and finds Hazlitt so memorably exercising his portraitist’s scrutiny) targets the utilitarian conflation of pleasure with “good.” “every pleasure, says Mr Bentham, is equally a good, and is to be taken into the account as such in a moral estimate,” writes Hazlitt. “But it is not so,” he continues. “Pleasure is that which is so in itself: good is that which approves itself as such on reflection, or the idea of that which is a source of satisfaction” (13–14). Real pleasure—that which is “sweet in the mouth” (14), soft to the touch, or lovely to the eye—is, Hazlitt intimates, a threatened category in an age of talkers, and although his primary concern in the Bentham

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piece is the infeasibility of utilitarian government (“virtue, to be sincere and practical, cannot be divested entirely of the blindness and impetuosity of passion!” [16]), Hazlitt also frets about the limitations of intellection generally. Bentham, he observes, “[h]as a great contempt for out-of-door prospects, for green fields and trees, and is for referring everything to utility. There is a little narrowness in this; for if all the sources of satisfaction are taken away, what is to become of utility itself?” (22). Civil society should regulate our animal appetites, not eradicate them. In a world devoid of pleasure, Hazlitt wonders, what’s the useful for? In conversations dedicated to pleasure in Romantic literature, John Keats— poet of fragrant bodices and crushed grapes, of slippery kisses and dewy roses—is a more likely subject than Hazlitt, but critics frequently acknowledge Keats’s debts to the older writer,1 whose lectures he attended in London and whose essays he read in Leigh Hunt’s liberal journals. Keats admired Hazlitt’s sustained radicalism, shared his dislike of egoistic display, and praised his “depth of Taste” (LJK i 205), but something of Hazlitt also inheres in the youngest major Romantic’s oft-cited preference for “a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts” (LJK i 185). Most notable, though, is the fact that despite the substantial disparity in their ages and personae, both Keats and Hazlitt affiliate pleasure with cozy spaces, with environments distinguished by smallness instead of grandeur. Consider, for example, the following passage, in which Hazlitt hints that Bentham defines pleasure not only too abstractly but also, quite literally, too broadly: Could our imagination take wing (with our speculative faculties) to the other side of the globe or to the ends of the universe, could our eyes behold whatever our reason teaches us to be possible, could our hands reach as far as our thoughts and wishes, we might busy ourselves to advantage with the Hottentots, or hold intimate converse with the inhabitants of the Moon; but being as we are, our feelings evaporate in so large a space—we must draw the circle of our affections and duties somewhat closer—the heart hovers and fixes nearer home. (15)

In Hazlitt’s view, breadth is the enemy of pleasure, of gratified “feelings,” and Keats echoes that sentiment in poem after poem celebrating the Spenserian bower in its various guises: the glade, the garden, the island, the bedchamber. This book is founded, however, on the premise that Keats, rather than abandon largeness altogether, repeatedly describes its involution. His spaces, always “draw[n] [close],” generally hold “globe”-scaled stores of sense-gratifying stimuli and thereby foster a brand of pleasure not only more material than Bentham’s “good” but also more intense than Hazlitt’s “satisfaction.” In his essay “on Gusto,” Hazlitt glosses his titular subject as the “power or passion defining any object” (597), and although that description suggests something like intensity, Hazlitt’s gusto is fundamentally neat, an ally of “precis[ion]” (597) and “appropriate character” (598). “[G]usto consists,” Hazlitt writes, “in giving … truth of character from the 1 In addition to arguing that Keats’s work helped, in some ways, to shape Hazlitt’s critical vision, Rodney Stenning edgecombe usefully summarizes recent perspectives regarding Hazlitt’s influence on Keats in “Keats, Hazlitt, and augustan Poetry.”

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truth of feeling … in the highest degree of which the subject is capable” (597). Gusto, in other words, is not largeness involuted, magnificence compressed; rather, it is a decorous union of size and sensation, a pleasure that maximizes capacity without straining it. Titian’s renderings of human flesh, for instance, are “like flesh, and like nothing else” (598). Shakespeare wants gusto, Hazlitt argues, in his failure to make the most of his faculties—“He never insists on anything as much as he might …” (599)—while Milton, a poet “of great gusto,” pushes his creativity to (but not beyond) its limits: “He repeats each blow twice, grapples with and exhausts his subject” (599). even when Hazlitt’s meditation seems to laud disproportion, it subtly honors decorum. “[T]he gusto of Michelangelo,” he explains, “consists in expressing energy of will without proportionate sensibility,” while Correggio’s “[consists] in expressing exquisite sensibility without energy of will.” The ostensibly imbalanced quality of each artist’s work is, however, appropriate to his chosen “style”: Michelangelo’s is “hard and masculine,” “the reverse of Correggio’s, which is effeminate” (598). Their gusto, as in the cases of Titian and Milton, derives, perhaps counterintuitively, from aptness and an almost mathematical sense of suitability. a “delicate subject” (599), Hazlitt’s gusto is a tailored relish, but Keats’s taste, however indebted to the larger body of Hazlitt’s incisive and often sensory criticism, leans toward less neoclassical ratios—toward, in fact, a tension between container and contained that originates in the strange involution described above. That indecorous relationship, this work argues, is the cornerstone of Keats’s aesthetic and, with respect to the story of nineteenth-century poetry, his most important legacy. To distinguish Keats as a poet of distension is, at least initially, to reexamine the attitudes toward space and materiality that prevailed in the decades preceding and constituting the Romantic era. as Rachel Crawford observes in Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830, an expansionist ideology dominates the best known political, philosophical, and aesthetic treatises of the eighteenth century and, as a result, eighteenth-century studies in our own time. In the period between the act of union with Scotland (1707) and the French Revolution, england saw dramatic increase in everything, Crawford notes, from export revenues and military expenditures to the scale of farms and civic buildings: Containment is not the first thing to come to mind when reading histories of Great Britain’s eighteenth century. … During this entire century trade, liberty, and empire apotheosized the increasing reach of Britain’s arm and fabricated an image of a small nation defined on all sides by the sea which formed a vital core of centrifugal power, a vigorous heart pumping lifeblood outward into the extremities of a Britannizable world. even during times of foreign threat that produced sentiments of strident isolationism, expansion remained the key discourse. (3–4)

Indeed, students and scholars of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature internalize a narrative that foregrounds not only Big Ideas— revolution, sublimity, and epic ambition, to name only a few—but also Grand

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Spaces: soaring skies, vast oceans, deep chasms, towering mountains, and, of course, imperial landscapes. Romantic artists in particular, we learn, prefer getting high to getting close; when Wordsworth and Coleridge occupy scanty plots and lime-tree bowers, it seems that they do so only briefly or for a lack of more expansive alternatives. In “Frost at Midnight,” for instance, Coleridge’s speaking poet feels “vex[ed]” (l. 9) and smothered by the quiet intimacy of his “cottage” (l. 4), and for the infant “cradled by [his] side” (l. 49), he wishes a life defined by infinite space, not domestic comfort: “But thou, my babe, shalt wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds / Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores / and mountain crags” (ll. 59–63). If there is something disconcerting about Coleridge’s prophecy—the terrain that he envisions is no more child-scaled than “babe”-proofed—there is also something quintessentially Romantic, as most understand that term, about its sprawling vastness, about the way in which the sky reproduces, ad infinitum, the landscape’s most dramatic features. Crawford goes on, however, to argue that england’s expansionist discourse was countered, especially as the dawn of the nineteenth century approached, by a significant (if more quietly conducted) revaluation of enclosure. “Contained, vernacular spaces such as town and kitchen gardens, which did not assist in the conceptualization of england’s national agenda, were part of a more muted conversation conducted among a thriftier audience,” Crawford asserts. “These spaces form a bedrock that was jolted to the surface by a seismic shift in public perception that took place during the final quarter of the century” (4–5). Despite its affiliation with military prowess and economic strength, living large became, in some contexts, associated with waste and insecurity, while “contained spaces geared toward productivity, usually … of smaller dimension, took hold of the english imagination.” More intimate venues, Crawford argues, “began to receive the attention of the architects of space: building designers, gardeners and agriculturalists, even poets” (5). The sublime, in other words, began to give way to the picturesque, and coincident with this new regard for circumscription and detail (as opposed to bird’s-eye-view drama) was the rediscovery of short lyric, “which reemerged after a century of neglect in dizzying numbers as a vernacular form in magazines, correspondence, and parlor games” (Crawford 5). Their epic projects forestalled, the major figures of British Romanticism (with the notable exception of Byron) made their names primarily with ballads, sonnets, and other brief poems, many of which integrated sublime themes with images of rural intimacy. In a way, Crawford contends, the picturesque is “an aesthetic category that in actuality extends and democratizes the judgment of the sublime by making it available to an ordinary audience of limited means and circumscribed prospects” (67). The former designation, in other words, signifies an enclosed, condensed version of the latter’s pleasures: a portable Snowdon, a bite-sized Xanadu, un petit Mont Blanc. But my term pleasures, a word that connotes sensorily registered delight, both fails to convey and is, in fact, at odds with the intellectual foundations of sublime experience. In that it strives to evoke not only the painter’s eye but also a sense

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of its subject’s proximity, picturesque art derives from an awareness of bodies, particularly their capacity to appreciate (in the word’s dual senses of recognize and enjoy) what Nicola Trott identifies as material “variety or novelty” (75). The sublime, in contrast, engages the mind, and although the category came to be associated with certain large-scale, real-world sites, the British Romantics, Trott observes, foreground the intellectual responses those sites engender—“grandeur of thought or conception, together with vehemence or intensity of passion” (78)—at the expense of their expansive, craggy materiality. Pleasure is not part of the equation; not only does sublime experience, as Burke describes it in his Philosophical Enquiry, hinge on the observer’s sense of fear, but it systematically transmutes visible, tactile objects into concepts. as Trott explains, “it is the ‘idea’ of the thing—or the ‘idea of terror’ attached to it—which produces the sublimity. So, although the Enquiry does indeed find certain objects ‘sublime,’ it is strictly speaking only the ideas of those objects that have this quality” (82). It seems, then, that to regard the picturesque as boxed sublimity is to intellectualize an inherently sensory concept. Indeed, despite Crawford’s emphasis on the “productivity” of contained gardens, her analysis privileges the abstract qualities associated with the small spaces that came to the fore around the time of the english Regency. as a result of its affiliation with insight (both creative and religious), the sublime was “[a]n aesthetic imbued with utilitarian and moral objectives,” and picturesque plots, Crawford argues, came to represent similar values on a smaller scale: “[T]he intervention of utility in the aesthetics of space made possible the democratization of sublimity and associated it with domestic ideals of hearth, home, and industry” (68, 69). If certain poets and landscape artists worked to associate picturesque spaces with sublime ideology, did others work toward something like the converse, a sublime materiality bound by picturesque constraints? In a March, 1818, verse epistle to J.H. Reynolds, Keats posits a “material sublime” and thereby distinguishes himself from his poetic forebears and contemporaries: o that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake, Would all their colours from the sunset take, From something of material sublime, Rather than shadow our own soul’s daytime In the dark void of night. … (ll. 67–71)

W. Jackson Bate asserts that Keats “is thinking [of] … ‘Tintern abbey’” (308), but Wordsworth’s “sense sublime,” though ostensibly inspired by expansive sensory experience, both begins and ends as intellection: [...] and I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man— (ll. 94–100, emphasis added)

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although the term pleasure makes a surprising five appearances in “Tintern abbey,” Wordsworth consistently modifies it—“unremembered pleasure” (l. 31), “the sense / of present pleasure” (ll. 62–3), “former pleasures” (l. 118), and “sober pleasure” (l. 139)—in ways that abstract or etherealize the experience it traditionally denotes. The only exception comes, of course, in his reference to “[t]he coarser pleasures of [his] boyish days” (l. 73), those “charm”-less (l. 81) gratifications that have, thank goodness, given way to “[t]he still, sad music of humanity” (l. 91). Keats’s verse epistle, in contrast, describes a different delight, a more material (if, by Wordsworthian standards, coarser) pleasure. The poet’s nighttime visions prove plenty cerebral—a little too Soul-full, in fact—and he longs for dreams drenched in the sun’s rich color, not steeped in “elevated thoughts” that only metaphorically represent the sun’s height and grandeur. “[T]o philosophize,” Keats continues, “I dare not yet!—oh never will the prize, / High reason, and the lore of good and ill / Be my award” (ll. 73–6). Significantly, praise for material reality accompanies his renunciation of talk: “Things cannot to the will / Be settled, but they tease us out of thought” (ll. 76–7). Keats’s use of the word sublime stems from its affective links to excess and extremity, but his wish is for sensory surfeit, not the grand immateriality of night’s “dark void.” Indeed, by the early months of 1818, Keats had rejected Wordsworthian “joy,” but, perhaps surprisingly, he proved no less critical of Leigh Hunt’s tendency to cloy. He summarily dismisses both poets in a February letter to Reynolds—“I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular” (LJK I 224)—and despite the fact that his literary reputation would remain, in certain respects, tied to Hunt’s, it is vital to recognize how quickly and profoundly Keats’s notion of pleasure diverged from that of his early mentor. Hunt’s poetry, unlike Wordsworth’s, is undeniably material, and Tory critics vilified the bourgeois sensibility on display in poems like The Story of Rimini, which finds the poet reveling in things-dominated settings, including, among others, Francesca’s well appointed room at Giovanni’s palace: The very books and all transported there, The leafy tapestry, and the crimson chair, The lute, the glass that told the shedding hours, The little urn of silver for the flowers, The frame for broidering, with a piece half done … . (III, ll. 153–7)

Keats’s early sonnet on Rimini characterizes Hunt’s poem as a sort of “bower” (l. 12), but what he arguably realized soon after is that Hunt shares with Wordsworth a taste for unboundedness, which, as Hazlitt suggests, is necessarily abstracting in its relative diminution of the sensory human body. a bower is defined, at least in part, by enclosure, without which its pleasures—be they visual, aural, olfactory, or tactile—would dissipate, rendered less intense (even, perhaps, undetectable) by distance and dilution. and upon careful inspection, one senses something strange about Francesca’s chamber: The room is a mere simulacrum of comfortable domesticity, a space “[f]urnished, like magic, from her own at home” (III, l. 152). In other words, Francesca’s personal effects have, to her “surprise” (III, l. 149),

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been transported from her quarters at her father’s residence, disembowered, as it were, from a structure that had once afforded genuine delight and real security. In their striking transportability, Francesca’s things seem, for practical purposes, to occupy a space too large to be homey, too vast to foster what Hazlitt might call pleasurable “feelings.” on what “side of the globe,” she might wonder, will she find herself next? More conceptual Wordsworthian “dwelling” than real Spenserian bower, the reconstructed bedchamber cannot repress the “pang” (III, l. 167) that strikes when Francesca remembers the husband who “had never shared her heart” (III, l. 170), and ultimately, Hunt’s descriptions in The Story of Rimini fall short— or, I might say, go long—of material sublimity. The materiality is present, but the picturesque delimitation is not. Without the constraints imposed by the latter, the former can approach muchness but not too-muchness, plenty but not excess. The procession with which Rimini commences is emblematic of the poem’s aesthetic. The seemingly interminable parade is marked by distance and diffusion, not compression and distillation. When, following innumerable trumpeters, heralds, pursuivants, squires, knights, and horses, the royals themselves appear, Hunt promises a “finish of fine sight” (I, l. 265) but, in fact, realizes no such terminus. The arrival of what spectators assume is Giovanni’s conveyance is likened to “the coming of a shape of light” (I, l. 266) and accompanied by “reeling air” that “[s]weeps with a giddy whirl around the fair” (I, ll. 279–80). and if such imagery did not in itself evoke an airy spaciousness, the fact that the princely rider turns out to be Paolo, not Giovanni, is enough to render the lengthy account more openended than “finish”-ed. When Keats combines profuse pleasure with spaces more intimately scaled and more explicitly circumscribed than Rimini’s parade or his own verse epistle’s gaping black sky, the result is a hybrid category that unites elements both picturesque and sublime, a glutted aesthetic that marries the physicality and constraint connoted by the former term to the magnitude affiliated with the latter. In the analysis presented here, I seek to define this hybrid aesthetic: its sociocultural foundations, psychological motivations, and formal ramifications. The narrative traced in these pages describes the birth and development of what I term the luscious poem, a lyric genre that fuses luxury with confinement in its themes as well as its forms. My curiosity about confinement derives, like Crawford’s, from eighteenth-century england’s new regard for intimate spaces, but my interest in luxury originates in Keats’s notion of a material sublime, of a sensory experience defined by magnificent profusion. In economic contexts, the word luxury denotes a kind of excess, a class of goods (purchased, presumably, with surplus cash) that satisfies consumers’ demands for sense-pleasing extras: fancy wearables, expensive entertainments, decorative housewares. To describe the experience of packed luxury (that is, circumscribed sensory excess), I choose the term luscious, a word whose etymological links to lush, plush, delicious, lascivious, and, of course, luxurious, render it uniquely suited to an aesthetic defined, paradoxically, by great wealth in little space. The tactile and oral experiences to which the word luscious and its pseudo-synonyms traditionally apply are rich indulgences nourished by the

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proximity that attends touching and tasting, and despite his debt to Wordsworthian notions of natural beauty and Huntian descriptions of material plenty, Keats turned for comfort and inspiration neither to sublime landscapes nor images of strung-out opulence but to circumscribed spaces crowded with sensory stimuli. To say as much is to counter a late twentieth-century critical tradition that posits a Romanticism founded on, if nothing else, the primacy of intellectual experience. To be sure, as Jerome McGann points out in The Romantic Ideology, the credibility of certain philosophical projects was called into question during the age we call Romantic. “In the Romantic Period,” McGann writes, “the ground universals of a Natural Law philosophy had been undermined, largely through the development of historical studies and the emergence of a modern historical sense. No longer did human nature seem always and everywhere the same, and the celebrated ‘epistemological crisis’ was the chief register of this new ideological fact” (67). In search of “stability and order,” he continues, “writers like Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge” looked to “Nature or the creative Imagination as … places of last resort”: “amidst the tottering structures of early nineteenth-century europe, poetry asserted the integrity of the biosphere and the inner, spiritual self, both of which were believed to transcend the age’s troubling doctrinal and ideological shifts” (67–8). as McGann’s abstract diction suggests, however, the Romantic turn to natural sublimity was simply a turn to a new philosophy, and he concludes that “Romantic works engage with the world, seek to engage with the world, at the level of ideology”: “The poetic response to the age’s severe political and social dislocations was to reach for solutions in the realm of ideas. The maneuver follows upon a congruent Romantic procedure, which is to define human problems in ideal and spiritual terms” (71). Keats, however, represents a problematic test case for McGann’s compelling and profoundly influential hypothesis. although the youngest of the major British Romantics was no intellectual lightweight, his “human problems” proved uniquely difficult to idealize or spiritualize; in addition to describing their author’s atheistic tendencies and articulating his general disregard for philosophic absolutes, Keats’s letters evoke a life rife with agonies arguably more painful (if more quotidian) than the dull, distant ache of epistemological crisis: financial insolvency, the absence of loved ones, a sense of professional failure, and, of course, illness. Keats’s anxieties, in other words, hit closer to home; despite his abiding interest in contemporary poetics (and, to some degree, contemporary politics), the crises he faced during his most productive years were personal and often visceral. Rather than abstract these real-world problems by reaching for philosophical solutions, Keats redefined language as something material and used it to forge an alternative reality, a new place to live. For Marjorie Levinson, that redefinition represents a fundamentally distasteful circumstance that Keatsians, eager “to rescue Keats’s deep meanings from his alluring surfaces” (2)—eager, maybe, to secure his position within a literary-historical movement increasingly defined by Big Ideas—long refused to acknowledge. “What was, initially, a substitute for a grim life became for Keats a substitute life,” she writes, “a real life of substitute things” (9). For Levinson, the

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luscious quality of Keats’s verse testifies to the artistic and emotional weaknesses of its socially striving author, whom she portrays in Keats’s Life of Allegory as mired in a kind of adolescence, more committed to autoeroticism than real sex— or, in literary terms, “overinvest[ed] in signs” of poetic authority and, given his limited education, ill-equipped to cultivate an authentic creative voice (9). The Romantic-era critics who vilified Keats’s poetry as “masturbatory exhibitionism” (4) judged more or less accurately, Levinson alleges, while later readers (including Christopher Ricks, Lionel Trilling, and Helen Vendler) erred in “put[ting] what the contemporary reviews called Keats’s ‘vulgarity’ under the sign of psychic, social, and textual unself-consciousness” (2): Following these powerful writers, we read Keats’s lapses from the good taste of innocent, object-related representation and transparent subjectivity as a determined consent to his own voluptuous inwardness and to self-conscious recoil. … In other words, those critics who acknowledge the stylistic vulgarity of Keats’s writing put it in the redeemable field of creaturely instinct and self-defense, and not in the really unsettling category of externality, materiality, and ambitious reflexiveness. (3)

I want to suggest, in contrast, that “self-defense” need not necessarily signify mere reflex or, worse, bestial “instinct.” What if Keats opted for what Levinson dismissively characterizes as “the self-fashioning gestures of the petty bourgeoisie” (4) because of—not unaware of or even in spite of—that subculture’s overt appreciation for acquired finery and its ability to refashion the spaces in which a population operates, experiences, lives? In other words, what if Keats was less benighted with respect to his defensive “gestures” than Levinson intimates? as Levinson notes, Keats’s verse typically highlights “its own fine phrases, phrases stylistically objectified as acquired” (4), but in addition to depicting circumscribed sanctuaries—islands, burrows, bedrooms, and pavilions, to name only a few— dense with sensory wealth, Keats explicitly and consistently posits such spaces as models for good verse, which, he contends, should feel “like a little copse” (“Written on a Blank Space at the end of Chaucer’s The Floure and the Leaf” l. 1). The luscious poem, then, not only describes lusciousness—material sublimity contained in a space of picturesque proportions—but represents it mimetically as well, its syntactic and prosodic structures (Levinson’s “stylistically objectified” phrases) generating a textual enclosure that denies the reader easy exit from the consuming sensuous experience portrayed therein. To illustrate this aesthetic innovation, we might turn to Lamia, an important text in Levinson’s argument and the opening act of the volume that eventually made Keats’s name. To assert that Lamia is luscious may seem strange, given its classical setting and Drydenian cadences. In his tellingly titled “The Decorum of Lamia,” o.B. Hardison, Jr., rejects other critics’ sense of the poem’s neoclassical quality—“… the couplet in Lamia is distinctly secondary to the verse sentence or paragraph, and … where Keats typically describes by qualitative adjective, Dryden describes through action” (34)—but still champions the poem as an extraordinary

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exercise in decorum, which he defines “in terms of the adaptation of the part … to the whole” (37): “In his early work, at every point, [Keats] sacrifices larger unity for the sake of local and spectacular effect. Gradually, this tendency is brought under control, until, in the Odes and Lamia, the poetry has the kind of ultimate decorum which we most commonly associate with Horace and Virgil” (33). Hardison acknowledges, like readers both before and after him, that Keats relies heavily upon “sense-appeal” and “accretion” (35), but he ultimately finds Lamia’s vessels (and, of course, Lamia itself) roomy enough to accommodate such profusion decently, without distension. on the contrary, however, the poem not only relies on images of astonishing fullness but also finds Keats pondering pleasure’s own reliance upon spatial limitation. Pleasure in an age of talkers (be they Benthamite philosophers, Wordsworthian poets, or apollonian sophists) is threatened not only by sensationdismissing abstractionism but also by the revaluation of spatial proportion that accompanies the veneration of the intellect. as Hazlitt puts it, abstract thinkers are diminished bodies that inhabit stunningly “large” spaces, but an age of talkers can generate, even in its ostensible opponents (in, that is, critics like Hazlitt) something akin to a suspicion of the inverse: massive materiality packed indecorously inside an intimately delimited “circle.” In Lamia, Keats embraces such materio-sensory engorgement—that is, luscious experience—as the most valuable, if most difficult to sustain, experience of pleasure. In his 1818 denunciation of Wordsworth and Hunt, Keats charges both poets with egotism, or outsized regard for self: “It may be said that we ought to read our Contemporaries—that Wordsworth &c. should have their due from us. But, for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an egotist? … I don’t mean to deny Wordsworth’s grandeur and Hunt’s merit, but I mean to say we need not be teazed with grandeur and merit …” (LJK I 224). When Wordsworth and Hunt calculate self-worth, Keats intimates, they recall the unbounded magnificence of their verse worlds—“round ocean[s],” “shape[s] of light”—and, as a result, reckon themselves literary divinities, creators on the scale of their creations. Lamia, significantly, finds Keats pondering the vexed relationship between pleasure and divinity while simultaneously narrating its heroine’s quest for material sublimity, for luscious experience. Godhead is perhaps best defined as the absence of limits, as the possession of immortality, omnipotence, and others’ unconditional devotion; as Lamia opens, Keats introduces a supernatural universe striking in its lack of restriction, both physical and philosophical. The nymph “to whom all hoofèd Satyrs knelt” (I, l. 14; emphasis added) is, quite simply, to everybody’s taste, and by rendering her invisible, Lamia has, for practical purposes, positioned the nymph less “somewhere” (I, l. 13) or “nowhere” (I, l. 31) than everywhere, as the luxurious gifts that litter the shores, springs, meads, vales, and woods of Crete attest. Possessed of an abstract “sweet”-ness (I, l. 31), a palpable sensuality, and, presumably, a certain je ne sais quoi that makes her worth the trouble, the nymph promises a sublime range of pleasures, and in exchange for Lamia’s assistance—indeed, in the spacious world of the poem’s

Introduction

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beginning, even loyalty is only as restrictive as it is convenient—Hermes casually offers “whatever bliss thou canst devise” (I, l. 85). But a world of whatevers is not without its perils, and in the same introductory lines that ostensibly celebrate the time “before the faery broods / Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods” (ll. 1–2), Keats questions the pleasure of limitlessness—and, as a result, the value of limitless pleasure. “[F]or woe of” an endless parade of lovers, the nymph’s “immortality,” Lamia explains, “grew” “[p]ale” (I, ll. 104–5), and Hermes himself is “ever-smitten” (I, l. 7), a figure dedicated to the pursuit of erotic pleasure rather than the experience thereof. unlike the carved-in-stone figures on Keats’s Grecian urn, Hermes can move at will, but his unfettered agency seems almost to cripple his capacity to recognize, let alone feel, sensory delight. “Real are the dreams of Gods,” Keats writes, “and smoothly pass their pleasures in a long immortal dream” (I, ll. 127–8): Those famous lines would describe an enviable state of existence, if not for the elegiac connotations of “pass,” a term that, in combination with “smoothly,” suggests that divinity inhibits the absorption of joy, “whatever” the “bliss.” as Neil Fraistat puts it, Hermes is “always desiring and always fulfilling desire, never and ever satiated” (103). It is no surprise, then, that the union of nymph with god is characterized as sacrifice, not consummation. When, like a flower to a bee, the nymph “[gives] up her honey” (I, l. 143; emphasis added), the pair simply disappears. For Levinson, who reads the poem as “an allegory about the evolution of value forms and their corresponding social forms” (261), the “marked cruelty of the nymph’s fate” represents “a lesson in the abstractive violence of exchange” (265); Lamia’s pandering of the nymph, she argues, becomes the first in a string of “serial prostitutions” (266) that, collectively, allow Keats to explore “the money form, itself the explanation of Keats’s literary practice” (261). Complicating Levinson’s account, however, is the fact that a crying Hermes—“[f]ull of adoring tears” (I, l. 135)—evaporates with the nymph. Hermes, too, seems spent by the end of Keats’s “strangely extended introductory narrative” (Levinson 262), and if the wood nymph, characterized by Levinson as “strangely anonymous … neither named nor described in the text,” signifies an “abstract property value” (265), Hermes’ value seems similarly fragile. Despite—or, perhaps, as a result of—the infinite blisses at his command and contrivance, Hermes also becomes a cipher, lost to the poem in the same moment as his prostituted paramour. His status does not confer stability. Lamia’s fate is different. Keats observes that Hermes and his object do not “[grow] pale, as mortal lovers do” (I, l. 145), but Lamia debuts as the very antithesis of pallor and, in contrast to the god and nymph, a figure defined by constraint. She is, in other words, colorful in the most literal sense of that term: tint-saturated, color-full. From the outset, Lamia describes her body as a “wreathèd tomb” (I, l. 38), and when Hermes stumbles upon her “cirque-couchant” (I, l. 46), she strikes a compact silhouette that nonetheless “palpitat[es]” (I, l. 45) with sense-seducing shades, with a barely contained aesthetic energy. “She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,” Keats writes,

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Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d; and full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, Dissolved, or brighter shone, or interwreathed Their lustres with gloomier tapestries— So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries, She seem’d at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self. (I, ll. 47–56)

If Hermes’ nymph—of limitless interest and, essentially, boundless body—signifies enormous pleasure, she does so proportionately, decorously. In other words, the spaces with which the nymph is associated seem scaled to accommodate the delight that Hermes anticipates, and despite the presence of “a world of love … at her feet” (I, l. 21), Keats’s descriptions of the poem’s first romance remain both unhurried and uncluttered. The initial setting, in sum, evokes the airy sublimity of the quintessential Wordsworthian vista, and when clever Lamia recounts her “splendid dream” of “Fair Hermes,” she flatteringly portrays the god as a beam of light, “severing the clouds, as morning breaks” (I, ll. 68–9, 77). Lamia herself, in contrast, emerges as a literal tangle of tones and textures, a luscious figure who lacks not only Hermes’ wide-open prospects—no “Phoebean dart” (I, l. 78), she lies on the ground—but also, it seems, a neoclassical disposition toward balance. Lamia’s “gordian shape,” like the nymph’s “loveliness” (I, l. 108), hints at an affiliation with a broad spectrum of pleasurable experiences (including the titillation of the exotic, the freshness of the pastoral, and the heft of the costly), but Keats’s language simultaneously suggests something like engorgement, distension. The sensory delights represented in and on Lamia’s body threaten almost to destroy it; she “seem’d” so much “at once” (I, l. 55) that the very integrity of her person—the “fit[ness]” of her form “for life” (I, l. 39)—is almost compromised. There is nothing balanced, proportionate, or decorous about Lamia’s corpus, and in her inability to evoke the “living air” of the open Wordsworthian prospect or the “reeling air” of the orderly Huntian procession, she embodies the congestion intrinsic to Keats’s material sublimity, his luscious aesthetic. Her “very breath,” Fraistat observes, possesses magical “potency” (104), and we might, in fact, regard Lamia as an involution of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” vision: No babe toddling through enormity, Lamia is enormity compressed into a babe-sized package. one must not, however, overlook the fact that although Lamia longs to abandon her “serpent prison-house” (I, l. 203), the reality for which she pines is, strangely, as limiting and delimited as the one she presently inhabits. In lieu of godhead, Lamia requests constraint. When offered “whatever bliss thou canst devise,” Lamia opts for narrowness and striking specificity: “‘o the bliss! / Give me my woman’s form, and place me where he is’” (I, ll. 119–20).2 “He,” of course, 2 Here, too, Levinson’s reading seems troubled. “Lamia,” she writes, “painfully gives up her chameleon colors and ‘gordian’ plasticity to receive a determinate female body; and under the pressure of Lycius’s desires, she assumes specific social attributes” (266).

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is Lycius, and the “where” signifies the outskirts of Corinth. Still, despite the banal particularity—a mortal body, a dirty city—of the boon that she requests, Lamia refuses to sacrifice her signature excess. In her provocative treatment of Keats and the early nineteenth-century life sciences, Denise Gigante argues that in the wake of physiologist John Hunter’s theory regarding the “possibility of a supervenient vital principle” (433), the too-muchness of Lamia would have defined her as a monster. “The aesthetic definition of monstrosity changed significantly during this period,” Gigante explains, “from an enlightenment concept of defect or deformity to a Romantic notion of monstrosity as too much life. … Such monstrosity does not remain at the level of theory but becomes the motivation for a new kind of monster in the literature of the Romantic period, one whose life force is too big for the matter containing it” (434). The disproportion described in that last clause evokes a phenomenon akin to the material sublime, but Keats, as I have noted, associates small spaces (especially those dense with sensory energy, kinetic or potential) with pleasure, not with danger or atrocity. When Lamia first addresses Lycius, she identifies herself as a creature of “many senses” (I, l. 284) and “a hundred thirsts” (I, l. 285), and though she seems cruel indeed when she taunts her beloved with his presumed inability to satisfy her sensory desires, Keats’s readers understand that those words are meant as bait, that Lamia has opted for the smallness that Lycius represents. This is no chance encounter, and the limitations that inhere in Lycius’ person and lifestyle—he is no Hermes, after all—seem greatly to enhance, rather than encumber, the couple’s experience of pleasure. earth-bound Lycius, whose sandals rather roughly “swept the mossy green” (I, l. 239), seems an unlikely erotic hero, but his initial encounter with Lamia is characterized by none of the lukewarm “bland”-ness (I, l. 141) that distinguishes the union of Hermes and his nymph. Rather, Lycius experiences a jolt of pleasure far larger—that is, richer, broader, and more enduring—than his body and, therefore, more potent than anything associated with immortality. Lamia’s words are “so delicious,” “[i]t seem’d he had loved them a whole summer long” (I, ll. 249–50), and her beauty, though contained in and by her body, seems bottomless, unending: “and soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up, / Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup, / and still The metamorphosis is physically painful but unquestionably driven by Lamia’s desires, not Lycius’. although Lycius seeks later (as elucidated below) to exchange Lamia’s sensuous figure for a bump in social status, he has not sought the original boon, and when Lamia requests “my woman’s form” (I, l. 120; emphasis added), the possessive pronoun implies that the “determinate … body” in question must meet Lamia’s idiosyncratic specifications, not another’s. Moreover, since lady Lamia is characterized as “bright” (I, l. 171)—a term also invoked in Keats’s description of rainbow-hued serpent Lamia (I, l. 52)—and lovelier than any maid that ever “blush’d” (I, l. 187), it seems unreasonable to represent the metamorphosis as a loss of color. Finally, as the narrative’s subsequent events demonstrate, Lamia’s more “determinate” form hardly diminishes her affiliation with plasticity generally; I will demonstrate shortly that lady Lamia magically molds and sculpts a variety of materials and spaces as the story moves forward. In sum, the dynamics of the “exchange” that interest Levinson are both more and less complicated than she intimates.

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the cup was full” (I, ll. 251–3). Were Lycius a god and, therefore, blessed with an existence defined by infinity and perpetuity, the pleasure afforded by Lamia’s magnificence would have recalled the proverbial raindrop in the ocean, not the tsunami in a teacup imaged here. For Gigante, when Lamia “overruns ‘the bewildering cup’ of her beautiful form in an abundance that Lycius can never fully consume, she becomes a devouring presence who inverts the rules of aesthetic contemplation” (444). an inverter, yes, but a devourer, no: Lamia’s union with Lycius (whose name, incidentally, sounds like luscious) is nothing if not an inversion of decorum, but her aim is not to consume her lover but to be consumed by him—by, that is, the narrowness and restriction that he embodies. Her desire, in other words, is to secure herself within Lycius’ delimited world, to “unperplex bliss from its neighbor pain” by “[d]efin[ing] their pettish limits” and “[e]strang[ing] their points of contact” (I, ll. 192–4). To that end, Lamia engineers a love nest that boasts not only the protective invisibility that she had once provided Hermes’ nymph but also a fortress-like solidity. The space is impossible to see—even “the most curious / Were foil’d, who watched to trace [the mute Persian servants] to their house” (I, ll. 392–3)—despite its dramatic materiality: While yet he spake they had arrived before a pillar’d porch, with lofty portal door, Where hung a silver lamp, whose phosphor glow Reflected in the slabbèd steps below, Mild as a star in water; for so new and so unsullied was the marble hue, So through the crystal polish, liquid fine, Ran the dark veins, that none but feet divine Could e’er have touch’d there. Sounds aeolian Breathed from the hinges, as the ample span of the wide doors disclosed a place unknown Some time to any, but those two alone … . (I, ll. 378–97)

The rich stuff that constitutes the enclosure—precious metals, expensive stones, fine finishes—goes a long way toward fulfilling the promise of sensory pleasure inscribed in and on Lamia’s spectacular body. Her body itself makes up the difference, and I cannot concur with Levinson’s assertion that Lamia metamorphoses from “materially particular snake” to “symbolically particularized woman, to … colorless, characterless, coldly abstract form” (268). Notwithstanding the staid classicism of its architecture—the “calm’d twilight of [its] Platonic shades,” as it were (I, l. 236)—Lamia’s materially particularized home (Keats goes so far as to document the marble’s veining and the doors’ hinges) pulsates with a scarcely controlled erotic heat, with a dynamic sensuality best signified by the “couch” made “sweet” with “use” (II, ll. 18, 23). Sensory distension (or even sensuous explosion) seems inevitable, but Lamia’s charms maintain the integrity of the nest, the “complete”-ness (II, l. 12) of the arrangement, in spite of Love’s “jealous” “buzz[ing]” “[a]bove the lintel of their chamber door” (II, ll. 12–14).

Introduction

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In fact, Lycius, not Lamia, initiates the devouring, the cannibalistic consumption that culminates in the narrative’s dramatic finale. When distant Corinth’s trumpets make Lycius “start” (II, l. 28), they simultaneously puncture the bubble of pleasure that Lamia has so carefully inflated, and Keats’s account of the events that follow seems to rely more heavily on simple laws of physics than complex theories of biological organization. When Lycius twitches, Lamia’s “purple-linèd palace of sweet sin” (II, l. 31) sustains something like a tear, and although the magic bubble does not pop, it does begin to leak. The pressure exerted by its pleasure-full interior against its own pierced walls initiates a process of equilibration, a drive toward balance that, though decorous, is dangerous: [...] Lycius started—the sounds fled, But left a thought, a buzzing in his head. For the first time, since first he harbour’d in That purple-linèd palace of sweet sin, His spirit pass’d beyond its golden bourn Into the noisy world almost forsworn. (II, ll. 28–33)

The buzz, previously confined to “the lintel of their chamber door,” has infiltrated the citadel, and Keats’s language—“[h]is spirit pass’d”—not only echoes the Part I adage regarding “the dreams of Gods” but also mimics the hiss of seepage, the sound of leaching pleasure. Lamia, who sees that her lover has “mused beyond her” (II, l. 38), understands “[t]hat but a moment’s thought is passion’s passing bell” (II, l. 39), but when she tearfully describes herself as “houseless” (II, l. 45)— unsheltered, uncontained—Lycius is quick to characterize his love as protectively consuming: ‘My silver planet, both of eve and morn! Why will you plead yourself so sad forlorn, While I am striving how to fill my heart With deeper crimson and a double smart? How to entangle, trammel up, and snare your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there, Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?’ (II, ll. 48–54)

unfortunately, as Lycius’ initial celestial metaphor suggests, grandeur, not intimacy, now dominates his desires, and his turn toward the sublimity of galactic space precedes a return to cool intellection: “My thoughts! shall I unveil them?” (II, l. 56). Rather than luxuriate in the dense pleasure that Lamia affords, Lycius opts for the prospect of an abstract joy: a sense of pride invigorated by others’ articulations of envy. Despite having stated an intention to “labyrinth” his love, his choice requires that he exhibit her: [...] ‘Listen then. What mortal hath a prize, that other men May be confounded and abash’d withal, But lets it sometimes pace abroad majestical,

16

Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century and triumph, as in thee I should rejoice amid the hoarse alarms of Corinth’s voice. Let my foes choke, and my friends shout afar, While through the throngèd streets your bridal car Wheels round its dazzling spokes.’ (II, ll. 56–64)

Lycius’ “passion” has “cruel grown” (II, l. 75), and rather than encircle Lamia in arms and walls that strain to hold her splendor, Lycius chooses to expose her to hungry Corinthian eyes. Rather than preserve Lamia’s sublime beauty in a space picturesque in scale, Lycius, as Hazlitt might have put it, hovers and fixes farther from home. “[S]ubdued” (II, l. 82), Lamia consents to the public wedding but makes one last attempt to patch and reinflate the pleasure dome that Lycius has pricked. In a final effort to defuse her lover’s damaging philosophic mind and to protect herself from the wideness of Corinth, Lamia aims once more for lusciousness, strategically selecting wedding decorations that downscale “glowing banquet-room” of “widearchèd grace” (II, l. 121) into full-foliaged leafy “glade” (II, l. 125). “In pale contented sort of discontent,” Keats writes, she stuffs the space, “mission[ing] her viewless servants to enrich / The fretted splendour of each nook and niche” (II, ll. 135–7). The architecture of Lamia’s makeshift bower is notable for the density of its walls—“Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first, / Came jasper panels; then anon, there burst / Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees, / and with the larger wove in small intricacies” (II, ll. 138–41)—but the sense-treating things that fill the hall’s newly intimate interior actually materialize in multiples: of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room, Filled with pervading brilliance and perfume: Before each lucid panel fuming stood a censer fed with myrrh and spicèd wood, each by a sacred tripod held aloft, Whose slender feet wide-swerved upon the soft Wool-woofèd carpets; fifty wreaths of smoke From fifty censers their light voyage took To the high roof, still mimicked as they rose along the mirrored walls by twin-clouds odorous. Twelve spherèd tables, by silk seats ensphered, High as the level of a man’s breast reared on libbard’s paws, upheld the heavy gold of cups and goblets, and the store thrice told of Ceres’ horn, and, in huge vessels, wine Come from the gloomy tun with merry shine. Thus loaded with a feast the tables stood, each shrining in the midst the image of a God. (II, ll. 173–90)

For Levinson, the “lavishly outfitted hall concocted by Lamia for her bridal feast” evinces a striking “systematicity”—“The various objects are strictly disposed according to familiar formal principles: symmetry, rectilinearity, circularity, regular

Introduction

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gradation, and correspondence” (283)—but I question that vision of mathematical decorum. Less pious gesture than metonymic representation of Lamia’s larger preoccupation, the presence of the carven deities hints at the problems with an interpretation that privileges the passage’s purported “systematicity.” engulfed in a sea of sensual delights that includes perfumes, textiles, and wines, the idols “in the midst” seem reduced to mere accessories, and as a result, the limitlessness that characterizes godhead seems curiously if impossibly (from a mathematical perspective, anyway) hemmed in.3 Despite Keats’s “shrining,” the tables are not altars but are, rather, heaped feast boards, and the pleasures that they proffer are the real object of worship. The party seems consciously bacchanalian, but there remains something ideologically indecorous about Lamia’s theology; as Bacchus approaches “meridian height” (II, l. 213), the earth-bound revelers, rather than experience airy transcendence, increasingly resemble the colorful, multi-“eyed” serpent whom Hermes discovered “cirque-couchant” in the grass at the beginning of the romance: “Flush’d were their cheeks, and bright eyes double bright” (II, l. 214). of course, the scene’s essential violation of decorum is material, not ideological. Decked tables and other images of hospitable abundance are relatively common in pre-Romantic literature, but Keats’s cornucopian vision derives its strength from a proportional mismatch, from a decorum-defying amalgam of material plenty and spatial constraint. alexander Pope’s portrayals of sensory wealth in The Rape of the Lock afford enlightening comparison, for although Belinda’s boudoir table holds a vast array of cosmetics and accessories—“unnumber’d treasures ope at once, and here / The various off’rings of the world appear” (I, ll. 129–30)—it never bows beneath its load; in fact, Belinda’s toilet remains impeccably, incomprehensibly organized, neither untidy nor prohibitively small. “each silver Vase,” Pope notes, stands “in mystic order” (I, l. 122), while other “glitt’ring spoil[s]” (I, l. 132) reside in discrete, roomy boxes or lie in easy harmony on the table’s spacious, uncluttered surface: This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks and all Arabia breathes from yonder box. The Tortoise here and elephant unite, Transform’d to Combs, the speckled, and the white. Here files of Pins extend their shining rows, Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux. (I, ll. 133–8) 3

erin Sheley observes that Keats frequently portrays olympian gods in a similar manner—“Keats’[s] reference to a ‘carved Jupiter’ demonstrates the manner of his mythmaking. The god is less important as an ideal than as an object in the physical world, acting upon the narrator’s evolving identity through his senses” (2)—but she remains more interested in Keats’s portrayal of consciousness than in his cultivated tension between divine infinity and earthly delimitation: “Keats develops these classical worlds only to turn them inward; his stylistic choices contribute to the development of an individual perceiving consciousness” (2).

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Pope’s party scene is characterized by similarly ordered luxury, Levinsonian “systematicity”—“For lo! the board with cups and spoons is crown’d, / The berries cackle, and the mill turns round: / on shining altars of Japan they raise / The silver lamp; the fiery spirits blaze” (III, ll. 105–8)—but the material splendor of Keats’s wedding banquet is, like Lamia herself, barely containable, an opulent jumble that, in generating a labyrinth of piles and puddles in the banquet hall, fashions a rich cocoon for bride, groom, and guests. Initially, visitors “themselves in order placed / around the silken couches” (II, ll. 196–7), but as “God Bacchus” ascends (III, l. 213), Pope-ish “mystic order” gives way to bloat. “Louder come the strains / of powerful instruments,” and as the poet’s syntax becomes as involuted as his setting, those “instruments” seem less certainly musical; consequently, the term “strains” seems succinctly to evoke a now familiar, if still indecorous, tension between container and contained. The colon and subsequent catalogue in the following passage arguably indicate that the “instruments” are, in fact, Lamia’s “powerful” tools of seduction, potent pleasures that flush cheeks, brighten eyes, and generally swell the feast space: Louder they talk, and louder come the strains of powerful instruments:—the gorgeous dyes, The space, the splendour of the draperies, That roof of awful richness, nectarous cheer, Beautiful slaves, and Lamia’s self, appear. (II, ll. 204–8)

Thanks to the “instruments,” pleasure suffuses the banquet, and vessels of every conceivable sort brim, as the following passage suggests, with every conceivable delight: Garlands of every green, and every scent From vales deflowered, or forest-trees branch-rent, In baskets of bright osiered gold were brought High as the handles heaped, to suit the thought of every guest—that each, as he did please, Might fancy-fit his brows, silk-pillowed at his ease. (II, ll. 215–20; emphasis added)

This arresting imagery is not neoclassic, Wordsworthian, or even Huntian, but Keats’s lusciousness, in addition to inverting contemporary aesthetic discourse, also engages more material socio-historical trends, especially with regard to its formal dimensions. The first chapter of this study draws on accounts of the burgeoning consumer culture of the early nineteenth century to demonstrate affinities among Keats’s luscious settings, the goods-packed shop interiors that introduced British consumers to exotic new worlds, and the middle-class notion that a richly appointed home, however small, not only signified but engendered both psychological and financial security. To Crawford’s list of prominently petite Romantic-era places, I add the city shop and the bourgeois residence, both of which had become, by the time Keats composed his “Imitation of Spenser” in

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1814, sites of sensory profusion. Keats’s connection to Hunt affiliates him with the nesting, shopping middle class, but Keats, ultimately less interested in real-world spaces than poetic ones, strove to translate gracious living into luscious verse by specific technical means. To the formalist work of Susan Wolfson, Jennifer Wagner, and others I add a new treatment of the poetic list, or catalogue. at once an ancient literary device and a sales device, the catalogue is an aggregative form well suited to the piling-up, packing-in quality of luscious experience. However, although accretive verbal structures can successfully evoke excess (that is, materiality of sublime proportions), they lack a natural stopping point, or built-in principle of formal closure. Lists, in other words, are not self-contained, but Keats, after completing the paratactic failure we know as Endymion, worked to bring the endlessly linear, string-like catalogue into a woven dialogue with closure by means of a new prosodic practice, one that interlaced multiple catalogues of goods and sensations to generate the richly entangling textual spaces of Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, the Great odes of 1819, and, of course, Lamia. Splendor alone, Keats learns, lacks the enveloping power of “fretted splendour,” and Lamia’s distinctly woven wedding bower—“Two palms and then two plantains, and so on, / From either side their stems branched one to one” (II, ll. 128–9)—not only holds lists within lists (that is, a textual weave) of sense-pleasing materials but also lays the groundwork for Keats’s best known denunciation of philosophy, a pursuit, he argues, that unravels earthly security to leave only an uncomforting series of facts. Lamia’s famous critique of Newtonian science characterizes “cold philosophy” as a knife, a blade that “clip[s] an angel’s wings” and rips—that is, “[u]nweave[s]”—the rainbow’s “woof” (II, ll. 230, 234, 237). Not surprisingly, then, old apollonius, Lycius’ sophist “instructor” (I, l. 376) and the poem’s antiLamia, possesses “sharp eyes” (I, l. 364) that, at the narrative’s conclusion, shred Lamia’s second delight-full bubble. This time, rather than leak slowly, the stretched space leaches dramatically. “[T]he stately music no more breathes,” Keats writes, and “[t]he myrtle sicken’d in a thousand wreaths. / By faint degrees, voice, lute, and pleasure ceased” (II, ll. 263–5). Within moments, an outsized nothingness has permeated the hall—“a deadly silence step by step increased / until it seem’d a horrid presence there” (II, ll. 266–7)—and in a matter of lines, “all was blight” (II, l. 275). Lamia, the poem’s original incarnation of material sublimity, has likewise been drained of sensory energy; “no longer fair,” she simply sits, “a deadly white” (II, l. 276). When, at last, “the sophist’s eye, / Like a sharp spear went through her utterly, / Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging” (II, ll. 299–301), Lamia evaporates, and the result is a deadly vacuum, a life-sucking void. “With a frightful scream she vanishèd,” Keats writes, “and Lycius’ arms were empty of delight, / as were his limbs of life, from that same night” (II, ll. 306–8). Following the tragic equilibration of interior and exterior pressures—the tragic rescaling, as it were, of contained to container—the couch, once “sweet” with “use,” becomes Lycius’ bier. in Keats and the Victorians, George Ford sees shades of Lamia in tennyson’s early piece “The Poet’s Mind,” which intimates that “the world of reasoned philosophy destroys the world of beauty” (34). Indeed, from the earliest moments

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of his career, Tennyson was considered, for better or for worse, Keats’s literary heir. Tennyson’s regard for the author of “ode to a Nightingale,” Ford points out, “was not a passing phase of … taste” (18); Keats was Tennyson’s “favourite nineteenthcentury poet” (Ford 18), and although Tennyson remained sensitive throughout his life to “the charge of imitation” (Ford 22), his stylistic “borrowings” from Keats, Ford notes, prove pervasive, if subtle (23). When andrew Bennett describes the broader Victorian attitude toward Keats, his diction portrays a character of McGannian abstraction, even ghostliness: “John Keats kept returning to, kept haunting, Victorian culture—haunting it like no other poet of the Romantic period, not even that other Romantic poet cut off in his prime, Percy Bysshe Shelley” (41–2). The comparison to Shelley, Romanticism’s most determinedly abstract voice, implicitly figures Keats as primarily ethereal, too, but Ford reminds his twentieth-century audience that since Tennyson and his Victorian contemporaries lacked access to Keats’s correspondence, they associated the youngest Romantic primarily with sensuality, not intellection—with bodies, not minds or spirits: “They did not lose themselves in … the poetic theory found in the letters. They kept their eyes on the poems themselves” (32). as a result, Ford argues, the Keats whom Tennyson knew was first and foremost an architect of textual sanctuaries, “a poet who had succeeded in escaping the sordid and disturbing environment of nineteenth-century life, a poet who had evolved in its place a picturesque world … painted in lavish colours and felt intensely through the senses” (32). Like Keats, Tennyson inhabited an anxious historical moment while confronting devastating personal losses, and this study’s second chapter treats his revision of Keats’s luscious aesthetic in the context of new Victorian notions of space and security by, among other tactics, reassessing and further developing Seamus Perry’s recent assertion that Tennyson was “an ostentatiously heterogeneous poet,” a figure as inspired by key Romantics in his “mistrust of ‘high art’” as in his championing of “the claims of the aesthetic” (5). Tennyson’s themes and imagery reveal a Keatsian understanding of text’s spatial character—“Tennyson,” Ford writes, “was one of the earliest to come under the spell of Keats’s world” (32)—and a fondness for rich interiors. However, like the Victorian bazaars and department stores that relied on broad arcades and plateglass windows to mitigate the distinction between shop and street, Tennyson’s interiors are explicitly circumscribed but oddly permeable. Drawing on Victorian socio-cultural studies that include treatments of the Great exhibition, mid-century commercial architecture, and the materiality of the domestic parlor, I demonstrate that an appreciation for fixed but membranous boundaries underlay the Victorian conception of sanctuary. My account chronicles the Laureate’s progress toward textual enclosures more porous than Keats’s, textile-texts that emphasize the tiny inter-filiated gaps by which even the densest fabrics breathe. Having identified the Lady of Shalott’s airy, landscaped tapestry as a model of compensatory creativity, Tennyson responds to the loss of his best friend and the many other losses, great and small, which that crisis focalized by retreating to poems that render lists into loosely woven alternative spaces. My analysis privileges In Memoriam, Maud, and

Introduction

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Idylls of the King, aggregative works in which ostensibly discrete lyric or narrative units—tightly rhymed stanzas, numbered monologic cantos, independently titled verse stories—are linked, or permeated, by border-hopping material catalogues. I turn finally to Hopkins, whose Jesuit dedication to ascetic ideals might initially seem irreconcilable with a poetics of luxury and intimate sensuality. In fact, as Julia Saville has shown, Hopkins maintained a vexed regard for pleasure that energized his spiritual and prosodic explorations. The third chapter makes the case for reading sprung rhythm as the century’s densest incarnation of luscious form, in which a Keatsian-Tennysonian interchange between the aggregative (the accumulation of accents) and the woven (intertwining lettered threads and counterpointed meters) appears condensed in every line. Hopkins’s own terminology of “inscape” and “instress” defines the poem as an interior space or internalized landscape, but whereas Keats’s and Tennyson’s textual spaces resemble sites of luxury consumption, Hopkins’s painstakingly wrought verse evokes the luxury commodity itself, redefined, counterintuitively, as a place in its own right. Hopkins, in other words, can eschew images of Lamia-inspired profusion because, in his view, a single wel made thing is a series of series unto itself, a habitable web that offers all the sense-pleasing security of a Keatsian commercial bower or Tennysonian department store. Duns Scotus, whose unique theology profoundly influenced Hopkins’s faith, posited natural objects, however small, as worlds unto themselves, holy spaces in which the divine spirit lives and thrives. Late-century proponents of aesthetic reform put forth a strikingly similar argument about the soothing inhabitability of artisanal crafts. Inspired by Pater, Morris, and other antiindustrialist sages, Hopkins created poems that function as both places and things, goods that evoke a golden era of artistic integrity and whose rich craftsmanship consumes the consumer. “The Wreck of the Deutschland” plays a key role in my argument, but the chapter centers around Hopkins’s sonnets, where carefully woven intralinear patterns afford faith-affirming thingy retreat from a reality defined, alternately, by self-contempt, isolation, and religious doubt. as the foregoing synopses suggest, I mean to reorient the traditional narrative of nineteenth-century poetics within a critical weave that knits cultural-history studies into a vital reconsideration of poetic form. I strive to bring fresh significance to familiar accounts of the period’s rich materiality, but since the luscious poem derives its spatial character from certain syntactic and prosodic structures, my project is fundamentally a formal one. I rely on rigorous textual analysis to make my case, and although my evidentiary base consists chiefly of primary texts, I endeavor, as often as possible, to turn an analytical eye on critics’ own diction. as subsequent discussion will demonstrate, nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians and literary scholars have, in the course of making arguments quite different from the one presented here, referred casually or figuratively to Keats’s poetic “worlds,” Tennyson’s verbal “tapestries,” and Hopkins’s textual “objects.” Since my work aims to infuse these terms and others with real critical significance, I try when I can to evaluate their meaning in other (and others’) critical contexts. I try, in sum, to be thorough, specific, and concrete, to offer an argument that compensates

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with depth for what it necessarily lacks in breadth. The line of influence traced in these pages is direct and true, but, perhaps, a little narrow; although Tennyson was Keats’s primary inheritor, he was not his only admirer, and I recognize that by excluding the poets associated with both the Pre-Raphaelite and the late-century aesthetic schools (both of which shaped, in different ways and to a lesser degree than Keats and Tennyson, Hopkins’s poetic development), my study proceeds with a kind of tunnel vision. I suspect, moreover, that in addition to parlors, gardens, and shops, a number of the spaces, spatialized concepts, and spatialized objects— including the subconscious, the cell, and the fossil, to name only a few—that figured prominently in discourses new to (or reinvigorated during) the nineteenth century bear some relationship to the lusciousness I describe. I do not pursue these connections, and I do not explore the ways in which the technological advances that allowed for faster travel and telescopic (or microscopic) perspectives redefined the very meaning of containment in the nineteenth century. I hope, however (to borrow Hazlitt’s description of Wordsworth), that the argument’s “strength lies in [its] weakness.” In Wordsworth’s case, Hazlitt writes, “We might get rid of the cynic and the egotist, and find in his stead a common-place man” (119). To broaden the book’s scope, I fear, would render its important evolutionary narrative insufficiently focused and its readings simply insufficient. In the end I have opted, like my poetic subjects, for containment, for the kind of security that only defined boundaries and visible termini can provide. In making those choices, I thought also of Hazlitt’s sketch of Coleridge, which opens with the “age of talkers” critique that serves as my touchstone in this introduction. Coleridge’s career, Hazlitt asserts, was stymied by its potential scope, by what it might have been: Mr Coleridge is too rich in intellectual wealth, to need to task himself to any drudgery: he has only to draw the sliders of his imagination, and a thousand objects expand before him, startling him with their brilliancy … . What is it he could add to the stock, compared to the countless stores that lie about him, that he should stoop to pick up a name, or polish an idle fancy? (40)

By Hazlitt’s account, Coleridge seems Lamian, a figure of “rich”-ness, “brilliancy,” and coiled potential. unlike Lamia, however, Coleridge finds himself consumed by his own muchness, intimidated, arguably, by the dimensional disparity between his divine “wealth” and his mortal person. The result, Hazlitt asserts, is impotence: “Persons of the greatest capacity are often those, who for this reason do the least; for surveying themselves from the highest point of view, amidst the infinite variety of the universe, their own share in it seems trifling, and scarce worth a thought …” (40). Despite a similarly intimidating “capacity,” Lamia resists such impotence, and to gloss her story as a quest, however romantic in its improbability, to retain integrity—to preserve, that is, both corporeal and psychic wholeness—is to align Keats’s poem with the delimiting decisions I have made here. “It was a misfortune to any man of talent to be born in the latter end of the last century” (40), Hazlitt writes, and if Coleridge was a casualty of an expansive era, Keats, like Lamia,

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was determined not to be. By exchanging “the infinite variety of the universe” for material sublimity, Keats redefined Romantic pleasure, and Lamia, as he describes it, is cocooning, a poem that “must take hold of people in some way— give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation.” I possess neither Coleridgean nor Keatsian “stores,” but I have drawn my “sliders” relatively close and hope, therefore, that Keats’s comment about Lamia could apply to this text, to Poetics of Luxury. Indeed, in this new age of talkers—of, that is, historians, linguists, theorists, and critics—what we often want, when cracking a new spine, is what Keats promised of Lamia: “sensation of some sort” (LJK II 189).

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Chapter 1

Wherewith They Weave a Paradise: Keats and the Birth of the Luscious Poem I Touchstone: “Imitation of Spenser” in The Taming of Romanticism, Virgil Nemoianu sought to expand the academy’s perception of Biedermeier literature, not only with respect to its literary merit but also with respect to its national affiliation. The designation Biedermeier, Stana Nenadic explains, “is derived from Gottlieb Biedermeier, a smug, wealthy, oldfashioned provincial philistine, who first appeared as a comic character in a popular German magazine of 1855” (218). The term, which Nemoianu loosely translates as “John Simpleton” and associates with “nostalgic, smiling benevolence,” was originally applied only to German literature produced between 1815 and 1848. Nemoianu, however, contends that the socio-historical conditions underlying the Biedermeier impulse toward “peaceful domestic values, idyllic intimacy … coziness, contentedness … [and] conservatism” (4) did, in fact, extend beyond Germany’s borders. according to Nemoianu, the Biedermeier tradition was fueled by anxiety, plain and simple; despite the fact that the period “managed to avoid major wars,” throughout europe those late-Romantic years were “riddled with outbursts of agitation and rebellion” (6). Since Keats composed his first poem—“an Imitation of Spenser”—in 1814, his brief career corresponds nicely with the onset of the Biedermeier years, and if recent accounts of Keats have employed a variety of aesthetic terms to describe his work, they have often associated him with a taste for homey pleasures and, in the case of Laura Wells Betz, even “charm.” Keats’s “charming style,” Betz asserts, was the product of a “culture” that located “meaning in the realm of the senses—without necessary recourse to ‘ideas’ and even, at times, in direct contravention of them.” according to Betz, the poetry of england’s Simpleton society became “more about experiencing a text than about gaining information from it—in Horatian terms, more about delight … than about instruction,” and she associates that cultural shift with “the general problem of poetry’s relationship to the sensationalism and consumer culture that were increasingly defining British life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (303). Nemoianu himself sees in Keats “a toning down of high-romantic impulses,” an intellectual and cultural back-pedaling; he argues that the youngest Romantic not only “reached back for eighteenth-century reassurance” but was quintessentially Biedermeier, “perhaps the perfect case of a ‘transitional’ poet within romanticism, [a poet] whose

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discourse encompassed the truths of both” the waning eighteenth century and the budding nineteenth (48). and “an Imitation of Spenser,” though a nineteenthcentury poem, is indeed eighteenth-century in flavor. as W. Jackson Bate points out, the extremely labored poem, “inlaid” with fragments of Milton and bits of highly conventional lyric description, actually more closely resembles eighteenthcentury imitations of Spenser than the work of Spenser himself (36). However, perhaps even more significantly Biedermeier than the poem’s reactionary style is its sentiment. Keats’s “Imitation” describes a place not only idyllic but carefully bounded, and thereby suggestive of the Biedermeier taste for pleasantly intimate spaces. The poem portrays a charming island, which andrew Motion glosses as “a miniature england”: “Its seclusion is an emblem of peacefulness in general, and the result of a particular Peace—the Peace between england and France, which was signed in Paris at the time it was written” (63). and since the island “in that fairest lake had placèd been” (l. 20), it actually proves doubly bounded, a discrete environment located inside an unambiguously circumscribed body of water. Given that context, Bate’s description of the poem as “inlaid” takes on new meaning. Keats is extraordinarily specific; although the lake is fed by smaller streams, it exists as a “middle space” ringed by “woven bowers” (ll. 9, 8). even divorced from the enclosing function that they serve here, bowers signify physical and emotional intimacy throughout Keats’s oeuvre, and since the “Imitation” opens with descriptions of Morning’s “orient chamber” (l. 1) and the woodland’s “mossy beds” (l. 5), it seems safe to say that Keats’s career-opening stanza—a word, incidentally, that originates from the Italian for “room”—portrays a semiconcentric series of cozily intimate spaces. But what of the furnishings in that stanza, those rooms? Biedermeier literature centered around comfortable middle-class domesticity; Nemoianu describes the Biedermeier culture as one in which “time seemed to be replaced by space as a dominant category: local landscapes, familiar objects, home and hearth, animals and plants, woods and gardens were fervently sought” (14). The “Imitation” isle seems preternaturally fertile, but even though its fecund spaces are closed and spatially intimate, it would be patently incorrect to call them familiar or conventionally homey. Keats not only populates the isle with swans and fays but furnishes it with materials that, though not actually made of gems, precious metals, exotic woods, and expensive textiles, suggest precisely that kind of uncommonly sensual luxury to the speaker’s imagination. The isle, home to “jetty”-eyed, ebonyfooted swans, is itself “an emerald in the silver sheen / of the bright waters” (ll. 16–17, 25–6). Something more, however, than simple sensuality is at work, and it seems important to note the deliriously inconsistent character of Keats’s imagery. The sun’s “amber” rays produce an incongruous “[s]ilv’ring” effect upon the rills (ll. 3–4), and although the fish appear to ply “silken” fins of “brilliant dye,” their “golden” scales cast a surprising “ruby glow” (ll. 11–13). These mismatched combinations of conventional lyric descriptions seem calculated to cultivate an environment rich but strangely alternative, rather than a classic domestic haven. In sum, the “Imitation of Spenser” seems unusually sensual, and to gloss the poem

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(as so many have done) as merely an early example of Keatsian escapism is to overlook key features of its construction. I acknowledge the poem’s escapist element. after all, the point of the isle— or, at least, the motivation behind the poetic “tell[ing]” of its “wonders”—is to “beguile” Dido of her grief, to “rob from aged Lear his bitter teen” (ll. 19, 21–2). The “Imitation” pits a world of pain against one of beauty, a move not only characteristic of Keats but consistent with the Biedermeier impulse toward the soothing and nostalgic. The problem, though, is that the escape offered within the poem is strangely soothing, an experience that lacks the hallmarks of conventional aristocratic ease. If the island seems, to borrow Betz’s terms, more delightful than instructive, it is also potentially discomfiting. as a result of the Biedermeier-esque spatial constraints in the “Imitation,” Keats’s luxuries seem unnaturally and almost awkwardly condensed, thus generating the queerly conglomerate descriptions noted above. Lines that read, “on his back a fay reclined voluptuously” (l. 18, emphasis added) and “all around it dipped luxuriously / Slopings of verdure” (l. 28, emphasis added) seem to uphold the traditional wisdom that luxury requires ample space, but the poem’s carefully bounded setting (not to mention its tight stanzaic construction) thwarts that wisdom. The result is packed luxury, an internally inconsistent experience that confuses and exhilarates speaker’s and reader’s senses alike. Here, amber is silver, gold is red, and swans reflect snowwhite in ruby-tinted waters: “… golden scalès light / Cast upward, through the waves, a ruby glow: / There saw the swan his neck of archèd snow” (ll. 12–14). If the world portrayed in “Imitation of Spenser” is indeed tight but rich, bewildering but beautiful, neither Biedermeier nor luxurious adequately describes it. Marjorie Levinson’s bourgeois, burdened by negative connotation, is problematic, too. Levinson fairly observes that Keats’s life lacked “ease” (8), but when she compares his mode of “Romantic retirement”—“a young man in a seaside rooming house in april, a borrowed picture of Shakespeare his only companion … [and] with nothing to do for a set period of time but write the pastoral epic which would, literally, make him” (7)—to others’ modes (Coleridge, for example, is “a writer musing in his garden, deserted by his wife and literary friends of an afternoon” [8]), she presumes that the limitations affiliated with bourgeois experience are, with respect to literary creativity, wholly undesirable and necessarily counterproductive. Such presumption is itself limiting—and not, unfortunately, in the less-can-be-more manner that lends Keats’s circumscribed isle (or, perhaps, the human sex experienced by Lamia and Lycius) its striking potency. a new designation is in order, and I propose luscious. With respect to both etymology and connotation, luscious is a word fraught with contradiction; its modern and archaic synonyms—delicious, lush, plush, and lascivious, among others—carry implications that range from the innocently healthful to the perversely indulgent. even more important, however, is the fact that luscious embodies the paradox of confined luxury, its marriage of richness to intimacy. Since the term typically describes pleasurable oral experience, tactile experience, or (less frequently) sexual experience, the luscious stimulus demands close inspection or

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cozy quarters. as an initial definition, the Oxford English Dictionary provides, “of food, perfumes, etc.: Sweet and highly pleasant to the taste or smell,” a description followed by, among many others, a passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that evokes embowered closure: “I know a banke … Quite over-cannopied with luscious woodbine.” as Gail Finney explains, the very word paradise (typically conceived as a luscious haven) has etymological roots in the notion of closedness; it derives from the Persian words for “around” and “to form,” and it initially suggested a kind of walled oasis that stood surrounded by a distinctly un-luscious landscape (7). I hope to demonstrate here that the experience of the luscious—the rich, dense, and closed—informs Keats’s project from its earliest moments, not only at the level of theme but also at the level of form. His verse, in other words, replicates the luscious spaces it describes, and more than simply escapist, that verse responds to a dark and difficult historical moment in a way that is at once critically and psychologically driven. II Luxury Goods into Luscious Experience yeats’s famous association of Keats with the sweetshop window offers a valuable point of entry into a study of Keats’s luscious aesthetic. In “ego Dominus Tuus,” yeats writes, “I see a schoolboy when I think of him, / With face and nose pressed to a sweetshop window, / For certainly he sank into his grave / His senses and his heart unsatisfied” (ll. 55–8). Without a doubt, sweets are luscious material: rich, oral, and delightfully unnecessary. They embody, as yeats puts it, “the luxury of the world” (l. 60) denied Keats by the circumstances of his birth and health. What distinguishes yeats’s pert description of Keatsian sensuality is its smooth blend of elements both social and psychological. In yeats’s remark, the candy exists not in a vacuum but a social space; their presence in the shop window marks the sweets as commercial objects, goods upon which the forces of the marketplace—demand, production, and exchange, to name but a few—act and thereby exert control. With publicly shared (and marketed) experiences like luxury, leisure, and delight as kissing cousins, lusciousness seems an indisputably social concept. at the same time, however, the Keats of yeats’s imagination is a child obsessed, a child for whom the pleasures of the sweetshop are compulsion as well as commodity. With lasciviousness and other forms of excessive desire only branches away on its family tree, luscious experience speaks to—and of—the inborn drives that govern our lifetime pursuits, social and otherwise. Since Keats praised the unintentional in Shakespeare’s sonnets—he described them as “full of fine things said unintentionally … in the intensity of working out conceits” (LJK I 188)—I feel justified in following yeats’s unwitting example as I lay the groundwork here for the study of Keatsian lusciousness that will follow. of course, since our hidden inner lives develop at least partly in response to environmental stimuli, the sociological and the psychological are hardly independent realms,

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and a discussion of one necessarily makes claims about the other. Still, it seems important to consider as best we can the real and conceptual distinctions that exist between a life of the mind and a life in the world, especially as those distinctions relate to a poet so frequently branded as a fervent proponent of one or the other. after identifying the socio-historical elements that influenced the birth of Keats’s luscious aesthetic (as evidenced by the pre-Endymion poetry), I will address key questions more properly labeled psychological. The luxury good—the real-world, marketplace embodiment of conceptual luxury—was an increasingly visible commodity in the early years of the nineteenth century. although the post-war period presented an economic downturn, the england of the mid-teens was, financially speaking, generally in good shape. Stuart Curran points out that despite “factory riots, a periodic threat of famine, the dislocation into the army and navy of an enormous number of young males, and widespread political agitation posing increasing challenges to an outdated, inept political establishment, england emerged from the Napoleonic Wars paradoxically the richest nation on earth” (217). However, long before 1815, British society had already become deeply (if uncomfortably) entrenched within a culture of material luxury. as Britain’s imperialist reach grew farther and stronger in the mid- to late eighteenth century, the domestic market was inundated with exotic goods, and domestic consumers accordingly adapted their attitudes toward consumption. “[a]s both the engines and beneficiaries of Britain’s increasing prosperity from trade and commercial enterprise, ordinary people increased their average annual incomes from 40 to 400 pounds by the 1760s,” Rachel Crawford observes. as a result of their “increasingly capacious pockets,” she continues, england’s new middle classes could afford “the acquisition of comforts once restricted to gentry and aristocrats” (17). Citing elizabeth Gilboy’s “Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution,” Maxine Berg explains that exotic commodities such as tea, chocolate, coffee, calico fabric, ceramics, glass, and metalware were “new wants” that “led those with a surplus ‘to try this and that, and finally to include many new articles in their customary standard of life.’” Surprisingly, perhaps, the poorer classes were similarly affected: “The new commodities also attracted those without the requisite surplus; they worked harder to get the surplus or skimped on necessities” (Berg 65). as this narrative suggests, no discussion of nineteenth-century British consumerism is complete without some attention to issues of empire. However, although scholars have interrogated the extent and the ramifications of cultural and material importation in Romantic-era england, few have considered the relationship between luxury consumption and physical space. Consider, for instance, Timothy Morton’s important characterization of the nineteenth-century spice trade and what he terms “Romantic consumerism,” “a self-reflexive, Kantian form of consumption in which the sense of consuming is itself consumed” (3).1 1 The passages cited here and elsewhere derive from Morton’s essay “Imperial Measures” (2001). For a lengthier treatment of these issues, see Morton’s The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (2000).

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Morton’s lexicon is more theoretical than practical even when he purports to describe the modes by which spices and other luxury goods moved through—as “flow,” below, suggests—the real marketplace: Narratives of colonialism and imperialism have been constantly preoccupied with mastering and representing the flow of commodities. Here spice has often come to stand for this flow in general. There is a complex variety of literary responses to this sign for commodity flow: The most interesting for a scholar of Romanticism being those which parody, ironize and otherwise warp capitalist ideology’s fascination with a fantasy substance that could become a substitute for money itself. (4)

Morton’s “flow” evokes, perhaps, the vast oceans that carried goods-laden ships to and from europe and its far-flung colonies, and the British empire was a grand space, indeed. However, the actual luxury drama—the spending, the display, and the rapid escalation of both—played out for most Britons in much more tangible and confined arenas. The first of these was the shop. as James Walvin explains in Fruits of Empire, by the middle of the eighteenth century, “the emphasis on fashion and style [in London] had reached new, often absurd, levels of extravagance … . The capital’s shops were quite spectacular, more lavish and eye-catching than anything to be found elsewhere in europe” (155). and, as a result of the steadily increasing population that crowded London’s streets, those shops were small, their lavish stock piled high. “Carriages created a traffic jam outside the more fashionable shops,” Walvin recounts, and as showroom floors and display windows became too packed with the goods desired by those anxious consumers, store owners simply opened new retail spaces, thereby proliferating the congestion (156). Moreover, since it was common for a single shop to carry a wide variety of luxury goods, the shopping experience, no matter the size of the shop, was the experience of a world condensed. In tight retail spaces, storekeepers cultivated the same atmosphere of exhilarating, delirious excess suggested by the silky-metallic fish and red-white swans in Keats’s “Imitation of Spenser.” Berg’s description of typical late eighteenth-century shop advertisements is telling: The trade cards and newspaper advertisements of toy-makers, jewellers, silversmiths, and china sellers indicated that many of these goods were sold together. Trade cards produced in the 1720s and 1730s sought to display the wide range of commodities on offer by any individual manufacturer or shopkeeper … . Cartouches were designed as mirror or picture frames or clock cases whose scrolling brackets supported candlesticks, teapots, and ceramics … . Newspaper advertisements also showed this complementary marketing. Joseph Farror’s cheap warehouse, advertised in 1796, offered tea, coffee, chocolate and cocoa, useful and ornamental chinaware … and Stourbridge glassware. William Goods advertised his toy warehouse in 1798 as selling foreign and english toys, cutlery, hardware, perfumery, etc. John Clarke called himself “Perfumer, Cutler, and Toyman … .” (70)

The packed-luxury experience continued within the confines of consumers’ homes. as Berg points out, luxury consumption was not fed by a philosophy

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of acquisition for acquisition’s sake. Certain commodities signaled “a new appreciation of ‘decency’ and ‘utility’ in middle-class domestic environments” (66), and in the name of bourgeois respectability, middle-class consumers adorned their modest homes with exotic goods and Britain-made “semi-luxuries,” including “flint and cut glass, metal alloys and finishes such as gilt and silver plate, stamped brassware, japanned tinware and papier maché, ormolu and cut steel instead of gold and silver” (67). unfortunately, middle-class wages frequently struggled to keep pace with “new wants,” and the bourgeois tendency to pack in the luxury resulted in a wave of bankruptcies and repossessions, especially in the years immediately following 1815. Contemporary accounts of those unhappy events provide a sense of how many expensive goods could be incorporated into a smallish middle-class interior. Nenadic points to David Wilkie’s painting Distraining for the Rent: a classic romantic genre scene, it shows a Scottish rural family in a state of great distress, in the main room of their farmhouse and having their domestic property inventoried by court officials prior to sale for non-payment of rent … . Though a modest interior, there are numerous objects that are up-to-date and fashionable, such as chairs, the bed and washstand with china basin and jug. (221)

Because viewers were sympathetic to its narrative, Wilkie’s painting, Nenadic explains, was among the most popular pictures exhibited at London’s Royal academy in 1815. The painting, she notes, implies no criticism of the family’s ill-fated consumption, and its middle-class viewers were understanding, not censorious. “The objects that are about to be lost are the cement of family life and emotional attachments” (221), and Distraining for the Rent amply illustrates the centrality of luxury consumption and its display to dreams of ideal domesticity. Moreover, since certain types of consumerism signaled Romantic sensibility, the elite classes were as guilty as their middle-class counterparts of stuffing their (significantly larger) homes with material luxuries. Nenadic notes that as a movement rooted in philosophical and psychological ideals, Romanticism, in order to be “experienced and expressed,” had to be “reified in the world of goods, and objects … became visible signs of an essentially amorphous state of mind.” Wealthy consumers converted the requisite Romantic longing for “emotional fulfilment” to a longing for materials, and Romantic houses, Nenadic says, “became sites in which goods that were laden with emotional associations were located” (210). Bourgeois page-turners devoured “silver fork” novels, detailed narratives of wealthy families that regaled readers with “copious descriptions of table services, the decoration of rooms … and such minutiae as the number of silver forks that were required to eat fish in fashionable circles.” Furthermore, anxious to flaunt their wealth and modern Romantic sensibilities, the owners of such “silver fork” country homes put their richly appointed domiciles on display for the middle-class tourists who “flocked to observe first-hand how the vastly wealthy furnished their houses and conducted their lives” (Nenadic 216). and lest we envision those country homes as similar in appearance to the ever-graceful settings of today’s period films, we must recognize the extraordinary magnitude of elite consumerism in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The homes of the wealthy, like the stores in

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which they shopped, were frequently rather ungracefully stuffed with luxury. Nenadic points to abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s gothic estate, as a prime example of elite Romantic consumption, and her description is notable for its emphasis on packed ornamentation: “Scott’s great financial folly was abbotsford [which] he filled with artifacts in great profusion to lend material substance to his ideas about the past … . His income was vast and entirely absorbed by his conspicuous, almost manic consumption of objects to embellish abbotsford” (223–4). as Scott frantically wrote novels to pay his off debts, he “continued to consume and to add to the fabulous and fabulised contents of abbotsford” (225). If the commercial and domestic status quo was indeed packed luxury, where and how does Keatsian lusciousness fit in? Betz rightly notes that although “[m]odern scholars have found Keats’s verse to be complicit with the popular sensationalism and commercialism of the early nineteenth-century period,” “scant attention has been given to the connection between the powerful sensorial experience of Keatsian language on which readers have always commented and the bustling consumer culture in which it was produced” (304). Keats’s own letters attest to his ever-present financial woes—“it appears that Money Troubles are to follow us up for some time to come perhaps for always,” he wrote in 1817 (LJK I 142)—but as Leigh Hunt’s protégé, Keats was immersed in the culture of bourgeois consumerism so effectively described by Berg, Nenadic, and Betz herself.2 Hunt’s “Now, Descriptive of a Hot Day”—a sort of prose poem to which Keats, in Hunt’s words, “contributed one or two of the passages” (in Wu 620)— offers an insider’s glimpse into the luxurious world once reserved solely for the wealthy and leisured: Now blinds are let down and doors thrown open and flannel waistcoats left off, and cold meat preferred to hot, and wonder expressed why tea continues so refreshing, and people delight to sliver lettuces into bowls … . Now fruiterers’ shops and dairies look pleasant, and ices are the only things to those who can get them. Now ladies loiter in baths; and people make presents of flowers; and wine is put into ice; and the after-dinner lounger recreates his head with applications of perfumed water out of long-necked bottles. (Essays 309)

The numerous working-class citizens who appear in “a Now” receive far less nuanced (if Whitmanesque) treatment—“Now labourers look well,” Hunt writes, “resting in their white shirts at the doors of rural alehouses” (Essays 307)— which suggests Hunt’s relative ignorance of the material conditions in which 2

Paraphrasing Neil McKendrick’s “The Consumer Revolution of eighteenthCentury england” and The Birth of a Consumer Society, Betz writes, “eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century england was the setting for the world’s first major consumer society. In this setting, manufacturers and shopkeepers, aided by the increased circulation of new china, clothing, and other goods due to improved trade routes and transportation, hoped that the sensory appeal of these objects would override reason and persuade people to buy aggressively. Though consumerism was developing by 1700, McKendrick shows that its full emergence in english society had not occurred until 1800” (303n).

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the remaining underclass conducted its daily business. In Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure, ayumi Mizukoshi notes that Hunt, born in 1784 to uppermiddle-class parents, was a product of the luxury-loving “culture of affluence” that had been growing steadily since the middle of the eighteenth century. Keats, born in 1795 to a London stable manager, was not so fortunate, and as a result, the aspiring—but not necessarily, as Levinson would suggest, benighted—poet was “eager to join the leisured and ‘cultured’ middle class.” Through Hunt, he did just that, and since, as Mizukoshi observes, “[b]ecoming a member of a circle like Hunt’s was for Keats synonymous with social advancement,” it is no surprise to learn how central Hunt’s ideas were to Keats’s developing aesthetic (13–14). and Hunt did have ideas, particularly about the nature of luxury. For Hunt, pleasure (especially sensual pleasure) was the single most important element in luxurious experience, and Mizukoshi rightly emphasizes this key difference between Hunt and the Romantic collectors described by Nenadic. She writes, The hallmark of Hunt’s aesthetic project was its total affirmation of pleasure, without any moral or religious justification. Hunt seemed to be the first middleclass writer to advocate pleasure for its own sake, and to regard the enjoyment of life as “the earthly possibility of the only end of virtue itself” … . Through his aesthetic project, he came to terms with—or rather, thoroughly approved of— the culture of affluence in which luxury had become “essential” to a bourgeois life. (25)

Hunt’s emphasis on pleasure brings us closer to the luscious aesthetic of Keats’s “Imitation of Spenser,” in which descriptions of rich materials play to our senses— “so fair a place was never seen, / of all that charmed romantic eye” (23–4)—rather than our conscience or intellect. However, since spatial intimacy and packed-ness are also key to my definition of luscious experience, it is crucial to recognize how attuned Hunt was to the predicament of bourgeois urbanites and suburbanites, many of whom made their homes in tight quarters. Hunt’s “critique of contained forms,” Crawford observes, “is distinguished because, perhaps naively, he is never vexed by the stigma of small or defined spaces” (6). as Mizukoshi explains, Hunt was a strong proponent of the “gardenesque aesthetic,” and his popular manuals on the subject urged readers to appreciate natural luxury—lush vegetation condensed in small urban and suburban gardens—as the form of indulgence best suited, ironically, to the lifestyle of a city-dweller. Mizukoshi contends that “what distinguished Hunt’s gardening book [The Months: Descriptive of the Successive Beauties of the Year] was that it offered useful tips for how to be ‘a lover of nature’ with little money. He advised that ‘if ever money is well spent upon luxury, it is upon such as draws one to love the cheap kindness of nature.’” “[H]owever small a portion,” Mizukoshi writes, a suburban garden “could give ‘a retired and verdant feeling’ and ‘something of the whispering and quiet amplitude of nature’” (44–5). Hunt encouraged readers to fill their villa gardens with flowering shrubs and trees or, in the absence of even the smallest plot, to surround themselves with potted plants. elizabeth Kent, Hunt’s sister-in-law and fellow advocate of the suburban

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gardenesque aesthetic, argued in favor of so-called “portable gardens” as a means of avoiding the “folly … of refusing all pleasure” (in Mizukoshi 45). although in later years Keats (and the readers who admired him) strove to sever his reputation from Hunt’s low-art taint, it seems safe to say that Hunt’s preference for “leafy luxury,” which significantly influenced Hunt’s own themes, played an important role in his protégé’s preoccupation with the luscious. Luscious Experience into Luscious Text The opinions of friends and mentors, especially when sanctioned by the larger culture’s interests and expectations, present a formidable vision-shaping force, but every mind also answers to psychological imperatives uniquely its own. even in the earliest moments of his career, Keats articulated a philosophy of the luscious distinct from Hunt’s in some fundamental ways. Mizukoshi points out that Keats, like Hunt, practiced container gardening; in an 1819 letter to Fanny Keats, he writes, “I ordered some bulbous roots for you at the Gardeners, and they sent me some, but they were all in bud—and could not be sent, so I put them in our Garden There are some beautiful heaths now in bloom in Pots” (LJK II 51). However, unlike the London shopkeepers and Hunt-inspired suburban gardeners who tended small spaces out of necessity, Keats intentionally privileged tight quarters. His “o Solitude!” makes a distinction between kinds of tightness but ultimately advocates the keeping of “vigils” in confined spaces. The city presents unpleasant condensation—“the jumbled heap / of murky buildings” (ll. 2–3)—but when confronted with the openness of “the dell, / Its flowery slopes, [and] its river’s crystal swell” (ll. 4–5), Keats’s speaker takes refuge “’[m]ongst boughs pavilioned” (l. 7). In fact, more than a few of the early poems read like the meditations of an agoraphobic, and if, as Levinson observes, Keats frequently escaped to “publicly designated resorts” such as Margate and Surrey (7), those environs rarely if ever appear in the poetry as sweeping landscapes, despite the fact that Keats, “alone and off-season” (Levinson 7), must have experienced them as relatively crowdless and uncongested. although young Calidore initially “smiles at the far clearness all around” (l. 7), he quickly finds his heart “well nigh over-wound” (l. 8), and he “turns for calmness” (l. 9) to a more closed, intimate space: “the pleasant green / of easy slopes, and shadowy trees that lean / So elegantly o’er the waters’ brim” (ll. 9–11). From the safety of the “bowery shore,” the knight sees a “jumbled heap” constituted by vegetal elements instead of architectural ones. The “sequestered leafy glades,” in which Calidore sees “[l]arge dock leaves, spiral foxgloves, or the glow / of the wild cat’s-eyes, or the silvery stems / of delicate birch trees, or long grass which hems / a little brook” (48–52), evoke a wildly amplified suburban garden, but Keats’s knight—and Keats, it seems—takes great pleasure in the image of tangled growth. and lest we associate moments like these with a merely Romantic appreciation of nature, it seems important to note the passage’s un-Wordsworthian, un-Shelleyan rejection of conventional sublimity. No single spectacular presence (a mountain or lake, perhaps) dominates the scene, nor is the plein air experience central. as Keats suggests in “To Hope,” “[t]he bare heath of

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life” presents, both literally and metaphorically, “no bloom” (l. 4); hope dwells not in the open air, but hides beneath “woven boughs” (l. 8) and canopies of “silver pinions.” although Keats was by nearly all accounts a sociable man critical of extended bouts of solitude—“I was in too much Solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought as an only resource,” he complained to Hunt in 1817 (LJK I 138–9)—his writing articulates an apparently deep-seated desire to burrow, if not necessarily to hide. What about rich enclosures appealed to Keats is a more difficult question to answer. His sonnet “To a Friend who Sent me some Roses” suggests that garden produce (as opposed to wild flora) is sweeter and more social for having been cultivated in an enclosed environment: “I thought the garden-rose [the musk-rose] far excelled: / But when, o Wells! thy roses came to me / My sense with their deliciousness was spelled: / Soft voices had they, that with tender plea / Whispered of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquelled” (ll. 10–14). In contrast, the sonnet “To one who has been long in city pent” suggests that luscious spaces foster a healthy degree of introversion. The poem’s speaker takes only brief pleasure in “the fair / and open face of heaven” (ll. 2–3) before “[f]atigued he sinks into some pleasant lair / of wavy grass, and reads a debonair / and gentle tale of love and languishment” (ll. 6–8). These conflicting possibilities aside, it seems most important to recognize the fact that Keats consistently associates luscious spaces with literary productivity. Keats’s own rooms were always tight, and although they could not properly be described as rich, he reveled in their crowded coziness. “I have unpacked my books,” he writes to Reynolds in 1817, “put them into a snug corner—pinned up Haydon—Mary Queen of Scotts, and Milton with his daughters in a row. In the passage I found a head of Shakespeare … . I like it extremely—This head I have hung over my books, just above the three in a row … . Now this alone is a good morning’s work” (LJK I 130). In spaces like these he penned his verse, verse that consistently shelters the creative act in packed interiors and overgrown bowers. an early verse epistle to George Keats defines poetic vision as a view of “golden halls” (l. 35) crowded with “ladies fair” (l. 37) and amply supplied with “rich brimmed goblets, that incessant run / Like the bright spots that move about the sun; / and when upheld, the wine from each bright jar / Pours with the lustre of a falling star” (ll. 39–42). Keats’s verse epistle to George Felton Mathew, in contrast, supplies a particularly lucid example of a naturally— that is, leafily—luscious creative space. If the poetic muse, that “fine-eyed maid” (l. 35), will come to Keats, “surely it must be whene’er I find / Some flowery spot, sequestered, wild, romantic, / That often must have seen a poet frantic” (ll. 36–8). as in “Calidore,” the secluded place in question is a tangle of luscious vegetation, an exhilarating but confusing mishmash of visual, tactile, and olfactory stimuli: Where oaks, that erst the Druid knew, are growing, and flowers, the glory of one day, are blowing; Where the dark-leaved laburnum’s drooping clusters Reflect athwart the stream their yellow lustres, and intertwined the cassia’s arms unite, With its own drooping buds, but very white.

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Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century Where on one side are covert branches hung, ’Mong which the nightingales have always sung In leafy quiet: where to pry, aloof, atween the pillars of the sylvan roof, Would be to find where violet beds were nestling, and where the bee with cowslip bells was wrestling. (ll. 39–49)

The aesthetic of “Sleep and Poetry” is strikingly similar. The speaker begs of Poesy to “[y]ield from thy sanctuary some clear air,” but he immediately qualifies his desire for openness. The “clear air,” it turns out, must be “[s]moothed for intoxication by the breath / of flowering bays, that I may die a death / of luxury” (ll. 56–9). “[a] bowery nook,” Keats writes, “Will be elysium—an eternal book / Whence I may copy many a lovely saying / about the leaves, and flowers …” (ll. 63–6). The nook-as-book equivalence set forth so clearly in “Sleep and Poetry” recurs frequently throughout the early work, but most often in reverse: Keats portrays text as luscious space. Poetry is not only born of richly adorned palaces and choked gardens; it resembles those spaces as well. To some degree, this tendency, too, seems Hunt-inspired. Crawford notes that Hunt’s work “consistently reveals crossings between lyric and topographical spaces” and “illustrates the porous boundaries between poetry and horticulture by inverting a well-established convention in garden treatises of presenting garden design in literary terms” (6, 7). However, where Hunt and his forerunners speak only figuratively about the spatial qualities of verse—“I think there are as many Kinds of Gardening as of Poetry,” addison writes, “your makers of Parterres and Flower-Gardens, are epigrammists and Sonneteers in this art. Contrivers of Bowers and Grotto’s, Treillages and Cascades, are Romance Writers” (in Crawford 7)—Keats takes a more literal view of poetry’s capacity to relocate its readers. In his sonnet commemorating Hunt’s release from prison, he expresses contempt for those who “[t]hink … [Hunt] naught but prison walls did see” during the period of his incarceration (l. 6). The truth, Keats contends, is that because Hunt read, “far happier, nobler was his fate! / In Spenser’s halls he strayed, and bowers fair, / Culling enchanted flowers” (ll. 7–9). Chaucer, another of Keats’s favorites, also constructs verse spaces; playing with the language of poetry’s own architecture (lines and stops), Keats describes The Floure and the Leafe: “This pleasant tale is like a little copse: / The honeyed lines do freshly interlace / To keep the reader in so sweet a place, / So that he here and there full-hearted stops” (“Written on a Blank Space at the end of chaucer’s tale of The Floure and the Leafe” ll. 1–4). at its best, Keats suggests, verse space is strange and inescapable, as enveloping as a real-world bower. In a passage reminiscent of the exhilarating confusion that pervades the “Imitation of Spenser,” Keats argues for texts that grip in “I stood tiptoe”: and when a tale is beautifully staid, We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade: When it is moving on luxurious wings, The soul is lost in dewy smotherings: Fair dewy roses brush against our faces,

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and flowering laurels spring from diamond vases; o’er head we see the jasmine and sweet briar, and bloomy grapes laughing from green attire; While at our feet, the voice of crystal bubbles Charms us at once away from all our troubles: So that we feel uplifted from the world, Walking upon the white clouds wreathed and curled. (ll. 129–40)

The vase-bound laurels alone supply an image that suggests verse in or as enclosure, and the “staid,” as opposed to the simpler said, delicately implies the relative permanence of text vis-à-vis speech. Meanwhile, Keats’s careful articulation of the glade’s tendency to cling and gently “smother” suggests enclosure in a sort of womb-like garden, while references to diamond, crystal, and fruit lend a sense of luxury to the textual tableau. But here surfaces another significant point. Keats consistently associates verse with space, but with equal frequency he describes texts as palliatives, real medicines that heal the wounds inflicted by life’s slings and arrows. Just as Keats’s “tell[ing]” in the “Imitation of Spenser” can alleviate the suffering of Dido and Lear, his textual glade is a place of “safety” that “[c]harms us … away from all our troubles.” Though frequently mediated by memory, the palliative of choice in Lyrical Ballads is space—that is, wide open nature—itself, but in an interesting twist on the Wordsworthian space-as-healer philosophy, Keats finds medication in poetic spaces that heal. “I felt rather lonely this Morning at breakfast,” Keats wrote to his brothers in 1817, “so I went and unbox’d a Shakespeare—‘There’s my Comfort’” (LJK I 128). It becomes important, then, to recognize the etymological and material links between lusciousness and self-medication. The nineteenth century introduced the term lush to describe both the drunkard—the quintessential self-medicator—and his drink, and although Keats’s fondness for claret was, by all accounts, well regulated, one might consider him lush-ious in other respects. He was indeed soothed by poetry, but even in the earliest letters and poems, Keats also proclaims himself a poetry addict, susceptible even to the symptoms of withdrawal. alethea Hayter observes that by the end of the seventeenth century, opium addiction and withdrawal were afflictions well documented (if not entirely understood) by the medical community (23), and Keats, trained as an apothecary, was certainly familiar with the side effects of such a commonly prescribed remedy. “I find that I cannot exist without poetry,” Keats writes to Reynolds, “—without eternal poetry—half the day will not do—the whole of it—I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan—I had become all a Tremble from not having written any thing of late—the Sonnet over leaf did me good. I slept the better last night for it—this Morning, however, I am nearly as bad again” (LJK I 133). Later, after an Endymion-writing binge, he describes similar sensations: I went day by day at my Poem for a Month at the end of which time the other day I found my Brain so overwrought that I had neither Rhyme nor reason in it—so was obliged to give up work for a few days—I hope soon to be able to resume my Work—I have endeavoured to do so once or twice but to no Purpose—instead

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With respect to its originator, then, the luscious poem is so described not only for its closed richness but also for the unparalleled mental state that its closed richness affords. under the influence of verse, Keats is satiated and high, unhampered by “lowness of spirits.” Conversely, life without verse leaves him beastly hungry and physically ill. In his treatment of Keats and Romantic-era brain science, alan richardson reads narcotic references in Endymion, The Fall of Hyperion, and other poems as emblematic of “a material side to the Romantic imagination that contrasts markedly with the more familiar transcendentalist account” (144), but his observation overlooks the addictive and material quality that Keats early attributes to poetic texts themselves, as opposed to the imagination that produces them. The distinction is important; Keats finds comfort not in the idea of Shakespeare, imaginer, but in the text he unboxes and reads. Interestingly enough, Hayter speculates that Keats may have experimented with opium from time to time during his most productive years. She acknowledges that “[t]here is no absolute evidence that Keats ever tasted laudanum before the winter of 1819–20, after he had written all his important poetry” (311), but she observes telltale signs of opium-induced creativity in Keats’s imagery. opium’s effects, Hayter argues, are primarily suggested by Keats’s poetic moods; she describes the 1819 sonnet “on Sleep” as “the perfect expression of that release from anxiety, that enclosed safety, which the opium-eater—though not he alone—hopes to find” (321). The material point is this: Whether or not Keats consumed opium, he had more and more need as time progressed for the kind of safety that only an alternative reality could afford. In addition to a politically and culturally uncertain age (the anxious Biedermeier years), Keats faced tragic personal circumstances that ranged from lost brothers and lost love to lost confidence and lost health. as Marilyn Gaull puts it, Keats, “perhaps more than any other writer, had reason to believe that the world was a ‘Vale of Soul-making’ … for by the time he was fifteen, his father had died in a fall from a horse, his mother from consumption; he had lost an infant brother, a favorite uncle, and the grandfather with whom he had been living” (221). In the face of such gut-wrenching loss it seems unreasonable to expect from Keats a purely intellectual response, and in light of the physicality, the rich enterableness, with which he imbued the textual experience, we need not. Richardson identifies “[a] conviction in the importance of ‘internal’ sensation—as opposed to Locke’s exclusive attention to the five external senses—” as one of the key features of Romantic psychology, and he contends that “[o]ne might … call Keats the most visceral of the english poets, so long as ‘visceral’ is understood as continuous with, rather than opposed to, intellectual—the sense it had in the brain science of his time” (129). In the mind-made luscious poem, Keats conceives an appropriately visceral response to gut-wrenching experience: a carefully

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circumscribed alternative space (always carefully marked as such by its strange extremity) of abundant sensual pleasure. in Black Sun, Julia Kristeva offers a similar analysis of beauty, “the depressive’s other realm”: Sublimation’s dynamics, by summoning up primary processes and idealization, weaves a hypersign around and with the depressive void. This is allegory, as lavishness of that which no longer is, but which regains for myself a higher meaning because I am able to remake nothingness, better than it was and within an unchanging harmony, here and now and forever, for the sake of someone else. artifice, as sublime meaning for and on behalf of the underlying, implicit nonbeing, replaces the ephemeral … . [B]eauty is the admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to make it live. (99)

Keats is frequently glossed as a tragic poet of beauty, his life of loss fused, Kristeva-style, with his artistry. The back cover of Penguin’s Complete Poems, for example, observes in dramatic bold-face that “Keats survives as the archetypal Romantic genius who suffered a tragically early death.”3 other critics are less comfortable associating Romanticism with personal tragedy. Nemoianu warns against a criticism that in extrapolating from “individual consciousness” to the larger culture recreates Romanticism as “a perfect mandala, a secondary reality— autonomous, intelligible, but in a sense lifeless and separated from the pressures of history and the surrounding culture” (22). The problem, of course, is that historical and biological pressures can stimulate in even the most committed realist an intense desire (or psychological need) for just such an alternative reality. and when that desire leads one artist to establish, however unwittingly, an influential textual tradition, it seems worth evaluating it with respect to the larger culture. Luscious Text into Luscious Form Susan Wolfson agrees that Keats’s take on text was influential. In The Questioning Presence, she argues that the Romantics (Wordsworth and Keats particularly) realized that language, in addition to representing reality, has the capacity to generate new truths and an alternative perspective on the real. “Questioning,” she writes, “is an active power of dislocation” (19), and her perhaps unintentional adoption of a spatial lexicon—“dislocation,” after all, denotes movement in space—suggests an alignment between her argument and the one I am making here. a poem that questions, Wolfson asserts, becomes an alternative reality, a place of unusual or even uncertain intellectual landscape. She invokes Coleridge, who praises “the 3 See also, more recently, Mark Sandy’s observation about Philip Roth’s choice in Everyman (2006) of an epigraph excerpted from “ode to a Nightingale”: “[Everyman] meditates on those personal and professional disappointments of contemporary life and the inevitability of death itself … . His epigraph reminds us how modern Keats’s tragic consciousness was with its ability to bespeak our greatest fears to us from some two hundred years ago” (155).

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marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the Faery Queene”: “[I]t is truly in land of Faery, that is, of mental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep, and you neither wish, nor have the power, to inquire where you are, or how you got there” (in Wolfson 36). For Keats, as I have observed, that mental space materializes in/as text, and while the device central to Wolfson’s position is the question, our rhetorical focus must somehow evoke a more substantive experience. If the interrogative poem derives from the question, the luscious poem derives from the list. The catalogue is an ancient literary device, and although Keats’s use of that structure speaks, perhaps, to his typically Romantic preoccupation with the epic, I am less interested in the list’s heritage than its affective potential and unique form. although I use the words catalogue and list interchangeably (as speakers frequently do today), it is worth noting that the term catalogue initially denoted an oral event—a mnemonic device born of the constraints inherent to the dissemination of oral culture—while the list, as Walter ong explains in his seminal evaluation of orality and literacy, is a distinctly textual phenomenon, a device that locates words in a clearly defined space, usually a visual one (123–4). When the catalogue maintained a presence in the epics of post-classical, literate Western cultures, it effectively became a kind of poetic list and as such, literature’s most efficient way to convey the experience of bounty. Given the luscious poem’s debt to nineteenth-century consumer culture, it is significant that outside the worlds of literature and taxonomy, the word catalogue is most often associated with shopping. a catalogue can introduce distance consumers to the material dimension of a shop if not the actual shop space, and Berg’s descriptions of late eighteenthcentury trade catalogues suggest that those documents were designed to highlight the kind of detail (complementary silver and glassware patterns, for example) that a real-life consumer would have to be in close proximity to observe. In addition to text, catalogues provided illustrations, and those visual lists allowed consumers to choose from a wide array of, say, ornate brass furniture handles with near first-hand knowledge of their details (70–72). In poetry, a list affords the same inthe-midst aesthetic, the same blend of generalized atmosphere and particularized experience. Perhaps the best known practitioner of so-called catalogue verse, Walt Whitman constructed lists that suggest everything from a condensed and close-knit america to a whole universe centered and shrunken around Whitman himself. Just as the speaker of “I Hear america Singing” feels surrounded by the “varied carols” of mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, shoemakers, and wood-cutters, the authoritative voice of “Song of Myself” celebrates cacophony with a list of urban noises and noisemakers: The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders, The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of shod horses on the granite floor, The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls, The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs, The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital … . (ll. 154–7)

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Calidore, too, sees in lists, and considering the fragment’s “twilight” setting, the knight’s ability to distinguish and catalogue dock leaves, foxgloves, cat’s-eyes, birch trees, and “long grass” is that much more noteworthy (ll. 48–51). The density and specificity of Keats’s description animates the vague “sequestered leafy glades” of line 47, and the result is an experience at once variegated and consistent, since the diverse plant life is homogenized by Calidore’s “glad senses” into a backdrop of “pleasant things” (ll. 54, 53). Keats’s own description of Devonshire—“it is a splashy, rainy, misty snowy, foggy, haily floody, muddy, slipshod County” (LJK i 241, punctuation sic)—is similar in kind to Calidore’s, though evocative of a much less pleasant landscape. Critics have begun to explore the ways in which lists played an important role in Romantic-era formal experimentation. To return, briefly, to “a Now” is to recognize that Hunt’s paean to (sub)urban luxury is essentially a list, and Timothy Webb observes that Hunt, Mary Robinson (in “London’s Summer Morning,” for instance), and others often relied on catalogue to capture “the crowded and cacophonous”—but not necessarily unpleasant—“plurality of city life” (98). Jeffrey Robinson, whose Unfettering Poetry also aims to broaden readers’ perception of the Romantic aesthetic by treating not only Robinson and Hunt but also the Della Cruscans and Felicia Hemans, posits a Romantic poetics of “fancy” that, unlike a Wordsworthian-Coleridgean poetics of high imagination, “isn’t about ‘work’ or ‘usefulness’ but about play” (11). If “the poetry of Fancy [has] a form,” Robinson writes, its defining feature is “a paratactic syntax”: “Parataxis can honor the outward-directedness of the Fancy by the theoretically infinite listing of elements in the world or in images” (13). although the term parataxis, derived from the Greek “beside arrangement” (Cuddon 638), simply denotes a list whose elements are presented without subordination (and, frequently, without conjunction), paratactic poetry affords a number of aesthetic possibilities. In the absence of an extensive body of criticism dedicated to Romantic-era list-making, today’s language poets and their critics provide a useful if unlikely source of insight into the value of parataxis, since the associative nature of language poetry links that fairly new mode to older catalogue-based structures—and to the earlier poets who employed them. as Bob Perelman explains, language writing thrives on series of individuated ideas, each of which “is more or less ordinary itself but gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has tangential relevance” (313). Michael Patrick o’Connor associates parataxis with a sense of “piling up” as well as effects as diverse as swift movement, compression, humor, logic, and formality (880). Similarly, Perelman notes that parataxis can “imply continuity and discontinuity simultaneously”; readers can work to draw connections among the atomized components of a list, but parataxis “keeps in check … the ‘syllogistic movement’ that would bind sentences into larger narrative, expository, and ideological unities” (316, 317). Barbara Herrnstein Smith incorporates these truths regarding the list’s expressive potential into a discussion of its unique structural qualities. Since parataxis by definition eschews those elements (subordinating conjunctions,

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in particular) that make for complex rhetoric, paratactic structures embody a formal naïveté unparalleled by any other rhetorical mode (102). Moreover, although o’Connor and Perelman imply that parataxis suggests juxtaposition, Smith observes that parataxis also generates a kind of organic coherence. “In a nonparatactic structure,” she writes, “the dislocation or omission of any element will tend to make the sequence as a whole incomprehensible, or will radically change its effect. In a paratactic structure … thematic units can be omitted, added, or exchanged without destroying the coherence or effect of the poem’s thematic structure” (99). These features of parataxis, both affective and formal, correlate with the features of the luscious poem in significant ways. as a category that fuses luxury with strains of addiction, eroticism, and childish excess, the luscious is well suited to a structure that can express contradiction, accumulation, primitivism, and redundancy. a brief list from “I stood tiptoe” perhaps best proves this point. In the face of “many pleasures,” Keats’s speaker “straightway began to pluck a posy / of luxuries bright, milky, soft and rosy” (ll. 26–8), and this act of gathering flowers into a “beside arrangement”—that is, a literal parataxis—inspires a short catalogue of luxurious adjectives that hint simultaneously at the playful and the illicit. after all, flower-picking is at once a child’s pastime, an opium-eater’s fixation, and a troubadour’s metaphor for sex. It takes a list to articulate that range. But as I have described it, spatial tightness is a crucial feature of the luscious aesthetic, and despite the fact that a list, its elements organized in lines or chained together with commas, occupies a distinct textual space, paratactic structures are difficult to close. Parataxis can suggest condensation—again, the sort of in-themidst-of-the-merchandise experience afforded by a shop’s catalogue—but as Smith points out in Poetic Closure, a paratactic structure, as a result of its associative nature, “does not wind itself up” (108). a list has no natural stopping point and, as a result, no formal closure. When, in his description of fancy, Robinson invokes “the theoretically infinite,” his diction is more congenial to conventional sublimity than Keatsian material sublimity, and if text afforded Keats a carefully circumscribed, pleasure-rich alternative to real space, the inherently open-ended list, despite its affinities with luscious experience, ultimately seems a flawed foundation for the luscious poem. Is it possible for a catalogue-based text to provide Keats the artist with the kind of safe, enclosed space that he grants his poetic personae? Is it possible to evoke the luscious without a list—or is it possible to close a paratactic structure after all? These questions are the ones that shaped Keats’s development and ultimately established his legacy. Keats realized almost immediately that Endymion, paratactic at the micro-level, macro-level, and every level in between, lacked enclosure despite its hero’s penchant for bowers and nests. “I am anxious to get endymion printed that I may forget it and proceed,” Keats wrote to Taylor in late February, 1818 (LJK I 239); it was late January, however, when an already forward-looking Keats articulated Endymion’s most significant problem. “[T]he Hero of [Endymion] being mortal is led on, like Buonaparte, by circumstance,” he wrote, “whereas the apollo in Hyperion being a fore-seeing God will shape his actions like one”

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(LJK I 207). In other words, Endymion’s narrative, a set of circumstances strung together paratactically, defies satisfactory closure because its form presupposes endless proliferation. Keats, however, never abandoned the list. Instead, in the ripening work of 1818 and the mature work of 1819, he brought parataxis into dialogue with closure, and the result was a luscious aesthetic embodied in a truly luscious form. III Wandering in endymion From the outset, Keats understood Endymion as a spatial endeavor. “I must make 4000 Lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry,” he wrote in 1817, his language evoking a task not unlike furnishing an empty warehouse. Within a text-as-space framework, a 4,000-line poem is roomy indeed, but Keats continues, articulating his intention to pack his grand textual space with poetic stuff: “I have heard Hunt say and may be asked—why endeavor after a long Poem? To which I should answer—Do not Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found in a second Reading: which may be food for a Week’s stroll in the Summer?” (LJK I 170). The readers of Endymion, it seems, are meant to experience an environment of close excess in which they may sort with picky discrimination through a variety of attractively displayed verse delicacies—an environment not unlike that of a fine shop. It turns out, however, that Keats could offer more in the space of 4,000 lines than the most enterprising storekeeper could offer in the space of a Romantic-era boutique. In honor of the work he dubbed “a trial of my Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention” (LJK I 169), Keats paradoxically both continued to privilege the spatially tight—the “little Region to wander in”—and freed himself of spatial constraint. unlike the shopkeeper who must carefully manage his inventory in order to maximize floor and window space for profitable display, Keats composed (initially, at least) secure in the value of more of the same, and in the process of fleshing out his “one bare circumstance,” he imbued Endymion with a distinctly aggregative aesthetic. Bailey’s account of Keats’s writing habits testifies explicitly to what the finished poem implies: Endymion was an exercise in poetic addition, a project conceived and executed in terms of breadth, not depth. “He sat down to his task,” Bailey wrote, “which was about 50 lines a day,—with his paper before him, & wrote with as much regularity, & apparently with as much ease, as he wrote his letters … . Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task,—but not often: & he would make it up another day” (in Bate 206). unfortunately, Keats’s was the theoretical perspective of the economist, not the practical perspective of the shopkeeper; as Gaull observes, adam Smith and his nineteenth-century inheritors “made sheer productivity a goal, equating it with progress and success—in fact, with happiness” (115).

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In literary (particularly formal) terms, “sheer productivity” translates as parataxis, and the paratactic quality of the poem is the feature that perhaps most contributes to what Karen Swann calls “the tedium of reading Endymion” (20). The poem is a struggle not simply because its bowers, lovers, and fine phrases are too many but also because they are ineffectively integrated. Bate identifies Endymion as “one of the most diluted poems Keats ever wrote” (171), and although his metaphor effectively captures the uncoordinated character of the poem’s narrative, it implies an affective roominess that Keats’s clinging and sometimes cloying language thwarts at every turn. The story is dilute, but the poem itself is thick with ever-proliferating images of lushness. as Endymion’s famous opening lines imply, Keats associates aesthetic pleasure with an infinite capacity for growth and addition: “a thing of beauty is a joy forever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness” (I, ll. 1–3). The art-as-timeless trope is, of course, a common one, but Keats’s strange interest in beauty’s capacity for increase seems to have gone unnoticed. Bate does observe that Keats “kept adding details—snatching at embellishments as mere filler—as he dashed forward” (174), but one might consider Keats’s unwieldy embellishment as indicative of more than mere impatience. The beginning of Endymion seems to echo Shakespeare’s opening sonnet—the one in which the Bard observes that “[f]rom fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty’s rose might never die” (ll. 1–2)—and this linguistic connection suggests that Keats’s additive mindset holds more than circumstantial significance. Shakespeare’s ultimate interest is his lover’s progeny, but the “us” to which Keats refers in Endymion’s fourth line is beauty’s beneficiary, not beauty itself. While Shakespeare imagines beauty proliferating predictably through generations upon generations of his golden lover’s offspring, Keats envisions increase without reference to any such relative principle. “In spite of all,” he writes, “Some shape of beauty moves away the pall / From our dark spirits” (I, ll. 11–13), and the list of beauties that follows is the first of his speaker’s many paratactic outbursts: [...] Such the sun, the moon, Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make ’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest break, Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms: and such too is the grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead; all lovely tales that we have heard or read— (I, ll. 13–22)

The list conjures a luscious experience complete with the close, sensual richness of a “shady boon,” a “cooling covert,” and a “mid-forest break.” The difficulty for the reader is that these descriptive elements proliferate without a clear relationship to one another and certainly without subordination to a more encompassing picture. The fact that the list stops, heavy-footed, on the word “dead” might have

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been enough to provide a sense of thematic if not formal closure (Smith 109) had Keats not concluded the introductory verse paragraph by celebrating his parade of beauties as “[a]n endless fountain of immortal drink, / Pouring unto us from heaven’s brink” (I, ll. 23–4; emphasis added). although the passage itself eventually stops, it never generates an end, either formally or metaphorically. The same, perhaps, can be said of Endymion as a whole. Luscious image follows luscious image,4 but with respect to producing a “finish of fine sight,” Keats resembles the Hunt of Rimini, not only effecting the Cynthia/Indian Maiden union with unsatisfactory speed but also concluding the work with literal wandering. Cynthia informs Peona that she and endymion will “range these forests” (IV, ll. 993–4), and Peona herself is our final image, a figure wandering “home through the gloomy wood in wonderment” (IV, l. 1004). In light of the authorial set-up provided in Book I, this is particularly surprising. Keats’s enthusiastic speaker— “’tis with full happiness that I / Will trace the story of endymion” (I, ll. 34–5)— describes his project (much as Keats himself described it to Bailey) as the simple progression of scene upon scene. He then lists the richly pleasant conditions under which he writes: ... each pleasant scene Is growing fresh before me as the green of our own valleys: so I will begin Now while I cannot hear the city’s din; Now while the early budders are just new, and run in mazes of the youngest hue about old forests; while the willow trails Its delicate amber; and the dairy pails Bring home increase of milk. (I, ll. 37–45)

Those conditions add up, of course, to springtime, and of no small significance to the argument here is the fact that Keats’s speaking author articulates a plan to contain his project within the better part of a calendar year. He will begin in spring, write through summer “as the year / Grows lush in juicy stalks” (ll. 45–6), and conclude his story in the fall: “[L]et autumn bold, / With universal tinge of sober gold, / Be all about me when I make an end” (ll. 55–7). each season becomes associated with a luscious space—spring with tendril-tied forests, summer with full-grown bowers (l. 48), autumn with a palpable, wall-like light that stands “all about” the speaker—and although this trip through the seasons and their splendors constitutes a sort of list, it is a list with a built-in ending. The year ends by definition with the “bare and hoary” winter season (l. 54), and the certainty of this temporal closure matches the clear boundedness of the seasonal “rooms” that Keats offers by way of describing the calendar. These moments of sure closure, however, contrast 4 For further discussion of the “series of sylvan enclosures” (22) that constitutes Endymion, see erin Sheley, who takes a rather more optimistic view than I of the fact that the poem “ends outside the bower” (29).

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significantly and uncomfortably not only with the uneasy conclusion of the narrative but also with the excess-forever quality of the paratactic accounts that constitute it. We might wonder, for example, how long it takes endymion to “[hie] / Through caves, and palaces of mottled ore, / Gold dome, and crystal wall, and turquoise floor, / Black polished porticoes of awful shade, / and, at the last, a diamond balustrade, / Leading afar past wild magnificence” (II, ll. 593–98). endymion’s adventures defy both geographic and temporal constraint, and the same is true of the lists that describe them. a paratactic description cannot wrap up spatially, but neither can it effect closure temporally. This is a truth that endymion himself articulates in Book II, when ensconced in a “grotto, vaulted vast, / o’er-studded with a thousand, thousand pearls, / and crimson-mouthèd shells with stubborn curls of every shape and size” (II, ll. 878–81), he reviews the timeline of his life. “In this cool wonder,” Keats explains, “endymion sat down, and ’gan to ponder / on all his life,” starting with childhood and ending with his recent “wanderings all” (II, ll. 885–901). The trick, of course, is that endymion’s paratactic journey toward love and self-discovery is far from over, and Keats’s list of biographical events ends with a question: “‘and now,’ thought he, / ‘How long must I remain in jeopardy / of bland amazements that amaze no more?’” (II, ll. 901–3). endymion has grown weary, and by this point one cannot help but wonder whether Keats has, too. The invocation to Book IV makes no mention of the seasons with which Keats’s speaker initially intended to bookend his narrative project and, all told, gets down to the business of storytelling quickly and abruptly. Weaving in 1818 ultimately, then, Endymion is a poem about enclosure that never formally achieves enclosure. as endymion pursues his quest, we find him variously trapped, bound, and entangled in palaces, bowers, and woods, but those spaces exist in infinite time and endless—not packed—richness. However, Keats was no slow learner, and the Endymion-writing experience proved instructive. Two early 1818 sonnets, “on Sitting Down to Read King Lear once again” and “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” suggest a revaluation of space, both prosodic and physical. The speaker in the sonnet on Lear trades “golden-tongued Romance” (l. 1)—Endymion was with the publishers—for “[t]he bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit” (l. 8); he must “burn through” (l. 7) the play, a dense verse space likened to an “old oak forest” (l. 11). When the fiery reading is done, however, he will “not wander in a barren dream” (l. 12) but will rise, inspired, from the ashy land with “new Phoenix wings” (l. 14). In light of the wandering that concludes Endymion, this resolve speaks to Keats’s renewed interest in tight verse, verse with a density that clings but does not cloy. The image that dominates the initial clause of “When I have fears” operates within a similar aesthetic: “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” (ll. 1–4). even more interesting than these lines’ emphasis on dense text is their forward

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thrust. The sonnet is difficult to excerpt because it is, in fact, a list, a series of conditional “when” statements each isolated within a quatrain but grammatically dependent on the poem’s final couplet. although grammatical dependence, by definition, indicates hypotaxis, the paratactic, building-up character of the poem’s first 12 lines is impossible to ignore; the closing couplet caps off Keats’s list of “when”s with an emphatic “then”: “… then on the shore / of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink” (ll. 12–14). That the poem concludes with yet another image of intimidating spaciousness— the wide world’s shore is emotionally and physically barren—is significant, but the sonnet’s relationship to Keats’s battles with textual closure is even more so. a capping couplet serves to close the list that is “When I have fears,” but the sonnet’s catalogue of conditions lacks the materiality so important to the poet’s luscious aesthetic. With the exception of the granary-like books mentioned in the second line, Keats limits his references to ephemera only—“cloudy symbols” (l. 6), “shadows” (l. 8), “magic” (l. 8), and “faery power” (l. 11)—and these, we intuit, have dissipated by the poem’s windswept conclusion. Thus the original problem remains: how to confine a catalogue rooted in the material, the physical. The stock-piles of real-world luxuries that are at the heart of Keats’s luscious poetry cannot, as Endymion proved, generate closure on their own. The trick to enclosing paratactic forms, Keats learns, is the same trick that turns literal strings—thread, yarn, and reeds, for example—into textiles, scarves, and baskets: weaving. Within a month of generating the closure-affirming sonnets “Lear” and “When I have fears,” Keats penned his famous “airy Citadel” letter and therein articulated the next phase in his formal development. on February 19, 1818, Keats describes to Reynolds his new understanding of creativity: Now it appears to me that almost any Man may like the Spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel—the points of leaves and twigs on which the Spider begins her work are few and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting: man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Webb of his Soul and weave a tapestry empyrean—full of Symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wandering, of distinctness for his Luxury. (LJK I 231–2)

By this point, this metaphor may seem familiar, since Keats describes a prototypically luscious experience—by which, as ever, I mean an experience defined by sensual wealth packed into a distinct physical space. at first glance, that space seems to be the airy Citadel, the fortress defended by the spider’s “beautiful circuiting.” However, closer reading suggests that in Keats’s conception, the circuiting itself constitutes an enterable, occupiable location in addition to delineating one. When Keats moves from spider to man, he offers another image in the same paradoxical vein as “airy Citadel”—“tapestry empyrean”—but now his material anchor is not edifice but weave. Like a citadel (and the textual silos of “When I have fears”) Keats’s metaphorical tapestry can hold, can be “full”; inside, one can give free rein

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to his senses and move through an atmosphere of dense, if contradictory (“spiritual touch”), luxury. If this space strikes us as disturbingly similar to the palaces and bowers of Endymion, we must be wary of hasty comparison. Woven spaces—and woven texts—are quite different from their merely paratactic counterparts. in Weaving the Word, Kathryn Kruger begins her sustained feminist analysis of textile metaphors by identifying the etymological connection between text and weaving. “In many languages,” she writes, including english, the verb to weave defines not just the making of textiles, but any creative act. Likewise, the noun text comes from the Latin verb texere, also meaning “to construct or to weave.” In Greek this verb, tekhne, refers to art, craft, and skill. Therefore, a weaver not only fashions textiles but can, with the same verb, contrive texts. Roland Barthes states that “etymologically the text is a cloth; textus, meaning ‘woven.’” (29)

The text-textile connection endures both colloquially and critically. In addition to observing that many idiomatic descriptions of storytelling and word play— to “spin a yarn,” for instance (30)—originally signified some form or aspect of textile production, Kruger neatly summarizes the influential claim offered by J. Hillis Miller in Ariadne’s Thread: “Miller proposes that a text’s architecture is really a labyrinth created from the thread of thought on which words are strung. accordingly, literary criticism may take up the narrative ‘thread’ of any given text and follow it ‘deep into the labyrinth of the text’ in order to discover the way a text ‘deconstructs itself in the process of constructing its web of storytelling’” (31). For both Miller and Kruger, however, weaving is a metaphor for literary production, not a description of the literary product’s final form. Miller invokes the airy Citadel letter in his chapter on anastomosis, which “explore[s] the topography of the self in its various modes of intersection with others” (145). For him, Keats’s description of a silken circuitry spun through and around bits of leaves and twigs reflects the process of constructing character-driven narrative, which, like Keats’s citadel, requires the forging of connections among discrete identities. adopting a similarly process-oriented perspective, Kruger reads the letter as descriptive of “the creator’s self-sustaining power of imagination” (32), and although she notes the tactility of Keats’s description—“This physical quality of a text/textile, the idea that it constitutes a kind of body or garment that can be worn or shorn, informs the language and our literature in surprising ways” (31–2)—her interest in weaving is ultimately more intellectual than material. In fact, the February 1818 letter can sustain a less figurative interpretation, if not a completely literal one. as previously established, Keats understood texts as spaces, not as metaphors for spaces. even in his earliest verse, Keats posits texts as sites that enclose their readers in a rich alternative reality, and since the linguistic and cultural connections between text and textile are indeed so strong, it seems possible to identify in Keats’s inhabitable textile—the “tapestry empyrean”—the elements of a new type of inhabitable text. In other words, weaving represents for Keats not only a metaphor for the creative imagination but also a formal description

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of the poetry that results from his creative labors. In his discussion of weaving in Keats, Mario D’avanzo makes the transition from process metaphor to form that Miller and Kruger do not, but his analysis also founders with regard to elucidating Keats’s formal technique. D’avanzo links Keats’s weaving references to his architectural ones, observing that Keats’s accounts of weaving and his allusions to woven pattern describe “not only the poetic process but also its product—that is, a latticed structure which other poems identify as the bower of poetry” (164). It remains unclear, however, what about Keats’s poetry actually resembles the lattice, and although D’avanzo refers confidently to the verse’s “woven verbal form” (168), he stops short of specifying which grammatical, rhetorical, strophic, or even aural structures constitute a woven poem. While verse based on catalogue alone results in the rich but strung-out and unbounded textual experience of Endymion, verse that weaves paratactic strings through one another becomes a verbal fabric—like D’avanzo’s latticed form—integral and complete in itself. as with textile, the strings are still present, ready, if necessary, to be teased from the larger structure. When in place, however, the threads of a weave, be they textual or material, are strong enough to effect closure. Poetically speaking, Keats came of age at time when textile-production methods were rapidly improving, and the strength of the industrial weave—its serviceability as cloth as well as its capacity to boost the economy—was very much at issue. as alison adburgham explains, the english textile industry boomed in the age we associate with Victoria, but the technology that underlay its success was born much earlier: although the Industrial Revolution began in the second half of the eighteenth century with Hargreaves’ Spinning Jenny and Crane’s warp knitting machine, it affected the fashion trade very little until after the Napoleonic wars, when Cartwright’s power-weaving loom began to be felt as a new production force. The jacquard loom, introduced on the continent in 1801, did not come to england until the early 1830’s. Heathcote invented his net-making machine in 1808, and this was really the beginning of machine-made lace … . The first embroidery machine, introduced in 1829, gave further impetus to the production of lace and other trimmings. (11)

Like his innovative industrialist contemporaries, Keats was preoccupied with the unique formal features of the weave; for instance, in the “material sublime” verse epistle to Reynolds dated March, 1818, he meditates on the distasteful unwovenness of his recent dreams. “[a]s last night I lay in bed,” he writes, “There came before my eyes that wonted thread / of shapes, and shadows, and remembrances, / That every other minute vex and please: / Things all disjointed come from North and South—” (ll. 1–5). accounts of dream states are common in Romantic-era literature, but what distinguishes Keats’s description is its attention to the unsettling aspects of the typically string-like, or merely associative, dream form. The speaking Keats is disturbed, it seems, as much by the stream-ofconsciousness structure of his waking dreams as by their content; he ruminates

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on his visions’ random movements—“shapes, shadows, and remembrances, / That every other minute vex and please”—and “disjointed” texture before entering into the extended parataxis that clarifies the sights themselves: Two witch’s eyes above a cherub’s mouth, Voltaire with casque and shield and habergeon, and alexander with his nightcap on, old Socrates a-tying his cravat, and Hazlitt playing with Miss edgeworth’s cat, and Junius Brutus, pretty well so, Making the best of’s way towards Soho. (ll. 6–12)

The catalogue—people with their parts, pets, and accessories threaded one after another into a strange necklace of associations—is disturbing indeed, and the epistle quickly becomes a condemnation of a stretched-string world view, one in which the “imagination [is] brought / Beyond its proper bound” (ll. 78–9). To extend the thread too far is, ultimately, to self-destruct; “I was at home / and should have been most happy,” Keats writes, “but I saw / Too far into the sea, where every maw / The greater on the less feeds evermore.— / But I saw too distinct into the core / of an eternal fierce destruction, / and so from happiness I far was gone” (ll. 92–8). as Keats suggests in his sonnet “To J[ames] R[ice],” written less than a month after the verse epistle to Reynolds, a condensed visionary experience—to “live long life in little space” (l. 5)—is far superior to the strung-out sort. However, Keats’s Endymion-inspired quarrels with the catalogue’s inherently reaching, unclosable form do not alter the fundamental truth that guided him toward parataxis in the first place: When the objective is to verbalize the experience of material plenty, the list is an ideal structure. Isabella comments on materiality—particularly the pitfalls of a materials-based system of values— far more explicitly than Keats’s other poems, and we can observe in Isabella Keats’s first attempt to distinguish between straight catalogues and woven ones. Isabella’s mercenary brothers possess unlimited riches, and Keats describes their wealth in catalogues that stretch instead of catalogues that weave; the experiences of Isabella and Lorenzo, on the other hand, are rendered in and as tapestry. as Endymion proved, simple parataxis can emulate the physical experience of excess, but in the absence of closure, those experiences lack the spatial security central to the luscious aesthetic. Despite their “marble founts” (l. 121) and “orangemounts” (l. 123)—not to mention, of course, their “red-lined accounts” (l. 125), a phrase that subtly links loss (as signified by red ink) to linearity, or string-like form—Isabella’s brothers are not secure. In addition to censuring their values outright—“Why in the name of Glory were they proud?” he demands (l. 128)— Keats’s speaker generates a catalogue of frights to counter his previous list of rhyming amenities. The mercenary Florentines live “self-retired / In hungry pride and gainful cowardice” (ll. 129–30), and their list of perceived enemies is as long as their list of luxuries. They reside

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Paled in and vineyarded from beggar-spies— The hawks of ship-mast forests—the untired and panniered mules for ducats and old lies— Quick cat’s-paws on the generous stray-away— Great wits in Spanish, Tuscan, and Malay. (ll. 132–6)

Strings, both verbal and literal, spell destruction for Isabella and Lorenzo as well. When Isabella’s dream informs her of her lover’s true fate (that is, murder at the hands of her cruel brothers), Keats writes that “it did unthread the horrid woof / of the late darkened time—the murderous spite / of pride and avarice, the dark pine roof / In the forest, and the sodden turfèd dell, / Where, without any word, from stabs he fell” (ll. 292–6, emphasis added). Isabella had been told that Lorenzo had simply departed the country on emergent business, but her nighttime vision unweaves that secure narrative, translating “the late darkened time” into a paratactic thread of horrors, both physical (the dark forest and soggy ground) and metaphysical (her brothers’ pride and greed). Lorenzo’s last in-life view of Isabella is “through an in-door lattice” (l. 200, emphasis added), and after learning of her lover’s murder, Isabella is left to recreate the refuge of that initial weave, the latticed luxury in which her love for Lorenzo was born. She decides, of course, to establish Lorenzo’s head at the foundation of a gruesome container garden, and Keats describes the luscious (if also macabre) result of her labors: Then in a silken scarf—sweet with the dews of precious flowers plucked in araby, and divine liquids come with odorous ooze Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully— She wrapped it up; and for its tomb did choose a garden-pot, wherein she laid it by, and covered it with mould, and o’er it set Sweet basil, which her tears kept ever wet. (ll. 409–16)

Isabella’s pot of basil is woven in many respects. Lorenzo’s head is wrapped in a scarf—a silken textile—laced with perfume, and its final enclosure is purposefully layered. once she pots it, Isabella covers her prize with “mould,” basil, and tears, which intermingle, it turns out, with special growth-enhancers, both physical and metaphysical: “[The basil] drew / Nurture besides, and life, from human fears, / From the fast mouldering head there shut from view” (ll. 428–30). The result of Isabella’s wrapping, lacing, layering, and mingling—activities that might fairly be described as weave-like—is an extraordinary vegetal security. Isabella’s basil plant is not only “thick, and green, and beautiful” (l. 426) but also “more balmy than its peers / of basil tufts in Florence” (ll. 427–8). even more important, however, than the experience Keats describes is the manner in which he describes it. Throughout the poem, love, comfort, and resolution (however temporary) are introduced by means of woven catalogues, while trouble, treachery, and trauma (or the foreshadowing of such) are expressed as awkward, anaphoric series:

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Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century Were they unhappy then?—It cannot be— Too many tears for lovers have been shed, Too many sighs give we to them in fee, Too much of pity after they are dead, Too many doleful stories do we see … . (ll. 89–93) Why were they proud? Because their marble founts Gushed with more pride than do a wretch’s tears?— Why were they proud? Because fair orange-mounts Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs?— Why were they proud? Because red-lined accounts Were richer than the songs of Grecian years?— Why were they proud? again we ask aloud, Why in the name of Glory were they proud? (ll. 121–8) and she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun, and she forgot the blue above the trees, and she forgot the dells where waters run, and she forgot the chilly autumn breeze … . (ll. 417–20)

In contrast to the foregoing, Keats’s earliest woven lists take advantage of aural and syntactic devices to elide the sense of bead-strung accretion that accompanies traditional series. The accretive sensibility is replaced with a truly integrative one, as Keats strives to connect across and among the discrete units that comprise his lists. His techniques are simple but effective; consonance in conjunction with a broken series pulls the reader’s attention backward and forward at once. When Isabella’s lost lover at last appears in a midnight vision, he receives such woven treatment. “[a]t her couch’s foot,” we hear, “Lorenzo stood, and wept: the forest tomb / Had marred his glossy hair which once could shoot / Luster into the sun, and put cold doom / upon his lips, and taken the soft lute / From his lorn voice, and past his loamèd ears / Had made a miry channel for his tears” (ll. 274–80). In addition to repeating an l sound—glossy, luster, cold, lips, lute, lorn, loamèd, and channel—that connects past to present (the previously glossy hair to the now loamèd ears, for example) and seems, in conjunction with series of rs, ns, ss, and os, to whisper Lorenzo’s name (“[l]uster into,” “lorn voice,” “channel for his”), the passage successfully balances the poet’s desire to inventory the features of Lorenzo’s once lovely head with his sense of the indelicacy and, with respect to satisfying closure, the inadequacy of such a catalogue. Hair, lips, ears, and eyes (metonymically, through “tears”) are woven through the lines (rather than listed in one of them), and for Isabella, the result is an alternative, integral reality. She “hung,” Keats writes, on the “music” in the apparition’s voice (l. 284), and his presence, as depicted in the consonant-rich passage above, actually seems to surround her, creating a space impermeable to fear: “Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright / With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof / From the poor girl by the magic of their light” (ll. 289–91). Lorenzo’s head, once potted, maintains its grip on Isabella, becoming a locus of security in an otherwise tragically disrupted life. Jack Stillinger associates Keats’s graphic descriptions

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of the moldering head with anti-romantic tension (“Romance” 37), but in truth, the passage that articulates Isabella’s troublesome forgetting (ll. 417–20, above) actually concludes with a description of satisfied closure: “and the new morn she saw not, but in peace / Hung over her sweet basil evermore, / and moistened it with tears unto the core” (ll. 422–4, emphasis added). When the theft of the basil destroys Isabella’s peace and hastens her death, Keats supplies an open ending in which a paratactic legacy (rather than a woven one) prevails. With no prospect of resolution, Isabella’s story spreads linearly through her world: “[T]his story born / From mouth to mouth through all the country passed” (ll. 501–2). “Still,” Keats notes, “is the burthen sung” (l. 503). Though quite different from Isabella and from one another, Keats’s next major undertakings reflect a developing understanding of woven form. Hyperion and The Eve of St. Agnes, composed late in 1818 and early in 1819, respectively, usher in Keats’s famously prolific spring with increasingly dynamic attempts at textual weaving. The Hyperion fragment, begun in the fall of 1818 and abandoned by the spring of 1819, is the product of a brief but intense moment for Keats, both creatively and personally. Tom Keats, whom brother John had nursed through the final stages of tuberculosis, died mid-composition, and predictably, perhaps, Hyperion and St. Agnes represent Keats’s most successful evocations of alternative textual universes to that date. although neither poetic world could properly be called pain-free, in certain key moments the rich materiality of each fully engrosses the senses, and the carefully circumscribed spaces Keats renders both imagistically and textually offer the kind of luscious security afforded Isabella by her potted basil. From a narratological perspective, the boundedness of Hyperion presents a conundrum. Narratives move forward, and an epic in leg irons, therefore, seems doomed to failure. However, as Lilach Lachman points out, each of the poem’s close-set moments is a single element in a series of tight spaces that connect through and across one another: “In Keats’s long poem, every segment is signaled by such a bounded location, where the movement ensures the continuous unfolding of adjacent spaces. accordingly, action is primarily formed as a process of bodily and perceptual movement across contiguous spaces” (90). as I have observed, the reader of Endymion is hard-pressed to experience that poem’s spaces as “adjacent” or “contiguous,” but as Lachman explains, Hyperion is different. By closely associating epic experience with spaces not only precisely located but also emotionally linked—consider particularly the fallen Titans’ den, Hyperion’s palace, and apollo’s bower—Keats advances toward a fully realized woven form and the sustained luscious aesthetic that it makes possible. In doing so, he also forges an important textual connection with Milton and Paradise Lost that informs the poem’s distinctive sensibility. Just as Lachman identifies a uniquely constructive attention to space in Hyperion, Keats admires Milton’s ability to render the physical settings that frame his action. “He is not content with simple description,” Keats muses in his Book VII marginalia, “he must station,—thus here, we not only see how the Birds ‘with clang despised the ground,’ but we see them ‘under a cloud in prospect.’ So we see adam ‘Fair indeed and tall— under a plantane’—and so we see Satan ‘disfigured—on the Assyrian Mount’”

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(525). Keats’s assertion that Milton “must station” proves central to Nancy Moore Goslee’s seminal analysis of the Romantics’ engagement with england’s epic giant; Keats, she argues, accurately assessed Milton’s practice, and “[t]o suggest that their unorthodox visionary figures are real enough to rival Milton’s God, the romantic poets follow the technique shown in [Keats’s] examples: they place or ‘station’ their figures in natural settings acknowledged as both literary topoi and actual places” (2). Stationing, Goslee observes, was also a term central to late eighteenth-century discussions of aesthetic theory: In contrast to the smooth, balanced order of the beautiful and the overwhelming, dislocating power of the sublime, the picturesque in nature or in art frequently was defined by roughness and by dramatic contrast. In late eighteenth-century guidebooks to picturesque scenery, a “station” is a viewpoint from which the tourist or painter might compose the most effective—that is, the most paintinglike—scene. Such composition was most complete when it contained a central figure for scale and focus. In an actual landscape painting, it might be a local shepherd or visiting deity; and in landscape gardens, it might be the statue of a god at the end of a path. (4–5)

Deities “contained” and sensory profusion (that is, “roughness and dramatic contrast”) penned: Goslee’s account of the picturesque resembles, in key ways, my own introductory description of Keats’s material sublime and its forthcoming manifestation in Lamia. Indeed, as Goslee notes, to attribute to Keats an unequivocal regard for the conventionally picturesque (as opposed to the materially sublime, or luscious) is problematic: “Keats repeatedly mocks the picturesque tourist” in the letters composed during his 1818 trip to Scotland and the Lakes (13), and Keats’s handling of space in Hyperion represents an attempt to fuse his appreciation for evocative landscapes—despite his mocking, Goslee writes, “all through the northern tour he writes attentively of its scenery to his brother Tom” (13)—with his regard for the textilic potential inherent in linked Miltonic “stations.” But Keats’s interest in a spatial Milton extends beyond epic scenery. The marginal notations in his edition of Paradise Lost suggest that Keats was even more attuned to the space of the text (that is, to the verbal structures, syntactic and sonorous, that define the poem itself) than to the descriptions of physical space presented within its narrative. The Miltonic character of Hyperion’s language has impressed generations of readers, but more central to this discourse is the subtle focus in Keats’s marginalia on Milton’s textual weaving. In response to Milton’s description of “reluctant flames, the sign / of wrauth awaked” (VI, ll. 58–9), Keats observes that “‘Reluctant’ with its original and modern meaning combined and woven together, with all its shades of signification has a powerful effect” (525, emphasis added). Since Keats’s chemical training taught him numerous ways to express the experience of combination—fusion, solution, and reaction come to mind—his choice of “woven” is significant, especially in light of other comments regarding Milton’s prosody. The rich texture of the poem, he contends, derives from the weaving together of contrasts: “Heaven moves on like music throughout. Hell

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is also peopled with angels; it also move[s] on like music, not grating and harsh, but like a grand accompaniment in the Base to Heaven” (518). Milton’s heaven and hell are, as Keats perceives them, linked spaces, “peopled with angels” and synchronically “mov[ing],” but he recognizes, as subsequent comments indicate, that the epic’s music begins at the level of the line. Drawn to a Book III passage in which Milton describes a windy sort of weave—“a violent cross wind from either coast / Blows them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry / Into the devious air” (III, ll. 487–9; emphasis added)—Keats identifies in Milton’s play of sound something “unaccountably expressive of the description” itself (523). In truth, the passage interlaces s sounds (cross, coast, transverse, thousand, devious) in a way reminiscent of Keats’s own repeated l from the dreamt-Lorenzo moment of Isabella, and the result is a woven passage that describes a crisscrossing event. The grandeur of Paradise Lost denies that poem an affiliation with the luscious aesthetic towards which Keats is developing, but it seems clear that Keats worked—he, like Milton, “devoted himself to the ardours … of Song” (518)—to extract from his epic inspiration the techniques best suited to his own creative imperatives. Most telling, perhaps, is the fact that one particularly powerful passage from the first book of Paradise Lost is distilled, in Keats’s marginalia, to a list: The light and shade—the sort of black brightness—the ebon diamonding—the ethiop Immortality—the sorrow, the pain, the sad-sweet Melancholy—the P[h]alanges of Spirits so depressed as to be “uplifted beyond hope”—the short mitigation of Misery—the thousand Melancholies and Magnificences of this Page—leaves no room for anything to be said thereon but “so it is.” (520)

So it is, then, that Milton’s epic, a poem of sweeping celestial space and immortal ambition, finds luscious revision in Hyperion, its material “Melancholies and Magnificences” woven to generate the kind of tight textual space with which Keats associates security. the locus of security in Hyperion is initially difficult to identify. Certainly no figure in the poem feels conventionally happy, and pain, both physical and emotional, dominates nearly every scene. In the final analysis, however, the story of Hyperion is about finding security in a world of flux, about accepting the inevitability of change and understanding the undeniable connection that exists between the past and present. Hyperion, neither accepting nor understanding, enters his palace “full of wrath” (II, l. 213), and his domain, though richly appointed, lacks comfort. Like endymion, Hyperion travels in and out of a series of close spaces, but at the end of the line he faces eternal void. He blusters “[f]rom stately nave to nave, from vault to vault, / Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathèd light, / and diamond-pavèd lustrous long arcades, / until he reached the great main cupola” (I, ll. 218–21), a wall-less structure from which the fallen god can curse his empire: “There standing fierce beneath, he stamped his foot, / and from the basement deep to the high towers / Jarred his own golden region” (I, ll. 222–4). The setting is unbounded, and the catalogue form of Hyperion’s lament echoes the awkward anaphoric series of Isabella:

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Hyperion’s inheritor faces similar insecurity. apollo has “left his mother fair / and his twin-sister sleeping in their bower,” and we meet him just as he “wandered forth” into the outside world (III, ll. 31–3; emphasis added). Though verdant, that world is far from luscious, since apollo finds himself literally unable to locate comfortable shelter. as the young god stands alone in the semi-darkness, Keats observes that “[t]hroughout all the isle / There was no covert, no retired cave / unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, / Though scarcely heard in many a green recess” (III, ll. 38–41). Sublimity haunts apollo, and later, Keats expresses the frightening moment of his deification as a list, one that emphasizes both immeasurable time and infinite space: Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, Sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, and deify me … . (III, ll. 113–18)

For Goslee, the difference between Hyperion and apollo is the difference between the sculpturesque and the picturesque (85), since the new sun god, unlike his predecessor, exists as a mélange of “dramatic contrasts”—“creations and destroyings,” for example—“all at once.” apollo’s station, she asserts, is defined by “luxurian[ce]” and “lushness” (91), and when the olympian’s limbs become “flush” (III, l. 124), “he absorbs into himself all the vitality of the springlike landscape of Delos” that surrounds him (92). However, as the simply linear descriptions cited above suggest, Hyperion and apollo both remain, when evaluated in terms of material sublimity (that is, in terms of Keats’s idiosyncratically revised notion of the picturesque), disturbingly inadequate. as apollo “[d]ie[s] into life” (III, l. 130), corporeal confines dissolve, and although he seems, initially, to experience “the struggle at the gate of death,” Keats quickly clarifies: The young deity is “liker still to one who should take leave / of pale immortal death” (III, ll. 126–8). Hyperion faces void, but apollo is void, ungated and ungateable. The “hollows of [his] brain” are “wide,” and as Goslee observes, “his own mind becomes the framing landscape for its drama” (93). More Hermean than Lamian—in other words, more spectacularly disembodied than, as Goslee’s account would suggest, lusciously involuted—apollo remains, in Keatsian terms, a figure of profound insecurity.

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The luscious center of the poem lies with oceanus, whose monologue, textually stationed between the poem’s accounts of Hyperion’s wrath and apollo’s deification, is meant to stanch the tide of bitterness consuming his Titan cohorts. “My voice is not a bellows unto ire,” he claims, and the reasoning that follows means to soothe and comfort those who hear it: “ye listen, ye who will, whilst I bring proof / How ye, perforce, must be content to stoop; / and in the proof much comfort will I give / If ye will take that comfort in its truth” (II, ll. 176–80). oceanus consoles by offering a woven world view—in fact, a woven textual world—that privileges the rich interconnectedness of generations rather than time’s unceasing forward march. although he acknowledges that his brethren “are not the beginning nor the end” (II, l. 190), oceanus works systematically to weave past, present, and future into a vital sensory tapestry. “From Chaos and parental Darkness,” he begins, “came / Light” (II, ll. 191–2). Light (with Darkness) begets Heaven and earth, who, in turn, generate “the giant race” of Titans (II, l. 200). But key to both sound and sense in the passage is Keats’s repetition of these family names once oceanus has completely traced the lineage through the present, through the “fresh perfection” of apollo’s generation (II, l. 212). Keats prevents that lineage from becoming—aurally, syntactically, or logically—a line, that uncloseable and therefore unsatisfying structure that he abandoned with Endymion but that haunts his portrayals of both Hyperion and apollo. In addition to distributing the elements of his ancestral catalogue over numerous lines of verse, he doubles back, repeating those names and generating a sort of associative integrity, rather than an aesthetic of isolation and atomization. Chaos, Darkness, Light, Heaven, and earth inhabit the present and future as well as the past, and their capitalized names lend visual pattern to oceanus’ speech: From Chaos and parental Darkness came Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil, That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came, and with Light, and Light, engendering upon its own producer, forthwith touched The whole enormous matter into life. upon that very hour, our parentage, The Heavens, and the earth, were manifest … . (II, ll. 191–9) [...] Mark well! as Heaven and earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; and as we show beyond that Heaven and earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, a power more strong in beauty, born of us and fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness: nor are we Thereby more conquered, than by us the rule of shapeless Chaos. (II, ll. 205–9; II, ll. 212–17)

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The “lineage” oceanus traces both begins and ends with Chaos and is, in fact, more like a tight-knit fabric than a simple string. To excel, it seems, is neither to conquer nor to eradicate, and Keats follows his portrayal of the Titans’ ancestry— a description luscious in its woven control of the material list it contains—with a poignant luscious image. “Say,” oceanus asks, “doth the dull soil / Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed, / and feedeth still, more comely than itself? / Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves?” (II, ll. 217–20). With respect to oceanus’ pronouncement, Goslee’s analysis is more congenial to my own; as she observes, the forest imaged by oceanus “with its soil and birds is not a hierarchical”—read linear, perhaps—“angelic image of order but a pictorial perspective of temporal process” (87). The Titans, oceanus argues, face not the interminable void imagined by Hyperion nor the formidable infinity perceived by apollo; instead, their passing inaugurates and nourishes—“feedeth still”—an era of leafy luxury. The challenged sun god must come to terms with the truth of the shadowy forest right now; apollo’s moment of reckoning will inevitably arrive. The dialogue between security and insecurity remains central in The Eve of St. Agnes, but the luxury in Keats’s best known romance is less leafy than posh. The rugged dens and outdoor bowers of Hyperion are replaced in St. Agnes with manorial hallways and bedchambers, but like Hyperion, The Eve of St. Agnes boasts a luscious center. Just as the closing couplet of each Spenserian stanza pulls the reading consciousness back to the pivotal rhyming line in the middle of the verse (immediately following the dead-center couplet),5 so Keats’s narrative struggles toward and ultimately leaves a sensuous and securely bounded central space. That space, of course, is Madeline’s bedroom, a sensory paradise located at the core of the estate’s mazelike interior. Porphyro and angela travel “[t]hrough many a dusky gallery” (l. 186) before reaching the chamber, and when they arrive, Keats introduces a draped bed—the “soft and chilly nest” in which his heroine succumbs to the “poppied warmth of sleep” (ll. 235, 237)—whose curtains further shelter Madeline from her peeping lover. But curtains aside, the room is early identified with tapestry when, in his initial request for Madeline’s whereabouts, Porphyro acknowledges the lamb sacrifice associated with St. agnes lore: “‘Now tell me where is Madeline,’ said he, / ‘o tell me, angela, by the holy loom / Which none but secret sisterhood may see, / When they St. agnes’ wool are weaving piously’” (ll. 114–17). The implication seems clear; in conjunction with his summary of the legend, the “where” in Porphyro’s demand suggests that Madeline is cloistered 5 Bate also comments on Keats’s choice of the Spenserian stanza, noting the form’s inherent capacity to link and close: “[T]he stanza is capacious enough not to pinch the writer into the affectations of compression that ottava rima so frequently does, as Keats himself had found in Isabella. yet at the same time it is very much of a unit. The result is that it tempts poetic narrative toward tableau, ample and yet self-contained. The musical potentiality of the stanza’s structure is analogous in its effect, permitting massiveness while it also compels unity (unity, that is, within each individual stanza). For the central recurring rhyme (the b-rhyme of a b a b b c b c c) can sustain as well as interlock, continuing to act as a kind of sounding board until the reverberation is lost in the long wave of the concluding six-foot line” (441).

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within a story as well as a room. Madeline is “asleep in lap of legends old” (l. 135), and to reach her, Porphyro must penetrate the narrative as well as the nest. The “stratagem” (l. 139) he devises—and later, “entoiled in woofèd fantasies” (l. 288), revises—eventually takes him to the center of both. at the level of signification, then, the poem’s luscious center is woven of both literal yarns (curtains and bedding) and figurative yarns (I recall here Kruger’s observation that to tell a tale is “to spin a yarn”), and Keats’s decisions with regard to versification reinforce that tapestry aesthetic. Speaking metaphorically, Stuart Sperry notes that for the Victorians, The Eve of St. Agnes was “a gorgeous bit of tapestry, full of color, tenderness, romance, and high feeling” (199), but we can once again observe that Keats’s writing is, in key moments, woven less figuratively than literally. Keats himself described the poem as a “drapery” (LJK II 234); calculated consonance, line-broken series, and (as in Hyperion) backstepping, repetitive series allow him to avoid the unrelenting and ultimately uncomfortable forward momentum of traditional parataxis by encouraging a more crosswise, or woven, reading of his material catalogues. The perils of the openended linear catalogue are best articulated, perhaps, in the narrative commentary that Keats provides just before Porphyro steps inside the castle’s “portal doors” (l. 76). at that moment, our hero’s self-acknowledged goal “to gaze and worship all unseen” becomes one with a list of unacknowledged desires: “Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss—in sooth such things have been” (ll. 80–81). With each new element, the list of sensual liberties increases in intimacy, and Keats abruptly stops the catalogue with a dash (no internal structuring, after all, will halt its forward movement) before it reaches a condemnable level of indecency. as in Isabella and Hyperion, a linear catalogue is a dangerous catalogue, and the narrative events that occur both before and after the poem enters the security of Madeline’s chamber are punctuated by brief but potent linear lists. We learn, for example, that the distracted Madeline dances “’[m]id looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn” (l. 72), while Porphyro, once inside the castle, must avoid “barbarian hordes, / Hyena foemen, and hot-blooded lords” (ll. 85–6). The doomed angela describes herself as “[a] poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing” (l. 155), and later, during the lovers’ escape, we hear that the Baron and his guests were plagued that night by dreams “[o]f witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm” (l. 374). Inside Madeline’s bedchamber, however, Keats constructs his images differently. The moment his heroine steps into her room, Keats invokes the story of Philomel—“her heart was voluble, / … / as though a tongueless nightingale should swell / Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stiflèd, in her dell” (ll. 204–7)— and thereby assumes a new attitude toward textual experience. For Stillinger, this “image embraces the entire story of the rape of Philomel, and with it [Keats] introduces a further note of evil that prevents us from losing ourselves in the special morality of fairy romance” (“Hoodwinking” 76–7). We cannot forget, however, that in addition to her status as iconic victim, Philomel maintains a key position in literature’s small but significant canon of influential weavers. Raped and robbed of her tongue by Tereus, Philomel, unable to speak, weaves her story into a tapestry, into a textile-text that narrates her trauma and, in conjunction with

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divine intervention, secures her fate as the sweet-voiced nightingale. Madeline, too, inhabits a world in which text is woven; at the luscious center of St. Agnes, Keats substitutes traditional catalogues for woven ones. The large stained-glass window in the bedchamber is presented in the first of such woven passages. In short, the casement window is “garlanded” with decorative carvings (l. 209), “diamonded” with panes of colored glass (l. 211), and adorned with a “shielded scutcheon” (l. 216), but the poignant beauty of the passage derives from the layered effect achieved when Keats intertwines this core, line-broken list of features with other rich material catalogues. The garlands in question are “carven imag’ries / of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass” (ll. 209–10), while the central shield image sits “’mong thousand heraldries, / and twilight saints, and dim emblazonings” (ll. 214–15). Meanwhile, the diamond-shaped panes—the central image in the passage and one that evokes a lattice of crisscrossing solder lines— are so “[i]nnumerable of stains and splendid dyes” (l. 212) that the texture of the glass actually resembles the surface of luxurious fabric, or, at least, the textile-like appearance of “the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings” (l. 213, emphasis added). at the same time, Keats knits a complex sonority by way of a d sound that repeats across the lines and lends special weight to the words central to the textile motif: diamonded, device, splendid dyes, deep-damasked. The final passage (in fact, the entirety of stanza xxiv) looks and sounds like this: a casement high and triple-arched there was, all garlanded with carven imag’ries of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, and diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, as are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings; and in the midst, ’mong thousand heraldries, and twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, a shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings. (ll. 208–16)

Bate notes that stanza xxiv is among the most heavily revised portions of the poem, and he observes that in its earlier incarnations, the stanza included the image of the red-lit Madeline that finally came to dominate stanza xxv. ultimately, though, Keats “[postponed] Madeline … and [focused] more on the casement itself” (450), a decision that, in conjunction with his deft textual weaving, successfully highlights the still materiality of the moment.6 The result is packed poetry, verse 6

In her persuasive treatment of Keats’s “charming style,” Betz also describes the way in which this stanza effects the “paralysis of the reader—or, more accurately, entrapment in the physical texture of words.” She does so, however, without reference to the lines’ textilic quality: [S]treams of different vowel emphases flow down the lines, providing continuity. The last two lines are exemplary, featuring short “o” and particularly “on” sounds (“emblazonings,” “scutcheon,” “blush’d,” “blood”) that stream out, sonically mimicking the blood-gush they describe. yet the vowels in the stanza play only a subtle role, as they

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that counters the forward momentum of the reading mind and ultimately surrounds it in a close environment of verbal luxury. a carefully cultivated environment of literal luxury is also at the heart of Porphyro’s “stratagem,” and the stanzas in which Keats lays out Porphyro’s feast together comprise the luscious centerpiece of the poem’s luscious center. Porphyro begins, significantly, by spreading a tablecloth “of woven crimson, gold, and jet” (l. 256), but a dash and a curse—“o for some drowsy Morphean amulet!” (l. 257)— follow “jet,” suggesting that Porphyro pauses, abruptly and nervously, when the “festive clarion / The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarinet” of the Baron’s raucous party “[a]ffray his ears” (ll. 258–60). Soon enough, however, “[t]he hall door shuts again” (l. 261), and when Porphyro resumes his luscious project in silence, Keats abandons the kind of linear list that introduced the outside noisemakers in favor of richly woven verbal tapestries more appropriate to the close luxury of Madeline’s bedroom. The “heap” (l. 264) of succulent edibles that Porphyro piles atop the table’s luxurious tapestry foundation has captivated the hungry imaginations of critics Spartan and Bacchanalian alike,7 but Keats’s woven structuring is arguably what underlies the stanza’s impressive dynamism. Like the casement window passage, stanza xxx is easily summarized. While Madeline sleeps, Porphyro arranges the food, which includes “candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd” (l. 265), as well as jellies, syrups, “[m]anna,” dates, and other “spicèd dainties” (ll. 266–9). What this summary fails to convey is the luscious enclosure of the passage itself, in which Keats not only fractures his catalogue across six lines but also seems consciously to slow the mouth-watering movement of his description with a variety of carefully calculated weaving techniques. The are dominated by the thick consonants: the heavy pressure of “d” and “nd” as well as “n” sounds blatantly suggests an interest in overpowering the reader with the physical effects of words. These effects, furthermore, are not just aural but also tactile, since the greatest impact of the consonants is the thick, slow-motion, stopped sensation they produce in the reader’s mouth as he or she enunciates them, or imagines enunciating them when reading silently. Recurring after a brief showcasing in the poem’s early stanzas, this proliferation of “d” and “nd” sounds particularly produces the feeling that one’s tongue—and thereby one’s ability to form the words in the mind and in the mouth and thus to read—is paralyzed. (307–8) 7 If Newlyn’s comparison of Porphyro to Satan, who “in the wilderness had tempted Christ” with food (176), seems austere in its suspicion of gustatory pleasure, Betz’s account of the passage represents a more (and more common) Bacchanalian reading: The feast scene at stanzas 28–30 is an even more intense plunge into highly physical language than the casement passage; the sheer density of the sounds is so overdetermined that Keats’s verse announces itself as a study in the charm. Stanzas 28–30 foster a much deeper physical experience of language because they more openly treat words as matter, stimulating the sense of touch, or the tactile feel of the words in the mouth, far more than the “higher” senses of sight or hearing. By placing the feast scene after the casement set-piece, Keats thus leads the reader both farther down into the physical experience of language at the core of this poem, and farther down into the body itself, from the eyes and ears down to the mouth and to the organ of touch, the skin. (309–10)

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result is an integrated luscious experience rather than a meandering list of exotic groceries, and we see in stanza xxx a sort of condensed, microcosmic version of the poem as a whole, a poem that, in Keats’s words, “diffuse[s] the colouring of St. agnes’s eve throughout” (LJK II 234, emphasis added). although the inventory commences like a simple list—“candied apple, quince”—Keats almost immediately begins to slow his pace by inserting unaccented buffers between the elements of his catalogue: “… and plum, and gourd.” “[J]ellies” alone dominate the next line, and when Keats introduces the syrups, we read at the rate of a crawl, mired in the thick, stickiness-mimicking texture of the words themselves: “[a]nd lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon” (l. 267). In conjunction with the molasseslike sonority of the syrups line, the semicolon following “cinnamon” effectively cancels the list’s momentum; Keats, however, picks up with “[m]anna and dates” at the beginning of the following line, and by the time the edibles catalogue closes with “spicèd dainties” in the stanza’s penultimate line, Keats has launched into a new inventory of exotic locales, the places—or “stations,” perhaps—in which Porphyro’s delicacies originated: Fez, Samarkand, and Lebanon. Here, Betz observes, Keats refer[s] indirectly to an entire network of commercial relations—and one more characteristic of early nineteenth-century english life than of the medieval period in which Keats’s poem is set: consumers who desire and buy goods from abroad; the transportation system put into place to get the consumers their goods; and, more generally, the culture that creates demand for luxury, novelty, and ever more scintillating sensory experiences. (318).

Indeed, shopping inflects Keats’s poetic shaping, but his short list of oriental markets is, textually/textilically speaking, only one of many series that intersect the line-broken catalogue of rich foods and thereby weave the stanza’s arresting fabric. Keats’s markets thread does not, in other words, stand alone, discrete, and although Timothy Morton’s analysis of Porphyro’s consumable offerings emphasizes the vastness of global markets rather than the intimacy of the setting itself—“he fetches [the desserts] not only from a closet but metonymically from the orientalist ‘oneiric horizon’” (15)—the stanza’s structure privileges involution over sprawl. What Morton characterizes as references to “quite different spice routes” (15) become entangled in and with Keats’s poetic space; Samarkand and Lebanon are, respectively, “silken” and “cedared” (l. 270), and those descriptors, in addition to forging a connection with Madeline’s similarly sensory linens (described by Keats in the stanza’s second line as “smooth” and “lavendered”), inaugurate a backwards-moving catalogue of the senses that recalls, structurally, the non-linear lineage traced in oceanus’ back-doubling speech. With the exception of hearing (which dominates the previous stanza), Keats invokes every sense: smell in “cedared,” touch in “silken,” taste in “spicèd,” and sight in “lucent.” The verbal reality is as difficult to exit as Porphyro’s well crafted dream reality, and like Madeline, we succumb, pulled centerward, into the luscious moment.

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Weaving in 1819 although The Eve of St. Agnes is properly recognized as a product of 1819, Keats’s most significant 1819 developments with respect to weaving and the luscious aesthetic date from late april, when he composed “If by dull rhymes our english must be chained,” his virtuosic sonnet on the sonnet. To cap a marathon—one might deem it wandering—letter to George and Georgiana, Keats includes “If by dull rhymes,” noting that the poem and the prosodic philosophy it describes are part of an ongoing experiment with versification: “I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language over-well from the pouncing rhymes—the other kind appears too elegiac—and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect” (LJK ii 108). His concerns, as Jennifer Wagner observes, are closure-related: “[I]t was ‘endings’—line endings, couplets, enforced formal closure—that led Keats to his late experimentation with the sonnet, and to his most complex statement about the form and what he wanted it to do for him” (94). Lusciousness demands enclosure, but a rhyme that “pounces” closed is as unsatisfying as a couplet that snaps shut; both problems are remedied in “If by dull rhymes,” in which Keats carves out as great a distance between rhymes as the sonnet’s scanty plot allows. at one point, four lines stand between the D line and its rhyming counterpart, and critics have struggled to develop a fitting lexicon to describe the strange formal quality of this important sonnet, the last Keats would write for months. Wagner, for example, claims that “the primary innovation is the suspension of closure by introducing at the end a new quatrain, a new beginning” (96). In light of the philosophy of delayed gratification—a more mature version, perhaps, of the gripping-text ideal represented by “I stood tiptoe”—that seems to determine the structure of the feast stanzas in The Eve of St. Agnes, Wagner’s theory of suspended closure seems appropriately focused. It seems equally reasonable, however, to seek a connection between the model of sonnet-writing articulated in the sonnet and the structure of the sonnet itself, and although Keats does not explicitly invoke suspension or delay, he does describe weaving. “If by dull rhymes” puts forth a theory of versification that associates weaving with proper poetic structure, and therein lies its significance. Rather than apply woven techniques remedially to shore up what would otherwise be inadequately circumscribed moments of materiality, Keats, this sonnet suggests, will at last strive toward fully woven poems. at the level of signification, weaving is everywhere in “If by dull rhymes.” a weaving lexicon dominates the sonnet’s opening line—“If by dull rhymes our english must be chained” (emphasis added)—as well as its best known image: “Let us find out, if we must be constrained, / Sandals more interwoven and complete / To fit the naked foot of Poesy” (ll. 4–6). Later, Keats invokes the “bay wreath crown” (l. 12)—that woven symbol of poetic prowess and tradition—and concludes by resolving to bind the Muse “with garlands of her own” (l. 14, emphasis added). Given the strength and centrality of the weaving motif, numerous readers, inspired by Keats’s explicit linking of text and textile, have chosen to describe the sonnet’s

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untraditional versification as somehow woven. Drawing on Karen Swann and John Hollander, Susan Wolfson identifies in the poem’s complex sonority a variety of weave-like patterns (in-and-out movement, for example) that unite to form a text that violates traditional sonnet boundaries while paradoxically maintaining the kind of tightness and formal integrity so closely associated with the sonnet tradition: Keats is … busy interweaving his constraints, staging an escape-artist performance. Take the emblematic play of the first rhyme, chaind [sic] and constrain’d. The hard consonance (strengthened by the intermediary stress on pained) frames the quatrain; yet line four breaks out, its syntax running to Poesy (6). Poesy, moreover, is a feminine foot … that is only loosely fettered by poetic chains: it is not bound to the abc rhyme pattern of 1–10; and if it is set to be caught by be and free (11 and 13), no other rhyme is so distant, suppressed, asymmetrical. (“Late Lyrics” 105)

as Wolfson’s analysis suggests, the sonnet’s rhyme scheme is, in the context of formal convention, its most obviously tangled feature, but other aspects of the poem’s artistry attest to Keats’s keen interest in and growing reliance on woven form. Given Keats’s expressed distaste for “dull rhymes,” readers like Wolfson have celebrated the sonnet’s fascinating and “slyly subversive nonpattern” of rhymes (Scott 771), potentially overlooking the poet’s more fundamental complaint and, therefore, the significance of his resolution. Is Keats suggesting, perhaps, that rhyme is inherently dull? To bind the Muse with garlands is to weave poetic constraint,8 and rhyme, even at its least monotonous (as in, say, the Spenserian stanza or the distanced slant rhymes on display in this sonnet), retains a point-counterpoint quality at odds with the complex closure associated with Keats’s more sophisticated woven texts. In fact, the non-dull rhyme scheme of “If by dull rhymes” is arguably a mere supplement to the real textual weaving—the intertwined sensory and material series—that lends Keats’s self-proclaimed woven poem its luscious character. “If by dull rhymes” is indeed a luscious poem, the body of its central figure (Poesy, or the Muse) supplying the requisite close, sensual space. In addition to envisioning a feminine form luxuriously draped in garlands and crowned with bay leaves, Keats locates himself (as poet) in extraordinarily close, erotically appreciative proximity to Poesy; he watches, listens, and otherwise absorbs the most subtle features of her presence, from the size of her “naked foot” to the tenor of her lyre. Moreover, to bind the Muse “with garlands of her own” seems to require a poet with a merchant’s savvy. Keats consistently links poetic riches to literal wealth both explicitly—“Misers of sound and syllable, no less / Than Midas of his coinage” (ll. 9–10)—and, by applying a commercial lexicon to his account of the writing process, more implicitly: inspect, weigh, gained, industrious, meet. 8 the Oxford English Dictionary defines garland as a “wreath of flowers” and in turn defines wreath as a “circular band of interwoven flowers, leaves, etc.”

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However, even more important than these hallmarks of luscious experience— that is, a circumscribed environment marked by sensory excess—is the infrastructure that defines luscious form. at the poem’s core, we once again find a series, the central portion of the sonnet’s if-then-so syntax mushrooming into an anaphoric list of “let us” statements (“Let us find out …”; “Let us inspect …”; “let us be / Jealous” [ll. 4, 7, 11]), the second of which encloses a list of its own: “Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress / of every chord, and see what may be gained / By ear industrious, and attention meet” (ll. 7–9). The list-within-list technique is, after The Eve of St. Agnes, a familiar weaving device, but Keats’s triple desire to inspect, to weigh, and to see is linked to a third line-broken catalogue, a string of bodily bits that, in conjunction with the lists identified above, challenges our easy exit from—not to mention thwarts the easy dissection of—the sonnet’s luscious space. When Keats wonders in line four “if we must be constrained,” he complicates our understanding of the fettered body introduced at the beginning of the poem, since, at that moment, the bound figure becomes the poet rather than Poesy. a list of body parts, one per “let us” statement, weaves through the midsection of the sonnet, and although two of those parts—“foot” and (taken either literally or metonymically) “crown”—belong to Poesy, the center element—“ear”—is possessed by the determined poet, who, as Keats’s catalogue of verbs suggests, strives for absolute control of his verse’s sound: “Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress / of every chord, and see what may be gained / By ear industrious, and attention meet” (emphasis added). That list-within-list description of the working ear sits at the very center of the sonnet, bridging the already minimal gap between the poet and his lady Poesy. By the poem’s conclusion, it seems, poet and poetry share a body, his crown tangled with her garlands, and for the first time in Keats’s oeuvre, we encounter a wholly woven poem. The Great odes of 1819 owe a heavy formal debt to Keats’s tinkering with sonnet convention. Not only do their unusual stanzas structurally represent an idiosyncratic combination of elizabethan and Petrarchan traditions (a quatrain and sestet are, more or less, the macro-elements from which Keats forges each stanza), but the sustained weaving of both sound and sense that distinguishes “If by dull rhymes” foreshadows the technical acumen on display in the greatest of the Great odes: “ode to a Nightingale” and “To autumn.” Lamia’s “fretted splendour” dates from the same period, and just as I do not aim to reiterate my introductory analysis of that important poem, I do not endeavor to recite the odes’ artistic merits. I aim, rather, to articulate the odes’ important place—in fact, culminating position—in the development of Keats’s luscious aesthetic. The odes are a set and, as such, have long represented an unparalleled analytical prospect for Keats scholars; written in the course of only a few months, Keats’s most celebrated poems occupy a sort of closed experimental space, and reading them in succession affords an opportunity to watch Keats work through the few expressive difficulties that remain at this late moment in his creative development. However, rather than the mini-trials and subtle advances that distinguish the odes from one another, at issue here is a unifying factor: refined and pervasive luscious form.

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Thematically speaking, the odes are dominated by images of circumscription and sensual wealth. although Keats varies the modes by which he encloses the luxuries he portrays, the core elements of luscious experience appear throughout. “ode to Psyche” presents not only a Lamia-esque physical bower—“the whispering roof / of leaves and tremblèd blossoms” (ll. 10–11)—but a temporal one, too; Keats’s lovers, in addition to existing in a circumscribed space, occupy the briefest of moments, a span of time comparable in scale to their physical nook: “Their lips touched not, but had not bade adieu” (l. 17). Time, of course, is similarly bound in “ode on a Grecian urn,” and the poem’s main “events”—the erotic chase and the pre-sacrificial procession of the garlanded, “silken flank[ed]” heifer (l. 4)—occur within the closely circumscribed “shape” of the urn itself, whose curved sides frame the “leaf-fringed legend” (l. 5) that Keats’s speaker strives to interpret. Thick, bowery vegetation and a shrinking field of vision circumscribe the sensory paradise of “ode to a Nightingale,” while the odes on Melancholy and Indolence are set inside, respectively, the sensorily rich “shroud” of a transient moment of misery (l. 14) and a bedchamber infused with a “blissful cloud of summer-indolence” (l. 16). In every ode, moreover, Keats relies on catalogue to convey an atmosphere of pleasurable excess, all the while carefully countering the list’s natural openness with a variety of momentum-stopping, backward-pulling weaving techniques. as a letter to his sister indicates, the interminable quality of traditional list-making was at the forefront of Keats’s mind during his most fruitful spring. at the end of a short May, 1819, note, Keats launches into a cheery list of everyday luxuries that blossoms into a paratactic poem: o there is nothing like fine weather, and health, and Books, and a fine country, and a contented Mind, and Diligent-habit of reading and thinking, and an amulet against ennui—and, please heaven, a little claret-wine cool out of a cellar a mile deep—with a few or a good many ratafia cakes—a rocky basin to bathe in, a strawberry bed to say your prayers to Flora in, a pad nag to go you ten miles or so; two or three sensible people to chat with; two or th[r]ee spiteful folkes to spar with; two or three odd fishes to laugh at and two or three numskulls to argue with—instead of using dumb bells on a rainy day— Two or th[r]ee Posies With two or th[r]ee simples Two or three Noses With two or th[r]ee pimples— Two or th[r]ee wise men and two or three ninny’s Two or three purses and two or three guineas … . (LJK II 56–7)

The verse continues for 20 more lines, ending with “Two or three dove’s eggs / To hatch into sonnets.” Keats seems hyper-aware, however, that such an ending does not close; the letter continues playfully but nonetheless emphasizes the impossibility

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of satisfactorily closing a traditional list: “Good bye I’ve an appoantment—can’t stop pon word—good bye—now don’t get up—open the door myself—go-o-od bye—see ye Monday” (LJK II 57). Interwoven catalogues (as opposed to isolated and interminable strings) play crucial roles in Lamia and every one of the odes, but what distinguishes these poems from their more tentatively—by which I primarily mean partially—luscious forerunners Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Hyperion is the drive toward woven completeness articulated by and evidenced in “If by dull rhymes.” as with Keats’s turning-point sonnet, the latest work shows weave becoming form, either dominating as a recurrent element or wholly penetrating the verse’s infrastructure. The odes to Psyche, the urn, Melancholy, and Indolence, like Lamia, follow the former of these two models. as I noted in this study’s introduction, Lamia privileges decorum-defying “accretion” throughout (Hardison 35), and to return to the passages that describe serpent Lamia’s coiled body, lady Lamia’s wedding banquet, or the invisible mansion textually stationed between those accounts would reveal tangled catalogues of colors, beasts, plants, vessels, foods, textiles, and more. In “Psyche,” too, much is listed. Both problem (Psyche’s lack of votaries) and solution (the speaker’s vow to be her “priest” [l. 50]) are articulated as woven lists that together comprise a significant percentage of the poem. The rhythmic strings of complaint and pledge are stalled regularly by carefully inserted, metrically short prepositional phrases: “So let me be … / … / Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet / From swingèd censer teeming— / Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat / of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming” (ll. 44–9). erin Sheley suggests that Keats’s “cascade of ritual images … illustrates the older formal worship which the narrator replaces through his poetic worship” (39), but since that “cascade” is a crucial component of the worshipper’s poem, the truth is arguably more complicated. Later, the votary promises his goddess a “rosy sanctuary” dressed “[w]ith the wreathed trellis of a working brain” (ll. 59–60, emphasis added), a distinctly woven environment not unlike the stanza itself, in which consonance links two separate mini-catalogues: “by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees” (l. 56) to “[w]ith buds, and bells, and stars without a name” (l. 61). Keats describes the world portrayed on the urn as similarly web-like, carved with “brede”—a variant spelling of braid as well as a pun on breed (Barnard 675n)—“of marble men and maidens overwrought, / With forest branches and the trodden weed” (ll. 41–3). However, if the alternative universe depicted on the urn seems woven, the experience offered by the urn itself—imagined entrance into an ancient past and an unseen future—is also queerly circumscribed, a sort of eye in history’s hurricane of tragedy: “When old age shall this generation waste / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours” (ll. 46–8, emphasis added). In the meantime, Keats writes, the urn “do[es] tease us out of thought” (l. 44, emphasis added), his diction suggesting, perhaps, that the greatest art coaxes us, string-like, from the tangled present to reweave a new reality around us. Like the urn, the ode itself is just such art, and the world proffered within the text of the poem is a

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woven one, replete with intertwining series and lists that wind vertically through its lines. although the urn’s “melodies” play to the imagination instead of “the sensual ear” (ll. 11, 13), Keats, in articulating his speaker’s urn-inspired fantasies, relies on series of questions that take us into the world of the urn both intellectually and materially. The questioning stanzas ostensibly inquire into the urn-maker’s narrative intentions, but they also weave each scene’s key sensory elements into line-broken catalogues, thereby fortifying the poem with material pleasures that include “pipes and timbrels” (l. 10), a “green altar” (l. 32), and a garlanded heifer with “silken flanks.” The pipes are a particularly important presence; a string of pipe references weaves through the first three stanzas, bridging the two series of questions and culminating in an ecstatic, p-peppered catalogue of inextinguishable sensual pleasures that holds, in its final two lines, a subordinate catalogue of pleasure-anticipating parts: ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; and happy melodist, unwearièd, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting, and for ever young— all breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, a burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (ll. 21–30)

The ode culminates with a line-broken list of urn-appellations—“[a]ttic shape,” “[f]air attitude,” “Cold Pastoral,” and “friend to man” (ll. 41, 45, 48)—that echoes the list of sensory epithets with which the poem begins: “unravished bride of quietness,” “foster-child of silence and slow time,” and “[s]ylvan historian” (ll. 1–3). Despite concluding references to the ravages of time, the textual circle is complete; the poem itself is as thoroughly circumscribed as Keats’s early Spenserian lake. Similarly, series twine vertically through every stanza of “ode on Melancholy.” Keats begins by listing traditional emblems of death, and despite the anti-suicide directive at the heart of the first stanza’s message, his catalogue constitutes a luscious space. The series itself—Lethe, wolf’s-bane, nightshade, yew-berries, beetle, death-moth, and owl—wends its way through lines that, thanks to repeated th and w sounds, actually seem to respire; the stanza ends with a long-voweled, slowmoving homage to the breathy w that begins like a sleepy echo of “nightshade,” mentioned five lines back: “For shade to shade will come too drowsily, / and drown the wakeful anguish of the soul” (ll. 9–10). Wolf’s-bane, nightshade, and yew-berry are poisons, and although ingestion represents danger in the first stanza, it signifies healing in the second. Keats’s speaker urges his silent auditor to “glut [his] sorrow” (l. 15, emphasis added) and thereby initiates another catalogue, this time of transient pleasures:

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Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, or on the wealth of globed peonies; or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, and feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. (ll. 15–20)

once again, Keats relies on a repeated long vowel to end his stanza at a snail’s pace, but his reference to the mistress’s hand offers a link to the final stanza in which Joy, one of a line-broken list of personified abstract pleasures that also includes Beauty, Pleasure, Delight, and, of course, Melancholy, poses with “hand … ever at his lips / Bidding adieu” (ll. 22–3). Joy is, in fact, both first and last in the stanza’s series of personifications, his lips and volatile grape bookending the ode’s final series of ingestion references. Joy’s lips inaugurate a listy illustration of consumption-related anatomy that, as the stanza progresses, moves from lips to mouth to tongue to palate: She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die; and Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, and be among her cloudy trophies hung. (ll. 21–30)

The ode ends deep inside a most intimate and sensitive cavity, but not his of the strenuous tongue. The palate tickled at the poem’s conclusion is the reader’s own, as Keats’s series of ns, ts, and ss draw real-world attention to the upper bound of one of the body’s most luscious spaces. Finally, at the center of Keats’s much maligned “ode on Indolence” is a circular parade that moves mechanically before a sickly passive speaker. The ghosts of Love, ambition, and Poesy constitute a sort of literal, mobile catalogue—“one behind the other” they “stepped serene” (l. 3)—that is inherently woven; the ghosts hold hands (fingers intertwined, we might presume), and Keats’s first sketch of them weaves gestural descriptors with anatomical designations in a rigidly alternating, this-that-this pattern: “one morn before me were three figures seen, / With bowèd necks, joinèd hands, side-faced” (ll. 1–2). The woven apparition returns periodically throughout the poem—weaves its way through the stanzas, one might say—but the ode’s most luscious moments come as portrayals of indolence, that inexorable alternative world from which the ghosts temporarily draw Keats’s lazy speaker. Indolence is engulfing—“a blissful cloud”—and thickly sweet, a “honeyed” elixir in which the body steeps (l. 37); most important, however, is its entrapping wovenness, best illustrated by the ode’s fifth stanza. Indolent sleep, we

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learn, is “embroidered with dim dreams” (l. 42, emphasis added), and although indolence leaves the speaker numb to sensory extremes—“Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower” (l. 18)—it shelters him in a sensuous bower of pseudo-leafy luxury, rendering his soul “a lawn besprinkled o’er / With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams” (ll. 43–4) while his head lies “cool-bedded in the flowery grass” (l. 52). The flowers, shades, and beams comprise a list in themselves, but the reference to flowers plays into a larger, line-broken list of vegetal pleasures that includes “a new-leaved vine” (l. 47), “budding warmth” (l. 48), and, of course, the “flowery grass.” The shades and beams, meanwhile, reach both forward and back to engage with Keats’s other atmospheric descriptors, notably the “clouded” but rainless morn (l. 45) and the “blissful cloud of summerindolence.” The window in the ode’s fifth stanza stands ajar, but the speaker’s observation that “[t]he open casement pressed a new-leaved vine” (l. 47) suggests a kind of cosmic resistance to the window’s unbolted state. The casement pushes against a defiantly dense outdoor world while warmth and song fill the room’s interior, and our exit is similarly challenged. unlike the odes to Psyche, the urn, Melancholy, and Indolence, “ode to a Nightingale” and “To autumn” function as luscious wholes, poetic tapestries that derive form as well as texture from Keats’s weaving techniques. Philomel is the nightingale’s mythical alter ego, and her weaver’s spirit is the object of Keats’s ode as well as its formal inspiration. For Mark Sandy, Philomel’s “sublimated” presence in the poem signifies violence only—“Behind Keats’s virtuoso poetic performance lurks the fear of silence and poetic failure just as behind the highly romanticized images of death as courted lover and the seductive romance landscape of ‘the warm south,’ with its erotically inviting ‘purple stainèd mouth,’ lies Philomela’s brutal ravishment” (138)—but unlike the figure to which Keats alludes in line 206 of The Eve of St. Agnes, this nightingale is decidedly not “tongueless.” If it seems too literal-minded to point out that blood stains are typically a dingy brown, not a vibrant shade reminiscent of Lamia’s “purple-linèd palace,” it might seem fairer to observe that in “ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s Philomel figure is more charmer than charmed, more Porphyro than Madeline—especially when compared to the poem’s stationary speaker. a figure of genuine authority, the nightingale owns a far-reaching voice that, Keats argues, plays weft to history’s warp, a thread intertwined with past and present, reality and art. Heard “[i]n ancient days by emperor and clown,” in biblical times by a homesick Ruth, and in a legendary era of “magic casements” by elves and fairies (ll. 64, 66, 69), the nightingale’s song weaves through the trees and brush of the darkling landscape in which Keats’s speaker sits, eventually fading “[p]ast the near meadows, over the still stream, / up the hill-side” and into “the next valley glades” (ll. 76–8). The language alone—past, over, up, in—suggests the directional movement of a weaver’s shuttle, and the speaker’s observation that “[n]o hungry generations tread [the nightingale] down” (l. 62, emphasis added) offers a pun, perhaps, on the loom’s treadle, a foot-powered mechanism that lifts rather than depresses. Constructed around the nightingale’s weave-like motion, the ode itself moves in,

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out, around, and through its speaker’s different states of consciousness. Sandy alleges that the poem’s “spatial movement” is merely “illusory” (158), but I want to emphasize the spatial dimension that inheres in the word state; despite the bulk of critical commentary that suggests otherwise, those states of consciousness are not reality and an imagined complement9 but rather two alternative worlds of sensual experience that Keats interweaves to generate a third: the luscious space of the poem itself. as the ode commences, its speaker is already ensconced inside a sensory universe degrees removed from everyday reality. “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense,” he says, “as though of hemlock I had drunk, / or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / one minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk” (ll. 1–4). The nightingale’s song has induced a kind of drunkenness, and that lush-ious consciousness is the lens through which Keats’s later references to “here” (ll. 24, 38)—the “real” world—must, in fact, be read. The poem weaves in and out of the nightingale’s environment, as the speaker perceives it—“some melodious plot / of beechen green, and shadows numberless,” he initially imagines (ll. 8–9)—and the forest space of the ode’s drunken present; the stanzaic divisions roughly distinguish these alternating green worlds, but not entirely. The embowered forest gives way to the nightingale’s tree-top universe by the end of the first stanza and remains at a distance throughout the second, which expands the bird’s full-throated song of summer into a warm world of its own, “[t]asting of Flora and the country green, / Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth” (ll. 13–14). The third stanza returns to the present, leaving the nightingale’s place “among the leaves” (l. 22) to offer a markedly melodramatic portrait of life on the ground: “Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; / Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (ll. 24–6). The rather immoderate quality of this picture (a caricature, really) attests to the speaker’s altered state, which remains in force throughout the fourth stanza, during which Keats moves to the nightingale’s sky world—“away! away! for I will fly to thee” (l. 31)—fighting his earthly intoxication all the while. Intoxication grounds the stanza’s fourth line—“Though the dull brain perplexes and retards” (l. 34)—only to be immediately vanquished by the “tender” night’s sky, the birdinspired vision of the Queen-Moon’s court. Before the fourth stanza concludes, however, we find ourselves back on the forest floor—“But here there is no light” (l. 38)—where we remain throughout stanzas V and VI. The nightingale’s woven world, populated by emperors, clowns, and fairies, dominates the seventh stanza, and although Keats firmly brings us ground-ward at the beginning of the eighth— “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!”

9

See, for example, Sandy, writing in concurrence with Charles Rzepka, on Keats’s “Nightingale” distinction between “the here and now” and “the triumphant testimony of the imagination” (157–8). Sheley similarly argues that Keats “divides his awareness between two discreet [sic] locations” (32).

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(ll. 71–2)—he eases into the nightingale’s realm once more before concluding by imagining the bird’s flight into “the next valley glades.” In-and-out but never out: such are the architectural allowances of “ode to a Nightingale,” which, in the final analysis, is a space integral unto itself. The poem’s sky visions have long been considered emblematic of Keats’s escapist tendencies, but the “reality” with which they compete is, in fact, a product of the same song-drunk senses that induce the ode’s bird-centered reveries. The poem begins, as it were, in medias weave, true reality ever outside its bounds. Keats’s famous interrogative conclusion—“Fled is that music—Do I wake or sleep?” (l. 80)—fortifies the ode’s back door, locating the poem’s contents outside the realm of real-world definition and, therefore, squarely within an alternative space, one constituted by a shuttling alternation reminiscent of the weaving act. The ode is not a dream, waking or otherwise; it is, instead, a poem, an inhabitable reality in its own right. Keats’s language interweaves the ode’s two worlds to form a tangled textual universe that, in conjunction with the poem’s forcibly alternative atmosphere, denies the reader easy exit from its distinctive space. If the nightingale’s shuttling movement lends the poem its sense of sequestered enclosure, it derives its luxurious aesthetic and a second level of tangled fortification from Keats’s woven catalogues of sensory pleasures. as evening darkens into night, the ode’s speaker tests the limits of his imagination, his memory, and his non-vision senses by importing the forest’s most intimate riches (the earthy flavor of its air, the dampness of its floor, the scent of its flowers) and the stuff of his own material-inspired reveries (wines, bodies, and so on) into the text by means of copious, interwoven lists. Helen Vendler distinguishes between the tropes of reiteration and enumeration, and although she denies this ode’s affiliation with the latter—“the trope of lists, of numerical plenitude”—her definition of reiteration shares key features with the woven-text ideal. Keats, she writes, .

risks both excess of description and obscuring of structural lines. However, with each successive stanzaic experiment, he seems to learn more and more about what can be done with the trope of reiteration, which is his principal trope in this ode. It is of course a static trope: it bends its scrutiny to one thing, and says over and over what that one thing is, or what it is like, or how much it can be said to contain. (87)

as Vendler’s closing list suggests, reiteration is, in fact, an inward-turning form of enumeration, and the reiterative text’s tendency to repeat and imbed its way toward completion generates the kind of complex, center-pulling connectivity associated with the confined landscape of the woven poem. In the case of “ode to a Nightingale,” each stanza both draws attention to its own interior with a momentum-complicating, metrically short bottleneck line (each strophe appears cinched in the middle) and reaches outward to its sisters via interconnected catalogues. Wine, Vendler argues, is “the first element of significance that Keats treats in a reiterative way” (87). In fact, the “draught of vintage” (l. 11) that inaugurates

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the meditative second stanza is actually the third element in a list of sedatives— hemlock, “some dull opiate,” and the “draught of vintage”—that begins in the first stanza and continues with Keats’s reference to “a beaker full of … the blushful Hippocrene” (ll. 15–16). The rural summer that Keats associates with the taste of his imagined vintage is significant, not just for the link it offers to the nightingale’s summer song but also for its form. Keats expresses the synaesthetic taste of warmth as a list—“Tasting of Flora and the country green, / Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!”—that not only intersects his broken catalogue of downers but also links the opiate experience (previously described as numbing) to a rich, bodily sensuality. The human capacity to taste, touch, smell, see, and hear is embodied metonymically in a by now familiar anatomical catalogue that weaves through the stanzas, connecting man to bird, bird to man. Wings and throat appear first, followed by “purple-stainèd mouth” (l. 18), “lustrous eyes” (l. 29), wings again (l. 33)—belonging to the poet this time—“dull brain” (l. 34), feet (l. 41), and finally ears (l. 59). Indeed, not all sensory experience is directly associated with pleasure (the “lustrous eyes” fade and the “dull brain perplexes and retards”), but the heightened bodily awareness to which the catalogue testifies affords a kind of delight in itself. Keats’s speaker longs for “a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,” and he later invokes “[t]he coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine” (l. 49); it is significant, then, that the poem’s other reference to fullness comes in the ostensibly unhappy context of human mortality, of a world “[w]here but to think is to be full of sorrow” (l. 27). Keats’s melodramatically sorrowful stanza is full indeed, deriving its almost playful pleasure from a listwithin-list, anaphoric structure that celebrates the body—its power, even crippled, to be full of sensuously descriptive possibilities—while acknowledging its ageinduced infirmities. “Here,” Keats writes, is a place “[w]here palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; / Where but to think is to be full of sorrow / and leaden-eyed despairs / Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, / or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow” (ll. 24–30). Sensuous sedatives, rural summer pleasures, anatomical treasures, and examples of rich material decay: catalogues of each weave their way past, over, up, and into one another, forging a luscious tangle by the ode’s fifth stanza. The stanza that portrays what Vendler identifies as a typically Keatsian bower is the luscious center of an indisputably luscious poem and, perhaps, the best embodiment—the richest condensation, that is—of Keats’s luscious legacy. elements from each of the above catalogues—“dewy wine,” “flies on summer eves” (l. 50), the speaker’s feet, and “[f]ast fading violets” (l. 47)—come together in the bower, an intimate space that, as Vendler points out, is impeccably circumscribed, enclosed by more than the encroaching darkness: “First, Keats points low to the flowers at his feet and high to the soft incense on the boughs above. Next he creates a gradually ascending enclosure, planting, so to speak, first the grass, then the thicket, then the overhanging fruit tree. He then redescends to shrubs, hawthorn and eglantine, and ends, where he began, with flowers—the violets and musk-rose” (92). accurate

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though it is, Vendler’s description elides the one-to-one relationship between luscious image and luscious form that renders the passage so remarkable. Keats’s language both portrays a bower and makes one, lists encircling lists until reader and speaker alike find themselves wrapped in an intoxicating textual tapestry, a prosodic space akin to the wine-full belly of the musk-rose. The stanza’s catalogue of unseen luxuries indeed begins with flowers and “soft incense” (l. 42), but “[t]he grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild” (l. 45) are not, as Vendler suggests, part of the same catalogue of guessed sweets that later includes hawthorn, eglantine, violets, and rose. attention meet to Keats’s grammar reveals that the floral sweets comprise a separate category; they are, he writes, the gifts “[w]herewith the seasonable month endows / The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild—.” The concluding dash introduces the line-broken catalogue of flowers (hawthorn, eglantine, violets, and musk-rose appear over the course of four lines) that picks up where “soft incense” left off, and that catalogue is, significantly, one of direct objects, endowments granted to the indirect objects grass, thicket, and tree. The former catalogue hems in the latter, just as the leaves enfold the violets, the rose surrounds the flies, and, most significant, the bower encloses the speaker. The time is mid-May, and all is pulled centerward. “[T]he odd result of the desolations in Nightingale and elsewhere,” Vendler argues, “is that we feel, in those pained awakenings from Fancy, Keats’s most solid poetic strength, a strength which eventually affirms not a vanishing but a discovery” (86). However, if desolation and pain remain outside the carefully circumscribed universe of the ode, an ascendant sense of power and pleasure is a less foreign presence in the poem than Vendler suggests. The ode’s darkness—the suicidal ideations, the palsied body, the homesick Ruth—is less real-world pain than reworked pain, valuable sensation both integral to and made bearable by the poem’s rich textual space. as Keats articulates at the ode’s climax, the darkness in “ode to a Nightingale” is embalmed, a term that accurately describes the scented intimacy of Keats’s bower and, perhaps, evokes the woven wrap that sheathes the preserved dead. The text, too, is an inhabitable tapestry, its interwoven strings of sensory luxuries forging a luscious refuge, visceral asylum from the genuine desolation that comes of tubercular brothers, political uncertainty, and lost love. In its fully realized form, the luscious poem is the textual embodiment of the embalmed darkness Keats describes; a rich cocoon, it envelops the reader in its strange intensity. The constriction is the ecstasy.10 It is somehow easy to overlook the fact that the first stanza of “To autumn” is grammatically incomplete, an expression without an acting verb. The strophe is rife with action—load, bless, run, bend, fill, swell, plump, set budding—but Keats buries every bit of it in dependent clauses, all modifying the epithets for autumn 10

Compare to Sheley, who takes an alternative view here, too: “Constriction, to the narrator, is physically debilitating. He resides in ‘embalmed darkness,’ surrounded by the physical—and potentially mental—limitation of the sarcophagus rather than the ecstasy of the nightingale’s bower” (32).

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with which the poem begins: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” (ll. 1–2). The grammar points us to the ode’s foundation, which is, in fact, a catalogue of autumns. That plural—autumns—is the key; as Sperry explains, “the ode compels us to conceive of the season in two different ways: as a conventional setting or personified abstraction that has been depicted poetically and pictorially from time immemorial with a fixed nature and identity of its own; and as a seasonal interval, a mere space between summer and winter that can never be abstracted from the larger cycle of birth and death” (338). Keats’s speaker, Sperry intimates, negotiates a bifurcated reality akin to that portrayed in “ode to a Nightingale.” The earlier poem’s low human world and bird-inhabited heights are replaced in “To autumn” with an artistically conceived season and its less anthropomorphized counterpart. “To autumn,” however, lacks a shuttle, a nightingale figure to interpenetrate its spaces and thereby forge a sustainable middle ground, a woven sanctuary. In the absence of the nightingale’s shuttling model, Keats foregrounds product instead of process; the latter poem, in other words, renders transparent the in-and-out intellectual structure that characterizes the former but retains its intertwining catalogues. Keats’s “two different ways” of conceiving autumn spawn a plethora of rich images, and at the heart of the latest ode is a verbal tapestry that weaves elements of an abstracted autumn with elements of a more organic, cycle-inspired understanding of the season. The result is a circumscribed textual space that, like the intimately scaled farm that serves as the poem’s setting and the discrete temporal interval of autumn itself, affords a cornucopia of sensory experiences. When, in the ode’s second line, Keats dubs autumn “[c]lose bosom-friend of the maturing sun,” he inaugurates a series of graphic personifications that runs through the poem’s second stanza—“Thee sitting careless on a granary floor” (l. 14); “or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep” (l. 16); “and sometimes like a gleaner” (l. 19); “or by a cider-press, with patient look” (l. 21)—and into its last, which portrays autumn as a composer/conductor or, perhaps, a vocalist: “[T]hou hast thy music too” (l. 24). autumn’s anthropomorphized body proves, in Keats’s hands, no slack-limbed, blank-faced doll; fully articulated and subtly, surprisingly human, the season boasts a gestural vocabulary capable of physically expressing a wide range of emotional states, including ease, fatigue, and determination. In language that evokes the heads-together plotting of young girls, Keats asserts that autumn “conspires” (l. 2) with the sun, and the season’s blithe geniality persists in the granary, where he “[sits] careless,” his “hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind” (ll. 14–15). Later, “on a half-reaped furrow” (l. 16) autumn dozes beside his hook, but as a gleaner, he adopts a straight-backed posture: “[T]hou dost keep / Steady thy laden head across a brook” (ll. 19–20). Industriousness similarly reigns at the cider press, where his face takes on a “patient look” (l. 21). The ode’s first line, in contrast, evokes an autumn less human than wildly organic, a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” that, though insentient, proves richly sensual. as the ode moves forward, winding lists of autumn’s vegetal trappings twine with Keats’s gestural images of a humanized season,

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simultaneously mitigating the forward thrust of the dominant catalogue and countering the anthropocentric message it contains. autumn begets vines thick with fruit, trees heavy with apples, produce ripe “to the core” (l. 6), swollen gourds, “plump” hazel nuts (l. 7), and “still more flowers” (l. 9), a petaled profusion that leaves the “clammy cells” of honeycombs “o’er brimmed” (l. 11). The question that inaugurates the ode’s second stanza—“Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?” (l. 12)—reinforces our sense of autumn’s dual nature, for although the “thee” speaks to Keats’s personifying impulse, the “store” he depicts does not. The season’s human embodiments are harvesters, workers who gather and ply autumn’s organic bounty; in the second stanza, however, Keats foregrounds the seasonal pleasures that resist harvest, those autumnal materials whose uselessness detracts nothing from their sensual beauty. The appetizing wealth of the ode’s first stanza gives way in its second to a sensory cornucopia of inedibles, a list of wild leftovers that weave, like the “twinèd flowers” (l. 18) in the wheat field, through a catalogue of practicalities: storing, reaping, gleaning, pressing. In lieu of “ripeness to the core” (l. 6), Keats treats the senses to a catalogue of rich detritus, including tactile chaff (blown by “the winnowing wind” [l. 15]), odiferous poppies (l. 17), and the tastable (but certainly not edible, or filling) “last oozings” of the “ciderpress” (ll. 21–2). The sensory journey through autumnal debris continues in the ode’s final stanza, which describes the “rosy” (l. 26) splendor of “stubble-plains” and the sound of a seasonal symphony: the “wailful” whine of “small gnats” (l. 27), the “bleat” of “full-grown lambs” (l. 30), the song of “[h]edge-crickets” (l. 31), the “whistles” of the “red-breast” (l. 32), and the “twitter” of “gathering swallows” (l. 33). In the ode’s concluding description of autumn’s “music,” however, Keats redoubles his formal efforts to sustain a circumscribed textual reality. as “To autumn” progresses, both night and winter (as well as the death they synecdochically portend) rapidly approach; Keats begins by describing a morning mistiness and a summery sense that “warm days will never cease” (l. 10), but only two stanzas later, “the soft-dying day” and a creeping wind define his setting. The “full-grown lambs loud bleat” because, we presume, they are about to be slaughtered, and Keats’s apostrophic injunction against wishing in vain for “the songs of Spring” (l. 23)—“Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”—strikes a tone at least as appropriate for soothing a frightened real-world person as coddling an underappreciated personified season. To wish for spring only is to desire a future that will never come, and Keats not only urges us—autumn, the animals, his readers, himself—to cling to the sensorily rich present the poem describes but, by weaving a textual network of material catalogues, makes that present cling to us. In the ode’s last seven lines, Keats’s intertwining series of sentient bodies and insentient vegetal riches condense to forge a tighter weave, a more tangled syntactic web. The apostrophe sustains the established anthropomorphosis, but Keats’s portrayal of autumn’s voice trades images of individual human bodies for groups of bestial ones; lambs, insects, and birds are rendered as plurals, and the integrated “music” to which Keats refers in the stanza’s second line breaks

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into its component parts: mourning, bleating, singing, whistling, twittering. each animal, moreover, speaks from a different leafy home—“river sallows” (l. 28), “hilly bourn” (l. 30), hedge, and “garden-croft” (l. 32)—and the result is a sensory explosion, the fractionated parts of which Keats reorganizes, almost literally, as a word-made braid of creatures, sounds, and landscapes. although the conjunctions and and or appear five times in the third stanza’s last five lines (compared to five and three times in the first and second stanzas, respectively), the lists forestall one another’s linear progression. The swallows’ “gathering … in the skies” (l. 33) signifies an imminent departure, but Keats uses accumulation to generate delay, to craft a textual space that forces us to linger within its borders, teasing meaning from its tangled syntax. In sum, “To autumn” affirms the luscious poem’s unparalleled sanctuary, its power to suspend readers in a safe, pleasurable space even as it hints at a more conventional reality, a world defined by loss. as the century progresses, the textual weaving that underwrites the odes’ security becomes Keats’s greatest formal legacy. To imagine sensory asylum is to conjure only fleeting succor; “[f]anatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave / a paradise for a sect” (ll. 1–2), Keats writes in The Fall of Hyperion, but those tangled visions, however lovely, simply dissolve—or, perhaps, unravel—if not properly committed to verse: [...] [P]ity these have not Traced upon vellum or wild Indian leaf The shadows of melodious utterance. But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die; For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm and dumb enchantment. (ll. 4–11)

Mere ideas, in other words, prove insufficiently soothing not only because they lack staying power but because their inevitable evaporation engenders further pain. “The poet and the dreamer,” Keats’s Moneta argues, “are distinct, / Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes. / The one pours out a balm upon the world, / The other vexes it” (ll. 199–202). Reading Keats’s work taught Tennyson and Hopkins that a poem, in addition to “pour[ing] out a balm upon the world,” can become a world of its own, a contained space rife with embalmed pleasures. as the verse epistle to Reynolds suggests, a dream’s “vex[ing]” “thread”-like form neither concludes nor encloses, but a woven poem can conjure paradise, a circumscribed textual plot that, like the shops and homes in which the Biedermeier bourgeoisie took shelter, consumes in its material profusion. as the century wore on, cultural definitions of luxury and security began to shift, but Keats’s Victorian inheritors, in the face of different traumas, continued to weave.

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Chapter 2

out Flew the Web and Floated Wide: tennyson and the Loose Luscious I Touchstone: “Timbuctoo” To inaugurate a chapter on Keats by discussing his “Imitation of Spenser” seems fair enough; after all, as Bate observes, Keats himself considered the “diligently labored” piece of juvenilia “good enough to include in his volume three years later” (36). To dedicate similar attention to Tennyson’s “Timbuctoo” is perhaps less just. although the poem secured for him Cambridge’s prestigious Chancellor’s Medal in Poetry, Tennyson, adam Roberts notes, “was always diffident about this work [and] did not include it in any edition of his own poetry during his lifetime” (556n). In his indispensable memoir, Hallam Tennyson records his father’s less than joyous response to a would-be publisher of a volume of Cambridge Prize Poems: “[P]rize poems … are not properly speaking ‘Poems’ at all, and ought to be forgotten as soon as recited. I could have wished that poor ‘Timbuctoo’ might have been suffered to slide quietly off, with all its errors, into forgetfulness” (Memoir I 45). Perhaps in deference to the Laureate’s wishes, most modern anthologies of Tennyson’s work begin with 1830’s “Mariana,” but this project’s twin interests in literary inheritance and the luscious aesthetic demand that “Timbuctoo,” strange and disdained, launch the discussion here. In his 1830 review of Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, arthur Hallam famously associated his friend and classmate with the late-Romantic “Poets of Sensation,” and Keats, who, Hallam notes, writes as though he were “fed with honeydew” (541), shines throughout the essay as the most sensual of the bunch. Keats’s spirit similarly dominates “Timbuctoo,” whose speaker pays homage to the visionary in “on First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” both physically and psychologically. Tennyson’s poem begins the way Keats’s ends, its speaker absorbing a panoramic ocean vista—“I stood upon the Mountain which o’erlooks / The narrow seas, whose rapid interval / Parts afric from green europe” (ll. 1–3)1— not unlike the one that Keats conjures in his sonnet for “stout Cortez,” who “stared at the Pacific … / … / Silent, upon a peak in Darien” (ll. 11–14). More significant, perhaps, is the mindset shared by both speakers, who, in the fashion described thus 1 I quote from adam Roberts’s edition of Tennyson’s poems throughout, except when citing Idylls of the King. Quotations from the Idylls derive from J.M. Gray’s edition of that work.

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far as quintessentially Keatsian, equate textual experience with spatial experience. The title of Keats’s sonnet asserts that reading will be the experience described therein, but the poem’s opening lines identify the speaker as a traveler: “Much have I travelled in realms of gold, / and many goodly states and kingdoms seen; / Round many western islands have I been / Which bards in fealty to apollo hold” (ll. 1–4). To read Chapman, Keats argues, is to enter and occupy Homer’s “demesne” (l. 6), to conquer, Cortez-like, a bright new world. Tennyson works from the opposite direction but with similar effect. as his speaker stands above the Straits of Gibraltar, presumably engaged in a real-life spatial experience, he finds himself drawn into a world of text, musing “on legends quaint and old / Which whilom won the hearts of all on earth / Toward their brightness” (ll. 16–18). The legendary stories upon which he reflects ultimately determine the course of the poem; the speaker pines for the alternative worlds offered in their pages—atlantis, eldorado, and finally Timbuctoo—and the winged Seraph arrives in response to his plaintive question, “[I]s the rumour of thy Timbuctoo / a dream as frail as those of ancient Time?” (ll. 60–61). The Spirit, who later identifies himself as “[t]he permeating life … / … / of the great vine of Fable” (ll. 216–18), zaps Tennyson’s speaker first into a state of general “mental excellence” (l. 134) and then into the Timbuctoo legend itself, granting him a distanced peek at the city’s architecture: domes, gardens, pagodas, obelisks, minarets, and towers. When the Seraph disappears, however, the vision evaporates; the fable ends with the poem, and the speaker is left in a dark and solitary reality: “[a]nd I / Was left alone on Calpe, and the Moon / Had fallen from the night, and all was dark!” (ll. 246–8). Despite the shared text-as-space philosophy at the heart of both poems, the emotional tenor of “Timbuctoo” is different from that of “Chapman’s Homer.” Whereas Keats’s speaker smoothly enters the alternative world of the text and— as might a visionary colonist like Cortez—stays there, Tennyson’s experiences dramatic entry into (“I felt my soul grow mighty, and my spirit / With supernatural excitation bound / Within me” [ll. 78–80]) and then sudden, unceremonious release from the legend of Timbuctoo. Later, in a Wordsworthian moment of tranquil recollection, he reenters that world through his own poetic text; we learn midway through “Timbuctoo” that the poem’s speaking visionary is actually the poet himself, drawing metaphors from his usual environment—waves in a lake, for example—in a struggle to locate what now seems “a half-forgotten dream”: [...] I know not if I shape These things with accurate similitude From visible objects, for but dimly now, Less vivid than a half-forgotten dream, The memory of that mental excellence Comes o’er me, and it may be I entwine The indecision of my present mind With its past clearness, yet it seems to me as even then the torrent of quick thought absorbed me from the nature of itself With its own fleetness. (ll. 130–40)

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In contrast to Keats’s speaking reader, who, by the sonnet’s conclusion, remains securely suspended in the alternative reality of Chapman’s text, the speaking poet of “Timbuctoo” engages a text-world with more permeable boundaries, a reality confined by something more membranous than wall-like. Neither legends nor (as his distracted, mid-poem aside suggests) his own poetic text seem able to offer full enclosure, and the resulting exchange between worlds distinguishes “Timbuctoo” from the poems in Keats’s luscious oeuvre. In addition to selfconsciously constructing his other world from the “visible objects” that comprise this one, Tennyson’s poet-visionary sees the legendary skyline of Timbuctoo—“a wilderness of spires, and chrystal pile / of rampart upon rampart, dome on dome, / Illimitable range of battlement / on battlement, and the Imperial height / of Canopy o’ercanopied” (ll. 159–63)—rise out of the real landscape in which he stands. Within the confines of a Tennysonian textual universe, it seems, windows open onto a view of the actual—and vice versa. In this case, the reality and its alternative share landscape, layout, and, until darkness envelops the scene at the poem’s close, light. By means of such connections, the speaker of “Timbuctoo” finds himself moving (albeit not always smoothly) between the worlds of life and text. To say that all Keats’s speakers and characters occupy an alternative reality as seemingly permanent as that portrayed in “Chapman’s Homer” would be patently untrue. Not until the 1819 odes did Keats generate the integral textual spaces that truly represent his unique aesthetic, and until that point, figures like Isabella and Madeline—not to mention those of us reading their stories—moved between secure woven worlds and far less pleasant open ones. It is true, however, that as far as Keats’s luscious spaces are concerned (the prosodic ones as well as the bowers and bedrooms his verse describes), to be in one is to be in one. The semipermeable boundaries that enclose the spaces in “Timbuctoo” are absent in Keats’s poetry, which most often presents places doubly or even triply shut in by moats, curtains, or dense foliage—and always complemented by the text’s tight linguistic weave. Windows are obscured, doors forgotten; interwoven catalogues of material luxuries tempt our senses and trap our tongues. The poetic tapestry in which we find ourselves is securely knotted. To see through it, let alone to leave it, is at least difficult and sometimes nearly impossible. Tennyson shares Keats’s impulse to enclose, as well as his penchant for lists and luxury. The poem’s epigraph, perhaps, says it all; the quote is attributed to “Chapman,” but since decades of scholarship have been unable to unearth any such original text, it seems plausible that the real source of the epigraph’s luscious sentiment is Keats, Tennyson’s inspiration and, as Keats’s sonnet testifies, Chapman’s inspiree.2 The “quotation” associates enclosure with economic 2 Matthew Reynolds agrees, asserting that “when he had prefaced ‘Timbuctoo’ with a couplet ascribed, falsely, to ‘Chapman’ Tennyson was alluding, not to anything in the works of Chapman himself, but to Keats’s sonnet ‘on First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ … . Like Keats, the ‘realms of gold’ in which he has been travelling are the realms of literature” (222). In this context, andrew Bennett’s description of Keats as a “haunting” figure seems more useful—resonant with the mystery surrounding Tennyson’s strange epigraph and the poem’s later reference (considered below) to a “lion-haunted” inland.

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prosperity—“Deep in that lion-haunted inland lies / a mystic city, goal of high emprise” (emphasis added)—and the resulting couplet suggests a gated palace rather than a busy metropolis. Later, in questioning the reality of Timbuctoo, Tennyson’s speaker enumerates a series of missing mythical environs, each distinguished by some sensual or commercial pleasure: “Where are ye, / Thrones of Western wave, fair Islands green? / Where are your moonlight halls, your cedarn glooms, / The blossoming abysses of your hills? / your flowering Capes, and your gold-sanded bays / Blown round with happy airs of odorous winds?” (ll. 40–45). although these spaces, like the one imagined in Tennyson’s made-up epigraph, might, upon first reading, seem borrowed from Endymion, the 1819 odes, or any number of the verses Keats wrote in between, to inspect their architecture more closely is to uncover some uniquely Tennysonian infrastructure. Like Tennyson’s textual worlds, these spaces are permeable enclosures—or, in some cases, simply flawed ones. We have only to compare the imagery in “Timbuctoo” to the similar descriptions in Keats’s “Imitation of Spenser” to begin to understand the poets’ key affective differences. So consciously isolated and sequestered is the “Imitation” isle that the surrounding water seems, obsessively and (as Marjorie Levinson might express it) almost autoerotically, to wash no shore but its own: [T]he glossy tide Rippled delighted up the flowery side; as if to glean the ruddy tears, it tried Which fell profusely from the rose-tree stem! Haply it was the working of its pride, In strife to throw upon the shore a gem outvying all the buds in Flora’s diadem. (ll. 29–36)

even the sky above the island lacks breadth; as Keats describes it, it exists only as the island’s upper boundary, a sort of bubble-shaped lid that “never lowers” (l. 9). The isle itself is rich with surface detail (supplied primarily by its richly outfitted animal inhabitants and rose-petal carpet) but, a rock-solid “emerald in the silver sheen” (l. 25), it seems all but impervious to outside influence. In contrast, the inland of Tennyson’s epigraph is “lion-haunted”—a description suggestive of unwanted but somehow un-excludable forces—while the poem’s catalogue of spaces is punctuated with problems. unlike Keats’s island, which is gently illuminated by Morning’s “first footsteps” (l. 2), Tennyson’s halls are not “moonlit” but “moonlight,” the noun modifier suggesting that the space is fully penetrated by that exterior force if not somehow paradoxically made of it. Rather than portray a flowered slope or leafy bower, Tennyson depicts blossoms covering an abyss, a space of unfathomable—not to mention unboundable—depth. “Glooms” offers a similarly untenable spatial description (despite the modifier “cedarn,” suggestive, perhaps, of a scented, tree-defined bower), and the golden sand on Tennyson’s shores is troublingly susceptible to what seem like far-reaching crosswinds. In sum, the spaces depicted in this early catalogue deceive with regard to both sensual and spatial security. although a tradition of circumscribed sensory luxury seems to underlie the list’s aesthetic, its places are imperfectly enclosed.

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Such membranous boundaries are, in fact, present throughout “Timbuctoo.” When commanded by the Seraph to “[o]pen [his] eyes and see” (l. 83), the poem’s speaker seems to become, strangely enough, a permeable entity himself. Loosed from “dull mortality” and “the bond of clay” (ll. 81, 82), he feels his “spirit / With supernatural excitation bound / Within [him]” (ll. 88–90), and the result is that his senses—those nervous loci through which the outer world enters our consciousness—become so “thrillingly distinct and keen” (l. 96) that the outer universe permeates his inner being, becomes him to such a degree that he seems “to stand / upon the outward verge and bound alone / of full beatitude” (ll. 92–4). Most significant, however, is Tennyson’s play on the word “bound”; even as his newfound, supernatural sensory capacity leaps and caroms—bounds—inside him, it remains, in fact, enclosed within his corporeal form, bound by his human skin. The body maintains its spatial integrity despite the dramatic, absorptive quality of its senses, and in “Timbuctoo,” this brand of permeable security likewise defines the world experienced by the visionary poet at its center. Consider, for example, the catalogue that presents his first sensations as an unfettered spirit: [...] I saw The smallest grain that dappled the dark earth, The indistinctest atom in deep air, The Moon’s white cities, and the opal width of her small glowing lakes, her silver heights unvisited with dew of vagrant cloud, and the unsounded, undescended depth of her black hollows. (ll. 96–103)

Shifts in perspective lend structure to the passage, in which the poem’s speaker alternates between nearsightedness and farsightedness, his excellent eye moving rapidly between compact, enclosed spaces and larger, far more ambiguously defined areas. Throughout, however, the packed and the expansive remain interconnected, the former never entirely secured from the latter. The tiny and ostensibly impervious space of the atom is defined only by an “indistinct” boundary, an unexpectedly weak barrier between it and the “deep air” outside. Similarly, the Moon’s “small glowing lakes”—sensuously pleasant enclosures not unlike the one that harbors Keats’s “Imitation” isle—reflect unfathomable “silver heights” that actually extend beyond the reach of clouds. The universe portrayed in “Timbuctoo” is a series of interconnected enclosures, even at the galactic level. Space—with a capital S—exists as supple weave of smaller, semi-bound spaces; planets surround suns, moons surround planets, and, as noted, reflective lakes dot the surfaces of moons. Tennyson concludes the catalogue excerpted above by describing the “clear Galaxy” (l. 103) as a loose tapestry woven of celestial yarns: “Blaze within blaze, an unimagin’d depth / and harmony of planet-girded suns / and moon-encircled planets, wheel in wheel, / arch’d the wan sapphire” (ll. 106–9). The golden pyramids of Timbuctoo are dressed to match the heavens—“each aloft / upon his narrow’d eminence bore globes / of wheeling

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Suns, or Stars, or semblances / of either, showering circular abyss / of radiance” (ll. 166–70)—but the most important counterpart to Tennyson’s loosely woven world is the tapestry-like mental state that the poem’s speaker experiences both at the time of his vision and during his struggle to recreate that vision in verse. The incident itself arrives as “[a] maze of piercing, trackless, thrilling thoughts, / Involving and embracing each with each, / Rapid as fire, inextricably link’d, / expanding momently with every sight / and sound” (ll. 113–17). The speaker later compares the experience to the crisscrossing wave-interference pattern that results when an avalanche disrupts the surface of “some large lake,” a pattern born of “restless and increasing spheres / Which break upon each other, each th’ effect / of separate impulse” (ll. 123–5). Perhaps most significant, the experience of writing it all down—of conjuring images like the one above—is also portrayed as a kind of weaving: “The memory of that mental excellence / Comes o’er me, and it may be i entwine / The indecision of my present mind / With its past clearness” (ll. 134–7, emphasis added). In Tennyson’s conception, to create is to weave. He asserts that the resulting textile-text is, like Chapman’s Homer or the legend of Timbuctoo, an inhabitable space, but like the spaces he describes in his first famous poem—and unlike the tight Keatsian tapestries that inspired him—Tennyson’s text space is permeable. Whereas Keats weaves strings of material pleasures into a dense poetic damask, Tennyson knits his sensory catalogues into a kind of poetic lace, integral but full of holes. The doors in his richest, seemingly most secure enclosures open onto deep space, and like the ones that mark the entrance to Timbuctoo’s golden palace—the legendary locus of pleasure for which Tennyson’s speaker hungers— they stand ever ajar: [...] But the glory of the place Stood out a pillar’d front of burnish’d gold, Interminably high, if gold it were or metal more ethereal, and beneath Two doors of blinding brilliance, where no gaze Might rest, stood open, and the eye could scan, Through length of porch and valve and boundless hall … . (ll. 170–76)

Tennyson’s revision, witting or unwitting, of Keats’s luscious aesthetic demanded similar revision of Keats’s luscious form. Keats struggled to amass an arsenal of syntactic and prosodic techniques that would let him close his catalogues and thereby sequester himself in cozy environments replete with material pleasures. Tennyson, congenitally melancholic and, after arthur Hallam’s death, inconsolably depressed, also retreated to luxurious text-spaces for comfort. although In Memoriam is his most accomplished and convincing argument for the ameliorative power of text, by no means is it his only one; moreover, the satisfaction he derived from words dedicated to descriptions of sensory pleasure is not only evidenced in his poetry but also captured in an observation recorded for posterity by Léonie Villard: “one day as he was … admiring alpine scenery near Murren, his own enjoyment led him to think of what he aptly called Keats’s ‘keen physical imagination.’ ‘If he had been

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here’ he added, ‘he would in one line have given us a picture of that mountain’” (in Ford 18). Still, despite these psychological affinities with Keats, “Timbuctoo” testifies to Tennyson’s very different conception of soothing enclosure, and although the packed-luxury aesthetic of the catalogue is indeed at the foundation of his poetic understanding, his fascination with permeable boundaries affects the way he works with series and the way, therefore, he constructs his luscious poetic spaces. Since, as evidenced by “Timbuctoo,” Tennyson conceives of space, both physical and textual, as woven, the text-as-textile model will remain central to this second phase in the life of the luscious aesthetic. Not in evidence in “Timbuctoo” is the new kind of verbal fabric—that is, the new luscious form—that would come to define Tennyson’s mature work, both long and short. If Keats employed the weave to bring the catalogue into dialogue with closure, Tennyson used weaving to close the catalogue differently, to transmute its open form into the kind of permeable sheath that, as he understood it, envelops the best spaces in which we live. Seamus Perry has also described Tennyson’s interest in spatial “heterogeneity”—“Frequently, especially in the early works, Tennyson creates an enchanted space, an exotic metropolis or spicy garden, which occupies the main-ground of his poem as an embodiment of art, while inviting all the time our speculation about its relation to provinces lying beyond” (8)—but he associates that osmotic quality with the perpetuation, not the alleviation, of anxiety. of “The Poet’s Mind,” for example, Perry asserts, “like Kubla in his pleasure garden, the poet’s mind is at once mighty, wandering the groves of Paradise, but also embattled and under siege from a heedless and uncontrolled world without” (8). on the contrary, security for Tennyson is paradoxically defined by such imperfect enclosure, and his verse spaces reflect his preference for permeability. The “tapestry empyrean” that is Keatsian verse is like the spider’s web: sticky, clinging, and inescapable. Tennyson, in contrast, claimed poetry to be “like shot silk with many glancing colours” (Memoir II 127), a description wonderfully suggestive of a looser, or more receptive, fabric. Woven to change colors in shifting light, shot silk is integral in itself, but, in the manner of Tennyson’s “moonlight halls” or lacy galactic space, identified by its ability to engage the exterior. Shot silk is thread and light, and as Tennyson matures, he invents and refines prosodic techniques that allow him to weave rich but permeable textual environments. II A New Material Culture: Luscious Space and Victorian Experience although Keats produced the bulk of his memorable work in the late teens, his understanding of material culture developed within the context of england’s preWaterloo economy. It is true, as the previous chapter illustrates, that the luxury market was growing and changing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; new supplies of both exotic goods and domestically produced luxuries fed the burgeoning popular demand for material indicators of status and domestic

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security. Still, as alison adburgham demonstrates in her treatise on shops and shopping in nineteenth-century england, 1815 (the year after Keats composed “an Imitation of Spenser”) marked the beginning of a genuinely “new age in production,” as well as “a starting point for a new pattern of retail distribution.” Before 1815, she notes, “goods were sold by individual shopkeepers, who were proprietors of their own shops and lived on the premises, and who were often craftsmen making the goods they sold” (11). In the relative prosperity that accompanied the end of the war, new trends took root. Individual storefronts gave way to shopping complexes, so-called bazaars that, by the late 1830s, had become the earliest department stores. Poor health and economic hardship notwithstanding, Keats may have witnessed the initial phases of this shopping revolution, but Tennyson, born in 1809, came of age, literally and poetically, during its most dramatic years. Does it matter? Very much. Like Keats, whose relationship with Leigh Hunt brought him into contact with luxury markets despite the troubled state of his own finances, Tennyson could hardly avoid London’s new commercial environments. Shopping does not seem to have ranked among the Laureate’s favorite forms of leisure (or, for that matter, among his domestic responsibilities), but the journal entries and letters preserved in Hallam Tennyson’s memoir attest to the family’s comfortable lifestyle as well as the poet’s taste for certain small luxuries, namely tobacco. Sources concur that the Tennysons were frequent and gracious hosts, and more than one friend recalls the surprising quantity of smoking paraphernalia amassed in alfred’s private room. Tennyson downplays his reputation as a tobacco connoisseur in a letter to the Duke of argyll, complaining that “americans always send me pipes, or tobacco, as if I cared for nothing else in the world” (Memoir II 46), but John Tyndall remembers “a rack over the chimney-piece in which were stuck fifteen or twenty pipes” and a table “crammed with tobacco of various kinds” (Memoir II 472). F.T. Palgrave gives a similar description of Tennyson “sitting close over the fire, with many short black pipes in front, and a stout jar of tobacco by his side” (Memoir II 485), but even more significant than Tennyson’s real-life tastes are the ones he imaginatively indulged in his poetry. arthur Hallam described his friend’s aesthetic as simply sensual, but other readers rightly saw something more commercial—that is, more luxurious, more tobacco-loving—in Tennyson’s evocative language. Palgrave indignantly recollects a conversation between himself and “the accomplished French critic M. Taine”: He asked whether Mr Tennyson in his youth had not been given to luxurious living, and surrounded by things of costly beauty. I told how I had then lately visited him in the Camden Town Road second-floor lodgings: that he had gone on his way from College days with little of the world’s goods, and that the picture of his style of life now drawn by the critic was imaginary. Whence had he learned it? “From the ‘Recollections of the arabian Nights,’ and a few other early poems,” M. Taine replied. I was glad of this meeting, as it happily enabled me to offer him a correction … the lively critic listened with a disappointed air. However, when his elegant but somewhat flimsy and one-sided review of Tennyson soon after appeared, this conjecture about the poet’s personal Sybaritism as the “milieu” of the early verses was barely perceptible. (Memoir II 497–8)

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Tennyson was no sybarite, but he was neither insensitive to nor uninterested in material pleasure. Taine is right to note that “Recollections” reads like a catalogue of earthly delights; “the golden prime / of good Haroun alraschid” is, according to Tennyson’s unabashedly enthusiastic speaker, quite literally a gilded age. Palgrave’s own Memoir reminiscences present Tennyson as a man of the world—a homeowner, a host, a celebrity, a smoker—and despite his religious convictions, Tennyson placed more than a little value on the here-and-now world of the human senses, an attitude reflected in his remark, recorded by Tyndall, during an 1858 conversation on “personal immortality”: “I should consider that a liberty had been taken with me if I were made simply a means of ushering in something higher than myself” (Memoir II 474). Similarly earthly ideals underlie his early dramatic monologue “Saint Simeon Stylites,” which parodically condemns its speaker’s ridiculous ascetic pride: [...] But yet Bethink thee, Lord, while thou and all the saints enjoy themselves in heaven, and men on earth House in the shade of comfortable roofs, Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food, and wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls, I, ’tween the spring and downfall of the light, Bow down one thousand and two hundred times, To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints; or in the night, after a little sleep, I wake; the chill stars sparkle; I am wet With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost. I wear an undress’d goatskin on my back; a grazing collar grinds my neck; and in my weak, lean arms I lift the cross … . (ll. 102–16)

God would prefer, Tennyson insinuates, that Saint Simeon properly indulge in the human pleasures listed in the passage’s opening lines, a sentiment echoed in tennyson’s commendation of Paradise Lost. Tickled by Milton’s portrayal of the angels’ “delicious” feast in the fifth book, he characterizes “old Milton the puritan” as “a bit of a sensualist in his nature,” arguably revealing his own inclination toward and appreciation for the aesthetically fine (Memoir II 521). The luxurious imagery in Tennyson’s verse may not reflect his lifestyle, but it does reflect his life: tastes and tendencies, preoccupations and proclivities. Moreover, man of the world that he was, Tennyson was no stranger to the city, and although he preferred not to live in London, he found himself a frequent visitor to that throbbing center of imperial commerce. “Before Hallam and Lionel Tennyson grew up,” Frederick Locker-Lampson writes in the Memoir, “I used to see a good deal of [Tennyson] in London … we sallied forth together to see many of his old friends … and we often took morning walks in the Parks and Kensington Gardens” (Memoir II 66). as Tennyson aged and, for various reasons, began to find the city more difficult to navigate, Palgrave recalls that he altered his pedestrian

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routines rather than abandon them: “When it happened that Tennyson was our guest, he always begged that he might not go forth alone into the ‘great city’; his shortness of sight and the crowded streets and crossings, with which he had now grown unfamiliarized, rendering him grateful for the sympathetic and admiring companionship which he always found” (Memoir II 489–90). as it happens, merely walking the streets of London was enough to bring a pedestrian into surprisingly intimate contact with the city’s new shopping environments, whether or not he habitually entered those stores to purchase tobacco, piece goods, or anything else. “Shopping was never synonymous with buying,” erika Diane Rappaport observes, and to Victorians, “[s]hopping meant a day ‘in Town’” (5). even the very earliest bazaars, as Robert Southey’s 1807 description of exeter Change suggests, were constructed in such a way as to eliminate, as much as possible, the barrier between shop and street—and, therefore, the distinction between shopper and mere ambler. “exeter Change,” Southey writes, “is precisely a Bazaar, a sort of street under cover, or large long room, with a row of shops on either hand, and a thoroughfare between them; the shops being furnished with such articles as might tempt an idler, or remind a passenger of his wants” (in adburgham 18). By 1830, the Royal London Bazaar—“[c]onsiderably smarter,” adburgham notes, than exeter Change (18)—was a multi-entranced commodities palace that blurred the distinction between the public space of the street and the private space of the shop by locating semi-private non-shopping spaces (galleries, arcades, and similar areas) outside or in between its individual stores. an announcement in The World of Fashion outlined the extraordinary material comforts (some for sale, some free to the wellheeled ambler) offered by the Royal London Bazaar: “you may purchase any of the thousand and one varieties of fancy and useful articles, or you may lounge and spend an agreeable hour either in the promenades or in the exhibitions that are wholly without parallel to the known world. Carriages may either wait in the arena for orders, or at the Royal entrance, Liverpool Street; or at the Gray’s Inn Road entrance” (in adburgham 18). Reminiscent of both Tennyson’s Timbuctoo and Haroun alraschid’s exotic kingdom (a “thousand and one” is, of course, a number freighted with orientalist connotations), the Royal London Bazaar and others like it existed as rich material worlds distinct from and yet oddly a part of the pedestrian environments that surrounded them. In fact, analogous landscapes abound in Tennyson’s work. Consider, for instance, “The Kraken,” whose eponymous sea monster at once enjoys an “uninvaded” (l. 3) slumber and “[b]atten[s] on huge seaworms” (l. 12). Both a part of the underwater ecosystem and an entity quite apart from it—even the “faintest sunlights flee / about his shadowy sides” (ll. 4–5)—the Kraken’s influence permeates two ostensibly separate spheres. Later in the decade, the bazaar gave way to the modern department store, an institution associated, even in today’s cities, with alluring street-side window displays that transform walker into shopper, street into shop. The shop window was not, in itself, a new concept, but by dramatically increasing the scale and number of such windows, Victorian department stores reinvented a classic form of advertising and, at the same time, effectively lined the public streets with material

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luxuries. By mid-century, adburgham explains, “The habit of having a day’s shopping in town began, and shopping now included ‘window shopping.’” as adburgham makes clear, the packed-luxury experience that shaped Keats’s new aesthetic was still the standard, but window space had become at least as important to the shopping experience as the interior space of the store itself: “The windows, stuffed from floor to roof, from back to front, with as much merchandise as they could possibly display, all clearly price-ticketed, were certainly not aesthetic. But they gave the shopper a very good idea of what she could find inside the shop” (145). Sensorily speaking, department store windows were even more successful than the bazaar’s public non-shopping spaces at dissolving the distinction between inside and out; no building material suggests permeability like glass, through which we can see, hear, and, given its capacity to conduct heat, sometimes even feel. Something like the bewitching irresistibility of the shop window is at the heart of the drama in “The Lady of Shalott,” whose heroine peers, day in and day out, through a glass that, instead of showing her the real world, offers a reflection—an artificial construction—of its sensory delights. When Sir Lancelot’s image dresses her mirror with a visually stunning array of metals and gems that simultaneously implies an aural and tactile encounter—“brazen greaves,” “gemmy bridle,” “blazon’d baldric,” “silver bugle,” “[t]hick-jewell’d” saddle, and luminous helmet complete with feather (ll. 76, 82, 87, 88, 92, 93)—she succumbs to temptation, turning from her post and entering his world of goods. In “Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere” (a verse fragment written a year or so before “The Lady of Shalott”), we find knight instead of lady lured beyond salvation by gleaming opulence. For love of Guinevere, who wears a “gown of grass-green silk … / Buckled with golden clasps” and brandishes a “light-green tuft of plumes … / Closed in a golden ring” (ll. 24–7), Launcelot sacrifices both moral and material wellbeing: “a man had given all other bliss, / and all his worldly worth for this, / To waste his whole heart in one kiss / upon her perfect lips” (ll. 42–5). No window frames or mediates Launcelot’s experience, but Tennyson’s description of the atmosphere holds strangely predictive significance. It has begun to drizzle—“The maiden Spring upon the plain / Came in a sunlit fall of rain” (ll. 3–4)—and the air through which the lovers view one another is oddly reflective, a “crystal vapor everywhere” (l. 5). Crystal, of course, is the word that Victorians would come to associate with the century’s most marvelously windowed edifice: Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, home to the Great exhibition of 1851 and a structure that associated permeable space with all that was progressive, powerful, and expensive. Large windows were the rage, but Jerome Hamilton Buckley identifies the Crystal Palace as “the most revolutionary building of the Victorian era, the one most daring in its use of ‘functional’ materials.” “The masters of an older style,” he explains, had thought that the outer wall must serve always as a weighty and weightbearing mass designed with due proportion to enclose finite space. But the Crystal Palace, breaking with all orthodox precedent, raised its airy shell,

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“[a]iry,” “light,” and affiliated with the “unlimited,” the century’s most emblematic piece of architecture recalls, in Buckley’s description, the glistening “bliss” and interior/exterior simultaneity (“his whole heart,” “her perfect lips”) that Tennyson portrays in “Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere.” Buckley claims, in fact, that Tennyson “thought the halls themselves more remarkable than the ingenious exhibits they sheltered,” and he observes that in the 1851 edition of In Memoriam, the Laureate chose to invoke the Crystal Palace’s Britain-distinguishing and planet-unifying architecture in his dedicatory stanza “To the Queen”: “europe and the scattered ends / of our fierce world were mixt as friends / and brethren, in her halls of glass” (285–6). Glass is notoriously fragile, but Tennyson associates the Crystal Palace (and, metonymically, the capacity to “mix” elements and blur boundaries) with strength and political security. Temples to england’s burgeoning economy, department stores were symbols of imperial strength, too, and in the years following the exhibition, they came to resemble—from the pedestrian perspective, particularly—halls of glass themselves. as Rappaport explains, “Department stores and exhibition halls certainly share many similiarities. In both locales, new glass and iron technology, special lighting, grandiose architecture, and the ‘overwhelming’ and ‘chaotic display’ of diverse products created a sense of ‘theatrical excess’ intended to overwhelm if also delight the spectator” (28). Gail McDonald concurs in her account of typical mid- to late-century american department stores, the majority of which were modeled after european examples: Large, imposing, and vaguely classical, such edifices are daunting to behold from a distance. yet for the pedestrian walking parallel to them, every aspect of the design works to dissipate a sense of awe: plate glass windows are less forbidding than walls; revolving or swinging doors are more welcoming than shut ones. The proliferation of apparent and real openings has a centripetal force: the shopper is drawn in by attractive window displays and eased through a door; the main entrance, usually a curved opening situated at a corner, protrudes on the sidewalk, enticing walkers from both directions. (232)

“[W]hat are the Great exhibitions but a sort of collective window display?” asked “the author of the 1866 article ‘Shop Windows’” (Rappaport 28), while Ruskin “dismissed the [Crystal Palace] as ‘neither a palace nor of crystal,’ as merely a glass envelope built ‘to exhibit the paltry arts of our fashionable luxury’” (Buckley 286). Given the parallels between Paxton’s design and post-1851 commercial architecture, these contemporary observers’ sense of the Crystal Palace as a giant street-side window display for something like the Great exhibition Department Store seem incisive and even prophetic. as Jennifer Wicke explains,

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The vast web of interrelated commercial activities centrifugally spun by the department store is the nexus of commerce inscribed in one place. Some of the visionary impetus of the department store as Commerce centralized and fantasized arose from … the Crystal Palace at the world-famous exhibition. That expanse of soaring glass, giving architectural support to the anthology of British commerce housed within, translated within a few decades into the structure of the department store, which was at once an exhibition hall, a palace of dreams, and a bureaucratic hub. (271)

With regard to architecture, the sense of permeability achieved by windowed walls would stay in vogue and remain a close associate of material wealth and economic security. Meanwhile, as new architectural trends functioned to erase the boundary between shop and street, store owners increasingly relied on a not-quite-closed aesthetic indoors as well. as the above descriptions suggest, england’s goods-packed shop interiors were still luscious environments—that is, spaces crowded with luxury wares—but in terms of square footage, department stores offered significantly more floor space than the boutiques of the early nineteenth century or even the bazaars’ individually operated shops. In an effort to counter their intimidating size, department stores were designed to function as series of interwoven spaces— departments—each of which, while enveloping the shopper in nearly bounded luxury, afforded a view of the store’s other offerings. McDonald describes the technique thus: “In 1912 Jerome Koerber, decorator of … Strawbridge and Clothier, told owners of such emporiums how best to maximize their sales: ‘eliminate the store by weaving through it some central ideas.’ But the architects of department stores had long employed a range of devices to make that sleight of hand possible” (231–2). McDonald continues, explaining that the ideal department store “invites drift: solid walls having been replaced by columns, the divisions between one department and the next are vague; wide aisles, like generous avenues, encourage movement along the lines of horizontal display cases and arouse flaneurlike observation of other shoppers; mirrored columns … multiply one’s focus and desire” (233). a version of this open floor plan takes center stage in “The Palace of art,” since the fantastic edifice of the poem’s title is designed to compartmentalize experience and to encourage experiential drift—both by means of differently (but always richly) appointed corridors and rooms. each chamber in the palace is “a perfect whole” (l. 58), but despite their spatial integrity, Tennyson’s rooms (as a set, anyway) are most notable for their adaptability, for their capacity to accommodate shifts in emotion and desire. Throughout the “livelong day,” Tennyson writes, “my soul did pass, / Well-pleased, from room to room” (ll. 55–6), and since those rooms offer colors and imagery “fit for every mood of mind” (l. 90) as well as illustrations of “every legend fair / Which the supreme Caucasian mind / Carved out of Nature” (ll. 125–7), the cataloguing lines that follow read like a department store directory. In “Palace,” Perry asserts, “Tennyson nags himself to get out more” by describing a space “of removed loveliness, almost parodically golden and gilded and lovely” (9). In truth, however, being in the palace is much the same as being out; in addition

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to the fact that the speaker’s experience is characterized by perpetual movement (“pass[ing]”), the structure’s material kinship with contemporary department stores undermines its Perry-conferred status as a hermetic and therefore “sick[ening]” (9) arty bubble. Despite its architectural likeness to the retail temples of the day, Tennyson initially describes his Palace of art as “a lordly pleasure-house” (l. 1), a private dwelling. This factor, too, is significant to the work’s in-is-out (or, as Perry might put it, “heterogeneously” spatial) aesthetic; in addition to dissolving boundaries between departments (“[a]n expedition to purchase shoes,” McDonald notes, “easily metamorphoses into one to redecorate the dining room” [233]), the most successful Victorian department stores worked hard to blur the boundaries between public shop and private home. “The chief purpose of the store, offering goods to buyers, was only one of many services it provided,” McDonald recounts. “Rising through the strata of floors, one could dine, nap, refresh one’s toilette, visit a beauty parlor or barbershop, write and mail letters … . at its most ambitious the department store … [catered] to the urban dweller’s desires for creature comforts, edification, or entertainment” (234). Surprisingly, the sacred domestic interior, so vigilantly defended from the external world of traffic and trade, had outposts in the retail world. “Indeed,” Krista Lysack writes, “one of the things which legitimized respectable women’s presence on the streets of the West end was the way in which stores replicated the feeling of a home away from home” (19).3 the meticulously cultivated connection between shop and home encouraged consumers to associate goods with domestic comfort, a factor that may have contributed, in turn, to the shop-like quality of Victorians’ most carefully decorated rooms. In her study of the Victorian parlor, the heart of the Victorian home, Thad Logan notes that “[o]ne of the most distinctive features of parlours throughout Victoria’s reign was the number of decorative objects found in them at all levels of social life” (7). The connection between material luxury and Romantic sensibility had been forged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but Victorians’ ideologically driven consumerism was far more conspicuous. Logan observes that “it is the accumulation and display of … objects that sets Victorian interiors apart from those of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries” (7), and she associates the newly dramatic scale of Victorian consumption with technology, advances in which also permitted the building and stocking of department stores: The characteristic bourgeois interior becomes increasingly full of objects, cluttered—to modern eyes, at least—with a profusion of things, things that are not primarily functional, that do not have obvious use-value, but rather participate in a decorative, semiotic economy. This eruption of objects in the home was, of course, part of the larger-scale evolution of the Victorian panoply of things. By the middle of the nineteenth century, technological development within a capitalist economy made the production and consumption of material goods possible on a scale never before realized in history. (26) 3

See also Rappaport 36.

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Thus the shop breathed life into the home, rendering the distinction between the commercial and domestic spheres, like the distinction between the housewares and shoe departments, less wall than membrane. Tennyson often portrays conspicuously stuffed interiors like the ones Logan describes. In “Recollections of the arabian Nights,” for example, decorative luxuries that appear in multiples— “fourscore windows all alight” (l. 122), “[a] million tapers flaring bright” (l. 124), and “[s]ix columns, three on either side, / Pure silver” (ll. 144–5)—contrast with the oneness of Haroun alraschid, the “[s]ole star of all that place and time” (l. 152). Similarly, The Princess’s College court, a quasi-domestic space, is “[c]ompact of lucid marbles, boss’d with lengths / of classic frieze, with ample awnings gay / Betwixt the pillars, and with great urns of flowers” (II, ll. 10–12; emphasis added). The tent that appears later in The Princess is even more opulent—“There leaning deep in broider’d down we sank / our elbows: on a tripod in the midst / a fragrant flame rose, and before us glow’d / Fruit, blossom, viand, amber wine, and gold” (IV, ll. 14–17)—and that space, not coincidentally, is a home-away-from-home, an environment analogous to a department store lounge or even a home-goods department itself. But further complicating the Victorian notion of domestic sanctuary is the fact that Victorian homes were designed with an awareness of and, supposedly, a concomitant desire to prevent the kind of spatial permeability that defined department store interiors. The decorative commodities that covered nearly every surface in the typical Victorian home brought the commercial world into the domestic sphere, but the not-quite-closed character of residential architecture merits treatment on its own terms. on the surface—literally—Victorian home design seemed to privilege absolute closure. House facades were purposely formidable; as Karen Chase and Michael Levenson observe in their treatment of Victorian domestic ideals, the well-off opted for “articulate wall[s]” and “brazenly protruding doorway[s], extended through muscular columns or, as the century wore on, through elaborate iron or glass awnings, stretching toward public space as if they were the advance guard of a militant privacy” (145). Behind those walls and doors, servants and masters inhabited separate worlds. Chase and Levenson explain, drawing on Robert Kerr’s influential 1864 treatise The Gentleman’s House: “Whatever the size of the house, notes Kerr, ‘Let the family have free passageway without encountering the servants unexpectedly; and let the servants have access to all their duties without coming unexpectedly upon the family and visitors.’ The family must never catch sight of the scullery and the kitchen; the outer walks must be kept free from the servants’ view” (165). Lest it seem, however, that the infrastructure of the typical middle- or upper-class Victorian abode little resembled that of the department stores that furnished it, we have only to reconsider the parlor, the room that Logan describes as “the center of the home and the most important room in the house” (23). “a self-enclosed room usually entered through a door leading from a central hallway” (Logan 5), the parlor boasted volatile boundaries, its crowded luxury tucked away from some and patently on display for others. as Logan explains,

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In other words, Victorian privacy was performed and the parlor enclosed, as it were, within a semi-permeable bubble through which outsiders viewed what Chase and Levenson identify in their book’s title as a “spectacle of intimacy.” Tennyson’s verse reflects his interest in this cultural circumstance, too. For instance, cluttered with the wrong stuff, the “moated grange” in which Mariana weeps is a parody of the cozy Victorian home, its every surface engulfed in unpleasant (as opposed to appealing) texture: “With blackest moss the flower-pots / Were thickly crusted, one and all; / The rusted nails fell from the knots / That held the pear to the gablewall” (ll. 1–4). Clinching the parody, however, is the grange’s utter isolation, the absent presence of the lover who “cometh not.” Without guests, the luxurious enclosure of the parlor is moot, and Mariana’s missing lover-cum-observer— rather than the disagreeable material circumstances that consume the bulk of the poem’s descriptive space—is the root of her discomfort. A New Weave: Luscious Form Redefined In “The Idealist,” a brief verse monologue voiced by a proponent of the new transcendental paradigm, Tennyson writes, “I weave the universe” (l. 5). His own philosophical views aside, the choice of “weave” is undeniably significant. The vast majority of the poem’s verbs are simple forms of be—“… I am one / I am the earth, the stars, the sun / I am the clouds, the sea. / I am the citadels and palaces / of all great cities” (ll. 8–12)—and Tennyson might have chosen any number of terms to express the idealist’s sense of “[c]reating all I hear and see” (l. 7). However, instead of generate, formulate, or even cause, Tennyson opts for a more specific kind of making—“weave”—to describe the way in which so many states of being unite in his speaker’s singular existence. The idealist is utterly self-assured, and the ultimate creation, his diction suggests, is textile. Having established an affinity between Tennysonian tropes and Victorian environments—between, that is, Tennyson’s interest in imperfectly enclosed, luxury-packed settings and iconic Victorian spaces, both commercial and domestic—we can turn our attention to the defining formal features of Tennyson’s luscious verse. Like Keats, whose influence Victoria’s Laureate felt acutely from the earliest moments of his creative career, Tennyson weaves his luscious environments, renders textual spaces as linguistic textiles. and like Keats, Tennyson arguably derived an appreciation for weft work from the material england in which he lived and wrote. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of weaving to the Victorian economy and decorative aesthetic. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the weaving technologies introduced during Keats’s lifetime

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saw great improvement and wider application, and the english textile industry exploded (adburgham 11). on the import front, oriental textile products—silks and rugs, most notably—rose rapidly among the ranks of sought-after luxury goods, and establishments such as Liberty’s east India House worked both to satisfy and intensify consumers’ demands (Lysack 18–19). Luxurious textiles became clothing, of course, but their increased prominence in interior décor is perhaps more significant to an inquiry into space and excess. Textiles, Logan points out, swallowed nearly every surface in the parlor, that all-important goodspacked sanctuary: Some, such as lamp mats (to catch spills) and antimacassars, served a purpose … . Various other kinds of covering, such as crocheted lampshades, seem to have been purely ornamental … . Tables were frequently covered with decorative cloths, often handmade or hand-embellished … . While the tendency to “underline” objects by placing pieces of fabric under, over, or around them can be seen throughout the Victorian period, by the last three decades of the nineteenth century there was a decided fashion for “draping” that affected many areas of the drawing room. Chairs and sofas might sport not only antimacassars but also shawls and elaborate pillows. (132–3)

In addition to dressing surfaces, textiles often served to blur apertures and mitigate the fixed quality of certain boundaries. Victorian homeowners draped piano legs, layered windows, replaced doors with tapestries, and swathed anything spare or hard-edged with lambrequins (Logan 43, 133–4). Tennyson was no stranger to this aesthetic; from the aforementioned tent in The Princess to the “arras”-hung walls in “The Palace of art,” the fabric-dominated interior is a recurring presence in Tennyson’s work. The overall effect of the drawing room’s décor, allison Kyle Leopold contends, was that of “protected, womblike enclosure”: “[T]he ideal Victorian home tended to boast a parlour that see-sawed clumsily between homely comfort and happy grandeur: … thickly upholstered chairs with well-padded backs, cosy fringed footstools and sumptuously curtained windows topped with swagged velvets, looped festoons, and lavishly trimmed brocades” (47; in Logan 11). But enclosure, as we have noted, was vexed conceptual territory for a population immersed in a culture of plate-glass and negotiable borders. all that was powerful, progressive, and even proper—as the soaring eminence of the Crystal Palace and the performed privacy of the parlor suggest—was associated with ambiguous boundaries and membranous walls. Both safety and pleasure were associated with packed but semi-open spaces, and those conditions underlay Tennyson’s renovated luscious form, as well as his new luscious aesthetic. Cultural forces aside, however, the Laureate’s revision of the Keatsian ideal smacks of Bloomian influence anxiety, and a look at the “revisionary ratio” Bloom calls tessera also yields valuable insights into Tennyson’s understanding of weaving and closure. Bloom initially defines tessera as “completion and antithesis,” the process by which “[a] poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain

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its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough” (14). In Keats’s work, woven structures—images of textiles as well as textile-like versification—afford the kind of absolute enclosure congenial to the Biedermeier temperament or agoraphobic psyche. In reality, of course, textiles are not walls; no matter how dense the weave, fabric will never hold water, deflect a sword, or secure a fortress. at best, woven enclosures only dim light and muffle sound, and to keep a body warm in winter requires layers and layers of traditional fabric. In any textile, interfiliated holes are the counterpart to interwoven threads, and while Keats’s weft work elides this fundamental truth, Tennyson’s accentuates it. By bringing the inherent permeability of textile into dialogue with his culture’s appreciation for blurred boundaries, Tennyson, to adopt Bloom’s language, “provides what his imagination tells him would complete the otherwise ‘truncated’ precursor poem and poet, a ‘completion’ that is as much misprision as a revisionary swerve is” (66). With this added insight, we can return to the previous comparison between Keats’s poetry-as-spider-web philosophy and the Tennysonian alternative that associates poetry with shot silk. Keats’s description emphasizes the spider’s sticky filaments and the “points” on which they hang, but Tennyson’s tesseric completion underscores the sense of void—the negative space, as opposed to the positive space—implied by Keats’s “airy.” To picture a spider’s web is to envision both positive and negative space (that is, the crossing filaments and the spaces between them), but Keats’s diction highlights the former. as if to call attention to the holey diaphanousness of an actual web, Tennyson invokes a far more substantial weave, but Keats’s oversight—the openness on which Tennyson’s antithetical completion is founded—becomes a central tenet in his heir’s revised aesthetic. Tennyson continues Keats’s project, but the negative space returns. Tennyson’s web is “shot” with light, and formally speaking, his textile-texts are similar: close but permeable, closed but open. Web, in fact, is the word that Tennyson chooses in “The Lady of Shalott” to describe the fruit of that famous damsel’s loom. The pictured tapestry is “[a] magic web with colors gay” (l. 38), but unlike any Keatsian drapery, it is characterized by a most unexpected airiness—“out flew the web and floated wide” (l. 114)—that further confirms the poetic misprision described above. Literature’s population of weaving figures is, I have noted, small but not insignificant, and the Lady of Shalott, forbidden to communicate directly with the world outside her window, is as much Philomel’s heir as Tennyson is Keats’s. However, while Philomel’s stolen tongue compels her to weave a personal narrative, the tapestry produced by the more mysteriously cursed Lady of Shalott illustrates only external experience: the goings-on outside the “[f]our gray walls, and four gray towers” (l. 15) that make up her island home. Her textile-text, in other words, derives both form—that is, its floaty weave—and content from semi-open experience. Tennyson’s interest in weaving has been treated before, most notably by Gerhard Joseph in Tennyson and the Text, which locates “The Lady of Shalott” at the “exact center” of its sophisticated theoretical analysis (117). Like Kruger and Miller, Joseph reads weaving as a stand-in for the creative act, as a metaphor

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for the process by which ideas become literature. Within a post-structuralist paradigm, however, the transmutation of ideas into literature occurs when a work is read, not written. For Joseph, the Lady’s story is a parable of modern labor, both commercial and creative. In the industrial world, he asserts, “a worker’s labor … becomes something objective and independent of him, a thing that takes on a life of its own and whose function in his life he cannot fathom”; in a post-structuralist critical universe, literary work is similarly severed from authorial intentions, and “both Lady and poet,” he argues, “are themselves the media through which a warp and woof weaving of a text happens” (120). For Joseph, then, the key moment in Tennyson’s poem occurs when the outside, the unintentional—the vision of Lancelot—becomes tangled with the Lady’s careful craft. “[S]ince tapestry is woven from the reverse side,” Joseph writes, “the Lady needs a mirror to see the design that she weaves. But that craft function is woven inextricably into its epistemological one: if the Lady needs the mirror to fashion her own design, the stimulus of Lancelot from the outside, a mise en abyme flash of textuality that accentuates the mirror’s splintering powers … makes it difficult for her to see her own production outright” (122). The poem, Joseph asserts, similarly lacks independence, integrity; it approaches completion (as Tennyson, Joseph implies, certainly recognized) only when laced with readerly interests and interpretations. as is the case with Keats, Tennyson’s work might accurately be described as woven in a sense more literal than a reading like Joseph’s would suggest. We must recall that the Lady’s famous mirror is established within the context of the poem as more than a craftsman’s tool; a weaver does, as Joseph points out, use a mirror to see the back of her textile, but the mirror in “The Lady of Shalott” is integral to the poem’s strange curse. Forbidden to look directly out the window—“a curse is on her if she stay / To look down to Camelot” (ll. 41–2)—the Lady watches the world through her glass, perpetually weaving its “magic sights” (l. 65) into a rich, variegated tapestry. The “shadows” (l. 48) she sees include the road, the river, and the people of Camelot; when Joseph asserts that Lancelot’s sparkling image constitutes a kind of invasion, a worldly assault on the integrity of the Lady’s artistic space, he elides a fundamental truth: this mirror has always reflected life beyond the tower’s walls. The fact of Lancelot’s appearance, then, is less unexpected than its effect, and the Lady of Shalott’s dramatic response to the knight’s gleaming person throws Tennyson’s aesthetic preferences into sharp relief. The poem’s weaving heroine lacks neither integrity nor artistic independence but rather the opportunity to connect, to link her space with others’. Given its pictorial detail, her famous textile is surprisingly light (later in the poem it floats) but nonetheless able to fill that void, and the poem’s uniquely woven versification mimics the luscious space generated by the Lady’s tapestry. If the mirror is linked to the inscrutable curse, the weaving itself is not; rather, the Lady’s creative making affords a kind of compensation, a way of engaging the forbidden exterior: “She knows not what the curse may be, / and so she weaveth steadily, / and little other care hath she, / The Lady of Shalott” (ll. 42–5). Locked in a space too bounded for Victorian tastes—“the silent isle,” we are told, “imbowers”

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her (l. 18)—Tennyson’s heroine not only takes full advantage of her window view but weaves herself an alternative reality, an inhabitable textile that, by literally picturing the outside world, mitigates the distance between rich, gay Camelot and her own stone enclosure. Her life is strange but not unpleasant, for although she lacks a “loyal knight and true” (l. 63), the Lady “delights / To weave the mirror’s magic sights” (ll. 64–5). The tapestry brings the sensory wealth of Camelot into the tower, and Tennyson’s prosody generates a luxe, permeable enclosure that mimics the not-quite-closed spatial experience cultivated in and by the Lady’s airy weave. Shalott and Camelot are physically (and, perhaps, politically) discrete but aurally proximal; their shared final syllable establishes, every fourth or fifth line, a link between them, and when people cross one en route to the other, they mitigate our sense of the Lady’s isolation. Meanwhile, the lines strung between the poem’s alternating refrains link Camelot to Shalott with chains of strong rhymes and, more often than not, a striking material catalogue: There the river eddy whirls, and there the surly village-churls, and the red cloaks of market girls, Pass onward from Shalott. Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, an abbot on an ambling pad. sometimes a curly shepherd-lad, or long-hair’d page in crimson clad, Goes by to tower’d Camelot; and sometimes thro’ the mirror blue the knights come riding two by two: She hath no loyal knight and true, The Lady of Shalott. (ll. 51–63, emphasis added)

as they stream into and out of the Lady’s mirror on their way to and from arthur’s door, so the inhabitants of Camelot weave through Tennyson’s lines, beating a path, metrically speaking, between the tower and the town. Their features (hair curly, long, or, in Lancelot’s case, “coal-black” [l. 103]), their gear (scarlet cloaks, funereal accouterments [l. 67–8], and sparkling armor), and the landscape that surrounds them (its lilies and river, fields and sheaves) prove marvelously absorbing for poet as well as Lady. Tennyson packs the spaces between refrains with the stuff of a wealthy kingdom, using it to evoke the kind of goods-packed interior at the heart of Victorian cultural experience and, simultaneously, to string together the poem’s otherwise too-isolated settings. after all, the syllable that Shalott and Camelot share—lot—signifies both a circumscribed space and the profusion that fills it; a measured unit of acreage constitutes a lot, as does the merchandise sold by distributor to retailer, or auctioneer to bidder. If the Lady’s experience resembles that of the window-shopper, Tennyson’s prosody, confounding the distinction between discrete places, functions like a commercial arcade.

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Lancelot’s arrival precipitates the Lady’s demise. When, in the fourth stanza of Part III, the legendary knight takes control of Tennyson’s second refrain—what should have been a line about Shalott becomes, “Sang Sir Lancelot” (l. 109)—he destroys a careful balance, rending, so to speak, the textual/textilic membrane that differentiated the Lady’s snug home without completely enclosing it. Like “[a] bow-shot” (l. 73), his metal-decked image rips into her world, replacing it, in the poem’s refrain, with his own more conventional reality; the Lady stops her weaving—“She left the web, she left the loom / ... She looked down to Camelot” (ll. 109, 113)—and although the poet continues his, the curse immediately takes effect. When the mirror cracks and the textile disintegrates (at this juncture, “floated wide” [l. 114, emphasis added] suggests a kind of unraveling, not simply the loose-weave ideal), the Lady’s security dissolves, and she leaves her home to die, isolated, at the very threshold of Camelot: “For ere she reach’d upon the tide / The first house by the water-side, / Singing in her song she died, / The Lady of Shalott” (ll. 150–53). In her last moments, Tennyson’s heroine trades textile for text, writing her name “round about the prow” (l. 125) of her deathbed boat, and in Part IV, the poem maintains the tapestry’s legacy, securing with its steady versification a unique reality in which Shalott and Camelot continue to permeate and enrich one another. In the final stanza of the 1832 edition (excised in the 1842 publication), Tennyson merges his text with the Lady’s more explicitly when, in a farewell letter, the Lady adopts the poet’s connective cadences: “‘The web was woven curiously / The charm is broken utterly, / Draw near and fear not—this is I, / The Lady of Shalott.’” In the “off-rhyme on ‘I,’” Perry hears dangerous instability, “acoustic disintegration”: “[T]he verse, which has rhymed so truly through the poem, and turned like a shuttle upon the frame of the repeated refrain, suddenly unravels before our ears, the tapestry of the poem ending in a widening fray of sonic loose ends” (10). However, cacophony to one ear is euphony to another, and where Perry identifies fearful “fray,” I see a new weave—lacier and looser, to be sure—that affords textual recompense for the demise of the larger tableau. Hardly “floating wide,” Tennyson’s merely slanted rhyme represents the consummate union of poet and Lady, neither of whom ends the poem ensconced in a scheme of stone. Immediately prior to Lancelot’s arrival, the Lady of Shalott declares herself “half sick of shadows” (l. 71), and that sense of monotony accounts, perhaps, for her willingness to turn her eyes on Camelot. It does not, however, change the fact that her tower life, defined by “cheerly” (l. 31) singing and the “delights” of the loom, afforded pleasant compensation for and effective escape from a cursed reality. Circumstances beyond her control—indeed, circumstances beyond the speaking poet’s comprehension—placed Lancelot beyond her reach, and Tennyson’s narrative condemns the Lady’s decision to sacrifice her richly woven asylum for knowledge of reality proper and the experience of traditional space. in In Memoriam, Maud, and Idylls of the King, a host of characters and personae struggle to find—not leave—enclosures like Shalott, physical manifestations of Tennyson’s modified luscious aesthetic. In the face of lost love, lost sanity, lost money, and lost power, the heroes of Tennyson’s most significant works home in

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on woven spaces that soothe without suffocating; the poems themselves, in the manner of “The Lady of Shalott,” textually complement those asylums with rich catalogues that offer connective, not isolating, enclosure. III in Memoriam: A Chequer-Work of Beam and Shade tennyson tells us himself that In Memoriam is a textile-text, a poetic tapestry woven of long-accumulated strings of verse: “The sections were written at many different places, and as the phases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publication, until I found that I had written so many” (Memoir I 304). By this account, the woven qualities of the elegy seem little more than a happy accident, but the poem itself suggests a different reading, one in which the loom looms large throughout. Tennyson’s early description of poetry’s palliative effects—“But, for the unquiet heart and brain, / a use in measured language lies; / The sad mechanic exercise, / Like dull narcotics numbing pain” (V, ll. 5–8)—links those curative properties to its textilic features: “In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er / Like coarsest clothes against the cold” (V, ll. 9–10). The woven product and the act of weaving represent comfort, and Tennyson marks the first two of the elegy’s three Christmases with painful descriptions of his attempts to cheer a miserable home with boughs of woven holly. on the first sad Christmas following Hallam’s death, he notes that “with trembling fingers did we weave / The holly round the Christmas hearth” (XXX, ll. 1–2); on the second, which comes “calmly,” he repeats himself: “again at Christmas did we weave / The holly round the Christmas hearth” (LXXVIII, ll. 4, 1–2). The poem’s final Christmas, however, qualifies Tennyson’s take on the woven. In section CV, when the holiday “strangely falls,” his speaker repudiates the traditionally woven holly, demanding something else instead: “To-night ungather’d let us leave / This laurel, let this holly stand” (ll. 4, 1–2). If we assume (as the passages’ progression from “sadly” to “calmly” to “strangely”—and Tennyson’s own account of the poem’s tripartite structure—suggest we should) that the third Christmas marks a turning point in the speaking mourner’s progress toward psychic peace, Tennyson’s rejection of garlanded holly is significant. He pursues in CV an alternative to that “ancient form” (l. 19), the prime shortcoming of which is subtly revealed in his descriptions of Christmases one and two. Holly wreaths, it seems, suggest stifling—as in complete—enclosure. In addition to encircling the hearth, the interwoven stems of the speaker’s Christmases past are associated with cage-like social spaces and landscapes “possess’d” (XXX, l. 3; LXXVIII, l. 3) by rain and snow. The first Christmas, characterized by “an awful sense / of one mute Shadow watching all” (ll. 6–7), features a “circle hand-in-hand” in which friends sit “silent, looking each at each” (ll. 11–12). on the second, the surveying Shadow gives way to an equally oppressive “sense of something lost” that “over all things brooding slept” (ll. 7–8). When the third holiday falls, however, Tennyson’s speaker

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eschews such bounded totality in favor of a looser connectivity, an airier weave. once a harbinger of too-tight enclosure, the holly becomes one element in a large and ever-changing tapestry of living vegetation, kin to—rather than socialized derivative of—the plants that thrive beyond the hearth. “There,” Tennyson writes, “in due time the woodbine blows, / The violet comes, but we are gone” (ll. 7– 8). The line-broken catalogue of flora that begins with laurel, holly, woodbine, and violet winds its way through the stanzas and clashes with a contradictory list of social rituals—“Be neither song, nor game, nor feast; / Nor harp be touch’d, nor flute be blown; / No dance, no motion …” (ll. 21–3)—before wrapping up with references to “rising worlds by yonder wood” and “the summer in the seed” (ll. 25–6, emphasis added). “The closing cycle,” Tennyson claims, “is rich in good” (l. 28), and that wealth, we understand, is valued less for its yearly predictability than its expansive possibility. Like the drift-inviting department store rich in goods, the universe figured in section CV blurs borders by infusing present experience with the whiff of future pleasure. Through seed, the closing cycle reaches beyond itself, and that sense of gently broken boundaries is replicated in the textual space generated by Tennyson’s line-broken list of living plants. But if line-broken series signified enclosure for Keats, how can their presence in In Memoriam effect something like the opposite, a respite from suffocating intimacy? Where Keats eschews dull rhymes, Tennyson embraces them, and those different prosodic landscapes differently contextualize the catalogues that wind through them. Keats’s tangled series compromise the forward momentum of verse that relies on unrhymed meters or distant rhymes—patterns that purposely deny readers the click of aural closure. We read backward, or, in the case of a poem like The Eve of St. Agnes, centerward, Keats’s interwoven catalogues raising the closure quotient of a stanzaic form that in itself evokes compartmentalization. In Memoriam operates differently. Tennyson chooses a form that employs numbered sections and spatially discrete, rhyme-defined stanzas, features that buttress the elegy with visible and audible walls throughout. Robert Pattison asserts that “the rhymed first and last line encapsulate the whole stanza like the shell of a nut” (108); Bernard Richards concurs, noting that the In Memoriam stanza is “ideal for the expression of elegiac feeling” because “[t]he second ‘a’ rhyme seems to turn the stanza back on itself, just as one thought it about to progress.” Indeed, the stanzas are individually girdled by rhyme, but Richards’s remarks regarding variations on the form even further illuminate its somewhat inscrutable integrity: But there are many variations possible with the form, depending where the lines enjamb … . Tennyson often begins a new sentence in mid-line, but not as often as Browning might have done had he used the form, and the reflective equanimity of the whole poem is to some degree dependent on the integrity of the line. The second of the “b” rhymes often enjambs, but with just sufficient emphasis in the rhyme to produce a slight pause and indicate the unit of the line. (65)

Sections hem in stanzas, stanzas shut in lines, and lines stubbornly partition themselves from their fellows. The infrastructure of In Memoriam effects a sense of absolute enclosure at every turn, a totalizing enclosure at odds with Tennyson’s

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culturally sanctioned permeable aesthetic. as it weaves through lines, stanzas, and even sections, a catalogue can render those problematic borders more membranous than wall-like. For example, parataxis trumps strophic structure in section XI, where stanzas inventory images of calmness, visions of a tranquil natural world that “suit” the speaker’s own “calmer grief” (l. 2). The only independent clause—“Calm is the morn without a sound”—appears in the verse’s first line, and the grammatical dependence of the statements that follow mitigate our sense of their completeness despite the fact that each appears isolated within a strictly rhymed, unenjambed stanza. Like the holly associated with Christmas number three, the speaker’s “calmer grief” is woven into something larger than itself, into something more cosmically significant than a single psyche. every stanza opens with the word “calm,” and the initial line of each associates peace with a different natural vista, from the sylvan landscape of the first stanza—“Calm is the morn without a sound / ... and only thro’ the faded leaf / The chestnut pattering to the ground” (ll. 1, 3–4)—through the “high wold” (l. 5) of the second, the “great plain” (l. 9) of the third, the “wide air” (l. 12) of the fourth, and the “silver sleep” (l. 17) of the seas in the fifth. although the canto’s anaphoric structure might initially seem reminiscent of Hunt’s “a Now,” Tennyson’s verse is different—Keats-inspired if not wholly Keatsian, for the vistas catalogue is not the only one that counters the verse’s absolute prosodic containment. each environment is in dialogue with the others, a conversation registered by series of related or repeated material markers. Despite his shifting perspective—the wold is “this,” the plain “yon,” the air “this,” and the seascape, presumably, less visible than visualized—Tennyson takes pains to indicate that the hour (morning) and the season (autumn) have arrived everywhere simultaneously, if differently. The forest’s chestnut-choking leaves find their falling counterparts in the fourth stanza’s “wide air,” and the dampness of the “dews that drench the furze” (l. 6) is magnified thousands-fold in the “waves that sway themselves in rest” (l. 18). References to green, gold, and red—as well as the morning light that variously fades, twinkles, and is “still” (l. 9)—wind through this section, and Tennyson’s allusion to silver links land to sea, mourner to mourned. The ocean’s “silver sleep” recalls the “silvery gossamers” (l. 7) that appear in the second stanza, and this connection is particularly important. Section X (immediately prior, of course, to section XI) closes with a description of the “home-bred fancies” (l. 11) that render a loved one’s at-sea “burial” so disconcerting to his mourners. It “sweeter seems,” Tennyson writes, To rest beneath the clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains, or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God; Than if with thee the roaring wells Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine, and hands so often clasp’d in mine, Should toss with tangle and with shells. (ll. 12–20)

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The line-broken lists of section XI, then, in addition to countering the speaker’s sense of psychic isolation, work to resolve a problem articulated in a different— and ostensibly distinct—piece of the poem. The environments contrasted at the conclusion of section X bleed into the catalogue of land- and seascapes that constitutes section XI, and despite his enduring grief, Tennyson’s mourner begins to recognize in the latter what he failed to see in the former: The sea, which shares color and affect with, respectively, terrestrial material and “calmer grief,” is a less foreign environment than initially supposed. Throughout In Memoriam, the sense of disconnectedness that accompanies profound loss (and that the elegy’s rigid infrastructure seems to reinforce) is systematically compromised by sectionhopping, stanza-crossing, connection-establishing catalogues. When, in section XII, Tennyson’s speaker becomes the dove who “[s]ome dolorous message knit[s] below / The wild pulsation of her wings” (ll. 3–4), we sense the technical similarities between mourning/recovery and the woven composition at hand. By no means is the poem’s speaking mourner healed at the end of section XII, after which follow more than a hundred additional verses. Neither, in fact, is his grief completely assuaged by the time the elegy concludes. as T.S. eliot argued, Tennyson is only “teased by the hope of … reunion beyond death,” and “the renewal craved for seems at best but a continuance, or a substitute for the joys of friendship upon earth” (220). It is true, however, that the technique employed in verse XI—the use of far-ranging inventories and interrelated catalogues to compromise stanzaic and sectional boundaries—is applied throughout In Memoriam to generate the very feeling of connectedness (to the dead, certainly, but also to cyclical processes of healing and regeneration) that the poet both fervently desires and sorely lacks. In one attempt to mitigate his sense of separation, Tennyson briefly casts Hallam in the role of bride, a figure less gone than in transition. In departing her parents’ home, the newly minted wife “enters other realms of love” to become “[a] link among the days, to knit / The generations each with each” (XL, ll. 12, 15–16). This understanding of events ultimately proves unsatisfying, and in the final lines of section XL, the distance the poet describes is not only physical but intellectual: “My paths are in the fields I know, / and thine in undiscover’d lands” (ll. 31–2). The verses that follow reiterate his sense that Hallam has “turn’d to something strange”—“I have lost the links that bound / Thy changes” (XLI, ll. 4–6)—and although this psychic disjunction persists, the elegy’s form offers a kind of compensation. “If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,” Tennyson writes in XLVIII, “Were taken to be such as closed / Grave doubts and answers here proposed, / Then these were such as men might scorn” (ll. 1–4). If In Memoriam’s verses do not close—that is, discontinue or conclude—their speaker’s reservations about the possibility of renewed connection with the dead, neither do they completely enclose them. In other words, the elegy refuses (despite outward appearances) to reinforce in form the psychological experience of isolation, and Tennyson substantiates his pun on “closed” with a description of the poem that emphasizes its aggregative looseness: “Nor dare she trust a larger lay, / But rather loosens from the lip / Short swallow-flights of song, that dip / Their wings in tears, and skim

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away” (ll. 13–16). The individual pieces of this collection, Tennyson suggests, must evoke a dynamic, fluid wholeness, and winding catalogues like the one that dominates In Memoriam’s eleventh “song” go a long way toward achieving a sense of permeable integrity. Section XI’s anaphoric and paratactic structure is replicated in verses XIV (in which 11 of 20 lines begin with “and”), LVI (in which a series of “who” statements inventories the struggles of human history), LXIV (in which “and” statements weave through another series of “who”s), XCI (in which “when” and “come” statements support a rich description of an imagined paradise), and many others. The sections leading up to and immediately following the turning-point Christmas of CV are particularly rich in anaphora and parataxis. In XCIX, Hallam is remembered on the second anniversary of his death in a luxurious extended apostrophe to “dim dawn,” Who tremblest thro’ thy darkling red on yon swoll’n brook that bubbles fast By meadows breathing of the past, and woodlands holy to the dead Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves a song that slights the coming care, and autumn laying here and there a fiery finger on the leaves; Who wakenest with thy balmy breath To myriads on the genial earth, Memories of bridal, or of birth, and unto myriads more, of death. (ll. 5–16)

In her sensuous embodiment, Morning trembles, murmurs, and wakens, and those actions, like the “calm grief” in section XI, affect a series of environs, each of which materially affirms—the flora, the damp, the redness, the breathing—its connection to the others. In its interconnected entirety, the catalogue that describes the dawn reflects the ideal of shared experience articulated in both the stanza that introduces the “myriads on the genial earth” and the verse’s concluding lines: “To-day they count as kindred souls; / They know me not, but mourn with me” (ll. 19–20). However, as I have demonstrated, part of canto XI’s connective power derives from its descriptive and intellectual links to the goings-on in section X, and inter-verse lists are no less important to Tennyson’s aforementioned quest for permeable integrity than intra-verse ones. The pastoral catalogue initiated by XCIX continues in C when the elegy’s speaker “climb[s] the hill” and learns that he “find[s] no place that does not breathe / Some gracious memory of my friend” (ll. 1, 3–4). Tennyson’s use of the definite article—this is not, we understand, an unfamiliar hill—locates this space within an already established context: the forested landscape of the previous section. That land, we learn at the end of C, is

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the long-time home that the mourner is now abandoning—“and, leaving these, to pass away, / I think once more he seems to die” (ll. 19–20)—but since, as Robert Ross points out, the Tennyson family moved from Lincolnshire “two years after the second anniversary of Hallam’s death,” Tennyson’s decision to locate that departure in the verses immediately following XCIX suggests that his “disregard of literal chronology” serves a grander connective purpose (65n). The birds and herds (ll. 3–4), brooks and meadows of the anniversary verse become part of the extended catalogue of material reminders that weaves through the rhymes of section C. Tennyson presents an inventory of pastoral markers—grange, fold, morass, reed, stile, sheepwalk, knoll, quarry, and runlet, among others—in a series of grammatically dependent stanzas that begin “nor”; both catalogue and linguistic negation continue in section CI, which offers a line-broken list of natural beauties— bough, blossom, beech, maple, sun-flower, and rose-carnation, as well as brook, hern, crake, creek, and cove—in stanzas that begin “[u]nwatch’d,” “[u]nloved,” “[u]nloved,” and “[u]ncared for.” When the impending move increases the threat of permanent psychic disjunction and unending emotional isolation—“and year by year our memory fades,” the speaker frets at the close of CI, “[f]rom all the circle of the hills” (ll. 23–4)—Tennyson redoubles his efforts to forge formal connections, and the result is a series of songs that heals while it suffers, weaves while it rhymes. If the elegy’s catalogues work in conjunction with its tight stanzaic infrastructure to generate the sense of interconnectedness, or permeable intimacy, associated with the Tennysonian luscious, they also evoke the packed-riches experience on which the aesthetic equally depends. In Memoriam is rarely described as sensual, but, as I have observed, Tennyson’s adaptation of pastoral convention is hardly ascetic. In section CXV’s anaphorically structured portrayal of spring, for example, the smallest spaces are replete with the wealth of the season—“Now burgeons every maze of quick” (l. 2)—and even the most quotidian encounters (melting snow and birdsong, for instance) are imbued with a sense of excess: “Now fades the last long streak of snow”; “Now rings the woodlark loud and long”; “The flocks are whiter down the vale / and milkier every milky sail …” (ll. 1, 5, 10–11; emphasis added). Keats’s textual spaces soothe with the luxuries accumulated in their woven lists, but Tennyson’s elegy offers a variation on that model. In the case of In Memoriam, such rich accumulation soothes not only in its own right but also because it evokes Hallam’s presence. Tennyson certainly perceives texts as spaces, a truth best illustrated by his speaker’s experience with the “noble letters of the dead” (XCV, l. 24). Both relics from a different world and an alternative landscape in their own right, the departed’s letters figure as “fall’n leaves which kept their green” (l. 23) and as a labyrinthine topography—“wordy snares”—through which the speaking elegist observes his friend, the consummate intellectual, “track / Suggestion to her inmost cell” (ll. 31–2). However, in addition to encapsulating Tennyson’s appreciation for textual realities, the letters episode also pinpoints the kind of space his speaker finds most comforting: a space he can share with Hallam. “So word by word,

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and line by line,” he writes, “The dead man touch’d me from the past, / and all at once it seem’d at last / The living soul was flash’d on mine” (ll. 33–6). To inhabit once again a shared landscape is a desire Tennyson articulates throughout the poem—“Be near me,” he repeats throughout section L—but also repudiates: “Do we indeed desire the dead / Should still be near us at our side? / Is there no baseness we would hide? / No inner vileness that we dread?” (LI, ll. 1–4). Like the speaker of “Timbuctoo,” the speaker of In Memoriam finds himself dismissed from the alternative world of Hallam’s letters and forced to reenter a different textual universe, the “matter-moulded forms of speech” (l. 46) that constitute the poem itself. He must ultimately learn to inhabit a world without his friend, but in addition to systematically forging linguistic connections in the face of ostensibly inscrutable formal closure, the elegy offers a transitional space, a world grounded in the reality of his loss but with windows onto a Hallam-infused paradise that takes form in woven material catalogues. Before reading his dead friend’s letters, Tennyson’s speaker was “alone” (l. 20) and hungry (l. 21); after, the evening previously distinguished by a pervasive “calm that let the tapers burn / unwavering” (ll. 5–6) seems dynamic and rich: and suck’d from out the distant gloom a breeze began to tremble o’er The large leaves of the sycamore, and fluctuate the still perfume, and gathering freshlier overhead, Rock’d the full-foliaged elms, and swung the heavy-fold rose, and flung The lilies to and fro, and said ‘The dawn, the dawn,’ and died away; and east and West, without a breath, Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, To broaden into boundless day. (ll. 53–64)

The line-broken list of leafy luxuries (sycamore, elm, rose, lily) intertwined with a prominent catalogue of f sounds (fluctuate, freshlier, full-foliaged, fold, flung, fro) recalls Keats’s textual weaves, but the repeated “and”s and interdependent stanzas—none but the last boasts a period, and the penultimate is enjambed—defy the form’s totalizing enclosure in a distinctly Tennysonian way. after exiting the reassuring landscape of Hallam’s letters, Tennyson recreates a sense of security— a sense, that is, of Hallam—in his own textual tapestry, a “matter-moulded” form both richly intimate and, as the last lines suggest, surprisingly, healingly expansive: “and east and West, without a breath / Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, / To broaden into boundless day.” In fact, Hallam’s presence is associated throughout the poem with a prominent woven materiality. In the second section, the speaking elegist imagines a corpse

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enshrined in a gruesomely tangled bower beneath the “old yew”: “Thy fibres net the dreamless head, / Thy roots are wrapt about the bones” (ll. 3–4). In life, however, Hallam enjoyed the woven environment beneath a different tree, a “towering sycamore” on a lawn “counterchange[d] … / … with dusk and bright” that generated crisscrossing shadows of its own (LXXXIX, ll. 4, 1–2). “Immantled” in that fabric of “ambrosial dark”—a phrase that recalls Keats’s “embalmèd darkness”—he cultivated the rich life for which the speaker remembers him, a life rich in sensory experience and appreciative accumulation: o joy to him in this retreat, Immantled in ambrosial dark, To drink the cooler air, and mark The landscape winking thro’ the heat: o sound to rout the brood of cares, The sweep of scythe in morning dew, The gust that round the garden flew, and tumbled half the mellowing pears! o bliss, when all in circle drawn about him, heart and ear were fed To hear him, as he lay and read The Tuscan poets on the lawn … . (ll. 13–24)

Inhaling, seeing, touching, hearing, reading: Tennyson incorporates each action into a multi-faceted gustatory metaphor that includes, in addition to delicious darkness, drinkable air, edible commentary, and pear-gifting winds. Hallam both consumes and feeds—“heart and ear were fed / To hear him”—and the result is an all-inclusive sensory feast that segues into a literal “banquet in the woods” (l. 32) (complete with “wine-flask lying couch’d in moss / or cool’d within the glooming wave” [ll. 44–5]) before returning to the realm of the synaesthetic and figural: “We heard behind the woodbine veil / The milk that bubbled in the pail, / and buzzings of the honied hours” (ll. 50–52). as the elegist remembers him in life, Hallam stood at the center of a weblike world of luscious experience. The bower “counterchange[d]” with light and dark offered sensorily stimulating and permeable sanctuary; not only can “[a] guest, or happy sister” (l. 26) enter and share its shelter, but changes in the landscape beyond the bower’s borders register beautifully inside it, the “all-golden afternoon” giving way to “the brightening moon” (ll. 25, 28) within the four-line space of a single stanza. Conversely, the rich experience inside the bower reaches far beyond it, a truth Tennyson illustrates with the extensive catalogue of gustatory activity— a catalogue that bleeds, in fact, into the next section, XC: “He tasted love with half his mind, / Nor ever drank the inviolate spring …” (ll. 1–2). as we have seen, however, In Memoriam’s lesson concerns the difficulty in maintaining a worldview so gentle and loose in the face of death’s ostensibly all-consuming

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totality. In section LXXII, the verse that commemorates the first anniversary of Hallam’s death and inaugurates the portion of the poem traditionally understood to be its Paradiso, the image of woven light engages with an image of unwoven plants not unlike the image of unwoven holly that furnished our point of entry into the poem’s textilic paradigm. In LXXII, Tennyson establishes those images in opposition to one another. The anniversary dawns stormily with winds that “whirl the ungarner’d sheaf afar, / and sow the sky with flying boughs” (ll. 23–4), but, Tennyson observes, the day would be hateful even in the context of a windless sunrise that “play’d / a chequer-work of beam and shade / along the hills” (ll. 14–16). My analysis thus far casts untied stems and light/dark tapestries as similar signifiers, verbal indicators of the same presence: Hallam’s. The disconnect between those signifiers evidenced in section LXXII—a passage that comes before both the third Christmas and the speaker’s school-days recollection—registers the difficult psychic work that underlies the developing peace of mind (if not genuine peace) on display in the elegy. The permeable weave with which Tennyson associates Hallam becomes the model for life in a post-Hallam universe, since psychological health requires an understanding of life and death, past and present as connected realms instead of walled-off territories. Death, in other words, is neither all-consuming nor total, and when Tennyson eases the elegy’s rigid infrastructure with line-broken catalogues of sensory pleasures, he affirms his commitment to permeability and healthy communion with the dead. By the poem’s third Christmastide he can “let the holly stand” and, we assume, view both “the ungarner’d sheaf” and hillside chequer-work with something like contentment. Maud: A Lion in a Silken Net “I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood”: In Keatsian terms, the statement that opens Tennyson’s longest dramatic monologue is undeniably antiluscious. Intimate and shut in by multiple boundaries—the hollow is not only behind the wood but beneath the field—the space described by Maud’s speaker is too completely enclosed for Tennysonian tastes. as the poem continues, however, we learn that the material features of the hollow are not its primary faults. The body of the speaker’s father, “[m]angled, and flatten’d, and crushed, and dinted into the ground,” had “long since” been discovered there (I, ll. 7, 5), and that gruesome circumstance underlies the suffocating psychological enclosure central to the poem’s drama. although Tennyson’s speaker finds the country setting both distasteful and oddly inescapable—“I am sick of the Hall and the hill, I am sick of the moor and the main. / Why should I stay? can a sweeter chance ever come to me here?” (I, ll. 61–2)—Maud’s most troubling landscape is a mental one. The poem’s disenfranchised son chooses spatial metaphors to describe his almost incapacitating obsession with his father’s death, a kind of emotional cage that he entered upon learning of the event—“my pulses closed their gates with a shock on my heart as I heard” (I, l. 15)—and continues to inhabit, vengefully and purposely, into the present: “I will bury myself in myself” (I, l. 76).

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No less important, however, is the fact that the hollow both physically resembles and metonymically represents an open wound. In addition to lavishly describing the hollow’s crimson, ostensibly leaky borders—“Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath, / The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood” (I, ll. 2–3)—Tennyson’s speaker recalls his grief-stricken mother, whose “shrill-edged shriek” was the knife that “divide[d] the shuddering night” (I, l. 16) and, presumably, dealt a mortal blow to her young son’s sense of security. and yet, Maud’s protagonist argues, these gaping topographical and emotional holes were not the only wounds left festering in the wake of his father’s untimely death. Whether a murder or a suicide (“Did he fling himself down? who knows?” [I, l. 9]), the event was precipitated by the failure of “a vast speculation” (I, l. 9) that left the family “flaccid and drain’d” (I, l. 20), their bank accounts hemorrhaging. It seems that despite the stifling sense of enclosure that accompanies obsession, Tennyson’s speaker, psychoanalytically speaking, lacks closure. His finances, his psyche, and (as he sees it) his land still suffer the aftermath of a “long since” tragedy, and to stanch the metaphorical bleeding, he must simultaneously see beyond—break out of—his fixation and also cordon off—home in on—a space that is economically, emotionally, and physically secure. This paradoxical desire for walls and windows, bowers and breezes, is, as established, quintessentially Tennysonian. Through the figure of Maud, his hero achieves (albeit briefly) both security and perspective, a healthy balance between interiority and engagement. The sense of perspective develops first. Maud comes to the speaker’s attention unaccountably and enters his obsessive discourse almost inexplicably, a non-sequitur in a diatribe about wealth and war at once interrupted and substantiated by his observation that there are “[w]orkmen up at the Hall”: “—they are coming back from abroad; / The dark old place will be gilt by the touch of a millionaire: / I have heard, I know not whence, of the singular beauty of Maud; / I play’d with the girl when a child; she promised then to be fair” (I, ll. 65–8). He cannot recall the context in which he learned of Maud’s good looks—“I have heard, I know not whence”—and the fact of her beauty enters the monologue as an abrupt shift in attention, a sudden breeze that stirs the oppressive atmosphere established in the preceding rant. If, however, the very idea of Maud broadens the speaker’s previously bounded horizons, it simultaneously affords the prospect of psychological closure, of the love and, perhaps more important, the money he needs to establish the kind of secure space in which his long-festering emotional wounds can heal. In the stanza that follows Maud’s curious infiltration of his consciousness, the hero utters a series of statements that link Maud (as he remembers her) to his own prelapsarian past, to an idyllic childhood rife with emotional and material pleasures: Maud with her venturous climbings and tumbles and childish escapes, Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall, Maud with her sweet purse-mouth when my father dangled the grapes, Maud the beloved of my mother, the moon-faced darling of all,— (I, ll. 69–72)

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a sense of intimate enclosure dominates this paratactic and anaphoric description, in which Maud’s presence evokes the experience of community both spatially and emotionally. The play on “ringing” says it all; Maud’s voice—a lilting laughter precipitated by, presumably, the aforementioned “climbings and tumbles”—not only echoes (rings) through the Hall but strangely rings the Hall, surrounds it in a bubble of richness and merriment. In fact, the world of the speaker’s youth both converged upon and was circumscribed by Maud, who, in addition to enveloping the town in a general atmosphere of love and pleasure—“moon-faced darling of all,” she cast an encompassing glow—was wont to find herself thronged by doting villagers, among them the speaker’s own parents (one of whom is close enough to feed her). Woven structuring reinforces this portrayal of a tightly knit community; in addition to the list of playful gestures (“climbings and tumbles and childish escapes”) that complicates the stanza’s simple paratactic movement from the outset, Tennyson’s decision to alternate between with and the statements— accounts of what Maud possessed or did versus simple appositive descriptions— lends the lines a distinctly woven aesthetic. Grammatically parallel, the series of four appositive epithets (“the delight of the village,” “the ringing joy of the hall,” “the beloved of my mother,” “the moon-faced darling of all”) is fractured into two lines and interrupted by a third, and the result is a passage almost Keatsian in its textual enclosure. as the monodrama progresses, Maud unwittingly continues to broaden the hero’s perspective while simultaneously promising emotional and financial asylum. In the early phases of the narrative, Tennyson’s speaker is as unwitting as his future beloved; when, less than one hundred lines into the poem, he explicitly articulates a desire for psychic peace—“Long have I sigh’d for a calm: God grant I may find it at last!” (I, l. 77)—he imagines Maud as his antagonist, a would-be enemy of harmony: “It will never be broken by Maud, she has neither savour nor salt, / But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past” (I, ll. 78–9). In fact, mere thoughts of Maud, which, once again, have entered the hero’s mindscape unbidden (the carriage passes only coincidentally), introduce a quiet peace to the passage that counters its paranoiac overtones. although he intends to portray Maud harshly, Tennyson’s speaker chooses adjectives almost synonymous with calm—“Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, / Dead perfection, no more” (I, ll. 82–3; emphasis added)—and, with them, generates a lulling cadence that slowly exchanges rhythmic, rocking dactyls for sleepy monosyllables. When, in the sonnet-like third section of Part I, Maud’s image dominates the hero’s dreams, her face is “[l]uminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike” (l. 95), and the richest of those descriptors—“gemlike”—inspires the stone-studded subsequent stanza that both describes and (in its material link to the previous passage) enacts a reverie of contented connectedness to a world outside the self, to a place beyond the dreaming mind: a million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime In the little grove where I sit—ah, wherefore cannot I be Like things of the season gay, like the bountiful season bland,

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When the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime, Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea, The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land? (I, ll. 102–7)

as Maud’s even features become associated less with eerie regularity and more with splendid cutting, the speaker’s worldview becomes simultaneously broader and more richly secure. The landscape he occupies here—a Keatsian “little grove”—is not bloody but ruby-decked, and by the pivotal fourth section of Part I, it affords an increasingly expansive view of the universe, in which the Hall, Maud’s home, figures as a luscious center. “Below me, there,” he notes, “is the village … / and here on the landward side, by a red rock, glimmers the Hall; / and up in the high Hall-garden I see her pass like a light” (I, ll. 108, 111–12). although he continues to repudiate her influence (“But sorrow seize me if ever that light be my leading star!” [I, l. 113]), we must attribute the hero’s increasingly unobsessive perspective on life and love—“our planet is one, the suns are many, the world is wide,” he proclaims (I, l. 146)—to Maud, who “wander[s] about at [her] will” (I, l. 160), weaving her way into the speaker’s consciousness and slowly luring him to a place beyond his grove and his pain. Maud, says our hero, has only “fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of life” (I, l. 161), but despite his best efforts “not to desire or admire,” he soon finds himself wrapped in a secure, Maud-centered reality, “walk[ing] all day like the sultan of old in a garden of spice” (I, ll. 142–3). When, in the final section of Part I, he urges Maud to “[c]ome into the garden,” the metaphor becomes literal experience. as Tennyson’s speaker ventures farther and more often from home, sightings of and conversations with Maud—in the meadow, on the street, at the village church, and, finally, within the walls of Maud’s personal garden—increase in frequency and duration, highlighting the emotional and sensory poverty of his pre-Maud existence. Both isolated and shabby, the hero’s residence is “an empty house,” Here half-hid in the gleaming wood, Where I hear the dead at midday moan, and the shrieking rush of the wainscot mouse, and my own sad name in corners cried, When the shiver of dancing leaves is thrown about its echoing chambers wide, Till a morbid hate and horror have grown of a world in which I have hardly mixt … . (I, ll. 257–65)

Just as Maud brings the speaker out of his all-encompassing obsession, his “morbid hate and horror,” she brings him into a warm world replete with material delights. Maud’s quarters at the Hall are certainly posh—amply furnished with music and books (I, l. 500), her space opens onto the aforementioned private yard—but her mere presence, Tennyson suggests, generates a sense of enclosure both appropriately permeable and undeniably luxe. Maud’s brother, “That jewell’d mass of millinery, / That oil’d and curl’d assyrian Bull / Smelling of musk and of insolence” (I, ll. 232–4), evokes the too close atmosphere of a windowless shop: “But his essences

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turn’d the live air sick, / and barbarous opulence jewel-thick / Sunn’d itself on his breast and his hands” (I, ll. 454–6). When “[t]he Sultan” (I, l. 790) leaves his estate for “the gross mud-honey of town” in search of some “fulsome Pleasure to clog him” (I, ll. 540–41), the Hall feels “lighter” (I, l. 538) in his absence; Maud’s aura, in contrast, neither gluts nor cloys, and light (in its various forms, including delight, a term that recalls the Lady of Shalott’s experience at the loom) is the word Tennyson most often uses to describe her distinctive richness. although, as Herbert Tucker points out, “[t]he hero’s metaphor of choice in describing Maud is the gem or pearl” (417), Tennyson tempers her affiliation with the brother’s brand of bejeweled suffocation by emphasizing the translucent quality of her gemlike features. even clothed “[i]n gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls” with a “jewelprint” for a foot (I, ll. 904, 890), Maud treads “light … along the garden walk” (I, l. 607) and illuminates—“lights”—her “own little oak-room” like “a precious stone / Set in the heart of the carven gloom” (I, ll. 496–9). No aspect of Maud is heavy, and the rich asylum her presence affords is luscious in the Tennysonian sense: opulent but strikingly permeable. Like the child Maud of his past, the woman Maud rings the hero with her voice and her visage, wreathes his universe with sweet smiles, amiable talk, and the prospect of glowing wealth. She is, in fact, “the promised good,” whose “gentle will” has rendered his existence “a perfumed altar-flame” (I, ll. 604, 621–2). By the poem’s sixth section, the speaker’s longcultivated bitterness has eroded, and Tennyson marks his concession to Maud’s charms by describing her influence as a sensuously but loosely woven web: What if with her sunny hair, and smile as sunny as cold, She meant to weave me a snare of some coquettish deceit, Cleopatra-like as of old To entangle me when we met, To have her lion roll in a silken net and fawn at a victor’s feet. (I, ll. 212–19)

offering luxurious enclosure without psychological or physical isolation, the “silken net” of the hero’s imagination bears the hallmarks of Tennysonian security, and while the speaker’s old paranoia still inflects this passage’s tone, suspicion and mistrust soon disappear. under the influence of “the new strong wine of love” (I, l. 271), Tennyson’s hero finds his tongue—it “so stammer[s] and trip[s]” (I, l. 272)—and his spirit utterly ensnared. It is vital to note, though, that Tennyson’s speaker associates Maud with text as well as textile, that “silken net.” The monologue’s fifth section finds Maud “singing an air”—“a passionate ballad gallant and gay, / a martial song like a trumpet’s call!” (I, ll. 164–6)—that the hero both knows and, as the poem continues, enters. although he initially resists the impulse to “fall before / Her feet on the meadow grass, and adore, / Not her, who is neither courtly nor kind” (I, ll. 186–8), he ultimately steps inside the romance world of the song’s lyrics,

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casting himself and Maud as characters in a literary narrative of courtly love. “From the beginning,” Tucker asserts, “the hero loves courtliness, not Maud,” and the language he employs to describe her—“imagery of stars, flowers, and especially gems” (416)—is part of and parcel to the courtly tradition. However, in addition to admiring Maud’s aristocratic qualities, Tennyson’s speaker cleaves to her song itself, to the world described in its lyrics. Concerned about Maud’s regard for a wealthy suitor, he turns for consolation to Maud’s poetry—“I wish I could hear again / The chivalrous battle-song / That she warbled alone in her joy!” (I, ll. 382–4)—and later, in Brittany, the “old song vexes [his] ear” (II, l. 95) until, in a vivid dream, he once more hears Maud singing it: “She is singing in the meadow / and the rivulet at her feet / Ripples on in light and shadow / To the ballad that she sings” (II, ll. 180–83). When the speaker identifies Maud with permeably woven security and an inhabitable textual world, he clinches her affiliation with Tennyson’s luscious aesthetic, and as the designation “monodrama” suggests it should, the text of Maud reflects its hero’s universe by formally recreating his experience of space. Like In Memoriam, Maud is accretive, or pieced. although the poem purports to possess both narrative and perspectival unity—“a Monodrama”—Tennyson understood it to be an experiment in collection, a work whose “peculiarity … is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters” (Memoir I 396). There is, in other words, a cumulative quality to Maud, a seriated affect underscored by the discreteness of its lyric pieces. Three basic Parts break into sections, which subdivide into idiosyncratically structured stanzas; lashed together with border-traversing catalogues, the first Part’s isolated stanzaic units forge a textual landscape that resembles In Memoriam’s loose but compelling asylum. If the elegy’s sections were “written at many different places” and subsequently intertwined, Maud spun outward from the fourth section of Part II, which begins “o that ’twere possible” and describes the aforementioned dream vision of Maud, balladeer. The lyric “o that ’twere possible,” Tennyson notes, “appeared first in the Keepsake. Sir John Simeon years after begged me to weave a story round this poem and so ‘Maud’ came into being” (Memoir I 404). In fact, as Samuel Schulman explains, “o that ’twere possible” was composed “immediately after Hallam died” and therefore occupies a key “place in the history of Tennyson’s own grieving” (636, 657). as In Memoriam suggests, the texts through which Tennyson grieved were painstakingly woven, and when Tennyson employs the language of textilic making to describe the relationship between Maud and its lyric seed, he does so casually but significantly. When “o that ’twere possible,” a microcosmic expression of Maud’s central issues and conflicts, privileges woven structures both imagistically and formally, it operates within the compensatory tradition of the luscious poem, its richly appointed membranous spaces soothing poet and persona alike. Within the context of Parts II and III, however, “o that ’twere possible” is an anomaly; after describing the woven connectedness that characterizes Maud’s lengthy Part I, we will evaluate the almost unmitigated sense of linklessness that purposefully dominates the poem’s much shorter denouement and conclusion.

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if Maud the text “weave[s] a story round” the lyric “o that ’twere possible,” Maud the woman, even in her earliest “o that ’twere possible” incarnation, weaves a world around her lover. The lyric’s speaker longs “[t]o find the arms of my true love / Round me once again” (II, ll. 143–4), and when he sees Maud’s “robe”-clad “shadow” (II, ll. 159, 151) in his dreams, her gestures and voice evoke a sensuous, comforting weave. as she “lightly winds and steals” (II, l. 158) through the hero’s nighttime visions, Maud “leads [him] forth” (II, l. 157) from an unpleasant urban reality—“the shouts, the leagues of lights, / and the roaring of the wheels” (II, ll. 161–2)—into a pastoral landscape not only ringed by her voice but, as the in-time tinkling of the rill suggests, utterly dominated by it: ’Tis a morning pure and sweet, and the light and shadow fleet; She is walking in the meadow, and the woodland echo rings; In a moment we shall meet; She is singing in the meadow, and the rivulet at her feet Ripples on in light and shadow To the ballad that she sings. (II, ll. 175–83)

The urban reality is itself a curiously woven enclosure, ringed less by music than by noise—“But there rings on a sudden a passionate cry, / There is some one dying or dead” (II, ll. 187–8)—and wreaths of industrial pollution: “and the yellow vapors choke / The great city, sounding wide; / The day comes, a dull red ball / Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke” (II, ll. 203–6). When, during the speaker’s waking hours, Maud’s shuttling shadow appears amidst “the hubbub of the market” (II, l. 208)—“It crosses here, it crosses there, / Thro’ all that crowd confused and loud” (II, ll. 210–11)—her presence links bordered town to bounded meadow, and “o that ’twere possible,” like the larger monologue Tennyson eventually pieced around it, ultimately highlights its hero’s desire for both healthy security and genuine communion: “always I long to creep / Into some still cavern deep, / There to weep, and weep, and weep / My whole soul out to thee” (II, ll. 235–8). The text itself, meanwhile, mimics the spatial experience it describes. Through a sequence of discrete verse spaces (designated as such by their unique rhyme schemes) Tennyson weaves series of material signifiers that possess, like Maud, the capacity to permeate boundaries. echo, Matthew Rowlinson argues, is central to Tennyson’s aesthetic (145–6), and in “o that ’twere possible,” key topographical and gestural elements repeat their way through the strophes, forging significant connections between the poem’s literal spaces and its textual ones. The “silent woody places” (II, l. 146) of the second stanza are re-recalled in the sixth stanza’s reference to a “woodland echo,” and the eleventh stanza’s image of laurels “[i]n the garden by the turrets / of the old manorial hall” (II, ll. 217, 219–20) reiterates the sixth stanza’s description of “the little flower that clings / To the turrets and the walls” (II, ll. 173–4). More notable, perhaps, are the passages that encourage

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the poem’s reader (like its rapidly deteriorating hero) to conflate cityscape and countryside, present setting and past. Both spaces boast waterways—a “rivulet” and a “misty river-tide” (II, l. 207), respectively—and captivating light. Maud comes “glimmering through the laurels” (II, l. 217), but the meadow itself is richly dappled; as the sixth stanza’s repetition underscores, the morning’s “light and shadow fleet” dress land and water alike: “and the rivulet at her feet / Ripples on in light and shadow.” although the city’s “leagues of lights” cast a different glow— “But the broad light glares and beats” (II, l. 229)—Maud’s phantom presence recalls, in town, the country’s sifting, shifting luminosity: “and the shadow flits and fleets / and will not let me be” (II, ll. 230–31). Bodies, too, intermingle, and a series of anatomical markers—some real, some imagined; some referencing speaker, some referencing Maud—winds through the stanzas. Tennyson begins at the outset with “arms” and moves through “hand,” “lip,” “eyes,” “feet,” “head,” “eye” again, “brain,” “eyelids,” and “faces” before transitioning with a signifier of dubious materiality—“heart”—to one distinctly abstract: “soul.” In sum, “o that ’twere possible” not only describes but represents a permeably woven reality, and the rest of Maud, woven around it, replicates its form. “o that ’twere possible” and other examples of textual weaving notwithstanding, the luscious center of Tennyson’s monodrama occupies the space between the poem’s two most significant events: the hero’s confession of his love to Maud and, a few days later, his duel with her brother. When Maud acquiesces to the speaker’s advances (somewhere in the blank space between the sixteenth and seventeenth sections of Part I), his world becomes, more completely and more pronouncedly than before, the Maud-made “silken net” he once resisted. The lyric “Go not, happy day” (the first Part’s seventeenth canto) portrays an experience simultaneously shrunken and protracted, rooted in Maud’s person but rocked by “Timbuctoo”-esque views of deep, global space. a life with Maud always promised the pleasures of permeable enclosure, and the poem’s “images of global hegemony,” Tucker writes, “come as if unbidden” (419)—as came Maud herself, in those early obsession-dissolving encounters. Now, with Maud in his corner, the intimate—“Roses are her cheeks, / and a rose her mouth” (I, ll. 577–8)—and the distant—“glowing ships,” “blowing oceans,” “the red man,” and the “red cedartree” (I, ll. 582, 583, 587, 588)—constitute for the speaker a woven unity, a series of sensory delights loosely secured by a common thread: the color crimson. When Maud consents to be the hero’s lover, Tucker explains, “eros and culture form one ‘dominion sweet’”: Maud’s mouth is a rose when it assents to the authority of patriarchal empire, which her faltering blush of submissive pride also confirms, and which the succeeding images of the westering course of commerce (“glowing ships”) and of colonial bliss and fecundity (“the red man’s babe”) expand upon, until a young man’s fancy and the first flush of sexual conquest have utterly merged with the Victorian englishman’s proudest boast: that upon his empire—rosy red on any good Victorian map of the world—the sun never sets. (421)

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The text, meanwhile, mimetically represents the textilic unity it describes. as Tucker suggests, the imperialist enterprise was fueled less by a need for space than a desire for influence, and when British institutions, commercial and otherwise, pushed eastward, they sought to forge connections between the “old” world and the “new.” The sunset, Tennyson writes, should “[b]lush from West to east” and “[b]lush from east to West” until the one sphere is inextricably intertwined with the other: “Till the West is east, / Blush it through the West” (I, ll. 591–4; emphasis added). The weaver’s shuttle traditionally moves from west to east and back again, but since poetic lines, read from left to right, do, too, the lyric’s connective blush runs north-south. In addition to anaphoric constructions (“over glowing ships; / over blowing seas, / over seas at rest” [I, ll. 582–4]) and echoing lines (the lyric’s final quatrain, for example, exactly repeats its second), Tennyson relies on a prominent, vertically winding catalogue of crimson descriptors—rosy, roses, rose, blush, and, of course, red—to link not only home (Maud’s pink features, the english sunset) and the world abroad (tanned indigenous skin, ruddy cedars) but the textual spaces (lines and quatrains) that describe them. Tennyson’s series of red words, which includes nouns, modifiers, and a verb, not only signifies a coherent visual experience but makes one, since its repeated elements—a preponderance of rs, os, and ss, in addition to wholesale reiterations—lend a distinctly visible streak to the lyric’s narrow body. The webby universe of the speaker’s imagination brims with scarlet joy, and Tennyson’s string of rednesses recasts that rich fullness as verbal reality. “Go not, happy day” was originally written for The Princess, and if it seems, at first glance, too insular and independent in its construction—the dominating catalogue, the bookending repetition—to satisfy Tennyson’s preference for a looser luscious, we have only to consider its dynamic relationship to the cantos that follow. By seizing on and spinning round a single element—the “red cedartree”—from the previous section’s catalogue of crimson things, Maud’s eighteenth segment continues to weave english countryside and oriental dreamscape into a single unified tapestry. The “pastoral slope” that lies between the Hall and the speaker’s own poor rooms is home to a “[d]ark cedar” that “[sighs] for Lebanon” and whose “[f]orefathers,” our hero notes, inhabited the “thornless garden” of biblical times gone by (I, ll. 617, 616, 615, 625). In addition to maintaining the cedar-rose association established in “Go not, happy day” (“thornless” ones, of course, are roses), the passage evokes a striking sense of interconnected space. The tree forges a material link between an imagined exotic past and the poem’s British present, but its origins in a “thornless garden” affiliate it with Milton’s eden, a textual plot simultaneously eastern (in setting) and english (in authorship). Moreover, as he gazes upward through the cedar’s “long branches” (I, l. 627), Tennyson’s hero senses an increasing intimacy between heaven and earth. once indications of “[a] sad astrology” and a “boundless plan” (I, l. 634), stars now interlace the cedar’s limbs—“and you fair stars that crown a happy day / Go in and out as if at merry play” (I, ll. 628–9)—and appear, to the speaker’s eyes, closer than ever before:

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Has our whole earth gone nearer to the glow of your soft splendors that you look so bright? I have climb’d nearer out of lonely Hell. Beat, happy stars, timing with things below, Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell … . (I, ll. 676–80)

This pleasant sense of netty connectedness is underwritten, of course, by Maud, both earthly star—like “honey’d rain and delicate air,” her “starry head” succors the displaced cedar (I, ll. 619–20)—and “countercharm” to cosmic boundlessness: “[W]hat care I, / Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl / The countercharm of space and hollow sky” (I, ll. 639–41). The heavens’ terrifying openness is not changed but mitigated, or countered, by Maud’s ringing love, which renders life beneath “iron skies” “yet … sweet to live” (I, ll. 635, 646). Like the “[c]old … / … nothingness” (I, ll. 637–8) of celestial space, the speaker’s mortal fear is never completely vanquished—“o, why,” he asks, “should Love, like men in drinkingsongs, / Spice his fair banquet with the dust of death?” (I, ll. 653–4)—but he finds sufficient comfort in Maud’s imagined evocation of a permeable metaphysical textile, a slack tangle of bliss and pain: “Life of my life, wilt thou not answer this? / ‘The dusky strand of Death inwoven here / With dear Love’s tie, makes Love himself more dear’” (I, ll. 657–9). With pearly Maud for earthly anchor, the world seems a space not only enclosed but bejeweled. When cedar gives way to stars, and stars give way to pearl, Tennyson inaugurates a winding catalogue of gems and precious metals that enriches the optimistic sensibility of section 18 and, later, twines with section 19’s duskier strands. Because he is happy, “[i]t seems” to Tennyson’s hero that “[a] livelier emerald twinkles in the grass” and “[a] purer sapphire melts into the sea” (I, ll. 648, 649–50); the nighttime clock, meanwhile, strikes a “silver knell,” and Maud, he imagines, treads in dreams “[a]mong the fragments of the golden day” (I, ll. 662, 668). When, much earlier, Maud’s “gemlike” visage inspired an appreciative description of the emerald- and ruby-studded lime tree, the speaker sensed a distance between himself and nature’s richest beauty (“[W]herefore cannot I be,” he asked, “Like things of the season gay …?”), but now, joyful, he has a pearl of his own and a purchase, as it were, on Maud’s luxe-lite (not barbarously opulent) world. No glutted Keatsian series, the jewels and metals constitute a loose but coherent string of luxurious images that secures the text’s space without completely closing it, and when, in the poem’s nineteenth section, the morning dawns “rich in atonement” (I, l. 689), Tennyson’s hero shades into a meditation inspired less by sensory luxury than personal wealth. He begins by recalling his mother’s “faded cheek” (I, l. 702)—so unlike Maud’s rosy one—and her dying days, “[v]ext with lawyers and harass’d with debt” (I, l. 705). In her own last hours, Maud’s mother, he asserts, was similarly troubled by contracts unfulfilled: How strange was what she said, When only Maud and the brother Hung over her dying bed—

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Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century That Maud’s dark father and mine Had bound us one to the other, Betrothed us over their wine, on the day when Maud was born; Seal’d her mine from her first sweet breath. Mine, mine by a right, from birth till death. Mine, mine—our fathers have sworn. (I, ll. 717–26)

Gems and ore are quarried from real-world mines, and by making Maud “mine,” Tennyson’s possessive speaker lays claim to a rich cache. When he tropes Maud “mine,” Isobel armstrong asserts, the hero affiliates his lover with “the depths,” with his own “subterranean world” of madness (270). From a developer’s perspective, however, mines represent profit, not pain, and when the eighteenth section’s catalogue of jewels is displaced, in section 18, by a series of mines, Tennyson underscores the financial (as opposed to merely sensory) appeal of Maud’s light net. “as long as my life endures,” the hero says to his absent lover, “I feel I shall owe you a debt / That I never can hope to pay” (I, ll. 769–71). The debt of which he ostensibly speaks is his overwhelming happiness, his release from “a dead body of hate” (I, l. 780), but his diction derives from the boilerplate of economic contracts: “I feel so free and clear / By the loss of that dead weight, / That I should grow light-hearted” (I, ll. 781–3). When, in section 20, he finds himself excluded from the Sultan’s “grand political dinner” (I, l. 811), his desire to see both mine and gems—Maud, at the party, “will wear her jewels” (I, l. 813)— leads him back to roses. on the night of the event, he will “linger” in Maud’s “own rose-garden” (I, ll. 827–8) to await a chance to revel in her richness: For a minute, but for a minute, Come out to your own true lover, That your true lover may see your glory also, and render all homage to his own darling, Queen Maud in all her splendour. (I, ll. 831–6)

The poem’s two estates are connected by a “[r]ivulet” (I, l. 837), and when, in Part I’s brief twenty-first section, the hero finds that a “garden-rose” (I, l. 839) has floated toward his home from the direction of the Hall, his stratagem seems Maud-blessed. The blush is rekindled (“My Maud has sent [this rose] by thee / … / on a blushing mission to me” [I, ll. 845–7]), and in the canto that follows, trees and flowers, jewels and mines, celestial bodies and earthly ones forge a loose but sensuous textual tapestry. Because “Come into the garden, Maud” forgoes exposition in favor of narrative pause—of invocation only (Schulman 643)—anthologists frequently excerpt it, but the monodrama’s best known segment is less remarkable for its discreteness than its connectedness. Its setting is sequestered but not isolated; a gated space of “bed and bower” (I, l. 492), the garden, unlike Madeline’s St. Agnes chamber, is touched by both nature and culture, cooled by “March-wind” (I, l. 889) and rocked

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by party clatter: “all night have the roses heard / The flute, violin, bassoon; / all night has the casement jessamine stirr’d / To the dancers dancing in tune” (I, ll. 862–5). In contrast to Keats’s Porphyro, Tennyson’s hero requires neither key nor guide to access his lover’s private plot, even though, as alan Fischler observes, his “attempted entry into the garden is the climax of his story. He has previously seen and spoken of Maud in this garden but has never tried to cross its boundaries” (769). In other words, “Come into the garden, Maud” repudiates the very notion of impenetrable borders, and the catalogues that twine through its stanzas extend the rich series initiated in previous cantos. Dominated by interwoven lists of plants (roses, of course, but also woodbine, daffodil, jessamine, lily, violets, acacia, “milk-bloom,” “lake-blossom,” pimpernel, “passion-flower,” and larkspur), celestial markers (planet, sky, moon, “rising day,” sun, and earth), and bodily bits (feet, eyes, head, and beating heart), the text enacts the union that its speaker only anticipates. Maud herself, the hero asserts, is “‘[b]ut mine, but mine … / For ever and ever, mine’” (I, ll. 880–81), and possessed of a “jewel-print” foot, she is monarch, flower, and star, a veritable braid of by now familiar series: Queen rose in the rosebud garden of girls, Come hither, the dances are done, In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, Queen lily and rose in one; Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, To the flowers, and be their sun. (I, ll. 902–7)

When, at long last, our hero hears Maud coming, Tennyson’s diction—her step is “ever so airy a tread” (I, l. 917)—calls to mind, like Keats’s reference to the “hungry generations” that do not “tread” the nightingale “down,” the loom’s footpowered thread-raising mechanism. Indeed, as the monodrama’s first part closes, Tennyson’s speaker attributes to Maud’s tread(le) the capacity to lift his body from the depths of death and reinsert it into the rich tapestry of crimson tones that, for some sections now, has evoked the joyous network of rubies, roses, and suns that constitutes his lover’s presence: She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, and blossom in purple and red. (I, ll. 916–23)

The bloody hollow of the poem’s opening lines (a space, we recall, both suffocating in its enclosure and terrifying in its openness) has been replaced (and its color redeemed) by the semi-permeable experience that Maud red weaves, and the work’s most luscious (in a Tennysonian sense) canto finds our hero at his safest and most content.

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To say, however, that “Come into the garden, Maud” scoffs at the very notion of impenetrable borders is to hint at our hero’s hubris, at the miscalculation that precipitates the poem’s dramatic turn. If Tennyson’s speaker can enter the garden with neither key nor invitation, so too can others, and the pair’s long-awaited tryst is interrupted by the arrival of Maud’s brother and a second would-be lover, the “babe-faced lord” (II, l. 13). The loosely woven courtly space that the speaker inhabits with Maud proves, like the visionary landscape described in “Timbuctoo” or the textual labyrinth constituted by In Memoriam’s “noble letters of the dead,” only temporarily secure. Tennyson’s literary explorer and speaking elegist relocate to the luscious word-made spaces that both recount and recreate their prior textual experiences, but Maud’s speaker has no such place to turn. He is, after all, his poem. a monodrama translates psychological reality into linguistic reality, and since Parts II and III seek to describe the hero’s developing lunacy and subsequent fragile recovery (as opposed, say, to his redeeming rapture for Maud), a sense of piecey disconnectedness prevails in the textual spaces that follow the fateful duel. as his repeated invocation of Maud’s courtly song suggests, the hero continues to seek asylum in a Maud-inspired textual reality, but his lyric meditations no longer evoke a textilic wholeness. With the notable exception of “o that ’twere possible,” the original canto that finds vivid memories of a woven past inextricably intertwined with present experience, Maud’s short ending (Parts II and III endure for a total of 401 lines, compared to Part I’s 848) foregoes connective catalogues in favor of formal incoherence, of text that reflects the speaker’s psychic brokenness. Trauma, Tennyson suggests, begets a fragmented worldview, and his “so overwrought” (II, l. 110) hero cannot see the forest for the trees, the beach for the shells, the whole for the part. It is “[s]trange,” he remarks, that the burdened mind “should … / Suddenly strike on a sharper sense / For a shell, or a flower, little things / Which else would have been past by!” (II, ll. 106, 110–13). When the Sultan “lay dying,” for instance, the troubled speaker “noticed one of his many rings / (For he had many, poor worm) and thought / It is his mother’s hair” (II, ll. 115–18). Gone are the series (flowers and trees, emeralds and rubies, planets and moons) that, in Part I, link the hero’s lyric ramblings; when, in the fifth section of Part II, he finds himself living among the insane, narrative coherence gives way to “blabbing” (II, l. 274), “gabble” (II, l. 279), and “babble” (II, l. 284), while the garden he briefly recalls is both sterile and bloody: “It is only flowers, they had no fruits, / and I almost fear they are not roses, but blood” (II, ll. 315–16). as Part III commences, a more stable voice reaches once more for a language of rich materiality, but flowers and stars are now emblems of death, not life: My mood is changed, for it fell at a time of year When the face of the night is fair on the dewy downs, and the shining daffodil dies, and the Charioteer and starry Gemini hang like glorious crowns over orion’s grave low down in the west … . (III, ll. 4–8)

Significantly, when Tennyson’s hero commits to the Crimean War, a delicate tapestry unravels: “[T]he cobweb woven across the cannon’s throat / Shall shake

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its threaded tears in the wind no more” (III, ll. 27–8). To fight against a czar is to internalize “the higher aims / of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold” (III, ll. 38–9), and to portray a turn from wealth, both sensual and commercial, is to write without a network of rich catalogues. Idylls of the King: A Gilded Trellis-Work Hallam Tennyson suggests that Idylls of the King, set “in a rich and varied landscape,” originated with a sketch of Camelot. The three paragraphs printed in the Memoir’s second volume represent, he writes, “[t]he earliest fragment of an epic that I can find among my father’s MSS,” and although the text, dated “about 1833,” bears the title “King arthur,” it lavishly describes a place, not a person. The “Mount of Camelot,” which “rose from the deeps with gardens and bowers and palaces,” is, Tennyson notes, “the most beautiful in the world, sometimes green and fresh in the beam of morning, sometimes all one splendour, folded in the golden mists of the West” (122). arthur, in contrast, is only a name, a “King … in his Hall,” and although the fragment includes both “sumptuous” queen and “Table Round,” its richness derives not from character but from Tennyson’s portrayal of Camelot’s striking topography. The epic born of these early musings is best known for its psychological depth, but the realm itself remains at the heart of the Idylls’ drama, arthur’s foremost concern in his final reproach of Guinevere and, arguably, Tennyson’s primary aesthetic interest throughout. a land where bleached skulls bear diamond-studded crowns and foundling babes sport ruby necklaces, the Camelot of the finished product evokes the “splendour” of the original sketch. The landscape is rich enough—Guinevere recalls “groves that looked a paradise / of blossom, over sheets of hyacinth / That seem’d the heavens upbreaking thro’ the earth” (G ll. 386–8)—but inhabitants of arthur’s legendary city live, love, dance, and dine in the midst of incomparable material wealth. The Idylls’ kingdom retains the cumulative fullness suggested by the “gardens and bowers and palaces” of the prose fragment; “a city of shadowy palaces / … rich in emblem and the work / of ancient kings” (GL ll. 296–8), Camelot boasts “havens, ships, and halls” and, at its center, a “myriad-room’d,” “many-corridor’d” estate (MV ll. 166, 729–30). The things that dress and fill the poem’s spaces proliferate, too, and Tennyson lingers on the sensory profusion of arthur’s hall—the “woodland wealth / of leaf, and gayest garlandage of flowers, / along the walls and down the board” (BB ll. 79–81) complement the “treble range of stony shields,” “[s]ome blazon’d, some but carven, and some blank,” that constitute a “stately pile” on the floor (GL 398– 400)—and other civic centers. The spectators’ gallery at the lists resembles “a rainbow fall’n upon the grass” (Le l. 429) or, filled with “[w]hite-robed” women and their “scatter’d jewels,” “a bank / of maiden snow mingled with sparks of fire” (LT ll. 147–9). Public “fountains running wine” herald the Tournament of Dead Innocence, after which follows a feast graced by “dame and damsel … / … glowing in all colours”: “[T]he live grass, / Rose-campion, bluebell, kingcup, poppy, glanced / about the revels” (LT ll. 141, 232–5). Charge of a king who

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gifts, spontaneously, “the worth of half a town” (GL l. 662) and a queen who “[glitters] like May sunshine” in gems and plumes (MV ll. 86–7), Camelot is, to use Tennyson’s epithet, a “rich city” (in contrast, say, to “the naked hall of Doorm” [Ge l. 569]), and to be affiliated with its space, as Gareth explains to his overprotective mother, is to possess something more valuable than “mere gold”: Nay, nay, good mother, but this egg of mine Was finer gold than any goose can lay; For this an eagle, a royal eagle, laid almost beyond eye-reach, on such a palm as glitters gilded in thy Book of Hours. and there was ever haunting round the palm a lusty youth, but poor, who often saw The splendour sparkling from aloft, and thought “an I could climb and lay my hand upon it, Then were I wealthier than a leash of kings.” (GL ll. 65, 42–51)

The paradisiacal richness of arthur’s realm is not, however, its only distinguishing feature. The Camelot of Tennyson’s original sketch is marked both by negotiable borders—“the Saxons whom [the King] had overthrown in twelve battles ravaged the land, and ever came nearer and nearer” (122)—and by a general sense of mutability that registers tellingly in its topography: “But all underneath it was hollow, and the mountain trembled, when the seas rushed bellowing through the porphyry caves; and there ran a prophecy that the mountain and the city on some wild morning would topple into the abyss and be no more” (122–3). In its Idylls’ incarnation, Camelot remains tenuous in form and imperfectly enclosed, features Tennyson affiliates less with impending doom than with arthur’s singular civic vision. Leodogran’s Cameliard, “[t]hick with wet woods” (Ca l. 21) and frighteningly susceptible to invasion—“wild dog, and wolf and boar and bear / Came night and day, and rooted in the fields, / and wallow’d in the gardens of the King” (Ca ll. 23–5)—becomes, with arthur’s help, appropriately permeable, open to light (both literal and legal) but closed to foe: “Then he drave / The heathen; after, slew the beast, and fell’d / The forest, letting in the sun, and made / Broad pathways for the hunter and the knight / and so return’d” (Ca ll. 58– 62). Choked by “great tracts of wilderness” (Ca l. 10), uther’s kingdom, too, was stifled by trees and trouble before the ascendance of arthur, who “[c]lear’d the dark places and let in the law, / and broke the bandit holds and cleansed the land” (Ge ll. 942–3). a remarkable amalgam of borderlessness and border patrol, arthurian security is distinctly Victorian; his ostensible aim is to clarify and defend Camelot’s boundaries—to “[make] a realm, and [reign]” (Ca l. 19)—but like the speaker of “Timbuctoo,” who sees, with senses “thrillingly distinct and keen,” “[t]he smallest grain that dappled the dark earth,” arthur, upon reaching “a field-of-battle bright / With pitch’d pavilions of his foe,” regards his present kingdom as strikingly, infinitely expansive: “[T]he world / Was all so clear about him, that he saw / The smallest rock far on the faintest hill, / and even in high day

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the morning star” (Ca ll. 95–9). arthur’s realm-making, in other words, results in an empire simultaneously integral and fluid, in a “slope of land” that evokes, in the brief space of Leodogran’s vision, both solidity and evanescence: “[o]n the slope / The sword rose, the hind fell, the herd was driven, / Fire glimpsed … / ... Till with a wink … the haze / Descended, and the solid earth became / as nothing” (Ca ll. 427, 430–32, 440–42). Gareth’s first glimpse of Camelot confirms Leodogran’s dream; as his party approaches the mountain’s base, the edges of the royal metropolis flicker and shift: “at times the summit of the high city flash’d; / at times the spires and turrets half-way down / Prick’d thro’ the mist; at times the great gate shone / only, that open’d on the field below: / anon, the whole fair city disappear’d” (GL ll. 189–93). If the empire’s space affords membranous enclosure, its name evokes an even more primal permeation. Whereas “Malory’s text abounds in [place] names,” W. Nash observes, Tennyson’s “map … is strangely blank. Camelot—Caerleon— astolat—Tintagel—Lyonesse—the names that plot or pinpoint the action of the poem are few indeed.” “Here,” he concludes, “is a Britain of uncertain date, a Victorian-Celtico-Tudoresque realm” (55). In fact, Tennyson never explicitly identifies arthur’s realm as Britain, and although the name Camelot certainly refers to the kingdom’s capital city, it simultaneously designates a mountain and, as “the Saxons … [come] nearer and nearer,” any land that remains under arthurian rule. It seems, then, that Camelot simply is ancient Britain, its interior edges—the lines, say, that distinguish its urban and suburban spaces—as negotiable as its outermost borders. as Nash’s invocation of a “Victorian-Celtico-Tudoresque” aesthetic suggests, the Idylls’ Victorian readers would have recognized this imperial model. “arthur’s expanding kingdom is itself a small empire, subjugating or overawing less civilized areas and bringing them within the pale of Christian manners,” Victor Kiernan explains. “In the same style modern Britain was carrying fire and sword, light and sweetness, into the dark places of asia and africa” (138). Camelot, as Colin Graham puts it, is “the imperial center” of arthur’s realm (63), but its sphere of influence and, therefore, its political space, resembles that of Victoria’s British empire, an entity whose borders, Ian Baucom notes, had long proved “far from stable.” “as england conquered Ireland, crowned a Scottish king, united with Scotland, and established colonies in North america, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the Indian subcontinent, and africa,” Baucom writes, “the recourse to a territorial definition of collective identity meant that Britishness, at least as a legal concept, was to become as elastic as the nation’s imperial boundaries.” Baucom’s diction hints at a pervasive boundary-inspired anxiety—“Were all the individuals born in the diverse places over which england claimed sovereignty to be considered identically and interchangeably British?” (8)—but for Tennyson, Matthew Reynolds argues, “unification … was almost universally a good”: “He wished the empire to grow ever more cohesive, even to the point of becoming a single nation” (203). unfortunately, Reynolds observes, “[w]hile Italy, and later Germany, were becoming more cohesive,” england, as a result of the anxiety Baucom describes, “was doing the opposite” (209), and arthur’s realm, both

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well defined and infinitely permeable, embodies Tennyson’s ideal Britain. “From Camelot,” Kiernan writes, “he judged his own england, and found it wanting. From the vantage-point of empire he could admire and applaud his england, and reassure himself that beneath all appearances it was still inwardly sound” (145). Linda Hughes notes that the Idylls’ “first readers” took similar comfort in Camelot, “a city filled with lively human beings and a king who inspired hope,” but she attributes their regard for Tennyson’s arthurian world to a pre-Modernist glasshalf-full optimism: “Victorians who entered into the poem might be said to have inhabited a different Camelot from that praised by twentieth-century audiences, to whom the city is more notable (like the Cheshire Cat) for disappearing than enduring” (39). one might, alternatively, suggest that for Victorian readers, the flickering edges of the arthurian capital (and the fundamental permeability that they metonymically represent) actually cinched Camelot’s affiliation with pleasant security, with an imperial present simultaneously familiar in its expansiveness and idealized in its easy unity. Since maintaining a healthy porosity is central to arthur’s spatial project, Camelot’s apertures are always semi-open. arthur’s wedding ceremony is ringed by loyal knights (Ca ll. 457–8) and sheltered by church walls, but spring permeates the scene, rendering inside and out virtually indistinguishable: “Far shone the fields of May thro’ open door, / The sacred altar blossom’d white with May, / The Sun of May descended on their King, / They gazed on all earth’s beauty in their Queen” (Ca ll. 459–62). a similar porosity marks other aspects of the kingdom’s architecture; open or closed, Camelot’s renowned gate, whose keystone “ripple[s] like an ever-fleeting wave” (GL l. 211), appears unsolid to Gareth—“it seem’d / The dragon-boughts and elvish emblemings / Began to move, seethe, twine and curl” (GL ll. 228–30)—and proves no obstacle for elaine, who slips like water through its membranous form: Then rose elaine and glided thro’ the fields, and past beneath the weirdly-sculptured gates Far up the dim rich city to her kin; There bode the night: but woke with dawn, and past Down thro’ the dim rich city to the fields, Thence to the cave: so day by day she past In either twilight ghost-like to and fro Gliding … . (Le ll. 838–45)

Indeed, notwithstanding a standing Saxon threat to arthur’s uncertain authority, the walled city and its sturdy buildings are neither locked nor guarded, and elaine’s easy movement through the gate is replicated by visitors to the hall, a structure as notable for its wide-flung doors as its luxurious interior. “[T]wo great entries open’d from the hall,” Tennyson writes, one “that gave upon a range / of level pavement where the King would pace / at sunrise, gazing over plain and wood,” and another, “counter to the hearth,” rising “[h]igh that the highestcrested helm could ride / Therethro’ nor graze” (GL ll. 650–53, 657–9). Through these apertures flows an unceasing stream of knights and boon-seeking civilian

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subjects, the steady in-and-out of whom epitomizes Camelot’s perfectly imperfect enclosure. Justice, arthur asserts, must permeate the kingdom—“The wastest moorland of our realm,” he promises Lynette, “shall be / Safe, damsel, as the centre of this hall” (GL ll. 589–90)—and Gareth thrills at the osmotic movement that speaks to the preservation of equity both inside Camelot’s most prominent civic space and far beyond its membranous borders: “and ever and anon a knight would pass / outward, or inward to the hall: his arms / Clash’d; and the sound was good to Gareth’s ear” (GL ll. 303–5). “[a]ll about” the city, Gareth observes, “a healthy people [step] / as in the presence of a gracious king” (GL ll. 308–9), and we might note not only the pervasiveness of arthur’s influence—people move as if their king is present, even when he is not—but also the striking physical fitness of his subjects. The haleness of the masses, Tennyson suggests, speaks to the vitality of the body politic, and as Helena Michie explains, Victorians regarded well maintained membranes as essential to the health of any corpus. Citing arnold J. Cooley’s The Toilet and the Cosmetic Arts in Ancient and Modern Times (1866), Michie describes the “paradox” of Victorian skin: [S]kin is infinitely permeable, allowing for the passage of air, food, and other substances into and out of the body, but it also, in Cooley’s words, “clothes” the body and covers it up, “resists” injury, and makes the body something separable from other bodies and from surrounding environments. Skin is, in this account, both the membrane through which the outside world enters the body and a barrier, a protection from the outside world … . [S]kin was defined as simultaneously permeable and impermeable. (408)

“[T]he cries of all my realm,” arthur states, “[p]ass through this hall,” and when, in “The Holy Grail,” his knights commit themselves to the quest for Christ’s cup, he foresees a kind of osmotic imbalance, an influx of pain and a diminution of succor that together destroy the kingdom’s delicate skin and, effectively, its overall health: “o my knights, / your places being vacant at my side, / This chance of noble deeds will come and go / unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires / Lost in the quagmire!” (HG ll. 315–20). Camelot is enclosed, but its securing structures, at the levels of hall, city, and realm, are defined by a calculated porosity, a holey integrity that, to adopt Cooley’s description of the body’s foremost membrane, “is absolutely essential” to the kingdom’s “corporeal and mental vigour” (in Michie 407). excessively rich and permeably bounded, Camelot is a luscious space by Tennysonian standards, but the Grail quest taxes the kingdom’s economic and defensive stores. as the mission-bound depart, arrayed in floral splendor, Camelot’s wealth seems to leach away, and the city’s walls strain beneath the weight of a melancholy populace. “[W]here the roofs / Totter’d toward each other in the sky,” Percivale recounts, Met foreheads all along the street of those Who watch’d us pass; and lower, and where the long Rich galleries, lady-laden weigh’d the necks of dragons clinging to the crazy walls,

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When Percivale and his Round Table brethren return to Camelot, they encounter a shattered space, a pile of architectural wreckage: “[H]eaps of ruin, hornless unicorns, / Crack’d basilisks, and splinter’d cockatrices, / and shatter’d talbots … / … brought us to the hall” (HG ll. 714–17). It would be unfair, however, to place the lion’s share of the blame for arthur’s eventual undoing on the shoulders of Galahad and his fellow Grail seekers. In fact, Camelot’s luscious character—its abundant sensory pleasures and interconnected intimate chambers—seems to foster (if not exactly cause) both the adulterous trespass for which the arthurian story is most famous and the rumor-mongering that renders the Lancelot-Guinevere affair truly toxic. The spaces in which the Queen and Lancelot rendezvous are uniformly rich and, like Camelot’s larger areas, easy to enter and exit. “[I]n that garden nigh the hall,” Tennyson writes, “a walk of roses ran from door to door; / a walk of lilies crost it to the bower: / and down that range of roses the great Queen / Came with slow steps, the morning on her face” (BB ll. 236–40). The space is “closebower’d” (BB l. 236) but not, as its multiple doors and sunny glow suggest, sealed, and when Lancelot enters “from the counter door” to “[pace] / The long white walk of lilies toward the bower” (BB ll. 241, 243–4), Guinevere sees and follows him. The problem, of course, is that Balin, unnoticed by the trysting lovers, is in the garden, too, and although his unique neurosis leads him not to gossip but to “[dash] away” in search of “strange adventure” (BB l. 284), other spies (both purposeful and accidental) are less discreet. Rumors, like people, travel easily through porous environments; Geraint not only believes “[t]he world’s loud whisper” (MG l. 27) but fears the transfer of Guinevere’s taint to his own pure wife, and Modred, “all ear and eye,” “[climbs] to the high top of the garden-wall / To spy some secret scandal if he might” (G ll. 24–6). “[W]iliest and … worst” (G l. 29), Vivien “peers askance” through “the portal arch” (MV ll. 97–8) at Lancelot and the Queen before effortlessly penetrating Guinevere’s inner circle: “Vivien half-forgotten of the Queen / among her damsels broidering sat” (MV ll. 135–6). There, she “heard, watch’d / and whisper’d” until her stories suffuse the city: [...] [T]hro’ the peaceful court she crept and whisper’d: then as arthur in the highest Leaven’d the world, so Vivien in the lowest, arriving at a time of golden rest, and sowing one ill hint from ear to ear, While all the heathen lay at arthur’s feet, and no quest came, but all was joust and play, Leaven’d his hall. They heard and let her be. thereafter as an enemy that has left Death in the living waters, and withdrawn, The wily Vivien stole from arthur’s court. (MV ll. 136–47)

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as the poet’s play on “stole” suggests, gossip is costly, and the wagging tongues of arthur’s subjects drain his moral project of its credibility. Tennyson intimates, moreover, that the king’s leavening—that is, lightening and expanding—work is not unrelated to Vivien’s ability to leaven the realm with rumors; as people come and go through Camelot’s porous borders and membranous walls to partake of arthur’s well of justice, they pass her news like plague. and yet Camelot’s rich permeability remains for Tennyson a kind of ideal. Despite its inherent dangers, mutability and porosity prove far preferable to stagnation and suffocating boundedness, for the greater peril lies in the solipsism that accompanies complete enclosure. When, en route to yniol’s ruined castle, Geraint encounters a provincial population wholly consumed by local events and frightened to the point of xenophobia, he scolds, “ye think the rustic cackle of your bourg / The murmur of the world!” (MG ll. 276–7). To live a noble and comfortable life (as In Memoriam and Maud articulate differently) is to appreciate borders while simultaneously looking beyond them; it is “madness,” Geraint later repeats, to “take the rustic murmur of [one’s] bourg / For the great wave that echoes round the world” (MG ll. 419–20), and yniol’s genuine if limited hospitality—“enter therefore,” the earl says, “and partake / The slender entertainment of a house / once rich, now poor, but ever open-door’d” (MG ll. 300–302)—epitomizes civil sanity. Indiscriminate openness, of course, leaves much to be desired; Tennyson, still Keats’s heir, implicitly repudiates the utter insecurity of ettarre’s palace, the “wide / yawning” portal and “[w]ide open … gates” of which (Pe ll. 411–12, 405) reflect their owner’s sexual laxity and nearly permit a double homicide. When a disillusioned Pelleas redefines himself as the terrible Red Knight, the “huge machicolated tower” he inhabits proves accessible but, because it lacks a moral filter, utterly inhospitable. The proverbial den of iniquity and the Idylls’ true antiCamelot, Pelleas’s hall stands “with open doors, whereout was roll’d / a roar of riot, as from men secure / amid their marshes, ruffians at their ease / among their harlot-brides, an evil song” (LT ll. 424–8). In the final analysis, arthur’s realm is neither too closed nor too open, and its perfect permeability persists even as its space dissolves. Had Camelot survived, an at-peace arthur suggests from his death barge, its membranous boundaries would only have ossified into threatening walls: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new / and God fulfils himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world” (Pa ll. 408–10). even post-Camelot, the poet asserts, arthur’s legacy endures in a universe that remains both integral—“the whole round earth is every way / Bound by gold chains about the feet of God” (Pa ll. 422–3)—and fluid: “Then from the dawn it seem’d there came, but faint / as from beyond the limit of the world, / Like the last echo born of a great cry, / Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice / around a king returning from his wars” (Pa ll. 457–61, emphasis added). Significantly, the contemporary england Tennyson portrays in his epilogue “To the Queen” describes a nation Camelot-esque in its economy (“wealthier—wealthier—hour by hour!” [l. 23]) as well as its “ever-broadening” (l. 30) imperial space. To portray a luscious kingdom is one thing, but to represent its space textually is the hallmark of the luscious genre. Having identified the luscious features of

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Camelot’s architecture and topography, we can turn our attention to the luscious formality of Tennyson’s aggregative epic. The Idylls’ poet subscribes to the notion that text is inhabitable, and although arthur’s realm exists in real space, it also possesses a compelling verbal dimension. Tennyson’s dying king says as much to Bedivere—“My house are … they who sware my vows” (Pa l. 157)—but Tristram more explicitly describes Camelot’s wordy foundations: [...] The vows! o ay—the wholesome madness of an hour— They served their use, their time; for every knight Believed himself a greater than himself, and every follower eyed him as a God; Till he, being lifted beyond himself, Did mightier deeds than elsewise he had done, And so the realm was made … . (LT ll. 669–76, emphasis added)

In Tristram’s opinion, the chivalric promises that initially constituted the realm quickly proved insufficiently flexible: “The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself— / My knighthood taught me this” (LT ll. 652–3). Matthew Reynolds elaborates: “The Round Table is established by a speech act. The State which is brought into being by this act includes a rule about language. Vowing to reverence their King as their conscience, their conscience as their King, the knights commit themselves to rendering fixed and unambiguous the relationship between signifier, signified and referent, be they speaking of a thing, an action, or a thought” (268). If, however, arthur’s vows lack the safe porosity of his kingdom’s borders, his own and his knights’ semi-open stories amply compensate. Camelot is oath-made but also, from its inception, tale-made; when Leodogran interrogates Bellicent with regard to arthur’s lineage, she regales him with story after story—“But let me tell thee now another tale” (Ca l. 358)—before invoking directly, by way of conclusion, her half-brother’s narrative cachet: Fear not to give this King thine only child, Guinevere: so great bards of him will sing Hereafter; and dark sayings from of old Ranging and ringing thro’ the minds of men, and echo’d by old folk beside their fires For comfort after their wage-work is done, Speak of the King; and Merlin in our time Hath spoken also, not in jest, and sworn Tho’ men may wound him that he will not die, But pass, again to come … . (Ca ll. 412–21)

Bellicent intimates that Camelot will endure as a textual space both discrete and, as her own competing accounts of arthur’s birth and authority suggest, open to interpretation. Her portrayal of arthur’s eminence—the king will “range through” and “pass, again to come”—mimics the poet’s representation of the steady in-

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and-out that characterizes Camelot’s membrane-bordered hall, and Tennyson’s references throughout the Idylls to Malory’s often different version of events highlight the capacity of the arthur legend to accommodate varied readings, to remain simultaneously integral and negotiable. Indeed, Victorian readers of the Idylls claimed to feel, upon cracking Tennyson’s text, that they had entered a space both discrete and (as their range of emotional responses suggests) adaptable. “I thought about … all those knights and heroes and beauties and purple landscapes and misty gray lakes in which you have made me live,” Thackeray effuses. “[e]very step I have walked in elfland has been a sort of Paradise to me … . [W]hat could I do but be grateful to that surprising genius which has made me so happy?” (Memoir I 445). Jowett describes the epic (elaine’s story, in particular) as equally inhabitable but more soothing than stimulating—“There are hundreds and hundreds of all ages … who … will find there a sort of ideal consolation of their own troubles and remembrances” (Memoir I 449)—while Ruskin portrays the poem as a too-seductive historical landscape: “Treasures of wisdom there are in it, and word-painting such as never was yet for concentration, nevertheless it seems to me that so great power ought not to be spent on visions of things past but on the living present. For one hearer capable of feeling the depth of this poem I believe ten would feel a depth as great if the stream flowed through things nearer the hearer” (Memoir I 453). William Buckler’s twentieth-century critique echoes the spatial rhetoric of its nineteenth-century precursors: “The reader is led into a new topography of poetic language, symbolic and complexly patterned, and is invited to explore a novel country which, despite its newness, he has strange intimations that he has visited before” (3–4). Buckler notes, furthermore, that “the medium of language” is what enables “this poetic country … to exist,” and when he observes that Tennyson’s work is “very different poetic terrain from Malory’s” (4), he emphasizes the Laureate’s regard for the permeability of textual boundaries: “[H]e knew … that poetic structure, however deep its roots in the literary past, must mutate in response to the altered spiritual pressures brought to it by a new and conspicuously different age” (9). Tristram, Bellicent, and the critics stress the textual dimension of arthur’s empire at its inception and in its literary future, but Tennyson asserts throughout the Idylls that in its heyday Camelot was still or already a storied space, shifty but compelling. Gareth, bound by “sooty yoke of kitchen-vassalage” (GL l. 469), only seems to live with “grimy kitchen-knaves” (GL l. 471); he truly inhabits a world of narrative, a reality defined by tales of chivalrous adventure: “Gareth telling some prodigious tale / of knights, who sliced a red life-bubbling way / Thro’ twenty folds of twisted dragon, held / all in a gap-mouth’d circle his good mates” (GL ll. 498–501). Gareth’s story not only transports those who hear it—“charm’d” from a servile universe, the knaves sit with “idle hands” (GL ll. 503, 504)—but makes of them an alternative world, a discrete area whose “gap-mouth’d” border affiliates this word-made space with Camelot’s porous polis. It is fitting, then, that when Gareth embarks on his own quest, he quickly finds himself embroiled in a tale:

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as captivating as this carved-in-stone narrative proves, however, its climax relies on the fluidity (not the fixedness) of signification—“Said Lancelot, ‘Peradventure he, you name, / May know my shield. Let Gareth, an he will, / Change his name for mine, and take my charger’” (GL ll. 1266–8)—and when the action concludes, Tennyson underscores the general mutability of textual enclosures: “So large mirth lived and Gareth won the quest. / and he that told the tale in older times / Says Gareth wedded Lyonors, / But he, that told it later, says Lynette” (GL ll. 1391–4). Merlin’s story similarly emphasizes the identity that, in an arthurian context, exists between interpretable language and permeable space. Merlin, significantly, is both architect and poet; the magician who “built the King his havens, ships, and halls, / Was also Bard” (MV ll. 166–7), and his account of the sage who “[r]ead but one book” (MV l. 620) highlights text’s ability to transmute walls into membranes— [...] [T]o him the wall That sunders ghosts and shadow-casting men Became a crystal, and he saw them thro’ it, and heard their voices talk behind the wall, and learnt their elemental secrets, powers and forces (MV ll. 626–31)

—and books into empires: [...] [B]ut when the King Made proffer of the league of golden mines, The province with a hundred miles of coast, The palace and the princess, that old man Went back to his old wild, and lived on grass, and vanish’d, and his book came down to me. (MV ll. 643–8)

“[B]ut twenty pages long,” the enchanted tome boasts a dense terrain in its “little blot[s]” and “ample marge,” “scribbled, crost, and cramm’d / With comment” (MV ll. 669, 667, 675–6), and, eschewing gifts of land, the bald mystic of Merlin’s tale finds in text territory enough. When, in the subsequent idyll, elaine imaginatively “reads” the scars on Lancelot’s shield, she too makes of words an alternative reality: “[elaine] read the naked shield, / Now guess’d a hidden meaning in his arms, / Now made a pretty history to herself” “… so she lived in fantasy” (Le ll. 16–18, 27). Her funerary arrangements say the most, however, about the importance of narrative and text to Camelot’s realm-obsessed king; elaine’s story, by arthur’s order, is inscribed on a lavish tomb, a gesture that affiliates the lily maid’s narrative world-making with arthur’s own politico-moral project: “and let

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the story of her dolorous voyage / For all true hearts be blazon’d on her tomb / In letters gold and azure!” (Le ll. 1332–4). enid’s story simultaneously complicates and clarifies Tennyson’s take on space and language. a dress, not a text, inspires the vivid flashback that consumes an entire idyll, but when, at the midpoint of her two-part story, enid steps into a “gorgeous gown” (MG l. 739), she enters, her mother notes, a story space: “[She] call’d her like that maiden in the tale, / Whom Gwydion made by glamour out of flowers, / and sweeter than the bride of Cassivelaun, / Flur, for whose sweet love the Roman Caesar first / Invaded Britain” (MG ll. 742–6). If written text owns spatial qualities like those of woven fabric, so, it seems, does cloth conjure around enid a credible narrative universe. The cloth-is-text-is-space equation established in enid’s chamber helps illuminate the Idylls’ relationship to luscious tradition by recalling Tennyson’s Keats-inspired regard for woven texts. Having clarified the textual nature of arthurian space, I can identify Camelot’s textilic features before describing, finally, the woven character of Tennyson’s form. The Idylls not only depict arthur’s kingdom but, because Camelot is at once text and textile, strangely are its legendary space. The epic is littered with fabrics rich and worn, fashionable and utilitarian. For enid, cloth is both punishment—“[P]ut on thy worst and meanest dress,” Geraint barks (MG l. 130)—and reward: “[Guinivere] did her honor as the Prince’s bride, / and clothed her for her bridals like the sun” (MG ll. 835–6). Percivale’s sister weaves from her own shorn locks “a strong sword-belt” (HG l. 153), while Vivien, who broiders with the queen, seduces in a samite robe “that more exprest / Than hid her” (MV ll. 220–21) and, in her stand-off with Merlin, a textile as hairy as (if less literal than) the holy nun’s: “[T]hen adding all at once, / ‘and lo, I clothe myself with wisdom,’ drew / The vast and shaggy mantle of his beard / across her neck and bosom to her knee, / and call’d herself a gilded summer fly / Caught in a great old tyrant spider’s web” (MV ll. 252–7). In elaine’s tale, woven sleeves (for dresses and for shields) soothe, disguise, and provoke; in ettarre’s, ladies-inwaiting, arrayed in “divers colours” (Pe l. 51), compare favorably to the rustic weavers of Pelleas’s homeland, “[m]akers of nets … living from the sea” (Pe l. 86). In addition to bodies, Tennyson drapes walls (arthur’s hall, Vivien notes, is “arras”-decked [MV l. 248]) and roads (“a streetway hung with folds of pure / White samite” [LT ll. 140–41] commemorates the Last Tournament), touches that highlight fabric’s privileged place among goods in this medieval economy. When Mark attempts to purchase with “cloth of purest gold” (GL l. 381) a seat at the hallowed Round Table, the king destroys his dazzling gift—“Then arthur cried to rend the cloth, to rend / In pieces, and so cast it on the hearth” (GL ll. 392–3) —in a gesture of financial-cum-moral independence. The sinister earl Doorm, meanwhile, hopes that “a splendid silk of foreign loom” will win Geraint’s rag-clad wife, and although the textile fails to move enid, Tennyson’s lavish description of its beauty epitomizes the poem’s preoccupation with things richly woven: He spoke, and one among his gentlewomen Display’d a splendid silk of foreign loom, Where like a shoaling sea the lovely blue

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as Tennyson tells it, the cloth Doorm proffers is a luscious specimen, “thick” with visual and tactile pleasures but notably fluid, a weave (it seems) of light and water. Most significant, however, is the silk’s evocation of a fully realized landscape, a space of hills and oceans enclosed by sward and sky; Camelot, too, is woven, a place not only textile-full but, like the fantastic topography evoked by Doorm’s fabric, textilic. In “Balin and Balan,” crisscrossing “walks” of flowers lend the Queen’s “[c]lose-bower’d” garden a woven quality, but Camelot’s weftish character predates Guinevere’s arrival. as the abbey’s youngest nun recounts, “the land was full of signs / and wonders ere the coming of the Queen” (G ll. 230–31), a magic she evokes with descriptions of loosely woven forms (if not an eldritch spinning jenny): “The flickering fairy-circle wheel’d and broke / Flying, and link’d again, and wheel’d and broke / Flying, for all the land was full of life” (G ll. 255–7). The textilic atmosphere extends to the hall, looped by “[a] wreath of airy dancers hand-in-hand” (G l. 259), and, in enid’s imagination, to the palace courtyards: “[S]he knew / That all was bright; that all about were birds / of sunny plume in gilded trellis-work; / That all the turf was rich in plots that look’d / each like a garnet or a turkis in it” (MG ll. 657–61). The kingdom’s mists are a tapestry unto themselves; “Guinevere” opens with white haze, “like a face-cloth to the face, / [Clinging] to the dead earth” (G ll. 7–8), and closes with a “moony vapour rolling round the King.” arthur “seem’d the phantom of a Giant,” Tennyson writes, as the fog “[e]nwound him fold by fold, and made him gray / and grayer, till himself became as mist” (G ll. 597–600). The cloth-like fog incorporates the king into its textilic form, but arthur is more weaver than weave. When Leodogran envisions “a slope of land” with “a phantom king, / Now looming, and now lost” (Ca ll. 427, 429–30), Tennyson’s diction is rife with possibility. To loom is to rise but also, perhaps, to weave, and although the terrain in Leodogran’s dream ascends “up to a height” (Ca l. 428), the location of that provocative adjectival phrase—“Now looming, and now lost”—seems also to modify the noun that abuts it: “king.” When he transforms discrete political and cultural threads into a single, integrated civilization, arthur more closely resembles the Lady of Shalott than his kingly predecessors: “[aurelius and uther] fail’d to make the kingdom one / and after these King arthur for a space, / and thro’ the puissance of his Table Round, / Drew all their petty princedoms under him, / Their king and head, and made a realm, and reign’d” (Ca ll. 15–19). Tennyson further affiliates arthur with the weaver’s craft when, at the lists, his robe and throne are both independently woven and, it seems, inextricably intertwined: [...] [T]he clear-faced King … sat Robed in red samite, easily to be known, Since to his crown the golden dragon clung,

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and down his robe the dragon writhed in gold, and from the carven-work behind him crept Two dragons gilded, sloping down to make arms for his chair, while the rest of them Thro’ knots and loops and folds innumerable Fled ever thro’ the woodwork, till they found The new design wherein they lost themselves, yet with all ease, so tender was the work … . (Le ll. 430–40)

uther’s dragon signifies the legitimacy of arthur’s authority, but its twining movement through crown, robe, and throne registers the uniqueness of arthur’s project. The Round Table is both unified—“I made them lay their hands in mine and swear,” he says, “To reverence the King, as if he were / Their conscience, and their conscience as their King” (G ll. 464–6)—and unity-making, since the knights’ ties to one another underwrite their ability to maintain the integrity (both moral and spatial) of an expansive kingdom. a network in the most literal sense of the word, arthur’s knights play weft to the land’s warp, shuttling in and out of the hall to link arthur to his far-flung territories and those territories to the king. even their subtle movements evoke weaving—Geraint, not unlike Keats’s nightingale, moves “[b]y ups and downs, thro’ many a grassy glade” (MG l. 236, emphasis added)—and although Tennyson opts for a metalwork metaphor (“unsolders” [Pa l. 182]) to describe the Table’s dramatic dissolution, textile is the craft with which he most often associates his hero. The dragons on arthur’s kingly accouterments (like the images on Camelot’s gate) loop, seethe, twine, and curl because Camelot is a woven space, and Tennyson’s form mimics its textual-textilic terrain. The word idyll derives from the Greek eidyllion, or “short separate poem,” and although the term originally described verse written in the pastoral tradition, Tennyson’s epic, as T.V.F. Brogan and J.e. Congleton note, “is hardly pastoral.” Perhaps, they suggest, “Tennyson thought the use of the term was appropriate: each idyll contains an incident in the matter of arthur and his Knights which is separate (or framed) but at the same time connected with the central theme; the contents treat the Christian virtues in an ideal manner and in a remote setting” (556). Hallam Tennyson stresses the work’s “epic unity” at the expense of its cumulative character—“the links … which bind the ‘Idylls’ into an artistic whole, are perhaps somewhat intricate” (Memoir II 130)—but the discreteness (the eidyllion quality) of the poem’s individual pieces is equally important to its aesthetic. The Idylls’ individually titled tales appear (in the manner of In Memoriam’s numbered cantos or Maud’s monologic units) closed off and disconnected, but like the knights, halls, cities, and patchwork plots of arthur’s kingdom (and, for that matter, the piecey bits of In Memoriam and Maud), they engage beyond themselves to read as parts of a unified textscape. If Camelot’s eye-popping wealth recalls the profusion of the Victorian department store, Tennyson’s form might best be termed a department story; individual retail departments enclosed shoppers but simultaneously encouraged what McDonald calls “drift,” a word Tennyson also invokes to describe his narrative’s underlying structure: “[T]here is an allegorical

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or perhaps rather a parabolic drift in the poem” (Memoir II 127). The reader, in other words, is invited to move through arthur’s kingdom and Tennyson’s poem, tracing “the spiritual development of man” (Memoir II 127) from one permeable space to another. “Many reviewers,” Hughes points out, “whether praising or censuring Tennyson’s choice of form, compared the [first] four idylls to cabinet pictures—small intimate views … . It was a form which depended on readers to relate the Idylls to each other” (46). Like Strawbridge’s Jerome Koerber, who advocated “[e]liminat[ing] the store by weaving through it some central ideas” (in McDonald 231), Tennyson facilitates his reader’s journey with textual weftwork, and the result is a form akin to that produced by Merlin’s “charm / of woven paces” (MV ll. 965–6), a spell in which weaving-inspired gestures generate transparent but effective enclosure. For Longfellow, the Idylls are “[r]ich tapestries” (Memoir I 413) whose lines, Meredith says, “[t]he Poet rolls … out like half yards of satin” (in Ricks 271). once more, however, careful reading reveals a textual space more literally woven than those critics’ florid offhand metaphors suggest. Tennyson’s much-quoted comparison of poetry to “shot-silk” was, his son claims, originally meant to describe his arthurian epic: “as for the many meanings of the poem my father would affirm, ‘Poetry is like shot-silk with many glancing colours. every reader must find his own interpretation according to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet’” (Memoir II 127). audience aside, the Idylls are founded on a series of interpretive acts, and as Tennyson’s remark implies, there is something textilic about the very word “interpretation,” a weft-warp perpendicularity to its common prefix and to the kind of experience (author and reader, forging meaning together, if sometimes from opposite directions) that it denotes. an interpretable text, I have observed, is integral but inherently semi-open, an entity no less porous than the kingdom’s ubiquitous samite, and when Tennyson’s Idylls confront Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (and, to a lesser degree, the Mabinogion), the result is a narrative textile, a weave of disparate legends that constitutes a new account of Camelot. “[o]ld books,” the monk ambrosius intimates, require rereading and rewriting—“For so they say, these books of ours, but seem / Mute of this miracle, far as I have read” (HG ll. 59, 65–6)—and Tennyson’s Idylls do for Malory what Percivale’s story does for Joseph of Glastonbury and the holy grail. Like Camelot’s city gate, the epic features “[n]ew things and old co-twisted” (GL l. 222), but Tennyson weaves more than contemporary and historical narratives. In the manner of Keats’s late work and, of course, Tennyson’s own In Memoriam and Maud, Idylls of the King resembles fabric not only ideologically but formally, structurally. First, as Sanford Schwartz points out in “Stitching and unstitching Camelot,” the Idylls’ piecemeal publication resulted in a form less traditionally seriated than uniquely woven. In other words, Tennyson did not compose his epic chunks in narrative order, and although Schwartz opts for the language of hard craft to describe the Laureate’s process—“Tennyson shaped his new materials and grafted them onto the old” (78)—his own thesis subtly reveals the weave-like alternation that, for original readers, characterized the poem’s final structure:

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“New idylls were usually inserted between already existing ones, and each additional piece was carefully constructed to relate to the one it follows as well as the one it precedes” (78, emphasis added). For Schwartz, this procedure proves most interesting for its capacity to counter the ostensibly fixed conclusions of individual narratives—“virtually every idyll,” he writes, “concludes with a scene that is echoed, if not explicitly parodied, by the opening scene of the following idyll” (78)—and thereby cultivate “a sense of impermanence and instability,” a “feeling that we are in a world where no resolution will remain in place” (79). as I have noted, however, negotiable borders and mutable termini are affiliated throughout the Idylls with arthurian security, and the textual tapestry Schwartz finds Tennyson “stitching and unstitching” ultimately seems consistent with both Camelot’s shifty textual-textilic space and Tennyson’s drift-inviting “shot-silk” poetics. The epic’s narrative threads are painstakingly intertwined, but Tennyson’s formal weaving manifests in other ways, too. Nearly every idyll counterpoints the poet’s authoritative pentameter with at least one more idiosyncratic intertext, usually a rhyming lay voiced by a title character. Thus Lynette describes pastoral love, elaine unrequited love, Pelleas dishonest love, and Tristram free love, all within the context of appropriately themed stories. Considered together, the Idylls’ songs constitute a collection within a collection, a string of beads that weaves through the larger tapestry. The notion of collection, however, returns us to the defining structural feature of the luscious poem: catalogue. We should observe up front that Tennyson’s epic is (as epics, perhaps, should be) packed with lists. Some move with the lines— “wyvern, lion, dragon, griffin, swan” (HG l. 350); “gossip and old wives, / and ills and aches, and teethings, lyings-in, / and mirthful sayings” (HG ll. 553–5); “The deer, the dews, the fern, the founts, the lawns” (LT l. 721)—while others disperse their elements across them: “and in the light the white mermaiden swam, / and strong man-breasted things stood from the sea, / and sent a deep sea-voice thro’ all the land, / To which the little elves of chasm and cleft, / Made answer, sounding like a distant horn” (G ll. 243–7). one particularly evocative passage in the final idyll marries these paratactic techniques: and friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; and some had visions out of golden youth, and some beheld the faces of old ghosts Look in upon the battle; and in the mist Was many a noble deed, many a base, and chance and craft and strength in single fights, and ever and anon with host to host Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn, Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash of battleaxes on shatter’d helms, and shrieks after the Christ, of those who falling down Look’d up for heaven, and only saw the mist; and shouts of heathen and the traitor knights, oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,

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Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs In that close mist, and cryings for the light, Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead. (Pa ll. 101–17)

In this description of arthur’s “last, dim, weird battle,” Tennyson means to evoke a “formless fear” (Pa ll. 95, 98), and his sense of what form is not helps to illuminate the infrastructure of his grandest poetic project. Here, lists convey a sensory mishmash, a jumble of sights, sounds, and textures that suggests not amalgamation but dissolution. The Round Table’s network has unraveled, and Tennyson’s catalogues of knightly pieces—visions, voices, armor—are grammatically disengaged strings, threads that no longer interlock to form coherent clauses, let alone viable fraternity. The Idylls’ local lists fail similarly, texturizing without connecting the epic’s individual narrative pieces, but one master catalogue twines through the poem, loosely circumscribing its textual space. arthur’s storied, shuttling knights realize Camelot’s textual-textilic landscape and, in Tennyson’s hands, the woven quality of the epic that celebrates their work. the series of names that constitutes the Idylls’ table of contents is the epic’s backbone, or, more appropriately, its unifying thread. arthur, who regularly leaves the confines of the hall to “smoke the scandalous hive[s]” of bee-like bandit hordes (HG l. 214), and Merlin, a warrior on Camelot’s more mystic fronts, are knights in their own right. Neither can we discount from Tennyson’s knightly roll call the ladies’ names; arthur himself, elliot Gilbert asserts, is an “almost maidenly Victorian monarch” (195), and Tennyson’s heroines, who inspire, coerce, and— most significantly—travel the realm, are at least as committed and assertive as their king and his Round Table brethren.4 Finally, “The Holy Grail” and “The Last Tournament,” which specify no heroes in their titles, are nonetheless dominated by famous arthurian names: Percivale and Galahad, Tristram and Isolt. The contents’ list of characters shifts and moves through the Idylls as the characters themselves enter and exit arthur’s hall, lending both diversity and unity to the poem as a whole. “as the pages are turned over,” Dean alford states in the Memoir, “and as name after name again catches the eye, one is newly struck by the abundant and dramatic variety of the men and women moving to and fro!” (II 128). at the center of Camelot stand the lists, enclosed tilting grounds where knights and ladies meet for tournaments; through the center of Camelot’s story runs the list, which is, in essence, the lists turned inside-out, its jousters (and spectators) let loose to defend the world outside the arena. on the day prior to the commencement of the ill-fated 4

Compare Tennyson’s arthurian women to Victorian women, who, according to Rappaport’s account, patronized and, in some cases, even inspired the shapes and structures of London’s newest shopping environments: “as early as the 1850s, [women] seemed to be in constant motion, ever traveling to and through the city center … . In the early seventies, another journalist noted how ‘thousands of women in the West end’ alternated ‘a day of visits with a day of shopping.’ These ladies evidently enjoyed ‘their sport’ all over London. When tired of the ‘proper district of Regent-street, Bond-street, oxford-street or Picadilly,’ they even ventured into the older district of St. Paul’s Churchyard in the City” (23).

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grail quest, arthur holds one last tournament at the lists to showcase “[t]he yetunbroken strength” of his Round Table (HG l. 326), and on the morrow, farewell wishers call the knights “each by name” as they pour forth from the gates. Since the grail seekers have set aside their duty to the realm, the onlookers’ catalogue presages a kind of unraveling, but Tennyson’s master list functions as a verbal tie that links the kingdom’s parts and people as it renders royally permeable the ostensibly insular spaces of the idylls. aside from catalogue and arena, the word “list,” in fact, denotes a kind of textilic binding, a tapestry’s selvage border, and the list of proper names that twines through the poem allows Tennyson to secure his own Camelot (that is, a permeably woven textual space) even as he describes the disintegration of arthur’s—its palace, hall, and, of course, lists. If, as Nash asserts, Tennyson’s epic conspicuously lacks place names, it surely compensates with personal names, with idylls called by (or implicitly identified with) the monikers that appear most often in their lines: Gareth and Lynette, Geraint and enid, Balin and Balan, Merlin and Vivien, Lancelot and elaine, Percivale and Galahad, Pelleas and etarre, Tristram and Isolt, Guinevere and arthur. Lancelot, Guinevere, and arthur turn up in every idyll, but other characters, including Merlin, Vivien, Pelleas, and non-featured names like Gawain, Mark, and Modred also make multiple appearances. In the same way, then, that arthur’s knights shuttle in, out, around, and through to weave of distant territories a networked empire, so they twine through Tennyson’s Idylls, rendering from discrete narratives a woven text, a permeably luscious poetic space. Tennyson’s “clear purpose,” Nash argues, is to evoke “that state in which names cease to typify the landscape, and the landscape itself typifies a realm of feeling. That is why the topography of these poems is not gazetteer topography, as Malory’s sometimes affects to be” (68). With regard to setting, Nash’s insight rings true; Camelot is the only place name that truly matters because, as a result the work of the Round Table, its space is paradoxically defined but infinite, gated but everywhere. The Round Table, however, is itself a collection of names, a series of signifiers that not only “typify” (as in define, bind, secure) the epic’s landscape but unify its textscape, render connected (in the manner of In Memoriam’s floral lists or Maud’s jeweled catalogues) the “cabinet pictures” (Hughes 46) that constitute its space. The idylls, in other words, not only describe Camelot but replicate it textually, and in the tradition of Keats, the elements that constitute Tennyson’s central securing thread are luxurious indeed. Descriptions of Geraint, who “[glances] like a dragon-fly / In summer suit and silks of holiday” (MG ll. 172–3), and Tristram, “armour’d all in forest green, whereon / There tript a hundred tiny silver deer” (LT ll. 170–71), epitomize the rich sensory detail that characterizes Tennyson’s accounts of the denizens of Camelot. Tristram’s particular ensemble hints in one more way at the commerce-inspired aesthetic that informs the Idylls’ treatment of spaces both political and poetic. In addition to green armor embossed with silver deer, Tristram sports “a holly-spray for crest, / With ever-scattering berries” and carries a shield emblazoned with “a harp” and “a bugle” (LT ll. 172–4). Icy deer, berried evergreen, and the instruments of heralding angels: Tennyson associates Tristram, champion of the epic’s autumnal Last Tournament, with the iconography of Christmas, with the material trappings

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of the season increasingly associated with luxury consumption and “doing the shops” (Hosgood 97). In a way, then, Idylls of the King best represents Tennyson’s adaptation of Keats’s luscious aesthetic. all three of the Laureate’s major works are seriated structures, their constitutive pieces ostensibly independent of one another: discrete, self-contained, excerptable. But the pieces of all three, upon more attentive reading, prove less closed than they initially appear. Tennyson’s twining material catalogues permeate textual barriers—titles, numbers, the white spaces between cantos—to forge loosely woven poetic spaces, alternative landscapes that formally resemble real-life Victorian sanctuaries. Inside Keats’s poems, knitted lists yield syntactic tangles that trap the reading mind, securing it within a woven citadel; inherently aggregative, In Memoriam, Maud, and the Idylls are, at a macro level, lists already, and when supplementary series wind through their interiors, the result is a nettier weave, an airier fabric. In its final form, the Idylls, plural in its title and listy in its contents, is the poem that most explicitly adopts this Keats-inspired formula. George Ford asserts that although Tennyson developed a “penchant for rich sensuous details,” “the sensational plunges in which Keats reveled were really not suited to Tennyson’s more subdued taste” (38). as Ford’s word “plunges” suggests, Keats’s poems take us deep, but Tennyson’s, in fact, prove similarly enveloping. Issues of density, not depth, are where Keats and Tennyson part company, and to recast Ford’s argument in terms of a luscious aesthetic is to observe that Tennyson’s verse, compared to Keats’s, reveals a poet less subdued than claustrophobic. No Calidore-esque burrower, the Tennysonian speaker demands intimacy tempered by porosity. Hopkins’s work, Mark Sandy rightly observes, “bears the hallmarks of the high Romantic poetry of Keats and Tennyson” (166). However, where Tennyson took issue with the opacity of Keats’s rich textual spaces, Hopkins condemned what he perceived as fakery in Tennyson’s work. of the Idylls, he writes, “each scene is a triumph of language and of bright picturesque, but just like a charade—where real lace and good silks and real jewelry are used, because the actors are private persons and wealthy, but it is acting all the same” (Correspondence 24). For Hopkins, Tennyson’s verse is somehow too loose; he attributes a troubling transparency to Tennyson’s methods and motives, which, like Gareth at the gates to Camelot, he claims to see straight through. Poetic profusion should serve genuine emotion, but feeling is lost, Hopkins intimates, when Tennyson rolls out sensuality by the yard, a Parnassian poetry that, “written without inspiration” (186), becomes a soulless textile. The Idylls’ opulently clothed Galahad, he complains, “is quite a fantastic charade-playing trumpery Galahad, merely playing the fool over Christian heroism” (Correspondence 24). When Hopkins’s own religious fears and fantasies inspire poems that depict the splendid variety of God’s creation, he turns, like Tennyson before him, to Keatsian parataxis, but unlike his Victorian model, he opts for internalized catalogues instead of externalized ones, for intricately woven individual lines over bolts of lacy narrative. Thus the luscious poem finds a third nineteenth-century incarnation, one that reinstates a Keatsian density but redefines, in a Tennysonian way, the meaning of containment.

Chapter 3

Where, Where Was a, Where Was a Place?: Hopkins and the Luscious Line I Touchstone: “The Wreck of the Deutschland” Since Hopkins destroyed much of his own juvenilia, we lack in his case the kind of early touchstone afforded by Keats’s “Imitation of Spenser” and Tennyson’s “Timbuctoo.” We do not, however, want for a starting point; as Robert Bridges observes in his notes to the first edition of Hopkins’s poetry, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” stands “like a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance” to the larger body of Hopkins’s work (Poems 104). Indeed, the difficult piece that marks Hopkins’s conscious reentrance into the world of poetry supplies an obvious if rocky place to begin the final phase of our study. as Walford Davies notes, “the special kind of pressured movement that [Hopkins] developed for his verse … had its first and fullest manifestation in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’” (xli). Better known as sprung rhythm, that pressured movement represents the century’s most extreme incarnation of luscious form, an adaptation of the aesthetic that condenses the definitive interchange between the aggregative and the woven into single lines. “Timbuctoo” and the “Imitation” are markedly different from “The Wreck of the Deutschland” at a foundational level—literally. The enclosed (or semienclosed) spaces described by Keats and Tennyson are founded, earthy and immovable. The island is an “emerald,” the city rock-based; Hopkins’s poem, in contrast, is occasioned by landlessness, literal and metaphorical: the shipwreck that drowned five Franciscan nuns in 1875 and, perhaps more important, the crises of faith that frequently left the poet himself unmoored, “álmost únmade” (l. 6).1 The nuns “fell to the deck / (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them)” (ll. 130–31), but Hopkins recalls facing an equally wrenching if less physical pair of horrors: “The frown of his face / Before me, the hurtle of hell / Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?” (ll. 17–19). That search for place—spiritual sanctuary, psychological asylum, safe haven—conducted by both the poet and the Deutschland’s refugee nuns is the driving force of the poem, and Hopkins’s subtle redefinition of space and place is both the heart of his unique aesthetic and the key feature of his new form. The public and private crises featured in “The Wreck” 1 I quote Hopkins’s poetry from Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips.

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teach Hopkins to find place in things, an inversion of the traditional logic by which things occupy place. In its Keatsian and Tennysonian incarnations, the luscious poem is a richly furnished textual space; the Hopkinsian version collapses the distinction (a Tennysonian move) between furnishing and space, and the result is a close textual landscape (Keatsian in its discreteness) that is at the same time a luxurious object. Without question, this duality is counterintuitive. as regards intuition, however, rewarding it was less important to Hopkins than confounding it. In response to Bridges’s concerns about the readability of “The Wreck,” he chides, “Granted that it needs study and is obscure, for indeed I was not over-desirous that the meaning of all should be quite clear, at least unmistakeable [sic] … . Why, sometimes one enjoys and admires the very lines one cannot understand” (Letters 50). Hopkins’s deep appreciation for obscurity is no doubt linked to his abiding love for an inscrutable Christian God, whose “mystery,” he writes in “The Wreck,” “must be instressed, stressed; / For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand” (ll. 39–40). In Hopkins’s lexicon, the term “instress” finds its corollary in “inscape,” a word with an obvious etymological connection to landscape but also, Davies explains, a less obvious link to craftsmanship, or object-making: “[I]ts main meaning is distinctive pattern, the relationship between parts that creates the integrity of the whole, which in turn is different at different times” (xxxvii). “The key-note of ‘inscape,’” Davies continues, “is … not just pattern but unique pattern,” and “‘[i]nstress’ is the active energy that binds parts into the ‘inscape’ of the whole” (xxxviii).2 In “The Wreck,” the place-craft duality inherent to the notion of inscape figures most poignantly in the poet’s descriptions of humankind, God’s most significant body of handiwork. a typically constructed moment of place-thing conflation closes the poem’s first section, launching us into the narrative proper with the resonant image of man as both smoldering ingot and frozen landscape: “With an anvil-ding / and with fire in him forge thy will / or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring / Through him, melt him but master him still” (ll. 73–6). When God crafted man—“bound bones and veins in [him], fastened [him] flesh” (l. 5)—the result was an inhabitable object, a snug space in which the human soul could thrive in proximity to the divine spirit. “I am sóft síft / In an hourglass,” Hopkins writes, —at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, 2

See also Sandy, who likewise describes Hopkins’s theory of inscape in terms of space-craft duality: “This inward and outward dynamic, for Hopkins, were the instress and inscape of a thing. The inter-play of these divine forces assure that all things possess a unique individual pattern (instress) and are aware of their own discrete individuality through an identification with similar although not identical entities (inscape).” Sandy argues that Hopkins’s theories “reflect his close poetic engagement with Keats,” whose “sensitivity to the inward and outward life-force of things shapes Hopkins’s poetic responsiveness to nature” (167).

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and it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane, But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift. (ll. 25–32)

In Hopkins’s schema, every object (including the human form) possesses its own topography, and although God is the figure most often portrayed as inhabiting the stuff of the universe—he “waft[s]” from the “Starlight” (l. 35) and “is under the world’s splendour and wonder” (l. 38)—the poet can, on occasion, share those spaces, meeting, greeting, and blessing the God he loves. He can, in other words, find sanctuary in things. To say as much is to understand that things are valuable and powerful, earthly but also singularly holy. “‘Thing’ or ‘things’ is a big word in Hopkins,” Davies explains. “[T]hat denaturing word ‘thing,’” he continues, “only puts into relief Hopkins’s aim to raise ‘things’ to the level of phenomena” (xxxii). In the world’s material hierarchy, Hopkinsian things rank high, and to inhabit them is to experience the kind of sensory pleasure associated with luxury goods, the stuff of rank in commercial hierarchies. Like the best crafted wares, Hopkins’s things are richly and uniquely patterned—inscaped—and to engage with them is tantamount to dialogue with God. With intent neither sacrilegious nor ironic, Hopkins compares the heart swollen with spiritual love to the consumption of a juicy berry, exquisite in form, taste, and texture: “How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe / Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, / Gush!—flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet, / Brim, in a flash, full!” (ll. 59–62). Significantly, the sloe ultimately consumes its consumer; the image portrays a sensual berry-world inside which the eater finds himself. That logic is echoed in Hopkins’s sense that God’s residence in the human body consumes it, thus generating an inhabitable holiness: “Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm; / Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung” (ll. 70–71). “Banned by the land of their birth” and left to drown in the Thames estuary (l. 162), the Deutschland’s nuns lack place in the most traditional sense of the word, but in Hopkins’s hands, theirs becomes a heroic tale of relocation to things. The “dréam” that “we are rooted in earth” (l. 85) is ultimately as unfounded as we are, and the tall nun’s ability to remain placed in the midst of terrifying landlessness is, in Hopkins’s eyes, the most impressive aspect of the event. although the sisters lack traditional sanctuary—God’s “unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth” (l. 166, emphasis added)—the very flakes of snow that caused the wreck and then engulfed it offered paradise to the holy-minded: “Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them” (l. 168). The word flake returns throughout the second section of the poem, and not without significance. “Key to the meaning of flick, fleck, and flake is that of striking or cutting off the surface of a thing,” Hopkins writes in an 1863 journal entry. His linguistic meditation leads him to conclude that a “flake is a thin scale of surface” (Journals 11), a definition that resonates in this context with particular strength.

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at once object (a graspable and even pocketable item) and space (“surface,” after all, signifies a location, a where), a flake is, perhaps, the ultimate place-thing conflation. as the snowstorm swallows the ship, the tall nun “that weather sees óne thing, one” (l. 149), and although editors gloss the line’s strange syntax as a typical example of Hopkins’s preference for obscurity, the ostensibly missing preposition—most readers expect “in that weather”—signals something more special here. The Deutschland is, without question, inside the storm, but the storm itself, that swirling collection of flakes, is also an intricately inscaped craft. By only implying the in, Hopkins makes way for another possibility, one that underscores the counterintuitive place-thing character of weather: “[S]he that weather sees as one thing, one.” In it or as it: Like the body of man—that is, a space as well as an object—the storm possesses the dual nature that, according to the poem thus far, is the hallmark of God’s handiwork. as such, the weather affords sanctuary, and the nuns who embrace it— She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails Was calling ‘o Christ, Christ, come quickly’: The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best (ll. 189–92)

—are “sealed in wild waters” but destined for incredible spiritual-cum-sensory pleasures: “To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances” (l. 183–4). However, while “The Wreck of the Deutschland” describes the asylum offered by things, it is also a thing itself. “all words mean either things or relations of things,” Hopkins had written in 1868, “For the word is the expression, uttering of the idea in the mind. That idea itself has its two terms, the image (of sight or sound or scapes of the other senses), which is in fact physical and a refined energy accenting the nerves, a word to oneself, an inchoate word, and secondly the conception” (Journals 125). That “conception,” we must understand, is actually no less physical than ink on paper, the reverberation of consonants against an eardrum, or, for that matter, the Immaculate Conception that resulted in a semi-mortal savior. Within a Christian framework, the concept of language is inseparable from material reality; as Hopkins puts it in “The Wreck,” “Heaven and earth are word of, worded by” God (l. 230), and although the stuff of the world is simultaneously place and thing, it is also the text in which we read evidence of the divine. Conversely, texts—scripture, prayer, and even poem—are enterable objects, words that furnish “an ark / For the listener” (ll. 258–9). Indeed, the verbal exchanges in “The Wreck” are primarily oral-aural rather than written-read, and the tall nun is ostensibly defined by speech instead of text: “[a] lioness arose breasting the babble / a prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told” (ll. 135–6). However, despite her calling and christening, Hopkins closely associates the tall nun and her sisters with written language; in his understanding, the women are the “cipher of suffering Christ” and a kind of “mark”: “Mark, the mark is of man’s

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make / and the word of it Sacrificed” (ll. 170–72). Mary may have conceived Christ, Hopkins writes, but the heroic nun offered “heart-throe, birth of a brain / Word, that heard and kept [him] and uttered [him] óutríght” (ll. 240–41). Her presence was a text in which the Deutschland’s other passengers—particularly the “unconfessed of them” (l. 244) who, on their own, were unequipped to see heaven in the terrible snow—might read the power of God, and as such, she proved a legible reminder that “[s]tartle[d] the poor sheep back” to faith (l. 248). The poet makes a point of noting that he was sheltered “under a roof” in Wales (l. 187) during the fateful storm, but his text (a more traditional collection of marks and ciphers) offers a word-made place-thing in which he and others might find sanctuary. In the aforementioned 1868 essay, Hopkins describes the effects of literary art in terms that highlight its capacity to enclose the reader. “[T]he mind,” he writes, “is absorbed (as far as that may be), taken up by, dwells upon, enjoys, a single thought; we may call it contemplation … . art extracts this energy of contemplation.” The same experience of rapt enclosure, Hopkins observes, marks our encounters with physical pleasures (Journals 126), a notable connection that cinches his affiliation with the tradition of luscious poetics chronicled here. as the essay continues, however, Hopkins’s revision of the aesthetic—or, at least, the revision he would apply some years later in poems like “The Wreck”—begins to come to light. “The further in anything, as a work of art,” he writes, the organisation is carried out, the deeper the form penetrates, the prepossession flushes the matter, the more effort will be required in apprehension, the more power of comparison, the more capacity for receiving that synthesis of (either successive or spatially distinct) impressions which gives us the unity with the prepossession conveyed by it. (Journals 126)

Where Keats and Tennyson concerned themselves primarily with the boundaries of their textual enclosures—with, that is, the prosodic walls and windows that do or do not grant the reader some degree of access to a space beyond the text’s richly packed world—Hopkins worries more about art’s infrastructure, the internal “organization” that “penetrates” the textual enclosure. “unity” and “synthesis” trump questions of access and exit, and the result is an aesthetic that identifies unique craftsmanship and a superior inscape as prerequisites for an absorptive and prepossessing—we might say luscious—textual place. First and foremost, the poem is a well wrought object, an inhabitable thing but a thing nonetheless. Patterns and forms, in other words, are valued as much for their innate sensual contributions to the stuff-filled world of the text as for their capacity to secure us within its boundaries. “[y]ou would have got more weathered to the style and its features,” Hopkins insists to a “Wreck”-bashing Bridges in 1878 (Letters 50). The choice of “weathered” seems to suggest a familiar Keatsian-Tennysonian text-as-place philosophy (to read the poem is to become acclimated, as to a jungle, desert, or other exotic terrain), but as the letter progresses, a more shape-shifting Hopkinsian ideology emerges. “When a new thing, such as my ventures in the Deutschland

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are, is presented us,” he writes, “our first criticisms are not our truest, best, most homefelt, or most lasting but what come easiest on the instant.” In this moment, the text is a “thing”; as Hopkins continues, however, the poem morphs from object to all-consuming boggy landscape, once again an experience to weather: “The Deutschland on her first run worked very much and unsettled you, thickening and clouding your mind with vulgar mudbottom and common sewage … and just then unhappily you drew off your criticisms all stinking … and bilgy” (Letters 51). a thing to weather indeed, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” represents the first emanation in the century’s final incarnation of luscious form. at this phase of my argument, as in the final third of the nineteenth century, the best crafted things are tiny sites of sensory exploration and spiritual refuge unto themselves, functioning not just in space—shops, drawing rooms, and so on—but as space. II Inscaped Luxury: Aesthetic Resistance and the World of the Thing Hopkinsian lusciousness is no less related to the contemporary luxury economy than the Keatsian and Tennysonian versions, despite the fact that Hopkins, like his predecessors, initially seems an unlikely contributor to any discourse surrounding wealth and material excess. Though a great admirer of Keats’s and Tennyson’s formal strengths, Hopkins criticized both poets’ thematic proclivities, which, he claimed, evidenced (at best) distasteful and (at worst) immoral preoccupation with worldly stuff. In Tennyson’s case, Hopkins writes of “genius uninformed by character,” complaining to Bridges that the Laureate’s “gift of utterance is truly golden, but go further home and you come to thoughts commonplace and wanting in nobility.” Compared to Burns’s work, which, Hopkins argues, evidences spiritual “richness and beauty of manly character” (Letters 95), the Laureate’s verse exudes a troubling baseness—a disconcerting worldliness, perhaps—despite its author’s considerable poetic gifts. Hopkins’s view of Keats was significantly dimmer; notwithstanding some triumphant “turns of construction” in the youngest Romantic’s late work, Hopkins finds it “impossible not to feel with weariness how his verse is at every turn abandoning itself to an unmanly and enervating luxury” (GMH 157–8). Hopkins’s Jesuit asceticism factors into these judgments, but his socio-political sensibilities also play a role. “Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist,” he writes to Bridges in 1871. “[I]t is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delight, or hopes in the midst of plenty—which they make … . england has grown hugely wealthy but this wealth has not reached the working classes” (Letters 27–8). In Hopkins’s opinion, the late-century luxury economy compromised the spiritual and social health of the nation, and although letters and journals documenting his experiences in London offer appreciative accounts of such worldly pleasures as the Royal academy exhibition and the gem

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display at the Kensington museum (White, Hopkins 218), expensive goods and the structures established to distribute them seem to have left him uninspired. The poetry, however, imparts a slightly different sense of Hopkins’s material interests. For example, “God’s Grandeur,” frequently regarded as an expression of “outrage at the injury done to nature by industrialism” (Davies xxxviii)—the same industrialism that, in Hopkins’s opinion, enslaved the working classes— makes appreciative use of manufactures-evocative imagery. The distinction in question amounts to the difference between the factory and the workshop, between industrial and artisanal modes of production. although much “is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil” (l. 6), the world, in general, remains “charged with the grandeur of God” (l. 1), an experience Hopkins illustrates with descriptions that, though evocative of material making, suggest conditions far less dreary than those portrayed in the octave’s factory-dominated second half. Though characterized by heat—“seared with trade”—industrial life lacks spark, and those caught within it trudge through days not only unvaried—all “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell” (l. 7)—but stimulus-free: “[T]he soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod” (ll. 7–8). In contrast, the workshop imagery that carries the opening metaphor suggests warmth as well as sparkling light; the divine presence, Hopkins claims, is a sort of electrical “charge” that “flame[s] out” in the manner of light reflected by “shook foil” or “the ooze of oil / Crushed” (ll. 1–4). Lakes, leaves, and myriad other God-made materials reflect light, too, but Hopkins portrays holy grandeur by evoking the kind of man-made goods—extracted lubricants, refined metals—that, in themselves, imply further human production. Not unlike the “gear and tackle and trim”—the splendidly varied accouterments of “áll trades”—to which Hopkins refers in “Pied Beauty” (l. 6), oil and foil are means to craftsmen’s ends; in the context of the poem, they ooze and shake because intelligent hands actively ply them, moving them in a purposeful and, Hopkins argues, inspired manner toward destinies as finished, tradable goods. The quarrel embodied in the octave’s imagery is with industrialized mass production, not artisanal making. Some salable things are born in an atmosphere charged with the creative energy of skill-blessed craftsmen, and those, it follows, are the ones worth buying. Indeed, for Hopkins the act of buying is less fraught with unholy connotation than one might initially assume, given the vow of poverty that was part of and parcel to his Jesuit ordination. “The Handsome Heart,” written in response to a real-life exchange between the poet-priest and a young helper, begins with an offer to reward good deeds with material goods: “‘But tell me, child, your choice … what to buy / you?’—‘Father, what you buy me | I shall like the best’” (ll. 1–2). although the sonnet becomes a meditation on the child’s inborn graciousness, the priest’s initial goods-for-services proposal remains unmaligned, and the poem concludes by comparing prayer to purchase. Instead of buying a material gift for his aide, the speaker will pray that the child’s natural generosity of spirit will endure: “of heaven then now what boon | to buy you, boy, or gain / Not granted? None but this, | all your road your race / To match and more than match | its sweet forestalling strain” (ll. 12–14). The portrayal of religious devotion as a

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kind of economic contract—piety in exchange for salvation—dates from George Herbert and beyond, but the good-faith offer that opens “The Handsome Heart” suggests a rough parity between literal buying and the more metaphorical, spiritual sort. In other poems, Hopkins emphasizes the latter without sacrificing the potent language and compelling imagery of the former. In “God’s Grandeur,” he writes that “nature is never spent” (l. 9), and although the primary meaning of “spent” is surely exhausted or depleted, the word’s financial denotation is at play, too. Natural beauty, “never spent,” operates outside the context of worldly economies, a kind of intangible but free-flowing currency that continually replenishes our stores of strength and faith. This arrangement does, however, imply a promise of exchange, one that Hopkins details in “The Starlight Night,” the speaker of which presses sky-gazers to pay properly for what they see. The richly crafted beauty of God’s world dominates the poem’s opening lines, a catalogue of star-inspired images: Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! o look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!— (ll. 1–7)

The fairytale brightness of the imagery and the breathless quality of the lines evoke something like a child’s response to the crowded temptation of the toyshop window (“Look, Mother, look!”), and the octave’s conclusion reinforces our sense of the sky as a kind of consumer’s paradise: “ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize” (l. 8). This spangled splendor, Hopkins’s speaker admonishes, is less gift than sacred mortgage, a loan that must be repaid with piety. In the sestet, he clarifies the terms of the exchange—“Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, alms, vows” (l. 9)—before commencing with the hard sell. The offering is a genuine bargain; the sky is merely the outer crust of heaven, its magnificence a mere prelude to the ecstasy of redemption: “These are indeed the barn; withindoors house / The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse / Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows” (ll. 12–14). The sonnet’s structure—a description of goods, an exhortation to purchase, a guarantee of quality—mimics the typical composition of print advertisements, a genre that Hopkins would invoke more explicitly six years later in a triolet entitled “Cockle’s antibilious Pills”: ‘When you ask for Cockle’s Pills, Beware of spurious imitations.’ yes, when you ask for every ill’s Cure, when you ask for Cockle’s Pills, Some hollow counterfeit that kills Would fain mock that which heals the nations. oh, when you ask for Cockle’s Pills Beware of heartless imitations.

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In one of the few poems published during his lifetime, Hopkins plays with the language of product promotion in a way that indicates a genuine familiarity with it, and the result is an ostensibly frivolous piece that offers real insight into its author’s more serious work. His vocation notwithstanding, Hopkins was a man in and of the world, and readings that privilege the early Romantic flavor of his natural imagery tend to overlook significant (if sometimes oblique) references to Victorian commerce: its diverse pleasures, powerful language, and prodigious ingenuity. Davies, for example, writes that “the irreplaceable part played by the world of nature in [his poetry] reminds us how deeply Hopkins as a Victorian shared the nineteenth century with the Romantics” (li), but the pro-consumption/ anti-industrialization rhetoric we find in Hopkins’s letters and verse echoes that of the most vocal Victorian proponents of a new ideology of luxury. Hopkins’s twin desires for, first, a workshop-based system that ennobles the laboring class and, second, goods that bear the craftsman’s touch place his work in dialogue with that of cultural revolutionaries like John Ruskin and Walter Pater, as well as commercial revolutionaries like William Morris. Most significantly, his remarks reflect the aestheticist notion that industrially generated products degrade the lives of those who make and buy them. artisan-made things, in contrast, refresh the minds and souls of producers and consumers alike. Morris details in “useful Work Versus useless Toil” the conditions that threaten the mental and moral health of both laborer and consumer in the present market. Not all labor degrades—“a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body” (News 288–9)—but problems arise, Morris explains, when the vast majority of a nation’s workers engage in the kind of unskilled, poorly compensated labor—“mere toiling to live, that [they] may live to toil” (News 289)—on which an industrialized capitalist economy depends. Hopkins agreed. an 1882 letter to Bridges describes with gusto the “stirring scene” that surrounds the construction of the new college at Blackburn— “contractors, builders, masons, bricklayers, carpenters, stonecutters and carvers, all on the spot” (Letters 151)—in language vastly different from that he applies to the “have trod, have trod, have trod” (“God’s Grandeur” l. 5) environment of the contemporary factory. Repetitive, unimaginative toil may tarnish workers’ dignity, but the uselessness of that toil was, for both Morris and Hopkins, the greater crime. In “The Leaden echo,” Hopkins portrays a society possessed of an insatiable, vanity-driven desire for worthless things: “How to keep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep / Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?” (ll. 1–2). Most industrially produced luxuries, Morris concurs, resemble the stuff Hopkins describes. They lack not only moral purpose but good design, and for that reason they debase the people who buy them as well as those who make them. “[T]here is the mass of people employed in making all those articles of folly and luxury,” he writes, “the demand for which is the outcome of the existence of the rich non-producing classes; things which

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people leading a manly and uncorrupted life would not ask for or dream of. These things, whoever may gainsay me, I will for ever refuse to call wealth: they are not wealth but waste” (News 291). The cycles set in motion by such an economy are tenacious and perpetually destructive, since leisure-class desires not only initiate the production of goods that further enervate the morals of the wealthy but also instantiate the trends and tastes that influence the purchasing decisions of the less well-off. In addition to consuming inferior food and dwelling in inferior homes, the laboring class “must even lend a hand to the great industrial invention of the age—adulteration, and by its help produce for their own use shams and mockeries of the luxury of the rich” (News 292). a similar aversion to such adulteration seems to underlie the closing lines of Hopkins’s “The Sea and the Skylark,” in which the two exquisite God-made creations of the title highlight the shoddiness of most man-made goods and, in turn, of modern man himself: How these two shame this shallow and frail town! How ring right out our sordid turbid time, Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown, Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime: our make and making break, are breaking, down To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime. (ll. 9–14)

However, as Morris and his colleagues struggled to prove, decorative goods carefully crafted by skilled artisans could afford a spiritually invigorating alternative to mass-produced luxuries. These new sorts of goods, distinguished first and foremost by the purposeful uniqueness of their construction, combined beauty with utility. an early 1860s circular advertising the services of Morris’s company of Fine art Workmen emphasizes the firm’s interest in utilitarian beauty by associating their work with architecture, the profession classically concerned with structures both functional and attractive: “The growth of Decorative art in this country, owing to the efforts of english architects, has now reached a point at which it seems desirable that artists of reputation should devote their time to it. although no doubt particular instances of success may be cited, still it must be generally felt that attempts of this kind hitherto have been crude and fragmentary” (Himself 43). In contrast to twentieth-century ideologies that associate the word decorative with frivolity, the aesthetic reform movement held that well made decorative things like those promised by the circular—murals, carvings, stained glass, metalwork, and furniture—were indeed useful. as Morris, arguably the most articulate and influential advocate of aesthetic reform, explains in “The Lesser arts,” “nothing can be a work of art which is not useful; that is to say, which does not minister to the body when well under command of the mind, or which does not amuse, soothe, or elevate the mind in a healthy state” (News 251). Made properly, he maintains, decorative objects “are the sweeteners of human labour,” quasi-magical things that render quotidian experience more productive and more pleasant: “[T]hey make our toil happy, our rest fruitful” (News 237–8). Morris’s quarrels with the state of contemporary architecture are few—“I shall not

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meddle much with the great art of architecture” (News 233)—but a new sense of hierarchy undergirds the essay’s argument, one in which decorative objects, rather than the walls, floors, and windows that they dress, put the haven in domestic heaven. unsung heroes of the homescape, well crafted things afford a brand of security distinct from and more powerful than that provided by glass and brick, a fundamental reformist principle that plainly resembles the place-in-things ideology espoused in “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” For Hopkins, such handmade goods possessed the added benefit of godliness. Morris maintained that the most captivating decorative work derives from or depicts the natural world, the ultimate source of richness and beauty. “Wealth,” he writes in “useful Work,” “is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use” (News 291). as a result, the hand-wrought, one-of-a-kind character of the new reformist merchandise blurred not only the distinction between commercial goods and high art but also the important distinction between God-made riches and man’s representations or applications of them. according to Morris, the best craftsmen are keen observers of nature’s gifts and the best crafts reflect, in every detail, that keenness of vision. “[a]ll handicraftsmen should be taught to draw very carefully,” he contends, “[f]or I wish specially to impress this upon you, that designing cannot be taught at all in a school: continued practice will help a man who is naturally a designer, continual notice of nature and art” (News 248). For Hopkins, however, the designer’s practiced ability to notice and render—his singular artistic vision and the unique work that comes of it—is, perhaps, even holier than the flora and fauna that he and Morris both regard so highly. Just as God made man in his own image, a well trained craftsman makes things that reflect his own inscape, and the result is a type of good that, by transitive logic, bears the mark of the divine. In an untitled poem that begins, “How all’s to one thing wrought!” Hopkins describes the degree to which a craftsman imbues his work with his own identity—“Who shaped these walls has shewn / The music of his mind, / Made known, though thick through stone” (ll. 9–11)3—before concluding that the act of making is as natural, as divinely ordained, as anything else in God’s universe: Therefore this masterhood, This piece of perfect song, This fault-not-found-with good Is neither right nor wrong. No more than red and blue, No more than Re and Mi, or sweet the golden glue That’s built for by the bee. (ll. 29–36) 3

I quote these lines from an earlier version of the poem (later published with the first line, “How all is one way wrought”), primarily for their beautiful evocation of wall-building, an act Hopkins also celebrated in the aforementioned comment regarding the construction of “the new college at Blackburn.”

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Not without significance are “song” and “good”—high art and commodity—located side by side, together representing the “masterhood” with which the stanza opens. Symphony or sofa, the well crafted thing inspires with its inscape; as Hopkins writes of Henry Purcell, blending the lexicons of music and metalwork, “It is the forgèd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal / of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear” (ll. 7–8). We must remember, however, that although reformist goods may possess dignity, beauty, utility, and (for Hopkins) the promise of God, they nonetheless retain their affiliation with the luxury market. as excerpts from “useful Work” have amply illustrated, luxury is often a dirty word for Morris, but his egalitarian rhetoric must not blind today’s readers to the fiscal reality that haunted the dream of aesthetic reform. “The Lesser arts” strives to sever decorative handicrafts from their reputation as “handmaids of luxury, of tyranny, and of superstition” (News 236), but Morris admits later in the essay that “it will cost much both of time and money to better these things even a little” (News 252). Initially, Morris and Co. had been more optimistic; the firm’s early circular acknowledges the expense traditionally associated with fine handicrafts but articulates a solution to the problem: up to this time, the want of that artistic supervision, which can alone bring about harmony between the various parts of a successful work, has been increased by the necessarily excessive outlay, consequent on taking one individual artist from his pictorial labours. The artists whose names appear above hope by association to do away with this difficulty. Having among their number men of varied qualifications, they will be able to undertake any species of decoration, mural or otherwise, from pictures, properly so-called, down to the consideration of the smallest work susceptible of art beauty. It is anticipated that by such cooperation, the largest amount of what is essentially the artist’s work, along with his constant supervision, will be secured at the smallest possible expense … . (Himself 43)

“[G]ood decoration,” the circular concludes triumphantly, “involving rather the luxury of taste than the luxury of costliness, will be found to be much less expensive than is generally supposed” (Himself 45). In any business, however, time is money. as Morris and Co. eventually discovered, artisanal—non-mechanized, non-industrialized—production simply takes too long to be profitable in a market flooded with machine-produced goods, and in reality, the firm’s tasteful handmade products were also prohibitively expensive. Jennifer Wicke points out the “contradictions implied in William Morris’s vaunted return to artisanal handwork”: “The handmade objects Morris favored and produced, whether fabrics or pottery or wallpapers or the gorgeous publications of his Kelmscott Press—were incredibly expensive, out of the reach of ordinary people; it was their machine-made knockoffs that made huge commercial profits for Morris and his Firm” (270). Ironically, then, luxury’s defining terms—excess and wealth—remain relevant in a context ostensibly characterized by anti-luxury sentiment. In fact, the goods produced by Morris and Co. were costlier than much of the industrially produced luxury merchandise that dominated window displays and poets’ imaginations in

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the first two-thirds of the century. as mentioned, handmade luxuries confounded the distinction between high art and commodity—“you see we are,” Morris writes, “… the only really artistic firm of the kind, the others being only glass painters in point of fact … or else that curious nondescript mixture of clerical tailor and decorator that flourishes in Southampton Street” (Himself 45)—and the result, for some, was sticker shock. Warington Taylor, business manager at Morris and Co., put it simply: “It is hellish wickedness to spend 15/- on a chair when the poor are starving in the street” (Himself 46). What artisanal production lacked in output excess, it made up in excessive price tags and, perhaps most importantly, excessive attention to detail. Since it would have taken months or even years to fill a department store with Morris-made goods, the sites of sensory excess—and luscious experience—in the age of aesthetic reform become the surfaces and structures of the goods themselves. Morris’s letters depict a craftsman intensely attuned to nuance and a series of products exquisitely wrought. Regarding screens commissioned by a Surrey church, for example, Morris writes exactingly to Frederick Leach in 1868: you will provide for painting the doors of the chancel screen first so as to be able [to] send them to us here as soon as may be … . Can you lay or get laid a proper painting ground on the panels of the chancel screen? It would be desirable to have this done before the mouldings are painted … . Tell us if you find any great differences between the drawing & the finished work— In making your estimate you may consider that the pattern work will be simple & not very profuse but you had better err in excess than defect … . Please return the drawings … . (Himself 47–8)

Good design, Morris argued repeatedly, demands unwavering attention to pattern, color, texture, and a slew of other material particularities, and the firm’s meticulously crafted products embodied that vision of artistic luxury. The goal— for Morris, anyway—was the creation of objects beautiful enough to consume, like Hopkins’s “lush-kept plush-capped sloe,” the consumer. In 1875, after months of fussing over designs and dyes, he writes that “a few pieces of printed cloth … are hung up in the big room, where they look so beautiful (really) that I feel inclined to sit and stare at them all day.” Significantly, his sense of satisfaction is marred only by his recognition of the textiles’ limited commercial appeal, which was due, presumably, to their exorbitant prices: “I don’t suppose we shall get many people to buy them however; which will be a pity as we shall be obliged in that case to give up the manufacture” (Himself 104). even more than their inscaped grace, the copious attention to detail associated with reformist goods is the factor that cinches Hopkins’s affiliation with late-century luxury. “In a culture destabilized by industrial capitalism,” Julia Saville writes, “Hopkins’s inscape can be read as a device for resisting flux and exchangeability

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while preserving a sense of rarity. Like finely wrought lattice work, the inscape of an object arrests the irresolute wandering or … desirous questing of the scanning eye and guides it to focus on a hidden particularity beyond it” (95). If the Victorian department store invites drift (or, to use Saville’s term, “scanning”), the reformist or Hopkinsian object demands “focus,” its plentiful detail obviating the aesthetic need for mass-produced profusion. The faceted craftsmanship of one thing, in other words, stands in for the lesser, flatter beauty of many. The surviving journals, in addition to the poetry, evince Hopkins’s acute “sense of the particularity of objects,” an awareness that, according to biographer Norman White, “was stimulated by his study of art.” “The fashionable aim in drawing,” White explains, “was the reproduction of objects by copying; suggestion was lazy and incorrect. The observer had to visualize the object as a collection of details before transferring it to paper. This habit of close observation and reconstruction was well established in nineteenth-century art before Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite painters formalized and sanctified it.” In his youth, Hopkins and his aunt Maria observed the stuff of gardens and country landscapes, “sitting side by side with their sketch-books, making faithful outlines, then filling in minutiae” (Hopkins 20), but in later years, Ruskin—most notably in Modern Painters and The Elements of Drawing—proved a more profound influence on the poet’s aesthetic development. as White explains it, “Hopkins worked primarily through engaging the senses with detail, having come to Ruskin’s conclusion about the grand significance implicit in nature’s smallest part. Nature possessed superhuman subtlety, and in comparison man lacked imagination; man should be led by nature to look into the heart of things” (Hopkins 76). as White’s rhetoric suggests, looking “into the heart of things” is an act that posits things as sites of exploration, enterable objects that, like Morris’s carefully wrought textiles, invite observers to take a sensory if stationary journey, to “sit and stare … all day.” “Pied Beauty” distills the experience of many such days, for although the poem catalogues a variety of things, it is the variety—the “dappled” quality (l. 1)—possessed by individual things that fascinates Hopkins’s speaker. The “brinded” cow (l. 2), the speckled trout, the variegated plumage of the finch: “Pied Beauty” celebrates a world of creation rich with difference and detail, a universe replete with “things counter, original, spáre, strange; / Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?) / With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím” (ll. 7–9). a well crafted object, the poem suggests, is a catalogue unto itself, and in the manner of reformist artisans like Morris, Hopkins opts for a lusciousness derived more from character-packed things than thing-packed places. In Maud, we might recall, Tennyson associates an eye for crafted minutiae with madness; the Laureate, famously near-sighted, appreciated sensory detail, but when his psychically broken speaker meditates on a shell, “[s]mall and pure as a pearl,” his language, both Morris-esque and Hopkinsian, is meant to evoke a man teetering on the edge of insanity: “Made so fairily well / With delicate spire and whorl, / How exquisitely minute, / a miracle of design!” (II, ll. 50, 53–6). It seems, then, that although Morris and his Pre-Raphaelite brothers found in Tennyson’s work a wellspring of artistic inspiration, Hopkins’s aesthetic ideals are more thoroughly in line with Morris’s own.

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Principles of Pattern-Making: Sprung Rhythm and the Textile-Text In Hopkins’s work, the basic tenets of aesthetic reform find not only spiritually inflected voice but also intelligent application, since, for Hopkins, text and thing are similar entities. In other words, Hopkins not only admired the principles of reformist making but also used them to create his poems, textual objects but objects nonetheless. James Wimsatt puts it thus: “as an artifact made up of material sound, poetry for him has a veiled significance related to that of the clouds and trees and waves whose physical designs Hopkins intensely scrutinizes when he walks out in the countryside” (Inscape 97). “He refuses to see words as merely referential tools, as signs which stand over against things, merely pointing to them,” Davies concurs. “In Hopkins, words become things. Compared even to the heavy tangibility of Keats and Tennyson … Hopkins’s concern with the thinginess of language is extreme” (liii). When critics counter this literalist take on Hopkins’s textuality—“to him,” Rebecca Boggs writes, “a poem is not a spatialized object [or] a well-wrought urn but rather a song, and is not so much a product of its creator as it is a sign of his creative mind” (835)—they necessarily elide the difficult but essential accounts of artistic making that abound in his work. Boggs looks past not only Hopkins’s assessment of Purcell’s music, urnishly “forgèd” and wrought, but also his passionate belief in a readable world spoken into existence by the most fabulous artist of all. “The Wreck” explains that the “thingy” quality of words stems from the fact that the material universe was “word of, worded by” God (l. 231); as one early piece suggests, the wordy origins of our physical reality render things oddly readable and our texts, concomitantly, more material than ethereal: “The sun on falling waters writes the text / Which yet is in the eye or in the thought. / It was a hard thing to undo this knot” (“It was a hard thing” ll. 8–10). Hard, indeed, the counterintuitive materiality of text is a quiet but insistent theme in the letters and journals—“a great work by an englishman,” Hopkins writes in 1886, “… is an unfading bay tree” (264)—as well as the poetry. In the sonnet beginning, “as kingfishers catch fire,” Hopkins describes the texts embodied by things while simultaneously allowing his own words to become the things he describes. “each mortal thing does one thing and the same,” he writes, “Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came” (ll. 5–8). To speak and to spell—to say and to write—are, as in “The Wreck,” portrayed as equivalent linguistic activities, and the repetition of the word “thing” in the initial line above embodies the seamless interplay between an object’s physical existence and the text it “spells.” The neatly crafted aural mimicry with which the poem begins, then, simply is what it portrays. The click of rocks through moving water is present in a series of b- and d-punctuated liquids—“as tumbled over rim in roundy wells / Stones ring” (ll. 2–3)—while the bell exists in the repeated ng sounds that imitate its echoing voice: “[L]ike each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s / Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name” (ll. 3–4). as things can be texts, their inscape spelled for all to read, so texts can be things, but

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as Davies points out, “More frequent than those moments when the language is simply miming things … is where the ‘thinginess’ of language seems enough on its own” (lv). The sonnet’s opening description of simple luminosity as dramatic conflagration—“as kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”—speaks, perhaps, to this latter formulation of Hopkins’s technique. alternating hard-c and f sounds structure the first line’s first half—“as kingfishers catch fire”—while in that same line’s second half, d sounds (now fused with rs) replace the hard cs but continue to alternate with f sounds (now fused with ls): “dragonflies draw flame.” Pattern (cs give way to ds, while single consonants give way to pairs) defines the passage, and although the sounds in question bear no obvious mimetic relationship to the things they describe—there is nothing inherently k-esque or f-ish about a kingfisher’s iridescence—they lend idiosyncratic but evident design to the poem’s surface, thus rendering the sonnet in itself as uniquely crafted, as material, as any bug, bird, or bell.4 as I have observed, however, in a Hopkinsian universe the inscaped thing— God-made or artisan-crafted—is place as well as object, and the poet articulates that principle, too, within the brief text of “as kingfishers catch fire.” The identity that each thing “speaks and spells” exists somehow—“dwells,” in fact—“indoors,” and God himself, the sestet argues, shares those bounded spaces: “For Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces” (ll. 12–14). In his thoughtful comparison of Keats’s and Hopkins’s avian imagery, Mark Sandy sees shades of Keats in the language of “Kingfishers”: Keats writes of this intimate immediacy of the empathetic imagination … it is as “if a Sparrow [had] come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel” [LJK I 186]. … Influenced, perhaps, by Keats’s fascination with birds and poetic creativity, Hopkins would also have associated the kingfisher with tranquility and known that the halcyon exemplified the divine generosity of the creator. Fabled for their ability to make their nests amidst stormy seas which are calmed by benign forces for the incubation period of their eggs, the kingfisher represents a perfect coalescence of Hopkins’s poetic fascination with birds in flight, their song, and the sea. (168–9)

In fact, Keats’s invocation of the sparrow is subtly but significantly different from Hopkins’s description of the kingfisher. Keats’s nightingale, we recall, is not craft but craftsman, and where Keats imagines himself sharing or, perhaps, recreating the sparrow’s worldly plot—“I … pick about the Gravel”—Hopkins figures the bird’s corpus as a space in itself, a counterintuitive but “perfect coalescence” of song and sea, thing and “dwell[ing].” The sea shelters the nest because divinity dwells in the sea and those embryonic “limbs … not his”; no less thingly than the kingfisher’s body that “speaks and spells,” the carefully crafted text is inhabitable as well. Davies attributes Hopkins’s concrete sensibility in part to his university 4

See also Sandy’s description of the sonnet’s dramatic “word clusters” (167–8).

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experience (liv), but we can also link oxford—an environment, according to Joseph J. Feeney, closely associated in Hopkins’s mind with unique material pleasures5—to Hopkins’s tendency to view things as spaces, and texts, of course, as both. at oxford, Hopkins studied with Walter Pater and, as Theodore Weiss observes, “was understandably drawn to him.” The relationship had its difficulties, but Weiss notes that “[e]ven after Hopkins became a priest stationed in oxford, though he avoided most oxonians, he did, out of longstanding regard, seek Pater out” (39). It seems significant, then, that Pater’s 1888 essay on “Style” defines the literary text as both place and thing. although the inhabitable poem was first described much earlier in the century, the similarities between Pater’s rhetoric and that of Keats and Tennyson merit special attention, since all three writers view textual spaces as assiduously defended sanctuaries. “Different classes of persons, at different times,” Pater writes, make … various demands upon literature. Still … all disinterested lovers of books will always look to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world … . as the painter in his picture, so the artist in his book, aims at the production by honourable artifice of a peculiar atmosphere. (Appreciations 7)

although the gist here seems familiar (that is, Keatsian or Tennysonian), references to painting and “artifice” hint at a literary product as much thing as space, and “Style” insists throughout that the best made texts are thoroughly both. Pater consistently describes literature in architectural terms, but his preference for structural metaphors—the literary artist “[sets] joint to joint” the pieces of his composition, for example (Appreciations 9)—emphasizes buildings’ external materiality (thingliness) more than the inhabitable volumes (spaces) they contain. as one passage contends, “The literary architecture, if it is to be rich and expressive, involves not only foresight of the end in the beginning, but also development or growth of design, in the process of execution, with many irregularities, surprises, and afterthoughts; the contingent as well as the necessary being subsumed under the unity of the whole” (Appreciations 9). The result of such rhetoric is a philosophy that posits text as simultaneously place and craft. In the same way that Morris’s firm designed both homes and the decorative goods (wallpapers and chairs, say) that filled them, Pater’s descriptions invoke smallerscale craftsmanship in addition to architectural making: 5

Feeney observes that Hopkins “enjoyed oxford ‘breakfasts’—leisurely meals in an undergraduate’s room with fish, meat, eggs, marmalade toast or buttered cakes, coffee, tea, and pipes or cigars. To his mother he boasts, ‘at the present rate it appears likely I shall know all oxford in six weeks. I have not breakfasted in my own rooms for 10 days I think’” (10). Note the intimate relationship between (if not quite conflation of) materiality and space in Hopkins’s remarks; via the rich breakfasts, experienced in individuals’ rooms, he will soon “know all oxford.” Feeney also acknowledges “the influence of Pater’s penchant for detail” on Hopkins’s work (90).

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[T]he excellences of literary form … are reducible to various kinds of painstaking; this good quality being involved in all “skilled work” whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament, as in sewing. In literature, as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding of a bell or a platter for instance, … wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing … there “fine” as opposed to merely serviceable art, exists. (Appreciations 3)

“[C]loistral refuge” though it may be, a good poem, like a good bell or platter, is also a well wrought object. Something of Pater’s tendency to privilege the materiality of architecture seems present in much of Hopkins’s imagery, including the meditations on Gothic styling offered in “The escorial” and the evocative description that opens “The elopement”: all slumbered whom our rud red tiles Do cover from the starry spread, When I with never-needed wiles Crept trembling out of bed. Then at the door what work there was, good lack, To keep the loaded bolt from plunging back. (ll. 1–6)

although the delineating and securing functions of roof and lock are key to the stanza’s mood, Hopkins portrays both architectural entities as the sum of their crafted parts; the domestic space defined by roof and lock becomes less important than those entities’ structural components, and although the line, “[c]rept trembling out of bed,” reads, in every sense, as an allusion to Keats’s similarly themed “The eve of St. agnes,” the general aesthetic of “The elopement” is more Pater-esque than Keatsian. The spaces in and of architectural things—the surfaces of tiles, the void that receives the spring-loaded bolt—capture Hopkins’s imagination in much the same way that “joint to joint” construction does Pater’s. In “Style,” however, architectural references are means to literary-critical ends, and Pater’s sense of the place-thing character of literature is evident in the theory and practice of sprung rhythm, Hopkins’s most significant stylistic legacy. Sprung: In that it connotes a kind of escape, the word itself speaks to Hopkins’s belief in text’s spatial character. used transitively or intransitively, the verb spring describes sudden, often forbidden movement—a boat, for example, springs a leak, or a jailbird is sprung from prison—and tells of borders compromised. although they disagree regarding the specifics of his metrical theory, critics concur that Hopkins aspired to free poetry from the constraints of running rhythm, from the traditional “prohibition [against] frequent contiguous stresses” in a single line of verse (Scott and Brogan 1,209).6 once sprung, however, Hopkins’s rhythms 6

employing a spatialized diction consistent with the connotations of “sprung,” James Wimsatt writes that “sprung rhythm breaks out of the usual repetitions of foot patterns, such as iambic and trochaic” (“alliteration” 535, emphasis added). Phillips concurs that sprung rhythm functions as an alternative to running rhythm, noting that when Bridges

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generate an alternative prosodic space—“a plane of higher stressing” (Scott and Brogan 1,209)—that poet and readers alike describe as less free than differently constrained. Sprung rhythm, Hopkins writes to Bridges in 1877, “is in fact the native rhythm of the words used bodily imported into the verse” (Letters 46), and his choice, in casual correspondence, of a spatial lexicon—“imported into”— dovetails nicely with his more systematic descriptions of the sprung poem’s landscape. Like traditional accentual-syllabic meters, sprung rhythm employs the concept of the metrical foot, but Hopkins, Jeanne LeVasseur explains, “achieves a kind of musical virtuosity by combining feet of unequal syllable length, such as trochees, dactyls, paeons, and single syllables, into feet of equal temporal duration” (434). Written for the ear, lines seem strange and irregular to the eye, and the result is a rugged textscape further complicated visually by “outrides,” unscanned syllables that, according to Hopkins’s own Preface, “hang below the line or ride forward or backward from it in another dimension from the line itself” (Poems 5). If Hopkins’s dynamic, spatialized description suggests a sort of word circus— nouns and verbs dangling dramatically from a stichic high wire—his readers perform the ultimate acrobatics; read aloud, strings of stresses quite literally take one’s breath away, but the rough, variegated space of the sprung poem is difficult to navigate even silently. Hopkins recognized the difficulty innate to his new form, which, despite its origins in “natural” usage, pushes language to the limits of its expressive capabilities: Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all? Because it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining, as it seems to me, opposite and, one wd. have thought, incompatible excellences, markedness of rhythm—that is rhythm’s self—and naturalness of expression … . (Letters 46)

To read Hopkins is to juggle myriad competing claims, and the difficulty inherent in that endeavor ultimately reinforces the poems’ spatial quality. The marriage of metrical urgency to “naturalness of expression” taxes our comprehension—“do not bother yourself with the meaning,” Hopkins advises the “Wreck”-weary Bridges, “but pay attention to the best and most intelligible stanzas” (Letters 46)—and as we struggle to understand its import, the verse’s world consumes us, sloes us down. Diligent readers become, as Hopkins promised, “weathered to the style and its features,” and the result is the sense of snug enclosure—the book lover’s “cloistral refuge”—described by Pater: To really strenuous minds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the challenge for a continuous effort on their part, to be rewarded by securer and more intimate grasp of the author’s sense … . [T]here will be an aesthetic satisfaction in that wrote sprung verse, he, unlike Hopkins, strove to line up slacks, not accents: “His use of the metre is strikingly different from that of Hopkins. … He says of the new prosody, ‘the use of feet which correspond to paeons, and the frequent inversions of feet in these new rhythms, render it possible for four or five unaccented syllables to follow on each other.’ Bridges’s interest here is in reducing the number of stresses in a line” (8).

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once again, however, Pater’s essay imparts a dual understanding of textual reality. His diction—“intimate,” “closeness,” “spacing out of,” “logically filled space”—suggests that difficult literature generates enclosure, but he simultaneously implies that such texts are things, the material products of “frugal,” “precise,” “just”-so craftsmanship. When not attempting to acclimate Bridges to the strange topography of his poetic landscapes, Hopkins, too, describes his literary work in the language of non-literary craft. “[T]o recognize the form you are employing and to mean it is everything,” he writes, and in contrasting Whitman’s “savage” free verse with sprung rhythm, he touts his own craftsman-like manipulation of raw verbal stuff: “extremes meet, and … this savagery of [Whitman’s] art, this rhythm in its last ruggedness and decomposition into common prose, comes near the last elaboration of mine. For that piece of mine is very highly wrought. The long lines are not rhythm run to seed: everything is weighed and timed in them” (Letters 157). References to weight and time invite comparisons between poet and sculptor or, perhaps, clocksmith, but whatever the analogy, Hopkins’s dedication to a “highly wrought” result is certainly Morris-esque. Moreover, sprung rhythm— “emphatic,” balanced, and inspired by the “natural”—is reminiscent of Morrismade goods. Its reliance on meticulous structuring affiliates Hopkins’s metrical innovation with reformist decorative principles and, significantly, with the guidelines Morris articulates in “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing.” Hopkins’s claim that “form … is everything” finds alternate expression in Morris’s notion that “delight in skill lies at the root of all art” (News 263), and Hopkins’s sense that sprung rhythm, “so eminently natural a thing and so effective” (Letters 156), generates something real—“a kind of touchstone of the highest or most living art is seriousness; not gravity but the being in earnest with your subject” (Letters 225)—echoes Morris’s condemnation of vagueness in pattern design: “I … must insist on plenty of meaning in your patterns; I must have unmistakable suggestions of gardens and fields, and strange trees, boughs, and tendrils, or I can’t do with your pattern, but must take the first piece of nonsense work a Kurdish shepherd has woven from tradition and memory; all the more, as even in that there will be some hint of past memory” (News 275). Morris’s special regard for weaving, “one of the most important branches of the art [of pattern-designing]” (News 273), is itself significant, for the sprung poem, like Keats’s and Tennyson’s forms, generates a kind of textual weave, its strings of accented syllables functioning as weft to rhyme’s warp. In other words, the horizontal accumulation of accents—often visually marked as such7—works in tandem with the vertical thrust of strophic 7 For a more in-depth treatment of this particular facet of Hopkins’s technique, see Meredith Martin, who regards Hopkins’s marked accents as the “material manifestation” of stress (251). as such, the marks are a key contributor to the poems’ thingliness.

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form to generate the crosswise character of textile even more distinctly, perhaps, than Keats’s and Tennyson’s line-broken, alliterative lists. That spirit of accumulation, however, is the factor that both affiliates Hopkins with the luscious aesthetic and distinguishes his work from that of his luscious forebears. Collection is at the heart of the Keatsian or Tennysonian project, in which catalogues of material pleasures, natural and commercial, both treat the senses and secure the text’s space. Hopkins, too, appreciates the power of catalogue—“God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” “Spring,” “Pied Beauty,” and other iconic pieces are rife with parataxis—but the sprung poem, unlike Keats’s and Tennyson’s luscious forms, can evoke the experience of close luxury even without rich lists. Packed with thingy verbal bits, the lines of the sprung poem are inherently accumulative, and Hopkins’s texts, like Morris’s goods, are luxurious objects, consuming in their patterned detail. Instead of thing-packed stores, the aesthetic reform movement relied on character-packed things, and sprung rhythm operates according to the same excess-in-product principle. In fact, the line, not the strophe, becomes the primary unit of luscious reckoning. Within the intimate confines of the line, accents’ unremitting thrusts tangle not only with the phantom remains of running meter but with strong phonetic threads, or interlacing series of repeated letter sounds. Hopkins was, as John Kerrigan elegantly portrays him, an instinctive and imaginative counter-configurer,8 and his residence in Wales exposed him to verse traditions particularly congenial to that aspect of his temperament. Davies notes that Welsh verse “delights in pattern and hard craft,” and forms like the cymeriad (“an alphabetical arrangement of images”), the dyfalu (in which “images are accumulated in a riddling exercise”), the cynghanedd (in which “consonants agree without forcing vowels to do so”), and the sangiad (in which syntax is systematically interrupted by tangential material) rely on unique and often complex combinations of patterned accretion and woven structuring (xliv–xlvi).9 Where Keats and Tennyson privilege the weave’s webby inhabitability—the spider’s airy citadel, the Lady’s landscaped tapestry—over its affiliation with craft, Hopkins is as interested in pattern as in architecture, and his conventionally formed textual spaces (sonnets, stanzas, lines, and so on) derive an additional level of interest and security from sprung rhythm’s patterned overlay, 8 after describing the “laboured” numerical details in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (292), Kerrigan suggests that Hopkins inherited his father’s mathematical mind—Manley Hopkins authored, among other works, A Handbook of Average and A Manual of Marine Insurance, and Gerard was “demonstrably acquainted with up-to-the minute [statistical] research” (294, 296)—and notes that the poet also possessed a unique “spatial and synaesthetic sense of numbers” (296). “Hopkins was drawn to mathematical order in ways which provided an antidote to theories of atomistic ‘chance’ and fateful statistics,” Kerrigan writes. “For historical as well as temperamental reasons, Keats’s impulses were different … . Deciding to write an exactly sheet-long epistle to Dilke, he is struck by the absurdity of calculating language in this way …” (298–9). 9 See also James Wimsatt’s account of Hopkins’s years in Wales, where he was “charmed by the Welsh verse system” generally and cynghanedd in particular (Inscape 80).

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its often netlike materiality. There is a kind of “[p]oetry,” Hopkins claims, in the latticed image of “a tree whose boughs break in the sky,” in the superimposition of pattern on space (“[ashboughs]” l. 3). In this, too, his work resembles that of Morris, who argues that pattern, “[p]roperly subordinated to architecture … ought … to play a great part in the making our houses at once beautiful and restful” (News 269). The engagingly patterned surfaces (walls, ceilings, windows, and the like) in a Morris-designed home call attention to the building’s materiality, not its inhabitable void; similarly, Hopkins’s sprung rhythm imparts a patterned dimension that underscores the text’s crafted quality. The result is a luscious form that can evoke the experience of rich craft without listing rich crafts simply because it is, in Hopkins’s understanding, a luxurious thing in its own right. The right kind of poem, in other words, is inherently a series of series; where Keats and Tennyson rely on shoploads of opulent stuff to weave their tangled webs, Hopkins’s linguistic technique results in complex intralinear patterns that suggest, within the confines of a single object, reformist opulence, consuming detail. The sprung poem’s capacity to generate asylum without directly describing it is at the heart of Hopkins’s project in the so-called terrible sonnets, those poems of “mental claustrophobia” (Wagner 160) composed during Hopkins’s unhappy residence in Ireland. The inhabitable things in which Hopkins finds both safety and pleasure during the late 1870s and early 1880s largely disappear from the terrible sonnets, but sprung rhythm (with its attendant textures and patterns) remains. III Writing a Raveled Reality: Inscape as Luscious Form When Hopkins dubs Duns Scotus “[o]f realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller,” he reveals his own happy sense that the world and its things are strangely textilic, raveled material entities from which a dedicated “insight” might tease the threads of higher understanding (“Duns Scotus’s oxford” ll. 12–13). In the years following “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins celebrates God’s woven handiwork with and in his poems, sprung texts that both describe and mimic the raveled beauty of the universe. His 1879 tribute to Scotus, for example, begins with a Scotus-inspired vision of oxford’s woven glory: Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers … . (ll. 1–4)

The towers’ strong verticals and the horizontal tree branches that visually connect them suggest a kind of weft and warp, both formally and metaphysically; the buildings and branches constitute a weave, but the spheres they represent—man’s creation and God’s, respectively—are similarly intertwined. The city’s “grey beauty” is “grounded,” Hopkins writes, in “[t]hat neighbor-nature” (l. 6), and the

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tension between town and country, those “coped and poisèd powers,” is embodied in the catalogue of noisemakers that dominates the sonnet’s second line. The bell’s tones blend with nature’s voices—cuckoo, lark, rook, and river—in a symphony that wraps the city and the valley below (the lily, Hopkins suggests, lends the landscape a kind of “ear”) in a rich mantle of sound. Despite its “graceless growth” in an industrial age, Scotus’s oxford has retained its raveled character; a place of weeds, waters, and walls (l. 10), of flowers, flocks, and folk (l. 8), oxford is woven of threads both human and divine. The sonnet invokes Scotus in the haecceitas, or thisness, of its striking material catalogues—the sounds, the “rural keeping” (l. 8), the geographic features—but the versification itself, so precisely crafted, independently pays homage to the detailoriented theologian “not / [r]ivalled,” in Hopkins’s opinion, by even antiquity’s greatest thinkers (ll. 12–13). Having established in his first line the up/across, urban/natural weave that is contemporary oxford, Hopkins begins, Scotus-like, to unravel that “realty,” pulling from it, so to speak, a string of appositives— “[c]uckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded”—to describe the town’s inscape in the sonnet’s second line. an exercise in excess, the noises catalogue swells to seventeen syllables (ten of which are accented), and the effect is one of immense fullness, of a wealth that strains the expressive capacity of the language generally and the sonnet, a pentameter-based tradition, in particular. But to mimic Scotus by unraveling is one thing; to capture the world he loved and “lived on” (l. 10)—“Duns Scotus’s oxford,” the title calls it—is quite another. To evoke the richness of the place itself is not to unravel but to ravel, not to stretch but to weave, and Hopkins is careful to keep the poem’s sprung second line embedded within the larger textual tapestry. Lettered connections including rhyme, alliteration, skothending (chiming end consonants), assonance, and other audible correlations10 underlie the text’s integrity; as Wimsatt explains, Hopkins’s unique prosody relies as much on such phonetic threads as accentual ones. “Rhythm,” he writes, paraphrasing the poet, lends to verse “more tone, candorem, style, chasteness,” and end-rhyme and alliteration … supply “brilliancy, starriness, quain, margaretting”; the former, then, imparts tonal brightness to the continuum of the verse, and the latter lend focal brilliance to the individual units, which thereby sparkle like stars or pearls (“margarets”). Clearly, sounds that sparkle will contribute to emphasizing the stresses. (“alliteration” 547–8)

Pearls, of course, are strung together, and the typical sprung passage, Wimsatt’s analysis suggests, is a weave of stressed and lettered threads—plainer strings 10

The term “lettering of syllables,” James Milroy notes, is Hopkins’s own: “To this belong rhyme, alliteration, assonance. They are all a sameness or likeness of some or all of the elementary sounds, the letters, of which syllables are made. Syllables so agreeing or resembling may be said to chime or rhyme but we keep rhyme for a more special or narrower sense” (in Milroy 135).

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and pearled ones. In “Duns Scotus’s oxford,” end rhyme is Hopkins’s start but not his finish; the second line’s final two syllables—“rounded”—establish the sonnet’s feminine B rhyme, but its ultimate syllable—ed—is repeated throughout lines two, three and four (swarmèd, charmèd, racked, eared, coped, poisèd), thus generating a strong series of slacks that not only plays weft to the accents’ warp but binds the second line, so keen to spring, to its less strained fellows. Consonance reinforces the weave with hard-c and r sounds that alternate almost one to one: “Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded.” The noises themselves comprise a diverse group, and Hopkins’s decision to limit so severely—to homogenize, in a way—the description’s audible consonants speaks to the significance of the line’s woven effect, which would have been unachievable without lettered repetition. oxford is a raveled “realty,” and, in the final prosodic analysis, “Duns Scotus’s oxford” is, too. In general, however, Hopkins portrays neither “Timbuctoo”-like vistas nor St. Agnes-esque bedchambers; like the Deutschland’s tall nun, he most often finds his home in things, in the woofèd worlds of God-made goods. Spring, he asserts in “The May Magnificat,” is “[g]rowth in everything” (l. 16), and his description of the season’s wealth highlights the woven character of divine craft: Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, Grass and greenworld all together; Star-eyed strawberry-breasted Throstle above her nested Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within; and bird and blossom swell In sod or sheath or shell. (ll. 17–24)

The alliterative catalogue with which the passage begins enacts the “all together” of its second line, and the effect is familiar: The spring landscape is a kind of textile, a rich integrity that the poem suggests (or even recreates) with intertwining lists of floral bits and faunal pieces. In the third line above, however, Hopkins turns his attention from space to object, from landscape to thingscape—or, we might say, inscape—and the aesthetic becomes distinctly his. More than just the forest’s feathered representative, the throstle both embodies a cosmos and births one. Her eyes and breast are, respectively, heaven and earth; “star” and “strawberry” are nouns (not adjectives), and the hyphenation implies a relationship less modifier/ modified than epithetical, a connection less descriptive than substantive. “[a] cluster of bugle blue eggs thin,” her nest holds the promise of tangled new life, of forms that heave and grow in a way both animal and vegetable: “and bird and blossom swell / In sod or sheath or shell.” Scotist theology, Christopher Devlin explains, holds that every individual’s “nature is the Nature of all the world, elemental, vegetative, sensitive, human.” To be unique, he continues, is “to possess the common nature in an especial degree. The individual degree … knits

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together in the one man all his natural activities, animal, rational, etc, and gives them direction God-wards” (13). Devlin’s diction—“knits”—resonates with the throstle’s raveled haecceitas. a weave of elements celestial and earthy, floral and faunal, the throstle is a rich universe unto herself, and like the second line of “Duns Scotus’s oxford,” the lines that give us her body and her nest are sprung, packing five accents in spaces that, until this point, have held only three or four. Davies glosses the “Magnificat” as “a ‘sprung’ treatment of the Horatian stanza form, with four stresses in each line of the first couplet and three in each of the second” (280n); as Hopkins recounts spring’s “magnifying” (l. 28) activity, however, the poem’s lines become engorged like the berries, buds, and bellies he describes. They retain, moreover, the woven character of spring’s rich things. a series of s, t, and r permutations weaves through lines 19 and 20—“Star-eyed strawberry-breasted / Throstle above her nested”—and into line 21, where “bugle blue” initiates the pattern of alliterative coupling that establishes intra- and interlinear connections throughout the remainder of the stanza. By the poem’s conclusion, the experience of “[a]ll things rising, all things sizing” (l. 25) finds expression in a new catalogue of springtime sensations. We know holy ecstasy, Hopkins writes, When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple Bloom lights the orchard-apple and thickset and thorp are merry With silver-surfèd cherry and azuring-over greybell makes Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes and magic cuckoocall Caps, clears, and clinches all— (ll. 37–44)

Compared to the neat enumeration of “[f]lesh and fleece, fur and feather” with which Hopkins’s meditation began, this final series is significantly more compact, both imagistically and prosodically. enjambment heightens our sense of the stanzas’ fullness; each line spills into and mingles with the next until dash and cuckoocall simultaneously stanch (“cap”) the flow and confirm (“clinch”) the connectedness (“all”) that has been created. Within the sealed-off space of the series, Hopkins reinforces individual descriptions of inscape with complex and purposeful weaving. The catalogue is, fundamentally, one of flowers—apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, and greybell—but the light-casting, merry-making, blue-washing blooms are also tiny variegated universes rendered in densely raveled text. The apple blossom, for one, is a marriage of flesh to fleece—“blood” to “foam”—and, in its textual rendering, a weave of visual and aural threads; to scan line 37 is to pit the hyphens’ strong horizontal presence against the accents’ regular downward thrusts, noting, meanwhile, the chain of ds, ps, and ls that link the couplet’s halves. “Silver-surfèd,” the cherry tree also suggests a Scotist tangle of dissimilar elements (ore and ocean, perhaps), but the terrain from which it grows, like its petaled branches, also evokes

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a kind of weave, since the noun “thickset” denotes both dense underbrush and a kind of sturdy cloth. although the former meaning of “thickset” is the one that Hopkins ostensibly intends to highlight, the couplet dedicated to the cherry’s happy beauty weaves th, s, and r sounds to lend brilliance to both lowlights and highlights—to, that is, slack syllables as well as accented ones: “and thickset and thorp are merry / With silver-surfèd cherry.” When the catalogue reaches its third and final flower, the “azuring-over greybell,” solid matter takes on liquid features; smothered in blue petals, the “banks and brakes” resemble water in both hue and texture. To mimic the richness of this elemental merger, Hopkins braids lettered strings—hard gs, bs, and ks; soft rs, ws, and ls; and long, swollen vowels—into a ten-stress couplet: “and azuring-over greybell makes / Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes.” Keatsian in its packed-ness, Tennysonian in its linked-ness, and Scotist in its implications, the catalogue that closes “The May Magnificat” imparts a uniquely Hopkinsian aesthetic. So much juice and so much joy: The poems composed during Hopkins’s preand post-ordination residence in Wales and england depict again and again the raveled beauty of God-made things. Certainly, the web, the weave, and the braid had been notable tropes in the pre-“Deutschland” work, particularly the journals. “The lines of the fields,” Hopkins writes in 1864, “level over level, are striking, like threads in a loom” (Journals 23). one entry meditates on ladies’ braided coifs at mass—“The hair is taken back and (apparently) made into one continuous plait with narrow white linen, which crosses the lock of hair not always the same way but zigzag” (Journals 172–3)—while another describes the effects of sunlight on “a piece of sky-blue gauze”: The folds, which of course doubled the stuff, were on the sun’s side bright light blue and on the other deep blue—not shadow modified, but real blue, as in tapestries and some paintings. Then the shadowed sides had cobweb-streaks of paler colour across, and in other parts became transparent and shewed the grass below, which was lit by the sun through the gauze. (Journals 152–3)

additional entries observe that elms wear a “web of springing green,” that willows boast a “lacy leaf” (Journals 134), and that flower petals “drawn geometrically across each other” resemble the “laces of boddices at the opera” (Journals 143). When Hopkins strives to capture in verse (as opposed to prose) the inscaped grace of natural things, he continues to rely on images of wovenness—and on a wide array of such pictures. Charles Madge identifies lacy and fretty as key Hopkinsian terms, words that “express [nature’s] violent intricacy” (19). Indeed, such references frequently appear in the poems—consider the “raindrop-roundels looped together / That lace the face of Penmaen Pool” (“Penmaen Pool” ll. 27–8) —but Hopkins also invokes other types of textilic make and making. Lace and fretwork are intricate but typically used sparingly, and Hopkins does not deny bigger and more common things—“Pied Beauty”’s “brinded cow” comes to mind—an affiliation with divine complexity or the textilic imagery that signifies it. autumn’s clouds, Hopkins writes, are “silk-sack” (“Hurrahing in Harvest” l. 3),

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and his windhover plies a “wimpling wing” (“The Windhover” l. 4). The woodlark’s song seems tatted—“Round a ring, around a ring / and while I sail (must listen) I sing” (“The Woodlark” ll. 14–15)—but it evokes a broader loomèd landscape decked with woven things, as indicated with italics below: Today the sky is two and two With white strokes and strains of the blue [...] The blue wheat-acre is underneath and the corn is corded and shoulders its sheaf, The ear in milk, lush the sash, and crush-silk poppies aflash, The blood-gush blade-gash Flame-rash rudred Bud shelling or broad-shed Tatter-tangled and dingle-a-danglèd Dandy-hung dainty head. (“The Woodlark” ll. 12–13, 26–34)

as the poem continues, the fumitory is “lace-leaved” (l. 38) while the wind is “velvety” (l. 39), and it seems, then, that when, in “The May Magnificat,” Mary delights in God’s “world of good” (l. 27), late-century england’s world of goods has influenced Hopkins’s diction. The textile’s privileged position within the aesthetically reformed canon of artisanal merchandise is echoed in Hopkins’s poetic portrayals of the natural universe, and like the luxurious “pieces of printed cloth” that inspired Morris to “sit and stare … all day,” nature’s woven structures leave Hopkins transfixed. one must not conclude, however, that the woven character of Hopkins’s prosody—the alternating letter patterns, the tension between rhyme and stress, the punctuation (or lack thereof) that forges inter- and intralinear links—is tangential to his poems’ descriptive mission. Inscaped objects are distinctly textilic, but they are also, we recall, inherently textual, “word of, worded by” God. To describe, in other words, is to reproduce in other words the holy fiat of creation, and only when Hopkins mimics with text the textilic quality of God-made things does he truly portray the worded web that is God’s world—that is, in fact, inscape itself. as Justus Lawler puts it, “at the core of Hopkins’s ‘theopoetics’ is the assumption that all words are seeking to join and to recall the ultimate Word which is their source.” When Hopkins lists, Lawler asserts, he does “what poets have done from the beginning: from adam naming the animals, through Psalms, and the Song of the Three Children, through the great medieval ‘lists’ of birds, plants, and so on … . [F]or anyone who, like Hopkins, would instinctively take the nomen/ numen syzygy with the seriousness it deserves, what seems like mere cataloguing would in fact be a sacred mission” (150). To take Lawler’s insight further is to recognize that the things Hopkins catalogues are collections unto themselves, rich microcosms that, like the greybell or apple blossom, fuse fur with feather, air with water, stone with wood. Worldly complexity demands wordly complexity,

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and a simple nomen, in Hopkins’s view, often proves an inadequate expression of inscape. Like Keats (and, to a lesser degree, Tennyson), Hopkins neologizes, and “[i]n his greater intensities,” Geoffrey Grigson writes, “like” disappears: adjectives, compound adjectives, compound nouns, active and embracing and characterising verbs, take its place; words have been as starkly and freshly scrutinised and possessed as any other relevant part or property of the poet’s environment, until the selected words are as close an equivalent as they can be to the things and the actions and the states which they convey. (212)

In his greatest intensities, perhaps, Hopkins’s forms pick up where his grammar leaves off. Jennifer Wagner asserts that the sonnets testify to Hopkins’s interest in the considerable expressive capacity of form alone: “Conscious of the miniaturization of octave in sestet, Hopkins focuses on the turn of the sonnet, the volta—and finds in that turn a formal trope for the imaginative bridge between heaven and earth, between divine and human.” The “persistent subject” of the sonnets, she continues, is “the presence of Christ in man, the accommodation of God in nature”; as such, they “can be read as an allegory in form, as the poet discovers in the sonnet a formal analogy for the incarnation of Christ” (152). Wagner stakes a compelling claim, but to speak in terms of octave and sestet is to neglect the smaller formal unit on which sprung rhythm is founded: the single line. To amend, amiably, her valuable insight is to point out that although the Petrarchan sonnet is a scanty plot, the octave and sestet are its macrostructures. While Wagner illustrates the sonnet’s ability to evoke condensed connectedness, she elides the sprung line’s capacity to do the same on its own. Stanzas of any length are defined as such by regularly occurring end rhymes, which, James Milroy explains, “are part of the necessary properties of verse as [Hopkins] understands it” (132). When they put aside their blank verse ambitions, both Keats and Tennyson toy with end rhyme—Keats fights its predictability in “If by dull rhymes,” while Tennyson embraces its ringing clarity in “The Lady of Shalott”—simply because their brands of lusciousness, based primarily on series of words (as opposed to series of grammatical bits: syllables, letters, and even punctuation marks) are necessarily strophe-based, dependent on multiple lines. Hopkins, however, can dedicate his attention elsewhere. Without end rhyme, Milroy continues, “Hopkins’s poetry would not in his opinion be verse at all,” and for that reason, his formal macrostructures are “less remarkable than [the] phonetic features that [he] exploits within the lines of his verse” (135). end rhyme is part of a sonnet’s “skeleton” (Milroy 133) and alone represents only a Parnassian mastery of poetic basics, a kind of mass-produced formality. In contrast, a line’s oft-neglected middle space can showcase precisely the kind of intricate patterning that Hopkins associates with God’s utterly unique creations. as Wimsatt puts it, Hopkins “does not join most theorists of the past two centuries in viewing various kinds of rhyme”—a catch-all category that includes alliteration, consonance, assonance, and other types of lettered repetition—“as providing inessential graces” to a poetic composition (“alliteration” 540). Just as surface embellishments lend comforting distinction

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to Morris’s architectural spaces, intralinear and generally net-like patterning is the hallmark of Hopkins’s object-spaces, those inhabitable textual crafts that, like artisan-produced things, evoke the holy proximity that Wagner describes. When, like Wagner and others, we find Hopkins perfecting a form that mimics a Christ-inhabited world (that is, Hopkins’s idea of an earthly paradise), we are reminded, ironically, of his position within the fundamentally compensatory luscious tradition. Joyous though the pre-1884 poems seem, Hopkins’s nearcompulsive desire to approximate in verse the inscaped beauty of God’s handiwork indicates, perhaps, a psyche in retreat from conventional reality. In “[s]torm flakes,” the Deutschland’s tall nun sees “one thing, one,” and the single-mindedness of her trauma-induced vision resembles the almost unmitigated religious ecstasy on display in the work traditionally understood as the manic counterpart to Hopkins’s late depressive poetry. Like the nun he portrays, Hopkins finds “heaven … astrew” in everything, and that circumstance hints, perhaps, at underlying psychic stress. The sisters treated in “The Wreck” were refugees, but Hopkins, too, faced a kind of disturbing (if less dire) itinerancy throughout his priesthood. “[C]onstant removal,” White observes, “was a basic condition of Jesuit life” (Hopkins 269), and although Hopkins found much to enjoy in Flintshire, Chesterfield, London, oxford, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Roehampton, and Stonyhurst, his life between 1875 and 1883 was marked by a “Wreck”-like sense of homelessness (or the threat of such displacement) that he worked vigorously to distinguish from havenlessness. Despite his dedication to the Society, White notes, the relentless relocation of himself and his Jesuit friends “still wounded,” and when Hopkins writes, “in professional justification … ‘it is our pride to be ready for instant dispatch’” (Hopkins 269), White senses false bravado: “People were not merely parcels for dispatch; the separation … from a person he had come to be fond of, affected him deeply in his loneliness” (Hopkins 269–70). Hopkins’s uprooted Franciscan nuns take shelter, counterintuitively, in the stuff of the storm, but the poet himself holes up in poems, thingy places that not only portray God’s inscaped bounty but, intricately woven of strings both lettered and stressed, embody its soothing asylum. Hopkins’s textual technique, moreover, commands the reader to linger. Since extended time in real-world spaces was a luxury that Hopkins lacked, his inscaped lines not only evoke the highest craftsmanship but also contrive their own delay. The sprung poem, after all, operates according to a different clock, for “[w]hen … two stresses fall together … [and] syllables are emphasized, the timing is slowed” (Milroy 121). Thus Hopkins finds his place in textual things, in work whose knitted subjects and woven formality generate a Christ-infused paradise. When Saville observes that Hopkinsian inscape is something woven, she draws a problematic distinction: “[I]t is important not to confuse inscape—which functions as a patterned latticework, like the masking effect of flowers and leaves on the wallpaper designed by William Morris—with the self or pitch or haeccity that must be drawn out, or instressed, by dwelling on that inscape” (96). Pitch, she contends, is “the finer discrimination” (95), and it, not inscape, is what “Hopkins sees as equivalent to Duns Scotus’s

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haecceitas, as he indicates … when he writes, ‘Is not this pitch or whatever we call it then the same as scotus’s ecceitas?’” (98). In fact, the poet’s dissembling “or whatever” highlights the counterintuitive identity that, in Hopkins’s universe, exists between ostensibly dissimilar phenomena: place and thing, signifier and signified, creator and created. Just as God’s Word is the World, the cause (inscape) is the effect (pitch), and Hopkins’s poems aim to recreate the “latticework” that, in the manner of Morris’s superficial designs, inspires the luscious lingering that begets a deeper comfort. “What you look hard at,” Hopkins had written in an 1871 journal entry, “seems to look hard at you” (Journals 204); Morris’s wallpaper designs are physically but not metaphysically superficial, for complexity motivates contemplation, which, in turn, reveals a new, more reflexive complexity. Having clarified Hopkins’s need for a poetics intricate enough to capture linguistically the tangled essence of an inscaped object, we can explore the pre-Ireland poetry, which finds Hopkins’s textual technique adaptable to an array of fretted subjects. Lóve-Laced!: Poems, 1875–1883 In 1877, Hopkins penned a dozen or so of his best loved sonnets, poems that seem, White argues, “to be advocating an acceptance of the rightness of the physical world” (Hopkins 271). Their woven loveliness, if we buy Morris’s description of the soothing power of craft, speaks to their creator’s quest for emotional rightness, to Hopkins’s capacity to locate and retreat to an alternative materio-textual reality. “[T]he presence of any beauty in a piece of handicraft,” Morris writes, “implies that the mind of the man who made it was more or less excited at the time, was lifted somewhat above the commonplace” (News 261). “God’s Grandeur” and “The Starlight Night,” White suggests, are companion pieces; written at the same time (and sent, as a pair, to Hopkins’s mother on her birthday [Hopkins 268]), both poems treat inscaped accretion and convey, with richly patterned language, the transporting thrill-in-craft that Morris describes. Morris’s artisan seeks refuge from the quotidian in a higher spatial plane—“lifted … above”—but in “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins reverses that directional movement, looking instead to “the dearest freshness” that “lives … deep down things” (l. 10). exploration of Godmade thingscapes yields ever and ever more, a profusion that Hopkins’s prosody purposefully recreates. The octave’s first four lines are a study in excess, in almost uncontainable power; “the grandeur of God” not only “flame[s] out” but “gathers to a greatness” (ll. 2–3), an inscaped fullness that Hopkins renders with a tapestry of lettered and accentual threads. Twining strings of ls, fs, ks, and shs, in addition to subtly shifting is and os, inscape the sonnet’s second line—“It will flame out, like shining from shook foil”—while two extra syllables and an enjambed spillage effect work in tandem with lettered series and a striking collection of stresses to enact, in the sonnet’s next two lines, God’s cumulative glory: “It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed. Why do mén thén nów nót réck his rod?” (ll. 3–4, my accent marks). unlike his “God’s Grandeur” counterpart (but in the tradition of Morris’s theoretical craftsman), the speaker of “The Starlight Night” looks not downward and into but upward and outward for asylum. The stars recall

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both places (“bright boroughs,” “circle-citadels,” “diamond delves” [ll. 3, 4]) and things (“fire-folk,” “airy abeles,” “flake-doves” [ll. 2, 6, 7]) while the text that describes them simultaneously contains, space-like, the sky’s divinely crafted wealth and exists, thing-like, as a richly patterned object in its own right. In other words, the opening catalogue’s sparkling elements, like goods that crowd a shop’s vitrine, fill the sonnet’s lines; those same lines, however, boast a crafted intricacy that derives not only from their textilic integrity (their intertwining linguistic threads, both lettered and stressed) but also from the surface sheen imparted by Hopkins’s alphabetically organized alliterative pattern: o look at the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!— (ll. 2–7)

Inscape, we recall, connotes not only raveled integrity but the tangle of contraries, a variegated weave; when, in 1870, Hopkins examines a bluebell, he sees an “inscape … mixed of strength and grace, like an ash tree” (Journals 199). “God’s Grandeur” and “The Starlight Night” highlight the Lord’s creative range— He flames, oozes, springs, broods; renders birds, blossoms, cities, castles—but downplay the diversity that constitutes a single God-made object: the individual throstle, a specific tree, one star. Poems like “The Sea and the Skylark” and “The Windhover” pick up where “God’s Grandeur” and “The Starlight Night” leave off. In addition to an ocean that “flood[s]” and “fall[s],” whispers and “roar[s]” (l. 3), the former describes a bird whose textilic song—“His rash-fresh re-winded new skeinèd score / In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl” (ll. 6–7)—both “pour[s]” like water and “pelt[s]” like hurled stones (ll. 7, 8). as it glides on a “wimpling wing” (l. 4), the windhover, too, evokes a fabric of diverse elemental sensations. Keats’s nightingale, like Tennyson’s knights, mimics the movement of the weaver’s shuttle and thus generates a habitable tapestry; Hopkins’s windhover, in contrast, is a web unto itself, the product of a holy loom. as Sandy puts it, Hopkins’s windhover is a figure of fusion, and the poem’s “diction and form [encapsulate] … the dynamism of being from both within and without by fusing interior with exterior, subject with object, and symbol with nature in such a giddying array that [Hopkins’s] poetic language stretches beyond the tactile world of sense” (169). Indeed, of the falcon’s sweeping flight, Hopkins writes, “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!” (ll. 9–10), and although Davies (and, to some degree, even sandy11) underscores the sense of rupture that inheres in the meaning of “buckle”— 11

“Hopkins’s stress on ‘buckle’ emphasizes its ambivalence, forging both this fiery element [a cascade of ‘fire that breaks from thee’] to the quintessence of the bird and the self-destructive fire to the unmaking of ‘air, pride, [and] plume,’ as the previous skilful elegance of the windhover buckles and breaks (at least from the observer’s perspective) under the very pressure of its own existence to reveal the divine within and Christ as the true ‘chevalier’ and saviour” (Sandy 169–70).

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“the deepest emphasis of the sestet is that sense of buckling under stress and being broken” (xxxiv)—the word’s more connective connotations seem viable as well.12 a buckle clasps, fastens, links, and as Hopkins’s progressively paratactic (that is, decreasingly conjunction-reliant) description suggests, the windhover’s form seamlessly marries the ethereal and the material, the aesthetic and the functional, even the culturally/spatially high—“king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin” (ll. 1–2)— and the culturally/spatially low: “[T]hen off, off forth on a swing, / as a skate’s heel sweeps smooth a bow-bend” (ll. 5–6). Breakage (like Scotist unraveling) fascinates in that it reveals inscaped variety, buckled multiplicity; dull dirt churned by the plow finds “[s]hine” (l. 13), while “blue-bleak embers” crumbled on a grate “gásh góld-vermillion” (ll. 13–14). In lines that lace lettered catalogues and stressy strings—“How these two shame this shallow and frail town! / How ring right out our sordid turbid time” (ll. 9–10); “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Falcon” (ll. 1–2)—both “The Sea and the Skylark” and “The Windhover” mimic prosodically the woven diversity of the divinely inscaped entities they describe. “Pied Beauty,” an exemplary specimen of Hopkinsian lusciousness, deftly merges the perspectives offered, on one hand, by “God’s Grandeur” and “The Starlight Night”; and, on the other, by “The Sea and the Skylark” and “The Windhover.” as the ambiguous plurality of its title noun suggests, “Pied Beauty” simultaneously treats a class of objects (pied beauties) in the manner of “God’s Grandeur” and “The Starlight Night” and stands as Hopkins’s most poignant celebration of the cumulative character, or piedness, possessed by individual things. Like one windhover or one skylark, one “brinded cow” (l. 2) is a pied beauty. “The proliferation of images in the poem,” Wagner writes, “is countered by the intensification of the sonnet form into ten and a half lines, emphasizing the divine accommodation necessary for containing the infinitude of the divine in the perceptible minutiae of nature” (169). Hopkins’s famous curtal sonnet is indeed a dense piece of writing, and at its foundation we find not one catalogue but several: Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh fire-coal chestnut falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; and áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim. all things counter, original, spáre, strange; Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?) With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím; He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change: Práise hím. 12

Joseph Feeney observes that when a knight “dons armor to enter the fray,” he buckles his attire, as one might buckle a belt (95). Citing Norman MacKenzie’s overview in The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Feeney notes that buckle has sustained a number of interpretations (96n), a circumstance that, in itself, speaks to a kind of semantic buckling/weaving.

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Seeming simultaneously to spawn and swallow one another, the poem’s lists within lists contrive a Keatsian web; in addition to the core series of pied beauties that winds through the sonnet’s six-line “octave,” Hopkins includes four additional catalogues: “fold, fallow, and plough”; “gear and tackle and trim”; “counter, original, spáre, strange”; and “swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím.” as Wagner suggests, however, Hopkins’s focus is not excess alone but excess in minutiae, divine diversity embodied in earthly individuality. The and-based pleasure of the sonnet’s essentially paratactic structure—the speaker’s childlike or adam-inspired joy in accumulation—is complicated by Hopkins’s all-based Scotist understanding of inimitability. each serialized thing, in other words, represents a uniquely knitted fusion of common elemental strands and, therefore, of everything; the word all makes only three appearances in the poem (compared to and’s five) but is embedded in every description and audible in every line. The suffix -le, W.a.M. Peters points out, is one of Hopkins’s favorite mechanisms—“it occurs where we do not expect it and it is not found where we naturally expect it” (145)—but in this case the presence of -le (and sounds like it) is central to the poem’s message. Dappled, couple, stipple, fall, fallow, tackle, original, fickle, freckled, and adazzle (in addition, perhaps, to colour, moles, and coal) hold the sound or shape of all, a virtuosic application of lettered repetition that lets Hopkins both say that God is of all, in all, and enact His Worded creation. However, textile—not inlay—most accurately reproduces divine artistry. a flecked fish not only inhabits nature’s rich diversity, but, like the throstle (in whose name, incidentally, we find another inlaid all), contains it; the trout’s “rose-moles,” like the finch’s subtly shaded wing and the fire’s glowing tonalities, are outward signs of woven inscape, a kind of shorthand in which the initiated might read proof of the Creator’s elemental weft-work. Indeed, the multi-colored sky, the brindled cow, and the variegated landscape are less spotted than streaked—less freckled, perhaps, than fickle—and even more reminiscent, therefore, of loomed cloth. Plotted or pieced, the poem’s dappled things (and, in its four-line “sestet,” the state of dappled-ness itself) are mimicked by Hopkins’s syllable-packed, stressheavy, repetition-powered lines. Curtal or not, the sonnet’s smallest discrete units are its lines, and like the inscaped items that together comprise Hopkins’s main catalogue, they are distinctly textilic, woven of accentual and lettered threads. Line two knits hard cs and ss, line three long os and ts, line four fs and chs, and so on, in a pattern “past change,” through the poem’s conclusion. The post-Wales, post-1877 poems (which include “The May Magnificat,” composed in 1878 at Stonyhurst, and “Duns Scotus’s oxford,” composed in 1879 at oxford) maintain the raveled text tradition established in the work conceived at St. Beuno’s, but some chinks begin to show in Hopkins’s woven armor. The fear, given brief airing in “The Sea and the Skylark,” that mankind “[has] lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime” (l. 12), begins to command more extended meditation. as Saville points out, the terrible sonnets represent an emotional nadir, and many of the poems written after Hopkins’s residence in Wales but before his removal to Ireland convey an increasing disenchantment that culminates in the

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late desolate lyrics. even in ostensibly stable moments, the threat of displacement haunted Hopkins, who writes from London in 1878, “I am, so far as I know, permanently here, but permanence with us is ginger-bread permanence; cobweb, soapsud, and frost-feather permanence” (Letters 55; in White, Hopkins 302). at the same time, however, Hopkins remains primarily optimistic, doggedly focused on that “one thing, one.” although the tone of this mid-period work is less celebratory and less sure, the bleak worldview espoused in poems like “Binsey Poplars” and “Spring and Fall”—lyrics, Saville argues, that “articulate the poet’s increasing sense of his Lord’s indifference and withdrawal” (131)—is hardly pervasive. The forms to which Hopkins compares his plight in the 1878 letter are ephemeral but beautifully inscaped (“The slate slabs of the urinals even,” he had mused in 1870, “are frosted in graceful sprays” [Journals 196]), and in the face of perpetual uncertainty, Hopkins continues to find his place in meticulously crafted things, both physical and textual. The weave remains a favored image; the young man pictured in the poem that begins “The furl of fresh-leaved dogrose” wears, for example, “locks like all a ravel-rope’s end, / With hempen strands in spray” (ll. 5–6) and a hat whose rustic form lets “sunlight [sidle]” through “the sieve of the straw of [its] plait” (ll. 16–17). No less prominent are woven prosodic structures, lines that gather and interlace accentual and phonetic threads. In “The Candle Indoors,” the “night’s blear-all black” is “[put] blissful back” (ll. 2–3) by both the taper’s shuttling flame (itself an inscape of heat and “yellowy moisture” [l. 3]) and the stressy slowness of a t- and r-made tapestry: “[T]ó-fró ténder trámbeams trúckle at the eye” (l. 4, my accent marks). Despite his empty pockets, the mendicant who inspires “Cheery Beggar” finds joy “[w]hen the air was sweet-and-sour of the flown fineflour of / Those goldnails and their gaylinks that hang along a lime” (ll. 4–5); the poet who breathless describes him takes at least as much comfort, we presume, in crafting intralinear webs (ss and fs twine with ws, while gs and ls alternate one-to-one) as in the variegated, viny environment itself. Similarly, in “as kingfishers catch fire,” lines that treat the bell’s deep chime not only mimic the instrument’s metallic voice but, with a stressy tangle of alliteration and skothending, textually reconstruct the textilic form of its inscape: “[L]ike each túcked stríng télls, each húng béll’s / Bów swúng fínds tóngue to flíng óut bróad its name” (ll. 3–4, my accent marks). Perhaps the curtal sonnet “Peace,” composed at oxford in 1879, both articulates and enacts the asylum-in-craft phenomenon most clearly. Since “piecemeal peace is poor peace” (l. 5), Hopkins’s speaker desires not fleeting moments of calm but solid, thingy serenity: a “wooddove” without the “roaming” (ll. 1–2). “o surely,” he exclaims in a fit of frustration, “reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu / Some good!” (ll. 7–8). He finds the wished-for compensation in “Patience exquisite,” the holy gift that eventually “plumes” (ll. 8–9) to full-fledged tranquility, an avian form characterized, in essence, by clipped wings: “and when Peace here does house / He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo, / He comes to brood and sit” (ll. 9–11). as usual, however, when Hopkins speaks of “some good” (never, it seems, some goodness), commercial connotations haunt his diction. No more a friend to the bleary factory during his years at oxford than

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he had been in the past or would be in the future (both “Binsey Poplars” and “Duns Scotus’s oxford,” White suggests, were composed on oxford’s Iron Bridge, “built in 1865, and embodying the harshly metallic insensitivity of the new Industrial age” [Hopkins 309]), Hopkins finds environmental and spiritual viability only in artisanal commerce, in craft-based trade. In addition to hen-like patience, then, the good that God leaves in lieu of peace is craft, the body of man-made work whose purposeful patterns mimic His own inscaped things. Men like Morris work in many materials, but since Hopkins’s sole medium is language, “Peace” constructs a woven sanctuary, a compensatory good, from the lettered threads and sprung clusters that lend woofèd pattern to its first line (“When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shý wíngs shút” [my accent marks]), last line (“He comes with work to do, he dóes nót cóme to coo, / He comes to brood and sit” [my accent marks]), and every meticulously crafted space in between. Consuming in its patterned detail, “Peace,” in the tradition of the poems described thus far, constitutes a luscious text, a verbal thingscape that affords soothing alternative to “[a]larms of wars” and the “death” of real-world harmony (l. 6). Meticulousness aside, however, “Peace” and a few of its contemporaries prove substantively different from the famous St. Beuno’s poems. Though cut from the same cloth, so to speak, as its Welsh predecessors, “Peace” lacks the intensity of a poem like “Pied Beauty,” and Hopkins’s limited concession to gloom (the poem’s speaker is optimistic, but peace remains only a wished-for presence as the sonnet concludes) accounts for only part of this affective discrepancy. The real difference stems from the fact that the woven structure of “Peace” bears no clear relationship to Hopkins’s allegorical figuration of tranquility. any bird, as we learn in poems like “The Windhover” and “The May Magnificat,” owns a knitted inscape, but the hennish peace that Hopkins describes is almost too thoroughly avian, a form that varies in size (it “plumes” from fledgling patience) but not in substance. Fleece- and foam-free, Hopkins’s peaceful bird is all feathers, and where “Pied Beauty” celebrates variegation, fickle or freckled, “Peace” asserts that true tranquility is never dappled: “[P]iecemeal peace is poor peace.” even my use of the word “tranquility” compromises the poem’s strange uniformity; in the space of ten and a half lines, Hopkins uses the word “peace” nine times, never opting for its synonyms. a disconnect persists, then, between the sonnet’s multiplicitous woven formality and its monolithic subject, and when read in the context of “God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” “The Sea and the Skylark,” “The Windhover,” and “Pied Beauty” (poems whose diverse series, diverse individuals, and diverse series of diverse individuals seem simultaneously to inspire and to reflect Hopkins’s inscaped rhythms), “Peace” sounds tired, or as Hopkins might put it, Parnassian. Characterized by its adherence to formal principles at the expense of accommodating genuine emotion, Parnassian language, Hopkins suggests in an 1864 diary entry, “[c]an only be used by real poets” but can, in fact, be “written without inspiration” (Journals 38). Hopkins’s decision to give peace an avian shape speaks to his still strong faith in—and sense of proximity to—the habitable stuff of God’s earth, but his

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unwillingness to foreground the bird’s braided materiality requires that the poem’s braided formality serve as his primary source of comfort. a variegated weave speaks to the presence of Christ, and when the world begins to fray around its edges (to appear, that is, less woofèd than monotonous or stringy), poetry must pick up the slack by sustaining with language a luxurious material retreat that servant and Lord can inhabit together. When Hopkins finally relocates to Ireland, birds and their crafted kin seem neither near nor potent, but the thingy space of the woven poem retains its palliative energy. In order to avoid Parnassianism, however, Hopkins must redefine the relationship between his poems’ increasingly desolate sentiments and their inscaped forms. Since, in Hopkins’s universe, words are things and things are places, texts are place-things, entities that exist, simultaneously, as both rich objects and secure spaces. although the pre-1884 work typically combines images of inscaped objects (speckled trout, brindled cows, and so on) with language that mimics their patterned intricacy, the latter condition alone, in Hopkins’s case, can constitute lusciousness. Hopkins need not picture the spatial intimacy and sensual fullness of divine craft simply because, at its most fundamental level, a sprung poem is forged from twining material catalogues, intermingled series of thingy linguistic bits. Woven series are the hallmark of luscious form, and during his grim Irish period, Hopkins employs textual webcraft (that is, luscious prosody) to contradict—not mimic—the barren world his poems describe. unlike “Peace,” in which the shape of the speaker’s wished-for good bears an unspecified relationship to the work’s tangled textuality, the terrible sonnets avoid the rote feeling of Parnassian verse by purposefully establishing woven form as the antithesis of what they describe: a rapidly unraveling reality. When, in the last moments of his career, Hopkins reinstitutes a mimetic relationship between his poetic subjects and textual objects, duskier strands twine through the former, and the latter, too, are newly dark. Mantling the Guilty Globe: The Terrible Sonnets and Late Poems In “The Blessed Virgin compared to the air we Breathe,” Mary is less person than place, less angel than sanctuary: “Be thou then, o thou dear / Mother, my atmosphere; / My happier world, wherein / To wend and meet no sin” (ll. 114–17). as Christ once did, Hopkins suggests, we inhabit Mary; like the “[w]ild air” that “[g]irdles” our every “eyelash” (ll. 1, 3–4) and diffuses the “blinding” sun (l. 97), the Virgin Mother’s spirit both encloses—“above me, round me lie / Fronting my froward eye / With sweet and scarless sky” (ll. 118–20)—and succors: “Through her we may see him / Made sweeter, not made dim, / and her hand leaves his light / Sifted to suit our sight” (ll. 110–13). Hopkins’s sense, however, of the spatial quality innate to things always informs his understanding of place, and this particular image speaks eloquently to Mary’s dual nature. With fingers splayed against God’s glare, the Mother’s corpus is weave-like in its capacity to filter light; we might, alternately, read in the crosswise pattern of flesh and beam—a tapestry of strands both earthly and divine—metonymic description of Mary’s pivotal role

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in Christ’s incarnation. either way, the Virgin’s blessedness is linked to her textilic form. “[W]e are wound,” Hopkins writes, With mercy round and round as if with air: the same Is Mary, more by name. She, wild web, wondrous robe, Mantles the guilty globe … . (ll. 34–9)

If Mary embodies an alternative “happier world” in which the poet-priest might “wend,” she simultaneously envelops the real universe—a “guilty globe”—in soothing security. The key to this paradox is her wovenness; both web and robe, airy citadel and tapestry empyrean, the Virgin is an inscaped vessel, and men, Hopkins asserts, “are meant to share / Her life as life does air” (ll. 44–5). Hopkins departed for Ireland early in 1884, and “The Blessed Virgin compared to the air we Breathe,” written in May, 1883, is among the last pieces he composed in england. Hopkins was very unhappy in Dublin. Ireland was a difficult place to live, especially for an englishman; as White notes, “unemployment, poverty, bad housing, and drunkenness were profound problems. and Irish politics in general— evictions, the Land League, the campaign for Home Rule—were in a new period of militancy in the 1880s” (Ireland 13). The constant displacement that defined Hopkins’s time in Wales, england, and (briefly) Scotland was emotionally taxing, but the appointments themselves—the duties, the company, the landscapes— proved relatively pleasant. after a string of “amenable postings” (White, Ireland 14), university College felt particularly inhospitable, and the fact that he was unlikely to be relocated became, ironically, more burdensome than the prior years’ homelessness. “[T]he Professorship was a permanent academic appointment,” White explains, “and he could move only if his superiors wished it. Hopkins had been thrust into a world that would seem foreign and strange, where an englishman would never know for certain if he were accepted, or how far surface signs of acceptance were merely convenient gestures” (Ireland 14). Not surprisingly, the work that defines the Dublin years is markedly different in tone from Hopkins’s earlier poetry, and the so-called “terrible sonnets” describe a psyche in the throes of staggering existential pain. as Daniel Harris puts it, the “radical cautery [in the terrible sonnets] of images embodying God’s manifested structure and beauty— and the altered form of those few images that remain—is the clearest possible index that Hopkins’s universe has suffered a cataclysmic fragmentation” (19). To lose images of “God’s manifested structure” is to lose images that evoke rich textile, and Hopkins’s bleak sonnets posit a universe less woven than “confused” and “incoherent,” a world simultaneously “emptied of God” and “wracked by human sin” (Harris 21). as “The Blessed Virgin” suggests, however, Mary’s webby form can mitigate the distresses of a guilty globe, and when, in “No worst, there is none,” Hopkins cries, “Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?” (l. 4), the sonnet itself compensates for the Virgin’s absence by evoking, formally, her textilic presence. The poem generates, in other words, its own woven

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intercession. Hopkins’s terrified persona and the world he inhabits are both strungout; “no worst” in sight, “More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring” (ll. 1–2), and despite his wish for closure—“‘No ling- /ering! Let me be fell …’” (ll. 7–8)—the tortured speaker only exacerbates the sonnet’s “steep or deep” (l. 12) atmosphere of open-ended linearity with “cries [that] heave, herdslong” (l. 5). The text, in contrast, mimics Mary’s heartening web with lettered repetition and punctuated stops that effectively counter the forward momentum of Hopkins’s most stress-strung passages and, even, the natural horizontality of the line itself. eight of the sonnet’s fourteen lines are end-stopped, and when the seventh line breaks mid-word, it forces a visual pause if not an aural one. Moreover, every line but the last stops at least once before breaking. In addition to affording the kind of restful hiatus that “whirlwind” (l. 13) reality denies, each line’s punctuation marks (excluding hyphens, the poem boasts upwards of thirty) work in conjunction with calculated repetition to establish, both visually and aurally, the textile’s characteristic crisscross pattern. When, for example, Hopkins apostrophizes the Virgin, a string of stops twines with alternating ms, rs, and ss, short us and long es: “Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?” The rest of “No worst” operates similarly, and as a set, the desolate late poems show Hopkins pushing his textual method to the very limits of its healing strength, struggling, in the face of newly dire circumstances, to overcome the Parnassian disconnect between subject and form that creeps into poems like “Peace.” Genuine misery inspires the terrible sonnets, but the shape that that despair takes seems to serve a surge of palliative formalist energy, not vice versa. In other words, Hopkins opts for images of blankness and void to describe his pain at least partly because the patterned fullness of a textual weave can mitigate the horror of such pictures even as it forms them. There are many ways to figure existential crisis, but like “No worst,” the late poems articulate their anguish with tropes that connote absence, chaos, disengagement, and sterility—tropes whose bleak truth is systematically contradicted by Hopkins’s vibrant linguistic knitting, an ordered, connective, fruitful weftwork that finds idiosyncratic lineation, punctuation, and repetition working in conjunction with intralinear networks of stressed and lettered threads. In sum, the universe depicted in the terrible sonnets is barren because it is bereft of inscaped craft, but the universe embodied by the terrible sonnets is inscaped to the core. Harris warns against “blurr[ing] the distinctive features of the ‘terrible sonnets’” (5), but the Dublin work consistently finds Hopkins taking refuge in Mary’s woven form if not her loving presence, in faithfully (as in carefully) constructed verbal tapestries if not a faith-full world of inscaped treasures. In the sonnet known as “Carrion Comfort,” for example, Hopkins explicitly casts his battle for devotion as a struggle to remain woven. To “feast” on Despair, that “carrion comfort,” is to unravel, to “untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man / In me” (ll. 1–2). In “Duns Scotus’s oxford,” to unravel is to explore and explain reality, God’s tight tapestry; here, reality itself faces disintegration, and to hope—to “not choose not to be” (l. 4)—is to fortify what remains of the original textile, to retwist its last threads into viable fabric. The task is difficult, however, for lack of models. The world described in “Carrion

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Comfort” is largely empty, and the things that remain are only bits and pieces—a “right foot,” a “lionlimb,” “bruisèd bones” (ll. 6–7)—of absent wholes. “[a] central poetic truth about the world of [the terrible sonnets],” Harris asserts, is that “nature has virtually disappeared from Hopkins’s ken” (19). The result, he continues, is an aesthetic of “dis-Incarnation”: “This is the imagery of primitive and distorted sensation, grotesque bodily deformity verging on shapelessness, decreation into animality; it delineates Hopkins’s speaker as a nearly composite form: a man who slides into beast down an untempered and variable scale of metamorphosis that effectually denies the existence of a stable ontology” (53). Gone are the finches, fruits, and farms of intricate inhabitable inscape and, with them, the credible sense of “sacramental identity”—the oneness, or sameness, between “the mystical Presence” and nature’s “material objects,” particularly eucharistic tokens (Harris 40)—that grounds the earlier poems. Imagistically speaking, a woven world is evident only in Hopkins’s initial description of threadbare self and, perhaps, in the sonnet’s final lines: “That níght, that year / of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God” (ll. 13–14). Bodies intertwined, creature and creator occupy the center of a rapidly fraying cosmos, and their mutual animosity seems all that remains of the identity paradigm, of the optimistic notion that “Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his” (“as kingfishers catch fire” ll. 12–13). Imagery tells one story, but form tells another, and at the textual level, “Carrion Comfort”’s woven aesthetic remains powerfully intact. When Hopkins feels melancholy, Harris contends, the universe appears broken, dispossessed; his “psychic disposition” literally and, Harris argues, “intimate[ly]” affects his “perception of the exterior world,” as evidenced by an 1873 journal entry: “In fact being unwell I was quite downcast: nature in all her parcels and faculties gaped and fell apart … like a clod cleaving and holding only by strings of root” (Journals 236; in Harris 25). If, however, intense depression significantly altered Hopkins’s worldview, precious little evidence suggests that it diminished his confidence in metrical systems, particularly his own. only weeks (if that long) after drafting “Carrion Comfort,” Hopkins indicates in a letter to Bridges that despite “a continually jaded and harassed mind,” his interest in versification has not decreased: “[a]m I thinking of writing on meter? I suppose thinking too much and doing too little. I do greatly desire to treat that subject; might perhaps get something together this year” (Letters 221). Indeed, Hopkins’s “[great] desire” to write a metrical treatise speaks to poetry’s enduring palliative strength in the face of ontological instability, to words’ capacity to compensate, even, for the absence of the Word. as Harris experiences them, the terrible sonnets sound as bleak as they read—“the sound of the poems … becomes obsessively monotonic. Internal rhyme gives way to stalled repetition, both in vocabulary and syntax” (63)—but this analysis fails to account for the real formal congruities that exist between the earlier manic poems and their later depressed counterparts. Hopkins’s most joyous sonnets rely heavily on interand intralinear repetition (at the levels of letter, syllable, and word) to mimic, in conjunction with accentual strings, the knitted quality of inscaped things. Formally speaking, “Carrion Comfort” operates no differently.

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The poem’s speaker inhabits a barren space, but its reader navigates an environment notably full, a textscape that strains against the boundaries of the average printed page. Hopkins’s lines range in length from twelve to eighteen syllables, and since fewer than twenty of the sonnet’s approximately 170 words (11 percent or so) are multisyllabic, those long lines are weighty with accents, averaging, by some scans, ten or so apiece. The tradition creaks beneath the heft; neither tidy pentameter square nor balanced alexandrine rectangle, “Carrion Comfort” bulges, even more obviously, perhaps, than “The Windhover” or “The Cagèd Skylark.” To counter lines that threaten to outstrip the horizontal space allotted them (and thereby violate their integrity as lines), Hopkins incorporates vertical-pulling series of questions (in both octave and sestet) and anatomical pieces (foot, limb, bones, eyes, hand, heart, and foot again) to function as weft threads. This is a Keatsian-Tennysonian strategy, motivated here by a thoroughly Hopkinsian concern: dramatic intralinear profusion. What Harris regards as “stalled” repetition similarly buttresses the strophe and, perhaps more importantly, generates a woven sensibility within individual lines. Not counting and, the, and prepositions, a full one-third of the poem’s words repeat, and the effect is less “monotonic” than sestinesque. Where the sestina concentrates its repetition at the ends of lines, Hopkins’s key terms—why, not, me, my, and that, among others— recur without such constraint, such industrial predictability; as we connect the dots, so to speak, both visually and aurally, a worded web emerges: “[M]y heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer. / Cheer whóm though? The héro whose héaven-handling flúng me, fóot tród / Me? or mé that fóught him? o whích one? is it eách one?” (ll. 11–13). When words recur within the boundaries of a single line, they merge with the lettered threads that, in addition to establishing a crisscross pattern in their own right, effectively mitigate the forward thrust of Hopkins’s accentual strings. Consider, for example, the sonnet’s second quatrain: But ah, but o thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me thy wring-earth right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, o in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? (ll. 5–8, emphasis added)

Hopkins’s most dramatically sprung passages—“why wouldst thou rude,” “wringearth right foot rock? lay,” “me heaped there; me frantic”—twine accentual threads through series of repeated sounds to generate within the poem’s smallest discrete units an aesthetic both aggregative and woven, or quintessentially luscious. Hopkins’s alliterative patterning emphasizes half-lines, but his assonant/consonant play connects hemistich to hemistich, accent to slack.13 the effects are sometimes 13

Wimsatt observes that “[t]hough the density of alliteration in Hopkins’s mature verse is generally comparable to that of old english, with the former it is optional in any one position, whereas there is a fixed pattern for the latter” (“alliteration” 550). again, the unpredictability of the alliterative play in “Carrion Comfort” demonstrates that inscape— idiosyncratic patterning—remains central to Hopkins’s compositional technique.

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subtle—the echo, for example, of “of” in “avoid,” or the slightly shaded vowels in “and fan”—but always calculated, and the result is a poem that evokes the crafted integrity its speaker can no longer find in either the world at large or his unraveling, doubt-torn conscience. The remaining terrible sonnets are a group unto themselves. Four poems, Hopkins writes to Bridges on the first of September, 1885, “came like inspirations unbidden and against my will” (Letters 221), and although “To seem the stranger,” “I wake and feel,” “Patience, hard thing!” and “My own heart” are built of lines considerably shorter than those that frame “Carrion Comfort,” they nonetheless weave lettered and accentual strings to contrive convincing thingy retreat from a variety of pains. In fact, Hopkins’s characterization of the sonnets as “inspirations unbidden” can be critically misleading because it foregrounds a psychological, not artistic, process. “unlike the Welsh sonnets,” Saville asserts, “which [Hopkins] constructed with a craftsman’s deliberation, the ‘terrible’ sonnets seem the products of intense psychic energy unconsciously accumulated until it eventually finds release in the sublimatory process of writing” (145). In truth, however, the “psychic … [accumulation]” of which Saville speaks finds formal expression in the inward-turning catalogues of stress and sound that define Hopkinsian lusciousness, and the craftsman’s hand remains a potent presence in these emotionally desolate poems. Like “Carrion Comfort,” Hopkins’s “inspirations unbidden” figure their miseries as anti-weaves, pains for which a raveled text can compensate. If unwoven forms explicitly signify doubt in “Carrion Comfort,” they implicitly connote loneliness in both “To seem the stranger” and “I wake and feel.” The experience of displacement grounds “To seem the stranger,” but unlike the Deutschland’s nuns, Hopkins’s speaker inhabits a landscape stripped of faithinspiring beauty. estranged from his family and distanced from england, he lives “at a thírd / Remove” (ll. 9–10) in Ireland, where he feels not only homeless but hapless, mystically barred from meaningful communication with his fellow men: “only what word / Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban / Bars or hell’s spell thwarts” (ll. 11–13). For Hopkins, however, words not only communicate realities but make them, and in a place “rife” (l. 8) with weary wars (as opposed, say, to woven wonders), he recreates an emotionally positive profusion with language. as the verb “breeds” implies, his heart’s “word”—like God’s original Word—begets a litter of materio-linguistic bits that, although unperceived or simply ignored by the world at large, constitute for the poet a compelling collection: “This to hoard unheard, / Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began” (ll. 13–14). The sonnet, in other words, articulates a sense of isolation but formally enshrines the unifying accumulation at which its hoarding speaker hints. In addition to proving audible, or “heard,” Hopkins’s verbal hoarding forges textually the kind of connection that his speaker lacks socially. every line boasts alliterative, consonant, or whole-word repetition, lettered threads that tangle with series of accentual thrusts. Brief examples of the poem’s textual weftwork abound—consider, for example, the r-enclosed set of alternating ts and ns in “Christ not near” (l. 3)—but longer passages prove more striking. In conjunction with a breath-defying chain of stresses, repeated bs and

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ws inscape Hopkins’s piecey eighth line—“y of idle being but by where wars are rife”—while series of bs, hs, and vowel-plus-r combinations twine through the sprung centers of the lines that comprise the sestet’s second half: “Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban / Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard, / Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.” In “I wake and feel,” temporal indeterminacy—“But where I say / Hours I mean years, mean life” (ll. 5–6)—exacerbates the speaker’s persistent sense of spatial “remove”: “and my lament / Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away” (ll. 6–8). Hopkins’s “dead letters” seem strangely to recall In Memoriam’s “noble letters of the dead,” those labyrinthine textscapes through which Tennyson’s elegist wanders in canto XCV. In Hopkins’s case, however, “dead letters” (that is, lost or ineffective correspondence) is metaphor only, since, on a literal level, the sonnet’s letters, or alphabetical signifiers, seem to “breed” like the “word” in “To seem the stranger.” Lettered threads (alliterative strands and series of repeated terms) and accentual strings twine like ivy through every line of “I wake and feel,” forging the visual and aural links that counter both the disconnectedness of line seven’s uncommunicative (if metaphorical) epistles and the bitter (as opposed to pleasant) fullness described in the sestet’s first half: “I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree / Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; / Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse” (ll. 9–11). Bereft of sweet divinity (“Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours” [l. 12]), the sonnet’s speaker turns, like his counterpart in “To seem the stranger,” to rich intralinear tapestries, to braids of stress and sound—“what black hours we” (l. 2); “what sights you, heart, saw, ways” (l. 3); “flesh filled, blood brimmed” (l. 11)—that, by mimicking the wovenness of holy craftsmanship, shield him from the plight of the truly faithless: “I see / The lost are like this, and their scourge to be / as I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse” (ll. 12–14). From despair to disengagement to, in “Patience, hard thing!” and “My own heart,” outright frustration: Hopkins’s demons take the shape of anti-weaves, figures incoherent, isolated or simply string-like. The God portrayed in “Patience” remains both stern—“yet the rebellious wills / of us wé do bid God bend to him even so” (ll. 10–11)—and disturbingly absent: “and where is he who more and more distills / Delicious kindness?” (ll. 12–13). as if recalling, in a dreamy haze, the love-laced world of the pre-Ireland sonnets, Hopkins asserts that God is also a latticed form, a beehive brimming with sweet patience: “Patience fills / His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know” (ll. 13–14). In this case, however, God’s honeyed tolerance is more maddening than soothing, for the good He owns in abundance is the one that Hopkins’s speaker pitifully lacks; patience is the balm that alleviates the pain of an austere and ostensibly godless universe, and while the Creator miserly hoards his soft store, the poet is left to scrape together his own “hard” (l. 1) substitute. Hopkins cannot make honey, but since he can linguistically mimic the holy form that holds it, he obliterates the distinction between God and gift, comb and harvest, to recast patience as something woven in its own right. “Natural heart’s-ivy,” Hopkins writes, patience sheaths the sorrowful soul just as

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twining stems dress architectural remains in tapestries of leaf and berry: “Patience masks / our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks / Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day” (ll. 6–8). When, in “My own heart,” Hopkins’s speaker desperately and unsuccessfully “cast[s] for comfort”—a phrase that evokes an interminable Endymion-ish wandering—before deciding, exhausted, to “call off thoughts awhile” and “leave comfort root-room” (ll. 5, 10, 11), relief remains ivy-ish, woven. albeit less stressy than their terrible sisters, both sonnets mimic the woofèd consolation at which their imagery hints in lines that weave lettered threads through accentual clusters: “[w]ants war, wants wounds”; “we do bid God bend”; “their dark can day.” as in “To seem the stranger” and “I wake and feel,” every line of both “Patience, hard thing!” and “My own heart” is detailed with intralinear lettering that functions, in conjunction with interlinear networks of repeated terms, to generate surface patterns that can only be described as weblike. “I would argue,” Saville writes, “that while the sonnets refuse to sustain the myths of consolation on which symbolic order must depend, their poetic form acts as an obstacle to any capitulation to negativity and the final silence of death.” She means, of course, that through the act of composing, Hopkins continues to talk—“the textual veil or obstacle of language allows the speaker to articulate an uncompromising sense of his suffering self and its desire” (152)—but the sonnets’ “textual veil” affords compensation as well as response, Marian balm in addition to mortal stop-gap. Divine intercession is no longer a prospect, and the terrible sonnets represent luscious form (Saville’s textilic language is significant) not only at its most condensed but also, perhaps, its most necessary. as blighted as his world appeared, the poet who wrote the terrible sonnets was not, Saville observes, “simply immersed in self-disgust.” “To what serves Mortal Beauty?” and “Carrion Comfort” were “drafted on the same side of a sheet of paper,” a circumstance that, for Saville, indicates that Hopkins was pondering not only God’s absence but also “the degree to which male beauty could operate as a redemptive agency” (174). The poems’ proximity also speaks, perhaps, to the redemption afforded by inscape generally and inscaped verse in particular. In “To what serves Mortal Beauty,” an extra-stressy alexandrine sonnet (whose caesurae, it seems, are consciously mitigated by hemistich-hopping alliterative strings and other forms of lettered repetition), Hopkins argues that inscaped loveliness, “the o-seal-that-so | feature,” reminds us “what good means”: “See: it does this: keeps warm / Men’s wits to the things that are” (ll. 2, 3–4). once again, the word good holds more than conventional moral significance. as “God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” “Pied Beauty,” and so many other poems suggest, exquisitely crafted natural beauties (throstles, thickets, bluebells, falcons) are the goods God trades for the faith of his votaries; in a world bereft of the divine spirit, those luxuries (as the terrible sonnets’ severely curtailed imagery suggests) disappear, and humans are left to devise their own thingy shelter. In other words, the late poems that avoid extended first-person meditation on an absent God (thereby escaping the critical classification “terrible”) nonetheless continue the quest for textual intercession in the face of an increasingly dire spiritual crisis.

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In the sonnet that begins, “Thou art indeed just, Lord,” spring has sprung— “See, banks and brakes / Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again / With fretty chervil” (ll. 9–11)—but its woven wealth remains beyond the speaker’s reach: “[B]ut not I build; no, but strain, / Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes” (ll. 12–13). even as the phrase “banks and brakes” recalls the juicy joy of “The May Magnificat,” it highlights the poverty of this new season; in the earlier poem, “azuring-over greybell makes / Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes” (ll. 41–2), but now spring’s floral profusion is floral only, not lake-like, not wet. It cannot, therefore, irrigate the speaker’s sere soul, which struggles like a dry-rooted plant: “o thou lord of life, send my roots rain” (l. 14). The only succor that remains, it seems, is language, and although Hopkins’s speaker, a priest who spends his “life upon [God’s] cause” (l. 9), claims to “breed” no “work that wakes,” the lines that describe nature’s woven bounty testify to the success of his linguistic labor, that verbal work that makes words “breed” as they did in “To seem the stranger.” In the first half of Hopkins’s sestet, ss spring from ss, bs beget bs, ks cause ks, ls lead to ls, and vowels (long es and long as) echo one another in an alternating pattern that textually recreates the season’s textilic growth: “See, banks and brakes / Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again.” Latticed language is inscaped craft and, therefore, viable compensation for a spiritually threadbare existence. When, in “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” Hopkins offers an apocalyptic vision of the universe unraveling—“lét life wínd / off hér once skéined stained véined varíety | upon, áll on twó spools” (ll. 10–11)—he does so in a conspicuously raveled text, in a fully realized example of sprung rhythm that mitigates the harshness of his message with luxurious lines densely woven of lettered and accentual threads. In Hopkins’s night-inspired description of Judgment Day, the world has gone to waste—“her béing has unbóund; her dápple is at énd” (l. 5)—but language retains its soothing fullness, its capacity to generate thoughtful pied-ness in a reality that has lost its dapple. The poem’s long lines both hold catalogues—“earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, | vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous” (l. 1); “womb-of-all, home-ofall, hearse-of-all night” (l. 2); “selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless” (l. 14)—and embody them; as lettered collections wind through stressy bunches, Hopkins weaves a verbal “damask” that lacks, thankfully, the black evening’s “dragonish” threat (l. 9). But does it? an unweaving world is, without question, a terrifying image by Hopkinsian standards, but one must not overlook the fact that in its raveled state, the reality depicted in “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” is a tapestry of white and black, or “right” and “wrong”: “[P]árt, pen, páck / Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds— bláck, white; | ríght, wrong; réckon but, réck but, mínd / But thése two” (ll. 11–13). In this formulation, terror and other unholies—sin, depravity, doubt, anger—are part of God’s textile, not isolated from it; it takes both skeins, white and black, to “tell, éach off the óther” (l. 13), and thereby define mortal experience. In “as kingfishers catch fire,” the tucked string “tells” of individuality (l. 3), a done web; here, the prospect of terminal unraveling leads Hopkins to consider the Creator’s process—and to conclude that His product’s darker fibers were placed by the

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selfsame hand. This is a notable departure for Hopkins, who has, until this late moment in his career, consistently posited inscaped (i.e., woven) form as evidence of divine grace, or whiteness only. In contrast, then, to the terrible sonnets, which characterize black realities (despair, loneliness, and frustration) as anti-weaves, “Sibyl’s Leaves” redefines the variegated multiplicity that underlies the concept of inscape to allow for the inclusion of negativity, reclassified as only one more differently colored thread. The result: Fretted form loses none of its soothing beauty, but psychic pain, a still unvanquished presence in Hopkins’s world, loses some of its bite. If you can’t beat ’em, the adage advises, join ’em, but in this case, “join” carries a connotation more crafty than social; white and black, grace and sin are inextricably intertwined, or joined, in God’s infinitely complex textile, and Hopkins, exhausted from his existential struggles, ultimately acquiesces to a revised worldview in which struggle proves no less holy than ease. The natural world that had “virtually disappeared from Hopkins’s ken” in the terrible sonnets (Harris 19) returns in “Sibyl’s Leaves” and “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire,” but it flashes a darker underbelly. The former invokes a starry sky that recalls both “womb” and “hearse,” while the latter, composed some three years later, pictures an inscaped space that, fire-like, weaves violence with beauty, or as Tennyson might have put it, “shade” with “beam.” “Shivelights and shadowtackle,” Hopkins observes, “in long | lashes lace, lance, and pair” (l. 4). Clouds are “torn tufts” that yet “glitter in marches” (ll. 1–2), while “the bright wind boisterous” joyously “ropes, wrestles, and beats earth bare” (l. 5). The speaker of “Heraclitean Fire” looks rapturously forward to the Resurrection, which will trade “shivelights,” a marriage of bright and dark, for “eternal beam” alone (l. 19). In the meantime, however, he and his “Sibyl’s Leaves” counterpart find strangely familiar succor in a world inwoven with duskier strands. Inscape, after all, connotes a tapestry of disparate elements (flesh and fleece, fur and feather), and a reality that marries dark immorality to glowing innocence is truly a union of contraries, a captivating drama in which good and evil reverberate “each off the other” (l. 13). It seems, then, that to characterize “Sibyl’s Leaves” as an extension of Hopkins’s terrible technique—in which a mimetic relationship between subject and form is exchanged for a distinctly non-mimetic one—is to discount the palliative power of the white/black world the poem portrays. In fact, although the poem eases into apocalyptic vision, its speaker, not unlike his “Starlight Night” foil, is simply a sky-gazer; the encroaching darkness only presages Judgment Day—“Óur tale, o óur oracle!” (l. 10)—and the world that the poet inhabits is, therefore, still raveled, yet to be “[wound] off.” When Hopkins weaves, then, his text resembles, not counters, the poem’s reality, and God’s “stained véined varíety”—which includes, of course, a sizeable skein of wickedness—proves immensely inspiring. Formally speaking, “Sibyl’s Leaves” and “Heraclitean Fire” are in a class unto themselves, leviathan-scaled sonnets that, for sheer syllabic bulk, make “Carrion Comfort” appear timid and restrained. More strikingly scary, however, are their intralinear weaves, which consistently highlight the darkness that, even at the linguistic level, lives in light. In “Sybil’s Leaves” the exchange of ms for hs brings birth closer to

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death—“womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night” (l. 2)—while alternating ks and ls trace the translation of “bleak light” into utter blackness: “only the beakleaved boughs dragonish | damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black, / ever so black on it” (ll. 9–10). “Heraclitean Fire” finds that the distance between “[d]elightful” play and danger is only the length of a braid of rs and ss—“ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare” (l. 5)—and that nourishment fades into waste when vowels change but consonants remain the same: “dough, crust, dust” (l. 7). from an ars poetica perspective, poetry, however lovely, generated by a suffering poet is itself a tangle of pleasure and pain—a black-and-white fabric or, perhaps, a “[s]hivelights and shadowtackle” tapestry. as works like “To autumn” and In Memoriam demonstrate, Keats’s and Tennyson’s palliative projects were simultaneously haunted and energized by this truth, but Hopkins, who comes closest to his predecessors’ more bracing attitudes toward grief in “Sibyl’s Leaves” and “Heraclitean Fire,” ultimately expresses it best. unlike “Thou art indeed just, Lord,” Hopkins’s final sonnet “To R.B.” explicitly mourns what its speaker perceives to be failed creative work, not failed pastoral (that is, priestly) work. Hopkins regrets his lack of inspiration and apologizes to Bridges for his poems’ pallor: “[I]f in my lagging lines you miss / The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation, / My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss / Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation” (ll. 11–14). The passage is notable for its strange syntactic conflation of text (“lines”), space (“[m]y winter world”), and body (“that scarcely breathes”), but it also succinctly represents the conundrum of palliative poetry. as Davies suggests in his editorial gloss of the poem, “desolation is … claimed to affect the poet’s creative powers. But it is an irony, peculiar to art in many forms, that such negative experience can be expressed with an imaginative power that belies that negativity. Just as the ‘terrible sonnets’ achieve triumphant form while expressing desolating trauma [this] sonnet is good poetry saying that good poetry is not possible” (312n). Feeney, who reads Hopkins’s voice as fundamentally ludic, describes the clever contrariety of “To R.B.” a little differently: “‘To R.B.’ is a masterpiece of poetry and irony, brilliantly explaining why it cannot exist. Hopkins continues to play, though with sad irony, even to the end” (141). In other words, Hopkins’s “lagging lines” do not lag, and to take Davies’s insight one step further is to recognize that poetry of a certain “triumphant” form (whether we deem that form playful, luscious, or something else entirely) not only “belies” its author’s psychological pain but also, however briefly, cures it. In the absence of a god and a muse, Hopkins weaves his own asylum, a textual Mary-inspired mantle that houses him as the Mother’s womb housed Christ. The lines in “To R.B.” that compare the creative process to gestation, the mind to a womb—“Nine months she then, nay years, nine years she long / Within her wears, bears, cares and combs the same” (ll. 5–6)—articulate a circumstance that, Hopkins claims in his sestet, no longer applies to him: “Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this” (l. 9). The text itself, however, affords womb-like compensation for creative drought in its Marian form, its woven integrity. The words “nine” and “years” twice alternate to initiate the weave; then, the first line’s th sounds thread through “[w]ithin” and

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“the” in the second, while “wears” and “bears” forge both a visual link to “years” and aural links to “cares” and “same.” a carefully crafted inscape emerges, and stressed strings—“nine years she long,” “wears, bears, cares”—not only enhance the intricacy of Hopkins’s phonetic weave but contrive, by slowing time, to keep him within its space. The artistry compensates for the trauma, but the trauma inspires the sonnet; to wind black and white, subject and form, on separate spools is to initiate apocalypse, and when mortal craftsman, abandoning art for agony, stops weaving in the face of pain, he acquiesces to irreversible godlessness. This is the truth that underlies the late poems, and this is Hopkinsian lusciousness.

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unweaving the Luscious: Decadence, Modernism, and Post-Victorian Poetics I have endeavored to demonstrate that the poetic proportion—great wealth in little space—that Keats devised in response to an array of personal, social, and aesthetic circumstances substantially influenced both Tennyson and Hopkins, who adapted Keats’s unique Romanticism to suit their own artistic imperatives (which were shaped, of course, by different socio-historical moments). Neither Tennyson nor Hopkins dismantled Keats’s original marriage of containment to profusion, but even before Hopkins’s death in 1889, new cultural and literary trends were challenging one or the other component of that essential luscious ratio. The first of such trends was Decadence, and although humanists often apply the terms Decadence and aestheticism interchangeably, the former properly denotes a creative philosophy that regards artistic form as “an end in itself,” a notion, Robin Gilmour writes in his treatment of late-century “aesthetic resistance,” that reformist figures like Ruskin and Morris considered “positively decadent” (235–6). The terminology is slippery for a reason: Decadence represents an extreme incarnation of aestheticism, a movement, we recall, that heralded unique (Hopkins might say “inscaped”) artisanal forms as bastions of moral security in a treacherous world of mass production. The Decadents, in contrast, not only divorced form from its ethical aesthetic connotations but valued it almost solely for its capacity to stimulate the senses. a movement rooted in the primacy of sensual experience and the Morris-dominated material revolution chronicled in Chapter 3 might initially seem compatible with Keatsian lusciousness and its Victorian manifestations. Indeed, the english Decadents, Karl Beckson notes, inspired by Théophile Gautier’s philosophy of l’art pour l’art and the work of other mid-century continental forerunners, embraced Keats as one of their own, having found in his work “a devotion to beauty and to the world of the imagination” (xxxii). Keatsian beauty is always sensory in nature, and the Decadents adopted the Conclusion of Pater’s The Renaissance, which ostensibly advocates living through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin, as their unofficial manifesto. “With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity,” Pater writes with Keatsian anxiety, “gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch” (Renaissance 152). as Pater’s abrupt dismissal of “theories” suggests, feeling ostensibly trumps talking in his famous Conclusion. as noted in Chapter 3, Pater also shared the luscious poets’ regard for the material dimension of language, and since the Decadent poets, like their luscious

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counterparts, crafted their forms as carefully as they did their images—for Gautier, Beckson recounts, “[t]he separation of form from content was … incomprehensible, for ‘une belle forme est une belle idée’” (xxiii)—they, too, posited text as a kind of habitable alternative reality. In his 1893 defense of “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” arthur Symons argues that Decadence is the product “of a civilization grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain in opinion or in conduct. It reflects all the moods, all the manners, of a sophisticated society” (136). In Joris Karl Huysmans’s “unique masterpiece” À Rebours, Symons continues, physical sensation (“the beauty of strange, unnatural flowers,” “the melodic combination of scents,” and “the imagined harmonies of the sense of taste”) unites with art, especially literature, to generate an exhilarating alternative world: “[Huysmans’s hero] Des esseintes creates for his solace, in the wilderness of a barren and profoundly uncomfortable world, an artificial paradise … . He delights in the Latin of apuleius and Petronius, in the French of Baudelaire, Goncourt, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Villiers; in the pictures of Gustave Moreau, the French Burne-Jones, [and] of odilon Redon, the French Blake” (147, 148). When Symons asserts, however, that Des esseintes’s space represents a “solace”-affording “paradise,” he operates from decidedly non-Keatsian (and, it follows, non-Tennysonian and non-Hopkinsian) definitions of both terms. neither À Rebours nor its hero’s materio-textual home is meant to succor those who enter there; the story, Symons writes, “[concentrates] all that is delicately depraved, all that is beautifully, curiously poisonous, in modern art” (147), and Des esseintes himself, “exhausted by these spiritual and sensory debauches in the delights of the artificial … is left (as we close the book) with a brief doubtful choice before him—madness or death” (148). Beckson observes that the “dull and muddy mettled middle classes”—their morality, their society, and certainly their art—were the “natural enemy” of the Decadents, and the kind of comfort that Des esseintes mainly takes, Symons seems to suggest, is the arrogant self-satisfaction that comes of not counting himself among their ranks. His “solace,” however, proves less an escape (of the sort represented in and by “Imitation of Spenser,” Idylls of the King, or even “Carrion Comfort”) from the pains of an “overluxurious, over-inquiring, too languid” world than a magnification of them, a gross exaggeration of nineteenth-century bourgeois experience. To posit art as something useful, for purposes palliative or otherwise, is itself bourgeois; as Gautier asserts in Mademoiselle de Maupin, “Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature” (in Beckson xxiii). Des esseintes, “a typical Decadent” (Symons 147), must remain both physically and psychically sick, for to ply the arts as healing balm would be to violate the first principle—art for art’s sake—of Decadent living. “[T]his representative literature of to-day, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and beautiful and interesting disease,” Symons writes. “Healthy we cannot call it, and healthy it does not wish to be considered” (136). In his “Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the young,” oscar Wilde articulates differently the disconnect that, in a Decadent

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context, exists between a sensational life and a long, healthy one: “Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness” (238). Since Decadent art aims to agitate rather than assuage, any “solace” it affords is of a distinctly un-luscious brand, but as Symons applies it, the term “paradise” also proves strangely inapplicable to the places, both physical and textual, that Keats and his luscious inheritors represent. By definition, we recall, a paradise is contained, a walled haven; although the goods and stimuli that it harbors are many in proportion to its space, to characterize them as unlimited in number or otherwise un(ful)filling is to compromise the enclosure on which the very notion of paradise depends. To encompass everything is to be borderless, to encompass nothing. as Keats learned in Endymion, infinite profusion—“[a]n endless fountain of immortal drink” (l. 23), for example—fosters a sense of openness, not containment. Decadent pleasure, however, originates with a disregard for limits of any kind. a “craving for the impossible,” Beckson notes, “was a central characteristic of the decadent sensibility” (xxvi), and Des esseintes’s outlandish space is a symptom of its owner’s perpetual “boredom,” his unrestrained and unceasing search for sensations à rebours, or “against the grain” (Beckson xxxi). ever stranger and ever more things make their way into Des esseintes’s home, a “paradise” open to everything and, therefore, no paradise at all. “Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor,” Symons argues, À Rebours “is—especially in regard to things seen—extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of the painter’s palette” (148). The speaker of oscar Wilde’s “Hélas,” who adopts a similar every- and all-based rhetoric to defend a life defined by the pursuit of Decadent sensation, inhabits a space (and, for that matter, a body) utterly boundless: “To drift with every passion till my soul / Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, / Is it for this that I have given away / Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?— / ... I did but touch the honey of romance— / and must I lose a soul’s inheritance?” (ll. 1–4, 13–14). When Keats invokes a “material sublime,” this book’s introduction asserts, he concretizes the latter term by associating it with magnitude, not magnificence—with Lamia’s large quantities as opposed, say, to Lycius’ lofty ideas. When Keats writes that Lamia’s baskets hold “[g]arlands of every green, and every scent” (II, l. 215), he simply means that they hold a vast floral variety—as vast a variety as their size can accommodate, bulging permitted. In contrast, Wilde’s Decadent “every” means every; his pursuit of “passion” yields neither to basket walls (a “stringed lute” is more sieve than weave) nor conventional morality, for, to borrow Pater’s phrasing, “Not the fruit of experience, but the experience itself, is the end” (Renaissance 152). In a Decadent context, the picking takes priority over the basketload, and as a result, the pleasure that underlies the movement is less sensational than notional, less materially sublime than traditionally so. By eschewing containment, therefore, the english Decadents, despite their taste for Keatsian sensuality, topple one of two pillars fundamental to the maintenance of a luscious aesthetic and embrace a perspective strangely Burkean, a philosophy that transmutes material entities into abstractions. Richard Le Gallienne, whose insider’s condemnation of certain Decadent tendencies inspired Symons’s essay,

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suggests that a disregard for proportionality (relationships, contexts, points of reference, and so on) is the feature that lends the movement both its novelty and its unease—or, as it were, disease: In all great literature, the theme, great or small, is considered in all its relation to the sum-total of things, to the Infinite, as we phrase it; in decadent literature the relations, the due proportions, are ignored. one might say that literary decadence consists in the euphuistic expression of isolated observations. Thus disease, which is a favorite theme of décadents, does not in itself make for decadence: it is only when, as often, it is studied apart from its relations to health, to the great vital centre of things, that it does so. any point of view, seriously taken, which ignores the complete view, approaches decadence. (in Beckson 134)

although his metaphysical (not quantitative) reference to “the Infinite” establishes a critical framework more Wordsworthian than Keatsian, Le Gallienne articulates the fundamental difference between Decadence and lusciousness: The Decadent artist explores sensory experience without reference to any delimiting factor, moral or material. In his contempt for the latter, he parts company with the luscious poets highlighted here. In fact, by categorically renouncing constraint, the Decadent artist simultaneously parts company with Pater, who lived to regret (and to retract or, at least, to qualify) his stirring Renaissance petition for ecstatic, experiential living. “The aesthetic program as Pater imagined it depends heavily on a discriminating and disciplined taste, on temperance and control,” David Weir explains. “Pater manages an odd fusion of the delicious and the disciplined, of decadence and ascesis” (67). In other words, Pater’s sensibility is closer to that of Keats (and certainly Hopkins, whom he taught at oxford) than to that of Symons or Huysmans. “Pater was indeed far less decadent than his disciples,” Beckson notes. “When someone once tried to convince him of the excellence of Huysmans and his style, he is reported to have said, ‘Beastly man!’” (xxxiii). If Decadent artists pursued sensuality at the expense of enclosure, others pursued an anti-luscious poetry rooted in the opposite: enclosure at the expense of sensuality. The abstraction that creeps, counterintuitively, into the literature of Decadent writers by virtue of their unwillingness to engage limitation became, for late-century inheritors of Robert Browning, a central focus. Tennyson’s rich, Keatsinspired verse established a dominant model but not an unchallenged one, and Browning’s influential grotesquerie, Isobel armstrong suggests, unites vigorous intellection (as opposed to invigorating sensation) with containment. She begins by noting that Walter Bagehot associated Tennyson with “‘ornate’ or Romantic art,” poetry that relies on “superfluous and distracting detail,” and Browning with “‘Grotesque’” art, a poetics of incongruity, distortion, and imperfection (285). as Bagehot’s distinction intimates, the physical shape and diverse capacities of the human body inform the grotesque aesthetic, but sensation (particularly the pleasurable sensations associated with luxury) and its stimulants are rarely a part of the formula. Instead of sensation, armstrong argues, grotesque poetry relies on an amalgam of closure and psychological abstraction: bottled energy. “[M]any of [Browning’s] poems are about energy,” she writes. “In Browning’s work the

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energies of the Grotesque not only manifest themselves in violent libido and desire but in frustration and aggression, or they issue in the exercise of oppression in power and domination” (289–90). The term grotesque, which derives from the Italian for “cavelike” (Cuddon 367), has etymological affiliations with enclosure, and armstrong points out that Browning’s grotesque, as words like “frustration” and even “libido” suggest, embodies an energy that derives from constraint. “The Grotesque,” she asserts, places “its pressure upon limit” (291), and a “typical Grotesque procedure,” evidenced by Browning’s “The Bishop orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” is to embrace “the distorted perspective of restricted vision”: “The dying Bishop, surrounded by ‘nephews,’ can only think of his magnificent tomb from the perspective of someone lying in it, just as he is lying on his deathbed” (287). When, as the century drew to a close, Hopkins adopted (with adaptation) Tennysonian lusciousness, Thomas Hardy (born four years earlier than Hopkins) inherited Browning’s grotesque aesthetic, a decidedly non-“ornate,” non-luxurious vision that nonetheless relies on luscious-esque delimitation. armstrong identifies The Dynasts as Hardy’s most grotesque work (and a culminating example of the species)—“It is as if Hardy carries the virtuosity of the dramatic monologue from drama to cinema by superimposing a number of limited and everchanging perspectives on one another” (488)—but contained, sensorily empty prospects dominate his lyrics, too. unarticulated anger reverberates through the close, colorless landscape of “Neutral Tones,” a space defined by barricades both physical and emotional. “Since then,” Hardy’s speaker recalls, “keen lessons that love deceives, / and wrings with wrong, have shaped to me / your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, / and a pond edged with grayish leaves” (ll. 13–16). The disconsolate lovers are hemmed in on all sides, and although the pun on “wrings” (a significantly more violent word, of course, than “rings”) evokes Tennyson, this is a world devoid of heat, hue, and harmony—the sun is “white” (l. 2), and the only bird is figurative (l. 12)—where only intellects seem alive: “your eyes on me were as eyes that rove / over tedious riddles of years ago; / and some words played between us to and fro / on which lost the more by our love” (ll. 5–8). Language, moreover, lacks the sensory verve that it retains even in Hopkins’s most desolate contexts; when faces become abstract “riddles,” they prove “tedious,” and Hardy’s rhyme on “love” and “rove”—a coupling that thwarts the chimeexpectant ear and, rendered distant by an intermediary couplet, the symmetryappreciative eye—also speaks to a kind of fatigue. Composed only five years after Symons’s “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” “Neutral Tones” boasts an aesthetic not only un-Decadent but un-luscious, and Bernard Richards aptly notes that Hardy “has a starkness of outlook and an impatience with the decorative and the self-indulgent that makes him seem not so very different, sometimes, from the Modernists” (241). Indeed, Modernism often seems a reformulation of the grotesque, since, as George Ford points out, “Twentieth-century verse is closer to Browning than to any other nineteenth-century writer, and Browning, much as he might admire Keats, is perhaps less close to his style of poetry than was any other major Victorian poet” (179–80). armstrong, it seems, would agree; since “[i]ts

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technique of montage, fragmentation and juxtaposition … looks forward to the poetic forms of high modernism,” Hardy’s grotesque Dynasts, she asserts, “is also perhaps the first modernist experiment” (488). of Hardy’s inheritors, T.S. eliot perhaps best articulates the marriage of containment to sensory blight that underlies Modern poetry. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he describes “the business of the poet” in a language that both prefigures armstrong’s sense of the grotesque’s delimited “pressure” and recalls Keats’s un-Wordsworthian desire for a poetics of picturesque constraint: [W]e must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all. (410)

eliot’s poem, it seems, is a grotto filled with the immaterial, a Hopkinsian placething that is not, in fact, a thing at all. “The poet’s mind,” he writes, “is … a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (408). The components of eliot’s list are notable; as his reference to “feelings, phrases, [and] images” suggests, his poetic “particles” are intellectual, not sensual. even Keats’s nightingale is less creature than creation, and the experience inspired by its song, eliot argues, has less to do with ears than with the brain that rests between them: “The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together” (409). Neither bird nor bower, eliot maintains, is the subject of the ode, and since, in a Modernist context, “the artistic process” (408) reigns supreme, the finished poetic product represents little more than the record of a solitary intellectual event. It most emphatically is not, as Keats suggests that it should be, “a balm upon the world” (The Fall of Hyperion l. 201). Richards observes that the Modernists largely defined themselves against their most visible “1890s predecessors, in whose hands the poetic traditions became threadbare and decadent” (241), but Modern literature, when compared to the luscious tradition that I have described is also “threadbare”—immaterial and certainly not evocative of textile. Despite their essential differences, both Decadence and Modernism eschew the social face of poetry and thereby deny form’s capacity to succor. Its grotto-esque (or grotesque) shape notwithstanding, there is nothing luscious about the poem—a mere exercise, it seems, in pseudo-chemical “concentration”—as eliot chillily describes it: [T]he poet has not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. (409)

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Buffered on one end by first-generation Romanticism and, on the other, by Decadence and proto-Modernism, the luscious aesthetic occupies an epoch as cleanly circumscribed as Keats’s Spenserian lake: the middle eighty or so years of the nineteenth century, a period during which england’s confined but luxury-packed spaces became loci of security for a new (and newly nervous) class of consumers. The english aesthetes questioned the bourgeois taste for material profusion, but as the nineteenth century eased into the twentieth, security itself became an ideal both less appealing (“any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development,” Wilde writes [“Phrases and Philosophies” 239]) and less plausible (“‘My labours—logicless— / you may explain; not I,’” says Hardy’s “unweeting” God [“New year’s eve” ll. 16–17, 30]) to an increasing and increasingly vocal proportion of english readers and critics. under such circumstances, the luscious, a poetics dedicated to sanctuary as well as luxury, found itself outmoded. as contemporary political discourse suggests, security has regained its status as an entity both valuable and attainable, but despite our artists’ renewed interest in the stuff of contemporary life, a luscious revival is not a likely prospect. Bill Brown, editor of Critical Inquiry’s 2001 issue dedicated to “Things,” observes that although the regard for material reality that underlay the luscious aesthetic informs numerous late twentieth-century historical studies—“These days, you can read books on the pencil, the zipper, the toilet, the banana, the chair, the potato, the bowler hat. These days, history can unabashedly begin with things and the senses by which we apprehend them” (2)—our culture’s preoccupation with things has not reinstated the material with the authority to soothe, with the power to convey a comfort beyond the merely physical. “[T]he quest for things may be a quest for a kind of certainty,” Brown writes, “but things is a word that tends, especially at its most banal, to index a certain limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and the unfigurable, the identifiable and the unidentifiable: Dr Seuss’s Thing one and Thing Two” (5). In other words, our recent taste for the unabstract has “hardly [put] a stop to that thing called theory” (3) and the frightening texts in which it thrives. In spatial language that recalls Keats’s, Tennyson’s, and Hopkins’s yearnings for poetic escape, Brown posits a dream of reassuring materiality that, in a post-Decadent, post-Modern culture of abstraction, simply cannot be: Why not let things alone? Let them rest somewhere else—in the balmy elsewhere beyond theory. From there, they might offer us dry ground above those swirling accounts of the subject, some place of origin unmediated by the sign, some stable alternative to the instabilities and uncertainties, the ambiguities and the anxieties, forever fetishized by theory. Something warm, then, that relieves us from the chill of dogged ideation, something concrete that relieves us from unnecessary abstraction. (1)

although our motives as readers of Keats and his luscious inheritors were already innumerable, Brown’s depiction of modern intellectual life—punctuated by an unwitting (or at least unacknowledged) echo of the “embalmed darkness” at the

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core of Keats’s “ode to a Nightingale”—adds yet another. His fantasy of thingy stability cannot be realized by contemporary writers, but as Wilde asserts in his epigrammatic “Phrases and Philosophies,” “The ages live in history through their anachronisms” (239). a luscious poem, therefore, can wrap present-day readers in a reality doubly alternative: a habitable tapestry of twining material series and an anachronistic philosophy of material succor that posits such a web as soothing. In a new age of inveterate talkers, luscious literature can afford a “balmy elsewhere.” In our darkness, embalmed poetry remains fresh.

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———. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell uP, 1986. Wordsworth, William. “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, 13 July 1798.” Romanticism: An Anthology. ed. Duncan Wu. 2nd ed. oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 265–9. Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. 2nd ed. oxford: Blackwell, 1998. yeats, William Butler. “ego Dominus Tuus.” The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats. ed. Peter allt and Russell K. alspach. New york: Macmillan, 1957. 367–71.

Index accents, in sprung rhythm, 158–9, 158n7 adburgham, alison, 49, 86, 88, 89 addison, Joseph, 36 aesthetic movement/aestheticism, 147–52, 187 aesthetic resistance, 187 “airy Citadel” letter (Keats), 47–9 alford, Dean, 136 alliteration, 161, 161n10, 178n13, 179, 180 alraschid, Haroun, 88 anastomosis, 48 architecture aesthetic reform and, 148–9 materiality of, 155–6 armstrong, Isobel, 190–92 ars poetica perspective, 184 art, Hopkins on, 143 artisan-made goods, 147–52, 158, 165, 172–3 “as kingfishers catch fire” (Hopkins), 153, 154 assonance, 161, 161n10 asylum-in-craft, 148–50, 172–3 avian imagery, 154, 174 Bagehot, Walter, 190 Bailey, Benjamin, 43, 45 Barthes, Roland, 48 Bate, W. Jackson, 5–6, 26, 44, 58n5, 60, 79 Baucom, Ian, 123 bazaars, 86, 88 beauty, 8, 27, 39, 44, 69, 146, 148, 150, 152; see also “Pied Beauty” (Hopkins) Beckson, Karl, 187–8, 189 Bennett, andrew, 20 Bentham, Jeremy, 1–2 Berg, Maxine, 29, 30–31, 40 Betz, Laura Wells, 25, 32, 60–61n6, 61n7 Biedermeier, Gottlieb, 25 Biedermeier literature, 25–7 “Binsey Poplars” (Hopkins), 172, 173

Birth of a Consumer Society, The (McKendrick), 32n2 Black Sun (Kristeva), 39 Blake, William, 8 “Blessed Virgin compared to the air we Breathe, The” (Hopkins), 174–6 Bloom, Harold, 95, 96 Boggs, Rebecca, 153 borders/boundaries permeable, 20, 22 Tennyson’s use of, 81, 83, 85, 108–9, 114, 122–3, 127, 129, 135, 143 textiles and blurred, 95–96 bourgeois residence, 18–19, 20, 31 bowers in Keats’s work, 6, 26, 35, 42, 53, 73–4 in Tennyson’s work, 107, 109, 118, 126 Bridges, Robert, 139, 140, 143, 144, 156–7n6, 157, 177, 179, 184 Brogan, T. V. F., 133 Brown, Bill, 193 Browning, Robert, 190–91 buckle/buckling, 169–70, 170n12 Buckler, William, 129 Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, 89–90 Burke, edmund, 5 Burns, 144 “Calidore” (Keats), 35–6, 41 Camelot, 124–38 “Candle Indoors, The” (Hopkins), 172 “Carrion Comfort” (Hopkins), 176–179, 181, 183 catalogue verse, 40 catalogues, use of, 19; see also parataxis crafted object and, 152 by Hopkins, 159, 161, 162–6, 169, 171, 182 by Keats, 42–3, 50–53, 55–6, 66–9, 72–7 luscious form and, 40–43, 65 straight vs. woven, 50–53, 55–6

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by Tennyson, 83, 84–5, 98, 101–6, 117–18, 135–7, 138 Chase, Karen, 93–4 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 36 “Cheery Beggar” (Hopkins), 172 Christ, in Hopkins’s work, 166, 167, 169n11, 174–5 Christmases, in Tennyson’s work, 100–101, 104, 137–8 “Cockle’s antibilious Pills” (Hopkins), 146–47 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 4, 8, 12, 22, 39–40 collections in Hopkins’s work, 165 in Keats’s work, 159 in Tennyson’s work, 113, 135–6, 159 commerce, Hopkins and, 145–7 Complete Poems (Keats), 39 Congleton, J. e., 133 connectedness, in Tennyson’s work, 103, 117, 118–19 “Consumer Revolution of eighteenthCentury england, The” (McKendrick), 32n2 consumerist culture, in nineteenth-century Britain, 18–19, 25, 29–32, 40, 62, 92, 95, 193 Cooley, arnold J., 125 Correggio, antonio da, 3 Crawford, Rachel, 3–4, 5, 29, 33, 36 creativity, Keats on, 47 crimson color, in Maud, 115–16 Critical Inquiry (journal), 193 Crystal Palace, 89–91 Curran, Stuart, 29 cymeriad, 159 cynghanedd, 159, 159n9 D’avanzo, Mario, 49 Davies, Walford, 139, 140, 141, 147, 154–5, 159, 163, 169 Decadence, 187–90 “Decadent Movement in Literature, The” (Symons), 188, 191 “Decorum of Lamia, The” (Hardison), 9–10 Della Cruscans, 41 “Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution” (Gilboy), 29

department stores, 20, 86, 88–9, 90–93, 133–4 Devlin, Christopher, 162–3 displacement theme, in Hopkins’s work, 166, 172, 175, 179 Distraining for the Rent (Wilkie), 31 dream states, Keats and, 49–50 Duns Scotus, John, 21, 160–61, 167–8 “Duns Scotus’s oxford” (Hopkins), 160–62, 163, 171, 173, 176 dyfalu, 159 Dynasts, The (Hardy), 191 echo, 114–15 edgecombe, Rodney Stenning, 2n1 “ego Dominus Tuus” (yeats), 28 Elements of Drawing, The (Ruskin), 152 eliot, T. S., 103, 192 elites, material luxuries and, 31–2 “elopement, The” (Hopkins), 156 empire British consumerism and, 29–30 Camelot and, 123–4, 129, 130, 137 enclosure theme Decadence and, 190 grotesque poetry and, 190–91 Hopkins and, 143 Keats and, 81–3, 85 revaluation of, 4 Tennyson and, 81–3, 85, 98–101, 110, 111–12, 114, 122–3, 130 end rhyme, 166 Endymion (Keats), 19, 38, 42–6, 189 enumeration, 72–3 “escorial, The” (Hopkins), 156 Eve of St. Agnes, The (Keats), 19, 53, 58–62, 101, 156 Everyman (Roth), 39n3 exchange, religious devotion and concept of, 146–6 exeter Change, 88 expansionist discourse, 3–4 Fall of Hyperion, The (Keats), 19, 38, 53–8, 77 fancy, 41, 42 Feeney, Joseph, 155, 170n12, 184 Finney, Gail, 28 Fischler, alan, 119

Index flake, 141–2 Floure and the Leafe, The (Chaucer), 36 Ford, George, 19–20, 138, 191 Fraistat, Neil, 11, 12 “Frost at Midnight” (Coleridge), 4, 12 Fruits of Empire (Walvin), 30 Gallienne, Richard Le, 189–90 gardenesque aesthetic, 33–4, 36 gardens/gardening Hunt and, 33–4, 36 Keats and, 34 Tennyson and, 118–9, 121–2 garland, 64, 64n8 Gaull, Marilyn, 38, 43 Gautier, Théophile, 187–8 Gentleman’s House, The (Kerr), 93 Gigante, Denise, 13, 14 Gilbert, elliot, 136 Gilboy, elizabeth, 29 Gilmour, Robin, 187 God/godhead defined, 10 in Hopkins’s work, 138, 140–43, 145–6, 148, 149–50, 153, 154, 160, 165–7, 171, 180–81, 182–3; see also “God’s Grandeur” (Hopkins) in Keats’s work, 10, 11, 12, 16–17, 17n3, 42, 56, 58 as latticed form, 180–81 pleasure and, 10–11 in Tennyson’s work, 87 godliness, artisan-made goods and, 149–50 “God’s Grandeur” (Hopkins), 146, 147, 159, 168–69, 170, 173, 181 good, conflation of pleasure with, 1 Goslee, Nancy Moore, 54, 56, 58 Graham, Colin, 123 Grail quest, 125–6 Great exhibition of 1851, 89 Great odes of 1819 (Keats), 19, 65–77 Grigson, Geoffrey, 166 grotesque poetry, 190–92 Haecceitas, 161, 163, 168 Hallam, arthur, 79, 84; see also In Memoriam (tennyson) “Handsome Heart, The” (Hopkins), 145–6 Hardison, o. B., Jr., 9–10

205

Hardy, Thomas, 191–2, 193 Harris, Daniel, 175, 176, 177, 178 Hayter, alethea, 37, 38 Hazlitt, William, 1–3, 10, 22 “Hélas” (Wilde), 189 Hemans, Felicia, 41 Herbert, George, 146 Hollander, John, 64 home, Victorian, 92–4, 95 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 139–85; see also individual works aesthetic reform movement and, 147–52 displacement/homelessness and, 166, 172, 175, 179 inscape and, 160–68 inscaped luxury and, 144–52 luscious form and, 21–2, 160–68 on luxury/material things, 144–6 poems, 1875–1883, 168–74 sprung rhythm and, 153–60, 161 on Tennyson, 138 terrible sonnets/late poems, 174–85 textile-text and, 153–60 Hopkins, Manley, 159n8 Hughes, Linda, 124, 134 Hunt, elizabeth, 33–4 Hunt, Leigh, 2, 6–7, 10, 32–4 Hunter, John, 13 “Hurrahing in Harvest” (Hopkins), 164 Huysman, Joris Karl, 188, 190 “I Hear america Singing” (Whitman), 40 “I stood tiptoe” (Keats), 42, 63 “I wake and feel” (Hopkins), 179, 180, 181 “Idealist, The” (Tennyson), 94 idyll, 133–4 Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 21, 99, 121–38 infrastructure, 133–5 “If by dull rhymes our english must be chained” (Keats), 63–5, 67 “Imitation of Spenser” (Keats), 18–19, 25–8, 36–7 “Imperial Measures” (Morton), 29n1 imperialism, British, 116, 123–4 In Memoriam (Tennyson), 20, 84, 90, 99, 100–108, 180, 184 infrastructure of, 101–2, 103, 105

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inscape, 21, 140, 141, 143, 149–50, 151–2, 169, 178n13, 183, 185 as luscious form, 160–68 inscaped luxury, 144–52 instress, 21, 140 intellection, Romantic age and, 1–2, 8 interpretable text, 134 interrogative poem, 39–40 Isabella (Keats), 19, 50–53 Joseph, Gerhard, 96–7 Jowett, Benjamin, 129 joy, 6, 11, 15, 69, 182 Keats, George, 35 “Keats, Hazlitt, and augustan Poetry” (edgecombe), 2n1 Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (Mizukoshi), 33 Keats, John; see also individual works addiction to poetry, 37–8 on creativity, 47 Decadence and, 187–8, 189 Hopkins and, 140n2, 154 on Hunt, 6 luscious experience and luscious text, 34–9 luscious text and luscious form, 39–43 luxury goods and luscious experience, 28–34 material sublime and, 5, 189 on pleasure, 2, 3, 6–7, 10–11, 23 portrayal of olympian gods, 17n3 redefinition of language as material, 8–9 rich enclosures and, 34–5 Tennyson and, 19–20, 79–85 weaving in work of 1818, 46–62 1819, 62–77 Keats, Tom, 53 Keats and the Victorians (Ford), 19–20 Keat’s Life of Allegory (Levinson), 9 Keepsake, 113 Kerr, Robert, 93 Kerrigan, John, 159, 159n8 Kiernan, Victor, 123, 124 Koerber, Jerome, 91, 134 “Kraken, The” (Tennyson), 88

Kristeva, Julia, 39 Kruger, Kathryn, 48 Lachman, Lilach, 53 “Lady of Shalott, The” (Tennyson), 89, 96–100, 166 Lamia (Keats), 9–19, 22–23 l’art pour l’art (Gautier), 187–8 Lawler, Justus, 165 Leach, Frederick, 151 “Leaden echo, The” (Hopkins), 147 Leopold, allison Kyle, 95 “Lesser arts, The” (Morris), 148, 150 lettering of syllables, 161n10 LeVasseur, Jeanne, 157 Levenson, Michael, 93–4 Levinson, Marjorie, 8–9, 12–13n2, 14, 16–17, 27, 34, 82 line-broken series in Keats’s work, 59, 60, 62, 65, 68–9, 70, 74 in Tennyson’s work, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108 lists see catalogues; parataxis list-within-a-list technique, 65 Locker-Lampson, Frederick, 87 Logan, Thad, 92 “London’s Summer Morning” (Robinson), 41 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 134 luscious, characterization of, 27–8 luscious aesthetic age of, 193–4 catalogue and, 40–43 Hopkins and, 21–2, 159, 160–68, 185 inscape as, 160–68 Keats and, 7, 9–20, 28–9, 33, 43, 47, 50, 53, 55, 63, 65, 84 Tennyson and, 19–21, 84–5, 95, 99, 113, 138 luscious experience Keats’s luscious text and, 34–9 luxury goods and, 28–34 luscious poem, 7–9 parataxis and, 42 sprung rhythm and, 21 luscious space, Victorian experience and, 85–94 lusciousness, 28, 37, 63, 166, 174, 179, 185 Decadence vs., 190

Index luxury, 7 aesthetic reform movement and, 147–52 inscaped, 144–52 luscious experience and, 27, 28–34 nineteenth-century culture of, 29–32, 85–6 Lycius, 13–16 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge), 37 Lysack, Krista, 92 MacKenzie, Norman, 170n12 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier), 188 Madge, Charles, 164 Malory, Thomas, 134 “Mariana” (Tennyson), 79, 94 Martin, Meredith, 158n7 material culture, Tennyson and, 85–94 material sublime, 5, 7, 9, 12, 54, 189 materiality in Isabella, 50–53 Romantic attitudes toward, 3–4 Mathew, George Felton, 35–6 Maud (Tennyson), 20, 99, 108–21 “May Magnificat, The” (Hopkins), 162–4, 165, 171, 173, 182 McDonald, Gail, 90, 91, 92 McGann, Jerome, 8 McKendrick, Neil, 32n2 Meredith, George, 134 metamorphosis, in Lamia, 13n2, 14 metrical foot, 157 Michelangelo, 3 Michie, Helena, 125 Middle-class domestic spaces, 18, 26, 31 Miller, J. Hillis, 48 Milroy, James, 161n10, 166 Milton, John, 3, 53–5, 87 mind, life of, 28–9 mirror, in “The Lady of Shalott,” 97 Mizukoshi, ayumi, 33, 34 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 152 Modernism, 191–3 monodrama, 110, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120 monstrosity, aesthetic definition of, 13 Morris, William, 21, 147–9, 150–51, 152, 158, 160, 168, 173, 187 Morris and Co., 150–51 Morte d’Arthur (Malory), 134

207

Morton, Timothy, 29–30, 62 Motion, andrew, 26 “My own heart” (Hopkins), 179, 180, 181 Nash, W., 123 Nemoianu, Virgil, 25–6, 39 Nenadic, Stana, 25, 31, 32 “Neutral Tones” (Hardy), 191 Newlyn, Lucy, 61n7 Newtonian science, Keats’s critique of, 19 “No worst, there is none” (Hopkins), 176 “Now, Descriptive of a Hot Day” (Hunt), 32, 41, 102 “o Solitude!” (Keats), 34 “o that ’twere possible” (Tennyson), 113–15 objects aesthetic reform movement and, 148–9, 150, 151, 152 Romantic view of, 5, 21–2, 31–2 texts as, 142, 153, 159, 165, 174 oceanus, 57–8 o’Connor, Michael Patrick, 41, 42 octave, 166 “ode on a Grecian urn” (Keats), 66, 67–8 “ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 20, 39n3, 65, 66, 70–74, 192, 194 “ode on Indolence” (Keats), 67, 69–70 “ode on Melancholy” (Keats), 67, 68–9 “ode to Psyche” (Keats), 66, 67 “on First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (Keats), 79–80 “on Gusto” (Hazlitt), 2–3 “on Sitting Down to Read King Lear once again” (Keats), 46–7 “on Sleep” (Keats), 38 ong, Walter, 40 Ottava rima, 58n5 outrides, 157 oxford, Hopkins and, 155, 160–62 Oxford English Dictionary, 28 “Palace of art, The” (Tennyson), 91–2, 95 Palgrave, F. T., 86, 87–8 palliative effect of text, 37–8, 100, 174, 176, 177, 184, 188 paradise, 189 Paradise Lost (Milton), 53–4, 87

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parataxis, 41–2; see also catalogues, use of Hopkins’s use of, 159, 171 Keats’s use of, 42–4, 46 Tennyson’s use of, 102, 135–6 weaving and, 47 parlor, Victorian, 93–4, 95 Parnassianism, 173–4 Pater, Walter, 21, 147, 155–6, 157–8, 187, 190 “Patience, hard thing!” (Hopkins), 179, 180–81 pattern Hopkins and, 20, 140–41, 143, 151, 153–4, 158, 159–60, 163, 165, 166–7, 168–9, 173–4, 176, 178–9, 181–2 Keats and, 49, 64, 69, 101 Morris and, 158 Pattison, Robert, 101 Paxton, Joseph, 89 “Peace” (Hopkins), 172–4, 176 “Penmaen Pool” (Hopkins), 164 Perelman, Bob, 41, 42 permeability of boundaries/enclosures, 81–3, 85, 111, 115 of Camelot, 124–7 of skin, 125 of spaces, 20, 89, 107, 130, 134, 137 of text, 84–5, 96, 98, 102, 104, 108 Perry, Seamus, 20, 85, 91–2 Peters, W. a. M., 171 Petrarchan sonnet, 166 Phillips, Catherine, 139n1, 156n6 Philomel, 59–60, 70, 96 Philosophical Enquiry (Burke), 5 “Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the young” (Wilde), 188–9, 194 picturesque, 4–5, 7, 54, 56 “Pied Beauty” (Hopkins), 145, 152, 159, 164, 170, 173, 181 pitch, 167–8 place, Hopkins and, 21, 139–42, 143, 149, 154, 156, 167–8, 174, 192 place-craft duality, 140 place-thing conflation, 140, 141–2, 143, 149, 156, 167, 168, 174, 192 pleasure conflation with good, 1 Decadent, 189 divinity and, 10–11

Hopkins and, 21 Hunt and, 33–4 Romantic age and, 1–2 space and, 2–3 in “Tintern abbey,” 6 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (Tennyson), 79 poems, interrogative, 39–40 Poetic Closure (Smith), 42 poetic list, 19 poetic vision, defined, 35 Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The, 170n12 Poetics of Spice, The (Morton), 29n1 Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830 (Crawford), 3 “Poet’s Mind, The” (Tennyson), 19–20, 85 Pope, alexander, 17–18 Porphyro’s feast, 61–2 Princess, The (Tennyson), 93, 95, 116 Purcell, Henry, 150 quatrain, 65 Questioning Presence, The (Wolfson), 39 Rape of the Lock, The (Pope), 17–18 Rappaport, erika Diane, 88, 90, 136n4 Rebours, A (Huysman), 188, 189 “Recollections of the arabian Nights” (Tennyson), 86–7, 93 reiteration, 72–3 religious devotion, promise of exchange and, 145–6 Renaissance, The (Pater), 187 Reynolds, J. H., 5, 47, 77 Reynolds, Matthew, 123, 128 rhyme, 161–62, 161n10; see also sprung rhythm end, 166 Rice, James, 50 Richards, Bernard, 101, 191, 192 Richardson, alan, 38 Ricks, Christopher, 9 Roberts, adam, 79 Robinson, Jeffrey, 41, 42 Robinson, Mary, 41 Romantic age, 1 attitudes toward space, 2–5 intellectual experience and, 1–2, 8 Romantic consumerism, 29–30

Index Romantic Ideology, The (McGann), 8 Romanticism, 1, 39, 193 Ross, Robert, 105 Roth, Philip, 39n3 Rowlinson, Matthew, 114 Royal London Bazaar, 88 Ruskin, John, 129, 147, 152, 187 Rzepka, Charles, 71n9 “Saint Simeon Stylites” (Tennyson), 87 sanctuary, 20, 75, 77, 93, 95, 107, 139, 141–3, 173, 174 Sandy, Mark, 39n3, 70–71, 71n9, 138, 140n2, 154, 169 sangiad, 159 Saville, Julia, 21, 151–2, 167, 171–2, 179, 181 Schulman, Samuel, 113 Schwartz, Sanford, 134–5 Scotist theology, 162–3 Scott, Walter (Sir), 32 sculpturesque, 56 “Sea and the Skylark, The” (Hopkins), 148, 169, 170, 171, 173 security/insecurity in The Eve of St. Agnes, 58–62 in Hyperion, 55–8 sense sublime, 5–6 sensuality Decadence and, 187–90 grotesque poetry and, 190–92 sestet, 65, 166 sestina, 178 Shakespeare, William, 3, 44 Sheley, erin, 17n3, 45n4, 67, 74n10 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 20 shops/shopping, 30, 86, 136n4; see also consumerist culture Keats and, 62 sensory profusion and, 18–19 Tennyson and, 88–9, 98 Victorian home and, 92–3 short lyric, rediscovery of, 4 shot-silk, poetry and, 134, 135 signification, 130 Simeon, John, 113 “Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere” (Tennyson), 89, 90 skin, paradox of Victorian, 125 skothending, 161

209

sky vision, in “ode to a Nightingale,” 72 “Sleep and Poetry” (Keats), 36 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 41–2 “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing” (Morris), 158 “Song of Myself” (Whitman), 40 sonnets Hopkins and, 166, 168–72 terrible sonnets, 171–2, 174–85 Keats and experimentation with, 63–5 sonority, 60–61n6, 62, 64 Southey, Robert, 88 space(s); see also enclosure in Biedermeier literature, 26 in Hopkins’s work, 139–40, 144 interconnected, in text, 116 in Keats’s work, 43, 47, 53–4 luxury consumption and, 29–30 pleasure and, 2–3 Romantic attitudes toward, 2–5 in Tennyson’s work, 82–5, 105–6, 114–15, 125–6, 127–33, 138 text as, 20, 105–6, 114–15, 127–33, 138 thing as, 155–6 verse and, 36–7 spatial experience, equation with textual experience, 80 “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” (Hopkins), 182–4 Spenserian stanza, 58, 58n5 Sperry, Stuart, 59, 75 Spirit of the Age, The (Hazlitt), 1 splendor, in Keats’s work, 19 “Spring and Fall” (Hopkins), 172 “Spring” (Hopkins), 159 sprung rhythm, 21, 139, 156–60, 161, 182 stanza, 101–2 “Starlight Night, The” (Hopkins), 146, 159, 168–9, 170, 173, 181, 183 stationing, 54 Stillinger, Jack, 52–3, 59 “Stitching and unstitching Camelot” (Schwartz), 134–5 Story of Rimini, The (Hunt), 6–7 stresses, 158n7, 179–80 “Style” (Pater), 155–6 sublime, 4–5 material, 5, 7, 9, 12, 54, 189 picturesque and, 7

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sense, 5–6 Swann, Karen, 44, 64 sweetshop window, Keats and, 28 Symons, arthur, 188, 189, 191 systematicity, 16–17 Taine, Hippolyte, 86–7 Taming of Romanticism (Nemoianu), 25 tapestry aesthetic, 58–60 Taylor, John, 42 Taylor, Warington, 151 Tennyson, alfred (Lord); see also individual works Keats and, 19–20, 79–85 luscious form and, 19–21 material culture and, 85–94 weaving and, 94–100 Tennyson, Hallam, 79, 86, 87, 121, 133 Tennyson, Lionel, 87 Tennyson and the Text (Joseph), 96–7 terrible sonnets, Hopkins’s, 160, 174–85 tessera, 95–6 textiles; see also weaving language/theme Hopkins and, 153–60, 165, 171, 175 Tennyson and, 94–100, 131–3, 134–5 text and, 48, 49 textile-text, 153–60, 175 text(s) as enterable object, 142–3 as habitable reality, 72, 188 luscious, into luscious form, 39–43 luscious experience and luscious, 34–9 as objects, 142, 153, 159, 165, 174 palliative effect of, 37–8, 100, 174, 176, 177, 184, 188 spatial character of, 20 textiles/weaving and, 48, 49, 94, 153–60, 175 things and, 153–4, 155–6, 158 woven, 48, 57, 64, 72, 131, 137 textual experience, equation with spatial experience, 80 textual place, Hopkins and, 143–4 textual space, in Tennyson’s work, 105–6, 114–15, 127–33, 138 Thackeray, William, 129 “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire” (Hopkins), 183–4 theopoetics, 165

things cumulative character of, 170 luscious aesthetic and, 159, 193 place/sanctuary in, 140, 141–3, 154, 167–8 as space, 155–6 text and, 153–4, 155–6, 158 “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend” (Hopkins), 182, 184–5 “Timbuctoo” (Tennyson), 79–85 “Tintern abbey” (Wordsworth), sense sublime and, 5–6 Titian, 3 “To a Friend who Sent me some Roses” (Keats), 35 “To autumn” (Keats), 65, 70, 74–7, 184 “To Hope” (Keats), 34–5 “To J[ames] R[ice]” (Keats), 50 “To one who has been long in city pent” (Keats), 35 “To seem the stranger” (Hopkins), 179, 180, 181 “To what serves Mortal Beauty?” (Hopkins), 181 Toilet and the Cosmetic Arts in Ancient and Modern Times, The (Cooley), 125 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (eliot), 192 Trilling, Lionel, 9 Trott, Nicola, 5 Tucker, Herbert, 112, 115–16 Tyndall, John, 86 Unfettering Poetry (Robinson), 41 “useful Work Versus useless Toil” (Morris), 147, 150 utilitarianism, pleasure and, 1–2 Vendler, Helen, 9, 72–4 verse space, 36–7 versification, Keats and, 63 Villard, Léonie, 84 Wagner, Jennifer, 19, 63, 166, 167, 170, 171 Walvin, James, 30 weaving language/theme; see also textiles in Hopkins’s work, 160–61, 164–5, 169–71, 172, 173, 174–6, 177, 180–85

Index in Keats’s work 1818, 46–62 1819, 63–77 Morris and, 158 Philomel and, 59–60 in Tennyson’s work, 84–5, 94–108, 110, 112–17, 120–21, 131–3, 134–8 text and, 48, 49, 94, 153–60, 175 Victorian aesthetic and, 94–5 Weaving the Word (Kruger), 48 web in Hopkins’s work, 164, 165, 172, 174, 176, 178, 181 in Keats’s work, 67, 96, 160, 171 in Tennyson’s work, 96, 112–13, 120–21 Webb, Timothy, 41 Weir, David, 190 Weiss, Theodore, 155 Welsh verse, 159 “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (Keats), 46–7 White, Norman, 152, 166, 168, 173, 175

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Whitman, Walt, 40, 158 Wicke, Jennifer, 90–91, 150 Wilde, oscar, 188–9, 193, 194 Wilkie, David, 31 Wimsatt, James, 153, 156n6, 159n9, 161, 166, 178n13 “Windhover, The” (Hopkins), 169, 170, 173 window shopping, 88–9, 98 wine, in “ode to a Nightingale,” 72–3 Wolfson, Susan, 19, 39–40, 64 “Woodlark, The” (Hopkins), 165 Wordsworth, William, 1, 4, 5–6, 8, 10 world, life in, 28–9 woven catalogues, 50–53, 55–6 in Great odes of 1819, 66–9, 72–7 woven text, Keats and, 48, 57, 64, 72, 131, 137 “Wreck of the Deutschland, The” (Hopkins), 21, 139–44, 153, 167 yeats, William Butler, 28