New Conservative Explications : Reasoning with some Classic English Poems [1 ed.] 9781443828017, 9781443827157

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New Conservative Explications

New Conservative Explications: Reasoning with some Classic English Poems

By

Kenneth B. Newell

New Conservative Explications: Reasoning with some Classic English Poems, by Kenneth B. Newell This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Kenneth B. Newell All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2715-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2715-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 The Creator as Divine Smith: Blake’s “The Tyger” Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 11 The Nature of Lucy’s “Sleep”: Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 19 Form by Association: Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 27 Beauty as the Only Truth: The Last Seven Lines of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 33 Transfiguration Re-imagined: The “Rome” Section of Shelley’s Adonais Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 41 Faith and Honest Doubt: The “Prologue” to Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 47 The Knight Who Wanted to Rival Shakespeare: Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” Chapter Eight............................................................................................. 55 A Tragic Hero Goes Home: Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 65 The Unanswered Question: Hardy’s “Hap”

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Chapter Ten ............................................................................................... 71 Folksong about an Irish Sun God: Yeats’s “Who Goes With Fergus?” Chapter Eleven .......................................................................................... 81 Pearse, MacDonagh, and the Two Voices: Yeats’s “Easter 1916” Chapter Twelve ......................................................................................... 91 The Flow of Feeling: Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” Notes.......................................................................................................... 97 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 107 About the Author ..................................................................................... 117

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is dedicated to my wife and fellow scholar Rosalie. Besides generally being a blessing in my life, she, along with Marsha Kinder and now departed relatives and friends—Ruth Skolnik, Libby Sheklow, Morris Sheklow, Genee Fadiman, Bill Fadiman, and Beverle Houston—provided generous support or advice that forwarded the writing of the book. Jackie Elam, Karla Shippey, and publisher’s anonymous reviewers also gave good advice. Ross Scimeca, Katherina Bell, and Brian Hartlet gave valuable library assistance, Edward Ipp gave valuable technical assistance, and Carol Koulikourdi, Amanda Millar, and Soucin Yip-Sou deftly shepherded the book through the publishing process. Manuel Schonhorn has provided enduring friendship, discussion, and collegiality. So too, while they lived, did L.S. Dembo, Bernard A. Block, and William D. Wolf. Hyman Kleinman and William York Tindall were inspiring teachers, and William H. Marshall was both inspiring teacher and friend. I regret only that this statement of my gratitude to all of them cannot be read by all of them. Chapter 10 was originally published in a slightly different form as “Yeats’s Fergus as a Sun God,” Éire-Ireland 13.1 (1978): 76-86, © 1977 by the Irish American Cultural Institute.

PREFACE

Because of the triumph of postmodern studies, explication of classic poems by great dead white male English poets of preceding centuries has greatly declined in the last several decades, even though many of the poems may still be puzzling to interested readers, young and old. And because of their puzzlement, the curious young readers may be trying— and the persistent old ones may still be trying—to gain what they would consider a basic “understanding” of some of the poems. This book is addressed to both audiences in the hope that new explications of some classic English poems (or sections of these poems) of the last two centuries will encourage the former’s curiosity about the poems and reinforce the latter’s continued devotion to them. Of course, in the present age, an explication cannot take the form of trumpeting a new and “correct” reading of a poem and so discarding all other readings as “incorrect.” But a lesser attempt may still be helpful—a new reading that is only a basic explication rather than a full-blown interpretation, that results from reasoning with any seemingly relevant evidence from either inside or outside the poem, and that purports to be, not “correct,” but only either more probable than an older explication or more-or-less as probable. Of the readings that follow, eight are offered as more probable, and three others—on poems by Wordsworth, Keats, and Browning—are offered as more-or-less as probable. Although the explication procedure is now unpopular in theory and held to be as subjective as interpretation, the procedure is based on the experience that, if a puzzling poem is reasoned with, it can often be found to make sense on a basic level of understanding—a sense perhaps complex, ambiguous, or ambivalent but not self-contradictory. And in an attempt to show that the procedure can resist subjectivity, a new reading of Blake’s “The Tyger” is offered but regretfully acknowledged to be less probable than an older explication. In essence, then, this is a book of poetry explications having esthetic aims but written in an era of unesthetic political and cultural studies. Of course, my using the word conservative in the title of the book may seem

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not only political but politically reactionary. However, conservative should be understood here as referring not to political but to explicatory conservatism as well as to critical and literary conservation—i.e., to conserving the practice of explication whether upon literary works old or new, and so also conserving esthetic interest in the old works themselves. In this book the selected works are twelve classic Romantic, Victorian, and Modern English poems or sections of these poems. Although they were explicated in the past, they are still puzzling even on a basic level of understanding, and so here they are newly explicated. Two of them (Hardy’s “Hap” and Yeats’s “Who Goes With Fergus?”) received fewer explications than they deserved because of critical interest in other poems by their authors; so too did two poem sections (the “Rome” stanzas of Shelley’s Adonais and the “Prologue” to Tennyson’s In Memoriam) because of critical interest in other sections. But other poems (Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum,” Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” and Auden’s elegy on Yeats) did receive the amount of explication they deserved, to the point of diminishing returns. And still others (Blake’s “The Tyger,” Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” the last seven lines of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”) were explicated far past that point and became critical causes célèbres, so that one must be doubly reckless not only to explicate old classic poems but also to offer presumably new readings of them.1 Nonetheless, I have taken the chance in the hope that, since all the readings here are conservative by current interpretive standards, conservativeness of explication will balance recklessness of choice. I have also taken the chance in the hope of showing that new conservative readings are still possible and can be still useful—even in the postmodern era and even on classic poems already much explicated—and that therefore explication still has much to do in the work of literary studies in the postmodern era. Let explication continue to do its work, and, if on some day in the distant future, it once again becomes a norm in literary criticism to explicate classic English poems, then-grown-old conservative readings of some of them may be found to be still useful. *****

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At this point, four caveats are in order: (1) Superficially, a relatively probable explication looks enough like a conventional explication to be, at first glance, mistaken for an exercise in the New Criticism. However, unlike that exercise, it can incorporate evidence from any source, not just the language of the text, and it exists here only in the comparison with one or more alternative explications instead of by itself as a “true” New Critical reading. (2) Whereas the explication offered here of one particular poem may be compared with many alternative explications, the explication offered here of another poem may be compared with only one alternative explication. However, it should not be supposed that this variation is an unevenness in an attempted survey of known explications of the poem. I have attempted no such survey. (3) I sometimes discuss in detail a crux on which I think the explication of a poem depends, but that does not mean that I intend to expand the explication into a full-scale interpretation of the poem. I have not attempted any such interpretations. (4) In any chapter, if it becomes necessary to repeat more than once that one explication is more probable than another or more-or-less as probable as another, I substitute a less precise but shorter phrase indicating, respectively, preference (e.g., one explication instead of or rather than another) or lack of preference (e.g., either one explication or another). In this way, the monotony and wordiness that would result from repetition of the relative-probability statement can be avoided. Nonetheless, the reader should understand that by the shorter phrase I mean that statement.

CHAPTER ONE THE CREATOR AS DIVINE SMITH: BLAKE’S “THE TYGER”

From the beginning of the poem two metaphors are in evidence. The Creator as a divine smith or blacksmith “frame[d]” the tiger1—i.e., gave it “form” (a manuscript reading) rather than created it out of nothing;2 and He formed the eyes (and perhaps all) of the tiger out of the fire of stars. The Creator’s smithy may therefore have been the starry heavens as well as the earth. Although the metaphor of the Creator as blacksmith becomes explicit when hammer, chain, furnace, and anvil are named as devices used in the creation, the blacksmith metaphor may first be suspected in the images where the Creator’s hand dares seize the fire (Adams, Blake 64) and frame the symmetry of the tiger and where His shoulder twists the sinews of its heart (John Grant 597-98). Similarly, although the metaphor of the tiger’s eyes as stellar fire becomes explicit in the question “In what distant deeps or skies / Burnt the fire of thine eyes?”3 the metaphor of the whole tiger as stellar fire may first be suspected in the image of the tiger “burning bright / In the forests of the night.” Besides being envisioned as an animal whose eyes reflect light at night (or whose bright orange hide is flame-colored) and so may be described as “burning bright” in the nighttime forests, the tiger may be envisioned also as a creature of stars—not the same as the ancient mythological creatures who were the constellations, yet like them in being composed of stellar fire and thus “burning bright” in the forestlike night (for the night sky may be figuratively described as “forests” of interspersed light, darkness, and shadow).4 By mention of the hammer, chain, furnace, anvil, seizing hand, and twisting shoulder, the poem evokes several steps in the blacksmithing process. With one hand, using tongs, the blacksmith holds in the furnace the piece of metal to be forged. With the other hand he pumps the top, movable handle of the furnace bellows to make the fire hotter. A chain attaches that handle to the furnace wall, and another chain attaches the bottom, immovable handle to the floor (as illustrated in Plate 6 of

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Jerusalem). When the piece of metal is as red- or white-hot as he needs, he twists, hammers, or otherwise works it into shape on the anvil.5 But a further step in the process is also relevant to the poem: the blacksmith then plunges the hot shaped metal into cold water to temper or merely cool it; and as the hot metal strikes the surface of the water, it sends a steamy shower of hot water droplets into the air (Watson 2, 50). The act of immersion here (rather than its result) is evoked in a rejected stanza written in Blake’s notebook around 1792. The stanza continues the thought of the last two lines of the preceding third stanza: And when thy heart began to beat What dread hand & what dread feet Could fetch it from the furnace deep And in thy horrid ribs dare steep In the well of sanguine woe In what clay & in what mould Were thy eyes of fury rolld (N109)

The object of quenching the hot metal in a bath of water is accomplished, in lines 2-3 of the above stanza, by inserting the hot heart into the rib cage where it “steep[s]” in a “well” of (“sanguine”) blood enclosed by the ribs. In addition, the result of immersion (rather than the act) is perhaps evoked in the couplet of lines 17-18: “When the stars threw down their spears, / And water’d heaven with their tears.” In a trial draft in Blake’s notebook this couplet was only six lines away from the metaphor of the tiger’s eyes as stellar fire and, when rearranged as directed by numbers in the notebook, was only three lines away: Burnt in distant deeps or skies The cruel fire of thine eyes Could heart descend or wings aspire What the hand dare sieze the fire 5 dare he smile laugh 3 And did he laugh his work to see ankle What the shoulder what the knee Dare 4 Did he who made the lamb make thee 1 When the stars threw down their spears 2 And waterd heaven with their tears (N108)

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Therefore, the relatedness of the stars in the couplet to eyes is more apparent in the notebook than in the published version where the couplet is eleven lines away. Besides, wherever placed in the poem, the couplet in itself relates the stars to eyes, for the stars “water’d heaven with their tears” (Deen 73). As a consequence, the couplet may be read as referring to the final step in creating the tiger: inserting its eyes. Having “dare[d] sieze the fire” from the stars to make the eyes, the Divine Blacksmith then performed the immersion that tempered or cooled them by inserting them into the tiger’s head (just as, in the rejected stanza, He had done for the heart by inserting it into the rib cage). Now quenched, the stars that formed the eyes ceased to be incandescent—to throw off or radiate rays of light like “spears”; and so it could be said that they “threw down their spears.” (However, quenching the stellar fire of the eyes did not make them cold or dull, just as steeping the beating heart in a well of blood did not make it stop beating. Like the rest of the tiger, the eyes were still “burning bright,” glowing with inner fire: they were still “eyes of fury.”) Also upon immersion, the hot stars that formed the eyes sent a steamy shower of hot liquid droplets into the air, and so it could be said that these stars “water’d heaven with their tears.” Four other possible readings of the couplet seem simpler but less coherent and so less probable: (1) The couplet announces the dawn, when the stars fade and the dew falls (Wicksteed 198; Pottle 39). If it is assumed that the Creator made the tiger at night (as well as that, in the poem, the tiger is envisioned at night), the question in line 19 then becomes, Did the Creator smile when the dawn came and He could “see” His finished work for the first time in the daylight? However, the reading is problematic because of the “dew”: In Blake’s time the stars were not thought to emit the dew and, with it, to water heaven as well as earth and its layer of air.6 (2) The couplet means that the “tiger grew on earth because the stars rained down their influences—threw down beams of light like ‘spears,’ and ‘watered heaven’ with those waters above the firmament that fertilise all growth in the elemental earth below” (Raine 49). But this reading too is problematic: If the beams of starlight were enough by themselves to make the tiger grow on earth, falling rainwater would not be additionally necessary to make it grow and so would not be necessary to mention in this context. Of course, Blake may merely have added the reference to the simultaneously falling waters gratuitously either to describe more fully the time of the creation of the tiger or to fill out the couplet with a second line and a rhyme; or else the reading here may be implying that the stars rain down their influences not directly upon the earth and its creatures but only

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upon the “waters above the firmament,” thus causing them to fall upon the earth and its creatures and make them grow. However, the first possibility questions Blake’s prosodic ability, and the second causes the growth of the tiger improbably to be considered part of “all growth” that the waters “fertilise . . . in” the earth. (3) Both lines of the couplet announce the same phenomenon (fiery heavenly bodies emitting light) but announce it in different terms: In one sense, the stars throw down spear-like rays of light; in another sense, the stars shower down light corpuscles (“Newton’s Particles of light”—418), which are like teardrops (Stevenson 14). Or, in one sense, the stars throw down a shower of meteors and/or the meteors throw down spear-like rays of light; in another sense, the meteors are themselves tears figuratively: the Perseid showers of meteors were known as “the tears of St. Laurence,” because they fell from heaven most abundantly on his feast day, 10 August. By tradition, St. Laurence was martyred on a gridiron and thus the falling stars were said to be his “fiery tears.” (Olson and Olson 17)

If again it is assumed that the Creator made the tiger at night, the question in line 19 becomes, Did the Creator smile when He saw His finished work by starlight and meteorlight? However, since He created the tiger by starlight and meteorlight and at least its eyes from starlight or meteorlight, He would not have seen the tiger by better light after the creation than during it. Therefore, the couplet would be superfluous in the poem. (4) The couplet announces the first occurrence of “lightning and thunderstorm—the actual, fulminatory beginning of the working universe” (Bier 42). In the alternate account of the Creation in Genesis 2, God makes rain (verse 6) before He makes the animals (verse 19). But why, then, should the couplet begin with “When” rather than “After,” and why should the creation of the tiger be “timed” by that event (the first rainstorm) rather than by any of the other events that preceded the making of the animals? A fifth possible reading seems less simple as well as, again, less coherent and so less probable: the stars are “assistants to the divine blacksmith” forging the tiger in a heavenly smithy, and the “spear-like rays of light from actual stars” are sparks showering down as the heavenly smiths strike hot metal with their hammers. After the shaping, they “watered heaven with their tears” to temper the still-glowing tiger-metal, yet in anguish over the thing they had helped create. (Eberly 12)

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The question in line 19 then becomes, When (or although) the Creator’s assistant smiths wept over the making of the tiger, did He (by contrast) “smile” over it? However, the reading is problematic. Did the smiths weep intentionally (to temper the metal) or unintentionally (because they could not contain their “anguish”)? They could not have wept for both reasons. Moreover, in striking sparks from the hot metal with their hammers, the smiths would not have intentionally thrown down the sparks, for these would have flown off freely in all directions. At most, the smiths could be said to have let fall the sparks. But, if the Creator needed help from assistants in creating or if assistants themselves did the creating, then such creating could not suggest, as does “The Tyger,” the inconceivably dread power of a Being that could and did create a life-form of such dread power as the tiger.7 Because these five less coherent readings of the couplet introduce all the above problems, the preceding reading of the couplet—the (insertingthe-) tiger’s-eyes reading—seems preferable for the time being. Besides, it is similar to the reading of an easily understood passage from Blake’s The Book of Los (1795), which describes the creation of the sun (“an Orb” like the eye).8 Here the sun is made not by God and/or many assistants but by God’s demiurge Los—the Creator as smith. As in “The Tyger” the forging process also begins with the fire and light of the stars—“the fierce fires / that glow’d furious in the expanse” and the “Light from the fires, / Beams” that, “conducted by fluid so pure, / Flow’d around the Immense.” And first from those infinite fires, The light that flow’d down on the winds He siez’d, beating incessant, condensing The subtil particles in an Orb. Roaring indignant, the bright sparks Endur’d the vast Hammer; but unwearied Los beat on the Anvil, till glorious An immense Orb of fire he fram’d. Oft he quench’d it beneath in the Deeps, Then survey’d the all bright mass, Again Siezing fires from the terrific Orbs, He heated the round Globe, then beat, While, roaring, his Furnaces endur’d The chain’d Orb in their infinite wombs. Nine ages completed their circles When Los heated the glowing mass, casting It down into the Deeps: the Deeps fled

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Chapter One Away in redounding smoke: the Sun Stood self-balanc’d. And Los smil’d with joy. (259-60 or Plate 5: lines 8-12, 27-45)

As in the forging of the tiger, the hand here also “siez’d” fire from the stars and “fram’d” it, using furnace, hammer, and anvil; and when the “chain’d Orb” of stellar fire was quenched in the Deeps, the water “fled away in redounding smoke” and the Orb remained “all bright.” At the end of the process, Los appraised the finished sun with a smile. On the other hand, the tiger being finished, the poet there rather asks about the Creator’s appraisal of it: “Did he smile his work to see?” The smile may allude distantly to the Old Testament Creator’s appraisal of His finished work: “And God saw that it was good.”9 But the question in “The Tyger” is not answered as in Genesis—with an affirmation of the goodness of the creation. Indeed, the question, like all the others in this poem of questions, is not answered at all, for they are all unanswerable, being questions about the metaphysical nature of the Creator and not about the nature of His created work. Moreover, the poet may not even be asking questions (rhetorical or otherwise) but rather wondering in the form of questions—wondering (up to line 16) what the dread power of a Being must be who makes a creature of such dread power as the tiger. As a result, in attempting to imagine the power of the tiger, the poet suggests that the power of its Creator is unimaginable. But in the question of line 19, the poet is asking or wondering not about the Creator’s metaphysical nature (His power) but about His ethical nature: did He—or even how could He—smile upon or approve of a “fearful,” “horrid,” “deadly,” “cruel” beast “of fury” and “terror”? Also ethical is the following question of line 20 (“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”), but the question is suggestively teleological as well: how could He but also why did He make the lamb and yet also make the tiger, which is its opposite or even its contradiction? This is really the last new question in the poem, since, to bring the poem full circle, the next and final question merely repeats the first question and so reverts to being about the Creator’s metaphysical nature or dread power (the change of “could” to “dare” in the final question not being significant, since “dare” appears in the first question in the notebook version as well as throughout the poem in both notebook and published versions). Consequently, wonder about the Creator’s ethics or purpose in making the tiger does not, at first glance, seem to be developed further. To this point the above reading of the poem is inclusive and coherent— mainly because the couplet can be read as part of the smith imagery in the poem. Therefore, with the evidence introduced thus far, it might not seem necessary to try to speculate what the poet is wondering about the

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Creator’s ethics and purpose. In other words, it might not seem necessary to speculate whether, to the poet, the ethical natures of the lamb and tiger are respectively good and evil (or good and wrathfully righteous/ energetic), whether the creatures therefore represent respectively Christ and Satan (or Christ and Christ Militant), and whether both natures therefore belong to God, their Creator.10 Indeed, to speculate in this way might make a reading of the poem that is less coherent. Evil and Satan (or wrathful righteousness/energy and Christ Militant) would have to be read into the nature of the tiger and its Creator as the latter two are evoked throughout the poem; and the belaboring of its parts to force such a reading might eliminate some meanings established above as well as the unity among established meanings but not produce a new unity—thus lessening coherence. Nevertheless, four bodies of evidence not yet introduced necessitate such speculation. First, the Lamb in line 20 may be read as Christ because, just as other poems in Songs of Experience are counterparts of poems in Songs of Innocence, so may “The Tyger” be the counterpart of “The Lamb.” There, as well as in “Night,” the lamb is equated with Christ; and though lambs are not thus equated in “The Shepherd” or “The Little Black Boy,” these poems mention lambs only in the plural and not in the singular. Second, the stars in the couplet may be read as referring to Satan’s armies or legions of fallen angels. In Night V of Vala (renamed The Four Zoas), Urizen, a figure like the rebellious Satan, describes the stars with the same image as in line 17 of “The Tyger”: “I call’d the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark;/ The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away./ We fell” (311, lines 223-25). Admittedly, this passage was composed at some time from seven to ten years after the publication of “The Tyger,”11 and, by then, the image may have developed additional associations not present in the earlier work. Nevertheless, even in 1791, reversing the Biblical convention of calling the stars “the host of heaven,” Blake called the armies in The French Revolution “starry hosts” (138, line 100); and in 1793 he described in America defeated legions (though not stars) throwing down their spears and at least howling in anguish if not watering heaven with their tears: “The millions sent up a howl of anguish and threw off their hammer’d mail,/ And cast their swords & spears to earth, & stood a naked multitude” (202 or Plate 15, lines 4-5). Third, two references possibly known to Blake in 1790 and after associate stars with weeping: Children call falling stars angels’ tears (Erdman 196); and “Tom of Bedlam,” an anonymous lyric reprinted in Joseph Ritson’s Ancient Songs in 1790, contains the lines “I behold the stars / At mortal wars, / In the wounded welkin weeping.”12 In both

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references the streams of light made by falling stars are probably being associated with streams of tears; and if Blake knew either reference, he might have associated it also with the weeping of Satan’s angels falling from heaven. Fourth, the image of the stars throwing down their spears and weeping can be and has been interpreted in another way: the stars do so not because, as Satan’s angels, they have been defeated by God but because, prior to the fall, they are terrified either by the Satan-like Urizen’s wrath against God or by its physical embodiment—the tiger that Urizen creates out of that wrath—and so they flee and weep with fear: the tiger was created by Urizen. The event took place at the very first Fiat of Creation, and was the result of Urizen’s primal disobedience. Urizen, “first born of Generation” (FZ vii: 245), “heard the mild & holy voice saying, ‘O light, spring up & shine’ [Gen i: 3], & I sprang up from the deep. . . . [He] said, ‘Go forth & guide my son [Albion] who wanders on the ocean.’ I went not forth: I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath; I call’d the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark; the stars threw down their spears & fled naked away” (FZ v: 218-24). Thus Wrath came into being. It is Urizen’s, not the benign Creator’s. Urizen’s satanic Pride was affronted when he was appointed to serve Man. That his Wrath was the creation of the Tyger is confirmed by the action of Urizen’s stars, who fling down their spears in terror.13

Since, in Stanza 5, the tiger can be interpreted as the embodiment of satanic Urizen’s wrath, the tiger can reasonably be equated with Satan and the lamb with Christ. But does this contravene the above explication of the first four stanzas? No, for the image of Urizen creating the tiger from his wrath is compatible with the smith imagery of those earlier stanzas. Like a blacksmith shaping red-hot metal or the demiurge Los “fram[ing]” the sun out of “particles” of stellar fire, Urizen may be thought of as “fram[ing]” the tiger out of his wrath. And though the creator of the tiger is Urizen rather than God, the poet can still be questioning or wondering (in all stanzas but the fifth) what the dread power of a being must be who makes a creature of such dread power as the tiger. As a result, in attempting to imagine the power of the tiger, the poet can still be suggesting that the power of its creator (Urizen) is unimaginable. Moreover, in attempting to imagine the intensity of cruelty, fury, and terror in the tiger and then asking whether its creator smiled upon it after it was created, the poet suggests that its creator is equal to or surpasses the tiger in cruelty, fury, and terror. Consequently, the answer to the question in line 20 must be “no,” for God, not Urizen, made the lamb.

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Because the above speculative explication of the couplet is different from the explication of it derived only from the smith imagery and yet is compatible with that imagery, the speculative explication seems more inclusive than the other while being equally coherent and so seems preferable. In other words, the couplet seems more probably about the terror-stricken angel-stars of the satanic Urizen than about the insertion of the tiger’s eyes. Besides, the later reuse of line 17 in Vala, where it refers to Urizen’s stars, is practically exact, and the above-mentioned closely associated images appear in other of Blake’s works contemporary with “The Tyger.” Conversely, since the couplet is about stars, it is not an exact statement about eyes despite the reference to tears. And even if considered about eyes, the couplet is not an exact statement about the tiger’s eyes. Even if it were, it would still not be a statement about thine eyes (as in line 6) or thy “tears,” for throughout the poem the tiger is addressed in the second person and not referred to in the third (“their tears”). Besides, would “eyes of fury,” made of “cruel fire” and set in a “fearful,” “horrid” beast of “deadly terrors,” be capable of “tears”? The couplet is therefore at several removes of explication from the tiger’s-eyes reading, and so that reading seems less probable than the terror-stricken-stars reading.14 Regretfully, then, that part of the new reading presented here must be acknowledged to be less probable than an older reading.

CHAPTER TWO THE NATURE OF LUCY’S “SLEEP”: WORDSWORTH’S “A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL”

This chapter will try to show that, in Wordsworth’s “Slumber,” one of the two major viewpoints about the nature of the dead Lucy is more or less as probable as the other viewpoint. Two questions have long been associated with the poem: whether it is, as a whole, ironic and whether, by dying, Lucy has become merely lifeless and inert matter or part of the living world of animate nature. The second question has been more widely discussed. After Cleanth Brooks espoused the inertness of the dead Lucy within the earth (236) and F.W. Bateson espoused her continuance within animate nature (33-34, 80-81), E.D. Hirsch, Jr., juxtaposed and contrasted their viewpoints as examples of opposite interpretations and at first judged in Bateson’s favor (“Interpretation” 476-77); but subsequently he judged the choice between them to be indeterminable (Validity 181 and throughout). Since then, the question of the nature of the dead Lucy as well as of the meaning of the whole poem has been used as a test case by theorists to debate the nature of literary interpretation.1 However, the poem will not be used here to continue this debate. Instead, the present chapter will try to show that either of the two viewpoints about the nature of the dead Lucy is more or less as probable as the other viewpoint but for a reason not mentioned by Hirsch—a reason dependent on an answer to the first question stated above, whether the poem is, as a whole, ironic. Consequently, the question about irony will be addressed first. Cleanth Brooks also observed that Lucy’s death in the second stanza is like the speaker’s slumber in the first except that it is permanent.2 Her death is like slumber because, when her death is first intimated at the beginning of the second stanza (the preceding two lines could have been referring merely to aging), the mentioned characteristics of her condition are those common to slumber also: she does not move, exert force, hear, or see, and she is “rolled round . . . with” the earth. This last characteristic

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implies a motion even gentler (because unnoticeable to the living) than the gentlest cradle-rocking motion for the slumbering. And so this last characteristic can also suggest that she is literally asleep, lying above or upon the ground like the elements of earth—the rocks, stones, and trees— that accompany her. But, just as the intimation of death rather than slumber becomes surer with the mention of each additional characteristic in stanza 2, so does the intimation of death become reconfirmed with the mention of each additional element of earth in the last line. Rather than rolling round with the earth upon which she lies asleep, she rolls round with the earth in which she is buried and of which, with the other elements, she is a part. Besides the second stanza describing death like the slumber in the first stanza, the first stanza can be said to describe the reciprocal condition— slumber that is like death in the second stanza. And it is important to note that this deathlike slumber in the first stanza does not logically follow merely from the slumberlike death in the second, for, even if slumber were described only literally in the first stanza, the slumberlike death in the second would still be true. No, the slumber in the first stanza is like the death in the second because of five elements in the first line of the poem. These elements suggest death figuratively and associate the speaker’s slumber with death: (1) A figurative meaning of the verb to slumber even without any surrounding context is “to lie at rest in death or the grave.”3 (2) The word spirit carries with it a suggestion of death, whereas an alternative word that would also fit the context of the first line—a word like senses or awareness—would not suggest death. Even when spirit denotes the most alive of entities—the animating breath of life itself—it is distinguished from (and so suggests by association) the physical organism that is dead and inanimate without it (Def. I1, OED). (3) The verb seal connotes a long-lasting, perhaps permanent “deadening” effect, whereas an alternative verb that would also fit the context of the first line—a verb like dull or numb—would not connote duration.4 Another passage by Wordsworth—this one about an immobile horse—uses the same sense of the verb seal in a context of figurative death: With one leg from the ground the creature stood Insensible and still,—breath, motion gone, Hairs, colour, all but shape and substance gone,

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Mane, ears, and tail, as lifeless as the trunk That had no stir of breath; we paused awhile In pleasure of the sight, and left him there With all his functions silently sealed up, Like an amphibious work of Nature’s hand, A Borderer dwelling betwixt life and death, A living Statue or a statued Life.5

(4) One of the ways in which Lucy’s death is indicated in the second stanza is through her loss of hearing and sight: “She neither hears nor sees.” But even in line 1 of the poem, the verb “seal” can carry with it the suggestion of a similar loss of hearing and sight in the speaker, for a figurative meaning of seal as in “to seal (a person’s) eyes or ears [is] to render blind or deaf, also to restrain from looking or listening.” Applied to the eyes alone, “this verb is not always distinguishable from the figurative use of SEEL” (“Seal,” def. 6b, OED), for seel also is “to make blind, to prevent from seeing.”6 Thus, in the first stanza, slumber produces in the speaker a state of blindness and deafness like the dead Lucy’s in the second stanza. Another passage in which Wordsworth uses both “slumber” and “seal” implies not only night approaching like death (“the last lights die”) but also hearing and sight being lost: On the . . . village Silence sets her seal And in the glimmering vale the last lights die The kine obscurely seen before me lie Round the dim horse that crops his later meal Scarce heard; a timely slumber seems to steal O’er vale and mountain; . . . ear and eye Alike are vacant. . . .7

(5) Some months after Wordsworth composed “Slumber,” he sent it to Coleridge, who then copied it into a letter to their friend Thomas Poole and there entitled the poem “Epitaph.” Any reader reading this title and then the first line would receive the mistaken impression that the poem is the speaker’s epitaph and that his slumber is his death. Although the succeeding lines would unsettle this first impression and gradually show that it is Lucy who died, the figurative if not literal association of slumber with death would already have been permanently effected. Of course, whether “Epitaph” was Wordsworth’s original title can never be verified since the copy of the poem he sent to Coleridge has been

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lost. Undermining the authenticity of the title is the fact that no edition overseen by Wordsworth used it. Moreover, before copying the poem for Poole, Coleridge wrote that “some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph” (Letters 479). On his own authority Coleridge may then have added his last word to the poem as its title. To his observation that Lucy’s death is a permanent slumber, Cleanth Brooks added that “her unnatural slumber has waked him [the speaker] out of his.” This shifting of slumbers and awakedness actually constitutes a second reciprocal condition (i.e., different from the one discussed above)—the intensely alive/awake Lucy goes to sleep permanently and, in response and reverse reciprocation, the sleeping speaker becomes intensely awake/alive. However, to Brooks, this shifting was not fully ironic: it had only “the makings . . . of a sort of ironical contrast between his slumber and hers,” since “Wordsworth does not choose to exploit the contrast as such.” And even what Brooks did admit to be an “ironical contrast” which Wordsworth “does stress”—a contrast between Lucy’s apparent immunity in the first stanza to feeling “the touch of earthly years” and her actual immunity in the second stanza to such feeling (i.e., that she is aging)—did “not necessarily” make the poem ironic to Brooks. Indeed, he introduced the question of irony in the poem only “to account for my temptation to call such a poem ironical—not to insist that others call it so” (Brooks 23637). Sixteen years later, Geoffrey Hartman noted the same shifting of slumbers between stanzas: “the slumber is depicted as having passed, as it were, from the poet to the object of his thoughts.” Hartman too accepted this shifting as ironic in tendency, but, like Brooks, he could not call the poem ironic: “the poem may have its structural irony, but the poem’s mood is meditative beyond irony.”8 With a special deconstructionist view of irony in mind, Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller also rejected the classification. For de Man the poem was not, “as a whole, ironic [because] the stance of the speaker, who exists in the ‘now’ is that of a subject whose insight is no longer in doubt and who is no longer vulnerable to irony” (206). For Miller “whatever track the reader follows through the poem he arrives at blank contradictions, [and] these contradictions are not ironic” (108). But even if one accepts such restrictions on the classification of irony, it should be noted that none of these restrictive critics except Hartman observed the deathlike character of the speaker’s slumber, and Hartman merely called the “poet-slumberer” a Sleeping Beauty figure.9 Admittedly, one may not be able to accept as sufficient to make the poem ironic (1) the shifting of figurative slumber from the speaker in the first stanza to Lucy in the second, as well as (2) the shifting of literal awakedness from Lucy in

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the first stanza to the speaker in the second. But if one observes, in addition, that (3) death shifts from being figurative in the speaker in the first stanza to being literal in Lucy in the second and that the second shifting is the reciprocal of both the first and the third shifting, then calling the whole poem ironic seems reasonable as long as irony here refers only to the irony of fate (or of situation or circumstance) and not to tragic (or dramatic) irony, deconstructionist irony, or any exclusively verbal irony. The irony of fate depends upon unexpected reversal,10 and the poem is pervaded not only by such reversal but by reciprocal reversal, which is even more unexpected and so intensifies the irony of fate.11 Literary examples of irony of fate had been available to any writer who had ever read or seen a play by Sophocles; but, in addition, around the beginning of the nineteenth century, such examples began to be noted and identified by the term irony.12 Therefore, Wordsworth’s knowledge of irony of fate and his use of it in a poem are plausible. The above reciprocal reversals bear upon the second problem in the poem, the nature of the dead Lucy. An intensely alive/awake Lucy going to sleep permanently and her death being like slumber (an animate state) suggest by association that her death is trancelike or still vital—that she is “alive” in some biological or metaphysical sense, buried in and organically part of the living world of animate nature. Although Bateson and many other critics have thought this the nature of the dead Lucy, they have cited as evidence not any slumberlike qualities in Lucy’s death but the majesty of the last two lines of the poem or the living trees at its end or the optimistic pantheism in other poems by Wordsworth.13 Indeed, the views of critics, whether of the dead Lucy as merely lifeless and inert matter or as part of the living world of animate nature, are views merely of the second stanza. They are therefore partial views, comprehending only half the poem as the means to interpret the whole poem and directing critical attention to the second stanza alone rather than to the irony between stanzas. If the relationship between stanzas is ironic because of unexpected reciprocal reversals (between deathlike slumber and slumberlike death as well as between the permanent falling asleep of Lucy and the awakening of the speaker), the relationship is additionally ironic because of contrasts other than the reversals—contrasts not only between the speaker’s past illusion and the present reality but also between his present feelings about his past illusion and his present feelings about the present reality. In the first stanza he muses over the past illusion, at first musing over his lapse of foresight and then over Lucy’s nature which was such as could make understandable that lapse in him. Although the first two lines might conceivably be read with bitterness, the last two lines evince a tone of

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wistfulness and so control the tone of the whole stanza to (at worst) a level of bittersweetness. By contrast, in the second stanza, as if forgetting himself completely, the speaker describes the present reality of Lucy. Once again, the first two lines might conceivably be read with bitterness— or hopelessness; but then the tone would clash with the tone in the last two lines—either with the pensiveness needed to convey the grim strangeness in such a conception of her state of death (if he thought her lifeless and inert within the earth) or else with the partial comfort needed to convey belief in her somewhat still vital state (if he thought her a living part of animate nature). As a whole, then, the second stanza should be read with as little trace of emotion as possible—as if the speaker were only just recovering enough from exhaustion of emotion to reflect upon her death. He passes from wistful or bittersweet, musing remembrance not only to vivid awareness of her present state but also to subdued wonder at the ironic difference between then and now. Since the first stanza emphasizes the past and the second stanza the ironic contrasts between the present and the past, the ironic effect would be more intense as the contrasts are more extreme; and since Lucy was intensely alive/awake in the past, a present state of complete lifelessness within the earth would be more extreme a contrast with the past than would a present state of mystical life within animate nature. Consequently, the irony produced by the contrasts discussed in the previous paragraph would favor the view that Lucy is utterly dead rather than mystically alive in nature. Unfortunately, this view is contrary to the one that the reciprocal reversals suggest by association. The reason for this contrariety may be that the ironic contrasts are literal whereas the irony of the reversals depends on their figurativeness—the speaker’s unawareness being like slumber, his slumber being like death, and Lucy’s death being like slumber. If slumber in the first stanza and death in the second had not been presented figuratively, no reversals and thus no irony from them would have resulted. Therefore, the question about Lucy’s state in death may seem to depend on a single consideration: (1) whether the irony of the figurative reciprocal reversals or the irony of the literal contrasts is more important. However, other considerations are also relevant to the question. Two of them result from the above discussion: (2) whether the figurative reversals, in suggesting by association a pantheistic view of Lucy, automatically become evidence of a literal pantheistic view of her—of Lucy not just figuratively but literally alive (though permanently asleep) within animate nature (3) whether Wordsworth did actually intend the ironic effect of the contrasts to be as extreme as possible.

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Other considerations are those alternative subordinate readings (of details in the poem) that support one or the other view of Lucy’s state in death: (4) whether “thing” in line 3 is to be understood in a subhuman sense to presage a later inanimate state or understood in a superhuman sense to presage a later mystically alive state or understood in one of these senses to contrast with the later opposite state or, innocent of all such intentions, is to be understood in none of these ways (5) whether Lucy’s seeming immunity from feeling “the touch of earthly years” while alive is then belied by her feeling that touch and so dying utterly or is then made actual by her becoming immune, in a protective death, from feeling that touch (6) whether her motion in line 7 relates to her motionlessness in line 5 as an irony or a contrast (an external replacing an internal motive force) or, innocent of either intention, as an accidental and superficial contradiction (7) whether, in line 8, trees are like rocks and stones in being earth elements associating her with inertness in the earth or are in contrast with rocks and stones in being organic and alive and thus associating her with a mystical life in nature.14 However, in each of these seven considerations, one alternative cannot be judged to be more probable than the other or others; and because of this circumstance, the view that, by dying, Lucy has become merely lifeless and inert matter is more or less as probable as the view that she has become part of the living world of animate nature.

CHAPTER THREE FORM BY ASSOCIATION: COLERIDGE’S “FROST AT MIDNIGHT”

In discussing the “law of association” in Chapter 5 of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge approvingly cites Aristotle’s analysis, which admits five agents or occasioning causes [of association]: 1st, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding, or successive; 2nd, vicinity or connection in space; 3rd, interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; 4th, likeness; and 5th, contrast. (72)

Coleridge’s poem “Frost at Midnight” seems to be organized by explicit association employing five of those specifically named agents— simultaneity, vicinity, causation, likeness, and contrast. While the “Frost performs its secret ministry”1 and the poet’s surroundings are quiet and motionless, a film of soot simultaneously but contrastingly flutters in a lively manner on the nearby fire grate, so that the poet likens the “companionable” film to the only other lively thing in that environment, his own imaginative self. He also identifies the film as a “stranger” (a portent of an unexpected visitor), and watching it reminds him of times when, in childhood, he similarly watched it at school and waited for an unexpected visitor to appear—perhaps his sister, whom he now remembers as a child also and, at one time, his companion (“play-mate”). Remembering both himself and her as children reminds him of his own infant son now asleep in a cradle by his side and thus his companion at present, and he contrasts the way in which he was “reared” in the city and educated in school with the way in which he plans for his son to be reared and educated in nature. In contrast with the poet, the son will “learn far other lore, / And in far other scenes!” The poet, “pent” in the city, . . . saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath

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Being thus reared in nature will cause the son to feel at one with all seasons, including winter with its frost, with which the poem began. However, much more comprehensively than the above summary indicates, the poem is organized through both implicit and explicit association. It is organized by additional allusions to “strangers” and strangeness and by additional contrasts between the poet’s education and his son’s projected education, between summer and spring, and between autumn and winter. But before this more comprehensive organization can be observed, a question about the opening sentence of the poem must be answered: whether the frost there performs its secret ministry in the same way as at the end of the poem—by hanging up eave-drops in icicles. The two occasions are similar in one respect: the frost at the beginning of the poem is “Unhelped by any wind,” and at the end the threefold quietness of “silent icicles, / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon” implies the same absence of wind. However, in other respects the two occasions are probably unlike. Although frost can vaguely mean any freezing cold, it specifically means—and meant in Coleridge’s time—not cold that freezes liquid water into ice (e.g., icicles) but cold that freezes water vapor directly into ice while bypassing the liquid stage, or, stated more generally, cold that “freezes the contained moisture of a porous substance, esp. the ground” or the air. Frost also means (and meant) the product of this process—“Frozen dew or vapor.” But only in the sixteenth century did it also mean “frozen water”—e.g., icicles (Def. 1b, 2, 2b, OED). If Coleridge knew about this distinction, it may be the reason why, near the end of the poem, he at first precisely stated the hanging up of eave-drops in icicles to be the secret ministry of “cold” rather than of “frost,” until, ten years later, his shortening the end matter tempted him to replace “cold” with “frost” (despite its imprecision) so as to round out the poem with an ending like its beginning. However, if he did not know about the distinction—and there is no reason to assume that he did—he may have thought to be identical several forms of ice resulting from freezing cold (including hoar-frost and icicles). Indeed, in his tragedy Remorse, written several months before the poem (Works 2: 812), he used frost to designate merely freezing cold and then, eight lines later, hoar-frost. In these lines the character Isidore stated that, when “an arm of frost above and from behind me / Pluck’d up and snatched me backward,” his flesh crept with cold terror, as if it had “drizzled needle-points of frost / Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald” (Works 2: 860). Here additionally, not distinguishing between hoar-frost and freezing “drizzled” rain (or sleet),

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Coleridge conceives of the one as the other: conceives of hoar-frost crystals as tiny icicles in form—“needle-points.” Consequently, the secret ministry that the frost performs and the poet senses at the beginning of the poem is more probably not the hanging of icicles from the eaves but the forming of ice crystals on the ground outside the cottage or on the vegetation there or, where the poet would be likely to see it as well, on the outside of his window pane or, since his fire is “lowburnt” and the pane probably below freezing, on its inside (where the frost would indeed be “Unhelped by any wind”).2 During his “Abstruser musings,” then, the poet may be either sensing or seeing the result of the secret ministry—the imperceptibly slow growth of ice crystals in a greyishwhite film, one similar to the greyish-white “film” of soot he then sees fluttering on the bar of the grate before the fire and notes by the name of “stranger.” And just as other unexpected things besides the film of soot were also known as “strangers”—“a floating tea-leaf in a cup; an excrescence on the wick of a candle, causing guttering; . . . a moth flying towards one”—and were “popularly imagined to forbode the coming of an unexpected visitor” (Def. 3b, OED), so might the similarity of the greyishwhite film of frost to the greyish-white film of soot—i.e., their implicit association—encourage the reader to consider the film of frost too a “stranger,” though only after Coleridge introduces the term. Besides, even when he first mentions frost, he considers its ministry to be “strange” in the usual sense of the term—strange because it is secret and because it is part of the “strange / And extreme silentness” of his greater environment. Although that environment is filled with “the numberless goings-on of life,” it seems strangely quiet; and as one of those “goingson,” the ministry of frost also seems strangely quiet, even though normally it is quiet. The poet calls the film of soot “the sole unquiet [i.e., moving] thing,” but the frost too, in performing its ministry, is active and “alive” though not perceptibly moving, just as his infant son, asleep in a cradle by his side, is “active” and alive though not perceptibly moving (he does not notice the movement of his son’s “gentle breathings,” which later he hears). The son too may be considered a “stranger” though not because of that implicit likeness to the films of frost and soot. He is a “stranger” in his own right and for two reasons. First, he was an unexpected “visitor” when he was born, for he arrived “earlier than had been expected” (Chambers 61). Before the birth Coleridge had planned to be away from home for several days, and so first (as he later wrote to Thomas Poole) “I consulted Mrs Coleridge who advised me to go—saying, that she should not be ill for three weeks.” However, a few days after his departure, he received news of his son’s birth and “was quite annihilated with the

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suddenness of the information. . .” (Letters 141-42). (Although stranger normally refers to the symbolic portent of an unexpected visitor and not to the visitor himself, Coleridge uses the term in this way the third time he uses it in the poem; “I hoped to see the stranger’s face.”) The second reason why the son may be considered a “stranger” is that the name was “[s]aid playfully of a newborn child. ‘Welcome, little stranger!’ was a quotation common in the early part of the 19th century, and sometimes printed or embroidered on articles for nursery use” (Def. 4b, OED). In addition, it may be observed that one of the reasons why the son is to learn the “lore” and “eternal language” of nature is that the poet implicitly feels himself to be a “stranger” to them. In this case—with “stranger” associated implicitly with the poet, his son, and the film of frost and explicitly with “Townsman, or aunt, or sister” and the film of soot—it may be said that ideas of strangeness and “strangers” are associated with most subjects in the poem and so help to unify it. What subjects these ideas are not associated with fall into two groups that contrast in detail—subjects concerned with the poet’s education in school (described in the Biographia but implicit in the poem because of the contrast) and subjects concerned with his son’s projected education in nature—and this contrast completes the unification. Addressing his son, the poet declares that in school he was taught by a “stern preceptor,” but in nature you will be taught by a kindly God, the “Great universal Teacher.”3 In school (as described in the Biographia) the preceptor molded Coleridge’s taste: “He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid” (4). But in nature God “shall mold Thy spirit.” In school Coleridge and his fellow students read texts in, and heard the “sounds intelligible” of, English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, so that in the end the preceptor “sent us to the University excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable Hebraists” (6). But in nature . . . shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters. . . .

In school, by asking, the preceptor made Coleridge and his fellow students give—i.e., by continually asking them questions “why” and “wherein,” he made them give thoughtful answers and produce thoughtful work: [A]vailing himself of the synonimes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in

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the original text. . . . [In addition, he] would often permit our exercises . . . to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, . . . the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day. (4-6)

But in nature, “by giving,” God will make your spirit “ask”—i.e., by teaching “Himself in all, and all things in himself,” God will make your spirit ask ultimate questions and ask, perhaps, for ultimate knowledge. There may be one further intrinsic contrast. Winter would remind Coleridge of the intense cold and damp of his rooms when he was at school and college. And because of his rheumatism and neuralgia, winter would be a time of greater pain than the other seasons. (Understandably, then, in the poem he envisioned a “hot Fair-day” in summer when dreaming of his happy childhood.) But, for his son, “all seasons shall be sweet to thee. . . .” The winter cold and damp and the poet’s rheumatism and neuralgia are enough to account for the contrast between his feelings about winter and what he believes his son’s feelings about it will be, and so that contrast need not be accounted for by the difference in overall rearing and education. Specifically, the poet does not necessarily believe (although he may believe) that, because of the difference in rearing and education, the present “hush of nature” in winter feels strange to him and “disturbs and vexes” his meditation but will not feel strange to his son. Even someone completely reared and educated in nature and thus sensitive to its various states could feel a strangeness in the extreme silence of a windless frosty night. Nor does the poet believe at all that, because of the difference in rearing and education, the ministry of frost is a “secret” unknown to him but will be known to his son. That ministry is “secret” in the chiefly poetic sense of being “not discernible or visible,” not in the sense of being “kept from knowledge” (Def. A1i, not A1, OED). Of course, being taught by God through nature, the son will know more than his father about nature including the ministry of frost; but that ministry will still be “not discernible or visible” to the son. The contrary would imply that his rearing and education in nature will provide him with superhuman sight by which he will see the invisible process (and not merely the visible product) of hoar-frost and icicle formation. The above extrinsic and intrinsic contrasts organizing the latter half of the poem may be the reason why Coleridge omits mentioning clouds when he states that, as a schoolboy in the city, he “saw nought lovely but the sky

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and stars.” In Wordsworth’s retelling of that circumstance of his friend’s youth, he does the opposite—omits mentioning sky and stars and mentions clouds only: . . . I speak to thee, my Friend! to thee, Who yet a liveried schoolboy, in the depths Of the huge city, on the leaded roof Of that wide edifice, thy school and home, Wert used to lie and gaze upon the clouds Moving in heaven. . . . (Prelude 189, 191)

This difference between the two reports may be meaningful. On the school roof in the city, the young Coleridge would have seen clouds even if he watched the sky only at night (except on nights cloudless or moonless and overcast). And he may have compensated for the lack of views of earthbound nature by imagining the clouds he saw to “image in their bulk both lakes and shores / And mountain crags”—i.e., to “represent” or “delineate” them like sculpture rather than “mirror” them (Def. 1 rather than 2, OED). But in “Frost at Midnight” he chooses to ascribe this imaginative conception to his son as he will be in the future. If Coleridge had also ascribed that conception to his schoolboy self—or even, like Wordsworth, had mentioned clouds as objects of his view—the organizing contrast between the father’s and son’s educations would have been vitiated by the shared experience or even shared word. Indeed, unvitiated contrast organizes the rest of the poem as well— after the contrast between educations is over—for the four seasons that “shall be sweet to” the son are contrasted in pairs and by means of the repeated construction “whether . . . , or. . . .” The image of summer is of quietness and complete “greenness,” whereas, by contrast, the image of spring is of the sound of the robin’s singing and the scarcity of greenness—dun being the color of the roof thatch and the tree branch, which is “bare” of leaves, and green being present, if present at all, only in the tree moss. The image of autumn is of sound and motion—either the eave-drops hitting the ground or the “blast” blowing—whereas, by contrast, the image of winter is of quiet and motionlessness (or imperceptibly slow movement): not only in the secret ministry of frost or cold hanging up the eave-drops in icicles but also in the icicles themselves, their shining to the moon, and the moon itself. According to Coleridge, cutting off the text at this image allowed “the rondo, and return upon itself of the Poem” (Quoted in Evans). According to Humphry House, it produced an “end” rather than merely a “stopping” and “was one of the best artistic decisions Coleridge ever made” (82-83). But additionally it emphasized, through end placement, examples of

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contrast (and thus the importance of contrast in the poem) and emphasized perhaps the strangest in the series of “strangers” in the poem—the alien, unknown, and mysterious yet familiar and beloved moon. In summary, then, although the “secret ministry” of the frost at the end of the poem is the hanging of icicles from the eaves, its “secret ministry” at the beginning of the poem is more probably the forming of ice crystals on the ground or vegetation outside the poet’s cottage or on the outside or inside of his window pane. While not depriving the poem of its “return upon itself” (the “ministry” of frost still comes first and last), the latter reading increases the degree of organization and therefore of unity in the poem, whose organizing elements then consist of (1) five of the “agents or occasioning causes” of association that Coleridge, following Aristotle, listed in the Biographia; (2) allusions to “strangers” and strangeness associated not only explicitly with a film of fire-grate soot and an unexpected visiting relative but also implicitly with frost as an imperceptibly slow growth of ice crystals in a greyish-white film, with the poet’s infant son, with the poet’s self-confessed ignorance of the language of nature, and perhaps with the moon; (3) contrasts between the poet’s past education in school (described in the Biographia) and the education he plans for his son in nature; (4) contrasts between summer and spring and between autumn and winter.

CHAPTER FOUR BEAUTY AS THE ONLY TRUTH: THE LAST SEVEN LINES OF KEATS’S “ODE ON A GRECIAN URN”

In discussing Keats’s “abstract and propositional language of philosophy” in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Poems 372-73), Helen Vendler correspondingly analyzed it in the “abstract and propositional language” of traditional logic (Odes 145). For example, Keats uses “propositions of the sort ‘X is sweeter than (or more endeared than, or far above) Y.’” Moreover, by means of the “riddling motto” equating beauty and truth, Keats “represents in an accommodated propositional form and its converse (X is Y—Y is X) a reality which can only be conceived of as the simultaneous and identical existence (in another realm) of X and Y.” For “he believed, at the time he wrote this ode, that the language of Thought was one which expressed itself in propositions purporting to encode truths, of which the perfect form was ‘X is Y’ (the ‘fallen’ form of the Platonic ‘X is identical to Y’)” (Odes 140, 149, 150). But such use of logic led Stuart Peterfreund to object that the words of the motto “do not create a riddle with its solution residing on the plane of eternal being, but rather a paradox that adverts to contradiction and, ultimately, to mystery” (63). Analysis by logic, then, led neither critic to an unmystical solution residing on the earthly plane. By contrast, this chapter aims to use logical analysis of the beauty-truth motto to show the possibility of an unmystical reading of it. First, however, in order to discuss the logical form of the proposition in question, it will be useful to replace with substitutes the supercharged words “beauty” and “truth” in the proposition. They evoke the potent emotional, metaphysical, and critical interpretations produced by a century of controversy over the poem, and such interpretations would obscure a discussion merely of logical form. Consequently, for the moment let the motto read, “Love is piety, piety love.” If merely the first clause is considered by itself—”Love is piety”—it can be read in two different ways that yield two different meanings. If the

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clause is read with the reader accenting (either orally or mentally) the last word—“Love is PIETY”—the meaning is that all love is piety and that no love is impiety. And merely preceding “love” with the implied “all” puts the clause in the standard logical form (Universal Affirmative Proposition) in which it can be used with other propositions in a reasoning process. One of the implications of the clause is that qualities other than love (faith and prayer, for example) may or may not also be piety; but, of course, the clause says nothing overtly about them. However, when the clause is followed by another that says, “[All] piety [is] love,” this second clause rules out the possibility that qualities other than love may also be piety. If all love is piety and all piety love, the two qualities are identical and the two terms synonymous. This identity and synonymy are even emphasized by the “look” of the two clauses together—their identical form or “symmetry.” (This reading of the two clauses together will be called “Reading #1” from now on in this chapter.) On the other hand, the first clause can also be read with the reader accenting the first word—“LOVE is piety.” Then, the meaning is that qualities other than love are not piety. For example, faith and prayer are not piety—only love is. And merely preceding “love” with the implied “only” makes the implied meaning of the clause evident. However, in this form (Exclusive Proposition), the clause is not in the standard logical form (Universal Affirmative Proposition) in which it can be used with other propositions in a reasoning process. And so it must immediately be converted into such a form (Searles 84-86; Copi 243). Thus converted, it becomes “all piety is love.” But, even apart from logical analysis—in common everyday discourse—anyone insisting orally that “only LOVE is piety” (but especially if he omits “only”) would ordinarily follow his statement with another one clarifying his meaning: “that is [or “in other words”], all piety is LOVE.” Speakers instinctively sense that listeners do not grasp the logical implications of an “only” proposition as readily as they do the implications of an “all” proposition. In other words, just as, for logic, an “only” proposition is insufficient and must be restated as an “all” proposition to be usable for reasoning, so, for communication also, an “only” proposition is insufficient and ordinarily is restated as an “all” proposition to be clearly understood. (The reading of these two propositions together will be called “Reading #2” from now on in this chapter.) When the words “beauty” and “truth” replace “love” and “piety,” it can be seen that Reading #1—”[All] beauty is TRUTH, [all] truth [is] BEAUTY”—has been the customary reading. Consequently, beauty and truth have been understood as being identical and synonymous; but, since

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on earth they are neither (by experience and dictionary definition), they are understood to be so elsewhere—in heaven as Platonic absolutes. From this reading, then, has come the tradition of calling the motto epithets like “riddle,” “paradox,” “contradiction,” and “mystery.”On the other hand, Reading #2—“[Only] BEAUTY is truth, [i.e., all] truth [is] BEAUTY”—has not been the customary reading, but it has appeared before (although not as a result of an argument like the above). In 1931 Hoxie Fairchild read the motto as “Beauty is the only truth that Keats knows” (Quest 412; quoted in Lyon 71); and in 1954 Fairchild read it as “All that is true for me, my only reliance in life, is the fact that beautiful objects are beautiful” (“Comment”; quoted in Lyon 115). When simplified, these readings become, respectively, “Beauty is the only truth” and “The only truth is beauty” (“all that is true for me” having an exclusive rather than an inclusive sense). Neither of these Reading #2 paraphrases (one is merely the other in reverse word order) particularly encourages viewing beauty and truth as Platonic absolutes. One reason may be that, because the two clauses in any Reading #2 paraphrase are not identical in form, they do not visually suggest identity and synonymy. Of course, a Platonic character for beauty and truth is still allowable, for in Reading #2 the first clause of the motto does not imply that they are not identical and synonymous. They may or may not be. (And the second clause is no help in deciding because it merely restates the first. By contrast, in Reading #1 the combination of both clauses of the motto indicates that beauty and truth are identical and synonymous.) Reading #2 is indefinite about whether beauty and truth are identical because, although the clause “Only beauty is truth” means that no other attributes except beauty can be classified as truth, the clause does not indicate whether attributes not classifiable as truth (deception and pretense, for example) can be classified as beauty. If they can be, beauty and truth are not identical; but if they cannot be, beauty and truth are identical. In addition to the simplified paraphrases of Fairchild’s readings, another paraphrase of Reading #2 could be “There is no truth but beauty.” This phrasing implies the non-existence of truth except for beauty and, by so doing, even discourages a reading of “truth” as a Platonic absolute. Equal in such discouragement would be still another paraphrase—one produced by merely substituting “true” for “truth” and so yielding “Only BEAUTY is true; i.e., what is true is BEAUTY.” (If used in the second clause, the phrase “all that is true” would be ambiguous: “everything that exists”?) Substituting “true” for “truth” is reasonable, for in his letters Keats sometimes used “truth” where “true” would have been as appropriate; and in a letter to Benjamin Bailey he used “truth” where

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“true” would have been more appropriate: Adam awoke from his dream “and found it truth” (Letters 1: 185). Reading #2 and its paraphrases receive support from three other segments of the last seven lines of the poem. Like the motto two of these segments (the third will be discussed later) also express the restriction of truth to beauty (or to the urn that signifies it or the motto that affirms it). The first segment, which comprises the three lines preceding the motto, states that the urn and its figures will remain a friend to humankind while all else changes. The present generation will grow old or die and new woe will replace the old (i.e., woes of an aged generation will replace its earlier ones or woes of a new generation will replace those of the present one); but the urn and its figures will be true—i.e., constant and reliable (Def. 1d, OED) like a faithful friend—and will not change or pass away. Through time, the urn is true—i.e., certain and to be relied upon.1 In other words, only BEAUTY (signified by the urn) is true; i.e., what is true is BEAUTY (signified by the urn). The second segment is the statement that “that is all / Ye know on earth.” In accordance with Reading #2, the demonstrative pronoun “that” refers to beauty or the motto2 and the motto can be paraphrased as “the exclusive truth of beauty.” The second-segment statement would then be that beauty (or its exclusive truth) is all that humankind knows. All other knowledge is uncertain and unreliable, but beauty (or its exclusive truth) is true—i.e., certain and to be relied upon. In other words, only BEAUTY (or its exclusive truth) is true; i.e., what is true is BEAUTY (or its exclusive truth). Altogether, then, the last five lines of the poem (minus “and all ye need to know”) can be paraphrased thus: In the midst of change and decay, the urn will remain constant and reliable. It says to humankind that only beauty (or its exclusive truth) is certain and to be relied on. Humankind can know only this knowledge (or only beauty or its exclusive truth), for it alone is certain and can be relied on.

Because such a paraphrase follows the thought structure of the last five lines of the poem, the paraphrase is redundant in expression and shows, not that Keats’s thought is redundant, but that the variety of his expressions constitutes a unified idea. Reading #2 and its paraphrases also receive support from two of Keats’s letters. Like the two segments from the poem, the letter to Bailey distinguishes between what is true and certain and what is not, but here the distinction is expressed in terms of what Keats is certain of as truth and what he is not:

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O I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth— whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. (Letters 1: 184)

Because Keats is certain of Beauty, he is certain of such “sublime Passions” as manifest (“seize” or are “creative of”) “essential Beauty”: the “Imagination” and the “Heart’s affections” (“Love”). However, he is “certain of nothing but” these, for, to him, nothing else is certain—not thoughts (“O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts”) or reasoning (“I have never yet been able to perceive how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning”3) or philosophy (“Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections?”).4 A year later, in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, he repeats this idea that, for him, certainty is limited to beauty: “I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty” (Letters 2: 19). Reading #2 and its paraphrases receive support as well from at least two of Keats’s other poems, for, like the letter to Bailey, they designate beauty and love as desirable and thought and philosophy as undesirable. In “When I Have Fears” (Poems 225-26) the “faery power of unreflecting love”—i.e., love without thought—is unfortunately replaced by thought, which causes love to “sink” to “nothingness.” In “Lamia” (Poems 452-75) Lycius is spellbound by beauty. In a “love trance,” he “knew not . . . and he never thought to know” since “but a moment’s thought is passion’s passing bell.” But soon “all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy.”5 It withers the beauty, breaks the love trance, and kills Lycius. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” the third segment that lends support to Reading #2 and its paraphrases includes both the statement that the urn “tease[s] us out of thought / As doth eternity” and the statement that “that is . . . all ye need to know.” Although “that is all / Ye know on earth” asserts that thought and knowledge of other than beauty (or of other than the exclusive truth of beauty) is uncertain, this uncertainty makes thought and such knowledge not exactly undesirable (as in the letter to Bailey and the two other poems) but rather insufficient or inadequate. Thought is insufficient because, just as it cannot comprehend the nature of eternity, it cannot comprehend the beauty signified by the urn. (The urn, therefore, “tease[s] us out of thought.”) And knowledge of other than beauty (or of other than the exclusive truth of beauty) is insufficient merely because it is

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uncertain. Knowledge only of beauty (or its exclusive truth) is certain (“that is all / Ye know on earth”), and therefore it is sufficient (“that is . . . all ye need to know”). One possible paraphrase of the last two lines, then, could be, “The only truth is beauty—that is the only truth ye know on earth [because it alone is certain] and the only truth ye need to know [because it alone is sufficient].” And here, the antecedent of “that” is most likely either “beauty” or the statement that “the only truth is beauty” (see n. 2). Finally, it is necessary to reiterate that the above analysis does not eliminate the identity of beauty with truth. Not only does Reading #1 specify it but also Reading #2 allows without specifying it. Consequently, a Platonic, mystical interpretation of the motto, inevitable with Reading #1, is still possible with Reading #2—indeed, must be considered more or less as probable as an unPlatonic interpretation. On the one hand, a Platonic interpretation seems obvious on initial readings of the poem and has a tradition of over a century to support it.6 On the other hand, there is also a tradition of nearly a century of doubting Keats’s familiarity with Platonism or at least his writing in its terms.7 And since an unPlatonic reading receives support from three other segments of the last seven lines of the poem as well as from two of Keats’s letters and two of his other poems and avoids “riddle,” “paradox,” “contradiction,” and “mystery,” that reading deserves as serious consideration as the Platonic one.

CHAPTER FIVE TRANSFIGURATION RE-IMAGINED: THE “ROME” SECTION OF SHELLEY’S ADONAIS

At some stage of reading Shelley’s Adonais, it is possible for the “Rome” section—stanzas 48-52 (but also 7)—to seem a temporary diversion away from the main line of progression in the poem— progression from Adonais’ bodily death to the absorption of his spirit into the World Soul. The “Rome” section may even seem a reversion to an earlier stage in that progression. After all, the condition of his body buried in the Roman Protestant cemetery of stanzas 49-51 is a condition that was reached earlier in 38: “Dust to the dust!”1 All subsequent descriptions of Adonais are of his spirit in the process of being absorbed into the One. Moreover, the “Rome” section is sandwiched between a group of stanzas in which he is “one with Nature” (42-43), one of the “splendours of the firmament of time” (44-46), and one with the universe even to its “void circumference” (47) and a group of stanzas in which, as part of the One, he “calls,” “beams on,” “breath[es]” on, “drive[s],” and “beacons” the poet (53-55). The two groups seem to be sequential in thought, and so the “Rome” section seems to interrupt the sequence. However, to my knowledge, no commentator on the section raises this question about it; and, indeed, the most comprehensive commentator on it, Earl Wasserman, makes the raising of the question unthinkable: Turning at last to the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, the poet fashions his final tableau in order to bring into summary relationship much of the poem’s imagery and thereby to engage in the tableau the terminal theme of the elegy. The scene has significant structural value. First, because the cemetery is the impersonal and irrevocably final act of death, its stillness stands in ironic contrast to the poet’s previous impassioned lament. In the larger structure the scene rounds out the poem: the initial setting had been Rome, where Keats died, the final one is the cemetery in Rome where Keats was buried. (Shelley 491)

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However, three points in this assessment are disputable: (1) The “final tableau” or “setting” that expresses the “terminal theme of the elegy” is not the cemetery that, in 49-51, provides a lamentcontrasting stillness. The final tableau is rather in 53 and 55, where Adonais calls the poet in a whispering low wind that builds to a mighty breath of a tempest riving earth and skies—a sound quite the opposite of stillness. (2) The “initial setting” of the poem is not Rome, unmentioned until stanza 7, but the “Paradise” or bower of Urania-Venus (in 2-3), where she listened to the echo of Adonais’ “melodies” and then slept while, far off, he died. (3) If the cemetery scene were introduced to “round out” the poem— return it to where it began—that circumstance would suggest not a progression but a lack of progression in the successive stages of the poem and of Adonais’ transformation. Undoubtedly, the cemetery description does summarize—does “bring into summary relationship much of the poem’s imagery” or, as Wasserman goes on to say, “thematically . . . gathers together, in the full development of their values, the symbols of . . . decay, mutability, and eternity.” But summarizing implies a repetition of already expressed ideas rather than an introduction of new ones, and Wasserman sees the latter as well as the former in the cemetery description: Most important, we are promised that through the material components of the scene we will gain the final truth, for it is by observing the cemetery that the one who still mourns for Adonais is to learn the true nature of life and death. The mute and solitary symbols in this earthly otherworld have contained all the while the truth that the poet has agonized to gain. . . . [T]he poem’s gradual generation of symbols . . . has transfigured all the objective features around and within the cemetery—the ruins, flowers, walls, weeds, graves, and pyramid—so that they may perform their proper roles as meaning in order to assert that although the Many change and pass, the One remains. Here in the symbol-charged cemetery the one who still mourns the death of Adonais can see why he should mourn no longer. (Shelley 491, 495)

But, even without the “Rome” section, the remainder of the poem from 38 on indicates the “true nature of life and death” (the “final truth . . . that the poet has agonized to gain”), affirms the permanent One beyond the changing Many, and shows why further mourning is illogical. Rather than primarily summarizing “truths” already expressed or introducing new ones, more probably the “Rome” section offers an

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alternative way of understanding the already expressed ones: it begins with a statement of alternativeness (“Or go to Rome”) and provides specifically an alternative way for the continuing mourner to imagine Adonais as part of the World Soul and so cease mourning. To imagine this by means of the conceptual exercise prescribed in stanza 47 may be too difficult: the mourner may not be able to keep his heart light so that his “spirit’s light” can dart “Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might / Satiate the void circumference.” As heavier elements sink to the lowest sphere—the earth—so his heavy heart may make him sink back from conceptually reaching the “brink” of the universe just “When hope has kindled hope” that he may reach it. Besides, even if the light of the mourner’s spirit can reach the “brink” and “Satiate the void circumference,” and even if his spirit can “then shrink / Even to a point within our day and night” (italics mine), his spirit would have to reach both extremities (and, indeed, all points) of the universe simultaneously—i.e., would have to be omnipresent—in order for the mourner perfectly to imagine Adonais as part of the World Soul, as absorbed into it and diffused throughout it. Therefore, a less difficult exercise of imagination is appropriate. If the mourner may not be able to imagine omnipresence—presence simultaneously (at the same time) throughout the whole of space—he would be able to imagine eternality—presence (in the same place) throughout the whole of time or history. This latter concept is embodied in the idea of Rome as the “Eternal” city.2 Earlier, in 38, Adonais had been linked with a similar concept— presence unchangeable (in the same state) throughout the whole of time: he is “A portion of the Eternal, which must glow / Through time and change, unquenchably the same.” But the mourner had not then been asked to imagine him as a “portion” of that “Eternal.” Now that such imagining is called for, it is put in the more conceivable terms of Rome as the “Eternal” city. Rome is eternal partly because it comprises all its past “ages, empires, religions” that “there / Lie buried.” Adonais—or rather Keats—shares in their eternality since he is buried there with them (indeed, he lends them glory). Rome is also eternal because of its immortal “kings of thought” (who “of the past are all that cannot pass away”), and Keats has been “gathered” to them. On both accounts Keats’s grave is “among the eternal” (7). But Rome is also a cemetery, a mausoleum of history and a grave of ruins (“wrecks” which “like shattered mountains rise” and “bones of Desolation”). There “kingly Death / Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay” (7). And so, for the mourner to “pass” then from Rome in general to the actual Roman cemetery in which Keats is buried is merely to move to the symbolic center of Rome’s meaning. In the cemetery too, other

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symbols of eternity (besides the “kings of thought”) “wage . . . contention with their time’s decay”: “[L]ike an infant’s smile, over the dead / A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread”; and a 116-foot-high Ancient Roman tomb that is symbolically eternal (“one keen pyramid with wedge sublime” that “doth stand / Like flame transformed to marble”) towers over and dominates Ancient Roman grey walls which “moulder round” and “on which dull Time / Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand.” (The flowers and tomb as symbols of eternity are discussed exhaustively by Wasserman, Shelley 492-95.) That tomb also dominates Keats’s grave. So too does “Heaven’s smile,” and by a chain of association the light of laughing flowers spread along the grass over the dead “like an infant’s smile” also dominates Keats’s grave. Consequently, by the mourner’s imaginatively going to Rome and then to this particular Roman cemetery, both of which represent the dominance of eternity, he can doubly conceive of Keats as part of eternity—as absorbed into it and diffused throughout it—and thus conceive of him as part of the World Soul, among whose aspects is eternity as well as omnipresence. Besides providing an alternative way of imagining Keats’s spirit as part of the World Soul, the description of his spirit as part of the “Eternal” city of Rome shows parallels with the earlier description, in 44-46, of his spirit becoming part of the “firmament” of eternal stars which are the immortal spirits of great poets “whose transmitted effluence cannot die.” Among these stars (situated midway between the region “within our day and night” and “the void circumference” that is “Beyond all worlds”) Adonais is gathered to the spirits of the poets and is welcomed into their “throng,” just as in Rome “he is gathered to the kings of thought” and in the cemetery is welcomed by the “newer band” of buried dead. The brightness of the spirits in the stars effaces “Oblivion” in the heavens, and the “Glory” of “the kings of thought” effaces the “ravage” and “Desolation” of Rome. And since the “fire” of the stars can also allude to the poet-spirits’ artworks that “outlive[d] the parent spark” of inspiration and became immortal, that fire parallels, in the cemetery, the “pyramid . . . wedge” artwork that is “Like flame transformed to marble.” By the beginning of 51, these parallels seem at an end. Indeed, the first six and a half lines of 52 convey the impression that Rome is no longer the setting, for Rome seems irrelevant to the trio of related contrasts between the “many” and the “One,” “Earth’s shadows” and “Heaven’s light,” and “Life” and “Eternity” as well as irrelevant to the famous “dome” simile and “stain” metaphor. [continued on page 39]

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But then, in the following two and a half lines, the trio of related contrasts becomes a quartet—the fourth contrast being between aspects of Rome and the “glory they transfuse.” And just as the many-colored-glass dome of Life stains or colors the “white radiance of Eternity” (or the seemingly colored dome of sky or atmosphere surrounding earthly life transmits but refracts and diffuses that radiance), so do aspects of Rome (some of them literally colored in the poem: the “blue Italian day,” “azure sky,” “slope of green access,” and “grey walls”) “transfuse” the “glory” that is Eternity—i.e., transmit but diffuse and perhaps refract that glory and so “are weak” “to speak” it “with fitting truth.” Or, to borrow imagery from stanza 54, the aspects of Rome are imperfect “mirrors,” each reflecting that glory imperfectly—reflecting it brightly or dimly in proportion as each mirror is clear or cloudy. Some of these ties between 52 and the rest of the Rome section can be presented graphically and so are shown in a diagram on the page opposite. (In the diagram, words underlined are quotations from the poem, and words in full capitals are words of color.) The diagram also includes parallels and contrasts between the entire Rome section and the section (44-46) on the stars. These stars are portions of the “glory” or “white radiance of Eternity” and represent not only the spirits of immortal poets and the “Heaven of song” (or music of the spheres) which those spirits produce but also, at a remove, the immortal poetry of the poets—at a remove since the poetry was their earthly creation and is situated on earth. And, as Rome’s “music” is a weak approximation of that Heaven of song, so too Rome’s “words”—its immortal poetry—is (like its “sky, / Flowers, ruins, statues”) “weak . . . to speak” the “glory . . . with fitting truth.”3 By means of these parallels and contrasts, the entire Rome section becomes fully integrated into the poem even while providing an alternative way of imagining Adonais’ spirit as part of the World Soul.

CHAPTER SIX FAITH AND HONEST DOUBT: THE “PROLOGUE” TO TENNYSON’S IN MEMORIAM A.H.H.

In the past there has been some question about whether the Prologue mainly expresses religious faith or religious doubt. And since the Prologue was probably the last section of In Memoriam to be written,1 an answer to the question may be considered an answer as well to a larger question—whether, by writing In Memoriam, Tennyson allayed his religious doubts and became a stronger believer for having allayed them, as he believed Hallam had done (See Canto 96). One answer to the smaller question was provided by Henry Sidgwick in 1860 in a letter to Tennyson: the Prologue shows faith to be “completely triumphant,” although, in doing so, the Prologue “does not quite represent the effect” of the whole poem, which alternates faith and doubt.2 Almost a century later, Eleanor B. Mattes provided a similar answer but, in explaining the triumph of faith in the Prologue, claimed that faith to be rationalist rather than orthodox Christian: it is probable that [F.D.] Maurice influenced Tennyson in the shaping of the one new article of In Memoriam’s creed which the Prologue adds: namely, belief in the “Strong Son of God, immortal Love” (Pro. 1), the giver of life and the conquerer of death. . . . Tennyson in the Prologue derived all hope of immortality and other religious assurances from trust in the Son of God. . . . Nevertheless, while the mood and tone of the Prologue commend it as Christian and won it a place in most hymnals, it avoids giving the expressly Christian answers to the questions which the earlier-written sections raise. . . . Tennyson’s argument for immortality is not . . . the fact of the Resurrection or Christ’s assurances of eternal life, but the rationalist deduction that man’s sense of deathlessness is a guarantee of it, since this sense was implanted by a just Maker Who would not deceive. And although Tennyson addressed the Prologue to the “Son of God,” and concluded it on a note of prayer or supplication to Him, he nevertheless protected himself against an outright commitment to

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A few years later, not commenting upon Mattes’ view, Basil Willey found the Prologue as well as In Memoriam proper to be pervaded by doubts. As evidence, he cited “Believing where we cannot prove” (4), “Our little systems” (17), and “We have but faith: we cannot know” (21), in addition to “Thou seemest human and divine” (13).3 Then, John D. Rosenberg presented this view of the Prologue in the strongest terms: the opening lines . . . , in which the tone of affirmation is struck after years of the doubter’s agony, betray an astonishing uncertainty. The Prologue is clogged with qualifications working antiphonally against the statement of faith, which is most vigorously offered in the first line but then retracted, celebrated denied, and asserted. . . .Thus, although the first line of the Prologue invokes the “Strong Son of God, immortal Love,” the poet admits that “We have but faith: we cannot know” (l. 21): he can only “trust” (l. 39) that Hallam lives eternally with the Strong Son of God. This final admission is extraordinary, for it climaxes seventeen years of obsessive meditation on the death and after-life of the poet’s friend. It epitomizes the energetic conflict between doubt and the will to believe. . . . (Rosenberg 229; repr. in Hunt 201 and Ross 207-08)

A decade later, however, Derek Colville restated Sidgwick’s view but added that Tennyson made the Prologue “highly Christian” in order “to stimulate a collective consciousness.” He “chose the most universal terms he could in order to stimulate the participation, conscious or not, of his reader.” The Prologue would thereby provide “an initial stimulus and challenge to a reading of” In Memoriam proper, in which the Christian terms are only metaphorical and “quite superfluous to the philosophical position the poet takes” (Colville 225). Most recently, Timothy Peltason offered a kind of compromise answer to the question of faith versus doubt in the Prologue: the final three stanzas (Nos. 9-11) express the private doubt resulting from Tennyson’s personal experience, and all the preceding stanzas express the public faith transcending that experience: these stanzas offer their secure and rounded assertions from some fixed point outside the partial and historical moments of the poet’s experience within the poem. . . . True, the God of the Prologue is embraced “by faith and faith alone,” but the poet professes his faith clearly and forthrightly: it is a thing accomplished and not just aspired to. . . .

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In stanza 5 the object of the poet’s faith is presented as a wholeness [“thou, O Lord”] that triumphs over the partiality of any merely historical experience [“Our little systems”]. . . . On behalf of the species the poet decorously acknowledges the encompassing omnipotence of God. But then, in the last three stanzas of the Prologue, this public decorum slips oddly into the depreciation of the private experience of the poet, who sets against the vision of cosmic wholeness and harmony “the wild and wandering cries” of the poem to follow. From the heights of his magisterial opening stanzas, the reader is conducted into the poem as into the actual experience of a fragmented human history. (Peltason 19-20)

Besides providing a compromise between the “faith” and “doubt” viewpoints, this interpretation has the added advantage of providing an esthetically pleasing bridge from the Prologue to the poem proper (even though, in doing so, it sacrifices any bridge between stanzas 8 and 9 of the Prologue). Nevertheless, those two advantages must be relinquished, for the implications of seven passages in the Prologue supply more evidence than Willey and Rosenberg cited for the view that religious doubts pervade the Prologue: (1) In stanza 1, the qualification admitted by Peltason—that the Son of God is embraced by faith alone—is compounded by the added qualification that Willey cited—”Believing where we cannot prove.” The implication here is that we should not believe unless we can prove—or, less insistent, that normally we would not believe unless we could prove. But in either case, the fact that we cannot prove overcasts belief with doubt. (2) Stanza 3 contains a deductive syllogism, although a rearranged and complex one with three premises, a conclusion, and a further conclusion. The first premise is “Thou madest man” (10, 12); the second is “thou art just” (12); and the third but unstated premise is that a just Creator would not have made man only to die (i.e., would not have made man so that he had no purpose other than to die). From these premises an unstated conclusion follows: therefore, thou didst not make man only to die. And a further conclusion is that man thinks thou didst not make him only to die—a slightly expanded paraphrase of 11: “He thinks he was not made to die.” But, as in stanza 1, man believes where he cannot prove: “He thinks” implies that he does not know (and “he knows not why” [10] states it outright). Therefore, the implication is that

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he may be wrong, he may have been made only to die, and God may be unjust. Moreover, if man was made only to die—i.e., for no purpose—he may not, after dying, be resurrected into heavenly life, for such resurrection would be necessary only to further some other purpose for man. And so it may be false that “Thou wilt not leave us in the dust” (9). (3) The last two lines of stanza 4 allude to the antinomy of human free will versus God’s will: God intends that we have free will but also that we make our will His. That this is an antinomy is shown by its contradictory implications: On the one hand, our wills are free (“ours”) only if they are free to be not His instead of His; on the other hand, since everything is God’s and is the result of His will, our wills, whatever they are, are already His without our making them His and so are not free to be not His. Consequently, merely to allude to the antinomy is to cast doubt on any of its assumptions. But then to add to the antinomy the qualification “we know not how” (15) not only implies the same lack and need of proof and knowledge as in stanzas 1 and 3 but also concentrates the doubt on the assumption that our wills are free. (4) Together, stanzas 5 and 6 allude to another antinomy—this one on the perfect source of knowledge versus the imperfect nature of knowledge (or of man the knower). God is eternal, allencompassing, and limitless, and yet knowledge, which comes from God, is transitory (17-18), partial (19), and irremediably limited (21-22). Again, merely to allude to the antinomy is to cast doubt on any of its assumptions: “And yet we trust it comes from thee” (23) implies the poet’s doubt about whether knowledge does come from God. The antinomy also has a supplement. If the limitedness of knowledge (or of the knower) is irremediable—if “we cannot know” (“For knowledge is [only] of things we see”)—then knowledge is of no avail to us despite its advancement. Consequently, there is no reason to advance it, and it should be abandoned for simple faith. (“We have but faith” anyway.) And yet, we still want knowledge to “grow” (24). (5) Stanza 7 repeats that we want knowledge to grow (25), but stanzas 8 and 9 cast doubt on its desirability—not, as before, because “we cannot know” but because we cannot “bear” knowledge (31-32). We are too “slight” (29), “foolish” (31), and “vain” (32) to

The “Prologue” to Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.

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assimilate it into wisdom, and so the growth of knowledge only lessens “reverence” (26)—causes us to “mock” rather than “fear” God (30)—and promotes the “sin” (33) of vanity about personal “worth” (34) and “merit” (35). Incidentally, identifying the poet here as one of the “vain worlds” and his “sin” as vanity emphasizes the continuity between the “we” of the first eight stanzas and the “I” of the final three. And though all of the final three stanzas (and no others) begin with praying God to “Forgive”—thus emphasizing their difference from all preceding stanzas—prayers to God begin at the latest in stanza 8 with asking Him to “help” (31-32), or probably earlier (in stanzas 6 and 7) with asking Him to “let knowledge grow” (24-25), or possibly even as early as stanza 3 with asking Him by implication not to “leave us in the dust” (9)— thus emphasizing continuity rather than difference. (6) In stanza 10 is the statement that Rosenberg found “extraordinary” in its doubt: “I trust he lives in thee” (39). But even if the poet were certain that Hallam now lived in God, the claim that “there I find him worthier to be loved” (40) seems a doubtful attempt to express a positive effect of God’s having “removed” (37) him— doubtful especially because the claim follows the poet’s assertion of love for the live Hallam—”Thy creature, whom I found so fair” (38). Hallam was found quite worthy enough while alive to be loved. Death was not necessary to confer love-worthiness. (7) In the final stanza, the poet calls the cantos that follow “wild and wandering” (41)—youthful “Confusions” that sometimes “fail in truth” (42-43). Yet he does not therefore destroy them (or at least the “untrue” ones) or even withhold them from publication. He publishes them anyway but asks God to “forgive them” (41, 43)—a compromise that may denote either irresistible creative ego (preventing him from suppressing any substantial work he wrote) or irresistible need to record completely his grief and love for Hallam or his struggle with religious doubts. But the compromise may also denote that the doubts are still there—that the “Confusions” did not “fail in truth” entirely. The final prayer to God—“make me wise” (44)—is the essential one in the Prologue since, if granted, it would also satisfy all the other prayers stated and implied: If the poet were wise, he would believe where he cannot prove, could make his will God’s, be content with irremediably limited knowledge and yet believe that it comes from God, bear His

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“light” and yet be more reverent—i.e., could reconcile knowledge with faith—and, indeed, reconcile all the religious doubts implied in the Prologue and described in the cantos that follow. Of course, it is conceivable that, when writing the Prologue, Tennyson was already strong again in faith but decided to adopt the stance of religious doubt for an esthetic reason—so that the whole Prologue (not just its last three stanzas) would express the same mixed state of mind as in the subsequent main poem and thus would introduce it more properly. Such a stance would attest to his dramatic ability to express feelings not (or no longer) his own—an ability shown in his plays and dramatic monologues. But in the Prologue he was speaking not as a dramatic character but as himself, and adopting the stance would have seemed an act of insincerity—perhaps especially because the feelings had once been his own. Moreover, if, as Basil Willey believed, the Prologue “was written to show the Christian world (and Emily Sellwood in particular) how far Tennyson could, with perfect sincerity, go in the direction of Christianity” (104; repr. in Ross 173), he would have been impelled to make the Prologue express as strong a faith as he possessed at the time. But since the whole Prologue (not just its last three stanzas) contains so many implied doubts, more probably than not he must still have been in the mixed state of mind that characterizes the poem proper. When Henry Sidgwick found in the poem proper this mixed state of mind, he described it perhaps more accurately as alternating states of mind: assurance and doubt must alternate in the moral world in which we live, somewhat as night and day alternate in the physical world. The revealing visions come and go; when they come we feel that we know: but in the intervals we must pass through states in which all is dark, and in which we can only struggle to hold the conviction that power is with us in the night Which makes the darkness and the light And dwells not in the light alone. (Quoted in Tennyson, Works 2: 524)

But these alternating states of mind are reflected also in the whole Prologue, where stated faith alternates with implied doubt. One must conclude, then, that, despite the renewed faith expressed in the last sections of In Memoriam proper and in the “Epilogue,” Tennyson more probably than not failed ultimately to allay his religious doubts by writing In Memoriam.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE KNIGHT WHO WANTED TO RIVAL SHAKESPEARE: BROWNING’S “CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME”

There is sufficient reason to entertain the belief that, in Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,”1 Roland allegorically represents Browning as poet and the Tower represents Shakespeare as poet—or, more precisely, Shakespeare’s poetic achievement. The poem then becomes Browning’s guarded, private allegory about his and other poets’ lifelong but destined-to-fail attempts to write such dramatic poetry as would rival that of the greatest dramatic poet, Shakespeare. Supporting this thesis are four separate applications of evidence in the poem and other works of Browning’s. Each application by itself is insufficient as an argument, but, by pointing toward the same conclusion, the four as an aggregate become a strong argument. Because of the enigmatic nature of the poem, many readers over the years have suspected that it expresses a guarded and private meaning. But just as Browning was evasive in the poem about showing a “meaning” (allegorical or otherwise), he was afterwards as evasive about acknowledging that the poem had a “meaning.” Years later, in 1887, confronted with a stranger’s allegorical interpretation, he said, Oh, no, not at all. Understand, I don’t repudiate it, either. I only mean I was conscious of no allegorical intention in writing it. . . . [It] came upon me as a kind of dream. I had to write it. . . . I did not know then what I meant beyond that, and I’m sure I don’t know now. (Quoted in DeVane 229)

Nevertheless, despite these denials, the specific allegorical reading presented in this chapter has enough evidential support to be more or less as probable as Browning’s being unaware of meaning anything by the poem.

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Soon after those denials, he was asked by a clergyman friend whether his poem meant that “He that endureth to the end shall be saved.” Browning replied, “Yes, just about that” (DeVane 231). However, this reply seems so different from the earlier one that the circumstance of the later one must be described to allow the difference to be accounted for. This circumstance was a visit to Browning at his home and was described by the visitor, the Reverend John W. Chadwick: Upon the lengthwise wall of the room, above the Italian furniture, sombre and richly carved, was a long, wide band of tapestry, on which I thought I recognized the miserable horse of Childe Roland’s pilgrimage:— “One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, Stood stupefied, however he came there: Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!” I asked Mr. Browning if the beast of the tapestry was the beast of the poem; and he said yes, and descanted somewhat on his lean monstrosity. But only a Browning could have evolved the stanzas of the poem from the woven image. I further asked him if he had said that he only wrote Childe Roland for its realistic imagery, without any moral purpose,—a notion to which Mrs. Sutherland Orr has given currency; and he protested that he never had. When I asked him if constancy to an ideal—”He that endureth to the end shall be saved”—was not a sufficient understanding of the central purpose of the poem, he said, “Yes, just about that.” (Quoted in Browning, Works, ed. Scudder 1020)

Here, the tapestry made vivid how effective esthetically (i.e., amorally) the “realistic imagery” of the poem was, and so the clergyman, naturally concerned with “moral purpose,” asked Browning whether he wrote the poem “only . . . for its realistic imagery, without any moral purpose.” And, after Browning’s defensive “protest,” it was only natural for the clergyman to ask whether—or suggest that—a certain moral that he had in mind was the “central purpose” of the poem. Browning could do little else but assent to that moral (or else supply another) lest his protest be shown to be a lie. However, as if in protest then against the necessity of assent, he tempered it with a reservation about the accuracy of the suggested moral: “just about that.” But whether the reply to the Reverend Chadwick is regarded as a counter to the imputation of amoral realism or a diplomatic attempt to spare the clergyman’s feelings or a no-longer-caring surrender to interpreters’ persistence or a contradiction of the earlier reply to the stranger or the truth or something else, at least one of the replies is an evasion. The question must then be asked why Browning might have wanted to avoid stating outright the meaning of the poem or even expressing a

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conjecture about its meaning. If the meaning was his attempt to rival Shakespeare, the poem may have been one of those in which Browning used “games” (here, a guarded, private allegory) “to avoid publicly revealing” in his poetry “his struggle and eventual reconciliation with an overwhelming predecessor” (Baker 176). Or Browning might have thought that readers would consider him presumptuous to suppose himself in the same “league” with Shakespeare. Browning’s imagining himself a contender (even a losing one) with the Immortal Bard might have been considered “bragging.” Indeed, when he wrote the third stanza of the “Epilogue to Asolando” near the end of his life, he was concerned that his readers might think him bragging; but, in this case—after years of public applause that might warrant such pride—he bravely decided to state his meaning outright despite the possible reaction (DeVane 553). Among the many published interpretations of “Childe Roland,” several expanded upon the allusion to King Lear in the title (the first of the four items of evidence alluded to above) and described “Shakespearian” parallels in the poem. For example, “Childe Roland is a Lear upon the heath . . . in whom all human anguish resounds” (Shaw 132, 135). Or, “one of the principal themes of King Lear—namely, the presentment of unregenerate human nature—is partially realized again in ‘Childe Roland’ in terms of landscape. . . . In both works Nature (or the powers with which the good soul must contend) is both fool and fooler” (Clarke 327). But no interpretation based on Shakespearian parallels used any other of the four items of evidence alluded to above, and so no interpretation is similar to the one presented here. The four items of evidence and their applications are as follows. First, the title of the poem is the beginning of Edgar’s song in King Lear. Therefore, merely by his title, Browning immediately parallels the poem— his own “song”—with Edgar’s and thus his own work with Shakespeare’s. And just as Edgar guardedly sings in physical and behavioral disguise, so does Browning guardedly “sing” in allegorical disguise. The second item of evidence is in an “Introductory Essay” that Browning wrote for an edition of Shelley’s letters about a month before writing “Childe Roland.” At the time, Browning was reading Shakespeare assiduously (DeVane 229, 579), and so it was natural, when writing the essay, for Browning to contrast Shelley’s art with Shakespeare’s. But then the latter’s art became a subject to discuss in its own right, and in that discussion Browning compared Shakespeare’s “personality” to a tower: Did the personality of such an one stand like an open watch-tower in the midst of the territory it is erected to gaze on, and were the storms and calms, the stars and meteors, its watchman was wont to report of, the

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Chapter Seven habitual variegation of his every-day life, as they glanced across its open roof or lay reflected on its four-square parapet?2

The third item of evidence involves the “blindness” of the Tower. In line 182 of the poem, the Tower is called “Blind as the fool’s heart”; and this phrase has been assumed to be an allusion to Psalms 14:1 or 53:1— “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” In the Psalm the fool’s “blindness” would be his atheism; but, referred to the poem, that blindness would make the Tower atheistic—an idea without any corroboration in the rest of the poem. However, “blind” can mean not only “unable to see” but “unable to be seen into”—i.e., opaque, obscure, impenetrable to sight or understanding. In the poem the fool’s heart is “blind” because it cannot be seen into or understood—i.e., by someone not a fool, someone capable of understanding. So too the Tower is “blind” because it cannot be seen into or understood. In other words, the Tower is “Dark” (as stated in the title of the poem and as Roland repeats in lines 15 and 40). It may be dark in the sense of darkly colored, darkly shaded, or gloomy (because “built of brown stone”—line 183), but it is also dark in the sense of unilluminated, unknown, unable to be seen into or understood. And so, in the one instance (lines 181-82) where Roland, mentioning the Tower, does not call it “Dark” but instead calls it “blind,” he is using a synonym. By itself, the above point is not relevant to an equivalence between the Tower and Shakespeare. But the point becomes relevant when it is coupled with evidence from Browning’s introductory essay to Shelley’s letters—evidence separate from that in the essay excerpt quoted above. In the essay too Shakespeare’s personality (likened to a tower) is described as unable to be seen into or understood. That personality too might have been called dark or “blind.” This sense is especially communicated in the following excerpt from the essay by the sentence “We learn only what he intended we should learn” and by the repeated phrase “We are ignorant”: Such a poet is properly the poiëtës, the fashioner; and the thing fashioned, his poetry, will of necessity be substantive, projected from himself and distinct. We are ignorant what the inventor of “Othello” conceived of that fact as he beheld it in completeness, how he accounted for it, under what known law he registered its nature, or to what unknown law he traced its coincidence. We learn only what he intended we should learn by that particular exercise of his power,—the fact itself,—which, with its infinite significances, each of us receives for the first time as a creation, and is hereafter left to deal with, as, in proportion to his own intelligence, he best may. We are ignorant, and would fain be otherwise. (5: 137-38)

Objection may be raised that, when the tower simile is introduced in the essay and the tower is described as an “open watch-tower” with an

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“open roof” and “four-square parapet,” the tower does not seem dark or “blind” in the above sense. But Browning states that the openness of the tower, roof, and parapet allows the personality within to “gaze” outward; he does not state that the openness allows the personality within to be gazed upon from outside. Moreover, Browning’s description of the tower interior also shows that it can be looked out of but not looked into from outside: Or did some sunken and darkened chamber of imagery witness, in the artificial illumination of every storied compartment we are permitted to contemplate, how rare and precious were the outlooks through here and there an embrasure upon a world beyond, and how blankly would have pressed on the artificer the boundary of his daily life, except for the amorous diligence with which he had rendered permanent by art whatever came to diversify the gloom? (5: 138)

In summary, then, the argument here for the Tower-Shakespeare equivalence in the poem is that both the Tower in the poem and the Shakespeare-equivalent tower in the essay are dark or “blind” in the same sense. The fourth item of evidence is that, in the last two lines of the poem when Roland blows upon his “slug-horn,” the sound that comes from the horn is this very poem. (Such a reading is possible even if a period rather than no punctuation at all is preferred after “blew,” for the period can still have the sense of a colon.) Otherwise, the purpose of repeating the sevenword clause at the end of the last line would appear to be mainly to fill out the line, even though other purposes could be supposed—such as providing a summary ending or one that cyclically (and thus dramatically) returns to the beginning. But any such purposes would have been satisfied by the clause being printed merely in normal type either in quotation marks (Browning again quoting Edgar) or without them (Browning again using Edgar’s words but now as his own). The clause would not have needed to be both in outer double quotation marks and either italicized or in inner single quotation marks. But since it is, the combination indicates that Browning is repeating the title of his poem and thus referring to the whole poem. The obvious reason for such reference would be that the whole poem is the direct object of “blew.” That horn music cannot literally be a poem should not cause trouble here. Just as wordless birdsong or wind-harp music can be (and had been) a metaphor for poetry, so too can horn music. Moreover, for the metaphor to be valid, Browning would not need to be aware that “slug-horn” was really only a corruption of “slogan” or battle-cry (DeVane 231), which is much closer literally to the spoken sound of poetry.

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Thus, figuratively, the knight-errant Roland finds himself at the “place” where, like his fellow knights before him, he is tested in some ultimate, unnamed way indefinitely associated with his blowing of the “slug-horn”; and, like the other knights, he fails. But, literally, the poet Browning finds himself with the opportunity to write a great poem worthy of Shakespeare; he writes this very poem but, like his fellow poets before him, fails in his high purpose. The likelihood of the Roland-Browning equivalence (and even the Tower-Shakespeare equivalence) would be additionally strengthened if any of the fellow knights preceding Roland were recognizable as fellow poets preceding Browning. Such recognition has occurred among a few critics. According to Harold Golder, the “lost adventurers” in the final two stanzas of the poem suggest the lost poets who beckon to Aprile in Paracelsus (975). And Harold Bloom believes the lost adventurers to represent all the poets of the Romantic tradition plus Tasso (42, 44). Moreover, W. Craig Turner suggests three specific equivalences: Cuthbert, who was guilty of “one night’s disgrace,” corresponds to Shelley, who deserted his first wife Harriet to live adulterously with Mary Godwin (47-48); the “traitor” Giles corresponds to Wordsworth because “Browning had earlier, in ‘The Lost Leader,’ recorded his feeling that Wordsworth had been a traitor to the liberal tradition” (48); and Roland corresponds to Browning: The not-so-successful poet—looking back over his scant poetic accomplishments of 1851 and considering his inability to write poetry that pleased the public (most recently illustrated by Christmas-Eve and EasterDay)—must have also been wondering if his own poetic quest would ever meet with success. . . . As Roland chastises himself for not immediately recognizing the object of his destination “[a]fter a life spent training for the sight” (180), Browning may well have been thinking of his own life “training” to become a poet. . . . (Turner 41-42)

The case for the Giles-Wordsworth equivalence is circumstantially stronger even than Turner suggests. The “soul of honor,” “frank” and supposedly “honest,” Giles had been knighted “ten years ago”; but afterwards he was publicly “cursed” as a “traitor,” perhaps by “his own bands.” Yet Roland pities him: “Poor traitor” (Noted in Karlin 28, 240n2). Correspondingly, in 1842-43—”ten years ago” (since “Childe Roland” was written in 1852)—the once-liberal Wordsworth had accepted from the conservative government a Civil List pension and the poet laureateship (DeVane 159). Browning then described him in “The Lost Leader” as a Judas who had betrayed his band “for a handful of silver.” Yet Browning pitied him enough to wish him “pardoned in heaven” (4: 183-84).

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After its publication, “The Lost Leader” was always a source of embarrassment and self-defensiveness in Browning. He still deplored Wordsworth’s gradual desertion of liberal principles for Toryism, but he felt that the poem had unjustly condemned the whole man and poet in condemning his political views (DeVane 160). In January 1852—with Wordsworth dead twenty months and above political criticism—Browning may have resolved, when writing “Childe Roland,” to avoid repeating his mistake and so to hide his feelings about Wordsworth behind a protective allegorical screen.3 Indeed, according to John Haydn Baker, in poems composed from at least 1835 to 1872 “Browning is playing a game with his readers, challenging them to spot his references—not out of simple intellectual one-upmanship, but out of a desire to conceal his changing attitude toward his predecessors” (57). In 1879 the Shakespearian scholar Frederick J. Furnivall asked Browning to reread Shakespeare’s works in a chronological order newly determined by Furnivall and to report his impressions. Browning supposedly reread the works but, according to Furnivall, reported that “the only general impression he got from Shakspere was, the lordly ease with which he swung up to the Throne whose lowest steps ‘the rest of us’ only reacht with infinite struggle” (Peterson 195). It is as probable as not that, twenty-seven years earlier, this same impression inspired Browning to write a poem about the “infinite struggle” and inevitable failure of “the rest of us” to attain to Shakespeare’s “lordly” art.

CHAPTER EIGHT A TRAGIC HERO GOES HOME: ARNOLD’S “SOHRAB AND RUSTUM”

Since the first publication of Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum,” at least three main questions have emerged from the critical debate about it: whether the ending—the description of the Oxus River from source to mouth—is organically relevant to the poem; whether the poem “animates” and “ennobles” (as Arnold suggested it did), thereby possesses two of the main virtues that he espoused for poetry and drama in his Preface to Poems, 1853, and so was a fitting replacement in Poems for “Empedocles on Etna,” which he felt did not have those virtues; and whether Sohrab’s defeat by his father indicates in Arnold a feeling of defeat by his own father—or, more precisely, a feeling of defeat of his youthful, poetic self by his mature, critical self which his father influenced. The purpose of this chapter is to show as more probable that the Oxus River description is organically relevant to the poem, that the poem does “animate” and “ennoble,” and that Sohrab’s defeat by his father does not indicate a feeling of defeat in Arnold by his father’s influence within him. The first of these questions may, perhaps, be understood best by quoting from what was both the first and the most passionate objection to the ending passage about the Oxus. Granted that the passage can be conjectured to have various functions in the poem—still Why, after all the human interest of the poem, are we to turn suddenly off to mere nature-description, beautiful as that may be? . . . True, the poem began with the Oxus, and ends with it also; but is that right, even in an episode? . . . Mr. Arnold . . . had far better have ended with And Rustum and his son were left alone, . . . than have tried to turn our human interest and affection from them, by telling us about the Oxus. Who cares whither the Oxus goes, or what becomes of it, while Rustum is lying in the sand by his dead son . . . ? The Oxus, and all the rivers on earth, yea all nature, and the sun and moon, if they intrude themselves at such a moment, are simply impertinences. Rustum and his son are greater than they: nearer to us than they. Our spirits

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Chapter Eight are hovering lovingly round their spirits; and as for the Oxus and its going into the Aral Sea . . . Let it go! (Kingsley 138)

To contribute to the debate about the ending of the poem, it is necessary to discuss, first, the beginning, then the theme of homegoing in the poem, and finally, related to that theme, those epic similes in the poem that are about traveling, flowing (or “streaming”), and floating, though not necessarily homeward—in other words, a theme and similes that can be associated with characteristics of the Oxus. When rearranged for the purpose of comparison, excerpts from the beginning of the poem can suggest much about its ending: And the first grey of morning But when the grey dawn stole filled the east, into his tent, And the fog rose out of the He rose . . . Oxus stream. ..................... .................... And went abroad into the cold wet fog, Through the dim camp. . . . Through the black Tartar tents he passed, which stood . . . on the low flat strand Of Oxus, where the summer-floods o’erflow When the sun melts the snows in high Pamere. . . . (lines 1-2, 7-8, 10-15; italics mine)1

Here Sohrab is immediately associated—even symbolically identified— with the Oxus through the use of shared images: In the “grey” dawn both the Oxus fog and Sohrab “rose,” then he entered the Oxus fog, which presumably passed through the Tartar camp as he did, and he passed by the tents by which the Oxus passed. Moreover, here the flow of the river from its source in Pamere is alluded to—the flow whose full description ends the poem. Thus, Sohrab’s symbolic identification with the Oxus at the beginning of the poem prepares for such an identification at its end. Sohrab’s main purpose in the poem is to get to his father, and that purpose is expressed also in terms of getting to his father(‘s)land—Seistan, the home of Rustum and Rustum’s father Zal. In wanting to get to both his father and his fatherland, Sohrab wants to claim both identity and identification—the former becoming possible when Rustum acknowledges him as his son, and the latter becoming possible when Sohrab feels that he is of Seistan. In the poem the Tartar tribes of warriors are identified by the homelands from which they come, and although these identifications are “epic enumeration . . . in the Miltonic manner” (Colville 108) and superficially provide the poem with the verbal color of exotic geographical

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names, they also provide contrasts to Sohrab’s status and examples of the kind of identification he wants: The Tartars of the Oxus, . . . who from Bokhara come And Khiva. . . . Next, the more temperate Toorkmuns of the south, The Kukas, and the lances of Salore, And those from Attruck and the Caspian sands; .................................. The Tartars of Ferghana, from the banks Of the Jaxartes, . . . and those wilder hordes Who roam o’er Kipchak and the northern waste, Kalmucks and unkempt Kuzzacks, tribes who stray Nearest the Pole, and wandering Kirghizzes, Who come on shaggy ponies from Pamere. . . . (117, 119-23, 128-34)

Although born and raised in Ader-baijan, his mother’s home, Sohrab mentions it only once, and then only as the place where his mother “dwells” (590). Yet he speaks of his father’s home, which he has never seen, with love and longing: O Ruksh [Rustum’s horse], thou art more fortunate than I; For thou hast gone where I shall never go, And snuffed the breezes of my father’s home. And thou hast trod the sands of Seistan, And seen the River of Helmund, and the Lake Of Zirrah; and the aged Zal himself Has often stroked thy neck . . .—but I Have never known my grandsire’s furrowed face, Nor seen his lofty house in Seistan, Nor slaked my thirst at the clear Helmund stream. . . . (747-53, 755-58)

And he asks Rustum to bury him there rather than in Ader-baijan: “[C]arry me with thee to Seistan, / . . . And thou must lay me in that lovely earth . . .” (784, 787). Rustum promises; but, though the body will be buried there, the spirit goes elsewhere: “[F]rom his limbs / Unwillingly the spirit fled away . . .” (853-54). Then “a cold fog, with night, / Crept from the Oxus” (867-68) just as it had done that morning accompanied by the rising of Sohrab; and the Oxus “floated on, / Out of the mist . . . of that low land, . . . flowed / Right for the polar star, . . .—till at last / The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide / His luminous home of waters opens . . .” (875-76, 879-80, 888-90; italics mine). Before Sohrab’s body goes to its longed-for

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home, the Oxus and Sohrab’s spirit, already identified symbolically with the Oxus, go to their longed-for home. This symbolic identification is also encouraged by two other elements in the ending passage—the river being personified by masculine personal pronouns (also done earlier, in lines 377 and 508) and being called a “foiled circuitous wanderer” (888), a name that applies as justly to the earlier Sohrab in search of Rustum. In addition, many of the epic similes in the poem have minor but noticeable “family resemblances” to the ending passage as well as to each other, and so they reinforce the personification and symbolism of the flowing Oxus, although they do so by distant association. No epic simile is primarily about homegoing, but two of them represent homegoing situations: a pearl diver of Bahrein returning home to his wife (284-89) and a male eagle returning home to his mate but not knowing that she has been killed (556-73). A situation related to homegoing—that of traveling, though not necessarily homeward—is represented in a troop of pedlars from Cabool crossing the Indian Caucasus and passing dead migrating birds (160-68); but more like a river are the traveling long-necked cranes that “stream” over the land on their way to the seaboard (111-16). Situations of flowing or “streaming” are also in a shiver running through a cornfield (154-56), reapers’ mowing a swath through the corn (293-96), a gardener’s mowing grass and accidentally cutting down a hyacinth (634-38), a hawk’s swooping down upon a partridge in the corn (400-02), two eagles’ swooping down upon one prey (472-74), and lightning and wind coming and going suddenly (722-24). Moreover, situations of both floating and flowing or “streaming” are in the Himalayan winter wind mowing boughs from the trees and the boughs floating down flooded rivers (410-15), the ocean tide moving shoreward (616-18), and a huge ocean wave rolling swimmers at its crest either shoreward to life or seaward to death (390-97). The second critical question about the poem is whether it “animates” and “ennobles” and thereby possesses two of the main virtues that Arnold espoused for poetry and drama in his Preface to Poems, 1853. In a letter to Arthur Hugh Clough, Arnold stated that “in its poor way I think Sohrab and Rustum animates. . . . [W]hat they [the “complaining millions of men” who “darken in labour and pain”] want is something to animate and ennoble them. . . .”2 Although these two words do not appear in the 1853 Preface, their sense is predominant there: a poem should “inspirit and rejoice the reader,” “convey a charm,” “infuse delight,” and create “happiness” and “enjoyment”—it being understood that “the more tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment” (1: 2). And throughout the Preface, variant forms of the word noble are associated with ancient tragedy and with what is needful in contemporary literature. The former

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has “noble simplicity,” and its “personnages” are “nobler” than in the latter. Contemporary poets must enable “a noble action to subsist as it did in nature”; “they want to educe and cultivate what is best and noblest in themselves.” Although the ancient poets “attained their grand results by penetrating themselves with some noble and significant action,” the contemporary poet should “delight himself with the contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time” and thereby endeavor “to feel nobly” (1: 5, 8, 11, 13-15). Moreover, Arnold called “noble and excellent” the Persian story that he adapted for his poem (Letters 1848-1888 30). But whether or not noble truly describes “Sohrab and Rustum” or its main characters, Arnold’s claim for the poem must depend on whether it “animates” and “ennobles” one or both of the characters. An early critic, Harriet Martineau, believed that it does not, and she used Arnold’s Preface to support her view. To her the outcome of the poem is unrelieved, undignified misfortune, the infliction . . . of a blind Fate . . . driving the Father and Son against each other. . . . [W]e find in Mr. Arnold’s preface this paragraph:—“What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous.” Now, . . . what is the situation in which we, at least, leave . . . Rustum, . . . to which the whole . . . tends, and from which we carry away our general impression?—surely in “a continuous state of mental distress, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.” Theory and practice, in this respect more utterly at variance, could not, it seems to us, be found anywhere. (Martineau 135-36)

J.A. Froude, another early critic of the poem, echoes this charge against it but expresses his view conditionally: “If . . . the nobleness of soul in the two sufferers, be not made to rise above the cruel accident which crushes them, we cannot listen to the poet” (92). Most subsequent critics have agreed with Martineau and Froude. On the other hand, there is evidence in the poem that the nobleness of soul in the dying Sohrab does rise above the cruel accident which crushes him and that then he is “animated” and “ennobled” and so capable of animating the reader. Sohrab achieves this state by preventing Rustum from killing himself. As, earlier, Sohrab spared Rustum’s life (422-26), not knowing who he was, now Sohrab saves his life, knowing who he is.

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When Rustum could not bear the “horror” of knowing that he has mortally wounded his own son (699), . . . he clutched his sword, To draw it, and for ever let life out. But Sohrab saw his thought, and held his hands, And with a soothing voice he spake, and said:— “Father, forbear! for I but meet to-day The doom which at my birth was written down In Heaven, and thou art Heaven’s unconscious hand. Surely my heart cried out that it was thou, When first I saw thee; and thy heart spoke too, I know it! but fate trod those promptings down Under its iron heel; fate, fate engaged The strife, and hurled me on my father’s spear. ................................. But it was writ in Heaven that this should be.” (704-15, 725)

Sohrab may indeed believe that “Heaven” or “fate” rather than Rustum is to blame—earlier he had shown that he believed strongly in the rule of “Heaven” and “fate” (387-96)—but, whether or not he believes what he says, the purpose of his words is to convince Rustum of his blamelessness and so turn him from killing himself. Sohrab attempts this also by trying to turn Rustum’s thoughts from suicide to Sohrab’s own imminent death and his need to feel his father’s love while he still can: . . . I find My father; let me feel that I have found! Come, sit beside me on this sand, and take My head betwixt thy hands, and kiss my cheeks, And wash them with thy tears, and say: My son! Quick! quick! for numbered are my sands of life, And swift; for like the lightning to this field I came, and like the wind I go away— Sudden, and swift, and like a passing wind. (716-24)

In trying to save his new-found father’s life, Sohrab acts out of love for him and out of his own generosity and nobility of spirit. He put out of his mind the thoughts that his slayer is an enemy, that he “transfixed an unarmed foe” (550), that, in doing so, he ungenerously failed to reciprocate Sohrab’s earlier courtesy to him when he was unarmed (42226), that he boasted to his mortally wounded foe and insulted his fate (551), and that, for these actions, he deserves the retribution that Sohrab’s avenger will wreak upon him. But after these thoughts left Sohrab, it might be expected that the prospect of his imminent death—especially at

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the hands of “fate”—would produce in him resignation and a feeling of helplessness. Instead, his spirit rises above the catastrophe, he exerts himself to cajole and persuade Rustum, and he is successful: . . . his voice released the heart Of Rustum, and his tears broke forth; he cast His arms round his son’s neck, and wept aloud, And kissed him. . . . (726-29)

Later, however, the desire to die returns to Rustum, and he exclaims, Oh, that its [the Oxus’] waves were flowing over me! Oh, that I saw its grains of yellow silt Roll tumbling in the current o’er my head! (768-70)

Again, Sohrab tries to dissuade him but with still another argument—that he must live in order to be Sohrab’s surrogate: Desire not that, my father! thou must live. For some are born to do great deeds, and live, As some are born to be obscured, and die. Do thou the deeds I die too young to do, And reap a second glory in thine age; Thou art my father, and thy gain is mine. (772-77)

Moreover, Rustum must live in order to carry Sohrab’s body to Seistan and bury it there (784-87). Again, Sohrab is successful: Rustum responds, “Fear not! as thou hast said, Sohrab, my son, / So shall it be . . .” (796-97). But when Rustum bemoans, “I shall never end this life of blood” (826), Sohrab must try once more. And this attempt is, perhaps, divinely inspired. He tries to dissuade Rustum from dying at the present time by prophesying his death in the distant future right after he discharges his last duty to the king (and so perhaps implying that, before Rustum dies, many other of his services will be needed by the king): . . . thou shalt yet have peace; only not now, Not yet! but thou shalt have it on that day, When thou shalt sail in a high-masted ship, Thou and the other peers of Kai Khosroo, Returning home over the salt blue sea, From laying thy dear master in his grave. (829-34)

Rather than drown himself in the Oxus now, Rustum will be drowned in the sea later. The prophecy comes from one of Arnold’s sources for the

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story, which relates in three separate passages the drowning at sea of the king’s nobles, although Rustum is not mentioned by name: the king . . . went, accompanied by some nobles, to a spring, which had been fixed upon as the place of his repose. Here . . . he disappeared, and all those who went with him were destroyed on their return by a violent tempest.3 He retires to an unknown place and is lost; in other words, dies, or is slain, in a distant country; and his companions, the first heroes of Persia, perish in a storm on their return. (519n) He proceeds to the spot he has fixed upon, where . . . he disappears; and his train, among whom are some of the most renowned warriors of Persia, perish in a dreadful tempest. (521)

About this event Arnold’s Sohrab at the point of death has the gift of prophecy. Unlike his earlier self, he now knows the plans of “Heaven” or “fate.” And he is evidently convincing, for Rustum accedes to his and Heaven’s wishes: “Soon be that day, my son, and deep that sea! / Till then, if fate so wills, let me endure” (836-37). Sohrab’s generous and noble attempts to save his father, even if they had failed, “animate” and “ennoble” Sohrab and so can “animate” the reader. They show Sohrab’s moral quality and so also give the poem a “profoundness of moral impression” and even “moral grandeur”—qualities that, in his 1853 Preface, Arnold commends in the ancient poets (1: 12, 14). Sohrab’s attempts are a moral victory after defeat (by Rustum and fate) and before and despite the imminent ultimate defeat by death. He is therefore a tragic hero rather than a pathetic victim. If it is believed that Arnold created no other tragic hero in his poetry, the creation of only one would seem unlikely. In Merope Arnold did write a tragedy in what he thought to be the manner of the ancients, but because of the fortunate outcome of that play, it contains no strictly tragic hero. However, there is the debatably tragic Balder in “Balder Dead” and the addressed self in “The Last Word”; and, a quarter century after writing “Sohrab and Rustum,” Arnold wrote an essay on a historical figure whom he thought a tragic hero. Lucius Cary, the second Viscount Falkland, was a man in the grasp of fatality. . . . [H]e is surely and visibly touched by the finger of doom. And he knows it himself; yet he knits his forehead, and holds on his way. His course must be what it must, and he cannot flinch from it; yet he loves it not, hopes nothing from it, foresees how it will end. (“Falkland” 8: 198)

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And, affirming in another essay (on French drama) the superiority of tragedy over comedy, Arnold described the tragic hero, although he gave that role to the tragic dramatist rather than to the main dramatic character: [O]nly by breasting in full the storm and cloud of life, breasting it and passing through it and above it, can the dramatist who feels the weight of mortal things liberate himself from the pressure, and rise, as we all seek to rise, to content and joy. Tragedy breasts the pressure of life. . . . Shakespeare has more joy than Molière, more assurance and peace. Othello, with all its passion and terror, is on the whole a work animating and fortifying. . . . (“French Play” 9: 72)

It is therefore possible that Arnold had in mind such a conception of the tragic hero when he wrote “Sohrab and Rustum.” And it should not then be surprising that he originally conceived of the poem as “The Death of Sohrab” (Tinker and Lowry 16-17). The poem has still another virtue that Arnold espoused in his 1853 Preface. It has an action that interests “our permanent passions,” that “most powerfully appeal[s] to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time.” The action deals with the permanent passions of the characters too—deals “with their inward man; with their feelings and behaviour in certain tragic situations, which engage their passions as men” (1: 4-5). In “Sohrab and Rustum” one of the permanent passions is evident in Rustum—the desire for a son—and it is shown primarily in his inclination towards and sympathy for Sohrab before they fight. But Sohrab embodies the major permanent passions in the poem: a son’s love for his father (though he has never seen him), desire to find his father, desire to go to his father(‘s)land as though going home, and, most of all, desire to preserve his father’s life. In light of the above answers to two of the main questions about the poem, it is difficult to answer the third affirmatively—to maintain that Sohrab’s defeat by his father indicates in Arnold a feeling of defeat of his youthful, poetic self by his mature, critical self which his father influenced. Lionel Trilling was the first to express such a view: The strong son is slain by the mightier father; and in the end Sohrab draws his father’s spear from his own side to let out his life and end the anguish. We watch Arnold in his later youth and we must wonder if he is not, in a psychical sense, doing the same thing. The avid lust for life and youth, and the desire for maturity which seems to Arnold to imply giving up all that youth means, live side by side. He has been seeking the poise and equilibrium of his energies; now he begins to look for what he calls “fixity”—not quite the same thing. It is as though, acting as his own

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But, as William E. Buckler stated, this is “a misreading of the poem,” for “Sohrab is clearly the mightier warrior and by far the greater man” (On the Poetry 178n15). Although Arnold may indeed have felt and done as Trilling believed, “Sohrab and Rustum” does not seem to be an unconscious embodiment of those particular feelings and actions, for Sohrab is not only the mightier warrior and the greater man but also, in his last moments, a moral hero symbolically victorious over his father (i.e., his father’s desire to die), over himself (his vengeance-desiring mind and painwracked body), and over death—not only by saving his father from it but also by making the moments in which he is firmly in its grip the finest and fulfilling moments of his life.

CHAPTER NINE THE UNANSWERED QUESTION: HARDY’S “HAP”

This chapter will attempt to show that the essential feature of Thomas Hardy’s early poem “Hap” (written 1866) is, more probably than not, an unanswered question, a philosophical dilemma that Hardy does not resolve in the poem: whether the metaphysical condition ruling the universe is chance and indifference or negative determinism and enmity. But first, it is necessary, for the sake of discussion, to divide the poem (a sonnet) into six parts—an octet consisting of a dependent “If” clause and an independent “Then” clause and a sestet consisting of a denial (“But not so”), a compound question (“How arrives it . . . And why”?), a statement about Casualty and Time, and a concluding sentence about them as “Doomsters.”1 About the “If” clause, critics are mostly in agreement that it expresses a condition of negative determinism—that it posits a god with malevolent (“vengeful”) purpose rather than benevolent purpose (positive determinism) or no purpose at all (antideterminism or chance). About the independent “Then” clause, critics agree at least on its basic assumption— that the speaker would then know why evil rather than good happens to him. The third part—the denial—means either that the metaphysical condition ruling the universe is not malevolence or that the speaker does not know whether it is (since “some vengeful god” has not called to him to inform him). Critics assume (rightly, I think) the first meaning and its implications—that the ruling metaphysical condition is not malevolence but “hap” or “chance,” the title of the poem in manuscript (Purdy 97; Hardy 10). But regardless of which meaning is preferred, the denial does not gainsay that the evils mentioned in the preceding two clauses have indeed happened to the speaker—that he has suffered, sorrowed, lost love, and shed tears. Most critics also assume that the rest of the poem too describes a condition just asserted by the denial—a condition of chance, indifference, antideterminism, purposelessness (see, e.g., Langbaum 45-46). Admittedly,

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the concluding sentence about the Doomsters does indicate their lack of purpose. But the intervening compound question and the statement about Casualty and Time describe a negative-determinist rather than an antideterminist condition. The question and the statement do not show an indiscriminate mixture of “blisses” and “pain”—of good overcoming bad sometimes and bad overcoming good at other times. Instead, they show only bad overcoming good: Joy is slain, hope “unblooms,” the sun is obstructed (stunting crops and cheerfulness), the rain is obstructed (causing drought and thirst), and a moan results rather than gladness. Indeed, even the concluding sentence implies that, despite the Doomsters’ lack of purpose, pain occurs rather than blisses: the verb phrase “had . . . strown” archaically denotes a subjunctive condition contrary to fact, and so, even though the Doomsters would “as readily” strow (or have strown) blisses as pain, they actually strow pain and not blisses. In other words, despite the speaker’s denial of cosmic ill will, he notes only evidence of such ill will, just as he did before the denial. But he is not contradicting himself here. He is expressing his puzzlement at what seems to him a contradiction in life. His reasoning powers cannot allow him to believe that God purposely intends only ill. Therefore, he must believe that God is indifferent and that blind chance rules. But if this is so, then “how arrives it,”2 he asks—i.e., how does it come about or why is it— that the results he experiences are only of bad overcoming good, are evidence only of the malevolence of the universe?3 His reasoning powers lead him to one conclusion as to the correct philosophical position, yet his experience indicates the opposite conclusion. Because Casualty is “Crass” (i.e., stupid or dull), it can have no conscious purpose to obstruct the good; yet the evidence shows that it does obstruct the good. Because Time is “dicing”—a universal image for blind chance—gladness and moans should be “cast” with about equal frequency; yet, according to the evidence, moans are invariably cast. And because both Casualty and Time (now called Doomsters) are “purblind” (i.e., shortsighted or effectively blind), they cannot see to strow either blisses or pain purposely and would “as readily” strow one as the other; yet the sentence implies that they strow pain and not blisses. The compound question “how arrives it . . . And why” formally ends at the question mark following “sown.” Nevertheless, the spirit of the question extends into the next statement (about Casualty and Time), which adds more evidence of cosmic ill will. And the dash preceding “Crass Casualty” may as likely be denoting this extension as it does the addition. As a result, the last sentence in the poem acts as a protest against the question, the statement after it, and all the negative-determinist evidence they present. With only minor alterations, Hardy could have inserted that

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sentence after the denial in order to place together both assertions of the rule of chance and thus make clearer the reasoning process in the poem. But Hardy placed that sentence at the end instead, and there it reassserts the rule of chance and thereby shows that the preceding negativedeterminist evidence has not made belief in that rule untenable for the speaker and that he has not abandoned it. Placement of the sentence at the end shows that the speaker cannot decide between the two positions but can abandon neither. He must still believe the one that his reasoning powers affirm, and yet he must still note all the evidence that seems to contradict it and indicate the opposite position. On this dilemma the poem ends, and the compound question remains unanswered.4 Since Hardy wrote “Hap” early in his career (1866) but did not publish it, one can speculate that he withheld publication because he still hoped to answer that question. If he did answer it, the poem as already written would then not represent his final, mature thinking on the matter. But when, thirty-two years later, he included “Hap” in his first collected edition of poems (1898), his decision to publish it may indicate that, after three decades, he realized that he would not be able to answer the question—that it was unanswerable and so must stand as it is.5 Unfortunately, the dilemma has not been noticed in “Hap” by Hardy critics, and so they have forced a resolution upon the poem. For them, the speaker in the poem intellectually accepts the condition that blind chance rules the universe and yet produces only suffering—i.e., that an antideterminist universe produces only negative-determinist experiences. Such critics perceive in the poem nothing that puzzles the speaker about such a contradictory condition. He may be protesting against it but only because he knows it to be so. According to Ernest Brennecke, Jr., writing of “Hap” in 1924, Hardy “protests against” blind Chance “that need not have made life as miserable as it is” (Universe 35). But Brennecke sees in the poem neither Hardy’s protest that blind Chance logically should not have made life as miserable as it is nor Hardy’s logically consequent question why blind Chance made life thus. A year later, Brennecke no longer believes that, in the poem, Hardy even “protests against” such a condition of the universe. Now, “Hap” expresses Hardy’s “idea of the essential malignity of chance and circumstance, coupled with a deterministic tendency of thought.” The poem also expresses the “Schopenhauerian idea . . . that chance and necessity are not mutually exclusive and contradictory terms, but that chance is the manifestation of necessity” (Brennecke, Life 124). Fortunately, Hardy read this later view and, as a result, underscored the words “essential malignity” in his copy of Brennecke’s book and wrote “false” on the margin of the page (Bailey 52). Nonetheless, subsequent

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critics who, like Brennecke, have observed in the poem a chance-ruled universe producing only misfortune have, like Brennecke, rationalized this contradictory condition without questioning it. According to James Granville Southworth, for example, “Once man understands the role of . . . those ‘purblind Doomsters’ who would as readily strew blisses in man’s path as pain, he can better steel himself to the unmerited ire that frequently overtakes him” (106). Or, according to G.W. Sherman, the “‘purblind Doomsters’ . . . deal out, with the colossal indifference of capitalist society, misery instead of happiness to human beings” (428). Of course, not all critics have even observed in the poem that cosmic chance produces only misfortune. On the one hand, F.B. Pinion believes the poem to state that cosmic chance can produce both good and bad fortune: Hardy “recognises that these ‘purblind Doomsters’ are so indifferent to what befalls that his luck may be good or ill” (38). For Leland Monk too the theme of the poem is “that chance might offer pleasure as well as pain, . . . create possibilities as well as thwart aspirations” (164). On the other hand, some critics believe the poem to state not that cosmic chance produces only misfortune but that it is itself a misfortune—that the indifference of the universe is difficult to bear. According to William E. Buckler, the speaker in “Hap” feels “mere pained endurance” since cosmic indifference “offers only a spiritually deadening pathos, everything to be endured, nothing to be done” (Poetry of Hardy 92). To Deborah L. Collins, the effect upon the speaker is more intense: Feeling “Nature’s savage apathy” and realizing “that his fate is determined not by design but by dice, he can respond only with anger, frustration, despair, and paralysis” (43-44). And Katherine Kearney Maynard finds in “Hap” both beliefs—that cosmic chance produces only misfortune and that chance is itself a worse misfortune because it is indifferent. On the one hand, chance . . . operates blindly here, thwarting and frustrating human life. . . . Hardy, . . . in poems like “Hap” and others, portrays a universe where people cannot be more vulnerable. No . . . universal law exists, or if it does, it is applied in such a fashion that, ironically, some individuals are sacrificed to its operations. By constantly returning to the scenes of chance and misfortune, Hardy . . . depicts the terrible and inscrutable suffering of human existence. . . .

On the other hand, Hardy’s sonnet introduces a view of God or supreme beings that . . . appear as distant or absent, consistently indifferent to human welfare. . . . “Hap” . . . suggests that in some regard a maniacal God is preferable because, at the very least, individual human life is acknowledged—if only

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as the object of hate or scorn. . . . Ironically, people can understand—if they do not approve—the urge in a living being to inflict pain upon another. People recoil from the thought of absolute indifference. (Maynard 53, 55, 151)

J.I.M. Stewart too finds in “Hap” the unbearability of cosmic indifference: [H]uman life [is] seen against the background of a total mindlessness. . . . We are not at the mercy of gods like wanton boys. But we are at the mercy of chance, and about this there is something intolerable which we must cry out against. Here many critics find the whole burden of the novels.

But Stewart adds that, for “other” critics of the novels, the problem of Hardy’s attitude, or philosophy, only begins here. They are much troubled by the fact that his Chance seems sometimes very like a malign intelligence—or a wanton boy—after all. To a quite unnatural and unverisimilar degree, it deals out far more “pain” than “blisses.” (36-37)

Notable here is the fact that, although Stewart and the “other” critics he alludes to have perceived the unresolved dilemma to be in Hardy’s novels or philosophy, they have not perceived it to be specifically in “Hap.” Yet the early poem may well have provided the keynote for the novels. If Hardy could not resolve the dilemma in “Hap” during the thirty-two years in which he kept it unpublished, he may have lived with the dilemma all those years—the period in which he wrote his novels. And so, the dilemma may be implicit in them, as Stewart’s “other” critics feel. This possibility could account for the difficulty that most critics have had in classifying Hardy under any one philosophical position.

CHAPTER TEN FOLKSONG ABOUT AN IRISH SUN GOD: YEATS’S “WHO GOES WITH FERGUS?”

According to William York Tindall, Yeats’s poem “Who Goes With Fergus?” is “one of the best of our time” (Yeats 10). Most critics consider it, at the least, one of Yeats’s finest poems and the best of his early period, but also the most enigmatic. The poem first appeared in 1892 as a song in his drama The Countess Cathleen. Between her singing of the first and last stanzas, Oona, the Countess’ foster mother, remarks, “I do not know the meaning of the song.”1 One can hardly blame Oona, for critics since then have not discovered a clear meaning either—and some have stated or implied that the poem has no clear meaning (Empson 187-90; Tindall, Symbol 236 and Yeats 11). However, if Fergus’ nature as a sun god is understood and heeded throughout the poem, a clear reading can emerge— one that is more probable than the view that the poem has no clear meaning. Like the sun god Apollo, Fergus drives the sun chariot across the heavens, and the first line of the poem (“Who will go drive with Fergus now”2) is both an invitation to join him and a question as to who will do so. Whoever does so will, like Apollo or Fergus, be one with the sun; and as a sunbeam or ray, that being will “pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,” “dance upon the level shore,” and shine down upon the young man and maid—thus making the young man’s brow “russet” with sunburn (but not necessarily the maid’s eyelids “tender”). His brow is bent and her eyelids are lowered not only because they self-protectively avoid looking at the sun but also because these postures are traditionally those of brooding. Man and maid have turned from the sun, but they have also broodingly turned aside from each other since they are perplexed by the unsatisfactoriness of love (regardless of whether it be one-sided or reciprocal), its “hopes and fears,” its “bitter mystery.” However (the poet then says), they should cease brooding, lift up head and eyes to the sun, and accept its inescapable “rule.”

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The last four lines of the poem explain why they should do so. The “brazen cars” ruled by Fergus are the sun chariots of successive days as well as earthly chariots engaged in war or hunting. As earthly chariots they are “brazen” because they resound to the din of battle or the chase and because they are made of brass or bronze. The sun that shines on them “rules” them in the sense that their metal reflects the sun, becomes bright with it, and is thus dominated by it. The consequent blinding brightness of the metal chariots is also a visual equivalent of the deafening din indicated by “brazen.” The sun also “rules” (i.e., creates and defines) the “shadows of the wood” and in line 2 has already shown its ruling power: Though the wood is “deep” and its shade “woven,” the sun can still “pierce” them. Moreover, it controls the movements of the tide (“the white breast of the dim sea”) and the movements of the seemingly uncontrolled comets (“all dishevelled wandering stars”)—for, even though comets seem to be “wandering” the heavens freely, they are actually in orbits around the sun. The tails of the comets are like long “dishevelled” hair. Therefore (the poet is saying), the young man and maid should cease brooding, lift up head and eyes to the sun deity, and “go” with him, for he rules all—even (the last line implies) perplexed young lovers. In a figurative sense, they too are “dishevelled wandering stars,” for love’s bitter mystery has made them like the comets—discomposed (“dishevelled”) in their emotions and astray (“wandering”) in their brooding thoughts and behavior. But—also like the comets—though they appear to be astray, they are in truth ruled by the sun deity. Although they may not be aware of it, he controls their path or destiny, and so they should turn to him, rise above their earthly and human confusion of the heart, seek their purpose amidst the divine, and thus achieve transcendence—a transcendence that Yeats also celebrates in other poems of the period—in “Ephemera,” “When You Are Old,” and “The White Birds.” Some critics mentioned elements in this explication before but mentioned them in isolation from one another and in conjunction with misleading impressions. Andrew Rutherford recognized Fergus to be a god but a reveller also and therefore an “Irish Dionysos” rather than an Irish Apollo. William York Tindall recognized that “Fergus, driving his brazen car,” is figuratively “like a sun god”; but literally Fergus “is still a man of affairs,” and his “ruling the shadows of the wood, the sea, and the comets” means only that “he has druid powers.” Tindall also observed that “‘dishevelled’ implies hair,” but hair is only “the material for tents” that a maid forms over her lover by letting her long hair fall down around him (Yeats 11-12). MacDonald Emslie also mentioned “the idea of comets . . . having their hair flying loose” but felt “some implication, in view of wandering, that they appear to be madwomen” (119-20). M.L. Rosenthal

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inferred “‘dishevelled wandering’ lovers” but stated only that the image causes the “impersonal” stars, with which it is associated, “to seem distraught and erotically perturbed” (“Poetry” xxii). And although Vicki Mahaffey noted that “the speaker directs two lovers to lift up their eyes,” it is not to the divine but rather to “a nature governed by the imagination, which is larger and full of sharper contrasts than the ‘fallen’ world of personal emotion” (99). Two questions that need to be asked are, from what source or sources might Yeats have acquired the conception of Fergus as a sun god, and why would he have chosen this conception rather than the usual ones found in the sources of that time? To my knowledge, no source before 1892 directly identifies Fergus as a sun god. But there is evidence that Yeats imagined a Fergus different from the figure in the sources he mentioned. In an 1899 note to his later poem “The Secret Rose” Yeats stated that he had “founded” his conception of Fergus in the poem upon the figure “in the ancient story of Deirdre, and in modern poems by Ferguson”; but Yeats then stated that in the poems “Fergus and the Druid” and “Who Goes With Fergus?” he had explained his “imagination” of Fergus.3 In 1908, after he had depicted Fergus in Deirdre, Yeats altered the note to read his “changing imaginations” of Fergus. Again altering the note in 1922, Yeats explained that, when he wrote of Fergus in “The Secret Rose” and “Who Goes With Fergus?” he “only knew him in Mr. Standish O’Grady, and my imagination dealt more freely with what I did know than I would approve of to-day” (y814). Therefore, even though Yeats knew the Fergus in the versions of O’Grady, Ferguson, and the “ancient story of Deirdre,” he “dealt freely” with the figure and produced “changing imaginations” of him in his early poetry. For example, in Ferguson’s “The Abdication of Fergus MacRoy” the spirit of the long-dead hero returns to tell of the incident when he fell in love. But from a few unimportant lines of the poem—”I am but an empty shade, / Far from life and passion laid” and “I am but a shape of air, / Far removed from love’s repair” (Ferguson 24, 26)—Yeats may have derived inspiration for “Who Goes With Fergus?” (Marcus 251). Although Yeats did not acquire from any of his mentioned sources the conception of Fergus as a sun god, by 1892 he was already familiar with sources that discussed the ancient Irish solar deities, and he could have imaginatively related them to Fergus. By 1888 he was familiar with John Rhys’s Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (Yeats, Letters 92; Marcus 249-51), and by 1890 he was familiar with Henri D’Arbois de Jubainville’s Le Cycle mythologique irlandais et la Mythologie celtique (Letters 249-50; Marcus 249-51). From both works Yeats learned about the sun gods and their opposites, the

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demons of darkness. Some of this learning he later expressed in notes to the 1895 edition of his Poems: The “Tuath De Danaan” or “Race of the Gods of Dana” were “the ancient gods of Ireland. They were the powers of light and life and warmth, and did battle with the Fomoroh, or powers of night and death and cold” (y796). This “great battle of good and evil, life and death, light and darkness, . . . was fought out on the strands of Moytura, near Sligo,” and “the leader of the hosts of darkness” was Balor (y794). From his sources Yeats would also have learned that Balor was a one-eyed creature whose glance destroyed whatever he looked upon, but that at the battle of Moytura, when he opened his eye upon the Tuath De Danaan, it was pierced by a spear and was itself destroyed, and the Fomoroh were routed. The spear had been cast by Lug, the principal sun god among the Tuath De Danaan. In general, these “solar gods”—dieux solaires is Jubainville’s phrase (203)—were the ancestors of the warriors of Ulster, among whom were Fergus and Cuchulain; and Lug specifically was the ancestor of Cuchulain. More than that, Cuchulain was “Lug re-born,” “the sun as a person” (Rhys 435). Cuchulain and his chariot, horses, and charioteer had “something superhuman about them” and were mostly “exempt from the general laws to which the rest of nature is subject” (Best 207). Although such sources do not identify Fergus as another direct descendant of Lug, Yeats may have associated Fergus with the sun not only because he was a descendant of the solar gods but also because he was the foster-father and tutor of the reborn sun Cuchulain. Moreover, Yeats was familiar with Eugene O’Curry’s On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (Yeats, Essays 511), and there he could have read an ancient description of Fergus in terms suggestive of solar imagery: Seated in a chariot as “large as a mountain on the plain,” Fergus has “branching, flowing, fair yellow, light-golden” hair, “a crimson cloak with a deep fringe of golden thread . . . and an inlaid golden brooch in that cloak,” a heavy spear “blazing red, in his hand,” a “well-studded shield, with a boss of red gold,” and a sword that, when raised for a stroke, expands “to the dimensions of a rainbow in the firmament” (O’Curry 298, 320). Of course, Yeats would not have needed to know all this (or any other) information to justify his poetic use of Fergus as a sun god; but Yeats might have been influenced by this information to make the imaginative extension of it he did. In six other poetic contexts in which he referred to Fergus, Yeats also included an allusion to the sun, the sun gods, or their battle with the demons of darkness: (1) In “The Wanderings of Oisin” (1889) Fergus and the man who betrayed him are followed by Balor in the sleeping Oisin’s dream vision:

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Came . . . Fergus who feastward sad slunk, Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle on his beard never dry, Came car-borne Balor, as old as a forest, his vast face sunk Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death-pouring eye. (y53)

(2) Yeats repeated this association of figures near the end of the first revised version of The Countess Cathleen (1895). Aleel, the poet from whom Oona had learned the Fergus poem, envisions the coming of the demons of darkness to claim Cathleen’s soul: . . . Balor comes Borne in his heavy car, and demons have lifted The age-weary eyelids from the eyes that of old Turned gods to stone; Barach the traitor comes. (Y155)

But Aleel also envisions the gods of light battling with the demons: Angels and devils clash in the middle air, And brazen swords clang upon brazen helms: [A flash of lightning followed by immediate thunder. Yonder a bright spear, cast out of a sling, Has torn through Balor’s eye, and the dark clans Fly screaming as they fled Moytura of old. (Y165; Marcus 253)

In the end, one of the gods appearing as an armed angel tells Aleel that Cathleen’s soul has been saved, for . . . The Light of Lights Looks always on the motive, not the deed, The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone. (Y167)

(3) Earlier in the play a reference to Fergus was juxtaposed with a reference to the “Danaan nations”: Oona. . . . Sit down by me, and I will chaunt the song About the Danaan nations in their raths That Aleel sang for you by the great door Before we lost him in the shadow of leaves. Cathleen. No, sing the song he sang in the dim light, When we first found him in the shadow of leaves, About King Fergus in his brazen car Driving with troops of dancers through the woods. (Y53)

Here it may seem that the subject of the first song is different from that of the second and the “Danaan nations” not really related to Fergus and his

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“troops of dancers.” But later Cathleen refers to the first song in slightly different terms that relate the Danaan nations to Fergus’ troops of dancers: . . . that wild song of the unending dance Of the dim Danaan nations in their raths, Young Aleel sang for me by the great door, Before we lost him in the shadow of leaves. (Y67)

That Yeats considered the two allusions related and even interchangeable is shown by still another reference to Aleel’s first song. In the editions from 1895 to 1908 Aleel . . . sang about the people of the raths, That know not the hard burden of the world, Having but breath in their kind bodies. . . .

For the 1912 edition Yeats revised the first line to read “. . . sang about the dancers of the woods” and left the remainder of the reference the same (Y163). (4) In another passage Cathleen juxtaposes a reference to Fergus with a reference to the Sidhe: O, I am sadder than an old air, Oona, My heart is longing for a deeper peace Than Fergus found amid his brazen cars: Would that like Edain my first forebear’s daughter Who followed once a twilight piercing tune, I could go down and dwell among the Sidhe In their old ever-busy honeyed land. (Y67)

In the 1895 edition Yeats noted that the Sidhe are the faeries, a depreciated version of the solar gods. “Robbed of offerings and honour,” the Tuath De Danaan “have gradually dwindled in the popular imagination until they have become the Faeries” (Y1287). (5) In the original ending of “Fergus and the Druid” (1892) Fergus internalizes the battle of Moytura: And in my heart the daemons and the gods Wage an eternal battle, and I feel The pain of wounds, the labour of the spear, But have no share in loss or victory. (y104; Marcus 252)

(6) Most telling of all, six lines earlier Fergus said that, among his many transformations, he had been “a gleam of light / Upon a sword.”4

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That Yeats was on firm mythological ground in making Fergus a sun god is shown by evidence in Thomas F. O’Rahilly’s Early Irish History and Mythology, which, published in 1946, was not available to Yeats. Of course, its evidence may have come to him earlier from other sources, scriptural or oral, but this I have not been able to ascertain. According to O’Rahilly, not only were Lug and Cuchulain manifestations of the Celtic sun god but so were Fergus and even Balor: [T]he Celts believed that lightning and its accompanying thunder had, like fire in general, their source in the sun. The Sun-god . . . was not only the god of lightning and thunder; he was also the lord of the Otherworld, and the ancestor (or maker) of mankind. . . . From its shape and brightness the sun was regarded as the divine Eye of the heavens. . . . When conceived anthropomorphically, the deity was often regarded as a huge one-eyed being. . . . The lightning issuing from the sun was sometimes conceived as a flashing glance from the god’s eye. This idea is exemplified in Irish traditions concerning the one-eyed Balar, whose glance brought destruction. . . . The general idea concerning the lightning-stroke or “thunderbolt” was that it was a surpassingly powerful missile or other weapon . . . [sometimes] a (fiery) spear [and sometimes] a sword. . . . [I]n myth we generally find it wielded by a younger and more human-like deity, the Hero, as we may call him. . . . With this weapon the hero overcomes his enemy, the Otherworld-god, or, as it might be expressed, he slays the god with the god’s own weapon. So we find Lug . . . wielding a mighty spear. . . . [I]t is said that the god [of lightning] Bolga . . . was the inventor of the missile spear. In the Ulidian tales we find “the spear of Bulga” . . . in the possession of Cúchulainn, who had obtained it in the Otherworld. . . . By acquiring this deadly spear he was equipped for his encounter with the god. . . . The lightning was also regarded as a flashing sword which broke forth fiery sparks. . . . Cúchulainn possessed not only the spear of Bulga, but also a sword . . . which shone at night like a torch. . . . One of the names of this lightning-sword [designated] . . . the sword of Léte, of Léte’s son, Fergus, and of Fergus macRoich, all of whom represent the Otherworld-deity under different designations. (58-61, 6768)

O’Rahilly also shows that Fergus was the son of the sun god because of his father’s name: As the horse was the swiftest of terrestrial travellers, the sun was fittingly regarded as the courser of the heavens. Sometimes the sun-god was imagined as having the form of a horse. Compare Roach, “great horse,” the name of the father of Fergus in the Ulidian tales. (291)

Mythologically speaking, the son of the sun god was himself the sun god also, for, according to Rhys, ancient Irish stories

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Like the Fergus-Sidhe passage quoted above, several passages in The Countess Cathleen (including those alluding to Fergus) express the desire to escape earthly and human trouble and find peace amid the superhuman or divine—to go away like Fergus “in his brazen car” and drive “with troops of dancers through the woods,” or to “go down” like Edain “and dwell among the Sidhe / In their old ever-busy honeyed land,” or to go up to the mountain or the hills: Herdsman. . . . The vales are famine crazy—I’m right glad My home is on the mountain near to God. . . . Kathleen. . . . Keep your bare mountain—let the world drift by, The burden of its wrong rests not on you. (Y58, 60)

Cathleen too is advised to escape in the same transcending direction by “one of the old gods” who appears to Aleel in a dream: Aleel. . . . lady, he bids me call you from these woods. And you must . . . live in the hills, Among the sounds of music and the light Of waters, till the evil days are done. (Y83)

The call comes not from the sun god but from Aengus of the birds, a god whom (in “The Old Age of Queen Maeve” [1903] and elsewhere) Yeats identifies with “Aengus the master of love, one of the greatest of the children of the goddess Danu” (y813), and with Aengus “the god of youth, beauty, and poetry” who reigns in “the country of the young” (y794). Still, Aengus’ call is a near parallel to the call of the sun god or his spokesman in “Who Goes With Fergus?” Repeated in many different contexts throughout the play, the sentiment of escapism comes twice from a Danaan god. Finally, a third question needs to be asked: If the Fergus in the poem is a sun god, why do none of Cathleen’s or Oona’s allusions to him outside the poem suggest his divine nature? Indeed, why do these allusions, on the contrary, suggest his human nature? Fergus drives “with troops of dancers through the woods,” not through the heavens. This is Fergus the reveller, not the sun god. Cathleen says, “I hear the horn of Fergus in my heart. . . . The horn is calling, calling.” This is Fergus the hunter, not the sun god. Why, then, is there this disparity? The answer is, because Cathleen and

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Oona “do not know the meaning of the song.” Cathleen knows it as a song of escape (“a soft cradle”) and about escape; but like her impulse to escape, the song is a call heard only in the heart: she does not listen to either impulse or song or heed its meaning. After singing Cathleen the first verse, Oona remarks, “You have dropped down again into your trouble. / You do not hear me” (Y53, 54). But even more to the point, the song is, as Oona says, one of the “old things,” a “tale, / Told many times” (Y46). In the play it represents a folksong so old and derivative (though ModernEnglished) that its original meaning is obscured and unfathomable; and just as listeners do not expect to fathom a truly ancient folksong and so do not try, Cathleen and Oona do not try, but merely assume that it is about the Fergus of whom they have heard in other folktales—Fergus as reveller and as hunter.5 What Yeats is doing here, then, is “creating a folksong”— or “fakesong,” as it is sometimes called. Of course, in the context of the play it acts the part of a true folksong: Cathleen and Oona treat it as one, and the audience is not led to suppose that they are deceived. That Yeats should add a simulated folksong to his play appears quite natural when one realizes that the play itself was a dramatization of what Yeats believed to be a traditional Irish folktale (Y1283; Marcus 253). He merely added a simulated folksong to a simulated folk drama. At this point the penultimate line of the song may be glossed: Fergus rules “the white breast of the dim sea.” Here the sun is said to control the movements of the tide but not because science in Yeats’s time believed so. Indeed, science then as now attributed control to both sun and moon together. But by that line the “folksong” appears to be of very ancient origin indeed, for sun-worshipping Celts of the “time” of Fergus would have attributed control of the tide to the sun alone. In “The Holy Grail” from Idylls of the King, Tennyson communicated an equally ancient voice by the same means when a band of druids speaks of the sun: . . . “[W]hat other fire than he, Whereby the blood beats, and the blossom blows, And the sea rolls, and all the world is warm’d?” (Works 3: 304-05, lines 667-69)

In summary then, one should not follow Cathleen and Oona (as critics have done unintentionally) in assuming that the poem is a retelling of already known aspects of the Fergus legend. One should consider it a “folksong” about a “variant” aspect of the legend—an aspect hitherto unknown because Yeats originated it in the song.

CHAPTER ELEVEN PEARSE, MACDONAGH, AND THE TWO VOICES: YEATS’S “EASTER 1916”

Whether or not Yeats’s “Easter 1916” is thought to have a single, resolved viewpoint or “voice” in its last six lines, the rest of the poem is, more probably than not, a debate between two alternating voices. “The inner debate projected is recognizably the Yeatsian ‘quarrel with oneself’ that makes poetry” (Thomas Edwards 193). This idea of debate in the poem is implicitly supported even by critics who affirm a single overall viewpoint in the poem, for they express that viewpoint in such dualistic terms as “ambivalence,” “ambiguity,” “contradiction,” and “conflict”—or, more dramatically, as “antithetical pull” causing “double consciousness” (Thompson 148) and as “play or dialogue of warring opposites” (Rosenthal, Poets 31). But, to my knowledge, no critic has described in complete detail where one voice in the debate shifts to the other voice. Without such a description, any segment of the poem between one shift and the next may all too easily be supposed to communicate by itself that ambivalence, ambiguity, contradiction, or conflict—a supposition that I will try to show as less probable than the one of alternating voices. For example, according to one critic, the first three stanzas by themselves are contradictory, and the contradictions are in the central motif of “change.” Specifically, in the first stanza, the speaker describes his acquaintances as having changed favorably—from a condition of triviality to one of “terrible beauty,” which “here must mean ‘sublime’ or ‘awesome’ beauty.” Then, in the second stanza, the changes involving three of those acquaintances are unfavorable—Countess Constance Markiewicz’s voice altering from “sweet” to “shrill,” Patrick Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh losing their lives, and Irish literature losing two fine poets. Then, a fourth acquaintance, Major John MacBride, changes favorably—from “a drunken, vainglorious lout” to a heroic martyr. And finally, in the third stanza, these changing acquaintances are compared to unchanging stone (O’Donnell 78-80).

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However, in these three stanzas, the speaker’s viewpoint is not contradictory, not even ambivalent or ambiguous. It is indiscriminately and consistently the same—i.e., unfavorable—toward all the acquaintances. There is no debate yet between two voices but only one voice of disfavor; and except for the statement in the refrain—that the conditions meriting disfavor have since “changed utterly” and been replaced by a “terrible beauty”—the first three stanzas contain no indication that a second or favorable voice will be heard in the poem. In the first stanza the speaker describes as unfavorable the condition of triviality that, until the “utter” change, he believed his acquaintances shared with him. In the second stanza, he describes as unfavorable Countess Markiewicz’s distinctive condition—having spent her days in “ignorant good will, / Her nights in argument / Until her voice grew shrill.” Political argument having made her sweet voice shrill is not, as the above critic believes, the current “utter” change to which the refrain of the poem alludes. (In the first two stanzas, that change is the revelation or transformation of the acquaintances’ true nature by open rebellion and martyrdom. And in the first stanza, that change is also the speaker’s realization of their true nature.) Then, before describing MacBride unfavorably, the speaker implies subtly an unfavorable aspect of Pearse and MacDonagh—that they were “bad poets” (Tindall, Forces 92) or at least “minor poets whom he had not thought much of” (George Fraser 32). If he had not implied this opinion subtly but had expressed it openly, Yeats could have been accused of professional meanness (considering the time and occasion) or even envy. * * * The view that the speaker’s remarks on Pearse and MacDonagh are unfavorable is counter to the view in all the other extensive discussions of the poem, and so it will be necessary here to support the unfavorable view with evidence. The speaker implies that Pearse and MacDonagh were bad poets by ironically describing them in bad poetry—by implication, the kind of poetry they themselves wrote. In respect to Pearse, “rode our wingèd horse” is a cliché metaphor (Tindall, Yeats 22), and “winged” is supposed to be pronounced archaically as two syllables. According to Yvor Winters, the metaphor is “a pseudo-poetism, as bad as Hyde’s sword or Roland’s horn” (19). In respect to MacDonagh, “force” is a forced rhyme (with “horse”) since it does not have a common usage or definition equivalent to “poetic maturity” or “mastery” or “height of poetic powers”—which is the sense desired here. Moreover, “coming into his force” is an awkward

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mismatching of a spatial verb phrase (or verb and preposition) with a nonspatial abstract noun. Lastly, “sensitive” disrupts the meter of the line (Winters 19) and slows it so that the pronunciation of the word must be drawn out and thereby stressed. As a result, it suggests (as does the ambiguous “seemed”) an ironic reversal of meaning—that his nature was really insensitive. In 1899 Pearse supported the nationalist Gaelic League and insisted that Irish literature should be written only in Gaelic. He was therefore outspoken in criticizing Yeats not only for writing Irish drama in AngloIrish but also for encouraging others to do so by his staging their plays in the Irish National Theatre. Unfortunately, in the Gaelic League organ An Claidheamh Soluis (“The Sword of Light”), Pearse attacked Yeats as an Anglo-Irish playwright and director. But, worse, he also showed contempt for him as an English poet: Mr Yeats’ precious “Irish” Literary Theatre . . . Let us strangle it at its birth. Against Mr Yeats personally we have nothing to object. He is a mere English poet of the third or fourth rank, and as such he is harmless. But when he attempts to run an “Irish” Literary Theatre it is time for him to be crushed. (Quoted in Ruth Edwards 30-31 and Porter 53)

Over the next fourteen years Pearse gradually reversed his position on Anglo-Irish drama and, in 1913, declared publicly that “Yeats and Synge would be the names of present day Ireland remembered hereafter and not the Gaelic League.”1 But Pearse never retracted in print his disdainful comment that Yeats was a “mere English poet of the third or fourth rank” and thus “harmless,” and Yeats privately may not have forgotten it. About MacDonagh’s potential as a poet, Yeats did not vary his opinion: he acknowledges that potential in “Easter 1916” just as he acknowledged it after meeting MacDonagh in 1909. But the limitations of that potential Yeats could only imply in the poem (Norstedt 142), whereas he could state them outright in 1909: Met MacDonagh yesterday—a man with some literary faculty which will probably come to nothing through lack of culture and encouragement. . . . In England this man would have become remarkable in some way, here he is being crushed by the mechanical logic and commonplace eloquence which give power to the most empty mind, because, being “something other than human life,” they have no use for distinguished feeling or individual thought. I mean that within his own mind this mechanical thought is crushing as with an iron roller all that is organic. (Autobiography 296-97)

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A year after they met, MacDonagh sent some of his unpublished poems to Yeats for appraisal; however, in his reply, Yeats vitiated praise with criticism and advice. According to MacDonagh’s first biographers, who read the reply, Yeats regretted that MacDonagh too often dulled the keenness of the emotional impact by using “rather worn out” words and combinations of words which the difficulty of rhyming had kept alive in poetry after they had disappeared from speech. He advised also a stricter word order: “one should never use inversions to get one out of difficulty but only if at all when it gives one some new emphasis or some new cadence.” (Parks and Parks 88)

Four years later in an essay in the Irish Review, MacDonagh retaliated in kind by attributing to Yeats’s poetry the same unconventional word order and the opposite diction fault—prosaic colloquialness: The weak prose of some of his [Wordsworth’s] peasant verse errs as much on one side as does . . . heightened diction . . . on the other. Of course the very latest of the Anglo-Irish writers have had something of Wordsworth’s difficulty. Mr. W.B. Yeats, who, for all the unearthliness of much of his work, has used in his lyrics the most direct colloquial phrase, confesses this in some of his poems. And in a letter to the writer he has said: “I remember as an important event getting rid of the word ‘rife.’” In passing, one may remark that this striving after colloquial directness has its dangers too. The latest poems of Mr. Yeats show that he has failed to recognise an important fact of English grammar, the function of the conventional word order. (Rpt. in MacDonagh 34)

But even before he wrote this criticism, MacDonagh had retaliated by writing a play entitled Metempsychosis. It was published in 1912 and then performed by a Dublin company of players who had left Yeats’s company to rival it. A principal character in the play—Earl Winton-Winton de Winton—was an obvious caricature of Yeats and a means to satirize him and his public belief in reincarnation (Norstedt 84-85; O’Donnell 79). Yeats could not have failed to be displeased with MacDonagh’s ridicule. Finally, in June 1916, a book that MacDonagh had finished writing a year before his death was published in Dublin posthumously, and Yeats, in Dublin that June, may have at least glanced into it then or during the following three months when he was contemplating and writing “Easter 1916.” At a glance Yeats would have found his name listed as the last entry in the index of the book and his name followed by the page numbers locating MacDonagh’s comments about him and his work. Easily and quickly, then, Yeats would have found not only the Irish Review essay reprinted in the book but a comment on “his want of musical ear” (71) and the statement that his work, which “may stand with the greatest Anglo-Irish

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poetry, . . . may be surpassed by the work of one of his younger contemporaries” (176). Worse yet, he would have found a lengthy and detailed attack on his inexpert use of Gaelic names in his poetry: Many of the best known Anglo-Irish writers . . . treat Irish words as W.S. Gilbert and such writers for comic purposes used to treat French. . . . Irish has been regarded as fair game for almost any treatment. A language with an elaborate grammatical system, with delicate phonetic changes to indicate changes of sense, is treated as if it had no system and as if it could suffer nothing from barbarous mispronunciation. If the ignorance or carelessness of the writers who use it so mattered only to the Irish language, the Irish language could well afford to let it pass: it would [not] affect it. . . . But to the new generation of Irish readers who know the two languages, many otherwise fine books are spoiled or at least made a little foolish and ridiculous by the grotesque disguises under which Irish words appear in them. And this ignorance of the authors is like that of the old sham philologists . . . [who are] doomed to unintelligible obscurity and to absurdity. What then of Mr. W.B. Yeats who confesses that when he wrote the greater number of his poems, he had hardly considered seriously the question of the pronunciation of Irish words, who copied at times somebody’s perhaps fanciful spelling, and at times the ancient spelling as he found it in some literal translation, pronouncing the words always as they were spelt? That is, pronouncing the words as if they were English. Mr. Yeats, however, is quite honest in the matter. He would not, he says, have defended his system at any time. If ever he learns the old pronunciation of the proper names he has used he will revise the poems. He is content to affirm that he has not treated his Irish names as badly as the mediaeval writers of the stories of King Arthur treated their Welsh names. But Mr. Yeats is not living in the Middle Ages. Whether we regret it or not, we cannot ignore the knowledge of those to whom we communicate our works. In the lines: “The host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare,” nothing is gained, surely, by that extraordinary perversion of the Irish name of the Old Woman of Beare, Cailleach na Béara. The word clooth is not Irish; it has no meaning. Even for others than Irish scholars the right word would have served as well. And—if it be not too Philistine a question—would not: “And over the grave of the Hag of Beare,” have been better in this poem in English? In his revision of The Wind Among the Reeds, Mr. Yeats has changed Irish words into English, “colleens” into “women.” Lately he has set his face against all this use of Irish words and Irish stories; but he cannot undo his work. (MacDonagh 49-51)

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Such sustained, even relentless, criticism might well have influenced Yeats, in “Easter 1916,” not to hide completely his true feelings about MacDonagh’s poetic abilities. * * * Having described as unfavorable the various conditions of the Countess Markiewicz, Pearse, MacDonagh, and MacBride until their “utter” change, the speaker continues in the third stanza to describe as unfavorable their common condition—the obsessive and fixed idea of revolution. They all have “hearts with one purpose alone.” (And here he speaks not only of his four acquaintances but of all revolutionaries, so that the past tense gives way to the eternal present tense.) Their obsession is bad because it continues for “too long” (as the last stanza notes); it is unchanging. But here it should be noted that the unchanging nature of their obsession does not contradict the “utter” change which is their open rebellion and subsequent martyrdom, for neither the rebellion nor the martyrdom changes (in the sense of “lessens”) their obsession. The former only reveals it, and the latter only emphasizes its high cost and, indeed, makes it symbolically unchangeable. Moreover, obsessed hearts are like (“enchanted to”) a stone, but only in the unfavorable sense of being unchanging and unmoving. They are not like a stone in the worse sense of being cold or dead or unfeeling. Quite the contrary. Obsession—or, as the last stanza expresses it, “excess of love”—compels such hearts to be fiery and impassioned.2 Indeed, “the stone and its inner fire” as well as “the stone of the fixed idea” are the ways Maud Gonne remembers Yeats referring to the image in his poem immediately after finishing it and reading it to her.3 And so, just as an unchanging, unmoving stone in the midst of a changing, moving stream “troubles” or creates turbulence in the stream, so does an unchanging, obsessed revolutionary heart “trouble” the lives and purposes of ordinary people, who change constantly like Nature itself. The revolutionary heart feels an unnatural “excess of love” rather than the natural love characteristic of ordinary people and other creatures of nature (“hens to moor-cocks call”). Six years earlier, Yeats had described the revolutionary sensibility in a similar way, except for calling its unnatural love no love at all rather than an excess: After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitation over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up between men’s minds and Nature, who never does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to the scaffold, cry down natural impulses with the morbid persistence of minds

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unsettled by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied with the nation’s future, with heroes, poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, but only as these things are understood by a child in a National School, while a secret feeling that what is so unreal needs continual defence makes them bitter and restless. . . . They no longer love, for only life is loved, and at last a generation is like an hysterical woman who will make unmeasured accusations and believe impossible things, because of some logical deduction from a solitary thought which has turned a portion of her mind to stone. (Essays 313-14; excerpted in O’Donnell 80)

With the beginning of the last stanza, the second voice in the poem— the viewpoint favorable to the rebels—is prepared for, though not immediately heard outright: “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.” Here the word “sacrifice” by itself can have favorable connotations, but the sentence surrounding it continues the images and unfavorable viewpoint of the previous stanza. Still, the potentially favorable connotations are strengthened by the word “suffice” in the following question “O when may it suffice?” Instead of a “sacrifice” unfavorable because it is “too long” and “can make a stone of the heart,” the question assumes the possibility of a sacrifice favorable because it suffices—i.e., lasts long enough to effect its desired end (national independence) but not long enough to make a stone of the heart. And the question assumes this possibility even if only rhetorically implying that the answer is “never.” Of course, the question has been variously interpreted, partly because “after how long a lapse of time” is a definition of the adverb when less familiar than “at what time” or “how soon.”4 Still, “suffice” is used because it means the opposite of “too long,” and so both must modify “a sacrifice” and “when” must signify time duration as “too long” does. In response to the question, the second voice is heard clearly for the first time, saying that to judge what length of time may suffice is not “our part,”5 for thereby we would be judging under what condition that sacrifice is worthwhile. “That is Heaven’s part” to judge. “Our part” is merely to commemorate elegiacally—“murmur name upon name.” Therefore, according to the second voice, the unfavorable criticism already spoken in the poem by the first voice is irrelevant. The second voice then uses an extended simile comparing “our part” as rebel-naming elegists with the part of a child-naming mother. But almost midway through the simile, the second voice almost gives way to the first. Initially the mother seems to murmur the sleeping child’s name with love, just as the second voice would murmur the dead rebels’ names; but, with the line “On limbs that had run wild,” the mother is shown to be murmuring the sleeping child’s name with mournfulness because she laments his wildness, just as the first voice would murmur the dead rebels’

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names because it laments their wildness. As critics have noted, the “wild” rebels are thus implicitly compared with those past exiled rebels of “September 1913” who manifested “delirium.” However, the second voice will not have its extended simile interrupted and reasserts its comparison of dead rebels with sleeping child: “What is it but nightfall?” That they are not dead but only asleep alludes probably to their immortality as national heroes and possibly to their immortality as human souls. The first voice protests. The rebels are not asleep but dead, and their death is complete and without qualification. It may also have been “needless,” for the national independence promised by England may be granted regardless. To this the second voice responds that, even if their death turns out to have been needless, it will be no less worthy. What matters is their purpose (“their dream”) and its result (their death), not whether their purpose would have been ultimately realized through other means. Then, in rebuttal of the idea that their death resulted from their purpose, the first voice suggests that their death may really have resulted only from an “excess of love” which “bewildered” them—both confused them and made them wild.6 Here the rebels are again compared implicitly with the wild child nine lines above and with the “delirious” exiled rebels of “September 1913,” but now (as critics have noted) for the additional reason that the latter seemed like romantically “mad” lovers: “‘Some woman’s yellow hair / Has maddened every mother’s son.’” The first voice’s suggestion and its implicit comparisons strike at the second voice’s assumption that the rebels’ actions resulted from rationally considered decisions and clear awareness of inevitable consequences. Instead, their actions are assumed to have resulted from a kind of madness. Worse yet, the line “Bewildered them till they died” suggests that continuing madness rather than consciously chosen purpose directly caused (rather than merely resulted in) their death, and so they seem involuntary victims of suicidal urges rather than voluntary martyrs to national freedom. It is as if their madness and not the English caused their death.7 Rather than protest against this most threatening of criticisms, the second voice peremptorily stops the debate by announcing that it will write out its view in a verse. In doing so, it also performs what it had said was “our part”—“to murmur name upon name.” But primarily it asserts that from the moment of their martyrdom—“now and in time to be”—it is as if the faults of the rebels never existed. That is the “utter” change martyrdom has produced. In this stanza the word “changed” is used differently than in the first two stanzas where it was a verb denoting the action of changing. Here it is used as an adjective denoting the state subsequent to the act of changing—a state that exists “now” and will continue to exist “in time to be”—a state of faultlessness. Martyrdom has cleared the rebels of all

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fault—or it has cleared at least the remembrance of fault. They are now above criticism. This condition is part of the meaning of the phrase “terrible beauty,” which ends the poem as it did the first two stanzas. Faultlessness is beautiful, but the violent death necessary to produce it is terrible. (Of course, in the first two stanzas “beauty” could not have alluded specifically to faultlessness. There it alluded generally to self-sacrifice for a noble cause.8) Unfortunately, it is sometimes believed that, as an oxymoron, “terrible beauty” indicates most clearly and simply the ambivalence, ambiguity, contradiction, or conflict in Yeats’s feelings about the rebels.9 However, the phrase expresses a common attitude about martyrdom (and not an attitude about merely the specific martyrs in this case)—that martyrdom is terrible because it entails death and yet beautiful because it entails self-sacrifice for a noble cause.10 That Yeats shared the common attitude is shown by the first voice’s words “No, no, not night but death” and by all the second voice’s words. But the attitude and the phrase “terrible beauty” would be appropriate even for a speaker who felt no ambivalence about the rebels, and so the phrase is as appropriate to the first voice in the first two stanzas as it is to the second voice in the last stanza. Moreover, for the word “terrible” to signify one side of Yeats’s ambivalent feelings about the rebels (rather than about martyrdom in general), he would have to feel that at least one of the following three ideas was “terrible” to contemplate—noble deeds being done in a noble cause by faulty acquaintances, or their faults now being forgiven and forgotten, or their “tragic gesture” being, “in the final analysis, not only misguided but futile” (Perloff 326). The last of these three ideas seems applicable, but the misguidedness and futility of the rebel’s gesture is a particular idea developed only in the third and final stanzas—too late to be the referent for “terrible” in the first and second stanzas. (There, by contrast, general knowledge of the rebels’ death can be assumed, and so their death can be the referent for “terrible.”) Besides, the misguidedness and futility of their gesture is an idea expressed by the first voice and suitable only to it. Therefore, in the last line of the poem the second voice would not be repeating and thus endorsing the idea. As for the first two of the above three ideas—if Yeats felt either of them “terrible” to contemplate, his feelings would attest to a kind of meanness that the rest of the poem does not show toward the rebels. Instead, the poem shows an attempt to evaluate the rebels independently and evenhandedly. In recording his debate with himself, he arranged that the second voice have the last word only after each voice had

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its say. In this way he “expressed his whole position” (Ellmann, Identity 144).

CHAPTER TWELVE THE FLOW OF FEELING: AUDEN’S “IN MEMORY OF W.B. YEATS”

Concerning Auden’s elegy on Yeats, critical debate is common in two areas. One includes debate about which of Auden’s images evoke which of Yeats’s poems, whether the images parallel1 or controvert the poems,2 which images evoke the tradition of pastoral elegy, and whether the images follow,3 controvert,4 or mock the tradition.5 In the second area, debate has been about the nature of Auden’s conception of the poet’s function as it is implied in the final section of the poem—whether the poet’s function is to create orderly, harmonious art out of the chaotic realities of life6 and, either as a result or independently, teach readers how to “rejoice,” “praise,” and be “free” despite those chaotic realities,7 or, conversely (the poet being unable to “charm his readers out of the difficult world of time into the intensity of the image or an eternity of pure form”), whether his function is to teach readers the “capability of their language to respond to the real world in which they live” (Mendelson, Early Auden 366) or to foster in them a “dialogue between . . . isolated intellect and unconscious feelings” (Callan 152) or, as a compromise, to provide a “model for the conscious exercise of human freedom within the constraints of natural necessity” (Callan 152) or, as a “paradox,” to persuade “man to celebrate his freedom to accept his own limitations” (Davison 152). The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to debate in the second area—to show that much of the imagery forms a unity, continuity, and progression through the poem and, by so doing, implies Auden’s conception of the poet’s function. Such a view of that conception in the poem is therefore based on more of the poem than is usual (a heretofore neglected aspect of it) and so is more inclusive and probable than any of the comparable views noted above. Imagery in the poem forms a unity, continuity, and progression by providing variations on the idea of the “flow” of feeling—showing an effect of disintegration or scattering when feeling does not flow and an effect of integration or coming together when feeling does flow. In the

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first two stanzas of Section 1, there is immediately a variation on this basic idea. A flow of unfeeling geographically far from the scene of Yeats’s dying is contrasted with an absence of flow near the scene. Far from Yeats’s illness and unconcerned with it, both the wolves and the peasant river “run on” as usual.8 By contrast, an absence of flow in the vicinity of Yeats’s dying is represented by the paralyzing effects of winter cold—an echo of the pastoral-elegy tradition in which Nature dies temporarily in response to the protagonist’s death.9 The frozen brooks do not flow, the almost deserted airports imply a dearth of travel and flight, the mercury in the thermometer does not flow up the tube but shrinks down toward the bulb.10 This thermometer is in the mouth not only of the dying day but also of the dying Yeats. There is no “flow” in either him or his environs. Like a city deprived of electricity (a “flow” of current), he has lost his “current” or flow of “feeling.” This loss is not only of poetic feeling—inspiration and sensibility—but also of sensory feeling, since the sense organs (in the “suburbs” and “provinces of his body”) have disconnected (“revolted”) from his “empty” mind and then become inert (“silent”). When he dies, the only thing that is left alive of him is his already created poems (line 11)—figuratively his young children11 who are not told of his death at once, but literally works of art beyond the reach of death, eternal and unchangeable in form. Poetry “lives” (comes into being) because of the poet (line 51) but then lives immortally. Yeats, therefore, does not die completely. When his body becomes merely a “vessel . . . [e]mptied of its poetry” (44-45), he—or his spirit or influence—still inhabits his poems and remains alive in them. It can therefore be said that he “disappeared” rather than died and that, just before “disappearing,” he spent his last afternoon “as himself”—implying that, after death, he becomes, not nothing, but something other than himself. He also becomes his admirers, for the poems are now possessed by them, are within them, and live through them. He may become his admirers also because each admirer is figuratively a city just as he was when alive, and so, in being scattered among a hundred cities figuratively, he is scattered among a hundred admirers. That he is now also “in another kind of wood” may refer by contrast to past woods envisioned in poems like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “Who Goes With Fergus?” but the wood may also refer ironically and somewhat drolly to the tree-like villi in the “guts” where the living now modify his poems. There, although unchangeable in form, the poems are changed in content and interpretation. Once the disintegration and “scattering” of Yeats is accomplished, the flow of feeling that occurred within him when he was alive and composing can occur again, but only among his admirers. Feeling can flow from them

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and unite them when they all think of the day of Yeats’s death or his poetry or find their own feeling expressed in his poetry. The first instance of their flow of feeling is in the fifth stanza of Section 1. Although the admirers are bodily and emotionally isolated from each other—each in the “city” or (as now replaced) the “cell of himself”—each one can temporarily stray or escape from the self by thinking of another person (Yeats) and so be, at least for the time, “free” from the prison “cell” that is the self, if not from the enclosing “city” that is the self’s body. But each admirer is still imprisoned in another “cell”—a cell that is, ironically, a delusion of freedom. In his delusion, he is convinced that he is free because of the political equality and independence provided by his form of government. Or at least he is “almost convinced” of this freedom: At times he may suspect what Auden knows for certain—that it is delusory. In a prose essay on Yeats first published contemporaneously with the elegiac poem, Auden explained the nature of this freedom:12 The most obvious social fact of the last forty years is the failure of liberal capitalist democracy, based on the premises that every individual is born free and equal, each an absolute entity independent of all others; and that a formal political equality . . . is enough to guarantee his freedom of action in his relations with his fellow men. The results are only too familiar to us all. By denying the social nature of personality . . . , it has created the most impersonal . . . and the most unequal civilisation the world has ever seen, a civilisation in which the only emotion common to all classes is a feeling of individual isolation from everyone else, a civilisation torn apart by the opposing emotions born of economic injustice, the just envy of the poor and the selfish terror of the rich.13

Consequently, an admirer must do more than merely think of Yeats and the day of his death in order to escape even temporarily the feeling of imprisonment caused by his form of government (“a feeling of individual isolation from everyone else”) and to experience “the social nature of personality.” As Sections 2 and 3 will show, an admirer must be part of the sources as well as the audience of Yeats’s poetry—i.e., implicated in its creation as well as influenced by it. The second instance of the flow of feeling is in the last five lines of Section 2. Here feeling-on-its-way-to-becoming-poetry “flows” like a river through a “valley” to a “mouth.”14 But because the poet is alive in his poetry and both are alive in his admirers, it may be moot to try to specify which of these is the source of the flow here and at what time—whether it is when the poet “mouths” the poetry aloud before putting it in writing or when he writes it down or recites it to admirers or when it “speaks” to them as they read it or afterwards remember it or when they recite it themselves. Of course, Auden finally revised “valley of its saying” to “valley of its

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making,” and the revision may have been his way of restricting some of the possibilities—perhaps indicating that poetry need not be spoken for the feeling to flow or that the flow represents the poet’s creative process rather than (as in the previous section) a re-creative process in his admirers. In other words, “mouth” may be a metaphor only for the poet or poetry that supplies words for the feeling common to all human beings. The poet’s words, then, represent a bringing together of the feeling in human beings, each of whom is otherwise still “in the cell of himself” although the cells are now called “ranches of isolation” and “raw towns.” But they are still the prisons of the self (that “we believe and die in”), and they keep the prisoners isolated from each other—until the poet begins his creative process. Then the river of feeling-on-its-way-to-becoming-poetry flows from and between those ranches or towns “of the busy griefs”— ranches at once isolated and enclosing feelings of isolation, towns at once “raw” (i.e., undeveloped) and enclosing raw emotions. By so flowing and uniting the inhabitants’ feelings, the river frees and unites the inhabitants in feeling. It effects “brotherhood.”15 Finally, the river of feeling flows to a “mouth,” is expressed in words by a poet, “happens” and “survives” as poetry. According to Auden’s contemporaneous essay on Yeats, to unite people in such a way was the object of Yeats’s poems: they “express a sustained protest against the social atomisation” and “a constant struggle to overcome it,” and they “attempt to find through folk tradition a binding force for society” (“Public” 393). The third instance of the flow of feeling is in the last five quatrains of the poem—the passage about Europe on the verge of becoming “a civilisation torn apart” by World War II. Again, human beings are shown physically and emotionally separated, but now not as one individual (or “city,” “cell,” “ranch,” or “town”) isolated from another but as one country of individuals isolated from another—as one of the “living nations,” each in the cell of itself, “[e]ach sequestered in its hate.” Again, feeling does not flow from or between the inhabitants, and the condition is expressed in the same freezing winter imagery that began the poem: “the seas of pity lie / Locked and frozen in each eye.” But again the poet with his “unconstraining voice” (his poetry) can end this condition. His voice is “unconstraining” not only in the sense of not constraining (not dictating, as wartime leaders do) but also in the more important sense of freeing from constraint—freeing from sequestration in hate, from separation, isolation, imprisonment in the cell of self. Precisely by singing distressfully about “human unsuccess” in feeling pity (and forestalling war), the poet can free or melt the “[l]ocked and frozen” “seas of pity” and make them flow from “each eye” of his listeners. Thus, the poet’s singing (“the farming of a verse”) can produce watering tears of pity and, with them, “[m]ake a

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vineyard of the curse” of unfeeling and belligerence, a first step toward ending “human unsuccess” in forestalling war. And since the source of pity is not in the eyes but in the heart, the watering flow (now called the “healing fountain”) would “start” there and “[m]ake a vineyard . . . [i]n the deserts of the heart.” Moreover, the poet’s singing can stir more than pity. Despite the threat of war, it can also persuade listeners “to rejoice”16 and can “[t]each the free man how to praise.” But rejoice at and praise what? And man, though “free,” would yet be “[i]n the prison of his days.” Here again, as in line 27—where “each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom”—the seeming contradiction between freedom and imprisonment probably refers to man’s delusory freedom explained in Auden’s contemporaneous essay. But here there may also be an addition. The “prison of his days” may be not only man’s daily bodily, emotional, and democracy-caused isolation and national isolationism discussed above but also the prison of mortality, the limited number of “days” in his life because of aging. If so, the phrase is another reminder (as was bodily separateness) that imprisonment is the human condition and not curable— not by universal poetry or (as Auden then thought) enlightened socialist government even though they can create emotional unification among human beings. Yet (and this may be another addition), Auden’s act here of calling man “free” despite his imprisonment may imply that, through universal poetry, the poet can free that part of man that can be freed—the emotional part—and, as a result, can persuade him to rejoice in his “days”—i.e., in life—and can teach him how to “praise” (appreciate? value?) it despite his human condition or, better still, because of it. Whether one accepts this second possible addition can affect whether one feels Auden at the end of the poem to be hopeful about the potential though limited “real” freedom of humankind. Finally, at this point it is appropriate as well as necessary to summarize what the above discussion of Sections 2 and 3 has implied about Auden’s conception of the poet’s function. That function is to bring together and express in “living” language the feeling in human beings (who must otherwise be incurably separate and isolated from one another) and so unite them in feeling. And when they constitute nations belligerent to one another, the poet’s function is not only to free in human beings a feeling of mutual pity and thus brotherhood and to unite them in this feeling but also, despite the threat of war and despite (or because of) the inevitability of death, to persuade them to rejoice in life and teach them how to praise it.

NOTES

Preface 1. The qualification “presumably” is advisable here since, on these four poems, I have not attempted to read all the criticism available in selected major academic libraries.

Chapter One 1. Blake, Writings 214. All quotations from the published versions of Blake’s poetry will be from this edition. “The Tyger” was first published in 1793. 2. Blake, Notebook N109. All quotations from manuscript drafts of “The Tyger” will be from this edition. Composition of the poem may have begun as early as 1790 and been completed as late as 1793. 3. Both nouns in the phrase “distant deeps or skies” (present in the first manuscript draft) are read here as being merely synonyms for the distant and deep space that contains the stars but not the sun, moon, or planets. The “deeps” might also be read as extending far below (as in “the furnace deep” of the first draft); and this reading might be encouraged by the question added in the next draft: could the Creator’s heart “descend” to the deeps? However, the question is absent from later drafts, whereas the first-draft question “ On what wings dare he aspire?” (implying above) is retained. Consequently, that the “deeps” in this poem are below seems less likely. Besides, the heart of an omnipresent, world-encompassing Creator may be thought to “descend” from above (as well as ascend from below) even to the highest and most distant regions of deep space. 4. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion (written contemporaneously with “The Tyger”), Blake called the tiger “glowing” (195 or Plate 8: line 5). To Paul Miner, the tiger is a “flaming beast wandering among the starry, spear-like globes of heaven” (59); and to Stanley Gardner, the forests of the night extend into “that infinite forest of darkness” that is the night sky (124). 5. Although for a less primitive smithy, this process is described in Watson 15, 25, 43. Although not shown in Plate 6 of Jerusalem, another chain is used in the blacksmithing process when the piece of metal to be forged is too heavy to be lifted by hand: one end of the chain is tied around the metal and the other end is attached to the hook of a pulley suspended from a traveling carriage on a heavy wooden crane, so that the crane lifts the metal and holds it suspended in the furnace or on the anvil while the blacksmith steadies or horizontally moves the metal with his tongs (Watson 22-23).

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6. Admittedly, in ancient times dew was supposed to fall from the sky or the heavens, but not particularly from the stars. Since then, dew has been popularly supposed to fall from the atmosphere; and even as early a thinker as Aristotle surmised that dew was moisture that evaporated from the surface of the ground during the day and fell again when chilled at night. See OED def. 1 and Webster’s Dictionary def. 1a of dew; Neumann; Aristotle Bk. I, Ch. X. 7. Incidentally, it must be admitted that, at least ten years after the publication of “The Tyger,” assistant smiths actually appeared in Blake’s Jerusalem. There, as “Labourers” at the “Furnaces” of God’s demiurge Los (the Creator as smith), the assistants created all elements of the universe including the “stars” (rather than being themselves stars) and the animals, among whom were the tiger and the lamb (713 or Plate 73: lines 2, 4, 17-19). But, in Jerusalem there was no suggestion of the inconceivably dread power of the creator(s) of the tiger. 8. The parallel between the two poems is noted but discussed differently in Miner 67-68, Deen 73-74, and Paley, “Tyger” 550-51 (repr. in his Energy 57-59). 9. The Biblical allusion is noted in Stevenson 18 and Hirsch, Innocence 250. Relevant excerpts from the books by Hirsch, Adams, and Gardner as well as the articles by Bier and Paley are reprinted in Weathers. 10. Over eighty years of such speculative readings of the poem began with Damon, William Blake 276-78, and continues with Essick 111-14, some of whose explication and scholarship is the same as that which supports the non-speculative reading presented thus far. For another non-speculative reading, see Fuller 82. 11. H.M. Margoliouth believes that Night V was composed at some time between 1800 and 1803 (xxiv-xxv). 12. Quoted in Paley, “Tyger” 549. In Energy Paley changes the date of Ritson’s book to 1792. 13. Damon, Blake Dictionary 414. All brackets and the ellipsis in the quotation are Damon’s. 14. The poem has also been viewed as ironic because of the surprisingly meek and mild appearance of the tiger in Blake’s accompanying illustration. But this viewpoint has not been discussed here because, if the poet really thought that the tiger had been created as meek and mild as the lamb, the resultant reading would be less probable than the readings discussed.

Chapter Two 1. Beginning in 1967 with Geiger 124-52 and continuing up to at least 1997 with Stecker 209-11. 2. “If a slumber has sealed the lover’s spirit, . . . so too a slumber has now definitely sealed her spirit” (Brooks 236). Also noted by Blair and Chandler 262—“eternal slumber now seals her spirit”—and by Drew 132—“the slumber of the first line, and the sealing of the poet’s spirit in total human unawareness, matches Lucy’s sleep of death and the sealing of her body in the vast indifference of the earth.” All quotations from the poem will be from Wordsworth, Works 2: 216.

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3. “Slumber,” def. 1b, OED. “‘Slumber’ implies a state of thorough quiescence” (Cooke 60). 4. “‘Seal’ implies an airtight, decisive shutting of the ‘spirit’ and an impressing of ‘slumber’ upon it” (Cooke 60). 5. From a draft of The Prelude XIII, in Wordsworth, Prelude 624, lines 38-47. Quoted in Davies 159. Here, incidentally, Davies interpreted “Slumber” as if the pronoun she beginning line 3 referred not to Lucy but to my spirit in line 1. Upon this new reference Brian G. Caraher based an entire book, but the reference seems so much less probable than the traditional one that I have not discussed its implications in the present chapter. Moreover, I have continued the tradition of calling that she Lucy but merely as a convenience since to keep referring to her as “the unnamed but loved young female” would be too awkward. This also means that she need not be the same Lucy named in any of six other published Wordsworth poems (“Lucy Gray,” “Strange fits of passion have I known,” “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” “I travelled among unknown men,” “Three years she grew in sun and shower,” and “Among all lovely things my Love had been” [The Glow Worm]) and that, to explicate “Slumber,” one need not relate it to any of these six poems. Indeed, in the present chapter I have not felt it necessary to do so. 6. Def. 2, OED. These and other definitions of seal have been noted in Jones 2931. 7. From the manuscript text of the sonnet “Written in Very Early Youth,” Works 1: 3. 8. Poetry 159. Seventeen years after that, Hartman, like Brooks, conceded irony in the contrast between Lucy’s apparent immunity to feeling “the touch of earthly years” in the first stanza and her actual immunity to such feeling in the second stanza, but he still could not merely call the poem ironic (Saving 147-49). 9. Saving 147. As far as I can discover, the deathlike character of the speaker’s slumber has escaped the notice of almost all other critics too, whether they classified the poem as ironic for other reasons or did not raise the question of irony at all. Of the former group, David Ferry did observe that “in the first stanza the poet . . . was asleep, perhaps even dead, to her vitality” (77), but Ferry developed the idea no further. Of the latter group, Michael G. Cooke did observe that the first line describes in “the speaker a state akin to death” and is itself a “paradoxical metaphor of death,” an “intimated death”; but, rather than noting that its description reverses the second stanza’s, Cooke stated that the intimated death “confirms itself in the reality of the second, and may be construed as blindly foretelling it” and even causing it (60-61). 10. “A state of affairs or events which is the reverse of what was, or was to be, expected; a result opposite to and as if in mockery of the appropriate result; as the irony of fate” (“Irony,” def. 3, Webster’s Dictionary). 11. An example of the difference between reversal and reciprocal reversal as they are used here would be if, the speaker having gone from sleep to awakedness, Lucy had gone from sleep into death (a reversal) or from awakedness to sleep (a reciprocal reversal). In other words, between two agents, a reversal would involve at least three states and a reciprocal reversal at least two states. The latter is

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therefore more “efficient” and “symmetrical,” less likely in nature, and so more unexpected and ironic. 12. E. Littré noted an irony-of-fate example in Madame de Staël’s use of the word ironie in her novel Corinne (written between 1805 and 1807). The example occurs in the description of an actress’ death scene in a play watched by the heroine of the novel: At last the dreadful moment came when Isabelle, escaping the women who try to restrain her from killing herself, laughs at the vanity of their efforts as she plunges the dagger into her breast. That despairing laugh is the most remarkable dramatic effect, the most difficult to achieve; it is far more moving than tears: this bitter irony [cette amère ironie] is the most harrowing expression of unhappiness. How dreadful is the heart’s suffering, when it gives rise to such barbaric joy, when the sight of its own blood yields the fierce satisfaction of the savage enemy who takes vengeance! (341 or Bk. 17, Ch. 4, par. 3) 13. Among the earliest of these critics were Henn 37, Marsh 56 and n5, Drew 133, and Ferry 78-79. 14. A reading of Helen Vendler’s would allow one to avoid the need to choose between the last alternatives: The speaker’s “strong feeling[s]” for Lucy cause him, at the end, poignantly to relent from “stern truthfulness” about her lifelessness and associate her with the animate nature of trees (Poems 86). Although only the most minimally comforting of thoughts, it would be one that would not deny the perceptible facts of her condition.

Chapter Three 1. Coleridge, Works 1: 240. All quotations from “Frost at Midnight” will be from this edition, 1: 240-43. 2. Discussing “Frost at Midnight,” Geoffrey Yarlott speaks of “the beauty of the frost-tracery” (114), and Allan Grant refers to frost “making patterns on the window or icicles under the eaves” (115). 3. This contrast is noted in Radley 56.

Chapter Four 1. Def. 3, Webster’s Dictionary. Fairchild substitutes the same meaning for “truth” in one of his motto paraphrases: beauty is “my only reliance in life.” 2. Actually, uncertainty about the antecedent of the demonstrative pronoun “that” as well as uncertainty about quotation marks around the motto allows three possible choices of antecedent—not only “beauty” and the motto but also the motto plus the preceding three lines. For discussion of this third choice, which Reading #2 would favor less than the other two choices, see Wasserman, Tone 5862. 3. Although Keats follows this statement with the admission “and yet it must be,” the admission does not negate his statement. Rather it implies that, although he has “never yet been able” to accept logically derived “truths,” others do accept

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them—his addressee Bailey, for instance, who at this time is studying at Oxford for the ministry and undoubtedly learning “truths” derived by “consequitive reasoning.” 4. Letters 1: 185. Several lines further in the letter, Keats remembers that Bailey, the diligent ministerial student, has a “hunger . . . after Truth” and is currently “get[ting] through” much “unpleasant reading” to master the knowledge, thought, reasoning, and philosophy that Keats is depreciating. And so he defers to Bailey’s difference from himself: Bailey’s “complex Mind” requires that he “exist . . . partly on thought,” “increase in knowledge and know all things,” so that “years should bring the philosophic mind” (1: 185-86). 5. Part I, lines 348-49, and Part II, lines 39, 229-30, 241. 6. In Lyon 44, beginning with Roden Noel in 1886. 7. In Lyon 54, beginning with A.C. Bradley in 1921.

Chapter Five 1. All quotations from the poem will be from Shelley, Poetry and Prose, and will be identified by stanza rather than page or line number. 2. Edwin B. Silverman also notes that the Rome section is an alternative to the stanza-47 “directive to conceive of the divine” but that, in the Rome alternative, “rather than exercise imaginative powers, one merely need be analytical” (62). 3. About Rome, Silverman notes only that there “lie the sepulchres of Adonais and Cestius, monuments to the ravages of man and the immortality of genius,” and that there “one also finds testaments to the awful power of time” (62).

Chapter Six 1. There is circumstantial evidence that Canto 121 may have been written in the same year—1849—as the Prologue, but the evidence is doubtful. See Mattes, “Chronology” 125; repr. in Ross 148-49. 2. The relevant passage from the letter is quoted in Tennyson, Works 2: 524. 3. Willey 104; repr. in Ross 173. All quotations from the Prologue will be from Tennyson, “In Memoriam” 36-37 and will be followed by their line numbers in parenthesis but without the designation “line” or “l.”

Chapter Seven 1. Browning, Works, ed. King 5: 248. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of Browning’s works will be from this edition. 2. 5: 138. This passage has been noted in Bloom 38 and Turner 49; but Bloom uses the passage to relate the poem to Shelley rather than Shakespeare, and Turner uses the passage merely to show the presence of towers in other of Browning’s works. 3. According to Turner, the “hoary cripple” who points Roland into the “ominous tract” may correspond to Browning’s still living and active father, who started his

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son on the way to becoming a poet (41). If so, Browning may have wanted to use an allegorical screen additionally to hide his feelings about his father from both him and the public.

Chapter Eight 1. All quotations from the poem will be from Arnold, Poems 322-55, and will be designated by line number(s) rather than page number(s). 2. Letters to Clough 146; repr. in Tinker and Lowry 211 and Dawson 133. 3. Malcolm 41-42. The relevance of this passage to Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” was noted in Arnold, Poems 352n and Jewett 132-33. In Malcolm, Rustum was intentionally not named among the drowned nobles, for he died much later and not by drowning (52). But Arnold changed the circumstances of Rustum’s death thus much for the sake of the poem.

Chapter Nine 1. Here the words “Casualty” and “Doomsters” do not have the modern negative connotations equating them with “accident” and “condemners” respectively; instead, they have the archaic (even in 1866) neutral connotations equating them with “chance” and “judges” respectively (Elliott 299). All quotations from the poem will be from Hardy 10. 2. Equivalent to the American colloquial “how come?” 3. This question, incidentally, eliminates the other possible meaning of the denial —that the speaker does not know whether negative determinism is the correct philosophy because no god has informed him of it. If this were the meaning of the denial, he would not be puzzled by the negative-determinist experiences he then cites, and he would not ask a question about them. He would merely accept them as evidence that the negative-determinist philosophy is correct. 4. Incidentally, the dilemma and the unanswered question are unchanged whether the speaker believes that all humankind or just himself is only mistreated by the universe. In the last line of the poem, his return to first-person-singular reference (“my pilgrimage”) after abandoning it in the previous five lines may suggest this more egocentric view. 5. Of course, a Schopenhauerian answer to the question exists and would have been available to Hardy: Although both good and evil happen to human beings in a chance or antideterminist universe, the good does not often make an impression on them (they overlook or forget it or take it for granted), and so the uncompensated evil makes them miserable. However, this answer to the question is not in “Hap.”

Chapter Ten 1. Yeats, Plays 54. Subsequent references to this edition will be designated by the capital letter “Y” preceding the page number—e.g., Y54.

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2. Quotations from the poem (Y52, 54, 56) are from the original 1892 version of the play. 3. Poems 813. Subsequent references to this edition will be designated by the small letter “y” preceding the page number—e.g., y813. 4. This image, incidentally, provides the only possible connection between the two Fergus poems: the sun god in “Who Goes With Fergus?” may be one of the transformations that the figure speaking with the druid has gone through. Assuming other connections can lead one (as it did Empson) into a maze of explanations. 5. Yeats described Fergus as reveller in “The Secret Rose”: “the proud dreaming king who flung the crown / And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown / Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods” (y170). He noted Fergus as hunter in the 1895 edition of Poems: “king of all Ireland, but gave up his throne that he might live at peace hunting in the woods” (y795).

Chapter Eleven 1. Quoted in Ruth Edwards 169 and Cullingford 91. See also Porter 53. 2. Realizing that a likeness to stone and an “excess of love” are both consistent with an obsession clears Yeats of the charge that he changed his mind in the middle of the poem: “In a striking re-adjustment of his earlier view of the revolutionaries, he decides that far from being stony-hearted, they were led astray by an excess of love” (Vendler, “Elegies” 218); or “The opposite is imagined: Perhaps it was not a heart of stone that brought fanaticism but an excess of love that brought bewilderment” (Adams, Book 139). 3. “Standing by the seashore in Normandy in September 1916 he read me that poem; he had worked on it all the night before, and he implored me to forget the stone and its inner fire for the flashing, changing joy of life; but . . . he found my mind dull with the stone of the fixed idea of getting back to Ireland” to resume revolutionary activities (Gonne 31-32; quoted in Perloff 324n). 4. “When,” adv., def. 1, Webster’s Dictionary. “Will there ever be sacrifice enough” (Archibald 109), “how much longer [must] such sacrifices . . . be made” (O’Donnell 80), “when if ever” will their sacrifice suffice to bring “the independence they sought” (Thomas Edwards 193), “when [will] sacrifice . . . be sufficient for redemption,” or when will “human life” be “no longer torn apart by irreconcilable opposites” (Thompson 156)? 5. The plural pronoun here can refer to the two voices as well as to the second voice speaking editorially on behalf of society. 6. “Bewildered” is glossed thus, probably because of its middle syllable, by Ellmann and O’Clair 131n. According to Declan Kiberd, Pearse actually used the phrase “excess of love” and used it approvingly in regard to rebellion; moreover, knowing this, Yeats intentionally repeated the phrase in his poem “with the implication of moral accusation against the rebels” (Kiberd 210). If all this is true, Yeats’s use of the phrase would be another implied criticism of Pearse. 7. “Love bewildered them, not till they were killed, but till they died, stumbling into death in pursuit of their heart’s desire” (Vendler 218).

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8. Yeats’s first use of the phrase “terrible beauty” on May 11 in a letter to Lady Gregory also alluded to self-sacrifice for a noble cause: “I am trying to write a poem on the men executed—‘terrible beauty has been born again’” (Quoted in Jeffares, Commentary 191). 9. “The oxymoron of the refrain, ‘a terrible beauty,’ reconciles the two opposing impulses which the poem considers” (Howarth 139). “The central metaphor of the poem is the oxymoron, ‘a terrible beauty,’ for in the oxymoron rests the double consciousness of the poem” (Thompson 155). “The poem speaks . . . with two voices, and sometimes enacts in single phrases (‘terrible beauty’) their contestation” (Kiberd 213). 10. “It has been assumed that this is an oxymoron, but this is not necessarily the case since it is arguable that beauty can be terrifying. Perhaps Yeats means by it that the beauty of attempted independence was achieved at a terrible cost in human lives” (Foster 26).

Chapter Twelve 1. Hynes, “Yeats” 19; McDiarmid 168-69, 173, 175; Ramazani xii, 176-78, 18290. 2. Smith; Lipking 154-57. 3. Bahlke 18; Ramazani xii, 176-78, 183, 185-86; Mendelson, Later Auden 7-8, 13. 4. Edith Williams 24; Sacks 303-04. 5. Roth 199-200; Blair 92-93; Davison 151. 6. Drew 270; Rosenheim 425; Callan 151-52; Hecht 151-52. 7. Blair 94; G.S. Fraser 1021; Ellmann, Domain 109; Hynes, Auden 351; Lipking 160. Except for the change in line 37 from “saying” to “making,” the analysis in the present chapter does not depend on or need to cite changes that Auden made in the poem after its original publication; therefore, all quotations from the poem will be from the authorized edition, the Collected Poems 197-98. 8. In the first English pastoral elegy—the November Eclogue of Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar—the wolves are notable exceptions among the animals. They alone behave normally and do not mourn the death of the shepherd (or, in this case, the shepherdess): “The beastes in forest wayle as they were woode, / Except the wolves, that chase the wandring sheepe, / Now she is gon that safely did hem keepe” (lines 135-37). 9. See, e.g., stanza 16 of Shelley’s Adonais—the elegy that Auden cites in relating Yeats’s elegy on Major Robert Gregory to the tradition (Auden, “Yeats” 193). 10. Only the thermometer is implied among “all the instruments” (or, as revised, “what instruments we have”). Therefore, other of the instruments may be the mournful poetic-musical ones, such as the shepherds’ pipes, that, in pastoral elegy, would “agree” about the day of the poet’s death being figuratively “dark” and “cold.” 11. They are similar, in pastoral elegy, to the dead poet’s inventions or ideas (and the dead shepherd’s sheep). See Adonais, stanza 9.

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12. The essay appeared in the Spring 1939 Partisan Review and the poem in the March 8, 1939 New Republic. 13. Auden, “Public” 392-93. Incidentally, the last few phrases of the excerpt may account for Auden’s juxtaposing the brokers and the poor in lines 25-26 of the poem. The brokers, acting for the rich and being rich themselves, may be “roaring” in the Bourse not only because of their competitive bidding but also because of their “selfish terror”; and the poor, only “fairly accustomed” to their sufferings, may not be completely so because of the “just envy” latent within them. 14. First noted in Wright 104-05. 15. “The social virtues of a real democracy are brotherhood and intelligence” (Auden, “Public” 393). 16. As had Yeats’s “The Gyres” and “Lapis Lazuli.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kenneth B. Newell is an alumnus of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and received a master’s degree and doctorate in English at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania respectively. Before his retirement, he coordinated the Humanistic Studies Program at Christopher Newport University and taught English there as well as at several other universities—Drexel, Kansas, California at Los Angeles, Virginia Commonwealth, California State at Bakersfield, and Southern California. He is the author of Structure in Four Novels by H.G. Wells, Pattern Poetry: A Historical Critique from the Alexandrian Greeks to Dylan Thomas, Conrad’s Destructive Element: The Metaphysical WorldView Unifying “Lord Jim,” A Theory of Literary Explication: Specifying a Relativistic Foundation in Epistemic Probability, Cognitive Science, and Second-Order Logic, and scholarly articles mainly on early Modern British fiction.