Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry [1 ed.] 9780520942202, 9780520255982
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Praise for Poems for the Millennium, volume one Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, editors “The word anthology hardly does justice to Rothenberg and Joris’s brilliant reconceptualization of twentieth-century poetry in a global context. This is that rare book that forces us to rethink what the poetic is and can be.” M A R J O R I E P E R LO F F
“A sourcebook for the future.” GARY SNYDER
“One of the most dense and most amazing anthologies of twentieth-century poetry ever produced.” B LO O M S B U RY R E V I E W
“This massive compendium of poems and documents that define poetic modernism . . . takes a global approach to the period of 1890 to 1945, offering translated work by poets from Europe and the Third World as well as the United States. . . . This ambitious documentary history should take its place in most poetry collections, large and small.” LIBRARY JOURNAL
“This invaluable collection . . . maps poetic possibility, thus demonstrating how poetry was literally remade during this period.”
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY
“A fat, impassioned, unabashedly partisan book, Poems for the Millennium gathers verse, manifestos, and a handful of artworks from the last fin-de-siècle to the height of African and Caribbean Negritude. . . . A raucous, international revival meeting.” ERIC MURPHY SELINGER, BOSTON PHOENIX
“Excellent. . . . The coverage of the various poetic movements as part of a general art world attempt to redefine and invent perception and rediscover freedom provides some of the most intense moments of this verse. . . . A major guide to the unquiet poetic history of this century.” THE READER’S REVIEW
“Rothenberg and Joris prove to be generous guides, providing historical and cultural contexts for poetry which could be inaccessible in fragmentary isolation. [They] establish the vitality of movements which are often overlooked in the context of poetry. . . . [Their collection] embraces an eclectic cosmopolitanism.” DEVIN JOHNSTON, CHICAGO REVIEW
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Praise for Poems for the Millennium, volume two Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, editors “A standing ovation, please, for an epic performance of an heroic breath and breadth. Superb in its being and its translations, the language leaps headlong from the pages into your space. After the invaluable first volume, this one celebrates a poetry and poetics wide awake to right now and full of sustenance: an event for the millennium.” M A R Y A N N C A W S , Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, Graduate School, City University of New York
“Rothenberg and Joris’s great anthology shows the heart and breath of poetry from the Cobra Group to the voices of Asia and new America, and lets Blake’s ‘Tyger’ out of the bag for all lovers of poetry. What heights and depths of consciousness! What variety and elegance!” M I C H A E L M c C LU R E
“Rothenberg and Joris have performed a heroic service to poets and poetry. This second volume bears out the assertion that the works gathered here constitute not a ‘minority poetics’ but rather an ocean, a manifold, a non-linear habitat where we meet and remeet an extraordinary range of poetic life forms. For the reader of poetry, here is both archive and visionary adventure. For poets (and would-be poets) here is a mine of legacies, and incitement to the scope and possibilities of our own task. For students of history and culture, here is a world pulse. Though such a collection can never be definitive, this one is admirable in its generosity of spirit.”
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
ADRIENNE RICH
“Presenting an astonishing amount of exciting poetry—as did Volume I: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude—this collection freely crosses national and aesthetic boundaries. . . . As an introduction to the many avant-gardes of the second half of the century and a revision of current thinking about canonization— the ‘what’s in’ and ‘what’s out’ of mainstream anthologies—the value of this international gate-crasher cannot be underestimated.” P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY
“A radical new interpretation of twentieth-century poetry’s movement and movements.” BOOKLIST
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions to this book provided by Bill Berkson, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Published in cooperation with the Archive for New Poetry, University of California, San Diego.
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
ADVISORS
David Antin Charles Bernstein Enikö Bollobás Augusto de Campos Mary Ann Caws Jeffrey Cox Michel Deguy Diane di Prima George Economou Anselm Hollo Susan Howe Pierre Joris Michael McClure Jerome McGann Michael Palmer Marjorie Perloff Esther Schor Richard Sieburth Anne Waldman Elizabeth Willis Heriberto Yépez
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
POEMS for the M I L L E N N I U M The University of California Book of Romantic
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
& Postromantic Poetry
Volume Three
Edited with commentaries by
Jerome Rothenberg and
Jeffrey C. Robinson
University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2009 by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson For credits and acknowledgments, please see page 919. For figure credits, please see page 926. isbn 978-0-520-24735-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-25598-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
The Library of Congress has catalogued volume 1 as follows: Poems for the millenium : the University of California book of modern & postmodern poetry / edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. v. cm. “A centennial book”—Vol.1, p. Includes bibliographical references and index. contents: v. From fin-de-siècle to negritude. isbn 0-520-07225-1 (v. 1).—isbn 0-520-07227-8 (v. 1: pbk.) 1. Poetry, Modern. I. Rothenberg, Jerome, 1931– . II. Joris, Pierre, 1946– . III. University of California (System) IV. University of California Press. pn6101.p493 1995 808.81—dc20
93-49839 CIP
Manufactured in the United States of America 18 10
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
10
09
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
CONTENTS
Introduction Thanks & Acknowledgments
1 19
PRELUDIUM Jean-Jacques Rousseau
from The Social Contract from Reveries of the Solitary Walker
23 23
Emanuel Swedenborg
from The Spiritual Diary
26
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Denis Diderot
from Rameau’s Nephew: An Improvisation
30
Christopher Smart
from Jubilate Agno
34
Erasmus Darwin
from The Loves of the Plants: Mimosa and Tremella
42
James Macpherson
from Ossian: The Songs of Selma
46
Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade
from Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded
53
Francisco Goya
Four Caprichos
58
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Prometheus
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
63
Thomas Chatterton
from The Rowley Poems: An Excelente Balade of Charitie: As wroten bie the goode Prieste Thomas Rowley, 1464
65
Seven Ancient Monuments: Map of Rudhall and Redcliff Wall
70
Mary Robinson
from A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination
72
William Blake
from America a Prophecy: Preludium
76
A FIRST GALLERY
From Goethe & Blake to Solomos & Pushkin Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mignon’s Song from Scenes from the Faust of Goethe [two versions] from Venetian Epigrams from Trilogy of Passion: The Marienbad Elegy The Metamorphosis of Plants
81 82 84 87 89
from Theory of Color: The Blindingly Bright Colorless Form
92
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
William Blake
[Epigraph] Letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802 from Songs of Innocence and of Experience The Sick Rose The Divine Image The Human Abstract The Chimney Sweeper London To Tirzah from An Island in the Moon: Chap 9 The Mental Traveller from Milton, Book the First: The Vortex
95 95 96 97 97 98 98 100 103
from Milton, Book the Second: “There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True”
105
from Jerusalem: The Covering Cherub
107
Joseph Joubert
from The Notebooks: 1789–1794
vi Contents Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
109
Mary Robinson
A London Summer Morning To the Poet Coleridge from Sappho and Phaon: Six Sonnets
114 115 117
Robert Burns
A Red, Red Rose Love and Liberty. A Cantata
121 121
Jean Paul [Richter]
First Flower-Piece: Speech of the Dead Christ from the Top of the Universe: That There Is No God
133
Germaine de Staël
Corinne’s Improvisation in the Naples Countryside Corinne’s Last Song
138 142
Friedrich Hölderlin
I Once Asked the Muse In the Forest Palimpsest: Columbus
145 147 153
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
William Wordsworth
Lines Written in Early Spring The Female Vagrant
160 161
Nine Sonnets: From London to Paris, August/September 1802
168
from The Prelude, Book Fifth: Books Ode: “There was a time”
172 176
Dorothy Wordsworth
from The Grasmere Journals Grasmere, Lineated
183 184
Novalis
[Epigraph] from Heinrich von Osterdingen from Faith and Love or The King and the Queen from Hymns to the Night [5 and 6]
190 195
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[Epigraph] “The heart should have fed” Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment Dejection: An Ode Urine Fragments from the Gutch Notebook
202 205 209 209
Contents vii Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Fire, Famine, and Slaughter: A War Eclogue Ne Plus Ultra
213 215
Charles Fourier
from The Theory of the Four Movements The Phalanx at Dawn
217 217
Thomas De Quincey
Dream-Fugue: On the Theme of Sudden Death
221
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Darkness from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto Three from Don Juan: Dedication On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year
230 232 237 240
Giuseppe Belli
Eleven Roman Sonnets: For the Pope
243
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Song from Prometheus Unbound
250
On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery
251
Queen Mab: Canto VII England in 1819 from Peter Bell the Third: Hell
252 262 262
“Arethusa,” with Robert Duncan’s “Shelley’s Arethusa Set to New Measures”
266
Ode to Liberty
269
SOME ASIAN POETS
Prologue
279
Kobayashi Issa
Fifteen Haiku from The Spring of My Life
281 282
Hô Xuân Huong
Autumn Landscape On Sharing a Husband Jackfruit Weaving at Night
viii Contents Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
285 285 286 286
Wu Tsao
For the Courtesan Ch’ing Lin Bitter Rain in My Courtyard I Have Closed the Double Doors
286 287 288
Bibi Hayati
Before There Was a Hint of Civilization How Can I See the Splendor of the Moon Is It the Night of Power
288 289 290
Rabindranath Tagore
from Gitanjali
291
John Clare
[I Am: A Sonnet & a Variation] The Badger: A Sequence from Letter to Messrs Taylor and Hessey [Mouse’s Nest] Emmonsails Heath in Winter from The Progress of Rhyme Jack Randalls Challenge to All the World To John Clare Letter to Mr. Jas. Hipkins
293 294 295 296 296 297 298 299 299
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
John Keats
Butterflies, Lineated “What can I do to drive away” from Endymion, Book One: Hymn to Pan Sonnet: “If by dull rhymes” Meg Merrilies Sonnet: “Bright star” Ode to Psyche Ode to a Nightingale Dream and Dream Sonnet: Paolo and Francesca Ode on Melancholy “This living hand”
301 301 303 305 305 306 307 308 311 312 313
Heinrich Heine
Ezra Pound, after Heine: Und Drang Morphine Heine per Gerard de Nerval The Castaway The Dream from Ludwig Börne: A Memorial from Germany: A Winter’s Tale [23–26]
314 316 317 318 319 322
Contents ix Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Adam Mickiewicz
from Crimean Sonnets: The Ruins of the Castle of Balaklava
335
The Romantic from Pan Tadeusz from Forefathers’ Eve: The Great Improvisation
335 337 340
Giacomo Leopardi
L’Infinito Saturday Night in the Village
343 344
from Operette Morali: Announcement of Prizes by the Academy of Syllographs
345
Broom, or the Flower of the Desert
348
Dionysios Solomos
The Destruction of Psara The Shark The Woman of Zante
358 358 360
Aleksander Pushkin
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
The Emperor Nicholas I The Prophet from The Bronze Horseman: Introduction Tsar Nikita and His Daughters from Eugene Onegin: Onegin at the Theater
375 376 376 379 385
A BOOK OF ORIGINS
Prologue
395
William Blake
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Ancient Poets
397
E. A. Wallis Budge
from The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Chapter of Changing into Ptah
397
G. R. S. Mead
from Pistis Sophia: O Light of Lights [Coptic Gnostic]
398
Sir William Jones
Two from Sanskrit from The Yarjurveda A Hymn to the Night x
Contents
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
402 403
Edward FitzGerald
from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam [Farsi]
403
Daniel G. Brinton
from Rig Veda Americanus: Two for the Goddess [Aztec]
406
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow / Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
Song of the Owl [Ojibwa]
407
Washington Matthews
from The Night Chant: Prayer of the First Dancers [Navajo]
408
Francis J. Child
Sir Patrick Spence
411
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Homer’s Hymn to the Moon [Greek]
412
Vuk Karadžic´
A Poem for the Goddess Her City & the Marriage of Her Son & Daughter [Serbian]
413
Lady Charlotte Guest
Hanes Taliesin / The Tale of Taliesin [Welsh]
414
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Esaias Tegnér / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
from Frithiof’s Saga [Icelandic / Swedish]
416
Christmas Gysarts [Mummers] Play from Bowden
417
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
from Negro Spirituals
421
Anonymous
Song of the Bald Mountain Witches & Magic Nymphs [Russian]
425
Five Dream Works, from Coleridge to Freud
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: from The Notebooks Mary Shelley: The King of Cats, a Ghost Narrative Gerard de Nerval: from Aurelia, or Dream and Life Georg Büchner: from Lenz Sigmund Freud: from The Dream-Work
426 427 428 429 430
Charles Darwin
from The Origin of Species
431
Contents xi Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
A SECOND GALLERY
From Hugo & Lönnrot to Swinburne & Mallarmé Victor Hugo
The Grave and the Rose The Slope of Reverie Russia 1812 from The Art of Being a Grandfather What the Public Says The Immaculate Conception from God: The Threshold of the Abyss Ma Destinée
435 435 439 441 442 444 449
Elias Lönnrot
from Kalevala: In the Beginning
451
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
[Epigraph] from Death’s Jest Book, Act One Dream of Dying A Crocodile from Death’s Jest Book: Three Songs 1. Isbrand’s Song 2. A Song of the Deaths 3. The Song That Wolfram Heard in Hell Dream-Pedlary
460 460 461 462 463 464
Elizabeth Barrett Browning Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Two Sonnets, for George Sand A Musical Instrument from Sonnets from the Portuguese: Three Sonnets from Aurora Leigh, Fifth Book [excerpt]
466 467 468 470
Aloysius Bertrand
from Gaspard de la Nuit: Preface and Six Poems
476
Gerard de Nerval
[Epigraph] from Aurelia, or Dream and Life Panorama Les Chimères
482 484
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Days Woods: A Prose Sonnet from The Notebooks: “Turtle in swamp” Hamatreya
xii
Contents
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
494 494 495 495
Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing Blight Bacchus
497 499 501
Edgar Allan Poe
Sonnet—Silence The Haunted Palace from Eureka, a Prose Poem
504 505 506
Alfred Tennyson
“Flower in the crannied wall” The Hesperides from Maud, or The Madness “Come into the garden, Maud” “Dead, long dead”
510 510 513 516
Robert Browning
“Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes” Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology in the Island Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
520 520 528
Edward Lear
Eight Limericks Mr and Mrs Discobbolos Letter to Mrs Stuart Wortley: The Moon Journey “How pleasant to know Mr Lear!”
531 535 536 538
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Søren Kierkegaard
The Illegible Letter from Either/Or: Diapsalmata Nebuchadnezzar
540 541 542
SOME OUTSIDER POETS
Prologue
546
Antoine Ó Reachtabhra [Blind Raftery]
I Am Raifteirí
547
Anonymous Revolutionary Pamphlet
from The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times
548
James Reuben
History of Nez Percé Indians from 1805 up to the Present Time, 1880
549
Contents xiii Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Jacob Carpenter
from Deaths on Three-Mile Creek: 1841–1915
551
Anonymous
The Boasting Drunk in Dodge [1883]
552
Ernest Jones
The Song of the Low The Song of the Gaggers
553 555
Thomas Cooper
from The Purgatory of Suicides, a Prison-Rhyme in Ten Books
556
Joanna Southcott
from The Strange Effects of Faith
560
Anonymous
The Honest Farmer’s Declaration [1853]
562
Mikhail Lermontov
My Demon Untitled Poem A Dream New Year’s Poem
563 563 564 566
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Walt Whitman
Fragment from “The Sleepers”
569
from Song of Myself: “I have heard what the talkers were talking”
570
This Compost Respondez! or Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness I Sing the Body Electric Good-bye My Fancy!
571 573 576 582
Herman Melville
Lines—after Shakespeare The Maldive Shark from Moby Dick Father Mapple’s Hymn The Cabin A Squeeze of the Hand from Billy Budd: Billy in the Darbies
xiv
Contents
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
584 585 585 586 587 588
Cyprian Norwid
The Sphinx What Did You Do to Athens, Socrates? Chopin’s Piano
590 591 592
Charles Baudelaire
Correspondences Two Prose Poems Get Drunk One O’Clock in the Morning A Carrion Litanies of Satan The Voyage To the Reader
596 597 597 598 600 602 606
Sándor Petöfi
The Madman Homer and Ossian from The Apostle [1, 3, 4]
608 610 612
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
from Dante’s New Life: His Pitiful Song Troy Town The Blessed Damozel: A Double Work of Art from A Trip to Paris and Belgium
619 621 624 629
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Emily Dickinson
#1249 “Had I not seen the Sun” Poem fragment: “We do not think / enough of the / Dead” #627 “I think I was enchanted” #764 “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – ” #706 “I cannot live with You – ” #778 “Four Trees – opon a solitary Acre – ” Visual poem: “A poor – torn heart – a tattered heart” To Recipient Unknown
634 635 635 637 637 639 640 641
Christina Rossetti
My Dream The Convent Threshold from Goblin Market
644 646 649
Sousândrade [Joaquim de Sousa Andrade]
from O Guesa Errante: The Wall Street Inferno
655
Contents xv Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Adah Isaacs Menken
Judith Battle of the Stars [After Ossian] Sale of Souls
663 665 669
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Second Chorus from Atalanta in Calydon A Ballad of Burdens Anactoria
674 675 677
Stéphane Mallarmé
“Cette adorable bague” The Tomb of Edgar Poe Igitur from A Tomb for Anatol
686 687 687 697
A BOOK OF EXTENSIONS
Prologue
707
William Blake
Laocoön
709
Two Shaker Vision Drawings
Sacred Roll Spirit Message
710 711
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Edward Lear
from Letters to Evelyn Baring
712
Lewis Carroll
Concrete Poem: A Mouse
713
Guillaume Apollinaire
from Calligrams: The Bleeding-Heart Dove and the Fountain
714
Lewis Carroll
Jabberwocky
715
The Shakers
Sound Poem [Glossolalia]
716
August Strindberg
from Holy Trinity Night: The Nightingale’s Song
xvi Contents Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
716
Lafcadio Hearn
Charcoal Man
717
James Clarence Mangan
A Railway of Rhyme
718
Leigh Hunt
Deformations
719
Arthur Rimbaud
Vowels & Colors
719
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Writing Aslant
720
Lewis Carroll
Three Syllogisms
720
Walt Whitman
Words
721
Mary Shelley
Improvisation: Contadini and Improvisatori
722
Henry David Thoreau
A Telegraph Harp [1851]
723
Stéphane Mallarmé
from Thèmes Anglais: Indefinite Articles
724
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Laurence Sterne
from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Verbs Auxiliary
726
Three Alphabets
Christopher Smart: from Jubilate Agno Victor Hugo: A Hieroglyphic Alphabet Benjamin Paul Blood: from The Poetical Alphabet
727 729 730
Sadakichi Hartmann
Sadakichi’s 1895 Light Show
731
A THIRD GALLERY
From Hopkins & Nietzsche to Yosano & Apollinaire Gerard Manley Hopkins
Star Images: September to December 1864
737
Contents xvii Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Two Sonnets Carrion Comfort Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
738 739 740
Friedrich Nietzsche
Oedipus: Soliloquies of the Last Philosopher
743
The Desert Grows: Woe to Him Who Harbours Deserts . . .
743
Only a Fool! Only a Poet! Letter to Jacob Burckhardt
747 750
Paul Verlaine
Chanson d’Automne / Autumn Song from Songs without Words: Seven Poems Overture Sonnet to the Asshole [with Arthur Rimbaud] The Art of Poetry
752 753 756 757 758
Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont
[Epigraph] “I replace melancholy with courage” from Poésies from Maldoror: Shipwreck and Sharks
760 762
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
José Martí
Undated Fragment from Notebook 5: “Movement is contagious” Not Rhetoric or Ornament Two Homelands Have I from Powder from the Wings of a Moth from Simple Verses: “I am an honest man” The Swiss Father
768 769 770 771 771 774 776
Arthur Rimbaud
Morning of Drunkenness The Drunken Boat Second Delirium: Alchemy of the Word Bad Blood Farewell
779 780 783 788 793
Jules Laforgue
[Epigraph] “Dans la pièce les femmes vont et viennent” Pierrots Complaint on the Oblivion of the Dead
xviii Contents Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
795 796
The Coming of Winter from Landscapes and Impressions
798 800
SOME ORIENTALISMS
Prologue
806
William Blake
from The Book of Los: Asia
807
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Arabian Ballad
809
George Gordon, Lord Byron
from The Giaour: Leila as Gazelle
813
from Hebrew Melodies Ancient & Modern: The Wild Gazelle
814
Victor Hugo
from Les Orientales: Bounaberdi
815
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Brahma
816
Walt Whitman
from Passage to India
816
Charles Baudelaire
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
L’Invitation au Voyage
819
Victor Segalen
from Stelae: Roadside Stelae
821
Arno Holz
Six from Phantasus Childhood Paradise
824 826
José Asunción Silva
Nocturne III
836
Sigbjørn Obstfelder
I Look The Dog Hurricane The Woman in Black The Arrow
838 839 841 842 843
Contents xix Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Rubén Darío
In the Land of Allegory Sonatina Agency To Roosevelt Metempsychosis Exploit in the Bullring
844 845 846 847 849 849
Alfred Jarry
from Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician Elements of Pataphysics: Definition A Visit to Lucullus Concerning the Surface of God
854 854 858
Gertrude Stein
from The Making of Americans
861
Antonio Machado
Six Poems
868
Rainer Maria Rilke
Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes
874
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Yosano Akiko
The Woman from Midaregami (Hair in Disorder): Cochineal Purple May It Not Come to Pass That You Die In Praise of May Auguste’s Single Strike Song of the Letter A
878 878 880 881 882 884
Guillaume Apollinaire
Zone
886
MANIFESTOS & POETICS Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[Toward a World Literature]
895
William Blake
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Reason and Energy
895
Friedrich Hölderlin
from On the Difference of Poetic Modes
xx Contents Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
897
William Wordsworth
from Advertisement for Lyrical Ballads
898
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
from Shakspeare, with Introductory Matter on Poetry, the Drama, and the Stage
899
Friedrich von Schlegel
Athenaeum Fragment 116 from On Incomprehensibility
900 901
Percy Bysshe Shelley
from A Defence of Poetry: Three Excerpts
902
John Keats
To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818
904
Heinrich Heine
from Journey from Munich to Genoa: Heine’s Epitaph
905
Victor Hugo
from Preface to Cromwell
906
Ralph Waldo Emerson
from The Poet
907
Walt Whitman
from Preface to Leaves of Grass
908
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Charles Baudelaire
from The Painter of Modern Life
908
Fyodor Dostoevsky
from Notes from Underground
910
Emily Dickinson
Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson
912
Walter Pater
from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
913
Stéphane Mallarmé
from Crisis in Verse
914
Gerard Manley Hopkins
from Poetry and Verse
915
Contents xxi Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Arthur Rimbaud
from Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871
916
Rainer Maria Rilke 918
Credits
919
Figure Credits
926
Index of Authors
927
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An Archaic Torso of Apollo
xxii
Contents
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. . . . The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that it is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic. FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL
It should be unnecessary to point out that romanticism, as a specific state of mind and temperament whose function is to create from scratch a new general conception of the world, transcends the very limited fashions of feeling and declaiming which are proposed as its successors and which textbooks strive to situate on the same plane as romanticism itself, declaring the latter to be decrepit—and thereby exorcising the subversive elements in it. . . . Above and beyond the sprinkling of works proceeding from it, or derived from it, notably through symbolism and expressionism, romanticism asserts itself as a continuum. ANDRÉ BRETON
The critical texts of the English and German Romantics were true revolutionary manifestos, and established a tradition which continues today. . . . But in 1800, as again in 1920, what was new was not so much that poets were speculating in prose about poetry, but that this speculation overflowed the limits of the old poetics, proclaiming that the new poetry was also a new way of feeling and living. OCTAVIO PAZ
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With the Romantic movement, the intellectual adventure of not knowing, of “Negative Capability,” Keats called it in poetry, returns. The truth we know is not of What Is, but of What Is Happening. ROBERT DUNCAN
If in the 19th century, as Gertrude Stein said, people saw parts and tried to assemble them into wholes, while in the 20th century people envisioned wholes and then sought parts appropriate to them, will the 21st century carry out a dissemination of wholes into all parts and thus finish what the 19th century began? LY N H E J I N I A N
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
INTRODUCTION
As the twentieth century fades out the nineteenth begins again it is as if nothing happened though those who lived it thought that everything was happening enough to name a world for & a time to hold it in your hand unlimited the last delusion like the perfect mask of death
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A Book of Continuities & Ruptures Lying behind the present gathering is a sense that the most radical and experimental works of our time—in poetry and across the arts—belong to a continuity that stretches back two centuries and more, along with a presentiment of the dark turn the world has again taken in the new century and millennium opening before us. The time, it seems to us, is ready for a reassessment of where we are and where we’ve come from—a new mapping that will stress connections, too often denied, while paying equal attention to the conflicts within the lineage we’re tracing. At the heart of our imaginings, as we look back over the last two centuries of poetry and life, is a romanticism that can, along with the modernism that follows, still come over—fresh—as an amazing mix of attitudes and directives. The nineteenth century begins again: nationalism, colonialism and imperialism, ethnic and religious violence, growing extremes of wealth and poverty, all reemerge today and with a virulence that calls up their earlier nineteenth-century versions and all the physical and mental struggles against them, struggles in which poetry and poets took a sometimes central part. With these dire connections to the nineteenth century we can see, as an instance of that “mental fight,” a linking of an experimental Romanticism to its modern and postmodern counterparts. In poetry the struggle occurred, as it did in the century that followed, as convulsive
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“unfetterings” of the imagination, presumed to be restricted by the powerful hegemonies of industrial capitalism and philosophical, political, and religious orthodoxies.1 Appearing in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the threat both east and west of reemerging religious fundamentalisms are in direct conflict with the liberatory poetics as the book will present them, Poems for the Millennium, volume three, becomes in our view an instance of imagination resisting, in Blake’s phrase, the “mind-forg’d manacles” of tyranny over nature and over the human mind-in-freedom. In its own terms, our volume calls for a reawakening to the boundary-breaking impulse in the poetry of the nineteenth century2 as it can still come down to us: a Romanticism not consoling and formally traditional, as it has too often been described, but inherently transgressive and increasingly experimental. A refocusing of literary history, our gathering is also a vision of a more or less collective enterprise in poetry that links Romanticism as groundwork (both formal and experiential) to the poetry and poetics of experimental modernism as revealed in the earlier volumes of Poems for the Millennium and long shared by many of the poets included in those pages.3 In 1995 and 1998, the University of California Press published the twovolume anthology Poems for the Millennium as an attempt at a globally decentered revision of twentieth-century poetry from the perspective of its many avant gardes. It was the hope of the editors—but also their conviction—that in compiling these two large books they were helping to fill a gap felt by many for a presentation truly reflective of the changes in poetry and poetics during the century then ending. In the aftermath of Poems for the Millennium and the series, Poets for the Millennium, that followed, it appeared to the present editors that another direction which now seemed possible, even inevitable, was toward a similar revision of the poetry of the century preceding that of Poems for the Millennium. Something of the sort was already under way in the opening section of that work, dedicated as it was to a select grouping of nineteenth-century forerunners. 1. “As long as a people is compelled to obey, and obeys, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, and shakes it off, it does still better; for, regaining its liberty by the same right as took it away, either it is justified in resuming it, or there was no justification for those who took it away” (J.-J. Rousseau, from The Social Contract). 2. “Poetry . . . expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination and by offering, from among the boundless multiplicity of possible forms accordant with a given concept, to whose bounds it is restricted, that one which couples with the presentation of the concept a wealth of thought (Gedankenfülle) to which no verbal expression is completely adequate” (I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith). 3. That there is a dark and dangerous romanticism linked to totalitarian temptations of the right and left is also to be noted.
2 Introduction Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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The idea for this third volume, simply put, was to assemble a collection of texts and commentaries with the same polemical abandon that the two original editors had given to Poems for the Millennium. Indeed, Poems for the Millennium served the present editors as a model, and the work that we began to plan has functioned for us as a “prequel” to the other work—in that sense a third though independent volume in what we now conceive as an ongoing project. As with the previous volumes, we feel that the newer project is not only personal to us (and it is!) but also coincides with a sense among many of our contemporaries that the roots of radical and experimental modernism—what has been named or misnamed the avant-garde—lie unmistakably within a visionary and experimental Romanticism as a first and still vital point of departure. It is an inheritance that has too often been wrested from us and to which—for all the differences and ruptures between then and now—we still adhere. In contrast, then, to the once standard accounts of Modernism’s dramatic break from a rebellious and chronically immature Romanticism (thus, T. S. Eliot and other “high modernists” and once “New Critics”) or from a Romanticism in its tamed and enfeebled later forms (by Russian Futurists and assorted Dadas), we are proposing that between the most vital strain of nineteenth-century poetry and the Modernism and avantgardism of the twentieth century there exists a fundamental, systemic continuity.4 It is this continuity, along with its divergences and recastings, that we have attempted to map in the form of a critical anthology with a guiding series of commentaries. Nor are we limiting ourselves to the modernist path—the way that French Romanticism, say, leads into the work of a Baudelaire or a Rimbaud or the way that Blake’s visionary and open poetics prefigures that of twentieth- and twenty-first-century practitioners—at the total disregard of the Romantic mainstream. It is our intention rather to reclaim the fullest range of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry—canonical as well as noncanonical—as a crucial part of our contemporary inheritance, our historical resources as poets and readers. In 4. “It should be unnecessary to point out that romanticism, as a specific state of mind and temperament whose function is to create from scratch a new general conception of the world, transcends the very limited fashions of feeling and declaiming which are proposed as its successors. . . . Above and beyond the sprinkling of works proceeding from it, or derived from it . . . romanticism asserts itself as a continuum” (A. Breton, in La Brèche / Action Surréaliste, October 1963). Or Gregory Corso, in a contemporaneous version of the same: “My only aim is now, and has always been, to revive that which was always alive. ROMANTICISM. Anything other than romanticism was always laughable. Right now I’m in the midst of twenty priests in Rome—in their monastery, and I’m trying to get them to join me in taking down that awkward cross from the Pantheon. I’ll be coming home soon” (from a letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, October 31, 1958, Rome).
Introduction 3 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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doing so we see the possibility of integrating Romantic and Postromantic poets with a wide range of inheritors and bringing back a sense of innovation, danger, and revolution, even or especially to work too often taken for granted or robbed of its newness and power through repetition and enshrinement (canonization). In the manner of Poems for the Millennium, then, we have asked ourselves what an assemblage of nineteenth-century poetry would look like if we went at it in search of its original newness and with no holds barred. Thus stated, it has become for both of us a way of bringing another portion of the vital past into the vital present—a constructed but true picture, to set alongside other, more familiar pictures, constructed and true in turn but subject, like all such pictures, to the banality or emptiness that comes from too much or too easy repetition. Toward this end too—and again on the model of Poems for the Millennium—what we have attempted to construct is an international compendium, something rarely tried but greatly needed. Here we imagine the nineteenth century—like the centuries that follow—as a time of multiple beginnings and our project as a chance to bring together, to juxtapose, poetry from diverse, sometimes conflicting and oppositional romanticisms and postromanticisms. These juxtapositions reveal one significant difference between the selections in this volume and that in the earlier volumes: whereas the first two volumes foregrounded a range of works and processes whose radical and experimental nature was unmistakable if often unfamiliar, the present book, while introducing some nineteenth-century poets and poems too often disregarded, attempts to defamiliarize, through its contiguities (as well as through our commentaries), the work of many unquestionably familiar poets. The vision of Romanticism presented here emerges out of the richly contentious history of thinking about the subject from the late eighteenth century to the present. The acknowledgment, at least a century old, that Romanticism has many faces lies at the heart of this book. As Octavio Paz in Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant Garde and Jerome McGann in The Poetics of Sensibility have observed, there has always been a conservative view of Romanticism and a radical one, and, moreover, a conservative later history of the fate of Romanticism and a radical history. The conservative view of Romanticism enshrines primarily a poetry of the individual subject asserting an inner freedom in the face of growing industrialization with a consequent alienation or atomization of the life of a person. At the same time, the resultant conservative history sees the visionary, expansive side of Romanticism as having built-in limits; Romanticism, by this definition, has its beginning but
4 Introduction Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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always comes to an end, as if “common sense,” a sense of the “tragic” nature of human life, or the knowledge of a “realist” account of modern life asserts itself as a thankful check upon Romantic visionary excess and experiment. Thus, and crucially for what lies behind our recasting of Romanticism throughout the nineteenth century, traditional literary history sees the second half of the nineteenth century as a realistic check on the extravagant, visionary first (“Romantic”) half. By contrast, the radical version and view of Romanticism—often politically as well as poetically radical—reject the idea that poetry stands at a nostalgic remove from experience and event. Says latter-day Romantic Hart Crane: “the writing of a poem is not—as the writing of a chemical equation is—intended to describe anything; instead, the poem is the chemical reaction itself.” In the social and political context, a Romantic poem becomes an event in history and consciousness. Its direction lies outward from the self enmeshed in the world. Geographically, its reach doesn’t stop with national borders but extends into other societies and cultures, and ultimately the universal human community. Rather than monumentality, its character is mobility. The centrifugal direction of such an imagination leads—happily unchecked—not only to its repetition in ever-new situations, but to its outcome in nonaesthetic realities: both the “liberation theology” of twentieth-century Latin America and the ecological movement, for example, have their roots in Romanticism. While using the convenient nomenclature of Romantic and Postromantic, we would also make clear—if we haven’t already—that we consider a major element in the revision of the romantic in poetry to be the very notion of a Romantic “period.” The standard time line for British and German Romanticism has them roughly bounded by the French Revolution and the first third of the nineteenth century, at which point Romanticism in France or in Russia (or in the Americas, for all that) is only just beginning. With this in mind we have expanded the time frame of our gathering to include the entire nineteenth century on the premise that experimental and visionary poetry, linked by a variety of characteristics in common, can be fully known and understood only within this larger scope. Furthermore, this surge of poetry—Romantic in its early stages, Postromantic and modern in its later—carries directly into the experimental Modernism of the twentieth century, as the previous volumes of Poems for the Millennium demonstrate. Several nineteenth-century “theorists” of Romanticism, such as Stendhal, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Walter Pater, predict our concept and design by insisting that “the romantic” refers less to a historical period and more to a quality of poetic intention—a visionary, expansive, at times comic/ironic
Introduction 5 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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quickening of impulse and mind that can lead beyond poetry to the larger social world, as Stendhal said, to a promesse du bonheur.5 A word about “Postromanticism” as a designation of roughly the second half of the nineteenth century—after, in traditional (conservative) accounts, Romanticism has vanished into “realism” or “naturalism” in the United States, “the Victorian period” in England, and various combinations of “realism” and “decadence” and, generically, “prose” elsewhere. In the wake of Romanticism’s visionary, experimental, performative, and socially radical excesses, the “progress-of-poesy,” according to mainstream literary history, corrects itself, comes to its senses, and “matures” into a healthy normality. Yet in our view, Postromanticism, including in particular a radically new and aggressive Modernism,6 is Romanticism by other means. In the second half of the century, then, powerful forces occasion the response of poets: the discoveries of Marx and Darwin and their acknowledgments of the power of the lower classes largely in cities, on the one hand, and the nonhuman origins of human life, on the other. Waiting in the wings and already emerging in unsystematized ways are the Freudian discoveries of the unconscious (including new representations of the mind-set of Sadean eroticism). And nationalist movements—in Greece, Hungary, Poland, Italy, Spain, and Latin America—call attention to previously invisible identities. In contrast to other views of nineteenth-century poetics, Romanticism, qua Postromanticism in our naming, takes up the challenge of this new array of forces, addressing them, sometimes promoting them, by way of inclusion and defamiliarization, seeking forms and language to engage positively the expansive, often conflictual, changes of the modern world. Even “Victorian” staples like Tennyson and Robert Browning write exploratory poetry, such as the sensuous, nearly free-verse experiment of the former’s “Hesperides” and the language of the body in the animalistic “Caliban upon Setebos” of the latter. Women’s poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century, frequently feminist, features dramatic formal, syntactic, and linguistic experiment in the work (often 5. Still more tellingly, as Raymond Williams had it in his influential Keywords: “‘Romantic’ as early as the seventeenth century in Spain was characterized by ‘freedom of imagination.’ The Romantic Movement in the late eighteenth century reinforced this definition: An extended sense of liberation from rules and conventional forms. . . . A corresponding sense of strong feeling, but also of fresh and authentic feeling, was also important. . . . New valuations of the ‘irrational,’ the ‘unconscious’ and the ‘legendary’ or mythical . . . developed alongside new valuations of the folk-cultures within which some of these materials seemed to be found.” Or Diane di Prima, much later, about Romanticism overall: “a kind of steady, esoteric current.” 6. “One must be absolutely modern” (A. Rimbaud).
6 Introduction Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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overlooked in this context) of poets such as E. B. Browning, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, and Adah Isaacs Menken.7 Our recasting insists, then, that the most vital energies of nineteenthcentury poetry counter the perceived narrowness of vision and language imposed upon persons by hegemonic and repressive societies then and now. Octavio Paz, for example, finds Charles Fourier’s and later Baudelaire’s theories of analogy or correspondences (with Emanuel Swedenborg an eighteenth-century precursor) central as a mode of expression and action for the radical Romanticism of the nineteenth century. For Fourier “there is a moment when revolutionary thought and poetic thought converge: the idea of passional attraction” of all the elements, where there is a “unity in the system of movement for both the material and spiritual worlds.” For Baudelaire the universe becomes “a language, a script. But it is a language in unending movement and change: each sentence breeds another sentence.” And Paz continues: “Analogy is the operation by means of which, thanks to the play of similarities, we accept differences. Analogy does not eliminate differences: it redeems them, it makes their existence tolerable.” The fundamentally innovative and risk-taking elements of Romanticism, given over in one manner or another to the achievement of “a better world than this,” never ceases. If Romanticism sometimes writes doom into its reports from the horizon, it also casts itself as perpetual renewal; indeed, a “postromanticism of renewal” may define Romanticism itself. (Thus, Poems for the Millennium, volume three, can itself be read as an act of romanticism.) In suggesting an analogy to the ambiguous separation of “Modernism” from “Postmodernism,” we wish to blur the distinctions of Romantic and Postromantic as much as to insist on them.
A Poetics in Search of a Counterpoetics We have proceeded, then, with a full awareness of both the standard and revisionary discourse on Romanticism—particularly in the context 7. Many other nineteenth-century women poets have, of course, been rediscovered in the past fifteen years or so (particularly in English-language poetry), but relatively few, in our estimation, achieve the level of innovation that characterizes more generally the poetry in this anthology. The periods of experimental Modernism and Postmodernism have witnessed a remarkable flowering of experimental poetry by women to the point that some would say, in quality and quantity, they currently dominate the avant-garde in American poetry. Some glimpses of this in the nineteenth-century words—prophetic—of Yosano Akiko: “The day when mountains move has come. / Though I say this, nobody believes me. / Mountains sleep only for a little while / that once have been active in flames. / But even if you forgot it, / just believe, people, / that all the women who slept / now awake and move.”
Introduction 7 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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of English literature—and have attempted to reimagine rather than deny such characteristics of Romanticism as the favoring of “feeling” over “reason,” of nature over urbanism, as earmarks of “the greater Romantic lyric.” All of these maintain considerable integrity for us and are present, we believe, in our gathering, but all are simultaneously under contention, as they were in their own time, and the defining characteristics of Romanticism and Postromanticism (in the latter of which we include a segue into early Modernism) are, as we now see them, also markedly different. Our assemblage highlights a revisionary poetics of Romanticism, inviting a radical usurpation of the canon by proposing a “counterpoetics” as a way of reimagining the familiar pieces and uncovering new and unfamiliar ones. That is, in terms of the traditional “Coleridgean” preference for a poetry of “Imagination” (synthetic, disinterested) over one of “Fancy” (playful, proliferating), our arrangement brings back into prominence a poetry of visionary, often experimental expansiveness: a poetry, in this sense, of the Fancy. Applied to an international Romantic movement, Coleridge’s well-known definition of the Imagination as the “reconciliation of opposite and discordant qualities” has historically prevailed against the notion of Romantic poetics that our anthology reveals as central to Romanticism’s vitality. Thus “the Fancy,” consistently demoted or trivialized, overtly and covertly, becomes for us a coequal rubric under which poetry values those very “opposites,” those dissonances (including dialect, popular idioms, juxtapositions) to the point that closure (“reconciliation,” finitude) dwindles before aperture and multiplicity. Given that Romanticism emerges typically (although not always) in periods of revolution and from poets with an adversarial political disposition, it is noteworthy that, as Romanticism has been absorbed into the cultural mainstream, its historians have dyed it too often in the colors of a conservative poetics. This is particularly, and surprisingly, true of more recent critical currents such as the New Historicism and the New Formalism. The former, to put it simply, has sought to bring history into our understanding of literature and thus to act as a corrective to an earlier period in which critics and scholars tended to consider art as more or less autonomous. Often New Historical criticism has become so absorbed in “context” that it paradoxically has abandoned its focus on art as a primary, formal event. New Formalism, by contrast, while generally conservative in its conception of form, has attended to that “deficiency” in the New Historicism (bringing history to bear on poetry without abandoning the poem), but the idea that form itself might react (through experiment, defamiliarization) to a radical political disposition has not significantly entered the narratives of either of these recent critical movements. By contrast, “our” Romanticism as instances of formal, thematic, and 8 Introduction
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
social transgressions, assumes that a radical Romantic poetics insists on an intellectually strong subject attentive to the world, a mind-in-its-freedom, one impatient with ideologically given accounts of “reality.” We awaken at the same moment to ourselves and to things. (George Oppen) The lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism. (Theodor Adorno)
Romanticism, that is, assumes the world to be a domain as turbulent and susceptible to change as the mind encountering it. This mind of romanticism, furthermore, takes us beyond the borders of the individuated subject in its identification with the claims of classes of persons, or, as Adorno puts it: “A collective undercurrent provides the foundation for all lyric poetry. . . . Romanticism practices a kind of programmatic transfusion of the collective into the individual” (“On Lyric Poetry and Society”). With such continuities and differences in mind, the field before us has opened to include the following, sometimes contradictory definitions and characteristics, both of poetry and of the identity and function of the poet: •
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•
•
A first challenge to closure (conventional/inherited truths), as regards both form and content, and the beginnings of an “open poetry”; thus Schlegel (Atheneum Fragment 116), that the “particular essence” of romantic poetry is “that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected.” Or Blake: “Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race.” A conscious emphasis on defamiliarization, what Novalis signals when he writes: “The art of estranging in a given way, making a subject strange and yet familiar and alluring, this is romantic poetics.” Or Coleridge: “The common end of all narrative, nay of all, Poems is . . . to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion—the snake with its Tail in its Mouth” (letter to Joseph Cottle, 1815). A foregrounding of emotions, feelings, and perceptions in the act of composition, not in any loose sense but as process and experiment (Wordsworth’s term in the preface to Lyrical Ballads), not against but in the line of Enlightenment and neoclassical emphases on rationality and logic.8 Offshoots of this concern are Wordsworth’s “poem on the growth of the poet’s mind” (The Prelude) and the writings of a wide range of poets concerned with alternative states of mind from dreaming and fantasizing to mystical and
8. See Wordsworth again: “This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist / Without Imagination, which, in truth, / Is but another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood” (Prelude, Book XIV).
Introduction 9 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
psychedelic forms of experience (Coleridge, Nerval, Büchner, De Quincey). Romanticism in this sense features nascent forms of the “unconscious” (a term likely coined by Thomas De Quincey). •
•
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•
•
The poet as visionary/seer (voyant) and poetry as a vision-making or vision-recording activity, what Breton called “a sacred action,” though practiced most often in a secular context (what Thomas Carlyle famously termed “natural supernaturalism”). We would tie this, as an act or strategy of composition, to Shelley’s redefinition of poetry as “vitally metaphorical”—an instrument therefore in the search, now renewed, for “the before unapprehended relations of things.” Along with this, the poet as a conduit for other voices, as in Whitman’s call for a “song of myself” that includes a multitude of other selves, or, where it exists, an attempt to bring excluded classes and orders of being into the mix of poetic voices and experiences. This in turn is a force behind an emerging ethnopoetics, which is itself, though not under that name, an innovation of the Romantic and Postromantic nineteenth century. Texts in dialect and texts transcribed or translated from oral sources can, then, also be seen as an important part of our gathering.9 An erasure of the boundaries between poetry and other forms of composition and speculation—often to be noted in the works of Goethe or in Poe’s book-length “prose poem” Eureka. With this, as in the fragments (epigrams) of Novalis and Schlegel, comes a push toward “a new mode of writing that would combine literary, critical, and theoretical discourse” (but philosophy and science as well) as a kind of mischgedicht (poem of mixed means). And that mode in turn is reflective of a new era of genre mixing and crossing, operative in all arts from then to now. At its finest, a poetry that allows for a guiding principle of uncertainty, for which Keats’s “negative capability” serves as a working model: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” a phrase picked up by many radical and experimental twentiethcentury poets. Along with this comes a foregrounding, where possible, of “romantic irony,” as it relates to techniques of defamiliariza-
9. “The nobility of languages is like the nobility of a people. . . . The kind of nobility that English words had before Shakespeare wrote, the one French words had before Racine did, the one Greek words had before Homer, and they all wrote the words of their time” (Dionysios Solomos).
10 Introduction Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
tion and moves toward what Jean Paul posited as the “humoristic” in romantic thought and writing.10 •
•
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•
Alongside the celebration of beauty (both “intellectual” and physical), a recurring exploration of the ugly and the grotesque, taken to extremes that will continue and intensify over the coming two centuries. Pushing past the more rarefied sublime (“the tempestuous loveliness of terror”—Shelley), with its sources in the neoplatonic past, there is a desire to bring to surface what has been suppressed and outcast (Whitman)—outside the realm of the simply beautiful. The contraries of “beauty” and “ugliness,” like “good” and “evil” in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven & Hell, come together in a renewed meeting and clash of opposites. (On the road, too, to Tzara’s pairing of “intensity” and “disgust” as primary Dada [modern and postmodern] values.) In the religious sphere, a calling into question of traditional religious forms, as in Victor Hugo’s multiphasic recastings in his monumental Dieu, Goethe’s probings into Islam, or Shelley’s defense of atheism alongside his defense of poetry. At one extreme, a line from Jean Paul to Nerval and Nietzsche explores the image of “the death of God,” which the nineteenth-century writer Charles Nodier called “the most daring idea of the Romantic spirit”; at another, poets like Hopkins in England and Norwid in Poland make new approaches to deity through radical recastings of language itself. Alongside Romantic ideas of fancy and fantasy, an emergence of a new realism: a poetry of “minute particulars” (Blake) and an attention to the details of the (physical/social) everyday world.11 Nature as a central, even a spiritual, value leads through Rousseau, Goethe, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and others to the concern with wilderness and ecology in twentieth-century poetry.12 Indeed, we stress not the antagonism between poetry and realism or poetry and science, but that for some writers presented here poetry and science
10. “If Schlegel rightly maintains that the romantic is not a genre of poetry but that poetry must itself be romantic: then the same goes more for the comic; that is to say, everything must become romantic, i.e., humoristic” (Jean Paul, from Preschool of Aesthetics). 11. “If the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age, the objective, in the strictest state, must still retain its original value. For it is with this world, as starting point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned” (R. Browning, “An Essay on Shelley”). 12. Or Goethe at the beginning: “Schiller preached the gospel of freedom; I wanted to keep intact the rights of nature.”
Introduction 11 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
are complementary manifestations of an inquiry into the natural world and our relationship to it. •
•
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•
A heightened sense of the transgressive set against an officially sanctioned ethos of gentility and conformity. The contents of a significant body of poetry open on areas that are increasingly subversive, sexual, or blasphemous, from de Sade and Blake in the 1790s, through Shelley, Hugo, Jean Paul, Baudelaire, Whitman, Menken, Swinburne, and Nietzsche, among a host of others. This marks the surfacing of the outrider tradition (A. Waldman)13and the poète maudit in Postromanticism and Modernism. A widespread experience of exile—forced or voluntary—that affected a large number of the poets gathered herein, as marker of a newfound location (dislocation) at the margins or in the “creases” (R. Schechner) of their respective worlds. Sometimes a result of the transgressive/subversive nature of their writings (above), it surfaces as an away-from-homeness in the works and lives of poets such as Heine, Mickiewicz, Byron, Pushkin, Norwid, Beddoes, and Rimbaud, and with it a (liminal) sense of writing between languages and cultures. (For which, see Pierre Joris’s advocacy of a “nomadic poetics” or Schiller’s early account of the Romantics as “exiles longing for a homeland.”)14 An accelerated change in the notion of what a poem can be formally, going from Blake’s illuminated poems in the early years of the century to Mallarmé’s Coup de dés at the very end. Among the changes in form are the following: Irregular forms and radical transformations of poetic genres (odes, experimental sonnets, sprung rhythm, etc.) and early free verse, not only as these appear in Blake, Mallarmé, and Whitman, but in Goethe, Hopkins, and, premeditated or not, the “palimpsests” of Hölderlin.15
:
13. “The OUTRIDER rides the edge—parallel to the mainstream, is the shadow to the maintsream, is the consciousness or soul of the mainstream, whether it recognizes its existence or not. It cannot be co-opted, it cannot be bought. Or rides through the chaos, maintaining a stance of ‘negative capability,’ but also does not give up that projective drive, or its original identity that demands that it intervene on the culture” (Anne Waldman, Outrider, 2006). 14. “It is only when constantly aware that the writer is not ‘at home’ in language (or anywhere else, for that matter) that any real and critical engagement with the enemy forces is possible” (Pierre Joris to Adrian Clarke, 2001). And Marina Tsvetaeva: “A poet dwells not at home but at the crossroads.” 15. “There is nothing modern about free verse. It begins with Goethe’s Wanderers Sturmlied in 1771, Macpherson’s Ossian, Blake and Novalis. Heine, Matthew Arnold
12 Introduction Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
: Prose
as a medium for poetry, involving both the development of the prose poem and, after the fact, writings in prose that share the dynamic character of the new poetry; experiments, therefore, not only in poetic form but in the sentence and the paragraph: the essay, the aphorism, the spontaneous notebook entry (see Dorothy Wordsworth, Joseph Joubert, but also Coleridge, Hopkins, et al.), and the nineteenth-century poetic and even political / social manifesto.
: The
fragment as a conscious poetic form, significant enough for Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy to write: “Indeed the fragment [ . . . the genre in which the Jena romantics’ bestknown texts are written, the genre that has become almost inevitably associated with their name . . . ] is the romantic genre par excellence.”
Improvisation and performance poetry, as an ideal more than a realization, for example, in poems invoking the actual Italian figure of the “Improvvisatore”/“Improvvisatrice” by Byron, Coleridge, Beddoes, de Staël, and others. :
to what would later emerge as sound poetry, most notably in the British non-sense poets Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, but also in the glossolalia and glossographia of the American Shakers and in the occasional works of writers such as Lafcadio Hearn and August Strindberg. Sound, in workings such as these, does not serve “meaning,” but travels beyond meaning’s precincts.
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: Approaches
: Experiments with dialect (Burns, Scott, Hebel, Belli, et al.) and with a gradual turning to the demotic in general (as in Wordsworth’s search for a poetry written in “a selection of the language really spoken by men”). With this too a concurrent demand for the right to practice an idiolect, a personal dialect and syntax, whether spoken or written.16
and Nietzsche all wrote free verse before French vers libre was invented by VieleGriffin. It is unlikely that Whitman knew anything about, much less read, most of these poets—although Hoelderlin’s Odes (assumed to be like those of Pindar whose prosody was not understood in those days) and Novalis’s Hymns of Night, which he wrote in strophic verse, but had printed as prose poetry, both bear an extraordinary resemblance to Whitman’s most profound poems” (K. Rexroth, from American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, 1971). 16. “Those who have made grammar up into a system and cut it into classes and orders as the student does the animal or vegetable creation may be a fine recreation for schools but it becomes of no use towards making any one so far acquainted with it as to find it useful” (John Clare, from The Letters).
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Experiments in verbal/visual interaction that would include the plates or “visionary forms dramatic” of Blake, the Caprichos with accompanying texts of Goya, and the illustrated nonsense poems of Edward Lear.
:
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As some of this already indicates, our gathering of poems, like the two that preceded it, ranges well beyond literature as such. As a matter of particular importance to the two editors, there is ample room in what follows for a selection of works that marked the vital if often neglected beginnings of an ethnopoetics that would emerge more fully in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century this manifested both in recurring attempts to establish national epics on the basis of ancient texts or ongoing oral and folk traditions (the Kalevala, the Nibelungenlied and Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, the Serbian gatherings of Vuk Karadzicˇ, etc.) and in ambitious translation projects involving recovered ancient languages (the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Mayan Popol Vuh) and oral poetries gathered from non-European peoples under colonial domination. Freed here and elsewhere of the need to conform to canonical restrictions, we were able to explore and bring forward, where relevant, the work of submerged and hitherto “minor” poets (e.g., John Clare, Arno Holz, Aloysius Bertrand, Friedrich Nietzsche), and we have been attentive as well to the poetry of some of those women writers who were innovative, even experimental, in their own time but who wrote, for obvious reasons, against the odds.
A Step Backward . . . into the Future The past is yet to come. D. ANTIN
To bring across the fullest range of nineteenth-century Romantic and experimental poetry within a book approximately the length of one of the volumes of Poems for the Millennium, we have made an arrangement of works similar to that in the earlier gatherings. And as with those earlier gatherings, we have approached the Romantics and Postromantics not as canonized and iconic figures but as if they were our contemporaries, knowing full well that they aren’t but remembering Ezra Pound’s wellknown dictum that “all ages are contemporaneous in the mind.” In doing so, we feel that we’ve allied ourselves with those poets of our own time who would resist the pressure to keep the Romantic past at a distance, and have approached even the most canonical of those included here as fellow experimentalists and innovators—the very notion of a poetic
14 Introduction Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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experiment going back to as canonical a figure as Wordsworth, who explicitly named it as such, but implicit as well in the poetry and poetics of almost all of those included here.17 It is our desire in fact to embrace as much of the poetic past as we can and to repudiate in so doing that “anxiety of influence” (H. Bloom) that would separate us (against our finer instincts) from our fellow poets. Wrote Blake as our great progenitor and one of the guiding angels of this book, “The most sublime act is to set another before you.” Accordingly, we have begun—as did the original Poems for the Millennium—with a “forerunners” section (here called “Preludium” after Blake’s opening to America a Prophecy): a small number of works that, contrary to the traditional notion of the eighteenth century as a time first of neoclassicism and second of a lyric of melancholy, anticipate the experimental and visionary romanticism that follows. For this our cutoff point—and the starting point of our gathering as such—is the last decade or so of the eighteenth century, with the nearly simultaneous appearance of the first British Romantics, the Jena school of poets and theoreticians in Germany, and a number of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment figures in revolutionary France and elsewhere. In making such a preludium we have taken Rousseau, not surprisingly, as our opening figure, and have followed him with the earlier figure of Swedenborg, and then with eighteenth-century writers and artists such as Diderot, Smart, MacPherson, de Sade, and Goya, each of whom ties in with aspects of the new poetics that moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into our own time as well. And along with these we have included the already dominant figure of Goethe, whose work would extend into the early nineteenth century, and the shadow presence of William Blake, whose dynamic force would not be felt until the nineteenth century had almost run its course. The gathering after the preludium is divided into a number of sections, three of which are of the type called “galleries” in the earlier volumes of Poems for the Millennium—a roughly chronological arrangement by birth year of a selected number of poets, with accompanying brief commentaries providing historical and poetic context. In addition, there are two nonchronological sections (called “books”), a separate section of mani17. “The first Volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general perusal. It was published, as an experiment, which I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart” (W. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800). Or Whitman some years along: “I sometimes think the Leaves is only a language experiment.”
Introduction 15 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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festos and poetics, and three short “clusters,” in our terminology, embedded in the three galleries. For the first of the galleries, which announces most of the themes to follow in the wake of the new Romanticism, we start again with Goethe and Blake and close with the great Greek experimentalist Dionysios Solomos and with Aleksander Pushkin, whose work created a new, nearly demotic language for Russian literature. As a gathering of poets born before 1800 and whose work as a whole launched a first wave of Romanticism, the gallery already displays a richness of languages and experimental modes (“Nature without check with original energy”—W. Whitman) that a compressed (pointed) presentation like ours may serve to dramatize. It is this “unboundedness” that William Blake celebrated as “the Prolific” and placed in eternal opposition to those who would confine it.18 The second gallery begins with Victor Hugo, arguably the first and greatest of the belated French Romantics, and ends with Mallarmé, who appears early but whose later work provides a segue into the century that follows. It is here that Romanticism—by now a widely recognized term and movement—divides and spawns a series of new and sometimes antagonistic offshoots, not diminishing but adding to the original richness. Here too the movement swings wide, into the recesses of Europe and North and South America, where it will produce new and unanticipated forms and will transform old forms and stances-toward-reality in the work of two or more new generations of poets. It is all of such a sometimes oppositional romanticism-by-other-means that we take as a viable postromanticism and that we carry still more overtly into the third gallery of our gathering—early Modernists, pre-Raphaelites, symbolists, and poètes maudits, Transcendentalists, modernistas, and a number of figures, here and elsewhere, outside of literature as such. The inevitable linkage in the third gallery—starting with Hopkins and Nietzsche and ending with Yosano Akiko and Apollinaire (but also other exemplary poets such as Stein and Rilke)—is to the first generation of twentiethcentury experimental Modernists. It is a linkage—however abbreviated in the telling—that we feel needed to make the work complete. In the way of completion, then, the “books” and “clusters” serve a similar function or several functions at once. With A Book of Extensions and A Book of Origins, we drop the chronological emphasis on individ18. “. . . one portion of being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring: to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole. . . . These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence” (W. Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven & Hell).
16
Introduction
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ual poets to present two aspects of romanticism as an emerging counterpoetics—an emphasis on the compositional tools for a newly constructed present/future and the search by its poets for a radically morphed poetic past. The former of these “books” presents a range of visual, performative, and conceptual works both by canonical poets (Hugo, Blake, Goethe, Mallarmé, Thoreau, et al.) and by others who can be more fairly placed at the fringes of literature. What this allows us to show is an earlier than anticipated play with those turnings of grammar and syntax, image and text, nonsense and beyondsense, improvisation and performance, that would become the markers of an experimental modernism yet to come: a balance (if we have it right) between language as play and language as an instrument of vision. Or, to take it a step further, A Book of Extensions concentrates a principle animating much of the romanticism in this volume: experiments in form often equate to, or imply the possibility of, social and spiritual / mental transformations. As Extensions shows one side of the nineteenth-century push into unexplored terrain—a counterpoetics in formation—A Book of Origins is largely ethnopoetic and archaeological in content and brings together recoveries from both European and non-Western sources. We take this search for new/old origins as a significant part of our definition of Romanticism—if at times a nostalgia for the past, more notably an accumulation of resources for an unforeseeable but desired future. The works that begin to emerge here are extraordinary in their range and variety—ancient and long occulted or repressed poetries and languages, along with literary and extraliterary sources (both written and oral) still alive in the present. The three short “clusters” embedded in the galleries are similarly tilted toward the ethnopoetic: Some Asian Poets presenting a number of groundbreaking poets working on parallel nineteenth-century tracks but otherwise uninfluenced (with one exception) by European Romanticism as such; Some Outsider Poets foregrounding the work of nineteenth-century European and North American poets and chroniclers positioned outside the boundaries of readily recognized literature; and Some Orientalisms highlighting the work of a number of poets (Blake, Goethe, Byron, Whitman, Hugo, and Segalen) who sought, whether successfully or not, to transform their own poetics through an immersion in the poetry and lore of other traditions and cultures. And finally, as a coda to the entire book, we have constructed a section of manifestos and poetics, which allows us to bring together an assemblage of some of the principles and projections (but only some) that have continued to resonate beyond their time and may touch off new beginnings in our own. We anticipate that a book so structured will be both historically cor-
Introduction 17 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
rective and forward-looking: an anthology-as-manifesto in the tradition of the two previous volumes—and a composition, an assemblage, in its own right. At the same time we are aware, as with those other volumes (or all anthologies for that matter), that there is no way to cover the full range of poetries and poets over a span as long as a century and as wide as the globe itself—nor have we intended to do so. Rather we have tried throughout to be pointed in our selections and to construct an image of the past that will also, hopefully but not inevitably, help to reclaim and revitalize a portion of the poetic past that can speak again to the needs and hopes of the poetic and cultural/political present. If there is a deliberate advocacy in all of this, it is not to propose yet another neo-Romanticism, certainly not a return to a spent or exhausted mode of poetry, but to map a process that the first Romantics set in motion and that later Romantics and assorted Postromantics encountered and transformed (often by shattering) to serve their needs—and ours. And it is our further intention to reimagine and to capture what remains vibrant from those times and by so doing to integrate it without apologies into our own idea-of-poetry. That many among us have already done so is still another point worth noting.
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Jerome Rothenberg Jeffrey C. Robinson Encinitas, CA / Boulder, CO 2008 an editorial note. In the spirit of accentuating the principle of language-asplay-and-vision, the editors have chosen to include and even to highlight, when they have occurred, moments of irreverence, unconventionality, instability, and inbetweenness in the poets’ presentations of their own work. In the same spirit we have honored inconsistencies and unconventionalities of grammar, spelling, syntax, and capitalization, wherever found and whenever appropriate. Such decisions and a general foregrounding of idiolect and difference question the assumptions of putatively disinterested textual editors, particularly in gatherings that insist upon “authoritative” and “normalized” versions, rather than celebrate the multiplicity of voices and forms of expression—the unsettled nature, in short, of the “romantic spirit.”
18 Introduction Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
THANKS &
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The acknowledgments before were to our own generation of poets or to the generations immediately preceding ours. But here the distance is greater and what has to be acknowledged—looking backward—is how we build from one time to another. If the times in which we live change—and they do—so does our relationship change to those who came before us. The perch from which we look at them is also different, the two volumes before this appearing at the end of the last millennium and the present volume at the new century’s beginning. Reevaluation and transformation, then, are what is called for, and a principal assertion of the present book is that such processes are and should be necessary and continuous. The true dedication of the book is to those Romantic and Postromantic poets whose work is here included—their presence among us as fellow travelers toward the work that lies ahead. Nor have we felt alone in the work, for there have been contemporaries of ours who have shared with us the idea of a visionary company of poets going back to the early Romantics of this book, and further out and outward from there. We have cited a number of them in these pages—Robert Duncan for sure, but also Michael McClure, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Kenneth Rexroth, and Anne Waldman, among the dozens we could name. Alongside these we have counted on the work of scholars who have maintained and developed the sense of a truly radical and experimental romanticism as a springboard for the radical discoveries of our own time—Jerome McGann and Richard Sieburth and Marjorie Perloff as first examples. Some of these are a part of the quasi-formal board of advisors for Poems for the Millennium, while others who have discussed the project with us at considerable length or who have provided translations or occasional commentaries include Pierre Joris, who was there
19 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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from the beginning, along with David Antin, Charles Bernstein, Enikö Bollobas, Augusto de Campos, George Economou, Jack Foley, Anselm Hollo, Mark Weiss, and Heriberto Yépez. A listing of acknowledgments, even where we’ve tried to be expansive, can hardly do justice to all who have been generous to us in the construction of the present work. We are mindful, as we work to wrap it up, of the assistance given to us by Jenny Cookson, John Leffel, Kirstyn Leuner, Michele Speitz, Carrie Taylor, Cameron Turner, and most of all Kristen Demaree, who worked with us close at hand, and those at the University of California Press—Rachel Berchten, Nola Burger, and Laura Cerruti foremost—whose skills and comradeship have been invaluable. Beyond that, the University of Colorado has provided valuable funding assistance: first, the Council on Research and Creative Work for a major seed grant at the start of the project, then several incidental grants from the Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and finally a Kayden Research grant for subventions. And the work has been further assisted by a grant from the Division of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego, and by Linda Claassen of that school’s Archive for New Poetry. More than all of these, however, our closest collaborators and advisors were Elizabeth Robertson and Diane Rothenberg, scholars and thinkers in their own right, who have been with us from start to finish. With them as with so many others, we have tried to bring art and life together and to touch, however tentatively, what Robert Duncan spoke of as “lilac blossoms of courage in daily act / striving to meet a natural measure.”
20 Acknowledgments Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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P R E L U D I U M
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
Jean -J a cqu es Rou s s ea u
1712–1778
from T H E S O C I A L C O N T R A C T
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer. If I took into account only force, and the effects derived from it, I should say: “As long as a people is compelled to obey, and obeys, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, and shakes it off, it does still better; for, regaining its liberty by the same right as took it away, either it is justified in resuming it, or there was no justification for those who took it away.” But the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded on conventions. Before coming to that, I have to prove what I have just asserted. Translation from French by G. D. H. Cole
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from R E V E R I E S O F T H E S O L I T A R Y W A L K E R
On Thursday, 24 October 1776, I set out after dinner along the boulevards, going as far as the Rue du Chemin-Vert, which I followed to the heights of Ménilmontant; then, taking the paths across the vineyards and meadows, I crossed the charming stretch of countryside that separates Ménilmontant from Charonne; having reached this village I made a detour and returned by another path across the same fields. I was happy walking through them, feeling the same pleasure and interest that agreeable landscapes have always aroused in me, and stopping now and again to examine plants by the wayside. I noticed two which I rarely saw in the vicinity of Paris, but which were growing abundantly in this district. The first is the picris hieracioides, one of the Compositae, and the second the bupleurum falcatum, of the Umbelliferae family. This discovery delighted me and occupied my mind for a long time, until I came across a plant that is even rarer, especially on high ground, the cerastium aquaticum, which in spite of the accident that happened to me that same day I later found in a book I had been carrying and transferred to my collection. Eventually, after examining in detail several other plants which I found
23 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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still in flower and which in spite of their familiarity I took pleasure in seeing and enumerating, I gradually passed from these detailed observations to the equally agreeable but more affecting impressions made on me by the complete picture. The wine harvest had been completed a few days earlier, the city dwellers no longer came out this way, and the peasants too were leaving the fields until it was time for their winter work. The country was still green and pleasant, but it was deserted and many of the leaves had fallen; everything gave an impression of solitude and impending winter. This picture evoked mixed feelings of gentle sadness which were too closely akin to my age and my experience for me not to make the comparison. I saw myself at the close of an innocent and unhappy life, with a soul still full of intense feelings and a mind still adorned with a few flowers, even if they were already blighted by sadness and withered by care. Alone and neglected, I could feel the approach of the first frosts and my failing imagination no longer filled my solitude with beings formed after the desires of my heart. Sighing I said to myself: What have I done in this world? I was created to live, and I am dying without having lived. At least I am not to blame; even if I cannot offer up to my maker the good works which I was prevented from accomplishing, I can at least pay him my tribute of frustrated good intentions, of sound sentiments which were rendered ineffectual, and of a patience which was proof against the scorn of mankind. Touched by these thoughts, I retraced the history of my soul from youth to the years of maturity and then during the long period in which I have lived cut off from the society of men, the solitude in which I shall no doubt end my days. I looked back fondly on all the affections of my heart, its loving yet blind attachments, and on the ideas which had nourished my mind for the last few years, ideas more comforting than sad, and I prepared myself to recall them clearly enough to be able to describe them with a pleasure which would almost match the pleasure of experiencing them. My afternoon went by amid these peaceful meditations, and I was making my way home, very pleased with my day, when the flow of my reveries was suddenly interrupted by the event which I must now relate. At about six in the evening I was on the hill leading down from Ménilmontant, almost opposite the Jolly Gardener, when some people walking in front of me suddenly stepped aside and I saw a Great Dane rushing at full tilt towards me, followed by a carriage. It saw me too late to be able to check its speed or change its course. I judged that my only hope of avoiding being knocked down was to leap into the air at precisely the right moment to allow the dog to pass underneath me. This lightning plan of action, which I had no time either to examine or to put into prac-
24 Preludium Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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tice, was my last thought before I went down. I felt neither the impact nor my fall, nor indeed anything else until I eventually came to. It was nearly night when I regained consciousness. I was in the arms of two or three young men who told me what had happened. The Great Dane, unable to check its onrush, had run straight into my legs and its combined mass and speed had caused me to fall forward on my face. My upper jaw, bearing the full weight of my body, had struck against the extremely bumpy cobblestones, and my fall had been all the more violent because I was on a downhill slope, so that my head finished up lower than my feet. The carriage to which the dog belonged was directly behind it and would have run right over me had not the coachman instantly reined up his horses. So much I learned from those who had picked me up and were still holding me when I came to. But what I felt at that moment was too remarkable to be passed over in silence. Night was coming on. I saw the sky, some stars, and a few leaves. This first sensation was a moment of delight. I was conscious of nothing else. In this instant I was being born again, and it seemed as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence. Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives. Translation from French by Charles E. Butterworth
COMMENTARY
I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself. J.- J. R., The Confessions
(1) The short opening sentence from his Social Contract, above, trumpets the challenge of our gathering of poems. The image of chains, picked up by Blake & many others at the end of the eighteenth century, reverberates to the imprisonment of dissidents but also to the ideological & imaginative constrictions that afford the crisis for experimental poetry. Rousseau, indeed, became the philosophical groundwork for the French Revolution—the Rousseau of The Social Contract & the Discourse on
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 25 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Inequality (1755) & the Essay on the Origin of Languages & Emile (1762), with its conviction, at the origin of all progressive theories of education in the West, that children evince a natural instinct for their own education otherwise distorted & perverted by oppressively controlling institutional methods. Yet his Confessions & the late Reveries of a Solitary Walker (posthumously published in 1782) reveal another side of Rousseau, equally crucial for Romanticism, the defiant expression of the mind in its freedom. The Reveries push, or expand, the arena of wandering self-exploration into the semiconscious zone that can—according to Rousseau & the many later writers from Keats & De Quincey & Hugo to Baudelaire & Nerval & Poe & Mallarmé & well into the Surrealist writers of the twentieth century—offer its own challenge to the cultural police by envisioning, through what appears to be a regressive or escapist lapse from the real world, a new space for our communal wandering.
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(2) But escape can be an image of release from captivity in a culture that produces satisfactions as a means of exploitation or pacification. The problem with “escapist” literature is that it offers no escape, narratively reinforcing our captivity. To escape, however, if only trope-ically, is not a utopian refusal to encounter the realpolitic of history: it is a crucial dialectical turn that allows imaginal place outside history as we “know” it, in order to critique it, an Archemidian point of imaginative construction, in which we can be energized, our resources shored. Charles Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption
Ema nu el Swed en b org
1688–1772
from T H E S P I R I T U A L D I A R Y
Concerning My Conversation with Abraham, Jacob, the Apostles and Many Others of Ancient Time
For many weeks I have been in conversation with the Apostles, with Abraham, with Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Sarah, the wife of Abraham, Leah and Rachel, at which time I could believe no otherwise than that I had
26 Preludium Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
been conversing with those persons: but afterwards, having been taught by experience, I could deduce that they were those who assumed the place of these persons in the interior heaven and also believed that they were those same persons. For the angels of the more interior heaven are able to speak with men by means of spirits of the interior heaven, thus this is effected mediately. But these spirits assume the place of those persons, and thus at the same time can show of what quality they had been at first after the death of the body. It is otherwise when the same spirits appear to man in the more interior heaven, which is effected by a sublime representation. 1747, Nov. 31. These things came into my thought today, but whether the case with these spirits is as stated, I cannot as yet know for certain. That the Worst Devils of the Infernal Crew Cannot Have Even the Least Power over Those Who Trust in God Messiah
A spirit was sent forth from the lowest hell. He trusted in himself and in his own power, and that there was nothing he was not able to overthrow. Indeed he supposed that he could remove rocks from their place. He was therefore permitted to use all his force and power against me, but he could not induce upon me even the least evil brought forth by him—not even into my thought, except something obscure—at which he was astonished, and afterwards he slipped away. 1747, Dec 1.
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That I Came into a Habitation Where Warmth Filled My Feet and Loins
When by the mercy of God Messiah I was led through certain of the habitations of the interior heaven, I was also led through a habitation where warmth then filled my feet and loins; and it was said to me that in that abode were women who have enjoyed a life of pleasure, but nevertheless had desired children, and one of them seemed to me to be bearing a child. Thus this habitation is different from that in which were those women who were in no desire for children, where I felt no warmth. Hence it can be concluded that although these women have indulged in pleasures, they have not extinguished the natural desire of love which is that of the procreation of offspring. Concerning Hell and the Infernal Crew
After midnight I was awakened twice, and had a vivid vision of what was taking place in the spiritual sphere around me. Someone had been sent forth from the lowest hell, accompanied also by a certain infernal crew who seemed to themselves to be carried round about as if around a kind
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of globe beneath the feet, around which they marched. They also inquired where there were innocent persons whom they sought with the utmost guile and assiduity. At length that crew, after seeming to themselves to have walked around the globe and to have enquired in vain, supposed they had found an innocent person whom they seemed to themselves to treat in a dreadful manner by their phantasies, and indeed with continued blows and lacerations. Later they also approached me and wanted to transfer me from one place to another in order that one of them might speak with me and so pervert me by his deceits; but by the mercy of God Messiah I was safe. Still I perceived in what a subtle manner he could by a wonderful influx pervert my thoughts, so that whatever was good he would bend into another sense, and substitute something poisonous, as it were: for the worst nature of those in hell is such that although they do not know what good is, still owing to their nature being contrary, they are keenly sensitive of its presence, and in a moment pervert it. It is moreover remarkable how phantasy deludes them; for when they are sent forth they suppose that they are walking around a kind of globe, and trampling the universe beneath their feet, so that they consider themselves to be the greatest gods. Moreover, an infernal place is represented to them as a vat with a covering, and with something almost globular on a kind of pyramidal base in which they suppose is the universe which they keep in view and govern. By their phantasy I was, as it were, let into such a vat, where the state is such as can never be described, for it is a hell too grievous for description; nor did it please God Messiah in His mercy, that I should be let down thither on account of the dire and wicked things there. Moreover, it was afterwards said to me from heaven, that those who are there are such as have so slight a residuum left that they remain there for ages, and that there are those who have been there now for twenty ages; that at this day there is none there of those who perished at the time of the flood, but that they have been released from that dreadful infernal vat; and there are those who have been created anew. Afterwards, when I arose from bed, that devil marvelled that I was living upon the earth. These things were seen by me in full wakefulness, and at the same time with vivid thought together with speech, so that this is the pure truth. 1747, Dec. 1.
COMMENTARY
For the Life of Man is his Love, . . . that is, according as he has exalted his Affections by Truths. (E. S., Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, marked approvingly
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by William Blake.) And again: The Immensity of the heaven of the Lord is evident . . . especially from this, that heaven is from the human race. . . . [H]eaven in its entire complex reflects a single Man, and corresponds to all things and each thing in man. (E. S., Heaven and Hell)
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(1) Initially drawn to Swedenborg’s stress on the reality of dream & of spiritual worlds, Blake famously turned from what he perceived in Swedenborg as a conventional Christian theology, declaring instead: “All deities reside in the human breast” (Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Yet for all of that, it was Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences between spiritual & natural realms of existence (he began his career as a scientist publishing papers on mineralogy, cosmology, physics, & anatomy) that influenced the poetic thinking of an astonishing number of nineteenth-century & some twentiethcentury writers, including not only Blake but Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Goethe, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Balzac, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Valéry, Borges, & Oscar & Czeslaw Milosz. “The doctrine of correspondences served as a basis . . . for the description of invisible worlds that parallel that of everyday experience, but cannot be seen by most people because knowledge of correspondences, originally possessed by all of humankind during a golden age, has been lost” (Lynn R. Wilkinson). In this formulation a poetry or prose of correspondences & hieroglyphics, such as that of Balzac & Baudelaire (page 596), intuits analogies not immediately visible; it becomes a modern experimental representation of the deep continuities among, as well as the “totality” of the elements of, modern urban, subjective, dream-filled, commercialized life, a poetry of juxtaposition and contiguity: “All—form, movement, number, color, perfume—in the spiritual as in the natural, is significant, reciprocal, converse, correspondent” (Baudelaire). (2) “Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods. / And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions. / Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further. / Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen [Jakob Böhme], produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s. and from those of Dante or Shakespear an infinite number. / But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine” (William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven & Hell). And immediately preceding: “Opposition is true Friendship.”
Emanuel Swedenborg 29 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
D en is D id erot
1713–1784
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from R A M E A U ’ S N E P H E W : A N I M P R O V I S A T I O N
HE [coming close and whispering in my ear]. I shouldn’t like to be overheard, for there are hereabouts plenty of people who know me—but it is dull. Not that I worry myself much about the dear uncle—if “dear” has to come into it. He is made of stone: he could see my tongue hanging out a foot long and he would not give me a glass of water. But try as he will—with the octave, the leading note—Tum-tum-ta-ta-tum, toot-toottoot-tra-la-toot—even though he makes a racket like the very devil, some people are beginning to catch on; they will no longer take banging for music. The police should forbid any person, of whatever rank, to have Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater performed. That Stabat should have been burned by the public hangman. Yes, these confounded bouffons with their Serva Padrona and their Tracollo have given us a stout kick in the butt. Formerly a Tancred, an Issé, an Europe galante, Les Indes, Castor, Les Talents lyriques, would run for five or six months. The run of Lully’s Armide was endless. Nowadays they tumble on one another’s heels like jackstraws. That’s why the managers, Rebel and Francœur, cry out to heaven. They say all is lost: “they are ruined; if these fair-ground musicians are allowed to keep on, our national music is done for; the so-called Royal Academy—the Opera—might as well shut up shop.” And there is some truth in it. The old fogies who have been going there every Friday for thirty or forty years no longer have a good time. They are bored, they yawn without knowing why. They ask themselves and can’t answer. They should ask me. As things are going now, Duni’s prophecy will come true, and I’m willing to give up living in four or five years if after The Painter in Love with his Model you find as much as an alley cat in our celebrated Opera house. The good souls! They have given up their symphonies to play the Italian ones. They thought they could accustom their ears to these new instrumental pieces without changing their taste as regards the vocal—as if symphonies were not in relation to songs (except for the greater freedom afforded by the range of instruments and the dexterity of the fingers) what songs are to declamation; as if the violin did not ape the singer, who in turn will become the ape of the violin when acrobatics will have replaced beauty. The first one who played Locatelli was the apostle of the new music. Next! Next! We shall all become accustomed to the imitation of passionate accents or of natural phenomena by means of voices and instruments—which is the whole extent of music’s purpose. D’you
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think we’ll also keep our taste for flights, dreams, glories, triumphs, and victories? Tell it to the marines. Did anyone imagine that the public could learn to weep or laugh at tragic or comic scenes when “musicated,” to respond to the tones of fury, hatred, and jealousy, the true plaints of love, the irony and pleasantries of the Italian or French theater, and that in spite of all this the public would continue to admire Ragonde or Platée? Taradiddle, tol-lol-lay! That they could once learn how easily, softly, gently, the Italian tongue, with its natural harmony, flexible prosody, easy ellipses and inversions, suited the art and motion of music, the turns of song and the measured pace of sounds—and yet would overlook the fact that French is stiff, heavy, pedantic, and monotonous? Well, well, well, they persuaded themselves that after weeping with a mother bewailing the loss of her son, and shuddering at the decree of a tyrant committing murder, they would not be bored with their fairyland, their insipid mythology, their saccharine love songs, which show the poet’s bad taste no less than the sterility of the music matched thereto. The good souls! It could not and cannot be. The true, the good, and the beautiful will prevail. Their rights may at first be challenged, but in the end they are acknowledged, and people come to yield their admiration. Inferior things may be esteemed for a time but the end is a great yawn. Go ahead, gentlemen, yawn away, yawn to your heart’s content, don’t be afraid! The power of nature and of the trinity which I worship will never be overcome by the forces of darkness—the True which is the father, engenders the Good, which is his son, whence comes the Beautiful, which is the Holy Ghost. Change is gradual. The foreign god takes his place humbly next to the native idol, little by little asserts itself, and one fine day elbows out his fellow—before you can say Jack Robinson, there’s the idol flat on its back. They say that’s the way the Jesuits introduced Christianity into India and China. And the Jansenists can say what they like, the political method that aims quietly and directly at the goal, without bloodshed, martyrdom, or so much as a queue of hair cut off, is obviously the best. MYSELF. There is some sense in almost everything you’ve said. HE. Sense! I’m glad! The devil take me if I’ve been making any special effort. I speak as it comes. I’m like the opera musicians when my uncle came on the scene. If I’m on the point, well and good. It only shows that a man of the trade will always speak about it more sensibly than any Academy or all the Duhamels in the world. [And now he paces up and down again humming in his throat some arias from L’Ile des Fous, Le Peintre amoureux de son Modèle, Le Maréchal ferrant, La Plaideuse, occasionally raising arms and eyes to the skies: “It’s beautiful, my God but it is beautiful!—Why? How can a
Denis Diderot 31 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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man sport a pair of ears and ask such a question?” He was getting into a passion and beginning to sing, his voice growing louder as his passion increased. Next he gesticulated, made faces and twisted his body, and I thought to myself: “There he goes—losing his wits and working himself up to a scene.” True enough, he suddenly burst out very loud: “I am but a poor wretch . . . My Lord, my Lord, I beg you to let me go! . . . O Earth, receive my gold and keep my treasure safe, my soul, my life, O Earth! . . . There is my little friend; there is my little friend. . . . Aspettare e non venire . . . A cerbina penserete . . . Sempre in contrasti con te si sta. . . .” He jumbled together thirty different airs, French, Italian, comic, tragic—in every style. Now in a baritone voice he sank to the pit; then straining in falsetto he tore to shreds the upper notes of some air, imitating the while the stance, walk and gestures of the several characters; being in succession furious, mollified, lordly, sneering. First a damsel weeps and he reproduces her kittenish ways; next he is a priest, a king, a tyrant; he threatens, commands, rages. Now he is a slave, he obeys, calms down, is heartbroken, complains, laughs; never overstepping the proper tone, speech, or manner called for by the part. [All the “woodpushers” in the café had left their chessboards and gathered around us. The windows of the place were occupied from outside by passers-by who had stopped on hearing the commotion. They guffawed fit to crack the ceiling. But he noticed nothing, he kept on, in the grip of mental possession, an enthusiasm so close to madness that it seemed doubtful whether he would recover. He might have to be put into a cab and be taken to a padded cell. While singing fragments of Jomelli’s Lamentations, he reproduced with incredible precision, fidelity, and warmth the most beautiful passages of each scene. That magnificent recitative in which Jeremiah describes the desolation of Jerusalem, he drenched in tears which drew their like from every onlooker. His art was complete—delicacy of voice, expressive strength, true sorrow. He dwelt on the places where the musician had shown himself a master. If he left the vocal part, it was to take up the instrumental, which he abandoned suddenly to return to the voice, linking them so as to preserve the connection and unity of the whole, gripping our souls and keeping them suspended in the most singular state of being that I have ever experienced. [Did I admire? Yes, I did admire. Was I moved to pity? I was moved. But a streak of derision was interwoven with these feelings and denatured them. [Yes, you too would have burst out laughing at the way in which he aped the different instruments. With swollen cheeks and a somber throaty sound, he would give us the horns and bassoons. For the oboes he
32 Preludium Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
assumed a shrill yet nasal voice, then speeded up the emission of sound to an incredible degree for the strings, for whose tones he found close analogues. He whistled piccolos and warbled traverse flutes, singing, shouting, waving about like a madman, being in himself dancer and ballerina, singer and prima donna, all of them together and the whole orchestra, the whole theater; then redividing himself into twenty separate roles, running, stopping, glowing at the eyes like one possessed, frothing at the mouth. [The heat was stifling and the sweat, which, mixed with the powder in his hair, ran down the creases of his face was dripping and marking the upper part of his coat. What did he not attempt to show me? He wept, laughed, sighed, looked placid or melting or enraged. He was a woman in a spasm of grief, a wretched man sunk in despair, a temple being erected, birds growing silent at sunset, waters murmuring through cool and solitary places or else cascading from a mountaintop, a storm, a hurricane, the anguish of those about to die, mingled with the whistling of the wind and the noise of thunder. He was night and its gloom, shade and silence—for silence itself is depictable in sound. He had completely lost his senses.] HE:
The nephew of French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. MYSELF: Denis Diderot.
Translation from French by Jacques Barzun
COMMENTARY
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Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast, and wild. D. D., “On Dramatic Poetry,” 1758
(1) The greatest of the French Encyclopedists, his Enlightenment perspective paved the way for the revolutionary (“romantic”) generation that followed & for much that came thereafter. Within that rationalistic framework he created & practiced a poetics that put a new stress on originality, spontaneity, expression over repression, the idiosyncratic over the customary, & the “barbaric” over the smugly “civilized.” His writing in that sense was carried forward by his presence—voice & gesture—in the salons that accompanied his written, often spoken words. Absent that presence, however, a masterwork like Rameau’s Nephew went through a curious publication history—a French copy of the written but suppressed & still unpublished text found its way to Schiller, who gave it to Goethe, who translated it into German in 1805, & Goethe’s translation was then translated back into French a decade or so later, aside from which no authentic manuscript of the original was known before 1891. Even so, Diderot’s influence in introducing new & experimental forms of verbal expression was enormous, as
Denis Diderot 33 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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was his impact on later philosophers & thinkers, from Hegel to Marx & Freud in the centuries that followed. (2) Of Diderot’s full-blown power as a speaker/thinker/writer—in short, a poet—David Antin, whose own “talk poems” bring Diderot’s poetics of discourse & improvisation (performance) into the twenty-first century, offers the following: “[Denis Diderot, The Poet of Conversation] Writing about his friend and collaborator, Denis Diderot, Melchior Grimm, editor of the great eighteenth-century cultural newsletter, the Correspondance Littéraire, had this to say about his conversational style: ‘He is the man least capable of knowing ahead of time what he will do or say. But whatever he says, he creates and he always surprises. The power and flight of his imagination might sometimes be frightening, if they weren’t tempered by the sweetness of manner of a child and by a good humor that lends a rare and singular character to all his other qualities. . . . The rare and perhaps unique quality of M. Diderot consists of recognizing connections among the most remote subjects and bringing them together in the wink of an eye. I admit this talent can sometimes lead to mistakes as well as to the discovery of truth, but even in his digressions he has the power to astonish and surprise.’ “We would probably say that it is just these sudden and unpredictable digressions that give Diderot’s writings their poetic power. His instinct for impulsive improvisation, for wild thought experiments and outrageous examples, drives his most original works—the ones that keep shifting shape, defying all genre classification—the great Salons, The Letter on the Blind, the Letter on the Deaf and the Mute, and that masterpiece of improvisation, Rameau’s Nephew, in which Diderot creates his own dark double as a virtuoso of dangerous conversation.” To which Arthur C. Danto adds, commenting like Antin on the central improvisation in Rameau’s Nephew presented here: “It is one of the great passages in literature, to my mind comparable alone to the tremendous moment in the Bhagavad Gita when the charioteer Krishna reveals his identity as god and the world at once.”
Chris t op her S ma rt
1722–1771
from J U B I L A T E A G N O
For God has given us a language of monosyllables to prevent our clipping. For a toad enjoys a finer prospect than another creature to compensate his lack. Tho’ toad I am the object of man’s hate.
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Yet better am I than a reprobate Who has the worst of prospects. For there are stones, whose constituent particles are little toads. For the spiritual musick is as follows. For there is the thunder-stop, which is the voice of God direct. For the rest of the stops are by their rhimes. For the trumpet rhimes are sound bound, soar more and the like. For the Shawm rhimes are lawn fawn moon boon and the like. For the harp rhimes are sing ring string and the like. For the cymbal rhimes are bell well toll soul and the like. For the flute rhimes are tooth youth suit mute and the like. For the dulcimer rhimes are grace place beat heat and the like. For the Clarinet rhimes are clean seen and the like. For the Bassoon rhimes are pass, class and the like. God be gracious to Baumgarden. For the dulcimer are rather van fan and the like and grace place &c are of the bassoon. For beat heat, weep peep &c are of the pipe. For every word has its marrow in the English tongue for order and for delight. For the dissyllables such as able table &c are the fiddle rhimes. For all dissyllables and some trissyllables are fiddle rhimes. For the relations of words are in pairs first. For the relations of words are sometimes in oppositions. For the relations of words are according to their distances from the pair. For there be twelve cardinal virtues the gifts of the twelve sons of Jacob. For Reuben is Great. God be gracious to Lord Falmouth. For Simeon is Valiant. God be gracious to the Duke of Somerset. For Levi is Pious. God be gracious to the Bishop of London. For Judah is Good. God be gracious to Lord Granville. For Dan is Clean—neat, dextrous, apt, active, compact. God be gracious to Draper. For Naphtali is sublime—God be gracious to Chesterfield. For Gad is Contemplative—God be gracious to Lord Northampton. For Ashur is Happy—God be gracious to George Bowes. For Issachar is strong—God be gracious to the Duke of Dorsett. For Zabulon is Constant—God be gracious to Lord Bath. For Joseph is Pleasant—God be gracious to Lord Bolingbroke. For Benjamin is Wise—God be gracious to Honeywood. For all Foundation is from God depending. For the two Universities are the Eyes of England.
Christopher Smart 35 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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For Cambridge is the right and the brightest. For Pembroke Hall was founded more in the Lord than any College in Cambridge. For mustard is the proper food of birds and men are bound to cultivate it for their use. For they that study the works of God are peculiarly assisted by his Spirit. For all the creatures mentiond by Pliny are somewhere or other extant to the glory of God. For Rye is food rather for fowls than men. For Rye-bread is not taken with thankfulness. For the lack of Rye may be supplied by Spelt. For languages work into one another by their bearings. For the power of some animal is predominant in every language. For the power and spirit of a CAT is in the Greek. For the sound of a cat is in the most useful preposition țĮIJ’ İȣȤȘȞ [according to one’s prayer]. For the pleasantry of a cat at pranks is in the language ten thousand times over. For JACK UPON PRANCK is in the performance of ʌİȡȚ [around or near] together or separate. For Clapperclaw is in the grappling of the words upon one another in all the modes of versification. For the sleekness of a Cat is in his ĮȖȜĮȚȘijȚ [splendour, beauty, adornment]. For the Greek is thrown from heaven and falls upon its feet. For the Greek when distracted from the line is sooner restored to rank and rallied into some form than any other. For the purring of a Cat is his IJȡȣȗİȚ [croaking-of-a-frog, or muttering, murmuring]. For his cry is in ȠȣĮȚ [Ah!, Woe!], which I am sorry for. For the Mouse (Mus) prevails in the Latin. For Edi-mus, bibi-mus, vivi-mus—ore-mus. For the Mouse is a creature of great personal valour. For—this is a true case—Cat takes female mouse from the company of male—male mouse will not depart, but stands threatning and daring. For this is as much as to challenge, if you will let her go, I will engage you, as prodigious a creature as you are. For the Mouse is of an hospitable disposition. For bravery and hospitality were said and done by the Romans rather than others.
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For two creatures the Bull and the Dog prevail in the English. For all the words ending in ble are in the creature. Invisi-ble, Incomprehensi-ble, ineffa-ble, A-ble. For the Greek and Latin are not dead languages, but taken up and accepted for the sake of him that spake them. For can is (canis) is cause and effect a dog. For the English is concise and strong. Dog and Bull again. For Newton’s notion of colours is ĮȜȠȖȠȢ unphilosophical. For the colours are spiritual. For WHITE is the first and the best. For there are many intermediate colours, before you come to SILVER. For the next colour is a lively GREY. For the next colour is BLUE. For the next is GREEN of which there are ten thousand distinct sorts. For the next is YELLOW which is more excellent than red, tho Newton makes red the prime. God be gracious to John Delap. For RED is the next working round the Orange. For Red is of sundry sorts till it deepens to BLACK. For black blooms and it is PURPLE. For purple works off to BROWN which is of ten thousand acceptable shades. For the next is PALE. God be gracious to William Whitehead. For pale works about to White again. NOW that colour is spiritual appears inasmuch as the blessing of God upon all things descends in colour. For the blessing of health upon the human face is in colour. For the blessing of God upon purity is in the Virgin’s blushes. For the blessing of God in colour is on him that keeps his virgin. For I saw a blush in Staindrop Church, which was of God’s own colouring. For it was the benevolence of a virgin shewn to me before the whole congregation. For the blessing of God upon the grass is in shades of Green visible to a nice observer as they light upon the surface of the earth. For the blessing of God unto perfection in all bloom and fruit is by colouring. For from hence something in the spirit may be taken off by painters. For Painting is a species of idolatry, tho’ not so gross as statuary. For it is not good to look with earning upon any dead work. For by so doing something is lost in the spirit and given from life to death.
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For BULL in the first place is the word of Almighty God. For he is a creature of infinite magnitude in the height. For there is the model of every beast of the field in the height. For they are blessed intelligences and all angels of the living God. For there are many words under Bull. For Bul the Month is under it. For Sea is under Bull. For Brook is under Bull. God be gracious to Lord Bolingbroke. For Rock is under Bull. For Bullfinch is under Bull. God be gracious to the Duke of Cleveland. For God, which always keeps his work in view, has painted a Bullfinch in the heart of a stone. God be gracious to Gosling and Canterbury. For the Bluecap is under Bull. For the Humming Bird is under Bull. For Beetle is under Bull. For Toad is under bull. For Frog is under Bull, which he has a delight to look at. For the Pheasant-eyed Pink is under Bull. Blessed Jesus RANK EL. For Bugloss is under Bull. For Bugle is under Bull. For Oxeye is under Bull. For Fire is under Bull. For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness. For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer. For he rolls upon prank to work it in. For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself. For this he performs in ten degrees. For first he looks upon his fore-paws to see if they are clean. For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there. For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the fore paws extended. For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood. For fifthly he washes himself. For Sixthly he rolls upon wash.
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For Seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat. For Eighthly he rubs himself against a post. For Ninthly he looks up for his instructions. For Tenthly he goes in quest of food. For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour. For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness. For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it chance. For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying. For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins. For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary. For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes. For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life. For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him. For he is of the tribe of Tiger. For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger. For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses. For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation. For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat. For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon. For every house is incompleat without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit. For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt. For every family had one cat at least in the bag. For the English Cats are the best in Europe. For he is the cleanest in the use of his fore-paws of any quadrupede. For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly. For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature. For he is tenacious of his point. For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. For he knows that God is his Saviour. For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
Christopher Smart 39 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better. For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in compleat cat. For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in musick. For he is docile and can learn certain things. For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation. For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment. For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive. For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command. For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom. For he can catch the cork and toss it again. For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser. For the former is affraid of detection. For the latter refuses the charge. For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business. For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly. For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services. For he killed the Icneumon-rat very pernicious by land. For his ears are so acute that they sting again. For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention. For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity. For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire. For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast. For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements. For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer. For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadrupede. For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick. For he can swim for life. For he can creep.
COMMENTARY
For I am the Lord’s News-Writer—the scribe-evangelist—Widow Mitchel, Gun and Grange bless the Lord Jesus. C. S., from Jubilate Agno
“Concerning this unfortunate poet, Christopher Smart, who was confined in a mad-house, [Johnson] had, at another time, the following conversation with Dr. Burney. —BURNEY. ‘How does poor Smart do, Sir; is he likely to
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recover?’ JOHNSON. ‘It seems as if his mind had ceased to struggle with the disease; for he grows fat upon it.’ BURNEY. ‘Perhaps, Sir, that may be from want of exercise.’ JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir; he has partly as much exercise as he used to have, for he digs in the garden. Indeed, before his confinement, he used for exercise to walk to the alehouse; but he was carried back again. I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it’” (from James Boswell, The Life of [Samuel] Johnson). What was missing from the account, however, was any knowledge of the second of the two great works in progress during Smart’s confinements (1757–63). While A Song to David—eighty-six carefully constructed & rhyming six-line stanzas—was published in the year of his release from “Mister Potter’s Madhouse in Bethnel Green,” Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb) remained hidden for nearly two centuries. First reconstructed & published in 1939 & a work in that sense of the twentieth century (the title itself the invention of Smart’s first twentieth-century editor), Jubilate Agno not only matches or surpasses the complexity of A Song to David but prefigures, like the prophetic books of William Blake (below) three decades later, the experimental thrust of future innovators. In formal terms the source of Smart’s line is clearly the English Bible—short verse sentences or utterances, all beginning either with for or let, keyed to each other & sometimes intermeshing. But even more radical is his mixing of biblical praises with what Blake would call “minute particulars”: names of persons living & dead, quotidian observations along with a range of erudite references & arcana, & a sense of personal involvement on an almost diaristic basis (“For I fast this day even the 31st of August N.S. to prepare for the SABBATH of the Lord”). In the process he explored, in ways that look back to the Kabbala, say, & forward to modern & postmodern (“concrete”) foregroundings of the word-in-itself, the materiality of language & sound, the spiritual significance & constellative properties of words with each other, the living quality of a word or phoneme. The strangeness of the work & its enduring sense of wonder have gradually given way to a realization of its no less wonderful sanity & coherence. For other poets whose delayed publication made them the contemporaries of generations after their own, the reader might look at Solomos, late Clare, Dickinson, late Hölderlin, even Blake to some extent—all represented in the pages that follow.
Christopher Smart 41 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Eras mu s D a r w in
1731–1802
from T H E L O V E S O F T H E P L A N T S
Mimosa and Tremella 1
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Weak with nice sense, the chaste MIMOSA stands, From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands; Oft as light clouds o’er-pass the Summer-glade, Alarm’d she trembles at the moving shade; And feels, alive through all her tender form, The whisper’d murmurs of the gathering storm; Shuts her sweet eye-lids to approaching night; And hails with freshen’d charms the rising light. Mimosa. The sensitive plant. Of the class Polygamy, one house. Naturalists have not explained the immediate cause of the collapsing of the sensitive plant; the leaves meet and close in the night during the sleep of the plant, or when exposed to much cold in the day-time, in the same manner as when they are affected by external violence, folding their upper surfaces together, and in part over each other like scales or tiles; so as to expose as little of the upper surface as may be to the air; but do not indeed collapse quite so far, since I have found, when touched in the night during their sleep, they fall still further; especially when touched on the foot-stalks between the stems and the leaflets, which seems to be their most sensitive or irritable part. Now as their situation after being exposed to external violence resembles their sleep, but with a greater degree of collapse, may it not be owing to a numbness or paralysis consequent to too violent irritation, like the faintings of animals from pain or fatigue? I kept a sensitive plant in a dark room till some hours after day-break, its leaves and leaf-stalks were collapsed as in its most profound sleep, and on exposing it to the light, above twenty minutes passed before the plant was thoroughly awake and had quite expanded itself. During the night the upper or smoother surfaces of the leaves are appressed together, this would seem to shew that the office of this surface of the leaf was to expose the fluids of the plant to the light as well as to the air. Many flowers close up their petals during the night. Veil’d, with gay decency and modest pride, Slow to the mosque she moves, an eastern bride;
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There her soft vows unceasing love record, Queen of the bright seraglio of her Lord.— So sinks or rises with the changeful hour The liquid silver in its glassy tower. So turns the needle to the pole it loves, With fine librations quivering, as it moves. 2
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On DOVE’S green brink the fair TREMELLA stood, And view’d her playful image in the flood; Tremella. Clandestine marriage. I have frequently observed funguses of this Genus on old rails and on the ground to become a transparent jelly, after they had been frozen in autumnal mornings; which is a curious property, and distinguishes them from some other vegetable mucilage; for I have observed that the paste, made by boiling wheat-flour in water, ceases to be adhesive after having been frozen. I suspected that the Tremella Nostoc, or star-jelly, also had been thus produced; but have since been well informed, that the Tremella Nostoc is a mucilage voided by Herons after they have eaten frogs; hence it has the appearance of having been pressed through a hole; and limbs of frogs are said sometimes to be found amongst it; it is always seen upon plains or by the sides of water, places which Herons generally frequent. Some of the Funguses are so acrid, that a drop of their juice blisters the tongue; others intoxicate those who eat them. The Ostiacks in Siberia use them for the latter purpose; one Fungus of the species, Agaricus muscarum, eaten raw; or the decoction of three of them, produces intoxication for 12 or 16 hours. History of Russia. V. 1. Nichols. 1780. As all acrid plants become less so, if exposed to a boiling heat, it is probable the common mushroom may sometimes disagree from being not sufficiently stewed. The Ostiacks blister their skin by a fungus found on Birch-trees; and use the Agiricus officin for Soap. There was a dispute whether the funguses should be classed in the animal or vegetable department. Their animal taste in cookery, and their animal smell when burnt, together with their tendency to putrefaction, insomuch that the Phallus impudicus has gained the name of stink-horn, and lastly their growing and continuing healthy without light, as the Licoperdon tuber or truffle, and the fungus vinosus or mucor in dark cellars, and the esculent mushrooms on beds covered thick with straw, would seem to shew that they approach towards the animals, or make a
Erasmus Darwin 43 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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kind of isthmus connecting the two mighty kingdoms of animal and of vegetable nature. To each rude rock, lone dell, and echoing grove Sung the sweet sorrows of her secret love. “Oh, stay!—return!”—along the sounding shore Cry’d the sad Naiads,—she return’d no more!— Now girt with clouds the sullen Evening frown’d, And withering Eurus swept along the ground; The misty moon withdrew her horned light, And sunk with Hesper in the skirt of night; No dim electric streams, (the northern dawn,) With meek effulgence quiver’d o’er the lawn; No star benignant shot one transient ray To guide or light the wanderer on her way. Round the dark craggs the murmuring whirlwinds blow, Woods groan above, and waters roar below; As o’er the steeps with pausing foot she moves, The pitying Dryads shriek amid their groves; She flies,—she stops,—she pants—she looks behind, And hears a demon howl in every wind. —As the bleak blast unfurls her fluttering vest, Cold beats the snow upon her shuddering breast; Through her numb’d limbs the chill sensations dart, And the keen ice-bolt trembles at her heart. “I sink, I fall! oh, help me, help!” she cries, Her stiffening tongue the unfinish’d sound denies; Tear after tear adown her cheek succeeds, And pearls of ice bestrew the glistering meads; Congealing snows her lingering feet surround, Arrest her flight, and root her to the ground; With suppliant arms she pours the silent prayer, Her suppliant arms hang crystal in the air; Pellucid films her shivering neck o’erspread, Seal her mute lips, and silver o’er her head, Veil her pale bosom, glaze her lifted hands, And shrined in ice the beauteous statue stands. —DOVE’S azure nymphs on each revolving year For fair TREMELLA shed the tender tear; With rush-wove crowns in sad procession move, And sound the sorrowing shell to hapless love.
44 Preludium Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
COMMENTARY
Whereas P. Ovidius Naso, a great Necromancer in the famous Court of Augustus Caesar, did by art poetic transmute Men, Women, and even Gods and Goddesses, into Trees and Flowers; I have undertaken by similar art to restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained prisoners so long in their respective vegetable mansions; and have here exhibited them before thee. E. D., Loves of the Plants
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“E’en round the pole the flames of Love aspire, And icy bosoms feel the secret fire—” Setting out “to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science,” he elaborates the “Sexual System” of Linnaeus’s classification of plants, as a stunning Ovidian epic of metamorphic animations & personifications, juxtaposed with naturalistic, historical, & political “annotations” in prose. In the prose “Interludes” of Loves of the Plants (1790), a Bookseller & a Poet argue, like Wordsworth in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, against any essential difference between poetry & prose & for poetry’s capacity to convey science’s most sublime ideas; as Shelley says two decades later, “we want . . . to imagine that which we know.” An inventor of a windmill, a speaking machine, a canal lift for barges, & weather-monitoring machines (& a student of cloud formation), Darwin prefigures the work of Goethe (Metamorphosis of Plants), Shelley (Queen Mab), and Poe (Eureka) as poets insisting on the complementarity of science & poetry as portals to world apprehension rather than as separate endeavors often perceived antagonistically. Loves of the Plants is a collage poem (science & imagination, poetry & prose) on a cosmic scale. This underappreciated poem features “the energetic translation of all . . . terms into and out of each other” (Jerome McGann). The erotic personifications of flowers, with immediate reference to the domains of 1790s liberatory politics & vitalist science (growing in popularity during the early Romantic period), resonates with his contemporary Blake in the latter’s images of personified plants & animals (e.g., “The Sick Rose,” below) & the visionary provocation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” Darwin provides the basis for the later British Romantic recovery in poetry of the sexual metamorphic tales of Ovid by inverting the Roman poet’s retrogressive trajectory (human translated into animal & plant) in order to insist on, in Coleridge’s phrase, a foundational “animated nature,” a perception lost in the world of the market economy.
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James M acp hers on
1736–1796
from O S S I A N : T H E S O N G S O F S E L M A
Argument
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This poem fixes the antiquity of a custom, which is well known to have prevailed afterwards, in the north of Scotland, and in Ireland. The bards, at an annual feast, provided by the king or chief, repeated their poems, and such of them as were thought by him, worthy of being preserved, were carefully taught to their children, in order to have them transmitted to posterity.—It was one of those occasions that afforded the subject of the present poem to Ossian.—It is called in the original, the songs of Selma, which title it was thought proper to adopt in the translation. The poem is entirely lyric, and has great variety of versification. The address to the evening star, with which it opens, has in the original all the harmony that numbers could give it; flowing down with all that tranquility and softness, which the scene described naturally inspires.—Three of the songs which are introduced in this piece were published among the fragments of ancient poetry, printed last year.
Star of falling night! fair is thy light in the west! thou liftest thy unshorn head from thy cloud: thy steps are stately on thy hill. What dost thou behold in the plain? The stormy winds are laid. The murmur of the torrent comes from afar. Roaring waves climb the distant rock. The flies of evening are on their feeble wings, and the hum of their course is on the field. What dost thou behold, fair light? But thou dost smile and depart. The waves come with joy around thee, and bathe thy lovely hair. Farewel, thou silent beam!—Let the light of Ossian’s soul arise. And it does arise in its strength! I behold my departed friends. Their gathering is on Lora, as in the days that are past.—Fingal comes like a watery column of mist; his heroes are around. And see the bards of song, grayhaired Ullin; stately Ryno; Alpin, with the tuneful voice, and the soft complaint of Minona!—How are ye changed, my friends, since the days of Selma’s feast! when we contended, like gales of spring, as they fly along the hill, and bend by turns the feebly whistling grass. Minona came forth in her beauty: with down-cast look and tearful eye; her hair flew slowly on the blast, that rushed unfrequent from the hill.—The souls of the heroes were sad when she raised the tuneful voice; for often had they seen the grave of Salgar, and the dark dwelling of white-bosomed Colma. Colma left alone on the hill, with all her voice of
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music! Salgar promised to come: but the night descended round.—Hear the voice of Colma, when she sat alone on the hill! Colma
It is night;—I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms. The wind is heard in the mountain. The torrent shrieks down the rock. No hut receives me from the rain; forlorn on the hill of winds. Rise, moon! from behind thy clouds; stars of the night, appear! Lead me, some light, to the place where my love rests from the toil of the chace! his bow near him, unstrung; his dogs panting around him. But here I must sit alone, by the rock of the mossy stream. The stream and the wind roar; nor can I hear now the voice of my love. Why delays my Salgar, why the son of the hill, his promise? Here is the rock, and the tree; and here is the roaring stream. Thou didst promise with night to be here. Ah! whither is my Salgar gone? With thee I would fly, my father; with thee, my brother of pride. Our race have long been foes; but we are not foes, O Salgar! Cease a little while, O wind! stream, be thou silent a while! let my voice be heard over the heath; let my wanderer hear me! Salgar! it is I who call. Here is the tree, and the rock. Salgar, my love! I am here. Why delayest thou thy coming?
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Lo! the moon appeareth. The flood is bright in the vale. The rocks are grey on the face of the hill. But I see him not on the brow; his dogs come before him tell not that he is coming. Here I must sit alone! But who are these that lie beyond me on the heath? Are they my love and my brother?—Speak to me, O my friends! they answer not. My soul is tormented with fears.—Ah! they are dead! Their swords are red from the fight. O my brother! my brother! why hast thou slain my Salgar? why, O Salgar! hast thou slain my brother? Dear were ye both to me! what shall I say in your praise? Thou wert fair on the hill among thousands; he was terrible in fight. Speak to me; hear my voice, sons of my love! But alas! they are silent; silent for ever! Cold are their breasts of clay! Oh! from the rock on the hill; from the top of the windy mountain, speak ye ghosts of the dead! speak, I will not be afraid.—Whither are ye gone to rest? In what cave of the hill shall I find you? No feeble voice is on the wind: no answer half-drowned in the storms of the hill. I sit in my grief. I wait for morning in my tears. Rear the tomb, ye friends of the dead; but close it not till Colma come. My life flies away like a
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dream: why should I stay behind? Here shall I rest with my friends, by the stream of the sounding rock. When night comes on the hill; when the wind is on the heath; my ghost shall stand in the wind, and mourn the death of my friends. The hunter shall hear from his booth. He shall fear but love my voice. For sweet shall my voice be for my friends; for pleasant were they both to me. Such was thy song, Minona, softly-blushing maid of Torman. Our tears descended for Colma, and our souls were sad.—Ullin came with the harp, and gave the song of Alpin.—The voice of Alpin was pleasant; the soul of Ryno was a beam of fire. But they had rested in the narrow house: and their voice was not heard in Selma.—Ullin had returned, one day, from the chace, before the heroes fell. He heard their strife on the hill; their song was soft but sad. They mourned the fall of Morar, first of mortal men. His soul was like the soul of Fingal; his sword like the sword of Oscar.—But he fell, and his father mourned: his sister’s eyes were full of tears.—Minona’s eyes were full of tears, the sister of car-borne Morar. She retired from the song of Ullin, like the moon in the west, when she foresees the shower, and hides her fair head in a cloud.—I touched the harp with Ullin; the song of mourning rose.
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Ryno
The wind and the rain are over: calm is the noon of day. The clouds are divided in heaven. Over the green hills flies the inconstant sun. Red through the stony vale comes down the stream of the hill. Sweet are thy murmurs, O stream! but more sweet is the voice I hear. It is the voice of Alpin, the son of the song, mourning for the dead. Bent is his head of age, and red his tearful eye. Alpin, thou son of the song, why alone on the silent hill? why complainest thou, as a blast in the wood; as a wave on the lonely shore? Alpin
My tears, O Ryno! are for the dead; my voice, for the inhabitants of the grave. Tall thou art on the hill; fair among the sons of the plain. But thou shalt fall like Morar; and the mourner shall sit on thy tomb. The hills shall know thee no more; thy bow shall lie in the hall, unstrung. Thou wert swift, O Morar! as a roe on the hill; terrible as a meteor of fire. Thy wrath was as the storm. Thy sword in battle, as lightning in the field. Thy voice was a stream after rain; like thunder on distant hills. Many fell by thy arm; they were consumed in the flames of thy wrath.
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But when thou didst return from war, how peaceful was thy brow! Thy face was like the sun after rain; like the moon in the silence of night; calm as the breast of the lake when the loud wind is laid. Narrow is thy dwelling now; dark the place of thine abode. With three steps I compass thy grave, O thou who wast so great before! Four stones, with their heads of moss, are the only memorial of thee. A tree with scarce a leaf, long grass which whistles in the wind, mark to the hunter’s eye the grave of the mighty Morar. Morar! thou art low indeed. Thou hast no mother to mourn thee; no maid with her tears of love. Dead is she that brought thee forth. Fallen is the daughter of Morglan. Who on his staff is this? who is this whose head is white with age, whose eyes are red with tears, who quakes at every step.—It is thy father, O Morar! the father of no son but thee. He heard of thy fame in battle; he heard of foes dispersed. He heard of Morar’s fame; why did he not hear of his wound? Weep, thou father of Morar! weep; but thy son heareth thee not. Deep is the sleep of the dead; low their pillow of dust. No more shall he hear thy voice; no more shall he awake at thy call. When shall it be morn in the grave, to bid the slumberer awake?
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Farewell, thou bravest of men! thou conqueror in the field! but the field shall see thee no more; nor the dark wood be lightened with the splendor of thy steel. Thou hast left no son. But the song shall preserve thy name. Future times shall hear of thee; they shall hear of the fallen Morar. The grief of all arose, but most the bursting sigh of Armin. He remembers the death of his son, who fell in the days of his youth. Carmor was near the hero, the chief of the echoing Galmal. Why bursts the sigh of Armin, he said. Is there a cause to mourn? The song comes, with its music, to melt and please the soul. It is like soft mist, that, rising from a lake, pours on the silent vale; the green flowers are filled with dew, but the sun returns in his strength, and the mist is gone. Why art thou sad, O Armin, chief of sea-surrounded Gorma? Sad I am indeed! nor small my cause of woe!—Carmor, thou hast lost no son; thou hast lost no daughter of beauty. Colgar the valiant lives; and Annira fairest maid. The boughs of thy family flourish, O Carmor! but Armin is the last of his race. Dark is thy bed, O Daura! and deep thy sleep in the tomb.—When shalt thou awake with thy songs? with all thy voice of music?
James Macpherson 49 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Rise, winds of autumn, rise; blow along the heath! streams of the mountains, roar! howl, ye tempests, in the top of the oak! walk through broken clouds, O moon! show by intervals thy pale face! bring to my mind that sad night, when all my children fell; when Arindal the mighty fell! when Daura the lovely failed. Daura, my daughter! thou wert fair; fair as the moon on the hills of Fura; white as the driven snow; sweet as the breathing gale. Arindal, thy bow was strong; thy spear was swift in the field; thy look was like mist on the wave; thy shield, a red cloud in a storm. Armar, renowned in war, came, and sought Daura’s love; he was not long denied; fair was the hope of their friends. Erath, son of Odgal, repined; for his brother had been slain by Armar. He came disguised like a son of the sea: fair was his skiff on the wave; white his locks of age; calm his serious brow. Fairest of women, he said, lovely daughter of Armin! a rock not distant in the sea, bears a tree on its side; red shines the fruit afar. There Armar waits for Daura. I come to carry his love along the rolling sea.
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She went; she called on Armar. Nought answered, but the son of the rock. Armar, my love! my love! why tormentest thou me with fear? hear, son of Ardnart, hear: it is Daura who calleth thee! Erath the traitor fled laughing to the land. She lifted up her voice, and cried for her brother and her father. Arindal! Armin! none to relieve your Daura! Her voice came over the sea. Arindal my son descended from the hill; rough in the spoils of the chace. His arrows rattled by his side; his bow was in his hand; five dark gray dogs attended his steps. He saw fierce Erath on the shore: he seized and bound him to an oak. Thick fly the thongs of the hide around his limbs; he loads the wind with his groans. Arindal ascends the deep in his boat, to bring Daura to land. Armar came in his wrath, and let fly the gray-feathered shaft. It sung; it sunk in thy heart, O Arindal, my son! for Erath the traitor thou diedst. The oar is stopped at once; he panted on the rock and expired. What is thy grief, O Daura, when round thy feet is poured thy brother’s blood. The boat is broken in twain by the waves. Armar plunges into the sea, to rescue his Daura, or die. Sudden a blast from a hill came over the waves. He sunk, and he rose no more. Alone on the sea-beat rock, my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent and loud were her cries; nor could her father relieve her. All night I stood
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on the shore. I saw her by the faint beam of the moon. All night I heard her cries. Loud was the wind; and the rain beat hard on the side of the mountain. Before morning appeared, her voice was weak. It died away, like the evening-breeze among the grass of the rocks. Spent with grief she expired. And left thee Armin alone: gone is my strength in the war, and fallen my pride among women. When the storms of the mountains come; when the north lifts the waves on high; I sit by the sounding shore, and look on the fatal rock. Often by the setting moon I see the ghosts of my children. Half-viewless, they walk in mournful conference together. Will none of you speak in pity? They do not regard their father. I am sad, O Carmor, nor small my cause of woe!
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Such were the words of the bards in the days of the song: when the king heard the music of harps, and the tales of other times. The chiefs gathered from all their hills, and heard the lovely sound. They praised the voice of Cona! the first among a thousand bards. But age is now on my tongue; and my soul has failed. I hear, sometimes, the ghosts of bards, and learn their pleasant song. But memory fails on my mind; I hear the call of years. They say, as they pass along, why does Ossian sing? Soon shall he lie in the narrow house, and no bard shall raise his fame. Roll on, ye dark-brown years, for ye bring no joy on your course. Let the tomb open to Ossian, for his strength has failed. The sons of song are gone to rest; my voice remains, like a blast, that roars, lonely, on a seasurrounded rock, after the winds are laid. The dark moss whistles there, and the distant mariner sees the waving trees.
COMMENTARY
It is believed that, by a careful inquiry, many more remains of ancient genius, no less valuable than those now given to the world, might be found in the same country where these have been collected. In particular there is reason to hope that one work of considerable length, and which deserves to be styled an heroic poem, might be recovered and translated. J. Macp., Preface to Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language, 1760
(1) The thrill here was in the discovery & invention of new/old sources for poetry—in part regional & nationalistic, in part the beginnings of an ethnopoetics that would inform an emerging Romanticism & carry from then into the century or two beyond. For those alive & active at the time, the heart of the matter was famously expressed in Goethe’s Sorrows of
James Macpherson 51 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Young Werther, where the novel’s hero, having translated one of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems (“The Songs of Selma”) into German & wracked by its sentiments—protoromantic—of desire, death, & the insubstantial, exclaimed: “Ossian has, in my heart, supplanted Homer.” The poems in question first appeared in 1760, reputed to be the work of the blind bard Ossian & other pre-Christian Celtic bards & surviving as part of an ongoing oral tradition, which Macpherson had been researching & translating. His “translations” as such, which demanded in turn a radical reshuffling of the poetic past, were widely accepted at first but later called into question & rejected as Macpherson’s literary hoax & the betrayal of a “pure original.” What now seems clear is that the writings or voicings of the putatively ancient Ossian drew on real sources explored & recomposed by Macpherson & others. Clear too is their neat fit with other ideas of the time: both Goethe’s & Herder’s Weltliteratur & a nascent primitivism that both supported & turned the tables on the new European imperium. Revisiting them now, 250 years after the fact, we can view them as the basis, not only for a doleful nineteenth-century poetics of sensibility—often enough in a warrior context though sometimes, oddly, in a feminist one—but for a later poetry & poetics that involved both form (open) & function (visionary). Yet, as William Hazlitt said approvingly some fifty years after Macpherson: “Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry. . . . The clinging to the shadow of all things as in a mock embrace, is here perfect.” See also the commentary on Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala, below, & the range of ethnopoetic entries in A Book of Origins, below. (2) Writes Macpherson himself in setting up the works—both real & imagined: “There can be no doubt that these poems are to be ascribed to the Bards; a race of men well known to have continued throughout many ages in Ireland and the north of Scotland. Every chief or great man had in his family a Bard or poet, whose office it was to record in verse, the illustrious actions of that family. By the succession of these Bards, such poems were handed down from race to race; some in manuscript, but more by oral tradition. And tradition, in a country so free of intermixture with foreigners, and among a people so strongly attached to the memory of their ancestors, has preserved many of them in a great measure incorrupted to this day. “They are not set to music, nor sung. The versification in the original is simple; and to such as understand the language, very smooth and beautiful. Rhyme is seldom used: but the cadence, and the length of the line varied, so as to suit the sense. The translation is extremely literal. Even the arrangement of the words in the original has been imitated; to which must be imputed some inversions in the style, that otherwise would not have been chosen.”
52 Preludium Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
D on at ien A lp hon s e F ra n ç o i s, marqu is de Sade
1740–1814
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from J U L I E T T E , O R V I C E A M P LY R E W A R D E D
Leaving the volcanic plain of Pietra-Mala, we climbed for an hour back up a tall mountain situated to the right. From the crest of this mountain, we noticed chasms more than two thousand fathoms deep, toward which our path was leading us. The entire area was enveloped by woods that were so remarkably thick, so laden with foliage, that one could scarcely see the road ahead. After descending a rigid slope for nearly three hours, we arrived at the edge of a vast lake. On an island located in the middle of that body of water, one could see the keep of the palace that served as our guide’s retreat; because of the high walls surrounding it, we could see no more than its roof. We had been walking for six hours without noticing a single house; not a single individual had crossed our sight. A small black skiff like a Venetian gondola was waiting for us at the edge of the lake. It was from there that we could take in the horrible basin in which we found ourselves: it was surrounded on all sides by mountains as far as the eye could see, whose summits and arid flanks were covered with green pine, larch, and oak trees. It would have been impossible to see anything more rustic and somber; it was as if we had reached the end of the universe. We climbed into the skiff, which the giant steered all by himself. It was still three furlongs from the dock to the castle. We then arrived at the foot of an iron door cut into the thick rampart surrounding the castle, after which a six-foot-wide moat lay before us; we crossed over it on a bridge that was raised the moment we had passed. When a second rampart stood before us, we passed through another iron door, and found ourselves in a clump of woods so dense that we thought it impossible to go any farther. And indeed we would not: this clump, formed by a living hedge, offered only spikes and no passage. In the heart of it stood the last rampart of the castle; it was ten feet thick. The giant lifted an enormous block of stone that only he could have moved, revealing a tortuous stairway. The stone closed over it again, and it was through the bowels of the earth that we arrived (still in blackness) in the midst of the building’s cellars, from which we climbed back up by means of an opening that was blocked by a stone similar to the one just mentioned. We finally found ourselves in a low-ceilinged room covered from end to end with skeletons. The seats in this place were formed only by dead men’s bones, and one had no choice but to sit on skulls. Horrible cries seemed
Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade 53 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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to reach us from below the earth, and we soon learned that it was in the vaults of this room that were located the dungeons in which this monster’s victims were moaning. “I have you now,” he told us once we were seated. “You are in my power; I can do with you as I please. Do not be alarmed, however: the actions I have seen you commit are too close to my own way of thinking for me not to feel you are worth knowing and worthy of sharing the pleasures of my retreat. Listen to me: I have time to tell you all before supper. They should be preparing it as I speak. “I am a Muscovite, born in a small village on the banks of the Volga. My name is Minsky. My father, when he died, left me enormous wealth, and nature endowed me with physical faculties and tastes in proportion to the favors with which fortune gratified me. Sensing that I was not cut out to vegetate in the depths of some obscure province such as the one in which I first saw the light of day, I traveled; the entire universe did not seem large enough to contain the breadth of my desires. It tried to impose limitations: I did not want any. Born a libertine, impious, debauched, bloodthirsty, and fierce, I traveled the world over in search only of vices, which I tried the better to refine them. I began with China, Mongolia, and Tartary; I visited all of Asia. Heading up toward Kamchatka, I entered America by the famous Bering Strait. I crossed through that vast portion of the world, living alternately with civilized populations and with savages, imitating the crimes of one group, the vices and atrocities of the other. I brought back to Europe penchants so dangerous that I was sentenced to be burned alive in Spain, broken on the wheel in France, hanged in England, and crushed under rocks in Italy: my wealth protected me from everything. “I headed on to Africa. It was there that I learned that what you have the madness to call depravity is nothing more than man’s natural state, and still more often the result of the very soil onto which nature has thrown him. Those good children of the sun laughed at me when I tried to scold them for their barbarity toward their women. ‘And what is a woman,’ they answered, ‘except the domestic animal that nature has given us to satisfy both our needs and our desires? What right does she have to be worthy of us, any more than the cattle in our farmyards? The only difference we can see,’ these sensible people told me, ‘is that our domestic animals might warrant some indulgence because of their gentle and submissive natures, whereas women deserve only harshness and barbarity, given their perpetual state of fraud, spitefulness, betrayal, and perfidy. . . .’
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“. . . I’ve maintained these tastes. All the debris of corpses that you see here are the remains of creatures I’ve devoured. I live exclusively on human flesh. I hope you will enjoy the feast that I’ve had prepared for you. . . . “. . . I have two harems. The first contains two hundred young girls, ranging in age from five to twenty; I eat them when the ways of lust have sufficiently mortified them. The second contains two hundred women aged twenty to thirty; you shall see how I treat them. Fifty valets of both sexes are employed in the service of this considerable number of objects of lubricity, and for recruitment I have a hundred agents deployed over every large city in the world. Would you believe that with the phenomenal movement that all of this requires, there is still but one way to enter my island: the road you have just taken? One would surely not suspect the number of creatures who pass by this mysterious path. “Never have the veils I’ve thrown over all this been pierced. It’s not that I have the slightest reason to fear: this belongs to the estates of the Grand Duke of Tuscany: they know the full extent of my irregular conduct, and the money I spread around keeps me safe from everything. . . . “. . . The furniture you see here,” our host told us, “is alive: each will walk at the slightest sign.” Minsky made this sign and the table moved forward; it had been in a corner of the room, and now came toward the middle. Five armchairs went to group themselves around it; two chandeliers descended from the ceiling and floated over the center of the table. “The mechanism is simple,” said the giant, seeing us looking closely at the composition of these furnishings. “You can see that this table, these chandeliers, these armchairs are composed exclusively of groups of girls artistically arranged. My dishes shall be served piping hot on the backs of these creatures. . . .” “Minsky,” I observed to our Muscovite, “the role these girls have to play is exhausting, especially if you prolong your stay at table.” “In the worst case,” said Minsky, “a few of them drop dead, and such losses are too easily repaired for me to worry about for even a second. . . . “. . . My friends,” our host said, “I have warned you that we eat only human flesh here. There is not a single dish before you that is not made from it.” “We shall try it,” said Sbrigani. “Repugnance is an absurdity: it derives only from lack of habit. All meats are fit for nourishing man, all of them have been given us by nature, and there is nothing more extraordinary about eating a man than there is about eating a chicken.” And so saying,
Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade 55 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
my husband plunged his fork into a quarter of young boy that seemed particularly well prepared, and having put at least two pounds on his plate, he devoured it. I did likewise. Minsky urged us on; and as his appetite matched all his other passions, he had soon emptied a dozen dishes. Translation from French by Mark Polizzotti
COMMENTARY
Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse’s breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason: cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue not a vice. (Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom) And again: There is no story or novel in all the literatures of Europe in which the somber mode is taken to a more terrifying and pathetic degree [than here]. (Note scrawled by Sade on a manu-
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script of his writings)
(1) But the work remained hidden or lived a truly underground existence, influential but largely unacknowledged, until brought to surface & into public view by the intervention of a range of twentieth-century poets & artists. As an aspect of his own time it reflected a current of absolute freedom pushed to an extreme of word & deed that saddled him with several decades of flights & imprisonments: the dungeon of Vincennes, the Bastille, the Charenton madhouse. (His final & terminal imprisonment, on orders from Napoleon Bonaparte, followed the anonymous publication in 1801 of Juliette & its companion volume Justine.) Viewed in this light, his work appears as the cruel & dangerous underside of Enlightenment & romantic/revolutionary explorations of energy & eros—the detournement of Rousseau’s reveries on the mind-in-freedom & the necessary negation of Blake’s positive outcry: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” Against the nineteenth-century’s suppression of Sade, Apollinaire, writing a hundred years later, saw in him “the freest mind that ever was,” & for the Surrealists & Breton, who printed this section from Juliette in his Anthology of Black Humor, his work was “the expression of a thought considered the most subversive of all.” In general circulation today, that work—still nominally transgressive—exists for us as both a challenge & a warning. (2) “The writer sees himself in the Revolution. It attracts him because it is the time during which literature becomes history. It is his truth. Any writer
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who is not induced by the very fact of writing to think, ‘I am the revolution, only freedom allows me to write,’ is not really writing. . . . “Sade is the writer par excellence, he combines all the writer’s contradictions. Alone: of all men he is the most alone, and yet at the same time a public figure and an important political personage; forever locked up and yet absolutely free, theoretician and symbol of absolute freedom. He writes a vast body of work, and that work exists for no one. Unknown: but what he portrays has an immediate significance for everyone. He is nothing more than a writer, and he depicts life raised to a level of passion which has become cruelty and madness. He turns the most bizarre, the most hidden, the most unreasonable kind of feeling into a universal affirmation, the reality of a public statement which is consigned to history to become a legitimate explanation of man’s general condition. He is, finally, negation itself: his oeuvre is nothing but the work of negation, his experience the action of a furious negation, driven to blood, denying other people, denying God, denying nature and, within this circle in which it runs endlessly, reveling in itself as absolute sovereignty” (Maurice Blanchot, “The Gaze of Orpheus,” trans. Lydia Davis).
Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade 57 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
F ran cis co G oya
1746–1828
FOUR CAPRICHOS
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The sleep of reason produces monsters
Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.
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Trials
Little by little she is making progress. She is already making her first steps and in time she will know as much as her teacher.
Francisco Goya 59 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Where is mother going?
Mother has dropsy and they have sent her on an outing. God willing, she may recover.
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Blow
No doubt there was a great catch of children the previous night. The banquet which they are preparing will be a rich one: “Bon appetit.” Translations from Spanish by Hilda Harris
Francisco Goya 61 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
COMMENTARY
Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together in a single imaginary being circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.
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F. G., announcement for Caprichos, February 6, 1799
(1) Not a poet in any ordinary sense of the word, Goya opens an exploration of the constructed dreamwork—a conduit for transformation & disease, holding up a crooked mirror, to see the world askew & dangerous, but ineluctably real. His Caprichos, initiated in 1796 as a series of eighty etchings & aquatints, come complete with captions, later reinforced by editorial “explanations,” on some of which (the so-called Prado manuscript in particular) Goya himself may have been an informal collaborator. As he takes hold of the idea of “caprichos”—what had been whims or fancies in the works of others—he becomes, as Robert Hughes writes of him & them, “the first artist to use the word capricho to denote images that had some critical purpose: a vein, a core, of social commentary.” And it is his alliance of this with a stunning sense of the fantastic—even the surreal—that makes him not only a forerunner of the romantic but, as Hughes & others have noted, “the first modern artist and the last old master.” In the notes to his early drawings for “The Sleep of Reason,” originally intended as the opening Capricho but finally positioned as Capricho 43, additional texts appear. As Hughes further describes them: “On the flank of the desk is written ‘Universal language [Ydioma universal]. Drawn and etched by Francisco de Goya in the year 1797.’ Then, below the design, we read in a pencil scribble: ‘The author dreaming. His only purpose is to root out harmful ideas, commonly believed, and to perpetuate with this work of the Caprichos the soundly based testimony of truth.’” That this “truth” incorporates images of witchcraft, animality, cannibalism, rape, & torture, often identified by him with those in power, made the Caprichos a target for censorship & inquisition as well as a sardonic & ominous reflection of Goya’s world & ours. N.B. The alternative translation as “the Dream of Reason [that produces monsters]” adds an ambiguity to the reading that we should not overlook. (2) “A face lurks at the corner / of the platform / —a golden beak—whose setting is romantic, / frantic & ecstatic, / raptured, / captured, / buried in blank spaces, / narrow places / perilous, / the perfect getaway for / Goya’s ghost” (J. Rothenberg, from 50 Caprichos, after Goya).
62 Preludium Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Joha n n Wolf gan g von G o e t h e
1749–1832
PROMETHEUS
Cover your heaven, Zeus, With cloudy vapors And like a boy Beheading thistles Practice on oaks and mountain peaks— Still you must leave My earth intact And my small hovel, which you did not build, And this my hearth Whose glowing heat You envy me.
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I know of nothing more wretched Under the sun than you gods! Meagerly you nourish Your majesty On dues of sacrifice And breath of prayer And would suffer want But for children and beggars, Poor hopeful fools. Once too, a child, Not knowing where to turn, I raised bewildered eyes Up to the sun, as if above there were An ear to hear my complaint, A heart like mine To take pity on the oppressed. Who helped me Against the Titans’ arrogance? Who rescued me from death, From slavery? Did not my holy and glowing heart, Unaided, accomplish all? And did it not, young and good, Cheated, glow thankfulness For its safety to him, to the sleeper above?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 63 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
I pay homage to you? For what? Have you ever relieved The burdened man’s anguish? Have you ever assuaged The frightened man’s tears? Was it not omnipotent Time That forged me into manhood, And eternal Fate, My masters and yours? Or did you think perhaps That I should hate this life, Flee into deserts Because not all The blossoms of dream grew ripe? Here I sit, forming men In my image, A race to resemble me: To suffer, to weep, To enjoy, to be glad— And never to heed you, Like me! Translation from German by Michael Hamburger
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COMMENTARY
All my works are fragments of a great confession, where every personal experience transforms into an image or a poem. J. W. von G., in Dichtung und Wahrheit
Before Romanticism as such, Goethe joined other Englightenment & postEnlightenment figures in a foregrounding of new intensities of language & mind that created for their time a poetics of Sturm und Drang (storm & urge/thrust/strain/assault) with continuing reverberations in the century to come. The early results brought a new expressionism into poetry & a concept of genius that turned poets & other writers & artists into heroic figures—Goethe not least among them—& would be one of the hallmarks & problematics of poetry from then till now. Yet if Goethe, later in life, spoke of his works as “fragments of a great confession,” the range of those works went well beyond any debased latter-day notion of the “confessional poem” & led him & the major poets of his time to search for a poetry, as Clayton Eshleman once described it, “that attempts to become responsible for all a poet knows about himself and his world.” While Goethe was
64 Preludium Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
not alone in this, he emerged beyond his contemporaries to become what Michael Davidson wrote of another poet, another time, “the model of the poet for whom all of reality can enter the poem.” The range of Goethe’s work is dazzling: lyric poetry, prose fiction, theater, conversations, aphorisms & reflections, autobiography & memoirs, scientific writings, & forays into art & politics. While his politics & social attitudes became increasingly conservative (he played, for better or worse, the role of wise man & spokesman for well-placed & inherently conservative patrons), the work as such continued to push beyond those limits. Some of his more radical moves worth noting: experiments (as here) with free or irregular verse, particularly during the Sturm und Drang time; a self-exposure or creation of himself as the central figure in a number of major works (Roman Elegies, Marienbad Elegy, Venetian Fragments, etc.) including erotic specifics (“I have softly beat out the measure of hexameters, fingering along her spine”); religious questioning—an unsettled, often antagonistic view of Christianity & an exploration of pagan, Islamic, & non-Western possibilities (in The East-West Divan, etc.); & with Johann Gottfried von Herder & others the beginnings of an ethnopoetics (Weltliteratur) & exploration of European folk themes & forms (used later both to challenge & support a notion of European, even German dominance). His role as a radical & experimental poet & thinker now seems inescapable. For more on Goethe, see the entry in Gallery One, below, & elsewhere in these pages.
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Thoma s C hat t ert on
1752–1770
from T H E R O W L E Y P O E M S
An Excelente Balade of Charitie: As wroten bie the goode Prieste Thomas Rowley[1], 1464
[To the Printer of the Town and Country Magazine. SIR, If the Glossary annexed to the following piece will make the language intelligible; the Sentiment, Description, and Versification, are highly deserving the attention of the literati. July 4, 1770.
D[unhelmus] B[ristoliensis]]
In Virgyne the sweltrie sun gan sheene, And hotte upon the mees[2] did caste his raie; The apple rodded[3] from its palie greene
Thomas Chatterton 65 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
And the mole[4] peare did bende the leafy spraie; The peede chelandri[5] sunge the livelong daie; ’Twas nowe the pride, the manhood of the yeare, And eke the grounde was dighte[6] in its most defte[7] aumere[8]. The sun was glemeing in the midde of daie, Deadde still the aire, and eke the welken[9] blue, When from the sea arist[10] drear arraie A hepe of cloudes of sable sullen hue, The which full fast unto the woodlande drewe, Hiltring[11] attenes[12] the sunnis fetive[13] face, And the blacke tempeste swolne and gatherd up apace.
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Beneathe an holme, faste by a pathwaie side, Which dide unto Seyncte Godwine’s covent[14] lede, A hapless pilgrim moneynge did abide, Pore in his viewe, ungentle[15] in his weede, Longe bretful[16] of the miseries of neede; Where from the hail-stone coulde the almer[17] flie? He had no housen theere, ne anie covent nie. Look in his glommed[18] face, his sprighte there scanne; Howe woe-be-gone, how withered, forwynd[19], deade! Haste to thie church-glebe-house[20], asshrewed[21] manne! Haste to thie kiste[22], thie onlie dortoure[23] bedde. Cale, as the claie whiche will gre on thie hedde, Is Charitie and Love aminge highe elves; Knightis and Barons live for pleasure and themselves. The gatherd storme is rype; the bigge drops falle; The forswat[24] meadowes smethe[25], and drenche[26] the raine; The comyng ghastness do the cattle pall[27], And the full flockes are drivynge ore the plaine; Dashde from the cloudes the waters flott[28] againe; The welkin opes; the yellow levynne[29] flies; And the hot fierie smothe[30] in the wide lowings[31] dies. Liste! now the thunder’s rattling clymmynge[32] sound Cheves[33] slowlie on, and then embollen[34] clangs, Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown’d, Still on the gallard[35] ere of terroure hanges; The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges; Again the levynne and the thunder poures, And the full cloudes are braste[36] attenes in stonen showers.
66 Preludium Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Spurreynge his palfrie oere the watrie plaine, The Abbote of Seyncte Godwynes convente came; His chapournette[37] was drented with the reine, And his pencte[38] gyrdle met with mickle shame; He ayneward tolde his bederoll[39] at the same; The storme encreasen, and he drew aside, With the mist[40] almes craver neere to the holme to bide. His cope[41] was all of Lyncolne clothe so fyne, With a gold button fasten’d neere his chynne; His autremete[42] was edged with golden twynne, And his shoone pyke a loverds[43] mighte have binne; Full well it shewn he thoughten coste no sinne; The trammels of the palfrye pleasde his sight; For the horse-millanare[44] his head with roses dighte.
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An alms, sir prieste! the droppynge pilgrim saide, O! let me waite within your covente dore, Till the sunne sheneth hie above our heade, And the loude tempeste of the aire is oer; Helpless and ould am I alas! and poor; No house, ne friend, ne moneie in my pouche; All yatte I call my owne is this my silver crouche. Varlet, replyd the Abbatte, cease your dinne; This is no season almes and prayers to give; Mie porter never lets a faitour[45] in; None touch mie rynge who not in honour live. And now the sonne with the blacke cloudes did stryve, And shettynge on the grounde his glairie raie, The Abbatte spurrde his steede, and eftsoones roadde awaie. Once moe the skie was black; the thunder rolde; Faste reyneynge oer the plaine a prieste was seen; Ne dighte full proude, ne buttoned up in golde; His cope and jape[46] were graie, and eke were cleene; A Limitoure he was of order seene; And from the pathwaie side then turned hee, Where the pore almer laie binethe the holmen tree. An almes, sir priest! the droppynge pilgrim sayde, For sweete Seyncte Marie and your order sake. The Limitoure then loosen’d his pouche threade, And did thereoute a groate of silver take;
Thomas Chatterton 67 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The mister pilgrim dyd for halline[47] shake. Here take this silver, it maie eathe[48] thie care; We are Goddes stewards all, nete[49] of oure owne we bare. But ah! unhailie[50] pilgrim, lerne of me, Scathe anie give a rentrolle to their Lorde. Here take my semecope[51], thou arte bare I see; Tis thyne; the Seynctes will give me mie rewarde. He left the pilgrim, and his waie aborde. Virgynne and hallie Seyncte, who sitte yn gloure[52], Or give the mittee[53] will, or give the gode man power.
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[Chatterton's] Notes to An Excelente Balade of Charitie
1. Thomas Rowley, the author, was born at Norton mal-reward in Somersetshire, educated at the Convent of St. Kenna at Keynesham, and died at Westbury in Gloucestershire. 2. mees, meads. 3. rodded, reddened, ripened. 4. mole, soft. 5. peed chelandrie, pied goldfinch. 6. dighte, dressed. 7. defte, neat, ornamental. 8. aumere, a loose robe or mantle. 9. welken, the sky, the atmosphere. 10. arist, arose. 11. hiltring, hiding, shrouding. 12. attenes, at once. 13. fetive, beauteous. 14. It would have been charitable, if the author had not pointed at personal characters in this Ballad of Charity. The Abbot of St. Godwin’s at the time of the writing of this was Ralph de Bellomont, a great stickler for the Lancastrian family. Rowley was a Yorkist. 15. ungentle, beggarly. 16. bretful, filled with. 17. almer, beggar. 18. glommed, clouded, dejected. A person of some note in the literary world is of opinion, that glum and glom are modern cant words, and from this circumstance doubts the authenticity of Rowley’s Manuscripts. Glummong in the Saxon signifies twilight, a dark or dubious light, and the modern word gloomy is derived from the Saxon word glum.
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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.
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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.
forwynd, dry, sapless. church-glebe-house, the grave. asshrewed, accursed, unfortunate. kiste, coffin. dortoure, a sleeping room. forswat, sun-burnt. smethe, smoke. drenche, drink. pall, a contraction from appall, to fright. flott, fly. levynne, lightning. smothe, steam, or vapours. lowings, flames. clymmynge, noisy. cheves, moves. embollen, swelled, strengthened. gallard, frighted. braste, burst. chapournette, a small round hat, not unlike the shapournette in heraldry, formerly worn by ecclesiastics and lawyers. pencte, painted. aynewarde tolde his bederoll, he told his beads backwards, a figurative expression to signify cursing. mist, poor, needy. cope, cloak. autremete, a loose white robe, worn by Priests. loverds, lord’s. horse-millanare, I believe this trade is still in being, though but seldom employed. faitour, a beggar or vagabond. jape, a short surplice, worn by Friars of an inferiour class, and secular priests. halline, joy. eathe, ease. nete, nought. unhailie, unhappy. semecope, a short under-cloke. gloure, glory. mittee, mighty.
Thomas Chatterton 69 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
SEVEN ANCIENT MONUMENTS Map of Rudhall and Redcliff Wall
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A Fabricated Parchment
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COMMENTARY
“The father’d songster Chaunticleer / Han wounde hys bugle horne, / And tolde the earlie villager / The coming of the morne.” In my humble Opinion the foregoing Verses are far more elegant and poetical than all the [neoclassical] Parade of Aurora’s whipping away the Night, unbarring the Gates of the East &c &c
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T. C., on the opening stanza of his “Bristowe Tragedie by Thomas Rowlie Priest”
(1) One generation after the forgeries of the apparently medieval “Rowley” poems were revealed to be the work of the sixteen-year-old Chatterton, Coleridge & Wordsworth built up the compelling formula of the wunderkind genius (Wordsworth’s “marvelous boy”) who, beaten down by the harsh world of commerce, committed suicide at seventeen, leaving as residuum a miraculous chthonic emanation of natural, English authenticity—intuitive poetry. It took Keats not only to swerve from the myth of the precocious vessel for “young-eyed Poesy/ All deftly masked, as hoar Antiquity” (thus: Coleridge), but also to focus on his more lasting contribution to poetry: the rejection of Latin & French diction privileged by official culture in favor of “pure English.” Claiming to have discovered old manuscripts, Chatterton strove for nothing less than an account of English origins through narratives of early English heroes. His gloss to his often spurious archaic vocabulary, in the apparatus to the Rowley poems, accentuates, as a translation, the idea of a truly ancestral origin. He was, moreover, following the contemporary “forgeries” of Macpherson (above) and Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto was supposedly a “translation” from an old Italian manuscript. But he went even further: along with the Rowley poems in a fabricated “native English,” there are extensive prose accounts of Chatterton/Rowley’s ancient city of Bristol—discussions of Bristol’s churches, its monetary system, important local families, & heraldries, as well as architectural sketches (as here) for churches & chapels, for the Bristol Walls, for tombs & coins. The project in the scope of its “recoveries” anticipates the Finnish Kalevala & even Pound’s Cantos. It has an epic intention, the construction of a “total” world, in which the sources of collective life overflow the boundaries of “literature” to incorporate the fullest range, in different media & genres, of the city’s beginnings. (2) In the line of eighteenth-century artificers, Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams, 1747–1826) was the Welsh counterpart to Macpherson (above) & Chatterton. Called a “Rattleskull Genius,” he practiced as a Freemason, druidic bard, laboring poet, romantic mythmaker, political radical, & consummate forger. Like Chatterton recovering “ancient” Bristol, Iolo claimed the druidic origins of his native city Glamorgan. While in debtors’ prison, he wrote (claimed to recover) The Secret of the Bards of the Isle of Britain (1786–87) & in 1795 began collecting materials (not until the twentieth century discovered to be forgeries) for his never-to-be-completed History of the British Bards. Iolo invented (“discovered”) the Peithynen, or
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“wooden book,” which consisted of four-sided sticks, or “lines,” each side of which contained poetry written in a “bardic alphabet” by early Welsh poets inheriting the learning of the ancient Druids. (3) “[Chatterton] is the purest writer in the English Language. He has no French idiom, or particles like Chaucer—’tis genuine English Idiom in English words. I have given up Hyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up” (John Keats, Sept. 21, 1819).
M ary Rob in s on
1758–1800
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from A L E T T E R T O T H E W O M E N O F E N G L A N D O N T H E I N J U S T I C E O F M E N TA L S U B O R D I N AT I ON
The barbarity of custom’s law in this enlightened country, has long been exercised to the prejudice of woman: and even the laws of honour have been perverted to oppress her. If a man receive an insult, he is justified in seeking retribution. He may chastise, challenge, and even destroy his adversary. Such a proceeding in man is termed honourable; his character is exonerated from the stigma which calumny attached to it; and his courage rises in estimation, in proportion as it exemplifies his revenge. But were a woman to attempt such an expedient, however strong her sense of injury, however invincible her fortitude, or important the preservation of character, she would be deemed a murdress. Thus, custom says, you must be free from error; you must possess an unsullied fame: yet, if a slanderer, or a libertine, even by the most unpardonable falsehoods, deprive you of either reputation or repose, you have no remedy. He is received in the most fastidious societies, in the cabinets of nobles, at the toilettes of coquets and prudes, while you must bear your load of obloquy, and sink beneath the uniting efforts of calumny, ridicule, and malevolence. Indeed we have scarcely seen a single instance where a professed libertine has been either shunned by women, or reprobated by men, for having acted either unfeelingly or dishonourably towards what is denominated the defenceless sex. Females, by their mis-judging lenity, while they give proofs of a degrading triumph, cherish for themselves that anguish, which, in their turn, they will, unpitied, experience.
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Not many centuries past, the use of books was wholly unknown to the commonality of females; and scarcely any but superior nuns, then denominated “learned women” could either read or write. Wives were then considered as household idols, created for the labour of domestic life, and born to yield obedience. To brew, to bake, and to spin, were then deemed indispensably necessary qualifications: but to think, to acquire knowledge, or to interfere either in theological or political opinions, would have been the very climax of presumption! Hence arose the evils of bigotry and religious imposition. The reign of credulity, respecting supernatural warnings and appearances, was then in its full vigour. The idle tales of ghosts and goblins, and the no less degrading and inhuman persecutions of age and infirmity, under the idea of witchcraft, were not only countenanced, but daily put in practice. We do not read in history of any act of cruelty practiced towards a male bewitcher, though we have authentic records to prove, that many a weak and defenceless woman has been tortured, and even murdered by a people professing Christianity, merely because a pampered priest, or a superstitious idiot, sanctioned such oppression. The witcheries of mankind will ever be tolerated, though the frenzy of fanaticism and the blindness of bigotry sink into oblivion.
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. The embargo upon words, the enforcement of tacit submission, has been productive of consequences highly honourable to the women of the present age. Since the sex have been condemned for exercising the powers of speech, they have successfully taken up the pen: and their writings exemplify both energy of mind, and capability of acquiring the most extensive knowledge. The press will be the monuments from which the genius of British women will rise to immortal celebrity: their works will, in proportion as their educations are liberal, from year to year, challenge an equal portion of fame, with the labours of their classical male contemporaries. In proportion as women are acquainted with the languages they will become citizens of the world. The laws, customs and inhabitants of different nations will be their kindred in the propinquity of nature. Prejudice will be palsied, if not receive its death blow, by the expansion of intellect: and woman being permitted to feel her own importance in the scale of society, will be tenacious of maintaining it. She will know that she was created for something beyond the mere amusement of man; that she is capable of mental energies, and worthy of the most unbounded confidence. Such a system of mental equality, would, while it stigmatized the
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trifling vain and pernicious race of high fashioned Messalinas, produce such British women, as would equal the Portias and Arrias of antiquity.
. Let WOMAN once assert her proper sphere, unshackled by prejudice, and unsophisticated by vanity; and pride, (the noblest species of pride,) will establish her claims to the participation of power, both mentally and corporeally.
. P.S. Should this Letter be the means of influencing the minds of those to whom it is addressed, so far as to benefit the rising generation, my end and aim will be accomplished. I am well assured, that it will meet with little serious attention from the MALE disciples of MODERN PHILOSOPHY. The critics, though they have liberally patronized the works of British women, will perhaps condemn that doctrine which inculcates mental equality; lest, by the intellectual labours of the sex, they should claim an equal portion of power in the TRIBUNAL of BRITISH LITERATURE. By the profound scholar, and the unprejudiced critic, this Letter will be read with candour; while, I trust, its purpose will be deemed beneficial to society. Exeter, Nov. 7, 1798
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COMMENTARY
Led by her [celestial freedom’s] daring hand, what pow’r can bind / The boundless effort of the lab’ring mind. . . . / From her, expanding reason learn to climb, / To her the sounds of melody belong, / That wakes the raptures of the Poet’s song; / ’Tis god-like freedom bids each passion live. . . . M. R., from Ainsi va le Monde
(1) During the era of the American & French Revolutions radical writers took aim at the “contracted,” “chained,” “bound,” or “fettered” mind & the repressive institutions that produced it. Nowhere was this more evident than in the social & mental constraints placed on women. Powerful feminist polemics—in drama, poetry, fiction, & tracts—abounded, establishing the first systematic feminist movement in Western society, in & through which women imbued radical culture in the 1780s and 1790s with much of its energy & idiom. If domestic abuse, control of sexuality, & severe economic dependence on men constituted the major expressions of the oppression of women—then as now—the solutions proposed most often focused less on
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efforts to enlighten patriarchy & more on the empowerment of women’s minds—an increase in their rational and imaginative independence. Not surprisingly, three key women writers—Mme. de Staël (below), the influential American dramatist and essayist Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820), and above all Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) in her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)—were among those who demanded an education for women equal to that of men. Toward that end all of them turned a critical eye on Rousseau’s otherwise radical program for the education of young men (Emile, 1762), because for Rousseau “Sophie,” as Emile’s female counterpart, was barred from the male experience of a mind unconstrained in the process of learning. Why, they asked, couldn’t this plan hold for women as well—women who were equally capable, whose minds, according to Murray, show a “playfulness,” an “exuberance of fancy,” “a strength of inventive imagination,” and a “great activity of mind”? These writers, it should be noted, did not see the liberation of the female mind as sufficient for the liberation of women as such but as a necessary precondition, since the constraints from which they suffered were not only mental but often violently physical or harshly economic as well. As late as 1854 it could be said about the legal condition of coverture: “A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman, and her existence is entirely absorbed in that of her husband.” “To Wollstonecraft,” writes Anne Mellor, “coverture was tantamount to slavery.” And Wollstonecraft herself, invoking with regards to women the imagery emblematic of the French Revolution (chains) and of the slave trade (“blood sugar”), would refer to “the more specious slavery which chains the very soul of woman, keeping her for ever under the bond of ignorance. . . . [T]he private or public virtue of woman is very problematical; for Rousseau, and a numerous list of male writers, insist that she should all her life be subjected to a severe restraint, that of propriety. Why subject her to propriety—blind propriety, if she be capable of acting from a nobler spring, if she be an heir of immortality? Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when principles would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man?” (2) But it was Mary Robinson who at the end of the 1790s underscored two decades of writing poetry with her powerful Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. Indeed, it is hard not to look back on her work as leading to this feminist statement, to see the principles, announced here, of women’s active and independent thought as channeled into poetic occasions. In this she joins forces with many of the writers in this preludium who register the mind in its freedom. William Blake, for example, in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, links its protagonist Oothoon’s female desire & its wounding by rape with her subsequent liberated, prophetic speech: “. . . trees. & birds. & beasts. & men. Behold their eternal joy. / Arise you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy! / Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!” For more on Robinson’s own writing, see the entry in the First Gallery.
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Willia m Blake
1757–1827
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from A M E R I C A A P R O P H E C Y : P R E L U D I U M
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William Blake 77 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
COMMENTARY
And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright / Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions / In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect / Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine / Of Human Imagination . . . / & every Word & Every Character / Was Human. (W. B., from Jerusalem) And again: Nature has no Outline, but Imagination has. Nature has no Tune, but Imagination has. Nature has no Supernatural & dissolves. Imagination is Eternity. (W. B., from The Ghost of Abel, 1822)
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(1) “Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race!” wrote Blake (1804), in whom we find, then, a first act of mental liberation & a recall to the oldest function of poetry & of the poet as inspired “prophet”; later as a shamanistic “seer” (Rimbaud) & “technician of the sacred.” And it is Blake who also turns transmitted Wisdom on its head, working out a poetics of oppositions, a new dialectic in which desire [= “energy”] can have a central place alongside “reason.” At the same time it’s just that thrust into embodiment that literally changes the face & voice of poetry—gets to the heart of the poem as structure/form, thus setting out the paradigm for much of what’s to follow. Here Blake’s line swings wide & opens, leaves the “bondage of rhyming” & “monotonous cadence” behind, & demands new forms of shape & color to present the visible poem by “a method of printing which combines the painter and poet.” Representing Blake’s intended total work—as painter, poet, printer—such “visionary forms dramatic” have been suppressed too often in favor of cold type & print. For more on Blake’s counterpointing of word & image, see the entry in A Book of Extensions, below. More of his poetry as such also appears in our First Gallery & elsewhere. (2) “A MEMORABLE FANCY. I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation. / In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a cave’s mouth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave. / In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave, and others adorning it with gold silver and precious stones. / In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air: he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite, around were numbers of Eagle like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs. In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire raging around & melting the metals into living fluids. / In the fifth chamber were Unnam’d forms, which cast the metals into the expanse. / There they were receiv’d by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries” (W. B., from The Marriage of Heaven & Hell).
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A
F I R S T
G A L L E R Y
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From Goethe & Blake to Solomos & Pushkin
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
Johan n Wolf gan g von G o e t h e
1749–1832
MIGNON’S SONG
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn, Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn, Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht, Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht, Kennst du es wohl? Dahin! Dahin Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn! Kennst du das Haus? Auf Säulen ruht sein Dach, Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach, Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an: Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan? Kennst du es wohl? Dahin! Dahin Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Beschützer, ziehn!
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Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg? Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg, In Höhlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut, Es stürzt der Fels und über ihn die Flut: Kennst du ihn wohl? Dahin! Dahin Geht unser Weg! o Vater, laß uns ziehn!
Know’st thou the land where the pale citrons grow, The golden fruits in darker foliage glow? Soft blows the wind that breathes from that blue sky! Still stands the myrtle and the laurel high! Know’st thou it well, that land, beloved Friend? Thither with thee, O, thither would I wend! Know’st thou the house? The roof set on its beams, Whose rooms stream light, whose inmost chamber gleams! And marble statues steadfast stare at me! Thou my poor child, what have men made of thee? Know’st thou it well, that house, thou surest guide? Thither with thee, O, thither would I ride!
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Know’st thou the hill where clouds obscure the way, Where mules amongst its fogs wander astray! Deep in those caves the dragon guards his brood, The cliffside plunges down and then the flood! Know’st thou it well, that hill? O father, hear! Thither our way, O, thither let us steer! Translation from German by Samuel Taylor Coleridge & Jerome Rothenberg
from S C E N E S F R O M T H E F A U S T O F G O E T H E [ T W O V E R S I O N S ]
Prologue in Heaven
The Lord and the Host of Heaven. Enter three Archangels. [Version 1] raphael
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The sun makes music as of old Amid the rival spheres of Heaven, On its predestined circle rolled With thunder speed: the Angels even Draw strength from gazing on its glance, Though none its meaning fathom may:— The world’s unwithered countenance Is bright as at creation’s day. gabriel
And swift and swift, with rapid lightness, The adorned Earth spins silently, Alternating Elysian brightness With deep and dreadful night; the sea Foams in broad billows from the deep Up to the rocks, and rocks and ocean, Onward, with spheres which never sleep, Are hurried in eternal motion. michael
And tempests in contention roar From land to sea, from sea to land; And, raging, weave a chain of power,
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Which girds the earth, as with a band.— A flashing desolation there, Flames before the thunder’s way; But thy servants, Lord, revere The gentle changes of thy day. chorus of the three
The Angels draw strength from thy glance, Though no one comprehend thee may; — Thy world’s unwithered countenance Is bright as on creation’s day. [Version 2] raphael
The sun sounds, according to ancient custom, In the song of emulation of his brother-spheres. And its fore-written circle Fulfills with a step of thunder. Its countenance gives the Angels strength Though no one can fathom it. The incredible high works Are excellent as at the first day.
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gabriel
And swift, and inconceivably swift The adornment of earth winds itself round, And exchanges Paradise-clearness With deep dreadful night. The sea foams in broad waves From its deep bottom, up to the rocks, And rocks and sea are torn on together In the eternal swift course of the spheres. michael
And storms roar in emulation From sea to land, from land to sea, And make, raging, a chain Of deepest operation round about. There flames a flashing destruction Before the path of the thunderbolt. But thy servants, Lord, revere The gentle alternations of thy day.
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chorus
Thy countenance gives the Angels strength, Though none can comprehend thee: And all thy lofty works Are excellent as at the first day. TRANSLATOR ’ S NOTE .
Such is a literal translation of this astonishing Chorus; it is impossible to represent in another language the melody of the versification; even the volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation, and the reader is surprised to find a caput mortuum. Translation from German by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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from V E N E T I A N E P I G R A M S
Urns & sarcophagi pagans paint into life, dancing fauns, dancing bands of bacchantes, bright lines of them, goatfooted, fatcheeked, squeeze sounds hot & wild through brass horns, percussions & cymbals blare out, we see & hear on the marble, birds beating wings, sweet taste of the fruit on your beaks, no noise to frighten you off still less to drive away Eros who joins the bright crowds rejoicing, hoisting his torch. So bounty overcomes death & the ashes within
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in the house made of silence still find pleasure in life. Some day may the tomb of the poet be graced with this scroll he has richly bejewelled with life.
.
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Tight little alleyway—no room to squeeze between its walls— a young girl blocks my way, my rambles around Venice knocks me off my feet, the place, the come-on to a stranger’s eye, a wide canal my drifting takes me to. If you had girls like your canals, o Venice, cunts like little alleyways, you’d be the greatest city in the world.
. what bothers me is this: the way Bettina gets to be so skillful every limb in her body grows looser & looser till she can stick her own little tongue up her own little cunt a charmer who tastes her own charms will soon lose all interest in men.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 85 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Is it so big a mystery what god and man and world are? No! but nobody knows how to solve it so the mystery hangs on.
. Lots of things I can stomach. Most of what irks me I take in my stride, as a god might command me. But four things I hate more than poisons & vipers: tobacco smoke, garlic, bedbugs, and Christ.
. Doesn’t surprise me that Christ our Lord preferred to live with whores & sinners, seeing I go in for that myself.
.
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I could have made it just as well with boys although my thing has always been with girls. And once I get my satisfaction with a girl I can turn her around & have her as a boy.
. Not schwanz meaning “tail” but some fancier word o Priapus me being a poet in German that word grinds me down. In Greek I can call you a phallos a marvelous sound to my ears and in Latin mentula from mens meaning “mind” another good word.
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But schwanz is something that sticks out from behind & behind isn’t where I find pleasure. Translation from German by Jerome Rothenberg
from T R I L O G Y O F P A S S I O N
The Marienbad Elegy
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And if tormented humanity is dumb, some god has given me the voice to tell of what I suffer. What have I to hope from this reunion, from the still unopened blossom of this day? The gates of paradise and of hell stand open for me; with what hesitancy my mind is moved!—Yet now begone, misgivings! She appears at the heavenly threshold, and one is lifted up into her arms. And thus one was received into paradise, as if worthy of an eternity of beautiful life; not a wish, not a hope, not a desire remained—here was the goal of one’s innermost aspiration, and in the vision of this unique beauty the fountain of one’s passionate tears at once was dried. How swiftly Day beat his wings, and seemed to drive the minutes before him! The kiss at evening, a faithful bond, a token that thus it should remain when the next sun rose. The hours moved softly by; like sisters indeed they resembled each other, yet none was quite like the rest. The last kiss of all, cruelly sweet, tearing asunder a splendid tissue of intertwining desires. The foot, in faltering haste, now flees that threshold, as if a fiery cherub drove it hence; the eye stares frustrated on a darkling path, and when it looks back the gate is still closed. And now the heart is imprisoned within itself, as if it had never opened, never known those blessed hours at her side when it vied in radiance with all the stars of heaven; and vexation, remorse, self-reproach, a burden of anxiety, now weigh it down, and sultry weather surrounds it. Is there not still the world? Are rocky cliffs no longer crowned with holy shadows? Does the harvest not ripen? Does a green countryside of bushes and fields not lie along the river? and does the great transcendent vault not still fill itself with shapes and empty itself of them again? How lightly and delicately, clearly and tenderly fashioned, like a hovering seraph, from amid the stern chorus of the clouds, up yonder against
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the blue sky a slender figure of bright haze rises, as if it were her own! It was thus that you saw her blithely dancing, the loveliest shape of all. But do not presume to hold fast an airy image in her stead for more than a few moments; return into your heart, for there you will more readily find her. There she lives and moves in changing forms: though ever one, she takes on many aspects—a thousand times different, and ever more dear. How she waited by the gates to receive me, and from then on increased my rapture step by step, and even after the last kiss hastened after me and caught me, to press the last of all upon my lips—this image of my darling, clear and active, is inscribed with letters of fire upon my faithful heart. Upon my heart, which preserves itself for her and her within itself, steadfast as tall battlements; which rejoices for her sake in its own continuance, knows itself only when she makes herself known, feels itself liberated by such well-loved bonds, and now has no beat but of gratitude to her for everything. Its power to love, its need for love in return, had burnt out and vanished away, but at once I found again the glad impulse to hope and to make plans, to take decisions and quick action! For if love has ever inspired lovers, it did so most delightfully to me: and that was her doing!—How heavy and irksome a burden of inward disquiet lay upon my mind and body: images of dread wherever I looked, in the waste land of the stifled empty heart! And now hope dawns on a familiar threshold: she herself appears in a mild radiance of sunlight. To the peace of God, which (we read) brings here on earth a blessedness that passes all understanding, I may compare the tranquil peace of love in the presence of the object of all our love; then the heart rests, and nothing can trouble that deepest sense, our sense of belonging to her. In the clear depths of our soul there springs an impulse to give ourselves freely, in gratitude, to something higher, purer, and unknown, and thus to unriddle the eternal Unnamed; this we call piety. It is in this high blessedness I seem to participate when I stand before her. Before her gaze as before the might of the sun, before her breath as before warm breezes of spring, cold long-unyielding self-regard thaws and melts away; no self-will, no self-interest can endure—they wilt and dissolve at her coming. It is as if she were to say: “Hour by kindly hour, life is offered to us; our yesterdays have left little record behind, and we are forbidden to know our tomorrows; and if ever, at evening, my heart misgave me, the setting sun still shone on sights that made me glad. “Do then as I do, and face the Moment, with joy and understanding, and without procrastination! Meet it quickly, with a good and lively will,
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whether in action or in pleasure. Beloved, be only where you are and be wholly there—be ever childlike, and you will then be all things, and be unconquerable.” You may well say so (I thought): by some god’s favour, the grace of the moment attends your glance, and in your sweet presence, in the twinkling of an eye, every man feels himself fortune’s favorite; but to me has come the terrible moment of banishment from you—of what use can it be to me to learn such lofty wisdom! I am far from you now. This present minute—what does it demand? I cannot tell. It offers me many good and lovely things; they are only a burden, which I must renounce. An irresistible longing drives me hither and thither; unending tears are my only counsel. Flow on then, tears, and flow unquenchably—though you could never still this fire within me! Already my heart is torn by a terrible frenzy, by a hideous life-and-death struggle. There may be herbs that can heal the body’s pain, but one’s mind lacks the power to will or to decide, or to grasp the very idea of being without her. A thousand times it evokes within itself her image, which is sometimes slow in coming and sometimes snatched away—now indistinct and now radiantly clear. How can this yield the slightest comfort, this ebb and flow, this going and coming?
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. Leave me here, faithful comrades! leave me alone amid rocks and marsh and moss! Hold to your course! To you the world lies open, the earth is wide, the heavens splendid and great; examine, investigate, collect details, and slowly spell out Nature’s mystery. I have lost the whole world, I have lost myself—I who but lately was the darling of the gods. They put me to the test, they gave me Pandora with her abundant store of blessings and greater abundance of danger. They pressed me to the bountiful lips—they sunder me from them, and destroy me. Translation from German by David Luke
THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PLANTS
Overwhelming, beloved, you find all this mixture of thousands, Riot of flowers let loose over the garden’s expanse;
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 89 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Many names you take in, and always the last to be spoken Drives out the one heard before, barbarous both to your ear. All the shapes are akin and none is quite like the other; So to a secret law surely that chorus must point, To a sacred enigma. Dear friend, how I wish I were able All at once to pass on, happy, the word that unlocks! Growing consider the plant and see how by gradual phases, Slowly evolved, it forms, rises to blossom and fruit. From the seed it develops as soon as the quietly fertile Womb of earth sends it out, sweetly released into life, And to the prompting of light, the holy, for ever in motion, Like the burgeoning leaves’ tenderest build, hands it on. Single, dormant the power in the seed was; the germ of an image, Closed in itself, lay concealed, prototype curled in the husk, Leaf and root and bud, although colourless yet, half-amorphous; Drily the nucleus so safeguards incipient life, Then, aspiring, springs up, entrusting itself to mild moisture, Speedily raises itself out of encompassing night. Single, simple, however, remains the first visible structure; So that what first appears, even in plants, is the child. Following, rising at once, with one nodule piled on another, Always the second renews only the shape of the first. Not the same, though, for ever; for manifold—you can observe it— Mutably fashioned each leaf after the last one unfolds, More extended, spikier, split into lances or segments Which, intergrown before, lay in the organ below. Only now it attains the complete intended perfection Which, in many a kind, moves you to wonder, admire. Many-jagged and ribbed, on a lusciously, fully fleshed surface, Growth so lavishly fed seems without limit and free. Forcefully here, however, will Nature step in to contain it, Curbing rankness here, gently perfecting the shapes. Now more slowly the sap she conducts, and constricts the vessels, And at once the form yields, with diminished effects. Calmly the outward thrust of the spreading leaf-rims recedes now, While, more firmly defined, swells the thin rib of the stalks. Leafless, though, and swift the more delicate stem rises up now, And, a miracle wrought, catches the onlooker’s eye. In a circular cluster, all counted and yet without number, Smaller leaves take their place, next to a similar leaf.
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Pushed close up to the hub now, the harbouring calyx develops Which to the highest of forms rises in colourful crowns. Thus in fulness of being does Nature now glory, resplendent, Limb to limb having joined, all her gradations displayed. Time after time you wonder as soon as the stalk-crowning blossom Sways on its slender support, gamut of mutable leaves. Yet the splendour becomes an announcement of further creation. Yes, to the hand that’s divine colourful leaves will respond. And it quickly furls, contracts; the most delicate structures Twofold venture forth, destined to meet and unite. Wedded now they stand, those delighted couples, together. Round the high altar they form multiple, ordered arrays. Hymen, hovering, nears, and pungent perfumes, exquisite, Fill with fragrance and life all the environing air. One by one now, though numberless, germs are impelled into swelling, Sweetly wrapped in the womb, likewise swelling, of fruit. Nature here closes her ring of the energies never-exhausted Yet a new one at once links to the circle that’s closed, That the chain may extend into the ages for ever, And the whole be infused amply with life, like the part. Look, beloved, once more on the teeming of so many colours, Which no longer may now fill with confusion your mind. Every plant now declares those eternal designs that have shaped it, Ever more clearly to you every flower-head can speak. Yet if here you decipher the holy runes of the goddess, Everywhere you can read, even though scripts are diverse: Let the grub drag along, the butterfly busily scurry, Imaging man by himself alter the pre-imposed shape. Oh, and consider then how in us from the germ of acquaintance Stage by stage there grew, dear to us, habit’s long grace, Friendship from deep within us burst out of its wrapping, And how Amor at last blessed it with blossom and fruit. Think how variously Nature, the quietly forming, unfolding, Lent to our feelings now this, now that so different mode! Also rejoice in this day. Because love, our holiest blessing Looks for the consummate fruit, marriage of minds, in the end, One perception of things, that together, concerted in seeing, Both to the higher world, truly conjoined, find their way. Translation from German by Michael Hamburger
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 91 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
from T H E O R Y O F C O L O R
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The Blindingly Bright Colorless Form
Looking at a blindingly bright form which is completely without color will leave a strong and lasting impression. The gradual fading of this impression will be accompanied by the phenomenon of color. Let us make a round aperture about three inches across in the window shutter of a darkened room; it should be possible to open and close the aperture at will. We can then allow sunlight to enter so that it shines through the aperture onto a sheet of white paper. After gazing steadily at the illuminated spot from a distance we may close the aperture and look toward the darkest part of the room. We will observe a round image floating before us, one which seems bright and colorless (or tinged slightly yellow), while the rim will immediately appear to have a purple cast. It takes some time for this purple color to spread inward and cover the whole circle, finally displacing the bright center fully. When the entire circle has turned purple the rim will begin to turn blue; the blue will gradually work its way in to take the place of the purple. After the image has become altogether blue the rim will turn dark and colorless. It takes a long while for the colorless rim to replace the blue entirely and render the whole area colorless. The image will then disappear slowly. It does so by simultaneously weakening in intensity and shrinking in size. Here we may once again observe how the retina gradually recovers from a forceful outer impression through a succession of alternating reactions. With my own eyes I have found the following relative times for this effect (verified by several repetitions of the experiment): After gazing at the blindingly bright form for five seconds and then shutting the aperture, I observed the apparent form with its color hovering before me. Thirteen seconds later it appeared entirely purple. It then took twenty-nine seconds for it to turn completely blue, and forty-eight to appear before me without any color at all. By blinking my eyes I revived the form repeatedly so that it took seven minutes to disappear. Other observers will find these times to be shorter or longer depending on the strength or weakness of their eyes. This variable aside, however, it would be of great interest if a specific mathematical ratio could be found in these observations. In the very process of turning our attention to this odd phenomenon, however, we become aware of a new modification in it. After receiving the above impression of light and then turning toward a light gray object in our dimly illuminated room, our eye will again see an image hovering before it—this time a dark one which gradually develops
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a green rim. Like the purple border in the last example, this green border will spread inward to cover the entire disk. After this we will observe a muddy yellow which, like the blue in the previous experiment, will fill the disk and finally yield to a colorless tone. These two experiments may be combined by placing a black surface next to a white one in a dimly illuminated room and looking from one to the other as long as the eye retains the impression of the light. When we do this we will find alternating images in purple and green, and then the rest of the images in turn. After some practice the two opposite colors may be seen at the same time by bringing the floating image to where the surfaces come together. This is easier when the surfaces are far enough away to make the spectral images seem larger. Once, toward evening, I found myself in a smithy just as the glowing metal was laid on the anvil. After gazing intently at this activity for a time, I turned and happened to look into the open doorway of a coal bin. At that moment an enormous purple form floated before my eyes; when I glanced over at a light-colored wooden wall the phenomenon appeared half in green, half in purple depending on whether the background was light or dark. At the time I made no note of how this phenomenon faded. The phenomena associated with the fading of an extremely bright bounded form also occur when the entire retina has been blinded by light. The purple color seen by those who have been blinded by snow belongs in this category, as does the uncommonly beautiful green color seen in dark objects after we gaze at a sheet of white paper lying in the sun. A more exact investigation of these phenomena will await the younger researcher whose eyes can still bear some hard use for the sake of science. Here we should also mention the letters printed in black which appear red when viewed during twilight. Perhaps, too, it is appropriate to include here the story that drops of blood appeared on the table where Henry IV of France sat to play dice with the Duke of Guise. Translation from German by Douglas Miller
COMMENTARY
Schiller preached the gospel of freedom; I wanted to keep intact the rights of nature. J. W. G.
(1) It is not as a conserver of classical traditions but as an originator that we would see him here—from the questionable & self-questioned expres-
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sionism of his early novel (The Sorrows of Young Werther) & Sturm und Drang poetry (pages 64–65) to the defense of the objective, even “objectivist,” side of a romanticism to which he responded both as a forerunner & uncomfortable participant, & as a frequent, sometimes acerbic critic. This objective view, in alignment with a complementary claim to “intuitive perception,” informed both his poetry & his serious & influential empirical studies & scientific writings. The push throughout was toward a unified view of the human & other-than-human within a transformative/transforming physical world—the model too, if we would take him as that, of a poet working at full throttle & a harbinger of ecological practices still to come. Thus a poem like “The Metamorphosis of Plants” (1798) links closely to his scientific writings under the same title—not a conflict between science & art, but a continuity at the heart of a new poetics emerging in his time. Or Goethe himself, writing of his experience both as scientist & poet:
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When I closed my eyes and lowered my head, I could imagine a flower in the center of my visual sense. Its original form never stayed for a moment; it unfolded, and from within it new flowers continuously developed with colored petals or green leaves. These were no natural flowers; they were fantasy flowers, but as regular as rosettes carved by a sculptor. . . . Here the appearance of an afterimage, memory, creative imagination, concept, and idea all work simultaneously, revealing themselves through the unique vitality of the visual organ in complete freedom and without intention or direction. (From a review of Johannes Purkinje’s Contributions to the Study of Sight from a Subjective Standpoint, 1824, translated by Douglas Miller) Beyond Goethe the fusion of poetry with other forms of philosophical & scientific discourse shows up in these pages in works such as Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants, Shelley’s notes to Queen Mab, Coleridge’s Notebooks, & Poe’s Eureka, & in the twentieth-century volumes of Poems for the Millennium, through such diverse poets as Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Miyazawa Kenji, Francis Ponge, & Hugh Macdiarmid. To which might be added Friedrich Schlegel’s directive for the Romantic: “all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one,” as well as Wordsworth’s linking of poetry & science in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, & Whitman’s famous outcry: “Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!” (2) Goethe’s poetic range isn’t bounded, of course, by his scientific oeuvre (important studies of light & color along with works on botany & plant & animal morphology) but extends into a variety of lyric & narrative modes in multiple genres. (For more on which, see the commentary in the preludium, above.) To indicate his range more fully, we have employed a mix of translations, including the attempt by one of us to complete the final two stanzas of Coleridge’s poeticized version of “Mignon’s Song” from Goethe’s novel The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister, and Shelley’s double translation
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(as closed & open verse) of a scene from Goethe’s Faust. The translation of “The Marienbad Elegy” into prose echoes Goethe’s comments to Nerval in praise of Nerval’s prose translation of Faust: “All honor no doubt should be accorded to rhythm and rhyme, for they are the primordial and essential attributes of poetry. But there is in a poetic work something far more crucial and fundamental, something that produces the profoundest of impressions and that works with the greatest effect upon our spirits—namely, that which remains of a poet in prose translation, for only this conveys the true values of the material in all its purity and perfection.”
Willia m Blake
1757–1827
Now I a fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulahs night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep from S O N G S O F I N N O C E N C E A N D O F E X P E R I E N C E
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The Sick Rose
O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. The Divine Image
To Mercy Pity Peace and Love, All pray in their distress: And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness.
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For Mercy Pity Peace and Love, Is God our father dear: And Mercy Pity Peace and Love, Is Man his child and care. For Mercy has a human heart Pity, a human face: And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress. Then every man of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine Love Mercy Pity Peace. And all must love the human form, In heathen, turk or jew. Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too The Human Abstract
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Pity would be no more, If we did not make somebody Poor: And Mercy no more could be, If all were as happy as we; And mutual fear brings peace; Till the selfish loves increase. Then Cruelty knits a snare, And spreads his baits with care. He sits down with holy fears, And waters the ground with tears: Then Humility takes its root Underneath his foot. Soon spreads the dismal shade Of Mystery over his head; And the Catterpiller and Fly, Feed on the Mystery. And it bears the fruit of Deceit, Ruddy and sweet to eat; And the Raven his nest has made In its thickest shade. 96 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The Gods of the earth and sea, Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human Brain The Chimney Sweeper
A little black thing among the snow: Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe! Where are thy father & mother? say? They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath, And smil’d among the winters snow: They clothed me in the clothes of death, And taught me to sing the notes of woe. And because I am happy, & dance & sing, They think they have done me no injury: And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King Who make up a heaven of our misery.
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London
I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
William Blake 97 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
To Tirzah
Whate’er is Born of Mortal Birth, Must be consumed with the Earth To rise from Generation free; Then what have I to do with thee? The Sexes sprung from Shame & Pride Blow’d in the morn: in evening died But Mercy changd Death into Sleep; The Sexes rose to work & weep. Thou Mother of my Mortal part. With cruelty didst mould my Heart. And with false self-decieving tears, Didst bind my Nostrils Eyes & Ears. Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay And me to Mortal Life betray: The Death of Jesus set me free, Then what have I to do with thee?
from A N I S L A N D I N T H E M O O N
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Chap 9
I say this evening [we’d] all get drunk. I say dash. an Anthem an Anthem, said Suction Lo the Bat with Leathern wing Winking & blinking Winking & blinking Winking & blinking Like Doctor Johnson Quid—— O ho Said Doctor Johnson To Scipio Africanus If you dont own me a Philosopher Ill kick your Roman Anus Suction—A ha To Doctor Johnson Said Scipio Africanus
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Lift up my Roman Petticoatt And kiss my Roman Anus And the Cellar goes down with a Step (Grand Chorus Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Hooooo my poooooor siiides die if I was to live here said Scopprell Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho 1st 2d 1 2d
Vo Vo Vo Vo
Want Matches Yes Yes Yes Want Matches No ________
1st 2d 1st 2d
Vo Vo Vo Vo
Want Matches Yes Yes Yes Want Matches No _________
I I should
Here was Great confusion & disorder Aradobo said that the boys in the street sing something very pritty & funny [about London O no] about Matches Then Mrs Nannicantipot sung I cry my matches as far as Guild hall God bless the duke & his aldermen all Then sung Scopprell
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I ask the Gods no more no more no more Then Said Suction come Mr Lawgiver your song and the Lawgiver sung As I walkd forth one may morning To see the fields so pleasant & so gay O there did I spy a young maiden sweet Among the Violets that smell so sweet Smell so sweet Smell so sweet Among the Violets that smell so sweet Hang your Violets heres your Rum & water [sweeter] O ay said Tilly Lally. Joe Bradley & I was going along one day in the Sugar house Joe Bradley saw for he had but one eye [one] saw a treacle Jar So he goes of his blind side & dips his hand up to the shoulder in treacle, here [ll]
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lick lick lick said he Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho then sung Scopprell And I ask the Gods no more no more no more no more no more
For he had but one eye
Ha
Miss Gittipin said he you sing like a harpsichord. let your bounty descend to our fair ears and favour us with a fine song
This frog he would a wooing ride Kitty alone Kitty alone This frog he would a wooing ride Kitty alone & I Sing cock I cary Kitty alone Kitty alone Kitty alone Cock I cary Kitty alone Kitty alone & I Charming truly elegant said Scopprell And I ask the gods no more
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Hang your Serious Songs, said Sipsop
& he sung as follows
Fa ra so bo ro Fa ra bo ra Sa ba ra ra ba rare roro Sa ra ra ra bo ro ro ro Radara Sarapodo no flo ro
T H E M E N TA L T R AV E L L E R
I traveld thro’ a Land of Men A Land of Men & Women too And heard & saw such dreadful things As cold Earth wanderers never knew For there the Babe is born in joy That was begotten in dire woe Just as we Reap in joy the fruit Which we in bitter tears did Sow
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And if the Babe is born a Boy He’s given to a Woman Old Who nails him down upon a rock Catches his Shrieks in Cups of gold She binds iron thorns around his head She pierces both his hands & feet She cuts his heart out at his side To make it feel both cold & heat Her fingers number every Nerve Just as a Miser counts his gold She lives upon his shrieks & cries And She grows young as he grows old Till he becomes a bleeding youth And she becomes a Virgin bright Then he rends up his Manacles And binds her down for his delight
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He plants himself in all her Nerves Just as a Husbandman his mould And She becomes his dwelling place And Garden fruitful Seventy fold An aged Shadow soon he fades Wandring round an Earthly Cot Full filled all with gems & gold Which he by industry had got And these are the gems of the Human Soul The rubies & pearls of a lovesick eye The countless gold of the akeing heart The martyrs groan & the lovers sigh They are his meat they are his drink He feeds the Beggar & the Poor And the way faring Traveller For ever open is his door His grief is their eternal joy They make the roofs & walls to ring Till from the fire on the hearth A little Female Babe does spring
William Blake 101 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
And she is all of solid fire And gems & gold that none his hand Dares stretch to touch her Baby form Or wrap her in his swaddling-band But She comes to the Man she loves If young or old or rich or poor They soon drive out the aged Host A Begger at anothers door He wanders weeping far away Untill some other take him in Oft blind & age-bent sore distrest Untill he can a Maiden win And to Allay his freezing Age The Poor Man takes her in his arms The Cottage fades before his Sight The Garden & its lovely Charms
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The Guests are scatterd thro’ the land For the Eye altering alters all The Senses roll themselves in fear And the flat Earth becomes a Ball The Stars Sun Moon all shrink away A desart vast without a bound And nothing left to eat or drink And a dark desart all around The honey of her Infant lips The bread & wine of her sweet smile The wild game of her roving Eye Does him to Infancy beguile For as he eats & drinks he grows Younger & younger every day And on the desart wild they both Wander in terror & dismay Like the wild Stag she flees away Her fear plants many a thicket wild While he pursues her night & day By various arts of Love beguild
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By various arts of Love & Hate Till the wide desart planted oer With Labyrinths of wayward Love Where roams the Lion Wolf & Boar Till he becomes a wayward Babe And she a weeping Woman Old Then many a Lover wanders here The Sun & Stars are nearer rolld The trees bring forth sweet Extacy To all who in the desart roam Till many a City there is Built And many a pleasant Shepherds home But when they find the frowning Babe Terror strikes thro the region wide They cry the Babe the Babe is Born And flee away on Every side
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For who dare touch the frowning form His arm is witherd to its root Lions Boars Wolves all howling flee And every Tree does shed its fruit And none can touch that frowning form Except it be a Woman Old She nails him down upon the Rock And all is done as I have told
from M I LT O N , B O O K T H E F I R S T
The Vortex
The Seven Angels of the Presence wept over Miltons Shadow! As when a man dreams, he reflects not that his body sleeps, Else he would wake; so seem’d he entering his Shadow: but With him the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence Entering; they gave him still perceptions of his Sleeping Body; Which now arose and walk’d with them in Eden, as an Eighth Image Divine tho’ darken’d; and tho walking as one walks In sleep; and the Seven comforted and supported him. William Blake 103
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Like as a Polypus that vegetates beneath the deep! They saw his Shadow vegetated underneath the Couch Of death: for when he enterd into his Shadow: Himself: His real and immortal Self: was as appeard to those Who dwell in immortality, as One sleeping on a couch Of gold; and those in immortality gave forth their Emanations Like Females of sweet beauty, to guard round him & to feed His lips with food of Eden in his cold and dim repose! But to himself he seemd a wanderer lost in dreary night.
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Onwards his Shadow kept its course among the Spectres; call’d Satan, but swift as lightning passing them, startled the shades Of Hell beheld him in a trail of light as of a comet That travels into Chaos: so Milton went guarded within. The nature of infinity is this: That every thing has its Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro’ Eternity Has passd that Vortex, he percieves it roll backward behind His path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun: Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty, While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth Or like a human form, a friend with whom he livd benevolent. As the eye of man views both the east & west encompassing Its vortex; and the north & south, with all their starry host; Also the rising sun & setting moon he views surrounding His corn-fields and his valleys of five hundred acres square. Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent To the weak traveller confin’d beneath the moony shade. Thus is the heaven a vortex passd already, and the earth A vortex not yet pass’d by the traveller thro’ Eternity. First Milton saw Albion upon the Rock of Ages, Deadly pale outstretchd and snowy cold, storm coverd; A Giant form of perfect beauty outstretchd on the rock In solemn death: the Sea of Time & Space thunderd aloud Against the rock, which was inwrapped with the weeds of death Hovering over the cold bosom, in its vortex Milton bent down To the bosom of death, what was underneath soon seemd above. A cloudy heaven mingled with stormy seas in loudest ruin; But as a wintry globe descends precipitant thro’ Beulah bursting, With thunders loud, and terrible: so Miltons shadow fell, Precipitant loud thundring into the Sea of Time & Space.
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Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star, Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift; And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enterd there; But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe.
from M I LT O N , B O O K T H E S E C O N D
“There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True”
There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True This place is called Beulah, It is a pleasant lovely Shadow Where no dispute can come. Because of those who Sleep. Into this place the Sons & Daughters of Ololon descended With solemn mourning into Beulahs moony shades & hills Weeping for Milton: mute wonder held the Daughters of Beulah Enrapturd with affection sweet and mild benevolence
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Beulah is evermore Created around Eternity; appearing To the Inhabitants of Eden, around them on all sides. But Beulah to its Inhabitants appears within each district As the beloved infant in his mothers bosom round incircled With arms of love & pity & sweet compassion. But to The Sons of Eden the moony habitations of Beulah, Are from Great Eternity a mild & pleasant Rest. And it is thus Created. Lo the Eternal Great Humanity To whom be Glory & Dominion Evermore Amen Walks among all his awful Family seen in every face As the breath of the Almighty. such are the words of man to man In the great Wars of Eternity, in fury of Poetic Inspiration, To build the Universe stupendous: Mental forms Creating But the Emanations trembled exceedingly, nor could they Live, because the life of Man was too exceeding unbounded His joy became terrible to them they trembled & wept Crying with one voice. Give us a habitation & a place In which we may be hidden under the shadow of wings For if we who are but for a time, & who pass away in winter Behold these wonders of Eternity we shall consume But you O our Fathers & Brothers, remain in Eternity
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But grant us a Temporal Habitation. do you speak To us; we will obey your words as you obey Jesus The Eternal who is blessed for ever & ever. Amen So spake the lovely Emanations; & there appeard a pleasant Mild Shadow above: beneath: & on all sides round, Into this pleasant Shadow all the weak & weary Like Women & Children were taken away as on wings Of dovelike softness, & shadowy habitations prepared for them But every Man returnd & went still going forward thro’ The Bosom of the Father in Eternity on Eternity Neither did any lack or fall into Error without A Shadow to repose in all the Days of happy Eternity Into this pleasant Shadow Beulah, all Ololon descended And when the Daughters of Beulah heard the lamentation All Beulah wept, for they saw the Lord coming in the Clouds And the Shadows of Beulah terminate in rocky Albion.
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And all Nations wept in affliction Family by Family Germany wept towards France & Italy: England wept & trembled Towards America: India rose up from his golden bed: As one awakend in the night: they saw the Lord coming In the Clouds of Ololon with Power & Great Glory! And all the Living Creatures of the Four Elements, wail’d With bitter wailing: these in the aggregate are named Satan And Rahab: they know not of Regeneration, but only of Generation The Fairies, Nymphs, Gnomes & Genii of the Four Elements Unforgiving & unalterable: these cannot be Regenerated But must be Created, for they know only of Generation These are the Gods of the Kingdoms of the Earth: in contrarious And cruel opposition: Element against Element, opposed in War Not Mental, as the Wars of Eternity, but a Corporeal Strife In Los’s Halls continual labouring in the Furnaces of Golgonooza Orc howls on the Atlantic: Enitharmon trembles: All Beulah weeps Thou hearest the Nightingale begin the Song of Spring; The Lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the morn Appears; listens silent; then springing from the waving Corn-field! loud He leads the Choir of Day! trill, trill, trill, trill, Mounting upon the wings of light into the Great Expanse: Reecchoing against the lovely blue & shining heavenly Shell:
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His little throat labours with inspiration; every feather On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the effluence Divine All Nature listens silent to him & the awful Sun Stands still upon the Mountain looking on this little Bird With eyes of soft humility, & wonder love & awe. Then loud from their green covert all the Birds begin their Song The Thrush, the Linnet & the Goldfinch, Robin & the Wren Awake the Sun from his sweet reverie upon the Mountain: The Nightingale again assays his song, & thro the day, And thro the night warbles luxuriant; every Bird of Song Attending his loud harmony with admiration & love. This is a Vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon!
from J E R U S A L E M
The Covering Cherub
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Thus was the Covering Cherub reveald majestic image Of Selfhood, Body put off, the Antichrist accursed Coverd with precious stones, a Human Dragon terrible And bright, stretchd over Europe & Asia gorgeous In three nights he devourd the rejected corse of death His Head dark, deadly, in its Brain incloses a reflexion Of Eden all perverted; Egypt on the Gihon many tongued And many mouthd: Ethiopia, Lybia, the Sea of Rephaim Minute Particulars in slavery I behold among the brick-kilns Disorganizd, & there is Pharoh in his iron Court: And the Dragon of the River & the Furnaces of iron. Outwoven from Thames & Tweed & Severn awful streams Twelve ridges of Stone frown over all the Earth in tyrant pride Frown over each River stupendous Works of Albions Druid Sons And Albions Forests of Oaks coverd the Earth from Pole to Pole His Bosom wide reflects Moab & Ammon on the River Pison, since calld Arnon, there is Heshbon beautiful The flocks of Rabbath on the Arnon & the Fish-pools of Heshbon Whose currents flow into the Dead Sea by Sodom & Gomorra Above his Head high arching Wings black filld with Eyes Spring upon iron sinews from the Scapulae & Os Humeri. There Israel in bondage to his Generalizing Gods
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Molech & Chemosh, & in his left breast is Philistea In Druid Temples over the whole Earth with Victims Sacrifice, From Gaza to Damascus Tyre & Sidon & the Gods Of Javan thro the Isles of Grecia & all Europes Kings Where Hiddekel pursues his course among the rocks Two Wings spring from his ribs of brass, starry, black as night But translucent their blackness as the dazling of gems His Loins inclose Babylon on Euphrates beautiful And Rome in sweet Hesperia. there Israel scatterd abroad In martydoms & slavery I behold: ah vision of sorrow! Inclosed by eyeless Wings, glowing with fire as the iron Heated in the Smiths forge, but cold the wind of their dread fury But in the midst of a devouring Stomach, Jerusalem Hidden within the Covering Cherub as in a Tabernacle Of threefold workmanship in allegoric delusion & woe. There the Seven Kings of Canaan & Five Baalim of Philistea Sihon & Og the Anakim & Emim, Nephilim & Gibborim From Babylon to Rome & the Wings spread from Japan Where the Red Sea terminates the World of Generation & Death To Irelands farthest rocks where Giants builded their Causeway Into the Sea of Rephaim, but the Sea oerwhelmd them all.
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COMMENTARY
I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create. (W. B., Jerusalem, 1804) Or again: First Thought is Best in Art, Second in Other Matters. (W. B., quoted by Allen Ginsberg)
(1) Working in relative isolation throughout his life (he might be contrasted in this regard to Goethe & others), Blake’s impact was long delayed but proved him, once it was felt, to be a harbinger of the two centuries ahead. The constantly transformative nature of his work moved from the deliberately naive surface of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) into experiments with open measure, collage, fragmented prose, & those “visionary forms dramatic” that characterized his prophetic & multiphasic books (page 76). His response to injustice & to the revolutionary events that overtook his world may have been the driving engines behind his search for a new language equal to his alienation from the corruption of thought & act he saw around him. Against previous systems (political, religious, sexual, aesthetic) his was a prophetic/ironic creation of an elaborate system of his own, peopled by the figures of his imagination (Orc, Los,
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Urizen, Beulah, etc.) but set in a landscape resembling that of London & England (Albion) in which he lived & worked. By such means he was the champion throughout of imagination over reason, desire over repression, Self-annihilation over selfhood, Minute Particulars over General Forms, & the prolific (productive) over the devouring (consuming). And yet his dialectical/oppositional way of thinking brought such polarities into play without fusing or (con)fusing them. (“Without contraries is no progression,” & again: “Opposition is true friendship.”)
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(2) “Blake . . . knew what interested him and he therefore presents only the essential, only, in fact, what can be presented, and need not be explained. And because he was not distracted, or frightened, or occupied in anything but exact statement, he understood. He was naked, and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal. . . . He approached everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions. There was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him terrifying” (T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood). (3) “Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! . . . believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever; in Jesus our Lord” (W. B. in Preface to Milton, Book the First). Or Diane di Prima at a later time: “the only war that matters is the war against the imagination” (from Rant, in Poems for the Millennium, volume two). For more on Blake, see pages 76, 397, 711, 807, and 895. His 1793 work, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, excerpted elsewhere in these pages & otherwise readily available, is arguably the greatest poem of its time in English.
Jos ep h Jou b ert
1754–1824
from T H E N O T E B O O K S : 1 7 8 9 – 1 7 9 4
1789
—There is no more white paper on the earth and the source of ink has dried up.—Give my pen an iron point, a diamond point, give me leaves of copper; I will engrave on them. . . . —
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— It is not facts, but rumors that cause emotions among the people. What is believed creates everything. Extension is the body of God, as Newton would readily say. — Mixture of dry and wet. Water swells before boiling. 1790
The ears and eyes are the doors and windows of the soul. — . . . And travel through open spaces where one sees nothing but light . . . Like Plato. — . . . They are born old . . .
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1791
Inundation. The Seine wanted to see the Bastille destroyed. It invoked the waters of heaven, and the waters of heaven carried it to the foot of the walls, where those famous towers once reigned, and which the inhabitants of Paris leveled to the ground three times three months and nine days ago. — Are you listening to the ones who keep quiet? — A winter without cold and without fire. — Always to link unknown things to known things. — The republic is the only cure for the ills of the monarchy, and the monarchy is the only cure for the ills of the republic. — — . . . where the accusers are almost always the guilty ones. — The reading of Plato is like mountain air. It does not nourish, but it sharpens our faculties and gives us a taste for fine food. — Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course. — In these times of trouble, one commits and suffers great evil.
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— Everything that has wings is beyond the reach of the laws. — —Nota. We must do as much to read an abbreviation as to read a word written in its entirety. This is because it is the mind that reads and not simply the eyes. — We are in the world as words are in a book. Each generation is like a line, a phrase. — Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking. — The cock sings the hours. It has sung midnight.
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1793
Wisdom is the strength of the weak. — His ink has the colors of the rainbow. — Let heaven forgive the wicked, after they have been punished. — In order to live, we need little life. In order to love, we need much. — It is necessary that something be sacred. — The good is worth more than the best. — What makes civil wars more murderous than other wars is that we can more easily accept having a stranger for an enemy than a neighbor; we do not want to keep the possibility of vengeance so near. — A sluggish river that carries nothing. — Imitate time. It destroys slowly. It eats away, it uses up, it uproots, it detaches and does not rip apart. — In their words one hears the tinkling of their brains. — We need a ladder to the mind. A ladder and rungs.
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1794
Here is the desert. In this silence everything speaks to me: and in your noise everything falls silent. — Freedom. That is to say, independence of one’s body. — The number of books is infinite. — ***My son was born during the night of the 8th and 9th, at two and a quarter hours past midnight. That he one day remember the pains of his mother! — ***we gave the child his names. It was the wise woman who named him, beside the fire, at three o’clock in the afternoon. He is named Victor Joseph, after his mother and myself. That same day I heard the nightingale. — I thought of my own happiness, of the mother’s calm and peace in body and soul, of the fine and decent shape of the child, which is an inestimable good. Though born of a weak mother he is quite strong. His constitution is healthy. He came into this world at Lacédémone. The child and mother are doing well. After so many fears concerning them both, such happily demented fears, I told myself rejoice. — I stayed at home and walked in the little garden to be alone in my joy. Labor was never happier, nursing never less difficult. The child does not seem wicked. — ***The gray bird in the Chaumont woods. — The mother got out of bed. Her thinness is considerable. The child nursed the whole time she was carrying him. Today he opened his eyes more often and longer than usual. He even seemed to want to smile when his aunt tickled him. — Of the last word.—The last word must be the last. It is like a last hand that puts the last nuance on a color, nothing can be added to it. Nuance on nuance—in this way color is formed. Transparency on transparency. —
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Big words. Claim too much attention. — Eye—is the sun of the face. — The sieve of forgetfulness. Or the riddle of forgetfulness. Or: Memory and forgetfulness are the mother and father of the muses. True knowledge is composed of these two things. Or: it holds a riddle in its hand. This riddle is called forgetfulness. — The soul paints itself in our machines. — Tragedy and marionettes. The strings. Undoing the strings. The ropes. — All truths are double or doubled, or they all have a front and a back. — Soul.—It is a lit vapor that burns without consuming itself. Our body is its lantern. Etc. The flame of this vapor is not only light but feeling. Etc. — I have little sap. Etc. — They cannot accustom themselves to lacking nothing. — Prescience. Is it possible?
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Translation from French by Paul Auster
COMMENTARY
. . . And all my stars in a sky. . . . All space is my canvas. Stars fall to me from the mind. And again: Poetry made with little matter: with leaves, with grains of sand, with nothings, etc. J. J.
(1) “A writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that never came to be written, a writer of the first order who paradoxically never managed to produce a book” (Paul Auster), he worked neither from defiance nor reclusiveness but from a modern instinct about what we might call the hypocrisy of closure: “To finish! What a word. We finish nothing when we stop, when we say we have come to the end.” A member of Diderot’s circle until the latter’s death in 1784, a supporter of the French Revolution, & a voluminous letter writer, Joubert lived (in spite of the private nature of his writing practice) very much in the world. As Chateaubriand said of him after his death: “No one has ever forgotten himself so thoroughly and been so concerned with the welfare of others.”
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(2) In the view of Maurice Blanchot, Joubert prefigures Mallarmé’s pathbreaking poem Un coup de dés (in Poems for the Millennium, volume one) in the way his thoughts, his words, while pursued over many years on a day-to-day basis, form a constellation, a “poetry of thought . . . in which one must go from part to part, the spectacle of a simultaneous speech in which everything would be said at once, without confusion, in one flash, complete, peaceful, intimate and in the end uniform.” Unlike Mallarmé’s constellative poetry whose “secret order . . . imitates chance,” Joubert’s projects “a need for relations that are even more rigorous than those of reason but that are pure, light, and free.” In this no single poem emerges, but Joubert catches the necessary interanimation between poetry & prose that both defines his own spare writing & the prose poetry of the next two centuries: “Let us look to beautiful poetry for the material of a beautiful prose.” Or Blanchot again: “What was essentially new and even ahead of his time in his quest: the progress of a thought that does not yet think or of a language of poetry that attempts to return to itself.” (3) “A book that reveals a mind is worth more than one that reveals its subject” ( J. J.).
M a ry Rob in s on
1758–1800
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A LO N D O N S U M M E R M O R N I N G
Who has not wak’d to list the busy sounds Of Summer Morning, in the sultry smoke Of noisy London?—On the pavement hot The sooty Chimney-boy, with dingy face And tatter’d covering, shrilly bawls his trade, Rousing the sleepy House-maid. At the door The Milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell Proclaims the Dustman’s office; while the street Is lost in clouds imperious. Now begins The din of Hackney-coaches, Waggons, Carts; While Tin-men’s shops, and noisy Trunk-makers, Knife-grinders, Coopers, squeaking Cork-cutters, Fruit-barrows, and the hunger-giving cries Of Vegetable-venders, fill the air. Now ev’ry Shop displays its varied trade; And the fresh-sprinkled pavement cools the feet Of early walkers. At the private door The ruddy House-maid twirls the busy mop,
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Annoying the smart ’prentice, or neat girl Tripping with band-box lightly. Now the Sun Darts burning splendor on the glitt’ring pane, Save where the canvas awning throws a shade On the gay merchandize. Now spruce and trim In shops, where beauty smiles with industry, Sits the smart damsel, while the passenger Peeps through the window, watching ev’ry charm. Now Pastry dainties catch the eyes minute Of hummy insects, while the slimy snare Waits to enthral them. Now the Lamp-lighter Mounts the slight ladder, nimbly venturous, To trim the half-fill’d lamp; while at his feet The Pot-boy yells discordant. All along The sultry pavement, the Old Clothes-man cries In tone monotonous, and sidelong views The area for his traffic: now the bag Is slily open’d, and the half-worn suit (Sometimes the pilfer’d treasure of the base Domestic spoiler) for one half its worth Sinks in the green abyss. The porter now Bears his huge load along the burning way: And the poor Poet wakes from busy dreams, To paint the Summer Morning.
TO THE POET COLERIDGE
Rapt in the visionary theme! Spirit Divine! with thee I’ll wander! Where the blue, wavy, lucid stream Mid forest glooms shall slow meander! With thee I’ll trace the circling bounds Of thy new paradise, extended; And listen to the varying sounds Of winds, and foamy torrents blended! Now by the source, which lab’ring heaves The mystic fountain, bubbling, panting, While gossamer its network weaves Adown the blue lawn, slanting—
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I’ll mark thy “sunny dome,” and view Thy “caves of ice,” thy fields of dew, Thy ever-blooming mead, whose flow’r Waves to the cold breath of the moonlight hour! Or when the day-star, peering bright On the grey wing of parting night; While more than vegetating pow’r Throbs, grateful to the burning hour, As summer’s whispered sighs unfold Her million million buds of gold!—
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Then will I climb the breezy bounds Of thy new paradise, extended, And listen to the distant sounds Of winds, and foamy torrents blended! Spirit Divine! with thee I’ll trace Imagination’s boundless space! With thee, beneath thy “sunny dome,” I’ll listen to the minstrel’s lay Hymning the gradual close of day; In “caves of ice” enchanted roam, Where on the glitt’ring entrance plays The moon’s beam with its silv’ry rays; Or, when the glassy stream That through the deep dell flows, Flashes the noon’s hot beam The noon’s hot beam, that midway shows Thy flaming temple, studded o’er With all Peruvia’s lustrous store! There will I trace the circling bounds Of thy new paradise, extended! And listen to the awful sounds Of winds, and foamy torrents blended! And now I’ll pause to catch the moan Of distant breezes, cavern-pent; Now, ere the twilight tints are flown, Purpling the landscape far and wide, On the dark promontory’s side I’ll gather wild flowers, dew besprent, And weave a crown for thee, Genius of heav’n-taught poesy!
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While, opening to my wond’ring eyes, Thou bid’st a new creation rise, I’ll raptured trace the circling bounds Of thy rich paradise, extended, And listen to the varying sounds Of winds, and foamy torrents blended. And now, with lofty tones inviting, Thy nymph, her dulcimer swift-smiting, Shall wake me in ecstatic measures Far, far removed from mortal pleasures; In cadence rich, in cadence strong, Proving the wondrous witcheries of song! I hear her voice—thy “sunny dome,” Thy “caves of ice,” aloud repeat— Vibrations, madd’ning sweet, Calling the visionary wand’rer home. She sings of thee, oh favoured child Of minstrelsy, sublimely wild!— Of thee whose soul can feel the tone Which gives to airy dreams a magic all thy own! SAPPHO
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from S A P P H O A N D P H A O N : S I X S O N N E T S
Sonnet Introductory
Favour’d by Heav’n are those, ordain’d to taste The bliss supreme that kindles fancy’s fire; Whose magic fingers sweep the muses’ lyre, In varying cadence, eloquently chaste! Well may the mind, with tuneful numbers grac’d, To Fame’s immortal attributes aspire, Above the treach’rous spells of low desire, That wound the sense, by vulgar joys debas’d. For thou, blest POESY! with godlike pow’rs To calm the miseries of man wert giv’n; When passion rends, and hopeless love devours, By mem’ry goaded, and by frenzy driv’n, ’Tis thine to guide him ’midst Elysian bow’rs, And shew his fainting soul,—a glimpse of Heav’n.
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Sonnet II
High on a rock, coaeval with the skies, A Temple stands, rear’d by immortal pow’rs To Chastity divine! ambrosial flow’rs Twining round icicles, in columns rise, Mingling with pendent gems of orient dyes! Piercing the air, a golden crescent tow’rs, Veil’d by transparent clouds; while smiling hours Shake from their varying wings—celestial joys! The steps of spotless marble, scatter’d o’er With deathless roses arm’d with many a thorn, Lead to the altar. On the frozen floor, Studded with tear-drops petrified by scorn, Pale vestals kneel the Goddess to adore, While Love, his arrows broke, retires forlorn.
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Sonnet III
Turn to yon vale beneath, whose tangled shade Excludes the blazing torch of noon-day light, Where sportive Fawns, and dimpled Loves invite, The bow’r of Pleasure opens to the glade: Lull’d by soft flutes, on leaves of violets laid, There witching beauty greets the ravish’d sight, More gentle than the arbitress of night In all her silv’ry panoply array’d! The birds breathe bliss! light zephyrs kiss the ground, Stealing the hyacinth’s divine perfume; While from the pellucid fountains glitt’ring round, Small tinkling rills bid rival flow’rets bloom! HERE, laughing Cupids bathe the bosom’s wound; THERE, tyrant passion finds a glorious tomb! Sonnet IV
Why, when I gaze on Phaon’s beauteous eyes, Why does each thought in wild disorder stray? Why does each fainting faculty decay, And my chill’d breast in throbbing tumults rise? Mute, on the ground my Lyre neglected lies, The Muse forgot, and lost the melting lay; My down-cast looks, my faultering lips betray, 118 A First Gallery
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That stung by hopeless passion,—Sappho dies! Now, on a bank of Cypress let me rest; Come, tuneful maids, ye pupils of my care, Come, with your dulcet numbers soothe my breast; And, as the soft vibrations float on air, Let pity waft my spirit to the blest, To mock the barb’rous triumphs of despair! Sonnet V
O! How can LOVE exulting Reason quell! How fades each nobler passion from his gaze! E’en Fame, that cherishes the Poet’s lays, That fame, ill-fated Sappho lov’d so well. Lost is the wretch, who in his fatal spell Wastes the short Summer of delicious days, And from the tranquil path of wisdom strays, In passion’s thorny wild, forlorn to dwell. O ye! who in that sacred Temple smile Where holy Innocence resides enshrin’d; Who fear not sorrow, and who know not guile, Each thought compos’d, and ev’ry wish resign’d; Tempt not the path where pleasure’s flow’ry wile In sweet, but pois’nous fetters, holds the mind.
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Sonnet VI
Is it to love, to fix the tender gaze, To hide the timid blush, and steal away; To shun the busy world, and waste the day In some rude mountain’s solitary maze? Is it to chant one name in ceaseless lays, To hear no words that other tongues can say, To watch the pale moon’s melancholy ray, To chide in fondness, and in folly praise? Is it to pour th’ involuntary sigh, To dream of bliss, and wake new pangs to prove; To talk, in fancy, with the speaking eye, Then start with jealousy, and wildly rove; Is it to loathe the light, and wish to die? For these I feel,—and feel that they are Love.
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COMMENTARY
. . . the Poet’s life is one perpetual scene of warfare: he is assailed by envy, stung by malice, and wounded by the fastidious comments of concealed assassins. The more eminently beautiful his compositions are, the larger is the phalanx he has to encounter; for the enemies of genius are multitudinous.
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M. R., from Preface to Sappho and Phaon
(1) Her poetry of characteristically formal & thematic variety emerged, in the years during & following the French Revolution, as a celebration of the free play of mind around serious social topics (what contemporaries referred to as a “dangerous enthusiasm”) that became the primary feature of her outspoken feminism in Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (see in the preludium). Arguing that “woman is denied the first privilege of nature, the power of SELF-DEFENCE,” she, as much as her more celebrated contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft, took aim at social repression but directly, in her case, through the liberating capacities of poetry: woman has a “mind capable of expansion,” which will allow her “to feel her own importance in the scale of society.” Her own poetry, if not as overtly feminist as her 1799 Letter, nonetheless exhibited the energies & mobility of the radical, mind-expanding British poets writing during & shortly after the French Revolution. As a poet herself, she began her career with playful coterie Della Cruscan leanings (see below) that transformed during the French Revolution into a radical universalist communitarianism. In the 1790s her poetry proliferated dramatically: the long erotic sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon; lyrics of urban description & fashion; the poem “To the Poet Coleridge” of ecstatic visionary absorption; & in her final years the book-length response to Lyrical Ballads called Lyrical Tales (1800), which recounted, as a kind of early witness poem like those of Blake & Wordsworth, the fate on native grounds of disenfranchised persons. She also identified herself with the then popular & nearly mythic figure of Sappho (a heterosexual Sappho, to be sure) as the female poet whose voice erupts in the midst of her pain. In her last work before her death in 1800, Robinson, twelve & fourteen years senior to Wordsworth & Coleridge respectively, proposed to join & thus to push forward into the new century her urbane, feminist poetry with that of the younger poets’ visionary & democratic Romanticism. (2) The so-called Della Cruscan poets began as British exiles in late eighteenth-century Florence, taking their name from an eighteenth-century Italian movement to recover Italy’s cultural traditions recently undermined by the Austrian occupation. Popular in English cities in the late 1780s & early 1790s, the Della Cruscans characteristically wrote a fast-paced poetry of fashion & surface, a poetry, at times, of the signifier. Some effects of this group can be felt not only in Robinson but in poets such as Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Keats, & certain British Postromantics of the later nineteenth century.
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Rob ert Bu rn s
1759–1796
A R E D, R E D R O S E
Tune: Major Graham 1
O, my luve’s like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June. O, my luve’s like the melodie, That’s sweetly play’d in tune. 2
As fair art thou, my bonie lass, So deep in luve am I, And I will luve thee still, my Dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry. 3
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun! O, I will luve thee still, my Dear, While the sands o’ life shall run.
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4
And fare thee weel, my only Luve, And fare thee weel a while! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!
L O V E A N D L I B E R T Y. A C A N T A T A
Recitativo When lyart leaves bestrow the yird, Or wavering like the *Bauckie-bird, Bedim cauld Boreas’ blast; When hailstanes drive wi’ bitter skyte, And infant frosts begin to bite, In hoary cranreuch drest; *The old Scotch name for the Bat. [RB]
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Ae night at e’en a merry core O’ randie, gangrel bodies, In Poosie-Nansie’s held the splore, To drink their orra duddies: Wi’ quaffing and laughing, They ranted an’ they sang; Wi’ jumping an’ thumping The vera girdle rang. First, neist the fire, in auld red rags, Ane sat; weel brac’d wi’ mealy bags, And knapsack a’ in order; His doxy lay within his arm, Wi’ usquebae an’ blankets warm, She blinket on her sodger: An’ ay he gives the tozie drab The tither skelpin’ kiss, While she held up her greedy gab Just like an aumos dish. Ilk smack still, did crack still, Just like a cadger’s whip, Then staggering an’ swaggering He roar’d this ditty up— Air
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Tune: Soldier’s Joy I am a son of Mars who have been in many wars, And show my cuts and scars wherever I come; This here was for a wench, and that other in a trench, When welcoming the French at the sound of the drum. Lal de daudle, &c. My prenticeship I past where my leader breath’d his last, When the bloody die was cast on the heights of Abram; I served out my trade when the gallant game was play’d, And the Moro low was laid at the sound of the drum. Lal de daudle, &c. I lastly was with Curtis, among the floating batt’ries, And there I left for witness an arm and a limb;
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Yet let my country need me, with Elliot to head me, I’d clatter on my stumps at the sound of a drum. Lal de daudle, &c. And now tho’ I must beg with a wooden arm and leg, And many a tatter’d rag hanging over my bum, I’m as happy with my wallet, my bottle and my callet, As when I us’d in scarlet to follow a drum. Lal de daudle, &c. What tho’ with hoary locks, I must stand the winter shocks, Beneath the woods and rocks oftentimes for a home, When the tother bag I sell, and the tother bottle tell, I could meet a troop of hell at the sound of a drum. Lal de daudle, &c. recitativo He ended; and the kebars sheuk, Aboon the chorus roar; While frighted rattons backward leuk, And seek the benmost bore:
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A fairy Fiddler frae the neuk, He skirl’d out encore! But up arose the martial Chuck, And laid the loud uproar. Air Tune: Soldier Laddie I once was a maid, tho’ I cannot tell when, And still my delight is in proper young men; Some one of a troop of dragoons was my daddie, No wonder I’m fond of a sodger laddie. Sing, Lal de lal, &c. The first of my loves was a swaggering blade, To rattle the thundering drum was his trade; His leg was so tight, and his cheek was so ruddy, Transported I was with my sodger laddie. Sing, Lal de lal, &c.
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But the godly old chaplain left him in the lurch, The sword I forsook for the sake of the church; He ventur’d the soul, and I risked the body, ’Twas then I prov’d false to my sodger laddie. Sing, Lal de lal, &c. Full soon I grew sick of my sanctified sot, The regiment at large for a husband I got; From the gilded Spontoon to the Fife I was ready, I asked no more but a sodger laddie. Sing, Lal de lal, &c. But the peace it reduc’d me to beg in despair, Till I met my old boy at a Cunningham fair; His rags regimental they flutter’d so gaudy, My heart it rejoic’d at a sodger laddie. Sing, Lal de lal, &c. And now I have liv’d—I know not how long, And still I can join in a cup or a song; But whilst with both hands I can hold the glass steady, Here’s to thee, my hero, my sodger laddie. Sing, Lal de lal, &c.
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recitativo Then neist outspak a raucle Carlin, Wha kent fu’ weel to cleek the sterling, For mony a pursie she had hooked, And had in mony a well been douked. Her love had been a Highland laddie, But weary fa’ the waefu’ woodie! Wi’ sighs and sobs she thus began To wail her braw John Highlandman. Air Tune: O An Ye Were Dead Guidman A Highland lad my love was born, The Lalland laws he held in scorn; But he still was faithfu’ to his clan, My gallant, braw John Highlandman.
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Sing hey my braw John Highlandman! Sing ho my braw John Highlandman! There’s not a lad in a’ the lan’ Was match for my John Highlandman. With his philibeg an’ tartan plaid, An’ gude claymore down by his side, The ladies’ hearts he did trepan, My gallant, braw John Highlandman. Sing hey, &c. We rang’d a’ from Tweed to Spey, An’ liv’d like lords and ladies gay: For a Lalland face he feared none, My gallant, braw John Highlandman. Sing hey, &c. They banish’d him beyond the sea, But ere the bud was on the tree, Adown my cheeks the pearls ran, Embracing my John Highlandman. Sing hey, &c.
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But Oh! they catch’d him at the last, And bound him in a dungeon fast; My curse upon them every one, They’ve hang’d my braw John Highlandman. Sing hey, &c. And now a widow, I must mourn The pleasures that will ne’er return; No comfort but a hearty can, When I think on John Highlandman. Sing hey, &c. recitativo A pygmy Scraper wi’ his fiddle, Wha us’d to trysts an’ fairs to driddle, Her strappan limb an’ gausy middle He reach’d nae higher, Had hol’d his heartie like a riddle, An’ blawn’t on fire.
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Wi’ hand on hainch, an’ upward e’e, He croon’d his gamut, one, two, three, Then in an Arioso key, The wee Apollo Set off wi’ Allegretto glee His giga solo. Air Tune: Whistle owre the Lave o’t Let me ryke up to dight that tear, An’ go wi’ me an’ be my dear, An’ then your every care an’ fear May whistle owre the lave o’t. Chorus I am a fiddler to my trade, An’ a’ the tunes that e’er I play’d, The sweetest still to wife or maid, Was whistle owre the lave o’t.
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At kirns an’ weddins we’se be there, And O! sae nicely’s we will fair; We’ll bouse about till Daddie Care Sing, whistle owre the lave o’t. I am, &c. Sae merrily’s the banes we’ll pyke, An’ sun oursells about the dyke, An’ at our leisure when ye like, We’ll whistle owre the lave o’t. I am, &c. But bless me wi’ your heav’n o’ charms, An’ while I kittle hair on thairms, Hunger, Cauld, an’ a’ sic harms, May whistle owre the lave o’t. I am, &c. recitativo Her charms had struck a sturdy Caird, As weel as poor Gutscraper;
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He taks the Fiddler by the beard, An’ draws a roosty rapier.— He swoor by a’ was swearing worth, To speet him like a pliver, Unless he would from that time forth, Relinquish her for ever. Wi’ ghastly e’e, poor Tweedle-dee Upon his hunkers bended, An’ pray’d for grace wi’ ruefu’ face, An’ so the quarrel ended. But tho’ his little heart did grieve, When round the Tinkler prest her, He feign’d to snirtle in his sleeve, When thus the Caird address’d her. Air
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Tune: Clout the Caudron My bonny lass I work in brass, A Tinkler is my station; I’ve travell’d round all Christian ground In this my occupation. I’ve ta’en the gold an’ been enroll’d In many a noble squadron; But vain they search’d, when off I march’d To go an’ clout the caudron. I’ve ta’en the gold, &c. Despise that shrimp, that wither’d imp, Wi’ a’ his noise an’ caprin’, An’ tak a share wi’ those that bear The budget an’ the apron. An’ by that stowp! my faith an’ houpe, An’ by that dear *Keilbaigie, If e’er ye want, or meet wi’ scant, May I ne’er weet my craigie. An’ by that stowp, &c. *A peculiar sort of Whisky so called; a great favourite with Poosie Nansie’s clubs. [RB]
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recitativo The Caird prevail’d—th’ unblushing fair In his embraces sunk, Partly wi’ Love o’ercome sae sair, An’ partly she was drunk. Sir Violino with an air, That show’d a man o’ spunk, Wish’d unison between the pair, An’ made the bottle clunk To their health that night.
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But hurchin Cupid shot a shaft That played a dame a shavie, The fiddler rak’d her fore and aft, Behint the chicken cavie. Her lord a wight o’ *Homer’s craft, Tho’ limpan wi’ the spavie, He hirpl’d up, and lap like daft, An’ shor’d them Dainty Davie O’ boot that night. He was a care-defying blade As ever Bacchus listed, Tho’ Fortune sair upon him laid, His heart she ever miss’d it. He had no wish but—to be glad, Nor want but—when he thristed; He hated nought but—to be sad, And thus the Muse suggested, His sang that night. Air Tune: For A’ That, an’ A’ That I am a Bard of no regard, Wi’ gentle folks, an’ a’ that; But Homer-like, the glowran byke, Frae town to town I draw that.
*Homer is allowed to be the oldest ballad singer on record. [RB]
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Chorus For a’ that, an’ a’ that, An’ twice as muckle’s a’ that; I’ve lost but ane, I’ve twa behin’, I’ve wife eneugh for a’ that. I never drank the Muse’s stank, Castalia’s burn, an’ a’ that; But there it streams, and richly reams, My Helicon I ca’ that. For a’ that, &c. Great love I bear to a’ the fair, Their humble slave, an’ a’ that; But lordly will, I hold it still A mortal sin to thraw that. For a’ that, &c. In raptures sweet, this hour we meet, Wi’ mutual love an’ a’ that; But for how lang the flie may stang, Let inclination law that. For a’ that, &c.
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Their tricks and craft have put me daft, They’ve ta’en me in, an’ a’ that; But clear your decks, an’ here’s the sex! I like the jads for a’ that. For a’ that, an’ a’ that, An’ twice as muckle’s a’ that; My dearest bluid, to do them guid, They’re welcome till’t for a’ that. recitativo So sung the bard—and Nansie’s wa’s Shook with a thunder of applause, Re-echo’d from each mouth; They toom’d their pocks, an’ pawn’d their duds, They scarcely left to coor their fuds, To quench their lowan drouth. Then owre again, the jovial thrang,
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The poet did request, To lowse his pack an’ wale a sang, A ballad o’ the best. He rising, rejoicing, Between his twa Deborahs, Looks round him, an’ found them Impatient for the chorus. Air Tune: Jolly Mortals Fill Your Glasses See! the smoking bowl before us, Mark our jovial ragged ring! Round and round take up the chorus, And in raptures let us sing. Chorus A fig for those by law protected! Liberty’s a glorious feast! Courts for cowards were erected, Churches built to please the priest.
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What is title? what is treasure? What is reputation’s care? If we lead a life of pleasure, ’Tis no matter how or where! A fig, &c. With the ready trick and fable, Round we wander all the day; And at night, in barn or stable, Hug our doxies on the hay. A fig, &c. Does the train-attended carriage Thro’ the country lighter rove? Does the sober bed of marriage Witness brighter scenes of love? A fig, &c. Life is all a variorum, We regard not how it goes; Let them cant about decorum
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Who have characters to lose. A fig, &c. Here’s to budgets, bags and wallets! Here’s to all the wandering train! Here’s our ragged brats and callets! One and all cry out, Amen! A fig for those by law protected! Liberty’s a glorious feast! Courts for cowards were erected, Churches built to please the priest.
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G LO S S A RY
arioso—melodious aumous dish—wooden alms dish banes—bones benmost bore—innermost hole beuk—book blinket—leered Boreas’ blast—North Wind bowse—booze, drink braw—fine cadger’s whup—beggar’s whip caird—gypsy callets—wenches caudron—cauldron cauld—cold cavie—hen coup chiel—fellow Claymore—broadsword cleek the Sterlin—steal the money clout—mend coor—cover core—crowd craigie—throat cranreuch—hoarfrost croon’d—whispered daffin—fun
dight—wipe douked—ducked driddle—play dyke—stone wall fou—drunk fuds—behinds gab—mouth gausy—boxom girdle—iron baking plate glowran byke—staring crowd gutscraper—fiddler hirpl’d—limped hizzie—girl hunkers—knees hurchin—urchin kebars sheuk—rafters shook kirns—harvest home lalland—lowland lap, leapedlave—remainder lowse—untie lyart—withered martial chuck—soldier’s whore mealy bags—oat meal neuk—corner niest—next
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orra duddies—spare rags pliver—plover Poosie-Nansie—merry meeting rak’d—had sex with randie, gangrel bodies—disorderly vagrants rattons—rats reams—froths riddle—sieve ryke—reach sair—sure shavie—trick skelpan—smacking skyte—lash smack—kiss snirtle—snigger sodger—soldier speet—spit stank—fountain
stirk—bullock stoiter’d—staggered stowp—cup Syne—then thraw—frustrate thristed—thirsted tinkler—tinker toom’d their pocks—emptied their pockets towsing—touching up tozie drab—tipsy trepan—ensnare trysts—cattle market usquebae—whisky wa’s—walls wale—select woodie—gallows yird—ground
COMMENTARY
Sae I’ve begun to scrawl, but whether / In rhyme, or prose, or baith thegither, / Or some hotch-potch that’s rightly neither, / Let time mak proof; / But I shall scribble down some blether / Just clean aff-loof. Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
R. B., “To the Same” ( John Lapraik)
(1) At the heart of his poetry, particularly that written in Scots dialect, is a “Presbyterian radicalism” leveled against a repressive theocratic control over the people, with its vision of our innately sinful & fallen nature. The liberatory energy of his poems reminds us of Blake’s with their defiant celebration of the erotic & the implicit location of the divine within “the human breast.” Burns’s radicalism, perhaps reaching its heights in his first major publication, Poems, Chiefly in the Scots Dialect (1786), & later in Love & Liberty (a.k.a. The Jolly Beggars), more precisely anticipates that of Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads as an early manifestation of the demotic in lyric poetry—here expressed through song, Scots folk culture, & a partly constructed, fully orchestrated, presentation of a Scots dialect. Here Burns insists on the necessity of a “subaltern” language in poetry (see also the Italian example of Belli, below) placed in direct opposition to “normative” English. (2) Almost immediately Burns became a Romantic “genius,” coupled with Thomas Chatterton by Wordsworth, most authentically poetic when young, poor, instinctive, & vulnerable to the noxious power of the society against
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which he wrote, “fired,” as Charlotte Smith said, “with the love of freedom!” Keats granted him the logic of the radical with respect to the erotic & over & against the repressive dictums of the Scottish kirk, commenting: “Were the fingers made to squeeze a guinea or a white hand? Were the Lips made to hold a pen or a kiss?” A more complex Burns caught the attention of a similarly inclined Byron: “What an antithetical mind!—tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness—sentiment, sensuality—soaring and groveling, dirt and deity—all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!” This poet of diversity helps prepare the way for the high value placed on poetic juxtaposition among more experimental twentieth-century poets. Indeed, the epigraph, above, captures an element of the linguistically playful & spontaneous in Burns’s poems, linked to the juxtaposition of the demotic with the formally aristocratic, which, again, must have sparked Byron in his improvvisatore mode (see below). Burns was the source & model for the twentieth-century Scots revival among poets, the most significant of whom was Hugh McDiarmid (see Poems for the Millennium, volume one). (3) Elsewhere titled The Jolly Beggars by an early editor, the cantata grew out of direct encounters with Scottish street performers & represented Burns’s principal attempt at a full-scale performance work. Set aside by him during his lifetime, it first came into print a few years after his death & into performance sometime later. Its lineage follows from what David Daiches called “a long line of songs and poems in goliardic vein which goes far back into the Middle Ages.” Wrote that eminent Victorian Matthew Arnold in a mixture of shock & awe at its democratic vistas: “The world of Chaucer is fairer, richer, more significant than that of Burns; but when the largeness and freedom of Burns gets full sweep, as in ‘Tam o’ Shanter,’ or still more in that puissant and splendid production, ‘The Jolly Beggars,’ there is more than hideousness and squalor, there is bestiality; yet the piece is a superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach’s cellar, of Goethe’s Faust, seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by Shakespeare and Aristophanes.”
J ean Pau l [R icht er ]
1763–1825
F I R S T F LOW E R - P I E C E Speech of the Dead Christ from the Top of the Universe: That There Is No God
If we hear, in childhood, that the Dead, about midnight, when our sleep reaches near the soul, and darkens even our dreams, awake out of theirs, and in the church mimic the worship of the living, we shudder at Death
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by reason of the dead, and in the night-solitude turn away our eyes from the long silent windows of the church, and fear to search in their gleaming, whether it proceed from the moon. Childhood, and rather its terrors than its raptures, take wings and radiance again in dreams, and sport like fire-flies in the little night of the soul. Crush not these flickering sparks!—Leave us even our dark painful dreams as higher half-shadows of reality!—And wherewith will you replace to us those dreams, which bear us away from under the tumult of the waterfall into the still heights of childhood, where the stream of life yet ran silent in its little plain, and flowed towards its abysses, a mirror of the Heaven?— I was lying once, on a summer evening, in the sunshine; and I fell asleep. Methought I awoke in the Churchyard. The down-rolling wheels of the steeple-clock, which was striking eleven, had awakened me. In the emptied night-heaven I looked for the Sun; for I thought an eclipse was veiling him with the Moon. All the Graves were open, and the iron doors of the charnel-house were swinging to and fro by invisible hands. On the walls flitted shadows, which proceeded from no one, and other shadows stretched upwards in the pale air. In the open coffins none now lay sleeping but the children. Over the whole heaven hung, in large folds, a grey sultry mist; which a giant shadow, like vapour, was drawing down, nearer, closer and hotter. Above me I heard the distant fall of avalanches; under me the first step of a boundless earthquake. The Church wavered up and down with two interminable Dissonances, which struggled with each other in it; endeavouring in vain to mingle in unison. At times, a grey glimmer hovered along the windows, and under it the lead and iron fell down molten. The net of the mist, and the tottering Earth brought me into that hideous Temple; at the door of which, in two poison-bushes, two glittering Basilisks lay brooding. I passed through unknown Shadows, on whom ancient centuries were impressed.—All the Shadows were standing round the empty Altar; and in all, not the heart, but the breast quivered and pulsed. One dead man only, who had just been buried there, still lay on his coffin without quivering breast; and on his smiling countenance stood a happy dream. But at the entrance of one Living, he awoke, and smiled no longer; he lifted his heavy eyelids, but within was no eye; and in his beating breast there lay, instead of a heart, a wound. He held up his hands and folded them to pray; but the arms lengthened out and dissolved; and the hands, still folded together, fell away. Above, on the Church-dome, stood the dial-plate of Eternity, whereon no number appeared, and which was its own index: but a black finger pointed thereon, and the Dead sought to see the time by it.
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Now sank from aloft a noble, high Form, with a look of uneffaceable sorrow, down to the Altar, and all the Dead cried out, “Christ! is there no God?” He answered, “There is none!” The whole Shadow of each then shuddered, not the breast alone; and one after the other, all, in this shuddering, shook into pieces. Christ continued: “I went through the Worlds, I mounted into the Suns, and flew with the Galaxies through the wastes of Heaven; but there is no God! I descended as far as Being casts its shadow, and looked down into the Abyss and cried, Father, where art thou? But I heard only the everlasting storm which no one guides, and the gleaming Rainbow of Creation hung without a Sun that made it, over the Abyss, and trickled down. And when I looked up to the immeasurable world for the Divine Eye, it glared on me with an empty, black, bottomless Eye-socket; and Eternity lay upon Chaos, eating it and ruminating it. Cry on, ye Dissonances; cry away the Shadows, for He is not!” The pale-grown Shadows flitted away, as white vapour which frost has formed with the warm breath disappears; and all was void. O, then came, fearful for the heart, the dead Children who had been awakened in the Churchyard into the Temple, and cast themselves before the high Form on the Altar, and said, “Jesus, have we no Father?” And he answered, with streaming tears, “We are all orphans, I and you: we are without Father!” Then shrieked the Dissonances still louder,—the quivering walls of the Temple parted asunder; and the Temple and the Children sank down, and the whole Earth and the Sun sank after it, and the whole Universe sank with its immensity before us; and above, on the summit of immeasurable Nature, stood Christ, and gazed down into the Universe chequered with its thousand Suns, as into the Mine bored out of the Eternal Night, in which the Suns run like mine-lamps, and the Galaxies like silver veins. And as he saw the grinding press of Worlds, the torch-dance of celestial wildfires, and the coral-banks of beating hearts; and as he saw how world after world shook off its glimmering souls upon the Sea of Death, as a water-bubble scatters swimming lights on the waves, then majestic as the Highest of the Finite, he raised his eyes towards the Nothingness, and towards the void Immensity, and said: “Dead, dumb Nothingness! Cold, everlasting Necessity! Frantic Chance! Know ye what this is that lies beneath you? When will ye crush the Universe in pieces, and me? Chance, knowest thou what thou doest, when with thy hurricanes thou walkest through that snow-powder of Stars, and extinguishest Sun after Sun, and that sparkling dew of heavenly lights goes out as thou passest over it? How is each so solitary in this wide grave of the All! I am alone
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with myself! O Father, O Father! where is thy infinite bosom, that I might rest on it? Ah, if each soul is its own father and creator, why cannot it be its own destroyer too? “Is this beside me yet a Man? Unhappy one! Your little life is the sigh of Nature, or only its echo; a convex-mirror throws its rays into that dust-cloud of dead men’s ashes down on the Earth; and thus you, cloudformed wavering phantasms, arise.—Look down into the Abyss, over which clouds of ashes are moving; mists full of Worlds reek up from the Sea of Death; the Future is a mounting mist, and the Present is a falling one.—Knowest thou thy Earth again?” Here Christ looked down, and his eyes filled with tears, and he said: “Ah, I was once there; I was still happy then; I had still my Infinite Father, and looked up cheerfully from the mountains into the immeasurable Heaven, and pressed my mangled breast on his healing form, and said, even in the bitterness of death: Father, take thy son from this bleeding hull, and lift him to thy heart!—Ah, ye too happy inhabitants of Earth, ye still believe in Him. Perhaps even now your Sun is going down, and ye kneel amid blossoms, and brightness, and tears, and lift trustful hands, and cry with joy-streaming eyes to the opened Heaven: ‘Me too thou knowest, Omnipotent, and all my wounds; and at death thou receivest me, and closest them all!’ Unhappy creatures, at death they will not be closed! Ah, when the sorrow-laden lays himself, with galled back, into the Earth, to sleep till a fairer Morning full of Truth, full of Virtue and Joy,—he awakens in a stormy Chaos, in the everlasting Midnight,—and there comes no Morning, and no soft healing hand, and no Infinite Father!—Mortal, beside me! if thou still livest, pray to Him; else hast thou lost him forever!” And as I fell down, and looked into the sparkling Universe, I saw the upborne Rings of the Giant-Serpent, the Serpent of Eternity, which had coiled itself round the All of Worlds,—and the Rings sank down, and encircled the All doubly; and then it wound itself, innumerable ways, round Nature, and swept the Worlds from their places, and crashing, squeezed the Temple of Immensity together, into the Church of a Buryingground,—and all grew strait, dark, fearful,—and an immeasurablyextended Hammer was to strike the last hour of Time, and shiver the Universe asunder, . . . WHEN I AWOKE. My soul wept for joy that I could still pray to God; the joy, and the weeping, and the faith on him were my prayer. And as I arose, the Sun was glowing deep behind the full purpled corn-ears, and casting meekly the gleam of its twilight-red on the little Moon, which was rising in the East without an Aurora; and between the sky and the earth, a gay transient air-people was stretching out its short wings, and living, as I did, 136 A First Gallery
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before the Infinite Father; and from all Nature around me flowed peaceful tones as from distant evening-bells. Translation from German by Thomas Carlyle
COMMENTARY
The whole spiritual Universe is dashed asunder by the hand of Atheism into numberless quicksilver points of Me’s, which glitter, run, waver, fly together or asunder, without unity or continuance.
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J. P., Preamble to “First Flower-Piece”
(1) But what remains most fixed in mind is the paraphrase by Nerval of Jean Paul’s nightmare line: “god is dead! the sky is empty / weep, children, you no longer have a father” (page 488). Given momentum by Jean Paul’s translators—Staël in France, Carlyle in England—it comes at us most forcefully through Nietzsche and for a while becomes a shaping proposition for twentieth-century thought & (dis)belief, a major inheritance from an earlier romanticism. As such the dream presented here was from a work that he called “flower-, fruit & thorn-pieces” (1796–97) & would be better read in the context of Jean Paul’s total oeuvre. In that light he emerges as a master of a “romantic irony” that pushes inexorably toward the surrealist “black humor” enunciated by André Breton (1948) & practiced by Kafka & Beckett, among others. Linked to Sterne & Voltaire among his predecessors—even more to Shakespeare, as in the first version of the present work that he titled “Lament of the Dead Shakespeare”—his contribution puts the “humoristic”/ comic / absurd alongside the ethereal/ephemeral/infinite at the heart of the romantic project. In the German original, Jean Paul’s stance is expressed in a language marked by “quirky vocabulary, . . . wayward syntax, . . . [and] endless metaphors” that makes him, writes Timothy Casey, “the most taxing of German writers.” It is to be remembered, too, that “Speech of the Dead Christ,” like much of his work, is a great dream narrative in which Jean Paul’s “I” echoes that of the Dead Christ, & that he later forces himself into awakening from what appears as the nightmare of an empty/emptied universe. (2) “By our definition romantic poetry, as opposed to plastic poetry, delights in presenting the infinity of the subject in which the object-world loses its limits as in a kind of moonlight. But how will the comic become romantic, since it consists merely in contrasting the finite with the finite and cannot allow any infinity? . . . If Friedrich [von] Schlegel is right in maintaining that the romantic is not a species of poetry, but that poetry must always be romantic [page 901], then the same is even more true of the comic; all comic poetry must become romantic, i.e., humoristic” (Jean Paul, “On Humoristic Poetry,” in School for Aesthetics, 1804). And Novalis in acknowledgment: “Jean Paul could possibly be called a humoristic epic poet. He is also an (instinctively) natural, encyclopaedic humorist.”
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G erma in e d e St a ël
1766–1817
CO R I N N E ’ S I M P R OV I S AT I ON I N T H E N A P L E S CO U N T RYS I D E
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Her lyre was ready, and all her friends were impatient to hear her. Even the ordinary people who knew her by reputation, those ordinary people who, in the South, are, through their imaginations, good judges of poetry, silently surrounded the enclosure where Corinne’s friends were gathered. Through their animated expressions all these Neapolitan faces expressed the keenest attention. . . . So, by common accord, all Corinne’s friends asked her to take the memories aroused by these places as the subject for the verses she was about to sing. She tuned her lyre and, in a faltering voice, began. . . . “Nature, poetry, and history are rivals in grandeur here. Here, at a glance, one can survey all times and all marvels. “I glimpse Lake Averno, an extinct volcano, whose waves used to inspire terror in former times; the Acheron, the Phlegethon, made to boil by a subterranean flame, are the rivers of the hell to which Aeneas made his way. “Fire, that consuming life which creates and destroys the world, was all the more terrifying in that its laws were less well known. In the past, nature revealed its secrets only to poetry. “The city of Cumae, the Sibyl’s grotto, Apollo’s temple, were on this hill. Here is the wood where the golden bough was plucked. The land of the Aeneid surrounds you, and the fictions sanctified by genius have become memories, of which we still seek the traces. “A Triton thrust into these waters the rash Trojan who, with his songs, dared defy the gods of the sea. These hollow, resonant rocks are those that Virgil described. Imagination is faithful when it is all-powerful. Man’s genius is creative when he feels nature, imitative when he thinks he is inventing it. “In the midst of these terrible piles of rock, these ancient witnesses of creation, can be seen a new mountain, which a volcano brought into being. Here the earth is stormy like the sea and, like the sea, does not retreat peacefully to its boundaries. The heavy element, lifted up by the quaking abyss, hollows out valleys, raises up mountains, and its petrified waves bear witness to the tempests that tear its heart apart. “If you strike this ground, the subterranean vault re-echoes. It is as if the inhabited world is now no more than a surface about to open. The Neapolitan countryside is the image of the human passions: sulphurous and fertile, its dangers and its pleasures seem to stem from these flam-
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ing volcanoes, which give the air so many charms and make the thunder rumble beneath our feet. “Pliny studied nature, the better to admire Italy. He applauded his country as the most beautiful of lands, when he could no longer honour it on other grounds. Seeking knowledge as a warrior does conquests, he set off from this very promontory to observe Vesuvius through the flames, and its flames devoured him. “Oh, memory, noble power, thou reignest in these places! Strange destiny! From century to century man laments what he has lost. It is as if times gone by are all, in their turn, depositories of a happiness which is no more. And whilst thought takes pride in its progress, and leaps forward into the future, our feeling seems to regret a former homeland brought closer by the past. “We envy the magnificence of the Romans, but did they not envy the virile simplicity of their ancestors? In the past they despised this luxuriant countryside, and its delights subdued only their enemies. Look at faraway Capua; it conquered the warrior whose unyielding soul resisted Rome longer than anyone in the whole world. “In their turn, the Romans inhabited these places. When the soul’s strength served only the better to feel shame and grief, they grew soft with no regrets. At Baiae we saw them overcome the sea to make a shore for their palaces. They dug into mountains to wrest columns from them, and the masters of the world, slaves in their turn, subjugated nature to console themselves for being subjugated. “Cicero lost his life near the promontory of Gaeta, which we can see before us. With no concern for posterity, the Triumvirate robbed it of the ideas this great man might have conceived. The Triumvirate’s crime still endures. It is still against us that they sinned grievously. “Cicero succumbed beneath the tyrants’ dagger. More unfortunate, Scipio was banished from his land when it was still free. He ended his days not far from this shore, and the ruins of his tomb are called The Tower of the Fatherland. What a touching allusion to the memory which filled his great soul! “Marius took refuge in the Minturnae marshes, near Scipio’s home. Thus, in all ages, nations have persecuted their great men. They are consoled, however, by their apotheoses, and heaven, where the Romans believed they still commanded, receives amongst its stars Romulus, Numa, and Caesar. They are new stars, which, for our vision, combine rays of glory and celestial light. “As if misfortunes were not enough, the traces of all crimes are here. See, at the end of the bay, the island of Capri, where Tiberius was dis-
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armed by old age. There, that soul, at once cruel and sensual, violent and weary, became bored even with crime and wanted to immerse himself in the basest pleasures as if tyranny had not yet degraded him enough. “Agrippina’s tomb is on these banks, opposite the island of Capri. It was built only after Nero’s death. The murderer of his own mother proscribed even her ashes. For a long time he lived at Baiae, amongst the memories of his crime. What monsters chance has brought together before our eyes! Tiberius and Nero look upon each other. “Almost from their birth, the islands brought out from the sea by the volcanoes were used in the commission of the ancient world’s crimes. Relegated to these lonely rocks, in the midst of the waves, the unfortunates gazed from a distance at their native land; they tried to breathe its scents in the atmosphere, and sometimes, after a long exile, a sentence of death told them that their enemies, at least, had not forgotten them. “Oh, land bathed in blood and tears, thou hast never ceased to produce fruit and flowers! Hast thou then no pity for man? And does his dust return to thy maternal bosom without making it tremble?” At this point, Corinne paused for a few moments. All those gathered together there for the festivities cast branches of myrtle and laurel at her feet. The gentle, pure moonlight made her face more beautiful; the fresh sea wind blew her hair about in a picturesque manner, and nature seemed to enjoy adorning her. But Corinne was suddenly gripped by an irresistible emotion; she looked round at the enchanting place and the wonderful evening, at Oswald who was there but perhaps would not always be there, and tears flowed from her eyes. Even the common people, who had just applauded her so noisily, respected her emotion, and they all waited silently for her words to tell them of her feelings. For a time she played a prelude on her lyre, and no longer dividing her song into eight-line stanzas, in her poetry she gave herself up to an uninterrupted flow. “Some memories of love, some women’s names, also demand your tears. It was at Miseno, in the very place where we are, that Pompey’s widow Cornelia remained in noble mourning till her death. For a long time on its shores, Agrippina wept for Germanicus. One day, the same assassin who robbed her of her husband deemed her worthy of following him. The island of Nisida witnessed the farewells of Brutus and Porcia. “Thus these women, beloved by heroes, saw their adored husbands perish. It was in vain that for a long time they followed in their steps. The day came when they had to leave them. Porcia kills herself. Cornelia presses to her heart the sacred urn which no longer responds to her cries. For several years Agrippina vainly angers her husband’s murderer. These
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unhappy creatures, wandering like shades on the devastated shores of the eternal river, long to land on the other bank. In their long solitude, they question the silence, and ask all nature, this starry sky as well as this deep sea, for a sound of a cherished voice, for an accent they will hear no more. “Love, supreme power of the heart, mysterious passion, containing within itself poetry, heroism, and religion! What happens when destiny separates us from the man who has the secret of our soul and gave us the life of the heart, celestial life? What happens when absence or death isolates a woman on the earth? She languishes, she falls. How often the rocks surrounding us have given their cold support to these deserted widows, who once leaned on a lover’s breast, on a hero’s arm! “Before you is Sorrento. There was the home of Tasso’s sister when, as a pilgrim, he came to ask this humble loved one for a refuge against the injustice of princes. His long suffering had almost made him lose his reason. All that was left to him was his genius. Only his knowledge of the divine remained; all the images of the earth were confused. Thus, frightened by the surrounding desert, talent searches all over the universe but finds nothing like itself. Nature responds to it no longer; ordinary people take for madness the malady of the soul which can no longer breathe enough air, enough emotion, enough hope, in this world. “Fate,” continued Corinne with ever-increasing emotion, “does not fate pursue exalted souls, poets whose imagination springs from the force of their love and suffering? They are those banished from another region; it was not to be that universal goodness should arrange everything for the small number of the elect or the proscribed. What did the ancients mean when they spoke of destiny with so much terror? What power has this destiny over ordinary, peaceful beings? They follow the seasons, they quietly follow the usual course of life. But the priestess who interpreted the oracles felt disturbed by a cruel power. I know not what involuntary power plunges the genius into misfortune. He hears the music of the spheres, which mortal ears are not made to grasp. He penetrates mysteries of feeling unknown to other men, and his soul conceals a God that it cannot contain! “Sublime Creator of this beautiful countryside, protect us! Our enthusiastic outbursts have no power, our hopes are illusory. The passions control us with a tumultuous tyranny that leaves us with neither liberty nor peace. Perhaps our fate will be decided by what we do tomorrow; perhaps yesterday we said a word that nothing can redeem. When our minds rise to very noble thoughts, we feel a dizziness which confuses our vision of everything, as we do at the top of high buildings. But even
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when grief, terrible grief, is not lost in the clouds, it tears through them, it partly opens them. Oh, God, but what does it want to tell us?” Translation from French by Sylvia Raphael
CORINNE’S LAST SONG
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A young girl, dressed in white and crowned with flowers, appeared on a kind of amphitheatre that had been prepared. It was she who was to sing Corinne’s lines. There was a touching contrast between her face, so calm and sweet, a face not yet marked by life’s troubles, and the words she was about to utter, but Corinne liked this very contrast. It spread a kind of serenity on the extremely gloomy thoughts of her dejected soul. Noble, sensitive music prepared the listeners for the impression they were about to receive. . . . “Fellow citizens, listen to my solemn greeting. Darkness already draws near to my vision, but is not the sky more beautiful at night? Thousands of stars adorn it. By day, it is but a desert. The eternal shadows reveal countless thoughts which gleaming prosperity made us forget. But the voice which could tell of them gradually grows faint. The soul withdraws into itself and seeks to gather up its last warmth. “From my earliest youth, I promised to bring honour to the name of Roman which still thrills my heart. You have allowed me glory, oh, liberal nation, you who do not banish women from your temple, you who do not sacrifice immortal talents to passing jealousies, you who always applaud the soaring flight of genius, that victor with no vanquished, that conqueror with no spoils, who draws on eternity to enrich the scope of time. “In the past, nature and life used to inspire in me so much confidence! I used to think that all misfortunes were the result of not thinking enough, of not feeling everything enough. I thought, too, that, on earth, one could already savour celestial bliss which is merely continuance of passion and fidelity in love. “No, I do not repent of that noble rapture, of that uplifting passion. No, that is not what made me shed tears, which still water the dust that awaits me. If I had devoted my resounding lyre to sing the praises of the divine generosity revealed in the universe, I should have fulfilled my destiny, I should have been worthy of Heaven’s bounty. “Oh God, you do not reject the tribute of talent; the homage of poetry is religious, and the wings of thought serve to bring us closer to you.
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“There is nothing narrow, nothing servile, nothing restricted, in religion. It is the immense, the infinite, the eternal. Genius is far from being likely to turn away from it. The imagination, right from its first flight, outstrips life’s limits, and the sublime in every genre is a reflection of the divine. “Oh, if I had loved only the divine, if I had raised my head to heaven when I would be shielded from passionate affections, I would not be prematurely destroyed; ghosts would not have taken the place of my brilliant fantasies. Unhappy woman! My genius, if it still survives, makes its presence felt only by the strength of my pain. It is in the shape of a hostile power that it can still be recognized. “So, farewell, my country, so, farewell the country where I saw the light of day. Childhood memories, farewell. What have you to do with death? You, who found in my writings feelings which responded to those in your own soul, oh, friends, wherever you may be, farewell. It was not for an ignoble cause that Corinne suffered so much. At least she has not lost her right to be pitied. “Beautiful Italy, you promise me all your charms in vain. What could you do for a deserted heart? Would you revive my desires to increase my pain? Would you remind me of happiness to make me rebel against my lot? “I submit to it serenely. Oh, you who survive me, when spring comes, remember how I loved its beauty, how many times I sang the praises of its air and its perfumes. Remember my verses sometimes, for my soul is stamped on them. But deadly muses, love, and unhappiness have inspired my last songs. “When Providence’s intentions for us have been carried out, an inner music prepares us for the arrival of the angel of death. There is nothing frightening, nothing terrible, about him. His wings are white, though he goes surrounded by darkness. But before his arrival, a thousand omens herald his coming. “If the wind sighs, you think you hear his voice. When daylight is fading, great shadows in the countryside seem like folds of his trailing gown. At midday, when those possessed of life see only a cloudless sky, perceive only a beautiful sun, he who is claimed by the angel of death sees a cloud in the distance, a cloud which, for his eyes, will soon cover all nature. “Hope, youth, emotions of the heart, all is over with them. Far from me are bitter regrets. If I still can shed a few tears, if I still feel loved, it is because I am about to disappear. But if I were to regain a hold on life, it would soon turn all its daggers against me. “And you, Rome, where my ashes will be conveyed, you who have seen so many die, if, with trembling step, I join your illustrious dead, for-
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give me for complaining. Perhaps noble, fruitful feelings and thoughts die with me, and of all the faculties of the heart I receive from nature, that of suffering is the only one I have fully put into practice. “No matter, let us submit. The great mystery of death, whatever it may be, must grant peace. You assure me of that, silent tombs; you assure me of that, beneficent divinity! I had made a choice on earth and my heart no longer has a refuge. You decide for me; my fate will be the better for it.” Translation from French by Sylvia Raphael
COMMENTARY
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Men of wit are so astounded by the existence of women rivals that they cannot judge them with either an adversary’s generosity or protector’s indulgence. This is a new kind of combat, in which men follow the laws of neither kindness nor honor. (G. de S., from On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions, 1800) And again: In monarchies, women have ridicule to fear; in a republic, hatred. If not a poet in the ordinary sense, Staël created through her novel Corinne, or Italy (1807) the image of a woman poet that would have an extraordinary afterlife in the century to come. A writer & presence of considerable power, she was also one of the principal voices of Romanticism—the key link in France to the German Romantics, both philosophers & poets, many of whom she knew personally, as well as to British, Swedish, & Russian intellectuals, politicians, & statesmen. As a well-connected & persistently political figure—she was in fact the daughter of Louis XVI’s Swiss-born chief minister, Jacques Necker—she remained active in France throughout the French Revolution but was sent into exile by Napoleon in 1803. This enhanced her international ties & her ability to spread ideas across national boundaries—Italy in Corinne, Germany in De l’Allemagne & other works—& contributed to what became an extraordinary international reputation. As such it prefigured the mix of cosmopolitanism & exile that would be the fate (imposed or chosen) of many poets & artists from then to now. In Corinne, Staël’s poetic accomplishment is twofold. The Corinne figure is herself the heroic image of a “female genius” whose intelligence & abilities as a poet (a modern Sappho, as some would have it, and even associated by Staël herself with the ecstatic-prophetic Roman Sibyl) are remarkable & contribute to her doom in a male-dominated world from which she cannot break free. That combination—most often tilted toward the sentimentally “tragic,” though Staël was also at times a strongly feminist presence—became a paradigm for other writers, some of whom directly identified with Corinne or wrote elegiac poems in imitation of her “final
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song” & other poems inserted in the novel. More strikingly still—at least for some of us—the fictive Corinne fed an interest in improvisation & the female improvvisatrici & male improvvisatori who carried it off. The thrust here was toward an improvised & public poetry, never realized as such but appearing as a theme for a range of nineteenth-century poets (Coleridge, Byron, Beddoes, Hemans, Landon) & reemerging nearer to the mark in twentieth-century experiments with automatic writing, orality, & spontaneous composition. At the same time there were actual improvising poets active in Italy & some—Tommaso Sgricci for one (known to Byron & the Shelleys), Corilla (Maria Maddalena Morelli, whose life was an actual model for Staël’s Corinne) for another—with reputations reaching well beyond there. (Diderot’s brilliant eighteenth-century improvising “nephew” has been noted in our preludium.) It should be noted, too, that Staël, in her versions of Corinne’s improvised songs, is an early practitioner of prose as an instrument for poetry—in that sense one of a number of forerunners of the nineteenth-century prose poem. Before the more general acceptance of the open form, Staël’s prose provided the nucleus for metrical variations, like those of Letitia Landon, composed for Isabel Hills’s English translation of Corinne (1833). Landon’s self-identification with Corinne (“Corinne is but another name for her who wrote”) brought her both a considerable degree of fame & condemnation for the implications of Corinne’s behavior when brought into an actual life. Of her own potentialities—& Corinne’s as well—Landon wrote in paraphrase & with possible echoes of Byron’s Childe Harold: “There is a power / Given to some minds to fashion and create, / Until the very being present on the page / Is actual to our life’s vitality! / Such was Corinne—and such the mind that gave / Its own existence to its work.”
F ried rich Höld erlin
1770–1843
I ONCE ASKED THE MUSE
I once asked the muse, and she Replied: You will find it in the end. No mortal can grasp it. Of the Highest I will not speak. But, above all, one’s native land Is forbidden fruit, like laurel. Of which Everyone shall taste in the end,
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Most deceptive are beginning And end. Yet the sign from heaven Come last, it snatches and men Away. This is what Hercules No doubt feared. But since we were born Dull, falcons are needed Whose flight horsemen Follow on hunts. In when And the Prince and fire and smoke flower On the parched green, But distinct from this, the voice Of the Prince, soothing The battle, surges from strong lungs.
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An artist makes vessels. Bought by but when it Comes to judgment, Chastely grazed By some demigod’s lips And bestows what he loves most Upon the barren, For from now on, the sacred Is no longer fit for use. Translation from German by Richard Sieburth
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IN THE FOREST
You noble beasts. But a man lives in huts, dressed in shame, the more inward he is, the more attentive also, and protects his spirit as the priestess protects the heavenly flame; this is the limit of his understanding, and why his wilfullness and greater ability to succeed and fail are given him; godly creature; and of these powers language is the most dangerous, so that creating, destroying, being annihilated, and returning to her, the mother and mistress, bear witness to what he is, having learned from her, the most godly, an all-encompassing love. He is homeless. No sign Binds. Not ever A glass to contain him.
There are three good things.
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I have no wish To destroy your symbols. and keeping the sacrament holy Holds our souls Together, the ones that God gives us, life-light Companion To our end. By all means, differences are good. Each and every Has its own existence.
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the dark leaf, And its Audible growth and the Syrian soil crushed, and flames underfoot Burning And nausea Overcoming me from desperate hunger Friedrich with his bitten cheek Eisenach The famous Barbarossa Conradin Ugolino— Eugenius Heaven’s ladder Time’s departure and they leave each other in peace
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Thus Mohammed,† Rinaldo, Barbarossa, as free spirit Emperor Heinrich. We confuse the times we live in. Demetrius Poliorcetes Peter the Great Heinrich’s Crossing the Alps and with His own hands he gave the people food and drink and his son Conrad died of poison Perfect visionary reformer Conradin, etc. all relations characteristic
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†Hear the watchman’s horn at night The fifth hour after midnight
Tende Strömfeld Simonetta. Teufen Amyclae Aveiro on the river Vouga the family Alencastro its Name therefrom Amalasuntha Antegon Anathem Ardinghellus Sorbonne Celestine and Innocent interrupted the lecture and named it the Nursery of French Bishops— Aloisia Sigea differentia vitae urbanae et rusticae Thermidon a river in Cappadocia Valtelino Schönberg Scotus Schönberg Tenerife Venafro Region of Olympus. Weissbrunn in Lower Hungary. Zamora Jaca Baccho Imperiali. Genoa Larissa in Syria
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Sulaco
When the vineyard is in flames And looks black as coal Around the time In autumn, because The reeds of life breathe fire In shadows of the vines, but How pretty when the soul unfolds And this brief life.
And the sky becomes a painter’s house With all his pictures on display.
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Near Thebes and Tiresias! The ground too barren for me.
Like the man who eats men, He who lives without (Love) and describing shadows, his eyes Would fill with anger
Quite simply this time, but often Something happens inside one’s head, impossible To understand, but when a freeman Goes out for a walk, he finds the path waiting
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As for the horses, an endless desire For life, as when nightingales Sing their sweet-home-song or the snow goose Sings with longing above The circle of earth
stripes of blue lilies Do you know the work Of artists alone or like Deer roaming in the heat. Not Without restrictions.
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Narcissi, ranunculi, and Syringas from Persia Flowers, pink carnations, black and pearl hyacinths growing, As when instead of music Heralding an entrance There’s the scent of an evil thought, My son should forget to enter Loving relationships and this life Christopher’s dragon has exactly Nature’s walk and spirit and shape
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He should take Everything Except the tallest trees To a pure place Where someone Scatters ashes and burns the wood with fire.
From pagan Io Bacche, let them learn to work with their hands And, by the same means. Be Forward or avenged. Vengeance, In fact, should return to its source. While we are raw, don’t let God Lash us with waves. To be sure, We are godless, Common folk all, Whom God tests Like nobility, Yet it’s forbidden To glorify this. But the heart knows A hero. It’s for me To speak of my country. Don’t Begrudge me that. In the same way, A carpenter makes A cross.
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Sword and hidden knife, when sharpened more or less well, But don’t let our country become Too small a place. Heavy is the To lie at rest, feet and hands outstretched. Only air.
knavish comical to laugh, when a man’s boldest hopes come true
I must build
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and erect new Temples of Theseus and the stadiums and where Pericles lived
But there is no money, too much was spent today. I entertained a guest and we sat together
Translation from German by Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover
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PA L I M P S E S T: CO LU M B U S
†HEAR THE WATCHMAN’S HORN AT NIGHT AFTER MIDNIGHT AROUND THE FIFTH HOUR Thus Mohammed † Rinaldo, Columbus
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Barbarossa, qua free spirit If there were a hero I wanted to be of a pastor or of a Hessian, (whose native And could freely, with the voice admit it speech Emperor Henry It would then be a hero of the sea. For to undertake action () (Is) To (spoil) nothing, is the friendliest of all, that But we are getting our dates Among all confused Demetrius Poliorand order, absolutely Familiar, temporary dwelling essential cetes in order to learn and figures Peter the Great , parched beauty (s) Henry’s In the sand vessels ( ) burnt, Night and crossing of the Alps and that Out of fire, full of images, finely polished with his own hands he gave the people food and drink & his son Con(Spyglass) telescope (higher law) higher edu- and it is necessary cation, in fact for rad died To question the sky life of poison Model of an innovator Of a reformer Conradin etc.
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But when you name them over Anson and Gama and buccaneers, and Aeneas And (Doria)?, Jason, Chiron’s all characteristic rock caves and The pupil in Magara’s (grottoes) of circumstances shivering In the rain of the grotto was taking shape As on the (well-tempered) lyre a human image From the impression of the forest, and the Templars, who (voyage) voyaged Buccaneers, voyages of discovery To Jerusalem Bouillon, Rinaldo Bougainville Their number is great
as attempts to define the (orbis) Hesperidean
But they themselves are greater
orbis, (in contrast) as against the
And strike dumb
the orbis of the ancients
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the men
Nonetheless
And I want to go to Genoa And inquire after the house of Columbus Where he, as if
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One were one of the gods and a wondrous thing Humankind, perhaps (seated) light In front of the granary, come from Sicily Lived in his sweet youth but one turns back Essentially, like a print-seller, standing there displaying images of the Do you think lands of the grandees (a) and sings also The splendors of the earth [ ]
But since you (ask) You ask me As far as my heart carries me, things will be fine
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According to custom and art as in the marketplace Columbus examines a map
But boarding the ship ils crient rapport, il fermés maison tu es un saisrien
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while they were shouting There was an impatient grumbling, for By a few paltry things
Manna and bread from heaven
The As if thrown out of tune by the snow It makes me bitter this The bell that lack of angry patience and kindness One rings my judge and guardian god and hastened ([ ]) with prophesying and For supper /of prayer so that (it) great commotion, / with goodwill And they thought they were monks. For we are men And one, an orator Stepped forth Yet out there, so that Plunge in O streams (p) (ce) and like a we would leave Of love and entiere personne content grace of God de son ame difficultes connoissance parson the place, thus called and luck in his rapport tire in a blue powerfully commanding to comprehend the powers, O images Of youth jacket the crew the voice of the seagod, as in Genoa, back then so pure, by which The earthly kingdom, Greek, imagined by a child Powerfully under my eyes
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earth
Heroes recognize, whether they have Lulled to sleep, fleeting poppy spirit gone right or wrong— suddenly to me Appeared You are all this in your beauty
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You are all this in your beauty apocalyptica lui moments tirees hautes sommeils the mariner a les Columbus aside
pleures
Hypostasization of the previous Naivete of science Passion for And sighing together, at the hour orbis After the heat of day They now saw,
For indeed there were many lovely (cities) isles, so that With Lisbon And Genoa divided; For alone one can (not) Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Bear the wealth of the gods All alone; though the reins might be loosened by a demigod, but for the Highest It is hardly enough To act
where daylight shines
And the moon, (therefore)
Friedrich Hölderlin 157 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
therefore
so
In fact (back then) often, when
Ursprung der Loyoté EȣȞȠȝȚĮ, ȤĮıȚȖȞȘtĮȚ tİ, ȕĮ—
It gets too lonely
șȡȠȞ ʌȠȜȚȦȞ, ĮıijĮȜȘȢ dȚȤĮ
(too lonely)
ȤĮȚ ȠȝȠIJȡȠʌȠȢ İȚȡĮȞĮ, IJĮȝȚĮȚ
For the gods, so that they
ĮȞdȡĮıȚ ʌȜȠȣIJȠȣ, ȤȡȣıİĮȚ
stick together alone
ʌĮȚdİȢ İȣȕȠȣȜȠȣ șİȝȚIJȠȢ
or the earth; for (in pain) all too pure is
Either
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But then
[ ] traces of ancient breeding Translation from German by Richard Sieburth
COMMENTARY
Is there measure on earth? There is none. No created world ever hindered the course of thunder. A Flower is likewise lovely, blossoming as it does under the sun. The eye often discovers creatures in life it would be yet lovelier to name than flowers. O, this I know! F. H., from “In Lovely Blue,” translated by Richard Sieburth: a text attributed to Hölderlin in Wilhelm Waiblinger’s 1823 novel Phaeton
(1) A veil of madness lies over the vision . . . as it will with others. But its first results, before its isolation overtakes him, is to allow silences—shown 158 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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as blank spaces—an entry to the poem, by which the poem-as-fragment becomes a field of energies, a kind of palimpsest or map, the process of his thinking/searching rendered on the page. It is something of this sort—a form of action writing that the translator Richard Sieburth describes as “the pace at which verbal relations come to be perceived”—that Hölderlin spoke of as the “rhythm of representation,” to be rendered (as here) through a “configuration of gaps and breaches.” Within that configuration—at its extreme in the later notebooks—the levels of language swing from distortions of Greek-based syntax & high-flown biblical intonations to the gutsier voice of his Swabian dialect. And with it all, he sees himself in a space in which the history of poetry & thought, of mythology & religion, is reconsidered from its most archaic roots, as what Vico, writing some eighty years before him, would have called “the language of the gods.” While there is also a legacy of completed works (the early poems, his play Empedocles, his novel Hyperion), the palimpsestic version of “Columbus” & the assemblage of fragments in In the Forest are derived, like many of the still later “hymns & fragments,” from notebook sketches, written & overwritten in the years just preceding his confinement. Their recovery a hundred years later thrust Hölderlin’s romanticism into the twentieth century—as a poet, in effect, of the new movements & poetries emerging then. (2) The confinement for Hölderlin came in 1806 & lasted until his death in 1843, most of it under guardianship in the tower of a house along the Neckar River in Tübingen. The writing continued, but always unterwegs, never completed, & in his final years he signed himself as “Scardinelli” & added made-up dates to his work, ranging from “March 24, 1671” to “March 9, 1940.” But the consciousness was there from before—a concept of the “momentarily incomplete,” which segued with the poetics of the Jena Group (page 201) & signaled an attempt, he wrote, “to attain within individual moments the totality [the poet] strives for.” Or Martin Heidegger, of the deeper sources here: “[In] the shaking of Chaos, which offers no support, the terror of the immediate, which frustrates every intrusion, the holy is transformed, through the quietness of the protected poet, into the mildness of the mediated and mediating word.” (3) Richard Sieburth’s note to his translation of “Columbus” (= “this fragmentary Columbiad”): “Based on D. E. Sattler’s transcription of Hölderlin’s original manuscript, the various drafts (or ‘phases’) of the poem [are distinguished] by different styles of type in order to display the palimpsestlike quality of Hölderlin’s late manuscripts. In this printing, the various temporal strata of the text are indicated in chronological order by: regular roman type, italic type, bold type, bold italics, and CAPITALS.” Adds Sieburth, concerning Hölderlin’s further range: “The French phrases [in ‘Columbus’] that punctuate the text in Poundian fashion may be snippets overheard in the ports of Bordeaux during Hölderlin’s residence in that city; the French, at any rate, is pure Hölderlinian idiolect. The Greek at the
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end of the poem is from Pindar’s Thirteenth Olympian: ‘Dika, unshakable foundation of cities, / and Eirena, preserver of wealth: / golden daughters of sagacious Themis. / They are eager to repel / Hybris, brash-tongued mother of Koros. / Yet there is beauty / to tell of here, / and boldness moves me / to tell it.’ (trans. Frank Nisetich).”
William Word swort h
1770–1850
L I N E S W R I T T E N I N E A R LY S P R I N G
I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.
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Through primrose-tufts, in that sweet bower, The periwinkle trailed its wreathes; And ’tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. The birds around me hopped and played: Their thoughts I cannot measure, But the least motion which they made, It seemed a thrill of pleasure. The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there. If I these thoughts may not prevent, If such be of my creed the plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man?
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THE FEMALE VAGRANT
By Derwent’s side my Father’s cottage stood, (The Woman thus her artless story told) One field, a flock, and what the neighbouring flood Supplied, to him were more than mines of gold. Light was my sleep; my days in transport roll’d: With thoughtless joy I stretch’d along the shore My father’s nets, or watched, when from the fold High o’er the cliffs I led my fleecy store, A dizzy depth below! his boat and twinkling oar.
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My father was a good and pious man, An honest man by honest parents bred, And I believe that, soon as I began To lisp, he made me kneel beside my bed, And in his hearing there my prayers I said: And afterwards, by my good father taught, I read, and loved the books in which I read; For books in every neighbouring house I sought, And nothing to my mind a sweeter pleasure brought. Can I forget what charms did once adorn My garden, stored with pease, and mint, and thyme, And rose and lilly for the sabbath morn? The sabbath bells, and their delightful chime; The gambols and wild freaks at shearing time; My hen’s rich nest through long grass scarce espied; The cowslip-gathering at May’s dewy prime; The swans, that, when I sought the water-side, From far to meet me came, spreading their snowy pride. The staff I yet remember which upbore The bending body of my active sire; His seat beneath the honeyed sycamore When the bees hummed, and chair by winter fire; When market-morning came, the neat attire With which, though bent on haste, myself I deck’d; My watchful dog, whose starts of furious ire, When stranger passed, so often I have check’d; The red-breast known for years, which at my casement peck’d.
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The suns of twenty summers danced along,— Ah! little marked, how fast they rolled away: Then rose a mansion proud our woods among, And cottage after cottage owned its sway, No joy to see a neighbouring house, or stray Through pastures not his own, the master took; My Father dared his greedy wish gainsay; He loved his old hereditary nook, And ill could I the thought of such sad parting brook.
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But, when he had refused the proffered gold, To cruel injuries he became a prey, Sore traversed in whate’er he bought and sold: His troubles grew upon him day by day, Till all his substance fell into decay. His little range of water was denied; All but the bed where his old body lay, All, all was seized, and weeping, side by side, We sought a home where we uninjured might abide. Can I forget that miserable hour, When from the last hill-top, my sire surveyed, Peering above the trees, the steeple tower, That on his marriage-day sweet music made? Till then he hoped his bones might there be laid, Close by my mother in their native bowers: Bidding me trust in God, he stood and prayed,— I could not pray:—through tears that fell in showers, Glimmer’d our dear-loved home, alas! no longer ours! There was a youth whom I had loved so long, That when I loved him not I cannot say. ’Mid the green mountains many and many a song We two had sung, like little birds in May. When we began to tire of childish play We seemed still more and more to prize each other: We talked of marriage and our marriage day; And I in truth did love him like a brother, For never could I hope to meet with such another. His father said, that to a distant town He must repair, to ply the artist’s trade. What tears of bitter grief till then unknown!
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What tender vows our last sad kiss delayed! To him we turned:—we had no other aid. Like one revived, upon his neck I wept, And her whom he had loved in joy, he said He well could love in grief: his faith he kept; And in a quiet home once more my father slept. Four years each day with daily bread was blest, By constant toil and constant prayer supplied. Three lovely infants lay upon my breast; And often, viewing their sweet smiles, I sighed, And knew not why. My happy father died When sad distress reduced the children’s meal: Thrice happy! that from him the grave did hide The empty loom, cold hearth, and silent wheel, And tears that flowed for ills which patience could not heal.
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’Twas a hard change, an evil time was come; We had no hope, and no relief could gain. But soon, with proud parade, the noisy drum Beat round, to sweep the streets of want and pain. My husband’s arms now only served to strain Me and his children hungering in his view: In such dismay my prayers and tears were vain: To join those miserable men he flew; And now to the sea-coast, with numbers more, we drew. There foul neglect for months and months we bore, Nor yet the crowded fleet its anchor stirred. Green fields before us and our native shore, By fever, from polluted air incurred, Ravage was made, for which no knell was heard. Fondly we wished, and wished away, nor knew, ’Mid that long sickness, and those hopes deferr’d, That happier days we never more must view: The parting signal streamed, at last the land withdrew. But from delay the summer calms were past. On as we drove, the equinoctial deep Ran mountains—high before the howling blast. We gazed with terror on the gloomy sleep Of them that perished in the whirlwind’s sweep, Untaught that soon such anguish must ensue,
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Our hopes such harvest of affliction reap, That we the mercy of the waves should rue. We reached the western world, a poor, devoted crew. Oh! dreadful price of being to resign All that is dear in being! better far In Want’s most lonely cave till death to pine, Unseen, unheard, unwatched by any star; Or in the streets and walks where proud men are, Better our dying bodies to obtrude, Than dog-like, wading at the heels of war, Protract a curst existence, with the brood That lap (their very nourishment!) their brother’s blood.
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The pains and plagues that on our heads came down, Disease and famine, agony and fear, In wood or wilderness, in camp or town, It would thy brain unsettle even to hear. All perished—all, in one remorseless year, Husband and children! one by one, by sword And ravenous plague, all perished: every tear Dried up, despairing, desolate, on board A British ship I waked, as from a trance restored. Peaceful as some immeasurable plain By the first beams of dawning light impress’d, In the calm sunshine slept the glittering main. The very ocean has its hour of rest, That comes not to the human mourner’s breast. Remote from man, and storms of mortal care, A heavenly silence did the waves invest; I looked and looked along the silent air, Until it seemed to bring a joy to my despair. Ah! how unlike those late terrific sleeps! And groans, that rage of racking famine spoke, Where looks inhuman dwelt on festering heaps! The breathing pestilence that rose like smoke! The shriek that from the distant battle broke! The mine’s dire earthquake, and the pallid host Driven by the bomb’s incessant thunder-stroke To loathsome vaults, where heart-sick anguish toss’d, Hope died, and fear itself in agony was lost!
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Yet does that burst of woe congeal my frame, When the dark streets appeared to heave and gape, While like a sea the storming army came, And Fire from Hell reared his gigantic shape, And Murder, by the ghastly gleam, and Rape Seized their joint prey, the mother and the child! But from these crazing thoughts my brain, escape! —For weeks the balmy air breathed soft and mild, And on the gliding vessel Heaven and Ocean smiled.
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Some mighty gulph of separation past, I seemed transported to another world:— A thought resigned with pain, when from the mast The impatient mariner the sail unfurl’d, And whistling, called the wind that hardly curled The silent sea. From the sweet thoughts of home, And from all hope I was forever hurled. For me—farthest from earthly port to roam Was best, could I but shun the spot where man might come. And oft, robb’d of my perfect mind, I thought At last my feet a resting-place had found: Here will I weep in peace, (so fancy wrought,) Roaming the illimitable waters round; Here watch, of every human friend disowned, All day, my ready tomb the ocean-flood— To break my dream the vessel reached its bound: And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined, and wanted food. By grief enfeebled was I turned adrift, Helpless as sailor cast on desart rock; Nor morsel to my mouth that day did lift, Nor dared my hand at any door to knock. I lay, where with his drowsy mates, the cock From the cross timber of an out-house hung; How dismal tolled, that night, the city clock! At morn my sick heart hunger scarcely stung, Nor to the beggar’s language could I frame my tongue. So passed another day, and so the third: Then did I try, in vain, the crowd’s resort, In deep despair by frightful wishes stirr’d,
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Near the sea-side I reached a ruined fort: There, pains which nature could no more support, With blindness linked, did on my vitals fall; Dizzy my brain, with interruption short Of hideous sense; I sunk, nor step could crawl, And thence was borne away to neighbouring hospital. Recovery came with food: but still, my brain Was weak, nor of the past had memory. I heard my neighbours, in their beds, complain Of many things which never troubled me; Of feet still bustling round with busy glee, Of looks where common kindness had no part, Of service done with careless cruelty, Fretting the fever round the languid heart, And groans, which, as they said, would make a dead man start.
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These things just served to stir the torpid sense, Nor pain nor pity in my bosom raised. Memory, though slow, returned with strength; and thence Dismissed, again on open day I gazed, At houses, men, and common light, amazed. The lanes I sought, and as the sun retired, Came, where beneath the trees a faggot blazed; The wild brood saw me weep, my fate enquired, And gave me food, and rest, more welcome, more desired. My heart is touched to think that men like these, The rude earth’s tenants, were my first relief: How kindly did they paint their vagrant ease! And their long holiday that feared not grief, For all belonged to all, and each was chief. No plough their sinews strained; on grating road No wain they drove, and yet, the yellow sheaf In every vale for their delight was stowed: For them, in nature’s meads, the milky udder flowed. Semblance, with straw and pauniered ass, they made Of potters wandering on from door to door: But life of happier sort to me pourtrayed, And other joys my fancy to allure; The bag-pipe dinning on the midnight moor In barn uplighted, and companions boon
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Well met from far with revelry secure, In depth of forest glade, when jocund June Rolled fast along the sky his warm and genial moon. But ill it suited me, in journey dark O’er moor and mountain, midnight theft to hatch; To charm the surly house-dog’s faithful bark. Or hang on tiptoe at the lifted latch; The gloomy lantern, and the dim blue match, The black disguise, the warning whistle shrill, And ear still busy on its nightly watch, Were not for me, brought up in nothing ill; Besides, on griefs so fresh my thoughts were brooding still.
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What could I do, unaided and unblest? Poor Father! gone was every friend of thine: And kindred of dead husband are at best Small help, and, after marriage such as mine, With little kindness would to me incline. Ill was I then for toil or service fit: With tears whose course no effort could confine, By high-way side forgetful would I sit Whole hours, my idle arms in moping sorrow knit. I lived upon the mercy of the fields, And oft of cruelty the sky accused; On hazard, or what general bounty yields, Now coldly given, now utterly refused, The fields I for my bed have often used: But, what afflicts my peace with keenest ruth Is, that I have my inner self abused, Foregone the home delight of constant truth, And clear and open soul, so prized in fearless youth. Three years a wanderer, often have I view’d, In tears, the sun towards that country tend Where my poor heart lost all its fortitude: And now across this moor my steps I bend— Oh! tell me whither—for no earthly friend Have I.—She ceased, and weeping turned away, As if because her tale was at an end She wept;—because she had no more to say Of that perpetual weight which on her spirit lay.
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N I N E S O N N E T S : F R O M LO N D O N TO PA R I S, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 1802 Composed upon Westminster Bridge [Begun July 31, 1802, Completed Sept. 3, 1802]
Written on the roof of a coach, on my way to France.
Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!
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Composed by the Sea-Side, near Calais, August 1802
Fair Star of Evening, Splendour of the West, Star of my Country! on the horizon’s brink Thou hangest, stooping, as might seem, to sink On England’s bosom; yet well pleas’d to rest, Meanwhile, and be to her a glorious crest Conspicuous to the Nations. Thou, I think, Should’st be my Country’s emblem; and should’st wink, Bright Star! with laughter on her banners, drest In thy fresh beauty. There! that dusky spot Beneath thee, it is England; there it lies. Blessings be on you both! one hope, one lot, One life, one glory! I, with many a fear For my dear Country, many heartfelt sighs, Among men who do not love her, linger here.
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Calais, August 1802
Is it a reed that’s shaken by the wind, Or what is it that ye go forth to see? Lords, Lawyers, Statesmen, Squires of low degree, Men known, and men unknown, Sick, Lame, and Blind, Post forward all, like Creatures of one kind, With first-fruit offerings crowd to bend the knee In France, before the new-born Majesty. ’Tis ever thus. Ye men of prostrate mind, A seemly reverence may be paid to power; But that’s a loyal virtue, never sown In haste, nor springing with a transient shower: When truth, when sense, when liberty were flown What hardship had it been to wait an hour? Shame on you, feeble Heads, to slavery prone!
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To a Friend, Composed near Calais, on the Road Leading to Ardres, August 7, 1802
Jones! when from Calais southward you and I Travell’d on foot together; then this Way, Which I am pacing now, was like the May With festivals of new-born Liberty: A homeless sound of joy was in the sky; The antiquated Earth, as one might say, Beat like the heart of Man: songs, garlands, play, Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh! And now, sole register that these things were, Two solitary greetings have I heard, “Good-morrow, Citizen!” a hollow word, As if a dead Man spake it! Yet despair I feel not: happy am I as a Bird: Fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair. Calais, August 15, 1802
Festivals have I seen that were not names: This is young Buonaparte’s natal day, And his is henceforth an established sway, Consul for life. With worship France proclaims Her approbation, and with pomps and games.
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Heaven grant that other Cities may be gay! Calais is not: and I have bent my way To the Sea-coast, noting that each man frames His business as he likes. Another time That was, when I was here long years ago: The senselessness of joy was then sublime! Happy is he, who, caring not for Pope, Consul, or King, can sound himself to know The destiny of Man, and live in hope. “It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free”
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This was composed on the beach near Calais, in the autumn of 1802.
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquillity; The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea: Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder—everlastingly. Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear’st untouch’d by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine: Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year; And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not. September 1, 1802
Among the capricious acts of tyranny that disgraced those times, was the chasing of all Negroes from France by decree of the government: we had a Fellow-passenger who was one of the expelled.
We had a fellow-Passenger who came From Calais with us, gaudy in array, A Negro Woman, like a lady gay, Yet silent as a woman fearing blame; Dejected, meek, yea pitiably tame, She sate, from notice turning not away, But on our proffered kindness still did lay
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A weight of languid speech, or at the same Was silent, motionless in eyes and face. She was a Negro Woman driv’n from France, Rejected like all others of that race, Not one of whom may now find footing there; This the poor Out-cast did to us declare, Nor murmur’d at the unfeeling Ordinance. Written in London, September 1802
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This was written immediately after my return from France to London, when I could not but be struck, as here described, with the vanity and parade of our own country, especially in great towns and cities, as contrasted with the quiet, and I may say the desolation, that the revolution had produced in France. This must be borne in mind, or else the reader may think that in this and the succeeding Sonnets I have exaggerated the mischief engendered and fostered among us by undisturbed wealth. It would not be easy to conceive with what a depth of feeling I entered into the struggle carried on by the Spaniards for their deliverance from the usurped power of the French. Many times have I gone from Allan Bank in Grasmere vale, where we were then residing, to the top of the Raise-gap as it is called, so late as two o’clock in the morning, to meet the carrier bringing the newspaper from Keswick. Imperfect traces of the state of mind in which I then was may be found in my Tract on the Convention of Cintra, as well as in these Sonnets.
O Friend! I know not which way I must look For comfort, being, as I am, opprest, To think that now our life is only drest For show; mean handywork of craftsman, cook, Or groom! We must run glittering like a Brook In the open sunshine, or we are unblest: The wealthiest man among us is the best: No grandeur now in nature or in book Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore: Plain living and high thinking are no more: The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws.
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London, 1802
Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart: Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea; Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life’s common way, In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
from T H E P R E L U D E , B O O K F I F T H
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Books
Even in the steadiest mood of reason, when All sorrow for thy transitory pains Goes out, it grieves me for thy state, O Man, Thou paramount Creature! and thy race, while Ye Shall sojourn on this planet; not for woes Which thou endur’st; that weight, albeit huge, I charm away; but for those palms atchiev’d, Through length of time, by study and hard thought, The honours of thy high endowments; there My sadness finds its fuel. Hitherto, In progress through this Verse, my mind hath look’d Upon the speaking face of earth and heaven As her prime Teacher, intercourse with man Establish’d by the sovereign Intellect, Who through that bodily Image hath diffus’d A soul divine which we participate, A deathless spirit. Thou also, Man, hast wrought, For commerce of thy nature with itself, Things worthy of unconquerable life; And yet we feel, we cannot chuse but feel
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That these must perish. Tremblings of the heart It gives, to think that the immortal being No more shall need such garments; and yet Man, As long as he shall be the Child of Earth, Might almost “weep to have” what he may lose, Nor be himself extinguish’d; but survive Abject, depress’d, forlorn, disconsolate. A thought is with me sometimes, and I say, Should earth by inward throes be wrench’d throughout, Or fire be sent from far to wither all Her pleasant habitations, and dry up Old Ocean in his bed left sing’d and bare, Yet would the living Presence still subsist Victorious: and composure would ensue, And kindlings like the morning; presage sure, Though slow perhaps, of a returning day! But all the meditations of mankind, Yea, all the adamantine holds of truth, By reason built, or passion, which itself Is highest reason in a soul sublime; The consecrated works of Bard and Sage, Sensuous or intellectual, wrought by men, Twin labourers and heirs of the same hopes, Where would they be? Oh! why hath not the mind Some element to stamp her image on In nature somewhat nearer to her own? Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail? One day, when, in the hearing of a Friend, I had given utterance to thoughts like these, He answer’d with a smile, that, in plain truth ’Twas going far to seek disquietude; But, on the front of his reproof, confess’d That he, at sundry seasons, had himself Yielded to kindred hauntings. And forthwith Added, that, once, upon a summer’s noon, While he was sitting in a rocky cave By the sea-side, perusing, as it chanced, The famous History of the Errant Knight, Recorded by Cervantes, these same thoughts Came to him; and to height unusual rose
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While listlessly he sate, and having closed The Book, had turn’d his eyes towards the Sea. On Poetry, and geometric Truth, The knowledge that endures, upon these two, And their high privilege of lasting life, Exempt from all internal injury, He mused; upon these chiefly: and at length His senses yielding to the sultry air, Sleep seiz’d him, and he pass’d into a dream. He saw before him an Arabian Waste, A Desart; and he fancied that himself Was sitting there in the wide wilderness, Alone, upon the Sands. Distress of mind Was growing in him when, behold! at once To his great joy a Man was at his side, Upon a Dromedary mounted high. He seem’d an Arab of the Bedouin Tribes, A Lance he bore, and underneath one arm A Stone; and, in the opposite hand, a Shell Of a surpassing brightness. Much rejoic’d The dreaming Man, that he should have a Guide To lead him through the Desart; and he thought, While questioning himself what this strange freight Which the New-comer carried through the Waste Could mean, the Arab told him that the Stone, To give it in the language of the Dream, Was Euclid’s Elements; “And this,” said he, “This other,” pointing to the Shell, “this book Is something of more worth.” And, at the word, The Stranger, said my Friend continuing, Stretch’d forth the Shell towards me, with command That I should hold it to my ear: I did so; And heard that instant in an unknown Tongue, Which yet I understood, articulate sounds, A loud, prophetic blast of harmony, An Ode, in passion utter’d, which foretold Destruction to the Children of the Earth, By deluge now at hand. No sooner ceas’d The song, but with calm look, the Arab said That all was true; that it was even so As had been spoken; and that he himself Was going then to bury those two Books, 174 A First Gallery
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The one that held acquaintance with the stars, And wedded man to man by purest bond Of nature undisturb’d by space or time; Th’other that was a God, yea many Gods, Had voices more than all the winds, and was A joy, a consolation and a hope. My Friend continued, “Strange as it may seem, I wonder’d not, although I plainly saw The one to be a Stone, th’other a Shell, Nor doubted once but that they both were Books, Having a perfect faith in all that pass’d. A wish was now engender’d in my fear To cleave unto this Man, and I begg’d leave To share his errand with him. On he pass’d, Not heeding me; I follow’d, and took note That he look’d often backward with wild look, Grasping his twofold treasure to his side. —Upon a Dromedary, Lance in rest, He rode, I keeping pace with him; and now I fancied that he was the very Knight Whose tale Cervantes tells, yet not the Knight, But, was an Arab of the Desart, too; Of these was neither, and was both at once. His countenance, meanwhile, grew more disturb’d, And, looking backwards when he look’d, I saw A glittering light, and ask’d him whence it came; ‘It is,’ said he, ‘the waters of the deep Gathering upon us’; quickening then his pace, He left me; I call’d after him aloud, He heeded not; but with his twofold charge Beneath his arm, before me full in view I saw him riding o’er the Desart Sands, With the fleet waters of the drowning world In chace of him, whereat I wak’d in terror, And saw the Sea before me; and the Book, In which I had been reading, at my side.” Full often, taking from the world of sleep This Arab Phantom, which my Friend beheld, This Semi-Quixote, I to him have given A substance, fancied him a living man, A gentle Dweller in the Desart, craz’d By love and feeling and internal thought, William Wordsworth 175
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Protracted among endless solitudes; Have shap’d him, in the oppression of his brain, Wandering upon this quest, and thus equipp’d. And I have scarcely pitied him; have felt A reverence for a Being thus employ’d; And thought that in the blind and awful lair Of such a madness reason did lie couch’d. Enow there are on earth to take in charge Their Wives, their Children, and their virgin Loves, Or whatsoever else the heart holds dear; Enow to think of these; yea, will I say, In sober contemplation of the approach Of such great overthrow, made manifest By certain evidence, that I, methinks, Could share that Maniac’s anxiousness, could go Upon like errand. Oftentimes, at least, Me hath such deep entrancement half-possess’d, When I have held a volume in my hand, Poor earthly casket of immortal Verse! Shakespeare, or Milton, Labourers divine. 1805 version
ODE: “THERE WAS A TIME” Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
[Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood] Paulò majora canamus.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it has been of yore; — Turn wheresoe’er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more. The Rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the Rose, The Moon doth with delight
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Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where’er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.
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Now, while the Birds thus sing a joyous song, And while the young Lambs bound As to the tabor’s sound, To me alone there came a thought of grief: A timely utterance gave that thought relief, And I again am strong. The Cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep, No more shall grief of mine the season wrong; I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng, The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep, And all the earth is gay, Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity, And with the heart of May Doth every Beast keep holiday, Thou Child of Joy Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd Boy! Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; My heart is at your festival, My head hath its coronal, The fullness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all. Oh evil day! if I were sullen While the Earth herself is adorning, This sweet May-morning, And the Children are pulling, On every side, In a thousand vallies far and wide, Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm, And the Babe leaps up on his mother’s arm:— I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! —But there’s a Tree, of many one,
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A single Field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone: The Pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
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Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the East Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And, even with something of a Mother’s mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely Nurse doth all she can To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man, Forget the glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came. Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, A four year’s Darling of a pigmy size! See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his Mother’s kisses, With light upon him from his Father’s eyes! See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, Some fragment from his dream of human life,
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Shaped by himself with newly-learned art; A wedding or a festival, A mourning or a funeral; And this hath now his heart, And unto this he frames his song: Then will he fit his tongue To dialogues of business, love, or strife; But it will not be long Ere this be thrown aside, And with new joy and pride The little Actor cons another part, Filling from time to time his “humorous stage” With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, That Life brings with her in her Equipage; As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation. Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy Soul’s immensity; Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,— Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find; Thou, over whom thy Immortality Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave, A Presence which is not to be put by; To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight Of day or the warm light, A place of thought where we in waiting lie; Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might Of untamed pleasures, on thy Being’s height, Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke The Years to bring the inevitable yoke, Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight, And custom lie upon thee with a weight, Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
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O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive! The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benedictions: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest; Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether fluttering or at rest, With new-born hope for ever in his breast:— Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise; But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts, before which our mortal Nature Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprized: But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish us, and make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake, To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! Hence, in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. Then, sing ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song! And let the young Lambs bound 180 A First Gallery
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As to the tabor’s sound! We in thought will join your throng, Ye that pipe and ye that play, Ye that through your hearts today Feel the gladness of the May! What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind, In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be, In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering, In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. And oh ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Think not of any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; I only have relinquished one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway. I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born Day Is lovely yet; The Clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 1807 version
COMMENTARY
Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the Poet’s art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere, William Wordsworth 181
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because not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.
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W. W., from Preface to Lyrical Ballads
(1) The Regency Decade (1810–20) generation of progressive British poets looked upon the “later” Wordsworth as an “apostate” from radical causes that, they said, he had fulfilled, more formidably than any other contemporary, in a radical poetry earlier in his career. But it is precisely as an experimental & visionary poet that we would see him here. In that guise he conducted four major poetic experiments, all of which respond to the larger social & psychological world opened up by the French Revolution: (1) In the 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads—& here he may be the first poet actually to call his poetic work an “experiment”—namely, “to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally endeavour to impart”; (2) investigations of fleeting states of mind & feeling that he called “sundry moods” or more commonly “reveries”; (3) a poetry in which the speaker as astonished witness sacralizes nature as Other through the intensification of his affect; and (4) the use of verse autobiography as the occasion for & substance of an epic accounting of the world. Here in The Prelude, the opening poem of a projected larger work (The Recluse) representing a person living “in retirement,” Wordsworth transforms Miltonic blank verse into a medium expressive of a person vulnerable to growth seen as the expansion of individual consciousness in an age acutely sensitive to the manifold presence of nature & to the sounds of voices from previously unacknowledged classes of people. Drawing on the spirit of Rousseau’s Second Walk in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker (see Preludium) & anticipating Baudelaire’s & Freud’s notion of the shock to sensibilities in the modern world, Wordsworth often explores sudden disorientations in one’s sense of the familiar, the horizons beyond which the world presents itself as mystery & difference. The effects of those shocks (demotic, ecological, vatic, introspective), if not wholly realized here, make his works & their underlying poetics seem prophetic of other, still more radicalized experimental works to come. The 1802 sonnets included here, composed on & after a month’s trip to France during the Peace of Amiens, have been arranged to form a plausible sequence, with increasing political intensity, from beginning to end of the journey, much in the spirit of his later numerous sonnet & journey sequences. We have intercalated as lead-ins to the sonnets themselves Wordsworth’s late explanatory prose notes transmitted to Isabella Fenwick. (2) “Not Chaos, not / The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, / Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out / By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe / As fall upon us often when we look / Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man— / My haunt, and the main region of my song” (from “Prospectus” for The Recluse).
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D orot hy Word swort h
1771–1855
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from T H E G R A S M E R E J O U R N A L S
Tuesday, May 4th [1802]. William had slept pretty well & though he went to bed nervous & jaded in the extreme he rose refreshed. I wrote the Leech Gatherer for him which he had begun the night before & of which he wrote several stanzas in bed this Monday morning. It was very hot, we called at Mr Simpson’s door as we passed but did not go in. We rested several times by the way, read & repeated the Leech gatherer. We were almost melted before we were at the top of the hill. We saw Coleridge on the Wytheburn Side of the water, he crossed the Beck to us. Mr Simpson was fishing there. William & I ate a Luncheon, then went on towards the Waterfall. It is a glorious wild solitude under that lofty purple crag. It stood upright by itself. Its own self & its shadow below, one mass—all else was sunshine. We went on further. A Bird at the top of the crags was flying round & round & looked in thinness & transparency, shape & motion, like a moth. We climbed the hill but looked in vain for a shade except at the foot of the great waterfall, & there we did not like to stay on account of the loose stones above our heads. We came down & rested upon a moss covered Rock, rising out of the bed of the River. There we lay ate our dinner & stayed there till about 4 o clock or later—Wm & C repeated & read verses. I drank a little Brandy & water & was in Heaven. The Stags horn is very beautiful & fresh springing upon the fells. Mountain ashes, green. We drank tea at a farm house. The woman had not a pleasant countenance, but was civil enough. She had a pretty Boy a year old whom she suckled. We parted from Coleridge at Sara’s Crag after having looked at the Letters which C carved in the morning. I kissed them all. Wm deepened the T with C’s penknife. We sate afterwards on the wall, seeing the sun go down & the reflections in the still water. C looked well & parted from us chearfully, hopping up upon the Side stones. On the Rays we met a woman with 2 little girls one in her arms the other about 4 years old walking by her side, a pretty little thing, but half starved. She had on a pair of slippers that had belonged to some gentlemans child, down at the heels, but it was not easy to keep them on—but, poor thing! young as she was, she walked carefully with them. Alas too young for such cares & such travels—The Mother when we accosted her told us that her Husband had left her & gone off with another woman & how she “pursued” them. Then her fury kindled & her eyes rolled about. She changed again to tears. She was a Cockermouth woman—30 years of age a child at Cockermouth when I was—I was moved & gave her a shilling, I believe 6d more than I ought
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to have given. We had the Crescent moon with the “auld moon in her arms”—We rested often:—always upon the Bridges. Reached home at about 10 o clock. The Lloyds had been here in our absence. We went soon to bed. I repeated verses to William while he was in bed—he was soothed & I left him. “This is the Spot” over & over again.
G R A S M E R E , L I N E AT E D
Grasmere very solemn In the last glimpse of twilight. It calls home the heart To quietness.
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. We saw a raven very high above us. It called out, and the dome of the sky Seemed to echo the sound. It called again and again as it flew onwards, And the mountains gave back the sound Seeming as if from their centre— A musical bell-like answering To the bird’s hoarse voice. We heard both the call of the bird And the echo After we could see him no longer.
. The moon shone Like herrings in the water.
. The hills, And the stars, And the white waters With their ever varying, Yet ceaseless sound.
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We stood there a long time, The whole scene impressive. The mountains indistinct, The Lake calm and partly ruffled. A sweet sound of water falling Into the quiet Lake. A storm was gathering in Easedale, So we returned; But the moon came out, And opened to us The church and village. Helm Crag in shade, The larger mountains dappled like a sky. We stood long upon the bridge, Wished for William.
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. We overtook old Fleming at Rydale, Leading his little Dutchman-like grandchild Along the slippery road. The same pace Seemed to be natural to them both— The old man and the little child— And they went hand in hand, The grandfather cautious, Yet looking proud of his charge.
. There was an unusual softness In the prospects, as we went, A rich yellow upon the fields, And a soft grave purple on the waters. When we returned many stars were out, The clouds were moveless, In the sky, soft purple, The lake of Rydale calm, Jupiter behind.
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Jupiter at least we call him, but William says We always call the brightest star Jupiter.
. I found a strawberry blossom in a rock. The little slender flower had more courage Than the green leaves, For they were but half expanded, and half grown, But the blossom was spread full out.
.
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A poor woman came, she said, To beg. But she has been used to go a-begging, For she has often come here. She is a woman of strong bones With a complexion that has been beautiful And remained very fresh last year, But now she looks broken, And her little boy, a pretty little fellow Whom I have loved for the sake of Basil, Looks thin and pale. He seems scarcely at all grown Since the first time I saw him.
. The snow still lies upon the ground. Just at the closing-in of the day, I heard a cart pass the door, And at the same time, The dismal sound of a crying infant. I went to the window, And had light enough to see That a man was driving a cart Which seemed not to be very full, A woman with an infant in her arms Was following close behind,
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And a dog close to her. It was a wild and melancholy sight.
. I gathered mosses in Easedale. I saw before me, Sitting in the open field Upon his pack of rags, The old Ragman that I know. His coat is of scarlet in a thousand patches.
.
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The moon hung Over the northern side Of the highest point of Silver How— Like a gold ring Snapped in two And shaven off at the ends. Within this ring There lay The circle of the round moon As distinctly to be seen As ever The enlightened moon is.
. The moon was a good height Above the mountains; She seemed far distant in the sky. There were two stars beside her That twinkled in and out And seemed almost like butterflies In motion and lightness. They looked to be Far nearer to us than the moon.
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A sweet evening, As it had been a sweet day, And I walked quietly Along the side of Rydale lake With quiet thoughts. The hills and the lake were still— The owls had not begun to hoot, And the little birds had given over singing.
. The lake was covered all over With bright silver waves That were each The twinkling of an eye.
.
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As I climbed the moss, The moon came out From behind a mountain mass Of black clouds. O, the unutterable darkness of the sky And the earth below the moon, And the glorious brightness of the moon itself!
. When I saw this lowly building in the waters; Among the dark and lofty hills, With that bright soft light upon it, It made me more than half a poet. Lineations from The Grasmere Journals by Hyman Eigerman
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COMMENTARY
The valley very green, many sweet views up to Rydale head when I could juggle away the fine houses, but they disturbed me even more than when I have been happier—one beautiful view of the Bridge, without Sir Michaels. Sate down very often, tho’ it was cold. I resolved to write a journal of the time till W & J return, & I set about keeping my resolve because I will not quarrel with myself, & because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home again. At Rydale a woman of the village, stout & well-dressed, begged a halfpenny—she had never she said done it before—but these hard times!—Arrived at home with a bad head-ach, set some slips of privett.
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D. W.
(1) Thanks largely to the women’s movement in the 1970s & beyond, she has emerged from the shadow of her poet-brother to claim her own contribution to poetry through a species of precise & objectified writings a century or more before American “imagism” or the “objectivism” (“thinking with the things as they exist”—L. Zukofsky) that followed from it. With Dorothy Wordsworth, as with a handful of her contemporaries, the notion of “poetry” slips the noose of line break, versification, & poetic idiom & heads, particularly in the Grasmere Journals (1800–1803), toward a form of near-poetry with prose as its medium. The hybrid status of her best work was declared by one Hyman Eigerman when, in 1940, he published The Poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth, lineating passages from her Journals & later prose writings (above); this produced startling deformations that make the case for her as an imagist, even proto-“objectivist” poet. Her quintessential diary entries, however, are far less normalized than Eigerman’s versions, employing a syntax & punctuation similar at their best to that in John Clare’s autobiographical prose (a generation away from her); moreover, they flatten “poetic” & “prosaic” subject matter, foreground & background, nature & society (encounters, often, with itinerant members of the lower classes), rural & urban culture, producing a genuine art of aleatory vulnerability with all of the “impurity” that implies. (2) Yet the interest in image and object is uniquely implicated in the circumstantial collaboration with her brother William, not necessarily stated as such but announced by the sheer contiguity, or presence, of his perceptions & alterings of the environment alongside her characteristic form of associative prose, of subtle mixings & interweavings of perception & imagination: “William lay, & I lay in the trench under the fence—he with his eyes shut & listening to the waterfalls & the Birds. There was no one waterfall above another—it was a sound of waters in the air—the voice of the air. William heard me breathing & rustling now & then but we both lay still, & unseen by one another—he thought that it would be as sweet thus to lie so in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of the earth & just to know that ones dear friends were near.”
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(3) Wrote Virginia Woolf, as an act of rediscovery: “She was no descriptive writer in the usual sense. Her first concern was to be truthful—grace and symmetry must be made subordinate to truth. But then truth is sought because to falsify the look of the stir of the breeze on the lake is to tamper with the spirit which inspires appearances.”
Nova lis
1772–1801
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It’s not the treasures I care about—he said to himself—such coveting is miles from my mind, but I long to see the blue flower. I can’t get rid of the idea, it haunts me. I never felt like this before, it’s as if I dreamed of it years ago, or had a vision of it in another world, for who would be so concerned about a flower in this world? and I’ve never heard of anyone being in love with a flower. Where did this stranger come from? None of us had ever seen anyone like him. I don’t know why his words impacted on me so deeply, the others heard him, and they didn’t produce the same effect on their minds. I can’t even express the strange state I’m in. Sometimes rapt in delight . . . but when I forget about the blue flower, a nameless longing takes possession of me, no one can understand this. I’d think I was mad, if it were not for the fact that my thoughts are so clear and connected, and I understand so many new things. I’ve heard it said that in the olden days, animals, rocks, and flowers all spoke to humans. I’m haunted by the idea that they have something to tell me, and I feel as if I could comprehend their speech. I used to be devoted to dancing, now I love music. Epigraph translated by Andrew Moore
from F A I T H A N D L O V E O R T H E K I N G A N D T H E Q U E E N
Prologue
If one intends to speak of something secret with a few others, when one is in a greater, diffused society, and the group is not close together, then one must discourse in an extraordinary language. This extraordinary language can be either in overtones, or after the image of a foreign language. The latter proves to be a metaphorical or cryptic language. The mystical expression is more an attracting thought. All truth is primeval. The charm of its newness lies only in the variation of expression. The more contrasting its manifestations, the greater the delight of the renewed knowledge.
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Whatever one loves, one finds everywhere, and everywhere sees resemblances and analogies to it. The greater one’s love, the vaster and more meaningful is this analogous world. My beloved is the abbreviation of the universe, the universe an elongation, an extrapolation of my beloved. The knowledgeable friend offers all flowers and gifts to his beloved. But whence arises the earnest, the mystic-political philosophy? An inspired one’s utterances reflect the higher life in all his functions: thus he also philosophizes poetically, in a manner yet more enlivened than usual. This tone of depth issues from the symphony of his powers and capacities. But isn’t the universe won through the individual, in proportion as the individual is realized through the universal? Let the dragon-flies rise; innocent strangers they are, who follow the twin-star, exulting, with gifts, this way. A blossoming land is surely wholly a kingly artwork, more than a park. An elegant park is an English invention. A land with its heart and spirit liberated may become a German invention, and the inventor will surely be king of all inventors.
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If tomorrow I became a prince, I’d entreat the King first for an eudiometer like his own. No instrument is more necessary for princes. I, like he, would seek to draw the vital air for my state more from blossoming plantings than from extracting saltpeter. Gold and silver are the blood of the states. An abundance of blood in either heart or head reveals frailty in both. The more vigorous the heart is, the more liberal and enlivened surges the blood back to the outer extremities. Each limb is warmed and invigorated, and swift and mighty the blood charges back toward the heart. A collapsing throne is like a falling mountain which shatters the plain. A dead sea is left behind where there once was a fruitful land and a delightful, healthy state. Its power equivalent only to that of the mountain, you should be grateful to the ocean. The ocean is the element of freedom and equality. Nevertheless, one is warned to tread upon the layer of fool’s gold (iron pyrite); otherwise the volcano (Vulcan) is there, and with it (him) the origin of new continents. The mephitic, stinking vapor of the moralistic world restrains and hinders in ways akin to its namesake in nature. The former advances gladly
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into the heights, whereas in nature the mists hover near the base. For the dwellers in the heights, there is no better remedy for vapors than the flowers and sunshine. Both rarely are found together in the heights. Upon each of the moral ascensions one can—even now—enjoy the purest breezes, and see a lily in the sun.
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It was no wonder when the mountains for the most part thundered downward into the valleys and devastated the plains. Evil clouds often lingered about the mountains there, and hid from them their origin above; then the flatlands appeared only as a darker abyss, over which the clouds seemed to endure. The clouds then appeared as an enraged, rising ocean—which, however, was not rising against the mountains in particular, and which gradually dulled and blunted the mountains by erosion, though they were only being swept under by apparently faithful clouds. The King is the pure life-principle of the state; he is, therefore, precisely what the sun is to the planets. Above all, there generates about the lifeprinciple here within the highest life of the state, an atmosphere of light. It is more or less likewise in each citizen. The appearance of the citizens in the King’s proximity becomes lustrous, and as poetic as possible, so that they utter expressions of the highest animation and there the highest spiritual animation takes place. The spirit’s effects are reflections, but the consummate or beautiful reflection is an image of the essence, and always is conjoined with the highest animation. So the citizens’ expressions in the King’s presence become those of the highest, steadily returned exuberance, of the liveliest emotion, governed through attentive presence of mind, and the proper regulation of conduct. Without etiquette, no court can last. There is but one natural etiquette—the most beautiful—and he who feigns the stylish is hideous. Restoration of the first will be no trivial concern for thoughtful Kings, for through etiquette the citizens both become significantly more refined, and manifest their love for the monarchic form. It is a gross failing of our state that one can see so little of it. Above all, the state should be visible, each man characterized as a citizen. Shouldn’t one order the introduction of insignia and uniforms throughout? Whoever considers this trifling knows not our essential nature. The ancient hypothesis that comets were flames from revolutions in planetary systems holds true, certainly, for another kind of comet, which periodically revolutionizes and rejuvenates the spiritual world-system. The spiritual astronomer notes for some time the influx of such a comet into an important component of the spiritual planets, which we term humanity. Mighty floods, changes in climate, variations in the center of gravity, general tendencies to flee, singular meteors are the symptoms of these 192 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
violent incidents, the effect of which is that a new world-age is created. As it is necessary, perhaps, that in certain periods all is brought forth in flux, inevitably mixed, and a newer, purer crystallization arises, so is it essential that something moderate this crisis and hinder the planet’s total dissolution. Therefore a core remains, a kernel, in order that the new mass may crystalize, and about it new, beautiful forms arise. The solids draw firmly together, the overflowing heated masses diminish, and one spares no remedy to forestall the softening of the bones, the unraveling of the fibers and tissues. Would it not be madness to make a permanent crisis, and to trust the feverish condition over the truly healthy state, the preservation of which all must favor? But as to a temporary crisis, who could doubt that it is beneficial, even necessary? Won’t the King prove to be so through the intimate touch of Her Worth? The King and the Queen protect the monarchy better than 200,000 men. Nothing is more invigorating than speaking aloud our secret desires, which thereby are already impregnated, already being fulfilled. In our time the true wonder of transubstantiation has come to pass. Isn’t the court transmuted into a family, a throne into a holy place, and a kingly marriage into an eternal bonding of the heart?
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When the dove becomes eagle’s beloved companion, then the golden age is near, or already there, even when it is not openly recognized and disseminated. Whoever now wishes to see eternal tranquility, and wishes to win love, journeys to Berlin and sees the Queen. There, each can be convinced of the obvious: that one must love the eternal, heartfelt tranquility of righteousness above all, and that it will not be held fast by anything else. Addenda
The ground of all folly in conviction and opinion is confusing the ends with the means. Most revolutionaries neither know—nor knew—exactly what they want: Form or Unform. Revolutions soon prove to be against the true energy of a nation. There is an energy of sickness and infirmity—which works more violently than the true—but which itself injures, leaving one with still deeper infirmities. When one passes judgment upon a nation, one evaluates for the most part only the principle evidence, the striking elements of that nation. Novalis 193
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The more infirm a component is, the more inclined it is to disorder and inflammation. What are slaves? Utterly weak, oppressed people. What are sultans? Through vigorous attractions, they gather slaves. How do sultans and slaves end? Violently. The former nimble as sultans, the latter nimble as slaves—both are frenetic, rabid. How can slaves be cured? Through very cautiously being set free and enlightened. One must handle them as if they were frostbitten. Sultans? In this wise: as Dionysius and Kroesus were cured. With fear, fasting and the restraint of the cloister one begins, and one ascends gradually, using restoratives. Sultans and slaves are the extremes. There are still many middle classes, up to the king and the true cynic—the class of consummate health. Terrorists and courtiers then fit in the class nearest after the sultans and slaves—and fit together like them. Both are representatives of two forms of sickness that indicate a weak constitution. The healthy constitution under a maximum of stimulation represents the king—the same under a minimum of excitation, the true cynic. The more alike both are, the more freely and constantly their roles can be exchanged, the nearer their constitution is to the perfect, completed constitution. The more independent a king is of his throne, the more kingly he is.
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All attractions are relative—are great—except one, which is absolute, and more than great. The most complete constitution arises through the invocation of and absolute union with this Attraction. Through it one can dispense with the remainders—and then it begins to work vigorously, so that the relative attractions fall away and disappear. One has but one whole power, so one becomes wholly indifferent to the lesser, relative attractions. This Attraction is absolute love. A cynic and a king apart from love are only titles. Each improvement of an incomplete constitution makes one more capable of love. The best state endures through inner indifference, or neutrality. In incompleted states, these are still the best of citizens. Quick to mention all good qualities, they laugh silently over the tomfoolery of their contemporaries, and contain themselves concerning their evil. They don’t seek to rectify error, because they know that each correction of this kind and under such premises is only a new error, and the Best cannot come from
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outside. They abandon all rank and title, and so are not troubled—and so they trouble no one and are everywhere welcome. Translation from German by Arthur Versluis
from H Y M N S T O T H E N I G H T [ 5 A N D 6 ] 5
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In times now passed there ruled over the far-flung races of people an iron fate with silent force. A dark and heavy blindfold lay upon their heavy soul—Earth was infinite—the gods’ seat, and their home. Since time unremembered its secret-filled structure had stood. Over morning’s red mountains, in the heavenly lap of the sea there lived the sun, the all-enflaming, living Light. An old giant carried the blessed world. Fast under the mountains the first sons of mother earth lay. Impotent in their destructive raging against the new rule of the race of gods and their relatives, the happy people. The ocean’s dark green depths were a goddess’s lap. In crystal grottoes a rich people revelled. Rivers, trees, forests and animals had human sense. The wine given by the visible feeling of youth tasted sweet—a god in the grapes—a loving, maternal goddess, growing upwards in completely golden sheaves—love’s sacred intoxication a sweet duty of the fairest of god ladies—an endless bright feast of heaven’s children, and life made the earth inhabitants drunk, down through the centuries—all races honored, childlike, the tender, thousand-fold flame as the highest of the world. Just one thought there was, from one atrocious dream picture, A thought stepping to the festive tables And making the spirit there turn to wild fright. Here even the gods had no suggestion How to fill uneasy hearts with comfort. And this monster’s path was full of mystery, And no plea or gift could still its rage; For it was Death who interrupted This revelry with fear and dread and tears. And always, now, cut off here From all that rules the heart in sweet delight, Divided from the loved ones who inclined away, Moved by vain longing and long sadness, A languid dream seeming cut off only in death, Only futile struggling laid on them, The wave of pleasure—broken On the rock of endless dismay. Novalis Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
195
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With a bold spirit and high passion Man beautifies the gruesome worm, A gentle youth turns out the light and rests— The end is soft, like a harp’s sigh. Memory melts in the cool tide of shadow, As the song goes, towards its gloomy need. But the riddle’s still unsolved, stays in endless Night, The sober sign of a far-off might. At the end the old world bowed. The pleasure garden of the young tribe withered—up into freer, deserted space the no longer childlike, growing people struggled. The gods disappeared with their retinue—nature stood alone and lifeless. An iron chain held it in arid count and strict measure. Life’s immeasurable blood fell off in dark words like dust and breeze. Sworn faith—it was gone, with its all-changing all-relating divine twin, imagination. A cold north wind blew unfriendly over the rigid plain, and the hardened place of wonders flew off into the ether. Heaven’s distances filled up with glowing worlds. Into deep sacredness, into the emotions’ higher spaces the world’s soul drew up with its powers—to rule there till the breaking of dawning world splendor. No longer was the Light the seat of the gods or their heavenly sign—over themselves they drew the veil of Night. Night became the mighty womb of revelations—the gods drew back into it—to go out in new and more splendid forms over the altered world. Among the people, who scorned above all too early maturity and to whom the blessed innocence of the young had become stubbornly alien, the new world appeared with features never seen before—In the poverty of the poetic tabernacle—A son of the first virgin and mother—unending fruit of mysterious embrace. The orient’s proud, rich-blooded wisdom was the first to recognize the beginning of the new time—A star showed the way to the king’s humble cradle. In that future, nature’s highest wonders honored him with glory and fragrance. The heavenly heart unfolded itself into a flower grail of almighty love—turned towards the father’s high countenance and resting on the dear, earnest mother’s bosom that foreshadowed such glory. The blooming child’s prophetic eye gazed with consecrating fire onto the future days, after its beloved, the shoot of its god stem, unconcerned about its days of earthy fate. Soon the childlikest spirits of inner fortune collected, wondrously seized by inner love, around him. Like flowers a strange new love grew up in his vicinity. Inexhaustible words and the gladdest of messages fell like the sparks of a divine spirit from his fond lips. From far shores, born under Greece’s happy skies, a singer came to Palestine and poured out his heart to the new-born child:
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You’re the youth since ancient days Has stood in contemplation of our graves: A sign of comfort in our private dark— A hopeful start to our new humanity. What sank us in our deepest down despair Draws us from here now with sweet craving. In death eternal life is known, And you are Death who makes us whole at last. The singer passed along, full of joy, to Hindustan—his heart drunk with sweet love; and shook it out in fiery songs under that gentle sky, so a thousand hearts bent to him and the glad tidings grew up thousand branching. Shortly after the singer’s departure that precious life was the victim of the deep human fall—He died young in years, torn away from his beloved world, torn away from his weeping mother and trembling friends. The lifeless mouth emptied unspeakable suffering’s dark grail—The hour of the new world’s birth drew near with shocking dread. It rang out hard with the old fear of death—The press of the old world lay heavy on him. Once more he looked fondly on his mother—then came eternal love’s releasing hand—and he slept. For only a few days a deep veil hung over the quivering ocean, over the trembling land—the loved ones wept uncounted tears—the mystery was unsealed—heavenly spirits hoisted the ancient stone from the dark grave. Angels sat by the sleeper—formed gently from his dreams—awoke into new godly splendor—he climbed the heights of the newborn world—buried the old corpse in the sunken hell with his own hand, and set stone on it with an almighty hand, which no power will lift. Still your dear ones are shedding tears of joy, tears of affection and unending thanks at your grave—always longing for you, joyfully terrified, in resurrection and themselves with you; see you weeping with sweet ardency at your mother’s bosom, soberly walking with your friends, speaking words as if broken off the tree of life; see you hurrying full of longing to your father’s arm, bringing young humanity and the golden future of the unspendable cup. Your mother comes soon and swiftly to you—she was the first to be with you in the new home. Long time’s since flown, and in the higher and higher radiance your new creation reigns—and thousands draw near you out of pain and out of fear, full of faith and longing and loyalty—follow with you and the heavenly virgin in the richness of love—serve in heavenly death’s temple and are yours in eternity. The stone is lifted— Humanity is risen—
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We all remain yours And feel no chains. The sharpest care flies off Before your golden basin, When earth and life soften At the last supper. Death summons to the wedding The lamps burn brightly— The virgins stand in place— There’s no need for oil— If the distance would only sound Already from your stroke, And the stars would call to us With the sound of human tongues.
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To you, Mary, A thousand hearts are lifted. In this shadow life They only call for you. They hope to be delivered With presentient desire— Will you press them, holy being, To your true breast. So many there are who burn, Consumed in bitter torment And fleeing from this world Turn away then to you; Who helpfully appeared to us In many a need or pain— We come now to you, And forever we would be there. Whoever, loving, has the faith Weeps painfully at no grave. Of love’s sweet possession No one can be robbed— To soothe him in his longing And inspire him there’s the Night— His heart is woken in him By the true and heavenly children.
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Cheer then—life strides Into eternal life; By inner incandescence Our sense is led transfigured. The starry world will melt To golden wine of life, We will enjoy it And become the light of stars. The love is freely given, There’s no dividing left. The whole life billows on Like an endless sea. Just one night of ecstasy— An eternal poem— And all our sun’s God’s face. 6
Longing for Death
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Down into the earth’s womb, Away from Light’s kingdoms, Pain’s raging and wild force Ensigns the happy departure. We’ve come in from a narrow boat Swiftly to heaven’s shore. Blessed be the endless Night to us, Blessed the endless sleep. Truly the day has made us hot, And long care’s withered us. The wish for strange lands is gone away, And now we want our Father’s home. What should we do in this world now, With our own love and faith? The old things have been set aside, What use could any new ones be O! There stands alone and in despair Whoever deeply and truly loves the times gone by.
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Those times gone by, where the senses’ light Burned brightly with high flames, Where the Father’s hand and countenance Were still recognized by humanity, And with high sense, in simplicity, Many still matched to His former image. The past, where still full blooming And primeval races walked abroad, And children, for heaven’s kingdom’s sake, Yearned for pain and death, And if also desire and life spoke, Still many a heart broke from love. The past, where with youthful ardor God showed himself to one and all, And with love’s strength committed His sweet life to an early death, Did not avoid the fear and pain Just so He would remain dear to us.
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With anxious longing we see them now, Shrouded in the dark of Night, And in this temporality Never will the thirst be quenched. For we must go away to home To know and see the holy time. What holds us back from this trip home, From our loved ones who have rested so long? Their graves concluded on our lives’ course, We are sad, we are afraid. We have no more to search for here— The heart is full, the world is empty. Endless and full of mystery Sweet trembling courses through us— To me it seems an echo sounds Out of the deep distance of our grief. Our loved ones too may be longing for us, And sent to us this yearning breath. Down now to the sweet bride, on To Jesus, to the beloved—
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Take heart, evening’s darkling greys To the loving, to the grieving. A dream will break our fetters off, And sink us forever in our Father’s lap. Translations from German by Dick Higgins
COMMENTARY
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The art of estranging in a given way, making a subject strange and yet familiar and alluring, this is romantic poetics. (Novalis) And again: Language is Delphi. (1) The image of the blue flower, above, remains as the central symbol for an aspect of Romanticism—a longing at once for the near & distant, the human & the other-than-human—that resonates into the present. For Novalis (born Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenburg) the milieu in which he moved & worked was a congeries of poets & intellectuals traveling between Jena & other German cities, led by the brothers Friedrich & August von Schlegel—an early group platform for Romanticism (“Romantik”) as such in the pages of their literary/philosophical magazine The Atheneum. Energized by the French Revolution, they programatically explored a revolution of mind & word that offered a new sense of artistic freedom & changed priorities—a plunge into techniques of defamiliarization or “making strange” (the Russian Futurists’ ostranenia) & of a composition-by-fragments with prose as its medium but with an awakened sense of a new poetry, in which distinctions between poetry & philosophy would likewise be erased. Still more important from our perspective, it is with the “Jena School” (= experimental German Romanticism) that we have a first organized challenge to the separation of poetry & poetics—the poetics imbedded in the poem, the poem in the poetics—working in this & other ways toward a poetry of mixed means (Mischgedicht) that paralleled that of their more radical British contemporary William Blake & has continued & developed into our own time. Beyond the assembled fragments—those by the Schlegels & those like Faith & Love (Glauben und Liebe) published by Novalis during his lifetime—Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, written in a mix of prose & verse & first printed in The Atheneum, is a primary example of Mischgedicht in action. Following closely on the death of his young fiancée Sophie von Kuhn & with a sense of his own impending death from tuberculosis, the thematics of death & sexual longing dominate the hymns, which are colored in turn by ideas of nature & self in the philosophical writings of Fichte & Schelling. The range of the poems (intellectual, affective) is remarkable, &the equation of Christ & bride in the final hymn is both stunning in itself & an instance of a poetry of rapture & longing that can produce not only further rapture
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but a clarity of thought & understanding—“a swoon . . . [that] brings you to your senses” (C. Bernstein). (2) “The analytical writer observes the reader as he is; accordingly, he makes his calculation, sets his machine to make the appropriate effect on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates his own reader; he does not imagine him as resting and dead, but as lively and advancing toward him. He makes that which he had invented gradually take shape before the reader’s eyes, or he tempts him to do the inventing for himself. He does not want to make a particular effect on him, but rather enters into a solemn relationship of innermost symphilosophy or sympoetry” (Friedrich von Schlegel, Aphorisms from the Lyceum, 1797, tr. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc). And Novalis selbst: “Nothing is more poetic than transitions and heterogeneous mixtures.”
Samu el Taylor C olerid ge
1772–1834
The heart should have fed upon the truth, as insects on a leaf, till it be tinged with the colour, and show its food in every the minutest fibre. KUBLA KHAN: OR, A VISION IN A DREAM
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A Fragment
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in “Purchas’s Pilgrimage”: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.” The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room,
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found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter: Then all the charm Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile, Poor youth! who scarcely dar’st lift up thine eyes— The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon The visions will return! And lo! he stays, And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms Come trembling back, unite, and now once more The pool becomes a mirror.
Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently proposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. AÎrion ëdion êsv [tomorrow I shall sing a sweeter song]: but the tomorrow is yet to come.
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As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.—
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
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A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!
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The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
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DEJECTION: AN ODE Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, With the old Moon in her arms; And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! We shall have a deadly storm. B ALL AD O F S I R PAT RI C K S P E N C E
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I
Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes, Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes Upon the strings of this Eolian lute, Which better far were mute. For lo! the New-moon winter-bright! And overspread with phantom light, (With swimming phantom light o’erspread But rimmed and circled by a silver thread) I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling The coming on of rain and squally blast. And oh! that even now the gust were swelling, And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast! Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live! II
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear— O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green: And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
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That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! III
My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
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IV
O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element! V
O pure of heart! thou need’st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be! What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power. Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne’er was given, Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, Life, and Life’s effluence, cloud at once and shower,
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Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud— Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud— We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light.
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VI
There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. But now afflictions bow me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination. For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man— This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. VII
Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality’s dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream Of agony by torture lengthened out That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav’st without, Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree, Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, Or lonely house, long held the witches’ home, Methinks were fitter instruments for thee,
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Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers, Of dark brown gardens, and of peeping flowers, Mak’st Devils’ yule, with worse than wintry song, The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among. Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds! Thou mighty Poet, e’en to frenzy bold! What tell’st thou now about? ’Tis of the rushing of an host in rout, With groans, of trampled men, with smarting wounds— At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold! But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence! And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd, With groans, and tremulous shudderings—all is over— It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud! A tale of less affright, And tempered with delight, As Otway’s self had framed the tender lay, ’Tis of a little child Upon a lonesome wild, Not far from home, but she hath lost her way: And now moans low in bitter grief and fear, And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.
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VIII
’Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep: Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep! Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing, And may this storm be but a mountain-birth, May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth! With light heart may she rise, Gay fancy, cheerful eyes, Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; To her may all things live, from pole to pole, Their life the eddying of her living soul! O simple spirit, guided from above, Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice, Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.
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URINE
What a beautiful Thing urine is, in a Pot, brown yellow, transpicuous, the Image, diamond shaped of the Candle in it, especially, as it now appeared, I having emptied the Snuffers into it, & the Snuff floating about, & painting all-shaped Shadows on the Bottom.
FRAGMENTS FROM THE GUTCH NOTEBOOK
With secret hand heal the conjectur’d wound. Guess at the wound and heal with secret hand!
And write impromptus spurring their Pegasus to tortoise Gallop.
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Due to the Staggerers that made drunk by Power Forget Thirst’s eager Promise, and presume, Dark Dreamers! that the world forgets it too!
Perish Warmth Unfaithful to it’s seemings
Old age, “the Shape & Messenger of Death”! His wither’d Fist still knocking at Death’s door.
And cauldrons the scoop’d earth a boiling sea! Rush on my ear, a cataract of sound. The guilty pomp consuming while it flares—
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My heart seraglios an whole host of Joys—
and pity’s Sigh shall answer thy tale of Anguish, like the faint echoe of a distant valley—
Leanness, Disquietude, & secret Pangs Some puny perambulatory Sin Goes before like Dwarf to proclaim the coming of a Giant—
Smooth, shining, & deceitful as thin Ice—
Nature Wrote Rascal on his face by chalcographic art
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The mild despairing of a Heart resign’d
Discontent mild as an Infant low-plaining in it’s sleep.—
The swallows interweaving there mid the paired Sea-mews, at distance wildly-wailing.—
The brook runs over Sea-weeds.—
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Sabbath day—from the Miller’s mossy wheel the waterdrops dripp’d leisurely—
On the broad mountain-top The neighing wild-colt races with the wind O’er fern & heath-flowers—
A long deep Lane So overshadow’d, it might seem one bower— The damp Clay banks were furr’d with mouldy moss
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Broad-breasted Pollards with broad-branching head.
’Twas sweet to know it only possible— Some wishes cross’d my mind & dimly cheer’d it— And one or two poor melancholy Pleasures In these, the pale unwarming light of Hope Silvring their flimsy wing flew silent by, Moths in the Moonlight—
The subtle snow in every breeze rose curling from the Grove, like pillars of cottage smoke.
The Sun-shine lies on the cottage-wall Ashining thro’ the snow—
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A word that is clothed about with Death— Mother of Love, & Fear, & Holy Hope,
From the snow-drop even till the rich Grape-cluster was heavy—
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(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) (23) (24)
Tame the Rebellion of tumultuous thought— ministration— sordid adherencies that cohabit with us in this Life— rolls round his dreary eye— outweighs the present pressure— Weigh’d in the balance of the Sanctuary— God’s Image, Sister of the Cherubim— And re-implace God’s Image in the Soul— well-weaved fallacy— The greatness of that Perishing— From Possible to Probable, from Probable to Certain and arrows steeled with wrath Pleasure dies, like the moment in which it danced it dwells with Yesterday.— abbreviation—: : saddest pressures— twilight of day, & Harbinger of Joy The eldest daughter of Death (Sin) drest in grave clothes— Deep sighings— unbind the poppy garland— worms & pollution, the sons & daughters of our bones— Lov’d the same love, & hated the same hate, Breathed in his soul—&c. throned angels—upboyling anguish Leader of a Kingdom of Angels. Love-fires—a gentle bitterness— Well-spring—total God
Sick, Lame, & Wounded—Blind, and Deaf and Dumb— Why sleep ye, O ye Watchman— Wake from the sleep of whoredom. trim your Lamp—
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Sound, sound the Trumpets—for the Bridegroom comes— O man, thou half-dead Angel— a dusky light—a purple flash crystalline splendor—light blue— Green lightnings.— in that eternal & delirious misery— wrathfires— inward desolations— an horror of great darkness great things that on the ocean counterfeit infinity—
F I R E , FA M I N E , A N D S L A U G H T E R : A WA R E C LO G U E
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The Scene a desolated Tract in la Vendée. Famine is discovered lying on the ground; to her enter Fire and Slaughter.
Famine. Sisters! sisters! who sent you here? Slaughter. [to Fire]. I will whisper it in her ear. Fire. No! no! no! Spirits hear what spirits tell: ’Twill make a holiday in Hell. No! no! no! Myself, I named him once below, And all the souls, that damned be, Leaped up at once in anarchy, Clapped their hands and danced for glee. They no longer heeded me; But laughed to hear Hell’s burning rafters Unwillingly re-echo laughters! No! no! no! Spirits hear what spirits tell: ’Twill make a holiday in Hell! Famine. Whisper it, sister! so and so! In a dark hint, soft and slow. Slaughter. Letters four do form his name— And who sent you? Both. The same! the same! Slaughter. He came by stealth, and unlocked my den, And I have drunk the blood since then Of thrice three hundred thousand men.
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Both. Who bade you do it? Slaughter. The same! the same! Letters four do form his name. He let me loose, and cried Halloo! To him alone the praise is due. Famine. Thanks, sister, thanks! the men have bled, Their wives and their children faint for bread. I stood in a swampy field of battle; With bones and skulls I made a rattle, To frighten the wolf and carrion-crow And the homeless dog—but they would not go. So off I flew: for how could I bear To see them gorge their dainty fare? I heard a groan and a peevish squall, And through the chink of a cottage-wall— Can you guess what I saw there? Both. Whisper it, sister! in our ear. Famine. A baby beat its dying mother: I had starved the one and was starving the other! Both. Who bade you do’t? Famine. The same! the same! Letters four do form his name. He let me loose, and cried, Halloo! To him alone the praise is due. Fire. Sisters! I from Ireland came! Hedge and corn-fields all on flame, I triumphed o’er the setting sun! And all the while the work was done, On as I strode with my huge strides, I flung back my head and I held my sides, It was so rare a piece of fun To see the sweltered cattle run With uncouth gallop through the night, Scared by the red and noisy light! By the light of his own blazing cot Was many a naked rebel shot: The house-stream met the flame and hissed, While crash! fell in the roof, I wist, On some of those old bed-rid nurses, That deal in discontent and curses. Both. Who bade you do’t?
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Fire. The same! the same! Letters four do form his name. He let me loose, and cried Halloo! To him alone the praise is due. All. He let us loose, and cried Halloo! How shall we yield him honour due? Famine. Wisdom comes with lack of food. I’ll gnaw, I’ll gnaw the multitude, Till the cup of rage o’erbrim: They shall seize him and his brood— Slaughter. They shall tear him limb from limb! Fire. O thankless beldames and untrue! And is this all that you can do For him, who did so much for you? Ninety months he, by my troth! Hath richly catered for you both; And in an hour would you repay An eight years’ work?—Away! away! I alone am faithful! I Cling to him everlastingly.
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N E P L U S U LT R A
Sole Positive of Night! Antipathist of Light! Fate’s only essence! primal scorpion rod— The one permitted opposite of God!— Condensed blackness and abysmal storm Compacted to one sceptre Arms the Grasp enorm— The Intercepter— The Substance that still casts the shadow Death!— The Dragon foul and fell— The unrevealable, And hidden one, whose breath Gives wind and fuel to the fires of Hell! Ah! sole despair Of both th’eternities in Heaven! Sole interdict of all-bedewing prayer, The all-compassionate!
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Save to the Lampads Seven Revealed to none of all th’Angelic State, Save to the Lampads Seven, That watch the throne of Heaven!
COMMENTARY
I fall asleep night after night watching that perpetual feeling, to which Imagination[—]or the real affection of that organ or its appendages by that feeling, beyond the other parts of the body (tho’ no atom but seems to share in it)[—]has given a place and seat of manifestation, a Shechinah in the heart.—Shall I try to image it to myself, as an animant self-conscious pendulum, continuing for ever its arc of motion by the for ever anticipation of it?—or like some fairer Blossom-life in the centre of the Flower-polypus, a Life within Life, & constituting a part of the Life, th[at] includes it? A consciousness within a Consciousness, yet mutually penetrated, each possessing both itself & the other—distinct tho’ indivisible!
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S. T. C., from The Notebooks
(1) Let us take more seriously than history has the title for his 1817 volume, Sibyllene Leaves, with its implications of the oracular & occult, the excessive, the disembodied, the voice from sources erupting & residing beyond the horizon of the stable & the familiar. “Habituated to the Vast,” he was drawn at the same time to the immediate material world (see, for example, his notebook entry on the “beautiful Thing urine”). “Kubla Khan” (composed 1797, published 1816), the poem of “that dome in air,” is not only the model for a Romantic poem that records the spontaneity of dream or reverie, but an early form of that “automatic writing” (A. Breton) that will be the defining mark of a later Surrealism. Oneiric, spontaneous, drug-induced, a leap across domains of consciousness—it is also something “built,” constructed, the initiation of a new poetics. As a poem received in dream it looks back as well to the oldest, shaman-derived roots of poetry. (2) Coleridge’s work opens further through The Notebooks, his experimental side found in a process that at times predicts the prose poetry coalescing later in the century. There, & in manuscripts now published in J. C. Mays’s Bollingen edition of his poetry, Coleridge revels in metrical experiments—for example, recasting Raphael’s flight to Earth in Paradise Lost into a different, less regular, meter, or “deforming” while translating poems of Schiller & Tieck. This leads to his famous formulation, in the preface to Christabel, of the breaking of accentual-syllabic into accentual verse—an important step toward the “heave” into the modern line. (Similarly the unpredictable use of line length and rhyme in “Kubla Khan” prefigures a “free” verse still to come.) Yet for Coleridge formal poetry is only one manifestation of his many forays, extending, like those of Goethe,
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into idealist philosophy, religion, politics, and science, a huge, only partly differentiated stream of exploration across languages & cultures through the millennia. (3) “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,” included here in its 1800 Annual Anthology version edited by Robert Southey, is an antiwar allegory directed against the decision, by the Tory prime minister William Pitt the Younger (he of the four-letter name, whom Coleridge once cited as an instance of “a cyclops walking backwards,” or one whose experience is not informed by ideas), to back a group of royalist émigrés in their 1796 attack on the Vendée in the west of France, a scene of a counterrevolutionary insurrection and “harsh reprisals by the Republican army” (William Keach). Writes Louis Zukofsky, a century & more after the fact: “I’ll do what says their Coleridge, / Twist red hot pokers into knots” (from “Poem Beginning ‘The’”).
C harles Fou rier
1772–1837
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from T H E T H E O R Y O F T H E F O U R M O V E M E N T S
I alone shall have confounded twenty centuries of political imbecility, and it is to me alone that present and future generations will be indebted for their boundless happiness. Before me, mankind lost several thousand years in fighting madly against nature. I am the first who bowed before her by studying attraction, the organ of her decrees. She has deigned to smile upon the only mortal who has brought incense to her shrine; she has delivered up all her treasures to me. I come as the possessor of the book of Destiny to banish political and moral darkness and to erect the theory of universal harmony upon the ruins of the uncertain sciences. Translation from French by Jonathan Beecher & Richard Bienvenu
T H E P H A LA N X AT DAW N
Every meal has a character of its own, a tone which is the same in all three classes. I will limit myself to describing the character of the anthem or first meal which is served in the very early morning before anyone has left the palace. The anthem is not a very orderly meal; it is marked by a pleasing confusion. Since people get up at different times, it is divided into three stages: there is the first anthem for a few groups who go out to
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work very early; then there is the big central anthem for the majority of the groups, which set off an hour later; finally there is the post-anthem for late-risers. . . . The central anthem, which takes place around five o’clock in the morning is gay and attractive in all respects. It provides an occasion for the presentation of distinguished travelers who have spent the night at the Phalanx. As people arrive for this meal, they are able to read reports and news dispatches which have arrived during the night; they learn about the plays to be performed in neighboring Phalanxes, about the movements of caravans and industrial armies, the voyages of the various paladins of the globe. In addition they find the various newspapers which have arrived during the night either from the Congress of Unity, which is located on the Bosphorus, or from the secondary congresses of the Amazon, the Chesapeake, etc. The anthem also serves as a second Exchange; it is an occasion at which the negotiations of the previous day may be modified if necessary. The news which has arrived during the night may necessitate some changes in the arrangements made earlier, and it is at the anthem that such matters are settled. This task is confided to special acolytes who serve as peripatetic negotiators during the course of the meal. All of these distractions make the anthem a very chaotic meal, a most satisfying imbroglio including many other surprises of which I will refrain from speaking since they do not coincide with our customs. I might add that all by itself the anthem would suffice to get the most sluggish individual out of bed by five in the morning, were he not already excited by the desire to participate in the sessions of his groups. Thus by the end of the central anthem, it would be unusual to find one-eighth of the Phalanx still in bed. In warm weather the central anthem concludes with the little morning parade which I will now describe. I will assume that it is held at five o’clock in the morning. Shortly before five the peals of a carillon announce the little parade and the hymn to the dawn. Those who are finishing their meal make ready; the musicians get their instruments, the priests and parade officers adjust their decorations, etc. The clocks strike five. The Athlete Conradin, who is fourteen years old and ranks as a Major on the parade staff, gives the command to form groups. I have already said that the officers for the little parade come from the choir of Athletes. Thus Conradin’s adjutants are also thirteen or fourteen years old; they are Anténor and Amphion for the groups of boys, and Clorinde and Galatea for the groups of girls. Amphion and Galatea set about bringing together the members of the
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orchestras, while Anténor and Clorinde start to place people in proper marching order. Ranks are formed in the following manner: I will suppose that the procession consists of 400 people—men, women and children—and that they make up twenty groups which are all ready to set out into the country. The twenty standard-bearers form a line facing the colonnade. The whole throng is divided like an orchestra into separate vocal and instrumental sections, each of which is headed by its own priest or priestess. Before the priests there are basins of burning incense tended by the Tots. A hierophant or high priest stands between the lines of men and women; the drummers and trumpeters are next to the colonnade; and the animals and wagons are drawn up in the rear. At the center of the entire gathering stands the young Major Conradin. His adjutants are at his side, and he is preceded by four children from the choir of the neophytes. These children carry signal torches which they wave when there are orders to be transmitted to the watch tower. The tower in turn relays the orders to the domes of adjacent castles, to neighboring communities, and to those groups which have already gone out into the countryside. When all is ready, the drums roll, the crowd falls silent, and the Major orders everyone to bow to God. Then the drums and trumpets sound a mighty fanfare and the carillons peal in unison. Incense rises, flags wave, and the colors are hoisted on the spires of the Phalanstery. The groups which are already in the fields pause to join in this ceremony as do passing travelers and the members of visiting caravans. When a minute has passed, the hierophant calls for the hymn by striking its first three bars on the tuning fork. The ritornelle is chanted by the priests and priestesses directing each of the vocal and instrumental sections. Then the hymn is sung by all the groups together. When the hymn is over, the Little Khan sounds the call to the colors. Everyone puts away his instrument and takes his place under the banner of his work group. Each group then marches freely, and not in perfect ranks, toward its animals and wagons. (Since the work groups are made up of people of all ages, they would be ill-advised to march in strict parade order.) Pushing its wagons, each group then parades before the great colonnade where the dignitaries are standing. If the parade is just a small one, one of the king’s paladins may be there, but on the days of big parades a paladin of the Emperor of Unity will attend. As each group passes the reviewing stand, it receives a salute equal to its rank. The groups of plowmen and masons, who come first, are given a fine fanfare, and then they proceed to their work. The salute to God circles the earth along with the sun. At the equi-
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nox, a big parade is held at sunrise in every Phalanx. Thus the dawn is greeted by a moving ribbon of Phalanxes which stretches for thousands of leagues, and as the day advances, the hymn to the dawn is sung over the length and breadth of the earth. On the two solstices the hymn is sung simultaneously by the whole human race at the moment which corresponds to noon at Constantinople. Translation from French by Jonathan Beecher & Richard Bienvenu
COMMENTARY
If your sciences dictated by wisdom have served only to perpetuate poverty and heartbreak, give us rather sciences dictated by madness, provided that they calm the furies and relieve the miseries of peoples.
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C. F., Theory of the Four Movements
A self-educated intellectual & reluctant entrepreneur, Fourier was best known as an early “utopian socialist” (Marx’s term) & cited as such by Marx & Engels & others of his near contemporaries. It was Marx & Engels in fact who first spoke, however critically, of his work containing “a vein of true poetry,” while, like other nineteenth-century admirers, they passed over the fantastic & outrageous side of his imagined utopia or even what Edmund Wilson later called his “almost insane capacity for pity.” But the more essential view of Fourier qua poet was by André Breton & other Surrealists, who foregrounded in the twentieth century precisely what others had suppressed in the nineteenth. Thus Breton, who wrote the great “Ode à Charles Fourier” & might have made of him a kind of Surrealist in Utopia among his Surrealist forerunners: “His most favorable commentators, and even the most enthusiastic proponents of his socio-economic system, have been united in deploring the rovings of Fourier’s imagination. They have gone to great lengths to conceal the ‘extravagances’ he indulged in, and have glossed over the ‘fantastic and rambling’ aspects of his thought, which most often was so beautifully controlled. . . . How could Fourier both satisfy such demanding men and disconcert almost everyone who has approached him with his dizzying ascents into things marvelous and uncontrollable? His theory of natural history—which held that the cherry was the product of the earth’s copulation with itself and the grape the product of the earth’s copulation with the sun—was patently insane, and many say that his cosmology is no better. For in it, the Earth occupies only the insignificant place of a bee in a hive formed by a few hundred thousand starry universes, the totality of which constitute a biniverse, these biniverses being themselves grouped by the thousands into triniverses, and so on; creation proceeds by successive stages and groupings; our individual existence is subject to 1,260 avatars covering 54,000 years in the other world and 27,000 in this one, etc.” Yet Engels, as Breton also points out,
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presented him as “‘one of the greatest satirists of all time’ and a consummate dialectician.” To this could be added Fourier’s push toward a unification of the human & other-than-human worlds & a “theory of universal harmony” seen in terms of a recognition & liberation of Newton-like forces of attraction & repulsion, including a radical reorganization of political & sexual behaviors. His proposals for a new social & economic order—an ideal realm called Harmony, based on smaller units called phalanxes, & geared toward a freedom from debilitating labor & a near-Blakean gratification of human desire—fostered a sense of “absolute doubt” & “absolute deviation” with regard to all philosophies & all philosophers before him. In the same autogenerative spirit, he was, as his translators Jonathan Beecher & Richard Bienvenu write of him, “a self-described ‘stranger to the art of writing’ . . . [who] also had a penchant for neologisms and typographical experimentation that some have cited as evidence of his ‘madness.’” But as Breton gets it again, in terms of the achievement: “a head in which, on the transcendental plane, hyperlucidity and extreme rigor in matters of social criticism are allied with total freedom of conjecture” (A. Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, translated by Mark Polizzotti).
Thoma s D e Qu in cey
1785–1859
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D R E A M - F U G U E : ON T H E T H E M E O F S U D D E N D E AT H Whence the sound Of instruments, that made melodious chime, Was heard, of harp and organ; and who mov’d Their stops and chords, was seen; his volant touch Instinct through all proportions, low and high, Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue. PARAD I S E LO S T, B O O K X I
Tumultuosissimamente.
Passion of Sudden Death! that once in youth I read and interpreted by the shadows of thy averted* signs;—Rapture of panic taking the shape, which amongst tombs in churches I have seen, of woman bursting her sepulchral bonds—of woman’s Ionic form bending forward from the ruins of her grave, with arching foot, with eyes upraised, with clasped adoring hands—waiting, watching, trembling, praying, for the trumpet’s *“Averted signs.”—I read the course and changes of the lady’s agony in the succession of her involuntary gestures; but let it be remembered that I read all this from the rear, never once catching the lady’s full face, and even her profile imperfectly.
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call to rise from dust for ever;—Ah, vision too fearful of shuddering humanity on the brink of abysses! vision that didst start back—that didst reel away—like a shrivelling scroll from before the wrath of fire racing on the wings of the wind! Epilepsy so brief of horror—wherefore is it that thou canst not die? Passing so suddenly into darkness, wherefore is it that still thou sheddest thy sad funeral blights upon the gorgeous mosaics of dreams? Fragment of music too stern, heard once and heard no more, what aileth thee that thy deep rolling chords come up at intervals through all the worlds of sleep, and after thirty years have lost no element of horror?
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1
Lo, it is summer, almighty summer! The everlasting gates of life and summer are thrown open wide; and on the ocean, tranquil and verdant as a savannah, the unknown lady from the dreadful vision and I myself are floating: she upon a fairy pinnace, and I upon an English three-decker. But both of us are wooing gales of festal happiness within the domain of our common country—within that ancient watery park—within that pathless chase where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, and which stretches from the rising to the setting sun. Ah! what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved. And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers—young women how lovely, young men how noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting towards us amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous corymbi from vintages, amidst natural caroling and the echoes of sweet girlish laughter. Slowly the pinnace nears us, gaily she hails us, and slowly she disappears beneath the shadow of our mighty bows. But then, as at some signal from heaven, the music and the carols, and the sweet echoing of girlish laughter—all are hushed. What evil has smitten the pinnace, meeting or overtaking her? Did ruin to our friends couch within our own dreadful shadow? Was our shadow the shadow of death? I looked over the bow for an answer; and, behold! the pinnace was dismantled; the revel and the revellers were found no more; the glory of the vintage was dust; and the forest was left without a witness to its beauty upon the seas. “But where,” and I turned to our own crew—“where are the lovely women that danced beneath the awning of flowers and clustering corymbi? Whither have fled the noble young men that danced with them?” Answer there was none. But suddenly the man at the masthead, whose countenance darkened with alarm, cried aloud—“Sail on the weather-beam! Down she comes upon us; in seventy seconds she will founder!”
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2
I looked to the weather-side, and the summer had departed. The sea was rocking, and shaken with gathering wrath. Upon its surface sate mighty mists, which grouped themselves into arches and long cathedral aisles. Down one of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel from a cross-bow, ran a frigate right athwart our course. “Are they mad?” some voice exclaimed from our deck. “Are they blind? Do they woo their ruin?” But in a moment, as she was close upon us, some impulse of a heady current or sudden vortex gave a wheeling bias to her course, and off she forged without a shock. As she ran past us, high aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, towering surges of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce to catch her. But far away she was borne into desert spaces of the sea: whilst still by sight I followed her, as she ran before the howling gale, chased by angry sea-birds and by maddening billows; still I saw her, as at the moment when she ran past us, amongst the shrouds, with her white draperies streaming before the wind. There she stood with hair dishevelled, one hand clutched amongst the tackling—rising, sinking, fluttering, trembling, praying—there for leagues I saw her as she stood, raising at intervals one hand to heaven, amidst the fiery crests of the pursuing waves and the raving of the storm; until at last, upon a sound from afar of malicious laughter and mockery, all was hidden for ever in driving showers; and afterwards, but when I know not, and how I know not.
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3
Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance, wailing over the dead that die before the dawn, awakened me as I slept in a boat moored to some familiar shore. The morning twilight even then was breaking; and, by the dusky revelations which it spread, I saw a girl adorned with a garland of white roses about her head for some great festival, running along the solitary strand with extremity of haste. Her running was the running of panic; and often she looked back as to some dreadful enemy in the rear. But when I leaped ashore, and followed on her steps to warn her of a peril in front, alas! from me she fled as from another peril; and vainly I shouted to her of quicksands that lay ahead. Faster and faster she ran; round a promontory of rock she wheeled out of sight; in an instant I also wheeled round it, but only to see the treacherous sands gathering above her head. Already her person was buried; only the fair young head and the diadem of white roses around it were still visible to the pitying heavens; and, last of all, was visible one marble arm. I saw by
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the early twilight this fair young head, as it was sinking down to darkness—saw this marble arm, as it rose above her head and her treacherous grave, tossing, faultering, rising, clutching as at some false deceiving hand stretched out from the clouds—saw this marble arm uttering her dying hope, and then her dying despair. The head, the diadem, the arm,—these all had sunk; at last over these also the cruel quicksand had closed; and no memorial of the fair young girl remained on earth, except my own solitary tears, and the funeral bells from the desert seas, that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem over the grave of the buried child, and over her blighted dawn. I sate, and wept in secret the tears that men have ever given to the memory of those that died before the dawn, and by the treachery of earth, our mother. But the tears and funeral bells were hushed suddenly by a shout as of many nations, and by a roar as from some great king’s artillery advancing rapidly along the valleys, and heard afar by its echoes among the mountains. “Hush!” I said, as I bent my ear earthwards to listen—“hush!—this either is the very anarchy of strife, or else”—and then I listened more profoundly, and said as I raised my head—“or else, oh heavens! it is victory that swallows up all strife.”
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4
Immediately, in trance, I was carried over land and sea to some distant kingdom, and placed upon a triumphal car, amongst companions crowned with laurel. The darkness of gathering midnight, brooding over all the land, hid from us the mighty crowds that were weaving restlessly about our carriage as a centre—we heard them, but we saw them not. Tidings had arrived, within an hour, of a grandeur that measured itself against centuries; too full of pathos they were, too full of joy that acknowledged no fountain but God, to utter themselves by other language than by tears, by restless anthems, by reverberations rising from every choir, of the Gloria in excelsis. These tidings we that sate upon the laurelled car had it for our privilege to publish amongst all nations. And already, by signs audible through the darkness, by snortings and tramplings, our angry horses, that knew no fear of fleshly weariness, upbraided us with delay. Wherefore was it that we delayed? We waited for a secret word, that should bear witness to the hope of nations, as now accomplished for ever. At midnight the secret word arrived; which word was—Waterloo and Recovered Christendom! The dreadful word shone by its own light; before us it went; high above our leaders’ heads it rode, and spread a golden light over the paths which we traversed. Every city, at the presence of the secret word, threw open its gates to receive us. The
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rivers were silent as we crossed. All the infinite forests, as we ran along their margins, shivered in homage to the secret word. And the darkness comprehended it. Two hours after midnight we reached a mighty minster. Its gates, which rose to the clouds, were closed. But when the dreadful word, that rode before us, reached them with its golden light, silently they moved back upon their hinges; and at a flying gallop our equipage entered the grand aisle of the cathedral. Headlong was our pace; and at every altar, in the little chapels and oratories to the right hand and left of our course, the lamps, dying or sickening, kindled anew in sympathy with the secret word that was flying past. Forty leagues we might have run in the cathedral, and as yet no strength of morning light had reached us, when we saw before us the aërial galleries of the organ and the choir. Every pinnacle of the fret-work, every station of advantage amongst the traceries, was crested by white-robed choristers, that sang deliverance; that wept no more tears, as once their fathers had wept; but at intervals that sang together to the generations, saying— “Chaunt the deliverer’s praise in every tongue,”
and receiving answers from afar,
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—“such as once in heaven and earth were sung.”
And of their chaunting was no end; of our headlong pace was neither pause nor remission. Thus, as we ran like torrents—thus, as we swept with bridal rapture over the Campo Santo* of the cathedral graves—suddenly we became aware of a vast necropolis rising upon the far-off horizon—a city of sepulchres, built within the saintly cathedral for the warrior dead that rested from their feuds on earth. Of purple granite was the necropolis; yet, in the first minute, it lay like a purple stain upon the horizon—so mighty was the distance. In the second minute it trembled through many changes, growing into terraces and towers of wondrous altitude, so mighty was the pace. In the third minute already, with our dreadful gallop, we were *Campo Santo.—It is probable that most of my readers will be acquainted with the history of the Campo Santo at Pisa—composed of earth brought from Jerusalem for a bed of sanctity, as the highest prize which the noble piety of crusaders could ask or imagine. There is another Campo Santo at Naples, formed, however, (I presume,) on the example given by Pisa. Possibly the idea may have been more extensively copied. To readers who are unacquainted with England, or who (being English) are yet unacquainted with the cathedral cities of England, it may be right to mention that the graves within-side the cathedrals often form a flat pavement over which carriages and horses might roll; and perhaps a boyish remembrance of one particular cathedral, across which I had seen passengers walk and burdens carried, may have assisted my dream.
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entering its suburbs. Vast sarcophagi rose on every side, having towers and turrets that, upon the limits of the central aisle, strode forward with haughty intrusion, that ran back with mighty shadows into answering recesses. Every sarcophagus showed many bas-reliefs—bas-reliefs of battles—bas-reliefs of battle-fields; of battles from forgotten ages—of battles from yesterday—of battle-fields that, long since, nature had healed and reconciled to herself with the sweet oblivion of flowers—of battle-fields that were yet angry and crimson with carnage. Where the terraces ran, there did we run; where the towers curved, there did we curve. With the flight of swallows our horses swept round every angle. Like rivers in flood, wheeling round headlands; like hurricanes that ride into the secrets of forests; faster than ever light unwove the mazes of darkness, our flying equipage carried earthly passions—kindled warrior instincts—amongst the dust that lay around us; dust oftentimes of our noble fathers that had slept in God from Créci to Trafalgar. And now had we reached the last sarcophagus, now were we abreast of the last bas-relief, already had we recovered the arrow-like flight of the illimitable central aisle, when coming up this aisle to meet us we beheld a female infant that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers. The mists, which went before her, hid the fawns that drew her, but could not hide the shells and tropic flowers with which she played—but could not hide the lovely smiles by which she uttered her trust in the mighty cathedral, and in the cherubim that looked down upon her from the topmost shafts of its pillars. Face to face she was meeting us; face to face she rode, as if danger there were none. “Oh baby!” I exclaimed, “shalt thou be the ransom for Waterloo? Must we, that carry tidings of great joy to every people, be messengers of ruin to thee?” In horror I rose at the thought; but then also, in horror at the thought, rose one that was sculptured on the bas-relief—a Dying Trumpeter. Solemnly from the field of battle he rose to his feet; and, unslinging his stony trumpet, carried it, in his dying anguish, to his stony lips—sounding once, and yet once again; proclamation that, in thy ears, oh baby! must have spoken from the battlements of death. Immediately deep shadows fell between us, and aboriginal silence. The choir had ceased to sing. The hoofs of our horses, the rattling of our harness, alarmed the graves no more. By horror the bas-relief had been unlocked into life. By horror we, that were so full of life, we men and our horses, with their fiery fore-legs rising in mid air to their everlasting gallop, were frozen to a bas-relief. Then a third time the trumpet sounded; the seals were taken off all pulses; life, and the frenzy of life, tore into their channels again; again the choir burst forth in sunny grandeur, as from the muffling of storms and darkness;
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again the thunderings of our horses carried temptation into the graves. One cry burst from our lips as the clouds, drawing off from the aisle, showed it empty before us—“Whither has the infant fled?—is the young child caught up to God?” Lo! afar off, in a vast recess, rose three mighty windows to the clouds; and on a level with their summits, at height insuperable to man, rose an altar of purest alabaster. On its eastern face was trembling a crimson glory. Whence came that? Was it from the reddening dawn that now streamed through the windows? Was it from the crimson robes of the martyrs that were painted on the windows? Was it from the bloody bas-reliefs of earth? Whencesoever it were—there, within that crimson radiance, suddenly appeared a female head, and then a female figure. It was the child—now grown up to woman’s height. Clinging to the horns of the altar, there she stood—sinking, rising, trembling, fainting—raving, despairing; and behind the volume of incense that, night and day, streamed upwards from the altar, was seen the fiery font, and dimly was descried the outline of the dreadful being that should baptise her with the baptism of death. But by her side was kneeling her better angel, that hid his face with wings; that wept and pleaded for her; that prayed when she could not; that fought with heaven by tears for her deliverance; which also, as he raised his immortal countenance from his wings, I saw, by the glory in his eye, that he had won at last.
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5
Then rose the agitation, spreading through the infinite cathedral, to its agony; then was completed the passion of the mighty fugue. The golden tubes of the organ, which as yet had but sobbed and muttered at intervals—gleaming amongst clouds and surges of incense—threw up, as from fountains unfathomable, columns of heart-shattering music. Choir and anti-choir were filling fast with unknown voices. Thou also, Dying Trumpeter!—with thy love that was victorious, and thy anguish that was finishing, didst enter the tumult: trumpet and echo—farewell love, and farewell anguish—rang through the dreadful sanctus. We, that spread flight before us, heard the tumult, as of flight, mustering behind us. In fear we looked round for the unknown steps that, in flight or in pursuit, were gathering upon our own. Who were these that followed? The faces, which no man could count—whence were they? “Oh, darkness of the grave!” I exclaimed, “that from the crimson altar and from the fiery font wert visited with secret light—that wert searched by the effulgence in the angel’s eye—were these indeed thy children? Pomps of life, that, from the burials of centuries, rose again to the voice of perfect joy,
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could it be ye that had wrapped me in the reflux of panic?” What ailed me, that I should fear when the triumphs of earth were advancing? Ah! Pariah heart within me, that couldst never hear the sound of joy without sullen whispers of treachery in ambush; that, from six years old, didst never hear the promise of perfect love, without seeing aloft amongst the stars fingers as of a man’s hand writing the secret legend—“ashes to ashes, dust to dust!”—wherefore shouldst thou not fear though all men should rejoice? Lo! as I looked back for seventy leagues through the mighty cathedral, and saw the quick and the dead that sang together to God, together that sang to the generations of man—ah! raving, as of torrents that opened on every side: trepidation, as of female and infant steps that fled—ah! rushing, as of wings that chased! But I heard a voice from heaven, which said—“Let there be no reflux of panic—let there be no more fear, and no more sudden death! Cover them with joy as the tides cover the shore.” That heard the children of the choir, that heard the children of the grave. All the hosts of jubilation made ready to move. Like armies that ride in pursuit, they moved with one step. Us, that, with laurelled heads, were passing from the cathedral through its eastern gates, they overtook, and, as with a garment, they wrapped us round with thunders that overpowered our own. As brothers we moved together; to the skies we rose—to the dawn that advanced—to the stars that fled: rendering thanks to God in the highest—that, having hid his face through one generation behind thick clouds of War, once again was ascending—was ascending from Waterloo—in the visions of Peace:—rendering thanks for thee, young girl! whom having overshadowed with his ineffable passion of Death—suddenly did God relent; suffered thy angel to turn aside his arm; and even in thee, sister unknown! shown to me for a moment only to be hidden for ever, found an occasion to glorify his goodness. A thousand times, amongst the phantoms of sleep, has he shown thee to me, standing before the golden dawn, and ready to enter its gates—with the dreadful Word going before thee—with the armies of the grave behind thee; shown thee to me, sinking, rising, fluttering, fainting, but then suddenly reconciled, adoring: a thousand times has he followed thee in the worlds of sleep—through storms; through desert seas; through the darkness of quicksands; through fugues and the persecution of fugues; through dreams, and the dreadful resurrections that are in dreams—only that at the last, with one motion of his victorious arm, he might record and emblazon the endless resurrections of his love!
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COMMENTARY
The true object in my Opium Confessions is not the naked physiological theme—on the contrary, that is the ugly pole, the murderous spear, the halberd—but those wandering musical variations upon the theme, those parasitical thoughts, feelings, digressions, which climb up with bells and blossoms round about the arid stock; ramble away from it at times with perhaps too rank a luxuriance; but at the same time, by the eternal interest attached to the subjects of these digressions, no matter what were the execution, spread a glory over incidents that for themselves would be—less than nothing.
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T. D. Q., Suspiria de Profundis
(1) De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) begins as a respectable autobiographical account of a life culminating in opium addiction—at once a “confession” & a “scientific” report on himself as a case study. But in his later autobiographical writing, Suspiria de Profundis & its second part, The English Mail Coach, from which “Dream-Fugue” is here excerpted, he pushes that account into a representation of altered states themselves (“dreams and noonday visions”) & an embodiment of that oceanic condition through long paratactic sentences & paragraphs—what he called “impassioned prose” & Jack Kerouac (if we read him rightly) “spontaneous prose.” A longtime friend of Wordsworth, he nevertheless has greater poetic kinship with the Coleridge of “Kubla Khan” in the merging of a proto-automatic writing with artificial substances as access to the unconscious; he writes “to emblazon the power of opium over the grand and shadowy world of dreams.” Baudelaire reverently appropriated large portions of the Confessions into his Artificial Paradises. In “Dream-Fugue” De Quincey seeks a prose that reaches toward musical structure & texture. At his best, his is a prose poetry that transforms the lyric rural perspectival vision of Wordsworthian Romanticism into the opiated, boundless absorption in the stream of nineteenth-century urban life. As such he looks forward in the century to the visionary prose poetry of Nerval, Poe, & Baudelaire & further to the automatic writing of the Surrealists’ manifestations of reverie & dream as the most authentic mental state, least subject to “regulation” in the age of totalitarian societies. (2) “At about the same time as Romanticism turned it into the seriousness of oeuvre, literature initiated the experience of its own substance: organized by a concept of work, it soon came to know play’s gravity. Such gravity exposed the work to experiences of peril and experimentation, obligating literature to map out a toxicogeography—an imaginary place where literature could crash against its abysses and float amid fragments of residual transcendency. The engagement with its essence threw literature off any predictably legible course but also created the mirage of a genuine autonomy” (Avital Ronell, Crack Wars).
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G eorge G ord on , L ord Byro n
1788–1824
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DARKNESS
I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came, and went—and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light: And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones, The palaces of crowned king—the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed, And men were gathered round their blazing homes To look once more into each other’s face; Happy were those who dwelt within the eye Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch: A fearful hope was all the world contain’d; Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black. The brows of men by the despairing light Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits The flashes fell upon them; some lay down And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled; And others hurried to and fro, and fed Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up With mad disquietude on the dull sky, The pall of a past world; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust, And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d, And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d And twined themselves among the multitude,
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Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food: And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again;—a meal was bought With blood, and each sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left; All earth was but one thought—and that was death, Immediate and inglorious; and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails—men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; The meagre by the meagre were devoured, Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one, And he was faithful to a corse, and kept The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay, Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food, But with a piteous and perpetual moan And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand Which answered not with a caress—he died. The crowd was famish’d by degrees, but two Of an enormous city did survive, And they were enemies; they met beside The dying embers of an altar-place Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things For an unholy usage; they raked up, And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld Each other’s aspects—saw, and shriek’d, and died— Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, The populous and the powerful—was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless— A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still, And nothing stirred within their silent depths; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropp’d
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They slept on the abyss without a surge— The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The moon their mistress had expired before; The winds were withered in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need Of aid from them—She was the universe.
from C H I L D E H A R O L D ’ S P I L G R I M A G E , C A N T O T H R E E
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Lake Leman woos me with its crystal face, The mirror where the stars and mountains view The stillness of their aspect in each trace Its clear depth yields of their far height and hue: There is too much of man here, to look through With a fit mind the might which I behold; But soon in me shall Loneliness renew Thoughts hid, but not less cherish’d than of old, Ere mingling with the herd had penn’d me in their fold. To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind; All are not fit with them to stir and toil, Nor is it discontent to keep the mind Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil In the hot throng, where we become the spoil Of our infection, till too late and long We may deplore and struggle with the coil, In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong ’Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong. There, in a moment, we may plunge our years In fatal penitence, and in the blight Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears, And colour things to come with hues of Night; The race of life becomes a hopeless flight To those that walk in darkness: on the sea, The boldest steer but where their ports invite, But there are wanderers o’er Eternity Whose bark drives on and on, and anchored ne’er shall be.
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Is it not better, then, to be alone, And love Earth only for its earthly sake? By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone, Or the pure bosom of its nursing lake, Which feeds it as a mother who doth make A fair but froward infant her own care, Kissing its cries away as these awake;— Is it not better thus our lives to wear, Than join the crushing crowd, doom’d to inflict or bear?
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I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me, High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture: I can see Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Class’d among creatures, when the soul can flee, And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain. And thus I am absorb’d, and this is life: I look upon the peopled desert past, As on a place of agony and strife, Where, for some sin, to Sorrow I was cast, To act and suffer, but remount at last With a fresh pinion; which I feel to spring, Though young, yet waxing vigorous, as the blast Which it would cope with, on delighted wing, Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling. And when, at length, the mind shall be all free From what it hates in this degraded form, Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be Existent happier in the fly and worm,— When elements to elements conform, And dust is as it should be, shall I not Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm? The bodiless thought? the Spirit of each spot? Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal lot? Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
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Is not the love of these deep in my heart With a pure passion? should I not contemn All objects, if compared with these? and stem A tide of suffering, rather than forgo Such feelings for the hard and worldly phlegm Of those whose eyes are only turn’d below, Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts which dare not glow? But this is not my theme; and I return To that which is immediate, and require Those who find contemplation in the urn, To look on One, whose dust was once all fire, A native of the land where I respire The clear air for a while—a passing guest, Where he became a being,—whose desire Was to be glorious; ’twas a foolish quest, The which to gain and keep, he sacrificed all rest.
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Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, The apostle of affliction, he who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first drew The breath which made him wretched; yet he knew How to make madness beautiful, and cast O’er erring deeds and thoughts, a heavenly hue Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they past The eyes, which o’er them shed tears feelingly and fast. His love was passion’s essence—as a tree On fire by lightning; with ethereal flame Kindled he was, and blasted; for to be Thus, and enamoured, were in him the same. But his was not the love of living dame, Nor of the dead who rise upon our dreams, But of ideal beauty, which became In him existence, and o’erflowing teems Along his burning page, distempered though it seems. This breathed itself to life in Julie, this Invested her with all that’s wild and sweet; This hallowed, too, the memorable kiss Which every morn his fevered lip would greet,
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From hers, who but with friendship his would meet; But to that gentle touch, through brain and breast Flash’d the thrill’d spirit’s love-devouring heat; In that absorbing sigh perchance more blest, Than vulgar minds may be with all they seek possest. His life was one long war with self-sought foes, Or friends by him self-banish’d; for his mind Had grown Suspicion’s sanctuary, and chose For its own cruel sacrifice, the kind, ’Gainst whom he raged with fury strange and blind. But he was phrenzied,—wherefore, who may know? Since cause might be which skill could never find; But he was phrenzied by disease or woe, To that worst pitch of all, which wears a reasoning show.
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For then he was inspired, and from him came, As from the Pythian’s mystic cave of yore, Those oracles which set the world in flame, Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more: Did he not this for France? which lay before Bowed to the inborn tyranny of years? Broken and trembling, to the yoke she bore, Till by the voice of him and his compeers, Roused up to too much wrath which follows o’ergrown fears? They made themselves a fearful monument! The wreck of old opinions—things which grew Breathed from the birth of time: the veil they rent, And what behind it lay, all earth shall view. But good with ill they also overthrew, Leaving but ruins, wherewith to rebuild Upon the same foundation, and renew Dungeons and thrones, which the same hour re-fill’d, As heretofore, because ambition was self-will’d. But this will not endure, nor be endured! Mankind have felt their strength, and made it felt. They might have used it better, but, allured By their new vigour, sternly have they dealt On one another; pity ceased to melt With her once natural charities. But they,
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Who in oppression’s darkness caved had dwelt, They were not eagles, nourish’d with the day; What marvel then, at times, if they mistook their prey? What deep wounds ever closed without a scar? The heart’s bleed longest, and but heal to wear That which disfigures it; and they who war With their own hopes, and have been vanquish’d, bear Silence, but not submission: in his lair Fix’d Passion holds his breath, until the hour Which shall atone for years; none need despair: It came, it cometh, and will come,—the power To punish or forgive—in one we shall be slower.
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Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake, With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring. This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing To waft me from distraction; once I loved Torn ocean’s roar, but thy soft murmuring Sounds sweet as if a sister’s voice reproved, That I with stern delights should e’er have been so moved. It is the hush of night, and all between Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear, Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen, Save darken’d Jura, whose capt heights appear Precipitously steep; and drawing near, There breathes a living fragrance from the shore, Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear Drops the light drip of the suspended oar, Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more; He is an evening reveller, who makes His life an infancy, and sings his fill; At intervals, some bird from out the brakes, Starts into voice a moment, then is still. There seems a floating whisper on the hill, But that is fancy, for the starlight dews All silently their tears of love instil, Weeping themselves away, till they infuse Deep into Nature’s breast the spirit of her hues.
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from D O N J U A N Difficile est proprie communia dicere. HOR[ACE], EPIST [OL A] AD P I S O N [ E S ]
Dedication
Bob Southey! You’re a poet—poet Laureate, And representative of all the race; Although ’tis true you turn’d out a Tory at Last,—yours has lately been a common case:— And now, my epic renegade! what are ye at, With all the Lakers in and out of place? A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye Like four and twenty blackbirds in a pie;
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“Which pie being open’d, they began to sing”— (This old song and new simile holds good) “A dainty dish to set before the King,” Or Regent, who admires such kind of food. And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But, like a hawk encumber’d with his hood, Explaining metaphysics to the nation— I wish he would explain his Explanation. You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know, At being disappointed in your wish To supersede all warblers here below, And be the only Blackbird in the dish; And then you overstrain yourself, or so, And tumble downward like the flying fish Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob, And fall, for lack of moisture, quite adry, Bob! And Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion,” (I think the quarto holds five hundred pages) Has given a sample from the vasty version Of his new system to perplex the sages: ’Tis poetry—at least by his assertion, And may appear so when the dogstar rages; And he who understands it would be able To add a story to the Tower of Babel. You, Gentlemen! by dint of long seclusion From better company have kept your own
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At Keswick, and through still continued fusion Of one another’s minds at last have grown To deem as a most logical conclusion That Poesy has wreaths for you alone; There is a narrowness in such a notion Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for ocean. I would not imitate the petty thought, Nor coin my self-love to so base a vice, For all the glory your conversion brought, Since gold alone should not have been its price. You have your salary—was’t for that you wrought? And Wordsworth has his place in the Excise. You’re shabby fellows—true—but poets still, And duly seated on the immortal hill.
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Your bays may hide the baldness of your brows, Perhaps some virtuous blushes—let them go, To you I envy neither fruit nor boughs— And for the fame you would engross below The field is universal, and allows Scope to all such as feel the inherent glow— Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe, will try ’Gainst you the question with posterity. For me who, wandering with pedestrian Muses, Contend not with you on the winged steed, I wish your fate may yield ye, when she chooses, The fame you envy, and the skill you need; And recollect a poet nothing loses In giving to his brethren their full meed Of merit, and complaint of present days Is not the certain path to future praise. He that reserves his laurels for posterity (Who does not often claim the bright reversion?) Has generally no great crop to spare it, he Being only injured by his own assertion; And although here and there some glorious rarity Arise, like Titan from the sea’s immersion, The major part of such appellants go To—God knows where—for no one else can know.
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If, fallen in evil days, on evil tongues, Milton appeal’d to the Avenger, Time, If Time, the Avenger, execrates his wrongs, And makes the word “Miltonic” mean “sublime,” He deign’d not to belie his soul in songs, Nor turn his very talent to a crime— He did not loathe the sire to laud the son, But closed the tyrant-hater he begun. Think’st thou, could he, the blind Old Man, arise Like Samuel from the grave, to freeze once more The blood of monarchs with his prophecies, Or be alive again—again all hoar With time and trials, and those helpless eyes And heartless daughters, worn, and pale, and poor, Would he adore a sultan? he obey The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh?
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Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant! Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin’s gore, And thus for wider carnage taught to pant, Transferr’d to gorge upon a sister-shore; The vulgarest tool that tyranny could want, With just enough of talent, and no more, To lengthen fetters by another fix’d, And offer poison long already mix’d. An orator of such set trash of phrase Ineffably, legitimately vile, That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile: Not even a sprightly blunder’s spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone’s ceaseless toil, That turns and turns, to give the world a notion Of endless torments, and perpetual motion. A bungler even in its disgusting trade, And botching, patching, leaving still behind Something of which its masters are afraid, States to be curb’d, and thoughts to be confined, Conspiracy or Congress to be made— Cobbling at manacles for all mankind—
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A tinkering slavemaker, who mends old chains, With God and man’s abhorrence for its gains. If we may judge of matter by the mind, Emasculated to the marrow, It Hath but two objects—how to serve, and bind, Deeming the chain it wears even men may fit; Eutropius of its many masters—blind To worth as freedom, wisdom as to wit— Fearless, because no feeling dwells in ice, Its very courage stagnates to a vice.
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Where shall I turn me not to view its bonds? For I will never feel them—Italy! Thy late reviving Roman soul desponds Beneath the lie this state-thing breathed o’er thee; Thy clanking chain, and Erin’s yet green wounds, Have voices—tongues to cry aloud for me. Europe has slaves, allies, kings, armies still, And Southey lives to sing them very ill. Meantime, Sir Laureate, I proceed to dedicate In honest, simple verse, this song to you; And if in flattering strains I do not predicate, ’Tis that I still retain my “buff and blue.” My politics, as yet, are all to educate, Apostasy’s so fashionable too, To keep one creed’s a task grown quite Herculean, Is it not so, my Tory ultra-Julian?
ON THIS DAY I COMPLETE MY THIRTY-SIXTH YEAR
’Tis time this heart should be unmoved, Since others it hath ceased to move: Yet though I cannot be beloved, Still let me love! My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; The worm—the canker, and the grief Are mine alone!
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The fire that on my bosom preys Is lone as some Volcanic Isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze A funeral pile! The hope, the fear, the jealous care, The exalted portion of the pain And power of Love I cannot share, But wear the chain. But ’tis not thus—and ’tis not here Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now Where Glory decks the hero’s bier Or binds his brow. The Sword, the Banner, and the Field, Glory and Greece around us see! The Spartan borne upon his shield Was not more free!
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Awake (not Greece—she is awake!) Awake, my Spirit! think through whom Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake And then strike home! Tread those reviving passions down Unworthy Manhood—unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of Beauty be. If thou regret’st thy Youth, why live? The land of honourable Death Is here:—to the Field, and give Away thy Breath! Seek out—less often sought than found— A Soldier’s Grave, for thee the best; Then look around, and choose thy Ground, And take thy Rest! Missolonghi January 22, 1824
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COMMENTARY
I perch upon an humbler promontory / Amidst life’s infinite variety / With no great care for what is nicknamed glory. / But speculating as I cast mine eye / On what may suit or may not suit my story / And never straining hard to versify, / I rattle on exactly as I’d talk / With anybody in a ride or walk. // I don’t know that there may be much ability / Shown in this sort of desultory rhyme, / But there’s a conversational facility, / Which may round off an hour upon a time. / Of this I’m sure at least, there’s no servility / In mine irregularity of chime, / Which rings what’s uppermost of new or hoary, / Just as I feel the improvvisatore.
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Byron, from Don Juan, canto XV, 19–20
(1) Baudelaire, approvingly, claimed that Byron wrote “le poésie lyrique anonyme,” a poetry not absorbed in the effusive expressivity of much “Romantic” writing & therefore open to the cool performativity in the lyric subject befitting the dandaical side of both of these poets & anticipating the more playful poetic constructions of many modern experimentalists. Not only in lyric (Baudelaire’s primary focus) but also in the relentlessly proliferative comedy of Don Juan does Byron practice a written version of the Italian performance artist popular in the eighteenth & early nineteenth centuries, the improvvisatore & improvvisatrice, who could extemporize rhymes, often in Byron’s chosen verse form, the ottava rima, & long poems before enthusiastic audiences. In Venice he knew one of the most famous of these, Tomasso Sgricci (born in Byron’s birth year, 1788). The ottava rima became for him (as well as for lesser contemporary poets) the perfect vehicle for a poetry written not from a disinterested position with a singular, “absorptive,” focus but “amidst life’s infinite variety,” achieved through a conversational & extravagantly playful improvisational mode. Although the Noble Lord’s Muse, according to Hazlitt, was “a lady of quality,” his “rattling,” “scribbling,” “irregular” methods actually resulted in a poetic diction more demotic than that practiced by his older nemesis Wordsworth with the latter’s injunction for “a selection of language really used by men.” For more on the poetics & practice of improvisation in the nineteenth century, see Mary Shelley’s “Contadini and Improvisatori” in A Book of Extensions, below, & the commentary on Madame de Staël’s Corinne, above. (2) Unlike much of the preceding poetry in Regency England, Byron’s was strongly internationalist in scope & influence, reflecting his travels & then his residency in Switzerland, Italy, & finally Greece. Not only was the “Byronic” hero—melancholic, alienated, but passionate—picked up throughout Europe & Russia (Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time is a good example), but Byron’s comic self-parody Don Juan found its imitators & revisionists all the way from Pushkin in Eugene Onegin (below) to Kenneth
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Koch’s baseball epic Ko, or A Season on Earth (1959). Equally important was his championing of Rousseau, particularly in Childe Harold, book 3, shown here; & he himself participated actively in the struggle for Greek independence. Poetically his activism had its comic, often transgressive correlate in Don Juan, in which he used his characteristic ottava rima stanza to construct, through juxtaposition, a critique of & release from what Charles Bernstein has called “[a] captivity / in a culture that produces satisfactions as a means / of exploitation or pacification.” And it was for all of these reasons, & not in spite of them, that Byron’s international reputation in his own time was as the greatest of the Romantic poets. (3) “Byron is neither antique nor romantic, but like the present day itself” (Goethe, in Conversations with Eckermann).
G iu s ep p e Belli
1791–1863
ELEVEN ROMAN SONNETS: FOR THE POPE Pope Leo
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Before Pope Leo Eleven had gone under To become a skull and four hambones You heard repeated everywhere at once That for us it was a windfall, a world wonder. What he did, nothing was really foul, What he said, everything was wise; Each enemy of his was a damned fool, A jacobin, a crook, a louse of lice. But all of a sudden, as soon as he had croaked, That blessed Pope became an adder’s sting, An ass, a raging wolf, a crazy cock. And so it happened to that poor little thing, That like the dirty rats when the cat is dead They danced upon his paunch a minuet.
Giuseppe Belli 243 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The Pope I
God don’t want the Pope to take a wife So as not to bring into this world other popelets: Otherwise the Cardinals, who lead a hard life, Would be up shit creek with their little hopelets. But the Pope at his pleasure can tie and untie All the knots, the loose ones and the tight, He can excommunicate, make saints, And give us all to know where he will strike. And besides all this that he unties and ties, He carries two keys so that he notifies Us: here he opens and here he closes shop. The triple crown that looks like a roll of rice Means that he commands, and don’t give a crap, In the world, in purgatory and paradise. The Pope II
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Enough to say the Pope when he was Pope Became so huge you could use a telescope: Every hair on his body grew like a bone And each eye was bigger than a stone. Enough to say his big fat holy ass Couldn’t fit into his former pants, alas! And that his dickie so puffed up on him It was a swollen bottle of goat-skin. Because at Castel Gandolfo, whenever he spoke, Pope Gregory unworthily had whined To each and every one of the Roman folk That when he returned to Rome, the poor old man, He wanted to go and live in the Vatican For at Monte Cavallo he felt confined.
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What Does the Pope Do?
What does he do, the Pope? Oh, he guzzles, snoozes, Stuffs himself, has a spot of coffee, stares Out of the window, fusses about, doodles, Debauches, and takes Rome for a hotel. Him, he don’t have no children, he don’t pant To conduct and harmonize that band; Because, at the worst, the last plate of soup Will always be the one he can command. For him the air, water, sun, bread and wine He thinks is his own stuff: It’s all mine; As if in this world there didn’t exist a fly. And almost, almost this shrewdie would enjoy Remaining alone,—just as God was when He lived before creating angels and man. Another Trip of the Pope I
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That’s right, another trip. The Holy Father now Having heard said that the Nazarene, with a great train, Entered Jerusalem, he wanted to go To Civitavecchia and do the same. This trip, then, about how much could it cost? Pish! a mere twenty-thousand, maybe less— Not counting, however, the famine of hay they caused By so many beasts they brought to bear the blest. And you will then see the triumphal arches All in honor of the victorious marches Against those lousy dogs, the liberals. And you will see the Jesus-Christ-on-earth, How many such thieves and criminals He’ll spring from the workhouse, condemned to a new birth!
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Another Trip of the Pope II
Thru Piazza Navona the news ran about That the Pope, in order to travel with more decorum, From the refreshment made at Palidoro Went on one big hell of a holy bat. And in the face of half the consistory He kept vomiting for a good half hour Plastering the whole of his Holy Person Down to his shoes with their cross of gold awry. And the Court, sputtering from the shower That issued forth from the Stomach Sovereign Took it all like blessings from Paradise. Who knows? In the book of etiquette Of courtiers, good and evil, virtue and vice May not be explained in Italian yet. Another Trip of the Pope III
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It’s like this: the Pope for a whole week All the time, and even for Sunday matins Did nothing else but sail about in a tartan For the entire length and width of the beach. But God forbid if a northeaster should sneak Stealthily up his ass and knock him flat Into the water, just like any old clam When the contents have been sucked and the shell spat! Couldn’t His Holiness discover some whale Related to the one of the prophet Jonah, Who’d make a nice bite of him for lunch and sail Away, without being so kind as to spew Him up again safe upon the shore, Like that other damn fool did with the Jew?
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Pope Gregory at the Excavations
“Good!” said the Pope in that unholy mess Of two excavations at the Roman Forum: “Beautiful hole! beautiful ditch! beautiful fosse! Beautiful these paving-stones! swell, by gum! And just have a little look at that capitol, If a stone-cutter can beat that, I wanna know ’im! And just have a little look at this speckled marble, If it don’t seem just like an oven stone!” And meanwhile, as the Pope in the midst of his court Architects and antiquarians Was thus expressing his profoundest thought, The crowd, half-aloud and half-hushed, Was saying: “Ah, this saint of a man’s a genius! Ah, a Pope of this cut is a great sort!” The Pope’s Kitchen
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The cook being a regular buddy of mine, This morning he invited me to visit The Holy Kitchen. Kitchen? some kitchen! I’d call it. Rather, something more to the point: a seaport. Vats, stewing-pots, kettles and oil presses, Sides of veal, vast slabs of tenderloin, Chickens, cheeses, eggs, greens, hams and fish, Fat game and every kind of special dish. Sez I: “Well, down the hatch, Mr. Holy Father!” Sez Cook: “But wait, you haven’t seen the pantry: There’s as much of God’s grace there to see!” Sez I: “Excuse me, but that’s tough, my son! Tell me, does some Cardinal share his meals?” “No-o—” sez he, “the Pope always eats alone.”
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Popess Joan
She was a real woman. She chucked the apron Before anything else and signed up with the army; Then she was made a priest, became a prelate, Then bishop, and a Cardinal finally. And when the male Pope was taken sick And died, as people say, by poisoning, She was made Pope, transported like a king To Saint John Lateran in the papal chair. But here we solve the plot of the whole affair; All of a sudden she got terrific pains And dropped a kid right there on the chair! From then on this other chair was arranged In such a way that it was easy to grope And tell if the Pontifex was Popess or Pope. And I Have Witnesses
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When the Holy Father passed yesterday By Pasquin, returning from the Nunziata, He wore the devil’s own scowl upon his features Worse than a corporal of the grenadiers. And he kept on making some sort of grim Gossip to a couple of Cardinals Who were seated together facing him, Both of them mighty serious, hush-hush. Meanwhile, the people were howling up a storm, And here and there from the carriage, gold and black, He tossed off a quick blessing. Then he went back To gesturing at those two with his huge hands; And they, with their obedient twin heads, Seemed forever to be yes-ing him. Translations from Romanesco by Harold Norse
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COMMENTARY
I have decided to leave a monument to what is today called the plebs of Rome. G. B., Introduction to I sonetti, 1831
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(1) With Belli, as with Burns (above), we come smack up against the presence of dialect—here the Romanesco spoken in his time by the people of Rome & more particularly in the Trastevere district, where his statue now stands. His more than 2,000 “Roman sonnets” (2,279 to be exact) not only adopt the Roman language—against any more “normative” form of Italian—as his idiom of choice, but turn the sonnet form itself into a similarly charged vehicle, to blast the existing order of things: political, social, religious, sexual, linguistic. In the process the sonnet sheds its dolce stil quality & turns into a raw surface—the harbinger of greater/rawer poetries to come—whose “coarseness” (wherein resides its power) speaks in the voice of those to whom the work, as “monument,” is dedicated. It is with the lyric underpinnings torn away that Belli can produce a series of explosive mini-narratives (blasphemous, obscene) whose force, after two centuries, still comes across to us. That major Italian poets closer to our time (Pasolini & Zanzotto as prime examples) continued writing as well in a range of dialects is a testimony to what Belli & others set in motion. (2) It is with dialect that translation—always a challenge to poetic composition—becomes or seems to become most elusive. Though many dialects approach the autonomous status of languages, there is always the presence behind them of the official, dominant language, which can make them, in the hands of a Belli or a Burns, an instrument for the subversion both of language & of mores. Their particularity is nearly impossible for the translator to emulate, even while bringing up similar particularities in the dialects or faux-dialects into which he translates them. For the reader who wants to get a sense of the translatative possibilities, there are, besides the versions presented here, Robert Garioch’s into Scots (by now an established “subaltern” idiom) and Anthony Burgess’s into a lightly articulated Yorkshire dialect. We have chosen, however, to offer Harold Norse’s workings into what William Carlos Williams called the “American idiom” & saw as the evidence of a new or newly emerging American “measure.” Yet for all that, Belli’s Romanesco (with its ineluctable Italianate coloring) remains decisively out of reach.
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Percy Bys s he S helley
1792–1822
SONG FROM PROMETHEUS UNBOUND
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My soul is an enchanted Boat Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing, And thine doth like an Angel sit Beside the helm conducting it Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing. It seems to float ever—forever— Upon that many winding River Between mountains, woods, abysses, A Paradise of wildernesses, Till like one in slumber bound Borne to the Ocean, I float down, around, Into a Sea profound, of ever-spreading sound. Meanwhile thy Spirit lifts its pinions In Music’s most serene dominions, Catching the winds that fan that happy Heaven. And we sail on, away, afar, Without a course—without a star— But by the instinct of sweet Music driven Till, through Elysian garden islets By thee, most beautiful of pilots, Where never mortal pinnace glided, The boat of my desire is guided— Realms where the air we breathe is Love Which in the winds and on the waves doth move, Harmonizing this Earth with what we feel above. We have past Age’s icy caves, And Manhood’s dark and tossing waves And Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray; Beyond the glassy gulphs we flee Of shadow-peopled Infancy, Through Death and Birth to a diviner day, A Paradise of vaulted bowers Lit by downward-gazing flowers And watery paths that wind between
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Wildernesses calm and green, Peopled by shapes too bright to see, And rest, having beheld—somewhat like thee, Which walk upon the sea, and chaunt melodiously!
ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI I N T H E F LO R E N T I N E GA L L E RY 1
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine; Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, The agonies of anguish and of death.
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2
Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone, Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; ’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain. 3
And from its head as from one body grow, As grass out of a watery rock, Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow And their long tangles in each other lock, And with unending involutions show Their mailèd radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a raggèd jaw.
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4
And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes; Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, And he comes hastening like a moth that hies After a taper; and the midnight sky Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. 5
’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there— A woman’s countenance, with serpent-locks, Gazing in death on Heaven from those wet rocks.
QUEEN MAB: CANTO VII
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SPIRIT.
I was an infant when my mother went To see an atheist burned. She took me there: The dark-robed priests were met around the pile; The multitude was gazing silently; And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien, Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye, Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth: The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs; His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon; His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate mob Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept. Weep not, child! cried my mother, for that man Has said, There is no God. FAIRY.
There is no God! Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed:
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Let heaven and earth, let man’s revolving race, His ceaseless generations tell their tale; Let every part depending on the chain That links it to the whole, point to the hand That grasps its term! let every seed that falls In silent eloquence unfold its store Of argument: infinity within, Infinity without, belie creation; The exterminable spirit it contains Is nature’s only God; but human pride Is skilful to invent most serious names To hide its ignorance. The name of God Has fenced about all crime with holiness, Himself the creature of his worshippers, Whose names and attributes and passions change, Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord, Even with the human dupes who build his shrines, Still serving o’er the war-polluted world For desolation’s watch-word; whether hosts Stain his death-blushing chariot wheels, as on Triumphantly they roll, whilst Brahmins raise A sacred hymn to mingle with the groans; Or countless partners of his power divide His tyranny to weakness; or the smoke Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness, Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy, Horribly massacred, ascend to heaven In honor of his name; or, last and worst, Earth groans beneath religion’s iron age, And priests dare babble of a God of peace, Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood, Murdering the while, uprooting every germ Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all, Making the earth a slaughter-house! O Spirit! through the sense By which thy inner nature was apprised Of outward shews, vague dreams have rolled, And varied reminiscences have waked Tablets that never fade; All things have been imprinted there, Percy Bysshe Shelley 253 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The stars, the sea, the earth, the sky, Even the unshapeliest lineaments Of wild and fleeting visions Have left a record there To testify of earth.
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These are my empire, for to me is given The wonders of the human world to keep, And fancy’s thin creations to endow With manner, being, and reality; Therefore a wondrous phantom, from the dreams Of human error’s dense and purblind faith, I will evoke, to meet thy questioning. Ahasuerus, rise! A strange and woe-worn wight Arose beside the battlement, And stood unmoving there. His inessential figure cast no shade Upon the golden floor; His port and mien bore mark of many years, And chronicles of untold ancientness Were legible within his beamless eye: Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth; Freshness and vigor knit his manly frame; The wisdom of old age was mingled there With youth’s primæval dauntlessness; And inexpressible woe, Chastened by fearless resignation, gave An awful grace to his all-speaking brow. SPIRIT.
Is there a God? AHASUERUS.
Is there a God!—aye, an almighty God, And vengeful as almighty! Once his voice Was heard on earth: earth shuddered at the sound; The fiery-visaged firmament expressed Abhorrence, and the grave of nature yawned To swallow all the dauntless and the good That dared to hurl defiance at his throne, Girt as it was with power. None but slaves
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Survived,—cold-blooded slaves, who did the work Of tyrannous omnipotence; whose souls No honest indignation ever urged To elevated daring, to one deed Which gross and sensual self did not pollute. These slaves built temples for the omnipotent fiend, Gorgeous and vast: the costly altars smoked With human blood, and hideous pæans rung Through all the long-drawn aisles. A murderer heard His voice in Egypt, one whose gifts and arts Had raised him to his eminence in power, Accomplice of omnipotence in crime, And confidant of the all-knowing one. These were Jehovah’s words. From an eternity of idleness I, God, awoke; in seven days’ toil made earth From nothing; rested, and created man: I placed him in a paradise, and there Planted the tree of evil, so that he Might eat and perish, and my soul procure Wherewith to sate its malice, and to turn, Even like a heartless conqueror of the earth, All misery to my fame. The race of men Chosen to my honor, with impunity May sate the lusts I planted in their heart. Here I command thee hence to lead them on, Until, with hardened feet, their conquering troops Wade on the promised soil through woman’s blood, And make my name be dreaded through the land. Yet ever burning flame and ceaseless woe Shall be the doom of their eternal souls, With every soul on this ungrateful earth, Virtuous or vicious, weak or strong,—even all Shall perish, to fulfill the blind revenge (Which you, to men, call justice) of their God. The murderer’s brow Quivered with horror. God omnipotent, Is there no mercy? must our punishment
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Be endless? will long ages roll away, And see no term? Oh! wherefore hast thou made In mockery and wrath this evil earth? Mercy becomes the powerful—be but just: O God! repent and save. One way remains: I will beget a son, and he shall bear The sins of all the world; he shall arise In an unnoticed corner of the earth, And there shall die upon a cross, and purge The universal crime; so that the few On whom my grace descends, those who are marked As vessels to the honor of their God, May credit this strange sacrifice, and save Their souls alive: millions shall live and die, Who ne’er shall call upon their Saviour’s name, But, unredeemed, go to the gaping grave. Thousands shall deem it an old woman’s tale, Such as the nurses frighten babes withal: These in a gulph of anguish and of flame Shall curse their reprobation endlessly, Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow, Even on their beds of torment, where they howl, My honor, and the justice of their doom. What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts Of purity, with radiant genius bright, Or lit with human reason’s earthly ray? Many are called, but few will I elect. Do thou my bidding, Moses! Even the murderer’s cheek Was blanched with horror, and his quivering lips Scarce faintly uttered—O almighty one, I tremble and obey! O Spirit! centuries have set their seal On this heart of many wounds, and loaded brain, Since the Incarnate came: humbly he came, Veiling his horrible Godhead in the shape Of man, scorned by the world, his name unheard, Save by the rabble of his native town, Even as a parish demagogue. He led
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The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace, In semblance; but he lit within their souls The quenchless flames of zeal, and blest the sword He brought on earth to satiate with the blood Of truth and freedom his malignant soul. At length his mortal frame was led to death. I stood beside him: on the torturing cross No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense; And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summed The massacres and miseries which his name Had sanctioned in my country, and I cried, Go! go! in mockery. A smile of godlike malice reillumined His fading lineaments.—I go, he cried, But thou shalt wander o’er the unquiet earth Eternally.———The dampness of the grave Bathed my imperishable front. I fell, And long lay tranced upon the charmed soil. When I awoke hell burned within my brain, Which staggered on its seat; for all around The mouldering relics of my kindred lay, Even as the Almighty’s ire arrested them, And in their various attitudes of death My murdered children’s mute and eyeless sculls Glared ghastily upon me. But my soul, From sight and sense of the polluting woe Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven. Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began My lonely and unending pilgrimage, Resolved to wage unweariable war With my almighty tyrant, and to hurl Defiance at his impotence to harm Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand That barred my passage to the peaceful grave Has crushed the earth to misery, and given Its empire to the chosen of his slaves. These have I seen, even from the earliest dawn Of weak, unstable and precarious power; Then preaching peace, as now they practise war,
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So, when they turned but from the massacre Of unoffending infidels, to quench Their thirst for ruin in the very blood That flowed in their own veins, and pityless zeal Froze every human feeling, as the wife Sheathed in her husband’s heart the sacred steel, Even whilst its hopes were dreaming of her love; And friends to friends, brothers to brothers stood Opposed in bloodiest battle-field, and war, Scarce satiable by fate’s last death-draught waged, Drunk from the winepress of the Almighty’s wrath; Whilst the red cross, in mockery of peace, Pointed to victory! When the fray was done, No remnant of the exterminated faith Survived to tell its ruin, but the flesh, With putrid smoke poisoning the atmosphere, That rotted on the half-extinguished pile. Yes! I have seen God’s worshippers unsheathe The sword of his revenge, when grace descended, Confirming all unnatural impulses, To sanctify their desolating deeds; And frantic priests waved the ill-omened cross O’er the unhappy earth: then shone the sun On showers of gore from the upflashing steel Of safe assassination, and all crime Made stingless by the spirits of the Lord, And blood-red rainbows canopied the land. Spirit! no year of my eventful being Has passed unstained by crime and misery, Which flows from God’s own faith. I’ve marked his slaves With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile The insensate mob, and, whilst one hand was red With murder, feign to stretch the other out For brotherhood and peace; and that they now Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds Are marked with all the narrowness and crime That freedom’s young arm dare not yet chastise, Reason may claim our gratitude, who now Establishing the imperishable throne Of truth, and stubborn virtue, maketh vain The unprevailing malice of my foe, 258 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Whose bootless rage heaps torments for the brave, Adds impotent eternities to pain, Whilst keenest disappointment racks his breast To see the smiles of peace around them play, To frustrate or to sanctify their doom.
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Thus have I stood,—through a wild waste of years Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony, Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined, Mocking my powerless tyrant’s horrible curse With stubborn and unalterable will, Even as a giant oak, which heaven’s fierce flame Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand A monument of fadeless ruin there; Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves The midnight conflict of the wintry storm, As in the sun-light’s calm it spreads Its worn and withered arms on high To meet the quiet of a summer’s noon. The Fairy waved her wand: Ahasuerus fled Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist, That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove, Flee from the morning beam: The matter of which dreams are made Not more endowed with actual life Than this phantasmal portraiture Of wandering human thought. from Shelley’s Notes on Queen Mab VII. 13 There is no God.
This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken. A close examination of the validity of the proofs adduced to support any proposition is the only secure way of attaining truth, on the advantages of which it is unnecessary to descant: our knowledge of the existence of a Deity is a subject of such importance that it cannot be too minutely investigated; in consequence of this conviction we proceed briefly and
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impartially to examine the proofs which have been adduced. It is necessary first to consider the nature of belief. When a proposition is offered to the mind, it perceives the agreement or disagreement of the ideas of which it is composed. A perception of their agreement is termed belief. Many obstacles frequently prevent this perception from being immediate; these the mind attempts to remove in order that the perception may be distinct. The mind is active in the investigation in order to perfect the state of perception of the relation which the component ideas of the proposition bear to each, which is passive: the investigation being confused with the perception has induced many falsely to imagine that the mind is active in belief—that belief is an act of volition,—in consequence of which it may be regulated by the mind. Pursuing, continuing this mistake, they have attached a degree of criminality to disbelief; of which, in its nature, it is incapable: it is equally incapable of merit. Belief, then, is a passion, the strength of which, like every other passion, is in precise proportion to the degrees of excitement. The degrees of excitement are three. The senses are the sources of all knowledge to the mind; consequently their evidence claims the strongest assent. The decision of the mind, founded upon our own experience, derived from these sources, claims the next degree.
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The experience of others, which addresses itself to the former one, occupies the lowest degree. (A graduated scale, on which should be marked the capabilities of propositions to approach to the test of the senses, would be a just barometer of the belief which ought to be attached to them.) Consequently no testimony can be admitted which is contrary to reason; reason is founded on the evidence of our senses. Every proof may be referred to one of these three divisions: it is to be considered what arguments we receive from each of them, which should convince us of the existence of a Deity. 1st, The evidence of the senses. If the Deity should appear to us, if He should convince our senses of His existence, this revelation would necessarily command belief. Those to whom the Deity has thus appeared
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have the strongest possible conviction of His existence. But the God of Theologians is incapable of local visibility.
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2d, Reason. It is urged that man knows that whatever is must either have had a beginning, or have existed from all eternity: he also knows that whatever is not eternal must have had a cause. When this reasoning is applied to the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created: until that is clearly demonstrated we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design before we can infer a designer. The only idea which we can form of causation is derivable from the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other. In a case where two propositions are diametrically opposite, the mind believes that which is least incomprehensible:—it is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it: if the mind sinks beneath the weight of one, is it an alleviation to increase the intolerability of the burthen? The other argument, which is founded on a man’s knowledge of his own existence, stands thus. A man knows not only that he now is, but that once he was not; consequently there must have been a cause. But our idea of causation is alone derivable from the constant conjunction of objects and the consequent inference of one from the other; and, reasoning experimentally, we can only infer from effects causes exactly adequate to those effects. But there certainly is a generative power which is effected by certain instruments: we cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments; nor is the contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration: we admit that the generative power is incomprehensible; but to suppose that the same effect is produced by an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent being leaves the cause in the same obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible. 3d, Testimony. It is required that testimony should not be contrary to reason. The testimony that the Deity convinces the senses of men of His existence can only be admitted by us if our mind considers it less probable that these men should have been deceived than that the Deity should have appeared to them. Our reason can never admit the testimony of men, who not only declare that they were eye-witnesses of miracles, but that the Deity was irrational; for He commanded that He should be believed, He proposed the highest rewards for faith, eternal punishments for disbelief. We can only command voluntary actions; belief is not an act of volition; the mind is even passive, or involuntarily active; from this it is evident that we have no sufficient testimony, or rather that testimony
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is insufficient to prove the being of a God. It has been before shown that it cannot be deduced from reason. They alone, then, who have been convinced by the evidence of the senses can believe it. Hence it is evident that, having no proofs from either of the three sources of conviction, the mind cannot believe the existence of a creative God: it is also evident that, as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief; and that they only are reprehensible who neglect to remove the false medium through which their mind views any subject of discussion. Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.
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ENGLAND IN 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king— Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow; A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field— An army, which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed; A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed— Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
from P E T E R B E L L T H E T H I R D : H E L L
Hell is a city much like London— A populous and a smoky city; There are all sorts of people undone And there is little or no fun done; Small justice shewn, and still less pity. There is a Castles, and a Canning, A Cobbett, and a Castlereagh; All sorts of caitiff corpses planning
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All sorts of cozening for trepanning Corpses less corrupt than they. There is a Southey, who has lost His wits, or sold them, none knows which; He walks about a double ghost, And though as thin as Fraud almost— Ever grows more grim and rich. There is a Chancery Court, a King, A manufacturing mob; a set Of thieves who by themselves are sent Similar thieves to represent; An Army;—and a public debt. Which last is a scheme of Paper money, And means—being interpreted— “Bees, keep your wax—give us the honey And we will plant while skies are sunny Flowers, which in winter serve instead.”
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There is great talk of Revolution— And a great chance of Despotism— German soldiers—camps—confusion— Tumults—lotteries—rage—delusion— Gin—suicide and methodism; Taxes too, on wine and bread, And meat, and beer, and tea, and cheese, From which those patriots pure are fed Who gorge before they reel to bed The tenfold essence of all these. There are mincing women, mewing, (Like cats, who amant misere,) Of their own virtue, and pursuing Their gentler sisters to that ruin, Without which—what were chastity? Lawyers—judges—old hobnobbers Are there—Bailiffs—Chancellors— Bishops—great and little robbers— Rhymesters—pamphleteers—stock-jobbers— Men of glory in the wars,—
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Things whose trade is, over ladies To lean, and flirt, and stare, and simper, Till all that is divine in woman Grows cruel, courteous, smooth, inhuman, Crucified ’twixt a smile and whimper. Thrusting, toiling, wailing, moiling, Frowning, preaching—such a riot! Each with never ceasing labour Whilst he thinks he cheats his neighhour Cheating his own heart of quiet. And all these meet at levees;— Dinners convivial and political;— Suppers of epic poets;—teas, Where small talk dies in agonies;— Breakfasts professional and critical;
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Lunches and snacks so aldermanic That one would furnish forth ten dinners, Where reigns a Cretan-tongued panic Lest news Russ, Dutch, or Alemannic Should make some losers, and some winners At conversazioni—balls— Conventicles and drawing-rooms. Courts of law—committees—calls Of a morning—clubs—book stalls— Churches—masquerades and tombs. And this is Hell—and in this smother All are damnable and damned; Each one damning, damns the other; They are damned by one another, By none other are they damned. ’Tis a lie to say, “God damns!” Where was Heaven’s Attorney General When they first gave out such flams? Let there be an end of shams, They are mines of poisonous mineral.
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Statesmen damn themselves to be Cursed; and lawyers damn their souls To the auction of a fee. Churchmen damn themselves to see God’s sweet love in burning coals. The rich are damned beyond all cure To taunt, and starve, and trample on The weak and wretched: and the poor Damn their broken hearts to endure Stripe on stripe, with groan on groan. Sometimes the poor are damned indeed To take,—not means for being blest, But Cobbett’s snuff, revenge; that weed From which the worms that it doth feed Squeeze less than they before possessed.
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And some few, like we know who, Damned—but God alone knows why— To believe their minds are given To make this ugly Hell a Heaven; In which faith they live and die. Thus, as in a Town, plague-stricken, Each man be he sound or no Must indifferently sicken; As when day begins to thicken None knows a pigeon from a crow,— So good and bad, sane and mad, The oppressor and the oppressed; Those who weep to see what others Smile to inflict upon their brothers; Lovers, haters, worst and best; All are damned—they breathe an air Thick, infected, joy-dispelling: Each pursues what seems most fair, Mining like moles, through mind, and there Scoop palace-caverns vast, where Care In throned state is ever dwelling.
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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
ROBERT DUNCAN
Arethusa
Shelley’s Arethusa Set to New Measures
I
Arethusa arose From her couch of snows In the Acroceraunian mountains,— From cloud and from crag, With many a jag, Shepherding her bright fountains. She leapt down the rocks, With her rainbow locks Streaming among the streams;— Her steps paved with green The downward ravine Which slopes to the western gleams; And gliding and springing She went, ever singing, In murmurs soft as sleep; The Earth seemed to love her, And Heaven smiled above her, As she lingered towards the deep.
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II
Then Alpheus bold, On his glacier cold, With his trident the mountains strook; And opened a chasm In the rocks—with the spasm All Erymanthus shook. And the black south wind It unsealed behind The urns of the silent snow, And earthquake and thunder Did rend in sunder The bars of the springs below. And the beard and the hair Of the River-god were Seen through the torrent’s sweep, As he followed the light Of the fleet nymph’s flight To the brink of the Dorian deep.
1
Now Arethusa from her snow couches [arises, Hi! from her Acroceraunian heights [springs, down leaping, from cloud and crag jagged shepherds her bright fountains. She bounds from rock-face to [rock-face streaming her uncombed rainbows of hair round [her. Green paves her way-fare. Where she goes there dark ravine serves her downward towards the West-gleam. As if still asleep she goes, glides or lingers in deep pools.
2
Now bold Alpheus aroused from his cold glacier strikes the mountains and opens a chasm in the rock so that all Erymanthus shakes, and the black south wind is unseald, from urns of silent snow comes, [Earthquake rends asunder thunderous the bars of the springs [below. Beard and hair of the River-god show through the torrent’s sweep where he follows the fleeting light of [the nymph to the brink of the Dorian, margins of deep Ocean.
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III
“Oh, save me! Oh, guide me! And bid the deep hide me, For he grasps me now by the hair!” The loud Ocean heard, To its blue depth stirred, And divided at her prayer; And under the water The Earth’s white daughter Fled like a sunny beam; Behind her descended Her billows, unblended With the brackish Dorian stream:— Like a gloomy stain On the emerald main Alpheus rushed behind,— As an eagle pursuing A dove to its ruin Down the streams of the cloudy wind.
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IV
Under the bowers Where the Ocean powers Sit on their pearled thrones; Through the coral woods Of the weltering floods, Over heaps of unvalued stones; Through the dim beams Which amid the streams Weave a network of coloured light; And under the caves, Where the shadowy waves Are as green as the forest’s night:— Outspeeding the shark, And the sword-fish dark, Under the Ocean’s foam, And up through the rifts Of the mountain clifts They passed to their Dorian home.
3
Oh save me! Take me untoucht, she [cries. Hide me, for Alpheus already grasps at my hair! The loud Ocean heard, to its blue depths stirrd and divided, taking her into the roar of its surf. And under the water she flees white Arethusa, the sunlight still virginal in her courses, Earth’s daughter, descends, billowing, unblended in the Dorian brackish waters. Where Alpheus, close upon her, in gloom, staining the salt dark tide comes, black clouds overtaking the white in an emerald sky, Alpheus eagle-eyed down streams of the wind [pursues dove-wingd Arethusa. 4
Under those bowers they go where the ocean powers brood on their thrones. Thru these [coral woods, shades in the weltering flood, maiden and raging Alpheus swirl. Over forgotten heap, stone upon stone, thru dim beams which amid streams weave a network of colord lights they [go, girl-stream and man-river after her. Pearl amid shadows of the deep caves that are green as the forest’s night, swift they fly, with the shark and the swordfish pass [into the wave
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—he overtaking her, as if wedding, surrounding her, spray rifts in clefts of the shore cliffs [rising. Alpheus, Arethusa, come home.
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V
And now from their fountains In Enna’s mountains, Down one vale where the morning [basks, Like friends once parted Grown single-hearted, They ply their watery tasks. At sunrise they leap From their cradles steep In the cave of the shelving hill; At noontide they flow Through the woods below And the meadows of asphodel; And at night they sleep In the rocking deep Beneath the Ortygian shore;— Like spirits that lie In the azure sky When they love but live no more. .
5
When now from Enna’s mountains [they spring, afresh in her innocence Arethusa to Alpheus gladly comes. Into one morning two hearts awake, at sunrise leap from sleep’s caves to [return to the vale where they meet, drawn by yearning from night into day. Down into the noontide flow, into the full of life winding again, [they find their way thru the woods and the meadows of asphodel [below. Wedded, one deep current leading, they follow to dream in the rocking deep at the Ortygian [shore. Spirits drawn upward, they are divided into the azure from which the rain falls, life from life, seeking their way to love once more.
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ODE TO LIBERTY Yet, Freedom, yet thy banner torn but flying, Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind. B Y RO N
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A glorious people vibrated again The lightning of the nations: Liberty From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o’er Spain, Scattering contagious fire into the sky, Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay, And in the rapid plumes of song Clothed itself, sublime and strong; As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among, Hovering in verse o’er its accustomed prey; Till from its station in the heaven of fame The Spirit’s whirlwind rapt it, and the ray Of the remotest sphere of living flame Which paves the void was from behind it flung, As foam from a ship’s swiftness, when there came A voice out of the deep: I will record the same. The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth: The burning stars of the abyss were hurled Into the depths of heaven. The dædal earth, That island in the ocean of the world, Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air: But this divinest universe Was yet a chaos and a curse, For thou wert not: but power from worst producing worse, The spirit of the beasts was kindled there, And of the birds, and of the watery forms, And there was war among them, and despair Within them, raging without truce or terms: The bosom of their violated nurse Groan’d, for beasts warr’d on beasts, and worms on worms, And men on men; each heart was as a hell of storms. Man, the imperial shape, then multiplied His generations under the pavilion
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Of the Sun’s throne: palace and pyramid, Temple and prison, to many a swarming million Were, as to mountain-wolves their ragged caves. This human living multitude Was savage, cunning, blind, and rude, For thou wert not; but o’er the populous solitude, Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves Hung tyranny; beneath, sate deified The sister-pest, congregator of slaves; Into the shadow of her pinions wide Anarchs and priests, who feed on gold and blood Till with the stain their inmost souls are dyed, Drove the astonished herds of men from every side. The nodding promontories, and blue isles, And cloud-like mountains, and dividuous waves Of Greece, basked glorious in the open smiles Of favouring heaven: from their enchanted caves Prophetic echoes flung dim melody On the unapprehensive wild. The vine, the corn, the olive mild, Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled; And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea, Like the man’s thought dark in the infant’s brain, Like aught that is which wraps what is to be, Art’s deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein Of Parian stone; and, yet a speechless child, Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain Her lidless eyes for thee; when o’er the Ægean main Athens arose: a city such as vision Builds from the purple crags and silver towers Of battlemented cloud, as in derision Of kingliest masonry: the ocean-floors Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it; Its portals are inhabited By thunder-zoned winds, each head Within its cloudy wings with sunfire garlanded,— A divine work! Athens diviner yet
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Gleamed with its crest of columns, on the will Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set; For thou wert, and thine all-creative skill Peopled with forms that mock the eternal dead In marble immortality that hill Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle.
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Within the surface of Time’s fleeting river Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay Immovably unquiet, and for ever It trembles, but it cannot pass away! The voices of its bards and sages thunder With an earth-awakening blast Through the caverns of the past; Religion veils her eyes; Oppression shrinks aghast: A winged sound of joy, and love, and wonder, Which soars where Expectation never flew, Rending the veil of space and time asunder! One ocean feeds the clouds, and streams, and dew; One sun illumines heaven; one spirit vast With life and love makes chaos ever new, As Athens doth the world with thy delight renew. Then Rome was, and from thy deep bosom fairest, Like a wolf-cub from a Cadmæan Mænad, She drew the milk of greatness, though thy dearest From that Elysian food was yet unweaned; And many a deed of terrible uprightness By thy sweet love was sanctified; And in thy smile, and by thy side, Saintly Camillus lived, and firm Atilius died. But when tears stained thy robe of vestal whiteness, And gold prophaned thy Capitolian throne, Thou didst desert, with spirit-winged lightness, The senate of the tyrants: they sunk prone Slaves of one tyrant: Palatinus sighed Faint echoes of Ionian song; that tone Thou didst delay to hear, lamenting to disown.
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From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill, Or piny promontory of the Arctic main, Or utmost islet inaccessible, Didst thou lament the ruin of thy reign, Teaching the woods and waves, and desert rocks, And every Naiad’s ice-cold urn, To talk in echoes sad and stern Of that sublimest lore which man had dared unlearn? For neither didst thou watch the wizard flocks Of the Scald’s dreams, nor haunt the Druid’s sleep. What if the tears rained through thy scattered locks Were quickly dried? for thou didst groan, not weep, When from its sea of death, to kill and burn, The Galilean serpent forth did creep, And made thy world an undistinguishable heap. A thousand years the Earth cried, Where art thou? And then the shadow of thy coming fell On Saxon Alfred’s olive-cinctured brow: And many a warrior-peopled citadel, Like rocks which fire lifts out of the flat deep, Arose in sacred Italy, Frowning o’er the tempestuous sea Of kings, and priests, and slaves, in tower-crowned majesty; That multitudinous anarchy did sweep And burst around their walls, like idle foam, Whilst from the human spirit’s deepest deep Strange melody with love and awe struck dumb Dissonant arms; and Art, which cannot die, With divine wand traced on our earthly home Fit imagery to pave heaven’ s everlasting dome. Thou huntress swifter than the Moon! thou terror Of the world’s wolves! thou bearer of the quiver, Whose sunlike shafts pierce tempest-winged Error, As light may pierce the clouds when they dissever In the calm regions of the orient day! Luther caught thy wakening glance,
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Like lightning, from his leaden lance Reflected, it dissolved the visions of the trance In which, as in a tomb, the nations lay; And England’s prophets hailed thee as their queen, In songs whose music cannot pass away, Though it must flow for ever: not unseen Before the spirit-sighted countenance Of Milton didst thou pass, from the sad scene Beyond whose night he saw, with a dejected mien.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
The eager hours and unreluctant years As on a dawn-illumined mountain stood, Trampling to silence their loud hopes and fears, Darkening each other with their multitude, And cried aloud, Liberty! Indignation Answered Pity from her cave; Death grew pale within the grave, And Desolation howled to the destroyer, Save! When like heaven’s sun girt by the exhalation Of its own glorious light, thou didst arise, Chasing thy foes from nation unto nation Like shadows: as if day had cloven the skies At dreaming midnight o’er the western wave, Men started, staggering with a glad surprise, Under the lightnings of thine unfamiliar eyes. Thou heaven of earth! what spells could pall thee then In ominous eclipse? a thousand years Bred from the slime of deep oppression’s den, Dyed all thy liquid light with blood and tears, Till thy sweet stars could weep the stain away; How like Bacchanals of blood Round France, the ghastly vintage, stood Destruction’s sceptred slaves, and Folly’s mitred brood! When one, like them, but mightier far than they, The Anarch of thine own bewildered powers, Rose: armies mingled in obscure array, Like clouds with clouds, darkening the sacred bowers Of serene heaven. He, by the past pursued,
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Rests with those dead, but unforgotten hours, Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral towers.
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England yet sleeps: was she not called of old? Spain calls her now, as with its thrilling thunder Vesuvius wakens Ætna, and the cold Snow-crags by its reply are cloven in sunder: O’er the lit waves every Æolian isle From Pithecusa to Pelorus Howls, and leaps, and glares in chorus: They cry, Be dim; ye lamps of heaven suspended o’er us. Her chains are threads of gold, she need but smile And they dissolve; but Spain’s were links of steel, Till bit to dust by virtue’s keenest file. Twins of a single destiny! appeal To the eternal years enthroned before us In the dim West; impress as from a seal All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal. Tomb of Arminius! render up thy dead Till, like a standard from a watch-towers’s staff, His soul may stream over the tyrant’s head; Thy victory shall be his epitaph, Wild Bacchanal of truth’s mysterious wine, King-deluded Germany, His dead spirit lives in thee. Why do we fear or hope? thou art already free! And thou, lost Paradise of this divine And glorious world! thou flowery wilderness! Thou island of eternity! thou shrine Where desolation, clothed with loveliness, Worships the thing thou wert! O Italy, Gather thy blood into thy heart; repress The beasts who make their dens thy sacred palaces. O, that the free would stamp the impious name Of KING into the dust! or write it there, So that this blot upon the page of fame
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Were as a serpent’s path, which the light air Erases, and the flat sands close behind! Ye the oracle have heard: Lift the victory-flashing sword, And cut the snaky knots of this foul gordian word, Which weak itself as stubble, yet can bind Into a mass, irrefragably firm, The axes and the rods which awe mankind; The sound has poison in it, ’tis the sperm Of what makes life foul, cankerous, and abhorred; Disdain not thou, at thine appointed term, To set thine armed heel on this reluctant worm. O, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle Such lamps within the dome of this dim world, That the pale name of PRIEST might shrink and dwindle Into the hell from which it first was hurled, A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure; Till human thoughts might kneel alone, Each before the judgment-throne Of its own aweless soul, or of the power unknown! O, that the words which make the thoughts obscure From which they spring, as clouds of glimmering dew From a white lake blot heaven’s blue portraiture, Were stript of their thin masks and various hue And frowns and smiles and splendours not their own, Till in the nakedness of false and true They stand before their Lord, each to receive its due! He who taught man to vanquish whatsoever Can be between the cradle and the grave Crowned him the King of Life. Oh, vain endeavour! If on his own high will, a willing slave, He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor. What if earth can clothe and feed Amplest millions at their need, And power in thought be as the tree within the seed? Or what if Art, an ardent intercessor, Diving on fiery wings to Nature’s throne,
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Checks the great mother stooping to caress her, And cries: Give me, thy child, dominion Over all height and depth? if Life can breed New wants, and wealth from those who toil and groan Rend of thy gifts and hers a thousandfold for one!
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Come Thou, but lead out of the inmost cave Of man’s deep spirit, as the morning-star Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave, Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame; Comes she not, and come ye not, Rulers of eternal thought, To judge, with solemn truth, life’s ill-apportioned lot? Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame Of what has been, the Hope of what will be? O, Liberty! if such could be thy name Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee: If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought By blood or tears, have not the wise and free Wept tears, and blood like tears?—The solemn harmony Paused, and the spirit of that mighty singing To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn; Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn, Sinks headlong through the aerial golden light On the heavy-sounding plain, When the bolt has pierced its brain; As summer clouds dissolve, unburthened of their rain; As a far taper fades with fading night, As a brief insect dies with dying day,— My song, its pinions disarrayed of might, Drooped; o’er it closed the echoes far away Of the great voice which did its flight sustain, As waves which lately paved his watery way Hiss round a drowner’s head in their tempestuous play.
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COMMENTARY
The language [of poets] is vitally metaphorical: that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things. P. B. S., A Defence of Poetry
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(1) George Oppen’s witty revision of Shelley’s famous claim at the close of the Defence of Poetry (“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World”) actually catches a central feature of the poetic radicalism of this most radical of the British Romantic poets: “Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world.” Attentiveness to the world is transformative, a “lifting of the veil” from the familiar, from the vision of society promoted by repressive Regency power—or repressive power anywhere, everywhere. Thus Shelley, again in the Defence: “Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” And poet Michael Palmer nearly 200 years later: “Shelley . . . represents a radical alterity, an alternative to the habitual discourses of power and mystification by which we are daily surrounded and with which we are bombarded. He represents a poetry of critique and renewal, rather than of passive re-presentation, a poetry which risks speaking to the central human and social occasions of its time, yet speaks from a decentered and largely invisible place. It exploits the margins to speak as it will, out of difference, rather than as it is always importuned and rewarded, out of sameness.” (2) Shelley’s poetry explodes in a multitude of forms, from cosmic dramas about the consequences of “repressive rule”; to urgent inquiries into visionary capacity & possibility; to poems of intensely erotic/lyric communion (Palmer again: “Desire itself will be seen as a signifier of resistance and subversion”); to more popular, rhyming, tetrameter poems of visionary outrage (The Mask of Anarchy and Peter Bell the Third); to poems—like Queen Mab—that juxtapose visionary prophecy with an elaborate set of notes rising at times to a kind of prose poetry of astronomical, naturalistic, & philosophical commentary. His translations—ranging from anonymous Homeric Hymns to fragments from Dante, Calderón, & Goethe’s Faust (page 82)—propose, along with those of his contemporaries like Leigh Hunt, a consciously transnational agenda for his poetry. This polysemous nature of Shelley’s poetic decisions registers in multiple, mythic, readings of his life & of his death by drowning at age twenty-nine. Yet Shelley, & this characterizes his most radical work, enters the field of poetry not as an ego but as an intellectually alive enthusiasm. Matthew Arnold’s infamously seductive formulation of Shelley as “a beautiful & ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain” has been challenged many times, often by political radicals—from the British working-class Chartist Movement of the 1840s, to Brecht & the Frankfurt School, to the radical student uprising of the Tienanmen Square demonstrations (1989)—who found either Queen Mab & its notes or The Mask of Anarchy productive of the “dangerous enthusiasm” desirable in collective revolutionary efforts.
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Wrote his contemporary & friend Leigh Hunt: “He was like a spirit that had darted out of its orb, and found itself in another planet. I used to tell him that he had come from the planet Mercury.” The centrality of Shelley for the Beat Generation & Black Mountain poets of the American 1950s & 1960s should also be noted—in particular, perhaps, the burial of Gregory Corso, American poet, next to the grave of Shelley in the Cimiterio Acottolico (“English Cemetery”) in Rome.
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(3) Presented here is part of Shelley’s parody of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, as an instance of his outraged vision of bigotry & oppression in London, a “Hell” in the manner of Blake, Dickens, & Baudelaire. (A juxtaposition of Shelley’s infernal London with Sousandrade’s “Inferno of Wall Street,” below, might also be of interest.) But at one with such a poetry of social critique & futurist possibility lies his hope for the transformed reader: “Poetry turns all things to loveliness” (Defence), itself a declaration of the political impact of Shelley’s extreme lyrical poetry, such as the song “My soul is an enchanted boat.” What might be called Shelley’s lyric extravagance emerges in Robert Duncan’s poetic revision of Shelley’s “Arethusa,” which extends that extravagance into a poetic profile of Romantic erotic poetics.
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SO M E
ASI AN
POE T S
Prologue “I am more and more convinced,” Goethe remarked, “that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. . . . I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather meaningless term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everywhere one must strive to hasten its approach.”
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P E T E R E C K E RM A NN, CON VE RSATION S WI TH GOE TH E I N T H E L A S T Y EA RS OF H IS LI F E , 1835
In that spirit there was an urge to move across boundaries, while the pull of the nation-state was also very strong & the project at the outset was restrained by limits of both space & time. The poetries of the West, when brought “into their comparisons” (R. Duncan), were read as both a past & present, but the Western view of Asia froze it in time or focused solely on what was old & “classic.” At the same time, Western poets & writers could present themselves as purveyors of Asian thematics, largely the result of ancient themes received at second or third hand. Yet within those parallel worlds in Asia & elsewhere, there were also poetries of the present, many of them subject to their own dynamics of change & innovation. At the outset, the impact—contemporary West on East & contemporary East on West—was muted, but by century’s end it was beginning, still slowly, to be felt. The small selection that follows offers a glimpse of dynamic writings within a range of nineteenth-century Asian poetries, largely absent—with the exception of Tagore, whose work stretched well into the twentieth century—from Western consideration.
. The oldest of these poets, Kobayashi Issa, remains known as a kind of outsider poet, coming out of a humble & devoutly Buddhist background, bringing that into his work: traditional but often earthy haiku, sometimes (as with Basho before him) mixed with prose. Writes our contemporary Nanao Sakaki: “Very skeptical of authorities, either political or religious,
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POE T S A S I A N
With Hô Xuân Huong, writing in a time of social turbulence & of a persistent & oppressive Confucianism, there is a remarkable departure from Mandarin to a more Vietnamese script (Chu Nôm) & a markedly demotic idiom. (The twentieth-century poet Xuan Dieu calls her “the mother of Nôm poetry.”) Coupled with her transgressive attacks on traditional male authority, “the greater part of her poems—each a marvel in the sonnet-like lu-shih style—are double entendres: each has hidden within it another poem with sexual meaning . . . a sexual design that reveals itself by pun and imagistic double-take.” (Thus: translator John Balaban in summary.)
S OM E
he (after Basho’s revolutionary breakthrough) opened the democratic trail for common people.”
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Writes Kenneth Rexroth as Wu Tsao’s major translator: “[She] was the daughter of a merchant and the wife of another, both of whom treated her with scant sympathy or understanding and she soon lost interest in males. She had many female friends and lovers, and wrote erotic poems to several courtesans. She was very popular in her lifetime, and her songs were sung all over China. . . . Her style is colloquial and fluent, and unlike most Chinese women poets, she dealt with a wide range of subjects. She is one of the great Lesbian poets of all time, perhaps not as great as Sappho, but certainly greater than any modern ones.” Bibi Hayati appears as part of a threesome with Nur’ Ali Shah, the leader of a heretical group of late eighteenth- & early nineteenth-century wandering Sufi dervishes called Calandars, & their musician companion Mushtaq, murdered, like Nur’ Ali Shah, at the end of the eighteenth century. She was a rare female presence on the dervish path, but was encouraged by Ali Shah in her practice, which included the composition of a divan (collection) of erotic/mystic poetry, often with herself & her two companions cast as traditional figures in Persian literature, “interiorised and expressed in poetry, in life, and in death.” (Thus Peter Lanborn Wilson, who adds concerning Hayati’s own accomplishment: “[Her] poems are more intimate, more subjective [than Nur’ Ali Shah’s], but no less ‘shocking,’ especially given that they were written by a woman.”) An international poet of the late nineteenth & early twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore received a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first Asian writer so acknowledged. He wrote primarily in Bengali, often self-translated into English, & his works included short stories, novels, dramas, & songs (both words & music). A literary innovator & a political resister on his own grounds, he was an early if often romanticized link
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FIFTEEN HAIKU
Shiohama o hogo ni shite tobu chidori kana Crumpling the briny shore into waste paper plovers fly Sendo yo shoben muyo nami no tsuki Boatman, don’t piss into the moon in the waves Tada hitotsu mimi giwa ni ka no hakaze kana
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A single mosquito stirs up a wind near my ear Tsukare u no miokuru sora ya hototogisu A tired cormorant watches a cuckoo pass in the sky Otabisho o wagamono gao ya katatsumuri At the Imperial Inn a snail acts as if it was all his Kyo miete sune o momu nari harugasumi Kyoto in sight, I knead my shins in spring haze Asayake ga yorokobashii ka katatsuburi Snail, are you delighted with the daybreak glow?
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POE T S
1763–1827
A S I A N
Kob aya s hi I s s a
S OM E
between India & the West, of whom William Butler Yeats wrote: “[His] lyrics—which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention—display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long.” And Ezra Pound—likewise cut off from him by language: “He is at one with nature, and finds no contradictions. And this is in sharp contrast with the Western mode, where man must be shown attempting to master nature if we are to have ‘great drama.’”
POE T S A S I A N S OM E
Seiten ni ubugoe ageru suzume kana A sparrow cries its birth cry into the azure sky Yu Fuji ni shiri o narabete naku kawazu Against evening Fuji, asses side by side, frogs croak Shoben no taki wo mishozo naku kawazu I’ll show a cascade of piss to you, croaking frog Yayo shirami haehae haru no yuku kata e Look here, lice, crawl, crawl to where spring’s going Kabashira no ana kara miyuru Miyako kana Through a hole in a mosquito column I see the City Toro ga katate agetari tsurigane ni vA praying mantis hangs from a temple bell with one arm Inazuma ni tsumuri nadekeri hikigaeru
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At the lightning a frog gives himself a pat on the head Katatsuburi sorosoro nobore Fuji no yama Snail, carefully, slowly climb Mount Fuji Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
from T H E S P R I N G O F M Y L I F E
Children hereabouts play a game wherein they bury a live frog and cover its grave with plantain leaves while they sing: Hey, hey, the toad is dead, the toad is dead. Let’s all bury it under the plantain leaves! Under the plantain leaves!
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In Chinese mythology, a toad taught a famous hermit how to fly. In Japan, we often credit frogs with having fought bravely at Ten’noji. But that too is ancient mythology. Today, the toads apparently have made peace with humanity and now live comfortably in the world. If I, for example, should roll out my mat on the ground some summer evening and cry, “Come out, Happy One, come out!”—out of the garden comes a fat toad to sit with me in the cool evening air. That’s the soul of a poet! And the greatest honor bestowed upon a toad was when, as written by Choshoshi, a toad was chosen to judge the Insect Poetry Competition. Sitting serenely, a plump toad enjoys viewing the mountain horizon
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. Kikaku wrote: The oh-so-heavy toad crept out to meet the lighthearted bush warbler
. And Kyokusui wrote: You’ve fallen silent, my toad. Is it all the words that bloat you so?
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POE T S
.
A S I A N
Spindly saxifrage bends above the toad’s grave and its white tears fall
S OM E
As it happens, an ancient Chinese botanical book, the Honzo komoku, refers to plantain as “toad’s skin,” which in this province somehow became “toad’s leaf.” The game, sprung from the correspondence between Japanese and Chinese common names, must have conveyed some message in earlier times.
POE T S A S I A N S OM E
Beginning to rain— the old toad wipes his brow with the back of his hand When farmers discuss rice fields, each thinks his own is the very best The mosquito flew into a woman’s bedroom and died there in flames Mimicking cormorants, children dive more cleverly than real cormorants
. Lying in hammocks, we speak so solemnly of distant thunder, distant rain
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While I was away, I left the mosquito net hanging lazily A flowing freshet— how the old woodcutter prayed, deep in the mountains Searching all this world, there is no perfect dewdrop even on the lotus From high in a tree the cicada cries after a wandering puppy
. May 28: They say it has rained annually on this day ever since 1193, when the Soga brothers avenged their father’s murder at the cost of their
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A S I A N POE T S
Ignoring Tora’s copious tears, I got soaked, drenched to the bone Translation from Japanese by Sam Hamill
Hô Xu ân Hu on g
1775–1820
AUTUMN LANDSCAPE
Drop by drop rain slaps the banana leaves. Praise whoever sketched this desolate scene: the lush, dark canopies of the gnarled trees, the long river, sliding smooth and white. I lift my wine flask, drunk with rivers and hills. My backpack, breathing moonlight, sags with poems. Look, and love everyone. Whoever sees this landscape is stunned. Translation from Vietnamese by John Balaban Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
S OM E
own lives. They say the rain commemorates the tears of Tora, wife of one of the brothers.
ON SHARING A HUSBAND
Screw the fate that makes you share a man. One cuddles under cotton blankets; the other’s cold. Every now and then, well, maybe or maybe not. Once or twice a month, oh, it’s like nothing. You try to stick to it like a fly on rice but the rice is rotten. You slave like the maid, but without pay. If I had known how it would go I think I would have lived alone. Translation from Vietnamese by John Balaban
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POE T S A S I A N S OM E
JACKFRUIT
My body is like the jackfruit on the branch: my skin is coarse, my meat is thick. Kind sir, if you love me, pierce me with your stick. Caress me and sap will slicken your hands. Translation from Vietnamese by John Balaban
W E AV I N G AT N I G H T
Lampwick turned up, the room glows white. The loom moves easily all night long as feet work and push below. Nimbly the shuttle flies in and out, wide or narrow, big or small, sliding in snug. Long or short, it glides out smoothly. Girls who do it right, let it soak then wait a while for the blush to show.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Translation from Vietnamese by John Balaban
Wu Ts a o
circa 1800
FOR THE COURTESAN CH’ING LIN
On your slender body Your jade and coral girdle ornaments chime Like those of a celestial companion Come from the Green Jade City of Heaven. One smile from you when we meet, And I become speechless and forget every word. For too long you have gathered flowers, And leaned against the bamboos, Your green sleeves growing cold, In your deserted valley:
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S OM E
I can visualize you all alone, A girl harboring her cryptic thoughts.
A S I A N POE T S
You glow like a perfumed lamp In the gathering shadows. We play wine games And recite each other’s poems. Then you sing “Remembering South of the River” With its heart breaking verses. Then We paint each other’s beautiful eyebrows. I want to possess you completely— Your jade body And your promised heart. It is Spring. Vast mists cover the Five Lakes. My dear, let me buy a red painted boat And carry you away. Translation from Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth & Ling Chung
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
B I T T E R R A I N I N M Y CO U RT YA R D
Bitter rain in my courtyard In the decline of Autumn, I only have vague poetic feelings That I cannot bring together. They diffuse into the dark clouds And the red leaves. After the yellow sunset The cold moon rises Out of the gloomy mist. I will not let down the blinds Of spotted bamboo from their silver hook. Tonight my dreams will follow the wind, Suffering the cold, To the jasper tower of your beautiful flesh. Translation from Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth & Ling Chung
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POE T S A S I A N S OM E
I H AV E C LO S E D T H E D O U B L E D O O R S
I have closed the double doors. In what corner of the heavens is she? A horizontal flute Beyond the red walls Blown as gently as the breeze Blows the willow floss. In the lingering glow of the sunset The roosting crows ignore my melancholy. Once again I languidly get out of bed. After I have burned incense, I loiter on the jeweled staircase. I regret the wasted years, Sick, afraid of the cold, afraid of the heat, While the beautiful days went by. Suddenly it is the Autumn Feast of the Dead. Constantly disturbed by the changing weather, I lose track of the flowing light That washes us away. Who moved the turning bridges On my inlaid psaltery? I realize— Of the twenty five strings Twenty one are gone.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Translation from Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth & Ling Chung
Bib i Hayat i
e a r l y 1 8 0 0 s –1 8 5 3
B E F O R E T H E R E WA S A H I N T O F C I V I L I Z AT I ON
Before there was a hint of civilization I carried a memory of your loose strand of hair, Oblivious, I carried inside me your pointed tip of hair. In its invisible realm, Your face of sun yearned for epiphany, Until each distinct thing was thrown into sight.
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S OM E
From the first instant time took a breath, Your love lay in the soul, A treasure in the secret chest in the heart.
Translation from Farsi by Aliki Barnstone
HOW CAN I SEE THE SPLENDOR OF THE MOON
How can I see the splendor of the moon If his face shines over my heart, Flaming like the sun? The Turks in his eyes charge through my soul, While untrue curling hair Defeats faith.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Yet if he lifted the veil from his face, The world would be undone, The universe astounded. He walks through the garden With grace, erect, His exquisite posture mocking even the straight cypresses. He charges, riding his gnostic horse Into the holy space of divinity, The sacred sphere. Tonight the Saki with its red-stained ruby lips Pours wine for the luxury of every drunk, And sates every reveler’s taste. As Hayati has drunk his ecstasy, Her soul now satisfied by the wine of his pure heart, How can she drink any other nectar? Translation from Farsi by Aliki Barnstone
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POE T S
I thank you one hundred times! In the altar Of Hayati’s eyes, your face shines Forever present and beautiful.
A S I A N
Before the first seed shot up out of the rose bed of the possible, The soul’s lark took wing high above your meadow, Flying home to you.
POE T S A S I A N S OM E
IS IT THE NIGHT OF POWER
Is it the night of power Or only your hair? Is it dawn Or your face? In the songbook of beauty Is it a deathless first line Or only a fragment Copied from your inky eyebrow? Is it boxwood of the orchard Or cypress of the rose garden? The tuba tree of paradise, abundant with dates, Or your standing beautifully straight? Is it musk of a Chinese deer Or scent of delicate rosewater? The rose breathing in the wind Or your perfume?
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Is it scorching lightning Or light from fire on Sana’i Mountain? My hot sigh Or your inner radiance? Is it Mongolian musk Or pure ambergris? Is it your hyacinth curls Or your braids? Is it a glass of red wine at dawn Or white magic? Your drunken narcissus eye Or your spell? Is it the Garden of Eden Or heaven on earth? A mosque of the masters of the heart Or a back alley?
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S OM E
Everyone faces a mosque of adobe and mud When they pray. The mosque of Hayati’s soul Turns to your face.
A S I A N
R ab in d ra n at h Tagore
POE T S
Translation from Farsi by Aliki Barnstone
1861–1941
from G I T A N J A L I
Mind without Fear
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action— Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. Little Flute
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new. At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
Rabindranath Tagore 291 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
POE T S A S I A N S OM E
Leave This
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil! Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all for ever. Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Song Unsung
The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart. The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by. I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house. The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor; but the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house. I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet. Translations from Bengali by the author
292 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
John C lare
1793–1864
[ I A M : A S ON N E T & A VA R I AT I ON ]
I feel I am;—I only know I am, And plod upon the earth, as dull and void: Earth’s prison chilled my body with its dram Of dullness, and my soaring thoughts destroyed, I fled to solitudes from passions dream, But strife persued—I only know, I am, I was a being created in the race Of men disdaining bounds of place and time:— A spirit that could travel o’er the space Of earth and heven,—like a thought sublime, Tracing creation, like my maker, free,— A soul unshackled—like eternity, Spurning earth’s vain and soul debasing thrall But now I only know I am,—that’s all.
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. I am—yet what I am, none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host Like shadows in love-frenzied stifled throes— And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; Even the dearest that I love the best Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest. I long for scenes where man hath never trod, A place where woman never smiled or wept, There to abide with my Creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, The grass below—above, the vaulted sky.
John Clare 293 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
THE BADGER: A SEQUENCE
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The badger grumbling on his woodland track With shaggy hid & sharp nose scrowed with black Roots in the bushes & the woods & makes A great hugh burrow in the ferns & brakes With nose on ground he runs a awkard pace & anything will beat him in the race the shepherds dog will run him to his den Followed & hooted by the dogs & men The woodman when the hunting comes about Go round at night to stop the foxes out & hurrying through the bushes ferns & brakes Nor sees the many hols the badger makes & often through the bushes to the chin Breaks the old holes & tumbles headlong in When midnight comes a host of dogs & men Go out & track the badger to his den & put a sack within the hole & lye till the old grunting badger passes bye He comes & hears they let the strongest loose The old fox hears the noise & drops the goose The poacher shoots & hurrys from the cry & the old har half wounded buzzes bye They get a forked stick to bear him down & clapt the dogs & bore him to the town & bait him all the day with many dogs & laugh & shout & fright the scampering hogs He runs along & bites at all he meets They shout & hollo down the noisey streets He turns about to face the loud uproar & drives the rebels to their very doors The frequent stone is hurled whereere they go When badgers fight & every ones a foe The dogs are clapt & urged to join the fray The badger turns & drives them all away Though scarcely half as big dimute & small He fights with dogs for hours & beats them all The heavy mastiff savage in the fray Lies down & licks his feet & turns away
294 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The bull dog knows his match & waxes cold The badger grins & never leaves his hold He drive the crowd & follows at their heels & bites them through the drunkard swears & reels The frightened women takes the boys away The blackguard laughs & hurrys in the fray He trys to reach the woods a awkard race But sticks & cudgels quickly stop the chace He turns agen & drives the noisey crowd & beats the many dogs in noises loud He drives away & beats them every one & then they loose them all & set them on He falls as dead & kicked by boys & men Then starts & grins & drives the crowd agen Till kicked & torn & beaten out he lies & leaves his hold & cackles groans & dies
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from L E T T E R T O M E S S R S T A Y L O R A N D H E S S E Y
I forgot to say in my last that the Nightingale sung as common by day as night & as often tho its a fact that is not generaly known your Londoners are very fond of talking about the bird & I believe fancy every bird they hear after sunset a Nightingale I remember while I was there last while walking with a friend in the fields of Shacklwell we saw a gentlman & lady listening very attentive by the side of a shrubbery & when we came up we heard them lavishing praises on the beautiful song of the nightingale which happend to be a thrush but it did for them & they listend & repeated their praise with heartfelt satisfaction while the bird seemed to know the grand distinction that its song had gaind for it & strove exultingly to keep up the deception by attempting a varied & more louder song the dews was ready to fall but the lady was heedless of the wet grass tho the setting sun as a traveller glad to rest was leaving his enlarged rim on the earth like a table of fire & lessening by degrees out of sight leaving night and a few gilt clouds behind him such is the ignorance of Nature in large Citys that are nothing less than overgrown prisons that shut out the world and all its beautys
John Clare 295 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
[MOUSE’S NEST]
I found a ball of grass among the hay & proged it as I passed & went away & when I looked I fancied something stirred & turned agen & hoped to catch the bird When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat With all her young ones hanging at her teats She looked so odd & so grotesque to me I ran & wondered what the thing could be & pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood The young ones squeaked & when I went away She found her nest again among the hay The water oer the pebbles scarce could run & broad old sexpools glittered in the sun EDITORS ’ NOTE .
Sexpools are rainwater pools in areas where peat has been dug out.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
E M M ON S A I LS H E AT H I N W I N T E R
I love to see the old heaths withered brake Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze & ling While the old Heron from the lonely lake Starts slow & flaps his melancholy wing & oddling crow in idle motions swing On the half rotten ash trees topmost twig Beside whose trunk the gypsey makes his bed Up flies the bouncing wood cock from the brig Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread The field fare chatters in the whistling thorn & for the awe round fields & closen rove & coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain & hang on little twigs & start again
296 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
from T H E P R O G R E S S O F R H Y M E
No matter how the world approved Twas nature listened—I that loved No matter how the lyre was strung From my own heart the music sprung The cowboy with his oaten straw Although he hardly heard or saw No more of music than he made Twas sweet—& when I pluckt the blade Of grass upon the woodland hill To mock the birds with artless skill No music in the world beside Seemed half so sweet—till mine was tried So my boy-worship poesy Made een the muses pleased with me Untill I even danced for joy A happy & a lonely boy Each object to my ear & eye Made paradise of poesy I heard the blackbird I the dell Sing sweet—could I but sing as well I thought until the bird in glee Seemed pleased & paused to answer me —& nightingales o I have stood Beside the pingle & the wood & oer the old oak railing hung To listen every note they sung & left boys making taws of clay To muse & listen half the day The more I listened & the more Each note seemed sweeter than before & aye so different was the strain She’d scarce repeat the note again —“Chew-chew chew-chew” & higher still “Cheer-cheer cheer-cheer” more loud & shrill “Cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up”—& dropt Low “Tweet tweet jug jug jug” & stopt One moment just to drink the sound
John Clare 297 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Her music made & then a round Of stranger witching notes was heard As if it was a stranger bird “Wew-wew wew-wew chur-chur chur-chur “Woo-it woo-it”—could this be her “Tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew “Chew-rit chew-rit”—& ever new “Will-will will-will grig-grig grig-grig” To hear the “tweet tweet tweet” so shrill Then “jug jug jug” & all was still A minute—when a wilder strain Made boys & woods to pause again Words were not left to hum the spell Could they be birds that sung so well— I thought & maybe more than I That music’s self had left the sky To cheer me with its magic strain & then I hummed the words again Till fancy pictured standing by My hearts companion poesy
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
JACK RANDALLS CHALLENGE TO ALL THE WORLD
Jack Randall The Champion Of The Prize Ring Begs Leave To Inform The Sporting World That He Is Ready To Meet Any Customer In The Ring Or On The Stage To Fight For The Sum Of £500 Or £1000 Aside A Fair Stand Up Fight half Minute Time Win Or Loose he Is Not Particular As to Weight Colour Or Country All He Wishes Is To Meet with a Customer Who Has Pluck Enough To Come To The Scratch Jack Randall May 1st 1841 So let thine enemies perish O Lord
298 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
TO JOHN CLARE
Well honest John how fare you now at home The spring is come and birds are building nests The old cock robin to the stye is come With olive feathers & its ruddy breast & the old cock with wattles & redcomb Struts with the hens & seems to like some best Then crows & looks about for little crumbs Swept out by little folks an hour ago The pigs sleep in the sty the bookman comes The little boys lets home close nesting go & pockets tops & tawes where daiseys bloom To look at the new number just laid down With lots of pictures & good stories too & Jack the giant killers high renown
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
LET TER TO MR. JAS. HIPKINS
March 8 1860 Dear Sir I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of & why I am shut up I dont know I have nothing to say so I conclude Yours respectfully john clare
COMMENTARY
“Do I write intelligible” I am genneraly understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc and for the very reason that altho they are drilled hourly daily and weekly by every boarding school Miss who pretends to gossip in correspondence. . . . Those who have made grammar up into a system and cut it into classes and orders as the student does the animal or vegetable creation may be a fine recreation for schools but it becomes of no use towards making any one so far acquainted with it as to find it useful— J. C., from The Letters
John Clare 299 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
(1) Unlike Hölderlin, who also spent the latter part of his life in confinement for perceived mental illness, Clare continued to write voluminously—producing vast numbers of sonnets; imitations of Byron’s Childe Harold and Don Juan & on facing pages verse paraphrases from the Hebrew Bible; & highly lyrical prose-poetry accounts of nature & of his own experiences in it. Much of this is laced with fantasies of long-lost loves while it also recalls the long-lost world before the Enclosure Act denied him full access to the public lands he loved to explore & recover in poems. He and his family always struggled with poverty; yet during the late Regency decade & in the early 1820s, he enjoyed a stretch of success in the London literary world. (He & Keats shared the same publisher.) A geographic minimalist, he spent most of his life in a tiny corner of East Anglia before being committed to a home for the insane. Over time, he became the exemplary outsider poet.
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(2) Our selection begins with his perennially most popular poem, “I Am,” ostensibly a poem of the lyric subject that indicates his extreme vulnerability to mental isolation; tradition has used this poem to identify Clare as a victim of poverty, poor & uneven education, & psychological instability, and as a poet of the self. Yet “I Am,” in contradistinction to the poetry of the lyric subject often identified with “the Romantic,” is followed in our selection by his more “Objectivist”-like attention to particulars, indeed a mobility & animism of the natural element, a concern less with himself & more with his world. A poet fully conscious of his choices, he wrote poems that were overtly or implicitly outcries against government enclosure of public lands & its negative effects on local inhabitants, assertions of his rights over his own grammar, declarations of independence even into his madness. Furthermore, he was a student of the folk milieu in which he participated, as testified by his serious gatherings of folk songs from his community. (3) Clare’s irregular syntax, punctuation, & capitalization caused problems for his generally sympathetic editors & publishers, who wanted to streamline & normalize material that they sometimes deemed otherwise not publishable. (In 1841 he even wrote poems in which every word was capitalized.) These difficulties led Clare to turn from publishing his work altogether; most of the experiments in poetry appeared posthumously. His loosely structured, often unpredictable sonnets (ca. 1832–37) anticipate the work of twentieth-century experimentalists in that form. The supreme Romantic poet of parataxis, he fills poems with lists of swarming natural life: in John Ashbery’s words, Clare makes “a distillation of the natural world with all its beauty and pointlessness, its salient and boring features preserved intact.”
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John Keat s
1795–1821
B U T T E R F L I E S, L I N E AT E D From a letter, l July 1819
I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days Lineated by Jeffrey C. Robinson
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“ W H AT C A N I D O TO D R I V E AWAY ”
What can I do to drive away Remembrance from my eyes? for they have seen, Aye, an hour ago, my brilliant queen! Touch has a memory. O say, Love, say, What can I do to kill it and be free In my old liberty? When every fair one that I saw was fair, Enough to catch me in but half a snare, Not keep me there: When, howe’er poor or particolour’d things, My muse had wings, And ever ready was to take her course Whither I bent her force, Unintellectual, yet divine to me;— Divine, I say!—What sea-bird o’er the sea Is a philosopher the while he goes Winging along where the great water throes? How shall I do To get anew Those moulted feathers, and so mount once more
John Keats 301 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Above, above The reach of fluttering Love, And make him cower lowly while I soar? Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism, A heresy and schism, Foisted into the canon law of love;— No,—wine is only sweet to happy men; More dismal cares Seize on me unawares,— Where shall I learn to get my peace again? To banish thoughts of that most hateful land, Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand Where they were wreck’d and live a wretched life; That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore, Unown’d of any weedy-haired gods; Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods, Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind; Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind, Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbaged meads Make lean and lank the starv’d ox while he feeds; There flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song, And great unerring Nature once seems wrong. O, for some sunny spell To dissipate the shadows of this hell! Say they are gone,—with the new dawning light Steps forth my lady bright! O, let me once more rest My soul upon that dazzling breast! Let once again these aching arms be placed, The tender gaolers of thy waist! And let me feel that warm breath here and there To spread a rapture in my very hair,— O, the sweetness of the pain! Give me those lips again! Enough! Enough! it is enough for me To dream of thee!
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from E N D Y M I O N , B O O K O N E : H Y M N T O P A N
Thus ending, on the shrine he heap’d a spire Of teeming sweets, enkindling sacred fire; Anon he stain’d the thick and spongy sod With wine, in honour of the shepherd-god. Now while the earth was drinking it, and while Bay leaves were crackling in the fragrant pile, And gummy frankincense was sparkling bright ’Neath smothering parsley, and a hazy light Spread greyly eastward, thus a chorus sang:
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“O thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; Who lov’st to see the hamadryads dress Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken; And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken The dreary melody of bedded reeds— In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx—do thou now, By thy love’s milky brow! By all the trembling mazes that she ran, Hear us, great Pan! “O thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtles Passion their voices cooingly ’mong myrtles, What time thou wanderest at eventide Through sunny meadows, that outskirt the side Of thine enmossed realms: O thou, to whom Broad leaved fig trees even now foredoom Their ripen’d fruitage; yellow girted bees Their golden honeycombs; our village leas Their fairest blossom’d beans and poppied corn; The chuckling linnet its five young unborn, To sing for thee; low creeping strawberries Their summer coolness; pent up butterflies Their freckled wings; yea, the fresh budding year All its completions—be quickly near,
John Keats 303 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
By every wind that nods the mountain pine, O forester divine!
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“Thou, to whom every faun and satyr flies For willing service; whether to surprise The squatted hare while in half sleeping fit; Or upward ragged precipices flit To save poor lambkins from the eagle’s maw; Or by mysterious enticement draw Bewildered shepherds to their path again; Or to tread breathless round the frothy main, And gather up all fancifullest shells For thee to tumble into Naiads’ cells, And, being hidden, laugh at their out-peeping; Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping, The while they pelt each other on the crown With silvery oak apples, and fir cones brown— By all the echoes that about thee ring, Hear us, O satyr king! “O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears, While ever and anon to his shorn peers A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn, When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn Anger our huntsmen: Breather round our farms, To keep off mildews, and all weather harms: Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, That come a swooning over hollow grounds, And wither drearily on barren moors: Dread opener of the mysterious doors Leading to universal knowledge—see, Great son of Dryope, The many that are come to pay their vows With leaves about their brows! “Be still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven, That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal—a new birth: Be still a symbol of immensity;
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A firmament reflected in a sea; An element filling the space between; An unknown—but no more: we humbly screen With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending, And giving out a shout most heaven rending, Conjure thee to receive our humble pæan, Upon thy Mount Lycean!”
SONNET: “IF BY DULL RHYMES”
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If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d, And, like Andromeda, the sonnet sweet Fetter’d, in spite of pained loveliness; Let us find out, if we must be constrain’d, Sandals more interwoven and complete To fit the naked foot of Poesy; Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d By ear industrious, and attention meet; Misers of sound and syllable, no less Than Midas of his coinage, let us be Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown; So, if we may not let the muse be free, She will be bound with garlands of her own.
MEG MERRILIES
Old Meg she was a gipsey, And liv’d upon the moors; Her bed it was the brown heath turf, And her house was out of doors. Her apples were swart blackberries, Her currants pods o’ broom, Her wine was dew o’ the wild white rose, Her book a churchyard tomb. Her brothers were the craggy hills, Her sisters larchen trees—
John Keats 305 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Alone with her great family She liv’d as she did please. No breakfast had she many a morn, No dinner many a noon, And ’stead of supper she would stare Full hard against the moon. But every morn of woodbine fresh She made her garlanding, And every night the dark glen yew She wove and she would sing. And with her fingers old and brown She plaited mats o’ rushes, And gave them to the cottagers She met among the bushes. Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen And tall as Amazon: An old red blanket cloak she wore; A chip hat had she on. God rest her aged bones somewhere— She died full long agone!
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SONNET: “BRIGHT STAR”
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors; No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft swell and fall, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
306 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
ODE TO PSYCHE
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O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, And pardon that thy secrets should be sung Even into thine own soft-conched ear: Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes? I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly, And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise, Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran A brooklet, scarce espied: ’Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian, They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass; Their arms embraced, and their pinions too; Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu, As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, And ready still past kisses to outnumber At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love: The winged boy I knew; But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove? His Psyche true! O latest born and loveliest vision far Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy! Fairer than Phœbe’s sapphire-region’d star, Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky; Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, Nor altar heap’d with flowers; Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours; No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet From chain-swung censer teeming; No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming. O brightest! though too late for antique vows, Too, too late for the fond believing lyre, When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
John Keats 307 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Holy the air, the water, and the fire; Yet even in these days so far retir’d From happy pieties, thy lucent fans, Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired. So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours; Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet From swinged censer teeming; Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming. Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep; And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep; And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same: And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in!
ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE 1
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,—
308 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 2
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
3
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 4
Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
John Keats 309 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
5
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves; And mid-May’s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 6
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod.
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7
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 8
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
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As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
D R E A M A N D D R E A M S O N N E T : PAO LO A N D F R A N C E S C A
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The fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more—it is that one in which he meets with Paolo and Franc(h)esca—I had passed many days in rather a low state of mind and in the midst of them I dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life—I floated about the whirling atmosphere as it is described with a beautiful figure to whose lips mine were joined as it seem’d for an age—and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I was warm—even flowery tree tops sprung up and we rested on them sometimes with the lightness of a cloud till the wind blew us away again— I tried a Sonnet upon it—there are fourteen lines but nothing of what I felt in it—o that I could dream it every night— As Hermes once took to his feathers light When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept So on a delphic reed my idle spright So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft The dragon world of all its hundred eyes, And, seeing it asleep, so fled away: Not to pure Ida with its snow-(clad) cold skies, Nor unto Tempe where Jove griev’d that day, But to that second circle of sad hell, Where in the gust, the whirlwind and the flaw Of Rain and hailstones lovers need not tell Their sorrows—Pale were the sweet lips I saw Pale were the lips I kiss’d and fair the fo[r]m I floated with about that melancholy storm—
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O D E O N M E L A N C H O LY 1
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. 2
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But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. 3
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
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“THIS LIVING HAND”
This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood, So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d. See, here it is— I hold it towards you.
COMMENTARY
. . . at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously— I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. J. K., letter to George & Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817
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“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” (1) Immensely influential among experimental poets of the twentieth century, the term Negative Capability has come to signify a poetry that abandons the ego’s imagined control over its material & simultaneously opens out to the world itself. In Keats’s own poetry this resulted in “intensities” of language like “cool-rooted” & “fragrant-eyed,” anticipating G. M. Hopkins’s notion of “inscape.” Infelt language (cf. the Einfühlung of the Jena School Romantics) is in Keats one with his engagement with feminine, erotic, often Ovidian, classical myth, characteristic of the (so-called) Cockney School of poets. Given their name sneeringly by right-wing Regency critics, these London-based poets & writers (including Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Keats, Lamb, & Hazlitt) saw themselves as a radical challenge in poetry & culture to the by then establishment figures of Wordsworth, Coleridge, & Robert Southey. At the same time, Keats’s poems, in a startlingly postmodern way, often refuse to resolve into meaning. The famous odes (most of which were written in a three-week burst) may be less dramas of “the poet” & more a series of “experiments” in subjective drama. “As to the poetical Character itself,” he wrote, “. . . it has no self—it is every thing & nothing.” In this sense the “camelion Poet” & “Negative Capability” formulations prepare the way for Rimbaud’s famous late nineteenth-century claim: “I is an other.”
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(2) From the time of Shelley’s great elegy “Adonais” (1821) & throughout the last two centuries, Keats’s poetry has been linked to his early death—like Chatterton & Burns, Novalis in Germany, Pushkin & Lermontov in Russia, poets too young & “innocent” for political consciousness to energize their poetry, but all the more “authentic” for that. Often disdained for his lower-middle-class origins, Keats, from his politically progressive education in science & literature at the Enfield School near London, to his firm stance, as he said, on the “liberal side of the question[s]” of his day, & his outrage at the Peterloo Massacre (a violent government suppression of a peaceful mass demonstration), saw poetic decisions linked to political commitments. From the early “Sleep & Poetry,” where he greatly “loosened” the tightly closed Popian heroic couplet of establishment poetry (a cause of the infamously negative reviews of his first & second books) to the development of his characteristic ode stanza out of the sonnet form, he—in a way that Blake & Clare could well have approved—unfettered form as an unfettering of the human race. At times too his letters, which seem spontaneously to have offered the core of a Romantic poetics, intensify into an informal prose poetry. In a different but curiously related vein, his attraction to Burns, to Scottish dialect & lore, & to the populist tradition of Robin Hood (championed also by Leigh Hunt & J. H. Reynolds) indicates the popular as well as formal inclusiveness of his poetic vision. (3) “My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk” (Keats, in a letter to Shelley, August 1820).
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Hein rich Hein e
1797–1856
E Z R A P O U N D, A F T E R H E I N E Und Drang I
I am worn faint, The winds of good and evil Blind me with dust And burn me with the cold, There is no comfort being over-man; Yet are we come more near The great oblivions and the labouring night, Inchoate truth and the sepulchral forces.
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II
Confusion, clamour, ’mid the many voices Is there a meaning, a significance? That life apart from all life gives and takes, This life, apart from all life’s bitter and life’s sweet, Is good. Ye see me and ye say: exceeding sweet Life’s gifts, his youth, his art, And his too soon acclaim. I also knew exceeding bitterness, Saw good things altered and old friends fare forth, And what I loved in me hath died too soon, Yea I have seen the “gray above the green”; Gay have I lived in life; Though life hath lain Strange hands upon me and hath torn my sides, Yet I believe. ....... Life is most cruel where she is most wise. III
The will to live goes from me. I have lain Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Dull and out-worn with some strange, subtle sickness. Who shall say That love is not the very root of this, O thou afar? Yet she was near me, that eternal deep. O it is passing strange that love Can blow two ways across one soul. ....... And I was Aengus for a thousand years, And she, the ever-living, moved with me And strove amid the waves, and would not go.
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MORPHINE 1
terrific resemblance between these two young boys—real beauties—but the first one paler, harder too almost might say more fancy than the other who would come up close, lock me in his arms—loving, tender like his smile, beatific look! & the wreath of poppies on his head sometimes would graze my forehead smelling weird would drive all pain out of my mind—sweet bliss but too soon gone—can’t get it all together till that other brother serious & white lowers his torch— good sleeping, better dying—still best never being born
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2
o lamb lamb I was your shepherd once guarded you against the world I fed you with my bread with water from this well— o rage of winter storms my breast was warm to you I gripped you in tight love— the rain had thickened wolves & mountain rivers howled from their stone beds —o hard hard—you be not afraid not trembling even when the bolt cuts down the tallest pine you in my lap you sleeping carefree carefree but my arm is getting weaker, death is slinking past—the sheep’s game, shepherd’s play runs out—
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o God I’ll shove the stick back in your hand—you guard this poor lamb when they lay me down to rest—you keep the thorns from cutting her— o keep her fleece from brambles & filthy sumps—her feet surrounded by sweet grasses let her sleep, be carefree as she slept long days ago against my lap Translation from German by Jerome Rothenberg
HEINE PER GERARD DE NERVAL The Castaway
Longing & love!
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It’s all broken: I’m lying here sprawled on the shore, deserted & naked, a corpse that the sea has spit up with contempt. Before me the ocean fans out, a vast desert of water, while in back of me nothing but exile & grief, & over my head clouds sail by, grey & formless, the daughters of air, who draw water up from the sea, wisps of fog that they lift with great effort, then let them fall back on the sea, exquisite & useless, just like my life. Waves murmur, gulls caw, old memories seize me, dreams forgotten, snuffed out, images slow to return, sad & tender. Up north there’s a beautiful woman, regal & beautiful, wearing a white robe, voluptuous, circling her frail cypress waist; her hair in black curls unloosening, blest like the night, from her head crowned with tresses, wind blowing capriciously, touching her tender pale face, & there in her tender pale face an eye large & powerful shines, a black sun. Black sun, how many times have your flames turned against me, your ardors consumed me, how many times was I left here staggering, drunk from your juices!
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But just then a trace of a smile crossed her lips fiercely arched like a child’s, sweet but fiercely arched, breathing out words faint as moonlight & gentle as attar of roses. My soul then came forth & glided rejoicing up to the sky. Be silent, you waves & you gulls! Joy & hope! love & longing! everything comes to a close. I lie down on the earth, a miserable castaway, pressing my face still aflame on the watersoaked sand.
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The Dream
A dream passing strange enraptured my mind, filled my body with dread. Many an image rose up before me & made my heart quaver. Here was a marvelous garden—so beautiful I wanted to walk through it absent all care; so many beautiful flowers were watching. Enraptured I watched them in turn. There were birds there that trilled softly, sweetly. A red sun that shone on a background of gold streaked the lawn with a medley of colors. Perfumed the grasses sprang up. The air was sweet & caressing, & everything opened, everything smiled, everything called me to share its magnificence. In the midst of a border of flowers I could make out a clear marble fountain. There I saw a lovely young girl who was washing some kind of white garment. With ruby red cheeks, with clear eyes & curly blond hair, an image of holiness!—And as I watched her, she seemed like a stranger, yet somehow familiar. The lovely young girl kept working & singing a very strange song: “Run, water, run in your fountain, wash out this white linen cloth.” I went up to her, spoke to her softly: “O tell me then, sweet lovely girl, why this garment is white?” And she answered straight off: “Prepare yourself well. The garment I wash is your death shroud.” And once she had spoken, all that vision vanished like mist. And I saw myself carried by magic to to the heart of a murky dark forest. The trees rose up to the sky, & caught by surprise, I stood there & pondered, stood there & pondered. But listen: what a muffled sound! The echo of an axe out in the dis-
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tance. And running through the bushes and the thickets I came on an open space. In the middle of a verdant clearing, a gigantic oak! & look, my marvelous young girl was hacking at it with an axe. Blow after blow, & brandishing her axe & swinging down she sang: “Steel bright, steel clear, cut me a plank to make a bier.” I moved up close to her & spoke in a low voice: “Tell me, lovely young girl, why you’re making this oak chest?” And she answered straight off: “Time runs on. And what I’m making here will be your coffin.” And no sooner had she said that when the vision vanished like mist. I saw a wasteland then, on every side of me, colorless & pale. I had no sense of how I got there. I hesitated frozen in my tracks & shivering. And when I managed to go on, directionless, I saw a white form up ahead & ran to reach it. There it was and I could see it was that lovely young girl once again. She was bending over, facing the pale ground & busy with a pickaxe, cutting through the clay. I moved up slowly, staring at her once again. She was at once a thing of beauty & of horror. Now the lovely young girl sang another strange refrain: “Pickaxe, iron pickaxe, large & sharp, dig out a hole for me that’s large & deep.” I moved up close to her & spoke in a low voice: “Tell me, lovely sweet young girl, what does this hole you’re digging mean?” She answered me: “Easy, rest easy, I’m digging your grave.” And as she said it I could see the hole grow wider, gaping, gaping. I looked into that hollow space, and as I did a quake of terror seized me, & I felt myself pulled down into the darkness of the grave. Translations from French by Jerome Rothenberg
from L U D W I G B Ö R N E : A M E M O R I A L
Helgoland, August 10 Lafayette, the tricolor, the Marseillaise! . . . My longing for peace is gone. I know now what I want to do, what I should do, what I must do. . . . I am the son of the Revolution and I take up the charmed weapons upon which my mother has pronounced her magic blessing. . . . Flowers! Flowers! I will crown my head with flowers in this fight to the death. And my lyre, give me my lyre too, that I may sing a battle-hymn. . . . Words
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like flaming stars that have shot from on high to burn palaces and illumine hovels! . . . Words like bright javelins, that will go whizzing up into the seventh heaven and strike the pious hypocrites who have crept into the Holy of Holies. I am all joy and song, all sword and flame! Perhaps I am quite mad. . . . One of those wild sunbeams wrapped in printed paper has flown into my brain, and all my thoughts are in a blaze. In vain I dip my head in the sea. No water can douse this Greek flame. But it is no different with the rest. The other seashore visitors have also been hit by the Parisian sunstroke, especially the Berliners, who have flocked here in great numbers this year, and cross over from one island to the other, so that one may well say that the whole North Sea has been deluged by Berliners. Even the poor Helgolanders are jubilant, although they understand the events only by instinct. The fisherman who ferried me yesterday to the little island where I bathed, laughed and shouted: “The poor people have won!” Yes, instinctively, the people understand these events much better perhaps than we with all our learning. Thus Frau von Varnhagen once told me a story of how they were waiting for news of the battle of Leipzig, when suddenly the maid rushed into the room, crying with terror, “The nobles have won.” This time, however, the poor have won the battle. “But it does them no good, even if they have done away with the right of succession!” These words were spoken by the East Prussian legal councilor in a tone which greatly affected me. I don’t know why these words, which I don’t understand, remain so uneasily in my memory. What did the dull fellow mean by that? This morning a package of newspapers was again delivered. I devour them like manna. Child that I am, the touching details occupy me much more than the significant whole. O, if I could only see the dog Medor. He interests me much more than the others who with their quick leaps retrieved the crown for Philipp of Orleans. The dog Medor retrieved rifle and cartridge box for his master, and when his master fell in battle and was buried together with his co-heroes in the courtyard of the Louvre, the poor dog stayed there, like a statue of loyalty, sitting motionless on his grave, day and night; he ate very little of the food which he was offered and buried the largest part of it in the earth, perhaps as nourishment for his interred master. I cannot sleep any longer. My overexcited imagination is beset by the most bizarre nocturnal visions. Waking dreams come stumbling one after another and become strangely confused and appear as in a Chinese shadow-play, now dwarf-like, now enormously elongated, so that I am
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almost driven mad. In this condition it often seems to me that my own limbs have likewise expanded to colossal size, and with giant strides I am running back and forth between Germany and France. Yes, I remember, last night I ran in this fashion through all the German provinces and counties, and knocked on the doors of all my friends and roused them from their sleep. . . . They glared at me with astonished, glassy eyes, so that I myself was frightened and could not say right off what I was doing or why I had awakened them! I poked the ribs of many fat philistines who snored frightfully, and all they did was yawn and say, “What time is it?” Dear friends, in Paris the cock has crowed. That is all I know. On the way to Munich, behind Augsburg, I met a throng of Gothic cathedrals apparently in flight, and they waddled terror-stricken. Tired of so much running around, I took to wings, and flew from star to star. These are not populated worlds, as some dream, but merely radiant orbs of stone, desolate and barren. They do not fall down, because they do not know where to fall. And so they soar on high, up and down, in great perplexity. I arrived in heaven. All doors were ajar. Long, lofty, echoing halls, with old-fashioned gilding—quite empty. Only here and there in a velvet armchair sat an ancient, powdered attendant, in faded scarlet livery, dozing lightly. In some chambers the doors had been lifted from their hinges; in other places the doors were locked fast and sealed three times with large, round official seals, like the houses of bankrupts or deceased persons. Finally I came to a room in which an old thin man sat at a writing desk, rummaging among thick stacks of papers. He was dressed in black, had white hair, a wrinkled businessman’s face, and he asked in a muffled voice, “What do you want?” In my naivete I took him for the good Lord, and I spoke to him quite confidentially, “Ah, dear Lord God, I would like to learn how to thunder. I already know how to strike with lightning. . . . Please, teach me how to thunder!” “Not so loud,” the thin old man replied vehemently, and he turned his back on me and once more rummaged among his papers. “That is the Keeper of Records,” one of the scarlet-liveried servants whispered as he rose from his reclining chair and rubbed his eyes and yawned. . . . Pan is dead! Translation from German by Frederic Ewen & Robert C. Holub
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from G E R M A N Y : A W I N T E R ’ S T A L E [ 2 3 – 2 6 ] 23
The republic of Hamburg was never as great As those of Venice and Florence; But the oysters of Hamburg can’t be beat— They’re best in the cellars of Lorenz. When I went down there with good old Campe The evening air was fine; We were bent on wallowing once more In oysters and Rhine wine. A good crowd sat there; and I was glad To find, among the others, Many old cronies, like Chaufepié, And many new-sworn brothers. Here’s Wille, whose face is a register; His academic foes Had signed inscriptions in that book Too legibly—with blows.
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Here was that thorough pagan, Fuchs, A personal foe of Jehovah— Devoted to Hegel, and also, perhaps, To the Venus of Canova. My Campe had turned Amphitryon, And smiled in great delight; Like a transfigured Madonna’s now His eyes were blessedly bright. I ate and drank with zest, and thought: “This Campe’s a perfect gem— There may be other good publishers— But he’s the best of them. Where another publisher perhaps Would have let me starve in hallways, This fellow even buys me drinks; I’ll have to keep him always.
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I thank the mighty Lord on high Who made the sap of the vine, And permitted such a publisher As Julius Campe to be mine! I thank the mighty Lord on high Whose glorious word gave birth To oysters in the ocean world And wine of the Rhine on earth! He made the lemons grow, with which Our oysters are bedewed— Now, Father, see that I may well Digest this evening’s food!” The Rhine wine always mellows me, And soothes my strife-torn mind, And kindles there a mighty urge, An urge to love mankind.
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It makes me leave my lonesome room; It drives me from street to street; I look for a garment soft and white, A soul for my soul to meet. At moments like these I nearly melt With sadness and desire; All cats are gray, all women then Are Helens, and set me afire. And as I came where the Drehbahn runs I saw the moon illumine A woman, splendid and sublime, A wondrously high-breasted woman. Her face was round, and hale, and sound; Her eyes were turquoise blue; Her cheeks were like roses, like cherries her mouth— And her nose was reddish, too. Her head was covered with a white And well-starched linen bonnet; It looked like a crown, with towerlets And jagged pinnacles on it.
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She wore a white tunic down to her calves, And oh, what calves they were! The bases of two Doric columns Couldn’t be lovelier! The most earthly unaffectedness Could be read upon her face, But her superhuman rear betrayed She belonged to a higher race. Stepping up to me, she said: “Welcome to Elbe’s shore— After an absence of thirteen years— I see you’re the same as before. Perhaps you seek those lovely souls Who often met you here And reveled all night long with you In a passed, a perished year.
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That hundred-headed hydra, Life, Long since devoured them all— The old times and the girls you knew Are lost beyond recall! You’ll find those pretty flowers no more, That you loved when your heart was warm; Here they bloomed—they are withered now, And their leaves are ripped by the storm. Withered, stripped, and trampled down By destiny’s brutal feet— My friend, such is the earthly fate Of all that is lovely and sweet!” “Who are you?” I cried. “You look at me Like a dream that once I knew— Majestic lady, where do you live? May I accompany you?” At this the woman smiled and said: “Sorry! But I’m refined; I’m a respectable, moral sort; Sorry! I’m not that kind.
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I’m not that kind of a mademoiselle, A Loretta with open bodice— Know then: I am Hammonia, Hamburg’s protecting goddess! You start, and even seem afraid; You—such a valiant singer! Are you still so anxious to come with me? Well, then! No need to linger!” But noisily I laughed, and said: “I’ll come along—proceed! I’ll come along, though hell’s the place To which your footsteps lead!” 24
How I got up her narrow stairs I really couldn’t say; Perhaps a few invisible ghosts Carried me part of the way.
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Here in Hammonia’s little room The hours went swiftly by. The goddess confessed, her opinion of me Had always been quite high. “You see,” she said, “before your time My heart was set afire By one who praised the Messiah’s works Upon his pious lyre. My Klopstock’s bust is standing yet On the bureau, there by the clock, Though recently I’ve been using it In place of a milliner’s block. Now you’re my pet; your picture hangs On the wall above my bed. And see, a fresh green laurel wreath Adorns your handsome head.
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And yet, the way you’ve often nagged My sons, I must admit, Has sometimes deeply wounded me; Let’s have no more of it. I trust that time has cured you of Such naughty occupation, And taught you even to look on fools With greater toleration. But tell me! Winter’s almost here— What could have been your reason For starting on a journey north In such a draughty season?” “O my goddess!” I replied, “Thoughts lie slumbering deep Within the core of the human heart, That may suddenly wake from their sleep.
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On the surface things went pretty well, But something within oppressed me, And day by day that oppression grew— Homesickness possessed me. The air of France, that had been so light, Now smothered me with its weight; I had to breathe some German air Or I would suffocate. I longed for German tobacco smoke, For the fragrance of our peat. My foot grew faint with eagerness To step on a German street. I longed to see my old lady again, And all through the night I’d sigh; She lives beside the gate of the dam; Lottchen lives nearby. That old and noble gentleman I also longed to see; He never failed to bawl me out, Yet always took care of me.
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‘Stupid fellow!’ he used to say. Once more I wanted to hear it— It always echoed like a song, A sweet song, through my spirit. I longed for the bluish chimney smoke That rises from German stoves; For the nightingales of Saxony; For quiet beech tree groves. I even hungered for those spots Where grief had bowed me down; Where once I dragged the cross of youth, And wore a thorny crown. I wanted to weep again, where once My bitterest tears fell burning— Love of country, I believe, Is the name of this foolish yearning.
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I do not like to speak of it; It’s only a disease; Modest, I never permit the crowd To see my agonies. I have no patience with the bunch That hopes to stir your heart, By putting its patriotism on show With every abscess and wart. Shameless, shabby beggars are they That kneel and whine for charity— Give Menzel and his Swabians A penny of popularity! O goddess mine, you’ve found me today In a very sensitive state; I’m somewhat ill, but if I take care, I’ll soon recuperate. Yes, I am ill, and you could help To raise my spirits some, By serving a cup of good hot tea; I’d like it mixed with rum.”
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25
She brewed some tea, mixed it with rum, And poured a cup for me. But she herself drank down the rum Without a drop of tea. Against my shoulder she leaned her head (The bonnet was somewhat crushed As a result of her carelessness) And she spoke in a tone that was hushed: “Often I’ve anxiously thought of you In Paris, that sinful place, Living without a watchful friend Among that frivolous race. You stroll along those avenues And haven’t at your side A loyal German publisher To be your mentor and guide.
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And it’s so easy to be seduced! Those boulevards are lined With sickly sylphs; and all too soon One loses peace of mind. Don’t go back, but stay with us! Here morals and breeding still stand— And many a quiet pleasure blooms Here in the fatherland. Stay with us in Germany; You’ll find things more to your liking; You’ve surely seen with your own eyes That progress has been striking. And the censorship is harsh no more— Hoffmann grows milder with age; No more will he mutilate your books As he did in his youthful rage. You, too, are older and milder now— Less eager for a fight; You’ll even see the bygone days In a more propitious light.
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To say that things were hopeless here Is gross exaggeration; You could break your chains, as they did in Rome, By self-extermination. The populace had freedom of thought, The greatest number possessed it; Only the few who published books Were ever really molested. Lawless tyranny never ruled; Demagogues—even the worst— Never lost their citizenship, Without being sentenced first. And even in the hardest times Evil did not prevail— Believe me, no one ever starved In any German jail!
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So many fine examples of faith And kindness could be found Blossoming here in days gone by! Now doubt and denial abound. Practical, outward liberty Will one day drag to its doom The ideal that grew in our breasts—it was pure As the dream of the lily in bloom! Our beautiful poetry also dies, Today it’s a flickering fire; Freiligrath’s King of the Moors goes down With the other kings that expire. Our grandsons will eat and drink enough, But their thoughtful silence is gone; The idyll is over, and in its stead A spectacle play comes on. Oh, could you be silent, I’d open for you The book of destiny; In my magic mirrors I’d let you view Things that are to be.
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I’d like to show you what no one else Has seen before this day— The future of your fatherland— But ah! You’d give it away.” “My god, O goddess!” I cried, enrapt, “Nothing could be so sweet! Show me the future of Germany— I am a man and discreet. I’ll pledge my silence by any oath That you may wish to hear; I guarantee my secrecy— Tell me, how shall I swear?” The goddess answered, “Swear to me In Father Abraham’s way, When Eleazar prepared for his trip— Now heed whatever I say!
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Lift up my gown, and lay your hand Down here on my thigh, and hold it, And swear that this secret, in speech and in books, Shall never be unfolded.” A solemn moment! I felt as though The breath of a buried day Blew on me as I swore the oath, In the ancient patriarch’s way. I gravely lifted Hammonia’s gown, And laid my hands on her hips, And vowed the secret would never escape From my writing quill or my lips. 26
The rum must have reached Hammonia’s crown— (Her cheeks became so red) And with a sigh she turned to me And sorrowfully said: “I’m growing old; I was born on the day That Hamburg rose from the ground.
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As queen of the shellfish, here at the mouth Of the Elbe, my mother was crowned. My father was a mighty king, Carolus Magnus by name. Friedrich the Great of Prussia had not Such wisdom, power, and fame. His coronation chair is still At Aachen; but the chair On which he used to sit at night Was left in mother’s care. Mother willed this chair to me; You see—it’s old and faded; But should Rothschild offer me all his wealth I’d never agree to trade it. Do you see, there in the corner stands A chair from an earlier day; The leather is torn from its back, and moths Have eaten the cushion away.
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But if you go up close and lift The cushion from the chair, You’ll see an oval opening; A pot is hidden there— It is a magic pot, in which The magical powers brew; Stick in your head, and future times Shall be revealed to you— Germany’s future, like waving dreams, Shall surge before your eyes; But do not shudder, if out of the mess Foul miasmas arise!” She spoke, and laughed peculiarly, But there was no fear in my soul; With curiosity I ran To stick my head in the hole. The things I saw, I won’t betray— I promised never to tell.
Heinrich Heine 331 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
I’m barely permitted to report: God! O God! What a smell! Against my will those cursed, vile Aromas come to mind: The startling stink, that seemed to be Old cabbage and leather combined. And after this—O God!—there rose Such monstrous, loathsome stenches; It was as though the dung were swept From six and thirty trenches— I know very well what Saint-Just said Of late to the welfare board— Neither with attar of roses nor musk Can the great disease be cured. But all other smells were put to shame By this prophetic scent— No longer could my nostrils bear That vile presentiment.
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My senses swooned, and when I woke I was still Hammonia’s guest— My head was resting comfortably Upon her ample breast. Her nostrils quivered, her lips were aglow, Her look was a shower of lightning; With a bacchanal hug of the poet, she sang In an ecstasy fierce and frightening: “I love you, stay in Hamburg with me; We’ll gaily eat and drink The wines and oysters of today, And forget tomorrow’s stink! Put back the cover! And spare our joy From the horrible smells below it— I love you as never a woman before Has loved a German poet! I kiss you—and your genius fills My soul with inspiration;
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And suddenly I’m overcome By a grand intoxication. I feel as though I hear the song Of watchmen on the street— They sing a prothalamium, My comrade-in-joy, my sweet! And now the mounted lackeys come, With torches richly burning; They dance the torch dance solemnly, Hopping, and waddling, and turning. Here come the worthy senators, And the elders in their glory; The burgomaster clears his throat For a trial of oratory. The diplomatic corps appear In dress befitting their stations; With reservations, they wish us well In the name of the border nations.
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With rabbis and pastors arm in arm God’s delegation appears— But alas! Here comes Herr Hoffmann, too, Wielding his censor shears! The shears are rattling in his hand; He comes with savage heart— And cruelly cuts into your flesh— It was the choicest part . . .” Translation from German by Aaron Kramer
COMMENTARY
I don’t care very much about my fame as a poet, nor am I concerned whether my songs will be praised or blamed. But you shall lay a sword on my grave, for I have been a good soldier in the war of liberation of mankind. (H. H., The Voyage from Munich to Genoa) And again: I am the son of the Revolution, and I take up the charmed weapons upon which my mother has pronounced her magic blessing. (H. H., The Romantic School)
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(1) A turning from Romanticism as previously practiced & a reminder of how much tension existed in such movements, both within & across generations. But with Heine selbst the drama of poetry (& of “the poet”) took its own particular twists, & after sentimental (“romantic”) early lieder, he became in works such as Germany: A Winter’s Tale (1844) a satirist/ironist who, as Nietzsche wrote of him, “possessed that divine malice without which I cannot conceive perfection.” His, then, was a further example of an oppositional, often courageous practice marked by a strong impulse toward dismissal & invective—against his literary & philosophical predecessors (The Romantic School, etc.) & the cultural & political milieu that banned his work & drove him into twenty-five years of Paris exile. Growing up in a period of post-Napoleonic reaction & with a sense of betrayal by earlier Romantics, much like what was felt by Shelley’s generation in England, he was a supporter of later revolutions (1830, 1848) & of a nascent socialism & communism. His turn toward materialism & a kind of art-&-life continuum was a counter both to his own romantic questing & to those “Goethians” & Jena School Romantics (“priests and petty nobility, who conspire against the religious and political freedom of Europe”) who “allowed themselves to be misled into proclaiming the supremacy of art and turning away from the demands of that original real world which, after all, must take precedence.” In saying which he revived & transcended the older Romanticism while pointing to a conflict that has still to be resolved. N.B. That he was also the only major Jewish poet of the nineteenth century—though a convert as well to evangelical Protestantism (“[his] entrance ticket to European culture”)—is another point worth noting. (2) “Yes, if a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinion, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good. Remember Heine? You have admired him. He walked through a revolution too. He didn’t have his eyes left, and he wasn’t as gay as you. It was paresis laid him low. (What got you?) He left what he called his mattress grave and found his way, blind, through the bullets in the street, it was 1848, to the Louvre. He did it, he took the risk, to have another look at Venus. What were you looking at in a broadcasting studio?” Charles Olson, from “A Lustrum for You, E. P. [Ezra Pound]”
(3) His close relationship with Gerard de Nerval (below), with whom he collaborated on the translation of many of his lyrics as prose poems, is the basis of some of our translations here.
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A d a m M ickiew icz
1798–1855
from C R I M E A N S O N N E T S
The Ruins of the Castle of Balaklava
These shapeless heaps of rubbish, which were castles, Once your pride and your defense, O infertile Crimea! Lie today on the mountains like skulls of giants, Inhabited by the reptile Or by men more abject than the reptile. Let us climb the tower, search out traces of armories; What do I see! an inscription. Perhaps the name of a hero Terror of armies, who sleeps in oblivion, Surrounded like an insect with the leaves of the wild vine. Here Greeks have chiseled Attic ornaments into the walls; There the Italians gave fetters to the Mongols, And the pilgrim to Mecca murmured the words of the namaz. Today the vultures crown the tombs With their black wings, As on the ramparts of a city exterminated by the plague A flag of death eternally flies.
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Translation from Polish by Louise Bogan
THE ROMANTIC
“Silly girl, listen!” But she doesn’t listen While the village roofs glisten, Bright in the sun. “Silly girl, what do you do there, As if there were someone to view there, A face to gaze on and greet there, A live form warmly to meet there, When there is no one, none, do you hear!” But she doesn’t hear.
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Like a dead stone She stands there alone, Staring ahead of her, peering around For something that has to be found Till, suddenly spying it, She touches it, clutches it, Laughing and crying. Is it you, my Johnny, my true love, my dear? I knew you would never forget me, Even in death! Come with me, let me Show you the way now! Hold your breath, though, And tiptoe lest stepmother hear!
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What can she hear? They have made him A grave, two years ago laid him Away with the dead. Save me, Mother of God! I’m afraid. But why? Why should I flee you now? What do I dread? Not Johnny! My Johnny won’t hurt me. It is my Johnny! I see you now, Your eyes, your white shirt. But it’s pale as linen you are, Cold as winter you are! Let my lips take the cold from you, Kiss the chill of the mould from you. Dearest love, let me die with you, In the deep earth lie with you, For this world is dark and dreary, I am lonely and weary! Alone among the unkind ones Who mock at my vision, My tears their derision, Seeing nothing, the blind ones! Dear God! A cock is crowing, Whitely glimmers the dawn. Johnny! Where are you going? Don’t leave me! I am forlorn!
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So, caressing, talking aloud to her Lover, she stumbles and falls, And her cry of anguish calls A pitying crowd to her. “Cross yourselves! It is, surely, Her Johnny come back from the grave: While he lived, he loved her entirely. May God his soul now save!” Hearing what they are saying, I, too, start praying. “The girl is out of her senses!” Shouts a man with a learned air, “My eye and my lenses Know there’s nothing there. Ghosts are a myth Of ale-wife and blacksmith. Clodhoppers! This is treason Against King Reason!”
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“Yet the girl loves,” I reply diffidently, “And the people believe reverently: Faith and love are more discerning Than lenses or learning. You know the dead truths, not the living, The world of things, not the world of loving. Where does any miracle start? Cold eye, look in your heart!” Translation from Polish by W. H. Auden
from P A N T A D E U S Z
Breakfast the judge Against the grain Admits alfresco: Sportsmen home again Move to and fro
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And serve the ladies, bear In Dresden ware Cups, capped in cream, Of coal-black, honey-thick Coffee, as aromatic As mocha, amber-clear On charming trays; Themselves the gentlemen Take as they may prefer Ham, goose, or tongue, All cured in juniper, And then stewed beef in gravy.
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As for the coursing match, Unsatisfactory; The dogs called off The hare in standing corn, The whole match off. And the count: They order these things better (That is, the chase) In Muscovy, respect the grain By ukase and decree As to time and place “On a higher plane.” So Telimena, Installed in a summer villa Outside St Petersburg; When Fate must send, To live next door, Dog-loving dull chinovnik; Alarming dogs conspire to rend The night, and drive her frantic. Worse is in store. The lady swoons To see her spaniel mangled By cruel beagles, and before Her eyes abruptly strangled.
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But brought to book, The culprits shook: The tsar’s own hunting master Was bending his tremendous look Upon both hound and master. “You coursed a doe!’’ “Milord, a dog.” “What, sir, you contradict me? The hunting laws, I’ll have you know, Are here enforced quite strictly.” Four weeks C.B., For chinovniki Who course game out of season; And for their dogs, a summary Death, for the same good reason. (Thus Telimena To the room at large; Thus, with composure.)
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Who’d not condone The dubious note In such a lovely cause? Triumph of tone! Her anecdote Draws laughter and applause. Meanwhile the swain Forgets the maid And courts this ampler fair, Who sets in train The ambuscade Of love, and baits the snare. Now she delays The murmured phrase Which he must stoop to catch; Her gaze, his eyes, His lips, her sighs Mingle, and make the match.
Adam Mickiewicz 339 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Oh that a fly Should come between So close a tête-à-tête! Pursuit, pass by, Nor intervene! Domestic hygiene, wait! He swats. They start And jump apart, Halves of a riven tree. The lightning stroke Has cleft an oak Of love’s own forestry. Translation from Polish by Donald Davie
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from F O R E F A T H E R S ’ E V E : T H E G R E A T I M P R O V I S A T I O N
. . . Listen to me, God, and you, Nature! Here is music that is worthy of you, songs that are worthy of you. I am master! Master, I stretch out my hands! I stretch them to the sky, I place my fingers on the stars. They are my musical glasses, my armonica. Now swiftly, now slowly My spirit turns the stars. Millions on millions of tones resound, It is I who called them forth, I know them all; I combine them, I separate them, I reunite them, I weave them into rainbows, into chords, into strophes, I scatter them in sounds and in ribbons of fire. I raised my hands, I held them high above the ridge of the world, And the wheels of the armonica suddenly ceased to whirl. I sing alone, I hear my songs— Long lingering like the breath of the wind, They blow through all mankind, They moan like pain, They roar like the storm. Tonelessly, the centuries accompany them; each sound resounds and burns,
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Is in my ear, is in my eye, As when the wind blows over the waves, In its whistlings I hear its flight And see it in its coat of cloud.
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These songs are worthy of God, of Nature! This is a mighty song, a creator-song. This song is force and power, This song is immortality! I feel immortality, I create immortality, And you, God, what more could you do? See how I draw my thoughts out of myself, I incarnate them, They scatter across the skies, They whirl, they sing, they shine, Already far away, I feel them still, Still feel their charm, I feel their roundness in my hand, I sense their movements in my mind: I love you, my poetic children! My thoughts! My stars! My feelings! My storms! Among you I am like a father in the midst of his family, All of you are mine. . . . Not from Eden’s tree have I drawn this power— From the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil— Not from books or tales that are told, Not from the solution of problems, Or the practice of magic. Creator I was born: I have drawn my powers from the source From which you drew yours: You did not search for your powers—you have them; You do not fear to lose them and neither do I! Was it you who gave me, Or did I, like you, have to seize it, This piercing and powerful eye: When I raise my eyes toward the track of the clouds, And hear the birds flying south on almost invisible wings, Suddenly, only by willing, I hold them as in a net with my eyes;
Adam Mickiewicz 341 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The flock gives a cry of distress, but, till I release them, Your winds cannot move them. If I gaze at a comet with all the strength of my soul, It cannot stir from the spot while my eyes are upon it . . . Translation from Polish by Louise Varèse
COMMENTARY
I am the master! I stretch forth my hands, even to the skies! I lay my hands upon the stars, as on the crystal wheels of the harmonica. Now fast, now slow, as my soul wills, I turn the stars. I weave them into rainbows, harmonies. I feel immortality! I create immortality!
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A. M.
(1) A national poet after the fact, he was, like others in these pages, an exile & a wanderer, with something in the life & work resembling what Pierre Joris has elsewhere called a nomadic poetics: “always on the move, always changing, morphing, moving through languages, cultures, times without stopping” (P. J., Notes towards a Nomadic Poetics, 1999). So for Mickiewicz the place of birth & of his early years was Lithuania—a part of Poland then, both under Russian rule—where the dominant surrounding languages were Lithuanian & Belarussian. (His mother likely was Jewish—of the heretical Frankist persuasion.) Nor did he ever live in Poland proper beyond part of a year spent, still in exile, at the Polish-Prussian margins. His exile as such had begun in 1823, the offshoot of his work with revolutionary student groups that landed him first in prison & then by czarist decree in Central Russia (Odessa, Moscow, St. Petersburg), & consequent meetings & interchange with Pushkin & others. His further hejira took in much of Western Europe: Berlin & Hegel, Weimar & Goethe, Paris & the first Chair of Slavonic Literatures (short-lived) at the Collège de France, Rome & a failed attempt to bring Pope Pius IX over to the side of Polish liberation. As an active translator of poetry he composed versions of Byron’s The Giaour and some sections of Childe Harold, along with work from a range of other poets such as Goethe & Pushkin. He died of cholera in Constantinople, while attempting to organize a Polish legion to fight against the Russians, was buried first in France, & then reburied, 1890, in Krakow as (by then) the duly celebrated nation-poet. (2) If Mickiewicz’s best-known poem was Pan Tadeusz, an epic in the mode of Pushkin & Byron, presented here in Donald Davie’s very free translation (“transcreation”), his most experimental, boundary-shifting work was the dramatic poem called Forefathers’ Eve. Written in Dresden, published in Paris, the work took its title from a peasant ritual around which Mickiewicz wove a narrative about a romantic rebel figure, Gustav (later called Conrad), which may or may not speak to his own life in exile. Apart from
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its thematics, however, the work, which culminates in the central figure’s “great improvisation,” shared in a (proto)modernist fragmentation—a mark thereby of its high experimental Romanticism—of which Julian Krzyz· anowski writes, “The loose structure of this dramatic poem, in which some saw a revival of the traditional mediaeval miracle plays, makes possible the linking of a dozen or so pictures, scenes with individual characters and above all collective scenes, both realistic and fantastic, which despite appearances go to make up one uniform whole.” Or Jerzy Grotowski, who returned it to theater in the late twentieth century, writing of his own attempt (& Mickiewicz’s, by implication) “to construct a specific theatrical dialect: of ritual and play, the tragic and the grotesque”: “If Forefather’s Eve is a ritual drama, then we draw very literal conclusions: we arrange the collectivity, which is not divided into viewers and actors but rather into participants of the first and second order. The point is to have a collectivity subordinated to the rigors of ritual.”
G ia como L eopa rd i
1798–1837
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L’ I N F I N I T O
This lonely hill has always Been dear to me, and this thicket Which shuts out most of the final Horizon from view. I sit here, And gaze, and imagine The interminable spaces That stretch away, beyond my mind, Their uncanny silences, Their profound calms; and my heart Is almost overwhelmed with dread. And when the wind drones in the Branches, I compare its sound With that infinite silence; And I think of eternity, And the dead past, and the living Present, and the sound of it; And my thought drowns in immensity; And shipwreck is sweet in such a sea. Translation from Italian by Kenneth Rexroth
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S AT U R DAY N I G H T I N T H E V I L LAG E
The day is ready to close; the girl takes the downward path homeward from the vineyard, and jumps from crevice to crevice like a goat, as she holds a swath of violets and roses to decorate her hair and bodice tomorrow as usual for the Sabbath.
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Her grandmother sits, facing the sun going out, and spins and starts to reason with the neighbors, and renew the day, when she used to dress herself for the holiday and dance away the nights—still quick and healthy, with the boys, companions of her fairer season. Once again the landscape is brown, the sky drains to a pale blue, shadows drop from mountain and thatch, the young moon whitens. As I catch the clatter of small bells, sounding in the holiday, I can almost say my heart takes comfort in the sound. Children place their pickets and sentinels, and splash round and round the village fountain. They jump like crickets, and make a happy sound. The field-hand, who lives on nothing, marches home whistling, and gorges on the day of idleness at hand. Then all’s at peace; the lights are out;
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I hear the rasp of shavings, and the rapping hammer of the carpenter, working all night by lanternlight— hurrying and straining himself to increase his savings before the whitening day. This is the most kind of the seven days; tomorrow, you will wait and pray for Sunday’s boredom and anguish to be extinguished in the workdays’ grind you anticipate. Lively boy, the only age you are alive is like this day of joy, a clear and breathless Saturday that heralds life’s holiday. Rejoice, my child, this is the untroubled instant. Why should I undeceive you? Let it not grieve you, if the following day is slow to arrive.
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Translation from Italian by Robert Lowell
from O P E R E T T E M O R A L I : A N N O U N C E M E N T O F P R I Z E S
B Y T H E AC A D E M Y O F S Y L LO G R A P H S
Whereas, in accordance with the primary purposes of its by-laws, the Academy of Syllographs is continuously mindful to keep furthering the common good and whereas it esteems nothing to be more conducive to this end than to aid in promoting the progress and the inclinations of the fortunate century in which we live, as an illustrious poet has said, it has taken into serious consideration the qualities and nature of our age, and after long and mature scrutiny has concluded that it be defined as the age of machines. This is so not only because the men of our time possibly live more mechanically than all those
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of the past but also because the number of machines recently invented and utilized—and constantly being invented and utilized for so many different purposes—is so extraordinary that we can now almost say that not men but machines carry on the human affairs and the operations of life. The Academy views this condition with profound satisfaction, not so much for the obvious conveniences resulting from it as for two reasons that it considers highly important, although generally overlooked. The first one is that the Academy feels confident that in the course of time the functions and the usufruct of machines will be extended to include not only material but mental and spiritual matters as well; so that whereas by virtue of those machines we are already protected and made safe from injury by lightning, hailstorms, and many other similar evils and frights, as time passes there may be invented, for example (and we apologize for the novelty of the names), an envy rod, a calumny rod, a perfidy rod, a fraud rod, a health wire, and other devices that will preserve men from selfishness; from widespread mediocrity; from the prospering of the stupid, the wicked, and the cowardly; from universal indifference; from the misery of the wise, the good, and the noble-hearted; and from similar inconveniences that for many centuries have been far more difficult to ward off than the effects of lightning and hailstorms. The other reason, and the more important one, arises from the fact that most philosophers have lost all hope of curing mankind’s defects, which are believed to be much greater and much more numerous than its virtues; and from the fact that it is held for certain that it would be easier to remake mankind altogether from a new mold or to replace it with another kind than to amend it. Thus, the Academy of Syllographs considers it to be extremely expedient for men to withdraw from the business of life as much as possible and gradually to let machines take their place. And having resolved to assist with all its power in promoting this new order of things, the Academy now announces three prizes for the inventors of the following three machines. The purposes of the first machine shall be to act as, and to substitute for, a friend—one who will not censure or mock his friend when absent; who will defend him whenever he hears him being slighted or ridiculed; who will consider friendship more important than his own reputation for being acute, witty, and able to raise a laugh; who will not divulge a secret that has been confided to him either to have a subject for gossip or to show himself off; who will not abuse the familiarity and confidence of his friend in order to supplant and surpass him; who will not envy his good fortune; who will be solicitous of his welfare, obviate and repair his misfortunes; and who will be ready to assist him in his desires and needs—and not by words alone. As to the other qualities of this robot, reference should be made to Cicero’s and the Marquise de Lambert’s 346 A First Gallery
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books on friendship. The Academy believes that the invention of such a machine should not be judged impossible, and not even very difficult, for, leaving aside the robots of Regiomontanus, Vaucanson, and others, including the London robot that drew portraits and wrote under anyone’s dictation, there are machines that play chess with themselves. Now, in the judgment of many wise men, human life is only a game; and some even declare that it is more frivolous and that, among other things, the game of chess is more rationally constructed and its moves more wisely organized than those of human life—which, according to Pindar, is no more substantial than the dream of a shadow, and thus a robot should easily be able to discharge its functions. As for speech, there seems to be no doubt that men have the power to transmit it to the machines they construct, as we can learn from various examples and especially from what we read about the statue of Memnon and from the human head manufactured by Albertus Magnus, which was so loquacious that Saint Thomas Aquinas lost his patience and smashed it. And if the parrot of Nevers, though it was just an animal, knew how to answer and speak sensibly, so much more is it to be believed that it could be done by a machine imagined by the mind of man and constructed with his very hands. Nor does it have to be as talkative as the parrot of Nevers or other parrots that can be seen and heard every day or as the head made by Albertus Magnus, and therefore it does not have to irritate a friend and provoke him to smash it. The inventor of such a machine will receive as a prize a gold medal four hundred zecchini in weight, bearing on its face the images of Pylades and Orestes, and on the reverse side the name of the winner, with this inscription: First Realizer of the Fables of Antiquity. The second machine shall be an artificial steam man, programed to perform virtuous and noble deeds. The Academy believes that since there does not seem to be any other means, steam might prove effective to inspire a robot and direct it to perform virtuous and glorious actions. Whoever shall undertake the construction of this machine should refer to the poems and the romances, according to which he will have to proceed regarding the qualities and functions necessary for the robot. The prize will be a gold medal, four hundred and fifty zecchini in weight, bearing on its face a figure symbolic of the Golden Age, and on the reverse side the name of the inventor, with this inscription taken from the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil: quo ferrea primum desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo [by whom the iron race will first desist and a gold race will spring up in the entire world]. The third machine shall be constructed in such a way as to perform the duties of a woman similar to the one conceived partly by Count Baldassar Castiglione, who presented his ideas on the matter in the book Giacomo Leopardi 347
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entitled The Courtier, and partly by other writers who discussed the subject in various works, which are easily available and which, like the count’s, will have to be consulted and followed. The invention of such a machine should not seem impossible either to the men of our time, for in extremely ancient times, when science was nonexistent, Pygmalion could manufacture a wife who is said to have been the best woman who ever lived. Whoever constructs this machine will receive a gold medal, five hundred zecchini in weight, bearing on its face Metastasio’s Arabian Phoenix perched on a tree of European species, and on the reverse side the name of the inventor with the inscription: inventor of faithful women and of conjugal happiness. The Academy has determined that the cost of these prizes will be covered by what was found in the satchel of Diogenes, who used to be one of its secretaries, or with one of the three golden asses that belonged to three fellow Academicians, namely, Apuleius, Firenzuola, and Machiavelli. All these effects came into the possession of the Syllographs by testaments of the above—as is recorded in the history of the Academy. EDITORS ’ NOTE .
Syllographs = the authors of burlesque & satirical poems in ancient Greece.
Translation from Italian by Giovanni Cecchetti
B R O O M , O R T H E F LOW E R O F T H E D E S E R T
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And men loved darkness rather than light. JO HN 3 : 1 9
Here on the naked back Of this amazing Exterminator, Mount Vesuvius, Cheered by no other tree or flower, You fragrant bushes of broom Take root in ones and twos, Making yourselves at home In these waste places. I’ve seen In the deserted countryside near Rome— Once mistress of the whole world— The same flowering hedges Embellish the earth, bearing Solemn, silent witness for the traveler To a vanished empire. And now
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I see you again, here, faithful Companions to affliction, lovers Of sad abandoned corners. These mountain fields Covered in cinders, smothered In solid, footstep-echoing lava, Where the coiled snake rests And stretches in the sun, and the rabbit Keeps close to its rocky warren, Were once pleasant towns, farmlands Yellowing with corn, herds Of bellowing cattle; were once Orchards and gardens and great houses, The rich man’s retreat and recreation; And were renowned cities once, Which the towering mountain— Torrents belching from its fiery mouth— Overwhelmed with all their inhabitants. Now Nothing but ruins left Where this sweet flower takes root And, it seems, takes pity On the sufferings of others, filling The air with fragrance, a touch Of consolation in the wasteland. Let whoever Likes to sing the praises of our state Come to these slopes and see How loving nature looks after Our human kind. Here He may measure exactly Man’s might, which that Heartless nurse when least expected Can with a little shrug, in an instant, Almost obliterate, and with Some barely bigger shudderings Just as abruptly bring to nothing. Inscribed on these slopes you’ll find Mankind’s Splendid and progressive destiny. Look and see yourself here, You proud, vain, ignorant century,
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You who abandoned the trail Blazed by an enlightened age And traveled backwards, All puffed up, calling it progress. Our learnèd men—whose bad luck Was to be born in times like these— Flatter your foolishness in public, Even if sometimes, among themselves, They make a laughingstock of you. But I Won’t take such shame to the grave: Instead I’ll let the whole world know The scorn for you that scalds my heart, Although I’m sure oblivion buries The man too bitterly opposed To his own time. By now, however, I can laugh at this misfortune Which makes us equal in the end. Freedom is the dream you dream While putting thought in chains again— Thought, which is all that brought us Almost out of the barbarous dark, alone Enabled civilization, is what alone Steers the state toward a better life. Having no love for the bitter truth Of that hard lot and lowly place Which nature gave us, you turned Your coward’s back on the light That lets us see these things as they are, And deserting it yourself you chide As churlish any man who’d guide His life by it, proclaiming as great of soul Only him—crazy or cunning, Hoodwinking himself or others— Who’ll praise our mortal state above the stars. A man of poor health and little means Who has a decent, open spirit Won’t pretend he’s robust or rich Nor make a silly show of himself By living the gallant life Of a man of the world.
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He, without any shame, will show His own lack of strength and substance, Openly admitting the whole truth Just of who and what he is. And I myself don’t ever deem A creature great of soul, But only a fool, That man who—bred in pain, born to die— Declares, I was made to be happy, And fills page after scribbled page With the stink of pride, Promising on earth Such fortunes sublime and miracles of joy As heaven itself—not to mention The world we live in—couldn’t encompass, And all this to creatures wiped away By a single shaken wave of the sea, Snatched off by a sudden wicked gust of wind, So annihilated by an underground tremor There’d be little or nothing left to remember. That man has a truly noble nature Who, without flinching, still can face Our common plight, tell the truth With an honest tongue, Admit the evil lot we’ve been given And the abject, impotent condition we’re in; Who shows himself great and full of grace Under pressure, not adding to his miseries The hate and hostility of his fellow-men (And what hurt could be worse than these?) By blaming man for his distress, But lays the blame where it belongs—on her Who is a mother in giving us life, A wicked stepmother in how she treats us. She’s the one he calls the enemy, And believing the human family Leagued to oppose her, as in truth it is And has been from the start, he sees As allies all men, embraces all With unfeigned love, giving and expecting Prompt assistance, useful aid
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In the many hazards and lasting hurts Of the common struggle. And he believes It sheer madness To arm your hand against another, Lay snares or stumbling blocks for your neighbor, As mad as, in a state of siege— Surrounded by enemies, the assault at its height— To forget the foe and in blind rage Turn your force upon your friends, Smite with the sword, sow havoc and panic Amongst those fighting on your own side. When ideas such as these are clear, As once they were, to the common people, And when the terror that first forged For human beings the social bond Against the savagery of nature Shall, in part, be again restored By a true grasp of things as they are, then Justice and mercy And an open, honest civil life Will no longer take root in those swollen fables On which our stolid common morals Are mostly grounded, and where they stand As steady as anything built on sand. Often I sit out at night On these forlorn slopes Which the undulant rough crust of lava Turns dark brown, and I see In the clear blue evening sky the stars Blazing down on the melancholy scene And in the distant mirror made by the sea, Until the whole world seems All one gleaming orb of sparks Floating through a perfect void. And when I peer out at those lights That seem no more than specks from here But are in fact so huge that truly Land and sea are specks to them, Where not just man himself but this Great globe where man is nothing Isn’t known at all; and when I gaze on out
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At those infinitely more remote Clusters of stars that look like clouds, To which not merely man, not earth, But all our stars together, numberless And vaster than we can imagine, The golden sun itself among them, Are either invisible or else appear As those clusters themselves appear To us on earth—just a smudge Of cloudy light—then what can I make Of you, my family of man? And when I consider your earthly state (Its very sign the ground I stand on) And how, in spite of it, you still Take for granted you’ve been made Lord and measure and end of all, And the many times you’ve loved to tell Fables and fairy tales of how On your behalf even the authors Of the universe itself came down To this dark grain of sand called earth, And how, time after time, they talked With you on friendly terms, and how Over and over you’ve told these same Silly dreams, insulting men of any sense Even into the present age That seems advanced beyond all others In knowledge and norms of civil life— When I consider you, then, Wretched race of mortal men, What thoughts batter my heart? I Cannot tell whether to laugh or cry. Just as a little apple falling From the tree in late autumn— Which no force but ripeness alone brings down— Crushes, lays waste, and buries in an instant Those neat dwellings the ants have labored To fashion in the soft clay, Destroying all the precious stores These painstaking, driven creatures Had prudently harvested
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Over the months of summer, so— Flung from the mountain’s Thundering bowels to the wide sky And plummeting from a great height— A downpour black as night Of ashes, brimstone, boulders With boiling streams of lava riddled, Or a flood of molten Rock, metal, blazing sand Torn through the mountain’s side and thrown In a crazy spate through tall grass Once overwhelmed, shattered to bits, And buried in seconds these coastal towns Washed by the waves of the sea, So that now, goats browse above them And new towns rise on the far side Which have as their footstool Those razed and buried walls The sheer-sloped mountain All but tramples in the dust. For nature has no Kinder regard for man Than she has for ants, and if such slaughters Don’t befall us as often, the only reason Is our loins breed Less than the loins of those teeming creatures. It’s almost eighteen hundred years Since these thriving towns Were wiped out by the force of fire, And still the peasant tending his vines— Which the thin, cinder-choked soil Can barely sustain—will cast Wary glances up At that death-dealing peak, no gentler Now than ever, still a terrorStriking sight, still threatening Death and destruction to him and his children And their few poor possessions. And oftentimes, out on the roof of his cottage, This wretch will bend all night A sleepless ear to the shifting
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Sound of the wind, many times Starting to his feet to mark The fearful track the lava makes As it pours from infinitely brimming bowels Over the mountain’s naked back, Lighting up the whole coast Of Capri, and Mergellina, and the port of Naples. And if he sees it getting closer, or hears The watery black depths of his well Gurgling like a mad thing, he’ll rouse his children, Shake his wife awake, and fleeing With whatever they can snatch up, He’ll see from a safe distance His hearth and home and that patch of ground He had to keep hunger from the door Fall prey to the red-hot torrent That comes with a great crackling roar And, relentless and forever, smothers everything. Obliterated for ages, forgotten Pompeii Like a buried skeleton—which greed for treasure Or respect for the dead lays bare— Rises to the blessed light of day; And from that deserted forum A traveler will stare for a long time Out between rows of broken columns And up at the cloven summit And smoking crest That still threaten these scattered ruins. And in the dread dead of night Through the empty theatres, Through shattered temples and the remains Of houses where the bat hides its young, The grim lava-glow goes floating Like an eerie torch that flickers Among abandoned palaces, And from far away reddens the darkness And stains every place in sight. So—indifferent to men and what men call Antiquity, to all the ties that bind One generation to another—nature Stays forever green, or seems,
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Having so vast a path to travel, To stay still forever. Meantime, kingdoms perish, Nations and the tongues of nations Pass away: nothing of this at all she’ll see: And man boasts he owns eternity. And even you, delicate hedges of broom, Who bless this desolation With groves of fragrance, Even you will succumb soon enough To the tyranny of fire from underground. Returning to its old haunts, The fire will spread its deadly mantle Over your tender hedgerows; then, Beneath its fatal weight you’ll bend Your innocent, unresisting heads. But Till that time comes you won’t bow down Like cowards before the one who’ll destroy you, Seeking your salvation in vain; and you won’t Raise vainglorious heads to the stars Or up above this wasteland where By chance and not by choice you have Your birthplace and your home; and still You’re wiser and that much less weak Than man, inasmuch as you don’t believe These delicate stems of yours have been, By yourself or the fatal scheme Of things, fashioned for immortality. Translation from Italian by Eamon Grennan
COMMENTARY
[The poet’s art] consists . . . in conferring light and nobility upon obscure and ignoble things and novelty on those that are commonplace, in changing the aspect of anything he is handling, as if by some magical incantation. (G. L., from the Zibaldone) And again from the Zibaldone: His pleasure was in walking, counting the stars. (1) The son of an aristocrat & political reactionary, Leopardi grew up sickly & alienated, living most of his short life in the eastern Italian backwater of Recanati, a retiring prodigy who mastered ancient & modern languages
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before age twenty & was drawn to classical philology & the preservation of literary culture. As a writer he was the keeper of thousands of pages of a philosophical & poetic journal (lit. Zibaldone = medley or hodgepodge), whose poems at their best tended to avoid political engagement (except in his vocal opposition to a resurgence of Catholic pietism), particularly with the compelling world of a growing Italian nationalism. Yet Leopardi & his poems evoked from the Florentine police a ban on reprinting his Canzone & on publishing one of his poetic-philosophic dialogues (Operette morali). In 1835 a new edition of his work was also suppressed. (2) Tradition (including Schopenhauer) sees Leopardi—called “a walking sepulcher”—as a “pessimist,” poetically a classicist & formalist, a Romantic who at best, while constructing visions of remembered contentment & abundance, had no patience with the “illusion” that humankind can appropriate those visions for itself; to do so is hypocrisy, a denial of the evidence. It is insufficient to describe his as a poetry of consolation. In his idylls & songs he accumulates, proliferates, in a parataxis of the picturesque, a scene into which one wants readily to be absorbed; thought, however, then enters to break the scene, leaving the voice to note the fleeting nature of beauty & pleasure. But in “Broom or the Flower of the Desert” the visionary impulse breaks free. Like Burns’s Mountain Daisy (“cheerfully thou glinted forth / Amid the storm”) the broom flower survives the aridity of lava-covered Mt. Vesuvius (Naples was Leopardi’s final home), sending forth a “perfume of sweetest fragrance.” Here & elsewhere, then, he anticipates the visionary & the anti-monumental in the poetry of the next century (influencing Pascoli, Ungaretti, Saba, & Quasimodo), resisting a retrograde romanticism that proposes that a (utopian) place, event, person, abstraction, even poem, can save one through its monumental stability & permanence. With this in mind, Leopardi’s experimental side formally & linguistically pushed Italian poetry forward in several ways: he “loosened the rigid metrical structure of the canzone and introduced freer lyrical verse forms [canzone libri]” (John C. Barnes); the Zibaldone & Operette morali contributed to the nineteenth-century drive toward a prose-poetry; & he championed a revivified Italian language, at once encouraging the preservation of the Trecento Italian of Dante but now mixed with the many local dialects of modern Italian communities. As he said, “Originality and liberty coexist in Italian.” (3) “It seems wrong and yet it is certain that a language is much more able to reach a level of refinement and high speech, the most elevated and sublime style, to the extent that its character is popular, to the extent that it is modeled on speech that’s from the home and personal relations and that is vernacular. The reason for this is that only such a language is capable of the elegance that comes from a wild, reckless, figurative, and nonlogical use of words and idioms. Now this use is what popular speech is all about, by its very nature” (G. L., quoted by Franco Loi in Art and Memory).
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Dionys ios S olomos
1798–1857
THE DESTRUCTION OF PSARA
On the all-black ridge of Psara Glory walks by herself taking in the bright young men on the war field the crown of her hair wound from the last few grasses left on the desolate earth Translation from Greek by Eleni Sikelianos & Karen Van Dyck
THE SHARK
Solomos’s poem “The Shark” (O Porphyras) is based on a newspaper account of the tragic death of a young English soldier whose remains were washed ashore the day after he was killed by a shark as he swam in the harbor of Corfu on July 19, 1847. The seventeen-line quotation is spoken by the young swimmer.
Though watchful Hell’s always out to get you, it has none but a distant dominion
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far from Paradise, and you have in you a place in your heart—hear it yearning? — You look at the first bright rose of the sun, yes, first, but that’s second to your own face! — “May night send me thousands of stars to bathe with. — You, black cleft in the rocks, laugh among flowers. — Now downward and near wheels the golden-winged that quickly left its branch for the rocky shore and there takes in beauties of sea and sky, and there heaves its voice with all its magic, harmonizing sea with desolate stone, and calls out the late night star that must rise. 358 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Birdie, airing your voice of miracles, if your marvelous song is not pure bliss, nothing good has flowered here or in heaven. Oh, if one stroke could get me where I’d go, sea-foam, keep me afloat till my return, with mother’s kiss, native earth in my fist. — I kiss my hands and sweetly hug myself. My soul’s eyes are open wide and watching. So whence springs your birth, fountain so graceful?” — Nature, you smiled at once and yielded to him. Hope, you bound his mind with all your magic powers. Lovely, new world full of joy and goodness. He looked around to see ............................. Now confronts the youth the tiger of the sea, and far, alas, from reach his sword and musket. How easily it slices through the deep
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and comes speeding ................................... for the pure white throat gleaming like a swan’s, for the strong broad chest and for the fair head, for the sweet magnanimous breath of youth, and thus the young man ............................... from Nature’s gorgeous, powerful embrace, in which she softly held and whispered him— while in his free, naked glowing body the crafts of swimmer and of warrior stirred. — Before it passed the great soul filled with joy, in a bolt of light the young man knew himself.
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Worlds around him opened, showering him with crowns. ...................................................................... Torso wondrous in your ruin and grandeur, dear lovely stranger in the bloom of youth, come, receive ashore the strong man’s lament. Translation from Greek by Stavros Deligiorgis & George Economou
THE WOMAN OF ZANTE Chapter 1: A Monk of Sorrows 1. I, Dionysius, a monk cloistered in the country chapel of Saint Lypios, in order to describe what is on my mind, say this:
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2. I was returning from the monastery of St. Dionysius where I had gone to speak with another monk concerning matters of the soul. 3. It was summer, and it was during the hour when the waters get murky, and I had reached the Three Wells, and the land there was well-watered, and it was a place where women often went to rinse their wash. 4. I stopped by one of the wells, and resting my fingers in the rope grooves of the well I stooped to see if there was much water. 5. And I saw that it was half full and I said “Praise God.
Make sure the character of the Monk remains consistent in every setting. Could it be that on occasion he could be made to sound somewhat derisive, his placid expression masking the derisiveness? The dwarf had better appear at the beginning of the whole, the middle and the end. Initially he climbs out of the well and grows to gigantic proportions, as high as the clouds, as he spreads his claws to east and west, as if the whole world were his spoil. In the middle he twists his horns the way a man twists his mustache. In the end he is discovered under the hanging woman. The character and appearance of the dwarf must be consistent throughout. Put the Woman’s description in the Devil’s mouth. He has to come across as sarcastic, as someone weighing all that will happen because of him.
6. He sends sweet refreshment for the insides of man in the summer; his works are great indeed, but so is man’s ingratitude. 7. And the just, according to Scripture, how many might they be?” And as I pondered this, my eye glanced at my hands resting on the rope tracks of the fountain rim.
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8. And as I tried to count the just on my fingers, I lifted my left hand off the grooves, and looking at the fingers of my right hand I wondered: “Are they perhaps too many?” 9. And I began matching the number of the just that I knew with each of my fingers, and finding out that there were fingers left over, I pulled my pinky into hiding between the rope track and my palm. 10. And I stood staring at the four fingers for a long time, and was perturbed seeing that I was constrained to cut those back as I placed the finger closest to it in the same place. 11. There remained, therefore, under my eyes, only three fingers which I was anxiously tapping upon the rope grooves as I badgered my brain to come up with any three just men. 12. And since my insides began heaving like a sea that never calms down, 13. I raised my poor three fingers and made the sign of the cross. 14. When I purposed, next, to number the unjust, I stuck one hand in my cassock pocket and the other inside my waist sash, because I knew, alas, my fingers would be of no use; 15. And my mind was clouded by their great number; but I was consoled at the thought that each one of them had some good quality about him. And I heard a frightening laugh inside the well and I saw two horns protruding out of it.
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16. And there came to my mind, more than anyone else, the woman of Zante, who strives to hurt others both with her tongue and her actions, and is a mortal enemy of the nation. 17. And I tried to see whether inside that soul of hers, in which Satan’s malevolence seethes, there was ever the smallest desire for good. 18. Then, pausing to think this through, I raised my head and my hands to heaven and cried: “My God, I think I am searching for a grain of salt in warm water.” 19. And I saw that all the stars were shining above me, and I made out the Plow Coulter which delights me immensely. 20. And I hastened to set out for the chapel of Saint Lypios, seeing that I had lingered, and wanted to get there to describe the woman of Zante. 21. And I saw about a dozen mangy dogs that wanted to block my way. 22. And since I refused to even kick them lest I touch the mange and gore they had on them, they thought I was afraid of them. 23. And they loped closer to me; but I pretended to bend down to pick up a stone,
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24. And they all sped away, and the poor vile things vented their rage by biting each other. 25. But someone who minded some of the mangy curs, he too picked up a stone, 26. And, taking aim at my head, this godless man, missed me, Dionysius the Monk. For by the great momentum with which he cast the stone he misstepped and fell. 27. I thus reached my Saint Lypios cell; I was comforted by the fragrances of the fields, the fresh water springs and the star-studded sky that loomed above my head like Resurrection itself. Chapter 2: The Monk Struggles to Be Comforted 1. To begin with, the woman’s body was small and emaciated. 2. And her chest almost always scarred by the leeches she applied to suck out her consumption, her tits hung beneath it like two tobacco pouches. 3. And this tiny body walked about very fast, her bones appearing to be disjointed. 4. Her face resembled a shoe last and was of enormous length if you looked at it from the tip of her chin to the top of her head 5. Where there rose a tightly wound braid topped by an enormous comb. 6. And whoever might approach to measure the woman in hand spans would find that her head was one quarter the size of her body.
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7. And her cheeks oozed eczema which at times looked alive and at others scabby and withered. 8. And every now and then she opened a huge mouth to mock others and to show her long and rotten lower front teeth that met with very white and long uppers. 9. And although she was young, her temples, forehead, eyebrows as well as the droop of her nose were those of an aged woman. 10. Forever aged, and especially so whenever she rested her head on her right fist to meditate upon deceit. 11. And this elderly mien was enlivened by two bright, deeply black eyes, one of which had a slight squint, 12. And they cast around everywhere to do evil, and they found it even where there was none. 13. And something glinted in her eyes that made you think a fit of madness had just left her or that one was about to overtake her. 14. And this was the habitation of her soul, evil and sinful that it was.
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15. And she showed her wickedness both when she spoke and when she was silent. 16. And when she spoke in secret in order to damage somebody’s reputation, her voice sounded like the rustle a straw mat makes under a thief’s foot. 17. [There is no number 17 in Solomos’s manuscript.] 18. And when she spoke loudly her voice sounded like the noise people make when they want to mock others. 19. And yet, when she was all by herself, she would stand and look at herself in the mirror, laughing and crying, 20. For she believed that she was the prettiest of all the women in the Ionian Islands. 21. And she was as good at separating married couples and siblings as Death itself. 22. And whenever she saw her sister’s beautiful body in a dream she would wake up terrified. 23. Envy, hatred, paranoia and falsehood always pulled at her insides. 24. She was just like the neighborhood brats who, covered with filthy rags, ring the country fair bells and drive everybody crazy. 25. But by constantly talking about other women’s vices her own mind had degenerated and become cynical. 26. And she was pleasuring herself in rehearsing these vices to herself.
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27. She nevertheless clung to the evil deeds. 28. But because she had overheard them call her an eyesore, her self-regard was hurt and she yielded to temptation, and in the end she did not restrain herself . . . Chapter 3: The Women from Messolonghi 1. And it happened that in those clays Messolonghi was besieged by the Turks, and the day-long, often round the clock heavy artillery fire made Zante shake. 2. And certain women from Messolonghi were walking around and begging on behalf of their men and children who were fighting there. 3. At first they were too shy to go out and waited until dark to stretch out their hands, because they were not used to that. 4. For they once had servants and also owned land, sheep, goats, and herds of cattle. 5. So they were becoming impatient and constantly looked out of their windows for the sunset so they could go out. Dionysios Solomos 363 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
6. But when necessity overflowed they lost all shame and walked about all day long. 7. And when they became tired they sat on the beaches and listened, because they were afraid Messolonghi might fall. 8. And people saw them running and begging for alms along roads, at intersections, houses, upper floors and storerooms, churches, and country chapels. 9. And they received money and bandages for the wounded. 10. And nobody said “no” to them because most of the time their begging was accompanied by the sound of the shelling of Messolonghi and the ground shaking under our feet. 11. And even the poorest took out and gave their meager pennies as they crossed themselves looking and crying in the direction of Messolonghi. Chapter 4: The Women from Messolonghi Beg while the Woman of Zante Is Busy 1. The Woman of Zante held her daughter on her knees and was sweet talking to her. 2. The crazy thing had pulled her hair behind her ears which, in her agitation, she had messed up. Here’s what she said to her daughter as she was kissing her eyes:
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3. “Dear eyes, dear soul, grow up to be good so you can marry and so the two of us can get in and out of the house as we please, so we can visit people, and sit by the window and read the Holy Scripture and the Arabian Nights.” 4. And having petted and kissed her eyes and lips she let her sit on the chair saying “Here is a small mirror for you to see that you are beautiful and look just like me.” 5. And her daughter, unaccustomed to such sweet talk, quieted down and shed tears of joy. 6. And, suddenly, there was a great tumult of steps that was getting louder. 7. And she paused, looking in the direction of the door, her nostrils flaring. 8. And, then, the women of Messolonghi appeared before her. With their right hands upon their hearts they were bowing; and they stood still and silent. 9. “So, just like that? What are you doing here? You came to play? You want something, ladies? Your clogs made such a ruckus as you were coming up I would guess you came to give me orders.” 10. And they all stood still and silent; but one of them said: “Well, you are right. You are in your own land and in your own home, whereas we are strangers in need of propping up.” 364 A First Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
11. And then the Woman of Zante interrupted her and answered back: “Schoolmistress, you may have lost everything, but I can hear you still have a tongue. 12. So I am in my own land and in my own home? Weren’t you, your ladyship, in your own land and your own home? 13. Did you lack anything then, or did the Turk wrong you in any way? Didn’t he let you have food, keep servants, own orchards and wealth? And, God be praised, you had more than I do now. 14. Did I make you lash out at the Turk, you who come to me to beg off me and to insult me? 15. But of course! You wanted to swagger. You, women, went to war—you must have been a pretty sight toting rifles while wearing skirts; or did you put on pants?—You did accomplish something in the beginning though, because you caught the hapless Turkish boys unawares. 16. How could he have suspected such treachery? Could God want this? Didn’t you and the Turk fraternize both day and night? 17. By the same logic, I could stick a knife, before dawn, into my husband’s neck (may he go to hell). 18. And now that things go badly for you, you want me to shoulder the burden. 19. That’s a good one. Messolonghi will fall any day now; it is kings, on whom all my hopes rest, who will be putting crazy Greece’s affairs in order;
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20. As for the survivors of the disaster, they are flocking to Zante to be fed, all the while swearing at us on a full stomach.” 21. And having said that she paused and looked the Messolonghi women in the eye. 22. “So I can talk too, right? Anything else you are waiting for? Did you enjoy listening to me talk? 23. You have no other business beside begging bread. To me only the shameless can afford to indulge in it. 24. But I have work to do. Are you listening? I am busy.” And while she shouted in this manner, she was no longer the three-span tall excrescence but looked normal. 25. For in her great anger she stood on tiptoe and barely touched the floor; and her eyes bulged out of her head, her good eye appearing to squint and the squinting eye to straighten. And she became like the plaster of Paris masks that artists cast of the dead in order to . . . 26. And whoever saw her return to her earlier state might say that maybe the Devil had taken possession of her but then changed his mind and left her behind because of the hatred he bears mankind. Dionysios Solomos 365 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
27. And her daughter screamed when she saw her, and the servants forgot all about their hunger, and the women of Messolonghi went down the stairs without causing any trouble. 28. The Woman of Zante then put her hand on her heart and said loudly as she sighed 29. “What a good heart you gave me, God, and how it is beating now! 30. These whores have upset me so! All the women of this world are whores. 31. But you, daughter, are not going to be a whore like my sister and the other women of our country! 32. Death is far better. And you, sweet eyes, were scared. Come, calm down, and if you stir from this chair I am going to call those witches back to eat you alive.” 33. And the servants, without waiting for the woman’s orders, made for the pantry and began talking about their hunger. 34. And at this point the woman went to her bedroom. 35. And in a while there was a great silence, and then I heard the bed creak slightly and then more violently. And in between the creaking there was panting and moaning, 36. Just like porters make when the poor things carry unbearable weights on their backs.
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37. And I, Monk Dionysius, turned away from this stumbling block. And as I exited the door of the house I ran into the woman’s husband who was on his way up. Chapter 5: A Prophecy upon the Fall of Messolonghi 1. And I followed the women of Messolonghi, who lay down on the beach, while I stood behind a fence and looked on. 2. And each one took out whatever she had collected, and they all made a small pile. 3. And one of them reached out and touched the beach and cried: “Sisters, 4. Listen, if the earth ever quaked as it does now from Messolonghi, we should know that it meant either victory or defeat.” 5. And I set out to leave and noticed behind the church (check its name) a little old woman who had set up small wax candles in the grass and also burned incense; and the little candles shone in the greenery and the incense wafted upwards. 6. And she raised her wizened arms through the incense and, crying as she moved her toothless mouth, prayed.
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7. And my spirit was greatly perturbed, and it transported me to Messolonghi. And I could see neither the fortress, nor the city, nor the camp, the houses, the lake, the sea or the earth upon which I stepped, nor the sky; and everything, besiegers and besieged alike, was steeped in dark smoke with flashes of thunder and lightning. 8. And I raised my eyes and hands to heaven in order to pray with all the intensity of my soul, and I saw in that smoke, a woman who was illuminated by unceasing sparks of brilliancy holding a lyre and pausing in the midst of the smoke-filled air. 9. And since I barely had the time to contemplate her attire which was black as a hare’s blood, her eyes etc., the woman in the thick smoke paused to survey the battle, and the myriad upward leaping sparks touched her robes and went out. 10. She spread her fingers across the lyre and I heard her sing: At dawn I took The path of the sun With justice’s lyre Slung on my shoulder, And from sunrise To its setting . . .
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11. And just as the Goddess finished singing these words, our side made great jubilation for their victory. Our side and also everything else suddenly vanished, and once again I was disturbed deep down and thought I had gone deaf and blind. 12. And shortly afterwards I saw before me the little old woman who was saying to me: “Praise God, Monk; I wondered if something had happened to you. I called out to you, I shook you and you couldn’t hear anything, and your eyes were staring into space, while, in the end, the ground was heaving like boiling water. It just stopped, now that the incense and the little wax candles have gone out. Do you think our people are winning?” 13. And I started to go away with Death in my heart. And the little old woman, who bowed to kiss my hand, said: “Your hand is like ice.” Chapter 6: That Which Is to Happen Is Present. The Terrible Ending 1. And I looked around and could see nothing, and I said: 2. “The Lord does not want me to see anything else.” And I did an about face to go to St. Lypios. 3. And I heard the ground shake beneath my feet, and lightning clusters filled the air ever faster and brighter. And I became afraid because it had gotten to be darkest midnight.
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4. So much so, that I stretched my hands out the way a blind man does. 5. And I found myself behind a mirror, between it and the wall. And the mirror was as tall as the room. 6. And a strong, rapidly speaking voice struck my ears saying: 7. “O Monk Dionysius, the future is now going to become present for you. Wait and see the vengeance of God.” 8. And a second voice spoke the very same words in a stammer. 9. And this second voice belonged to an old man who had died and whom I knew. And I marveled since this was the first time I ever heard the man’s soul stammering. And I also heard a third murmuring that sounded like a gust of wind blowing through rushes, but I could not hear any words. 10. And I gazed all around to make out where these voices were coming from, and could only see the two long and thick hooks in the wall upon which the mirror rested tied about the middle. 11. And I sighed deeply like a man who’s been deceived, and I noticed the smell of a cadaver. 12. And I came out of there and looked around and saw. 13. I saw opposite that mirror at the other end of the room a bed, and next to that bed a light. And it seemed there was nothing in that bed, and upon it was a high heap of flies.
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14. And upon the pillow I saw a motionless, desiccated head like the ones sailors tattoo on their arms and chests with a needle. 15. And I said to myself: “The Lord sent me this vision as a dark emblem of his will.” 16. So then, passionately imploring the Lord to deign to help me understand this emblem, I approached the bed 17. And something stirred under the tattered, foul and bloodied bedsheets. 18. And as I took a better look at the pillow my guts turned inside out because, by one movement of that mouth, I recognized the Woman of Zante sleeping, the sheet pulled up to her neck, worn away by consumption. Chapter 7: I Won’t Give You One Crumb 1. But I took a harder look at that slumber and I understood that it wouldn’t be long before it gave way to the other sleep that is without dreams.
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2. And because there was no family member present nor friend, doctor, or religious person, I Dionysius the Monk bent down and earnestly urged her to make her confession. 3. And she half-opened her mouth, bared her teeth and went on sleeping. 4. And I heard the first unknown voice in my right ear: “The unfortunate woman is constantly thinking of gallows, dungeons, Turks winning and Greeks being massacred. 5. This minute she is seeing in her sleep the only thing she wishes for, her sister as a beggar, which is why you just saw her smile.” 6. And the second voice—the one I recognized—repeated these same words only with a stammer and the swearing of all sorts of oaths, as he used to do when he was alive. 7. “B-b-by the Holy Virgin; listen, for-sssooth, b-b-by St. Nicholas, listen, forsssooth, b-b-by St. Spyridon; listen, for-sssooth, by God’s H-H-Holy Sacraments.” And then, once again, there was the sound of a gust of wind through rushes. 8. Suddenly the woman pulled her hands from under the bedsheet, clapped, and the flies took to the air. 9. And in the midst of the buzz they made I heard the voice of the woman who shouted: “Get out of here, whore; I won’t give you one crumb.” 10. And she jerked her arm out of the bed to shoo her sister away who, she thought, had come to her to ask for alms.
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11. And she removed the filthy sheet almost completely uncovering herself and I saw a sickly, dying cat that had been blown out of the garbage by a whirlwind. 12. However, she hit her hand against a dead man’s coffin that suddenly appeared there, and that wicked woman’s dream was cut short. 13. And she opened her eyes, and shuddered at the sight of the coffin because she feared she would have been put in there if taken for dead. 14. And as she was about to scream loudly to show that she was not dead, a woman’s head also ravaged by consumption emerged from the coffin which, although much older, bore a strong resemblance to her. 15. She leaped to the other side of the bed but bumped her face against another coffin with the head of an old man sticking out of it: this was the old man whom I used to know. 16. And so I came to know what lay in store for the Woman who was in the company of her father, her mother and her daughter before giving up the ghost.
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17. And I was terrified and turned my face away, and gave my eyes some respite in the mirror that reflected only the woman by herself, me, and the light. 18. Because the bodies of the other three were now resting in their graves out of which they will rise again when the Trumpet will sound, 19. And along with me, the Monk Dionysius, the Woman of Zante, and all the children of Adam in the great valley of Jehosaphat. 20. And I began to meditate upon the justice of God, which on that day will become visible, and my eyes (that were fixed upon the mirror) were hindered from meditating further. 21. But later, my meditation was hindered by my sight, 22. Because in turning my eyes hither and thither, like a man who is pondering a difficult matter that he struggles to comprehend, 23. I saw through the keyhole something that blocked the light; and this lasted for some time before it turned up again. 24. And a murmuring could be heard in the next room, and I couldn’t understand anything and I looked once again in the direction of the vision. 25. And there was great silence and you could not hear a fly buzz out of that swarm because they had all piled up on the mirror, 26. Which in many places displayed the color of the crepe draping on it, as when someone from the family is gone forever.
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Chapter 8: The Waistband 1. But her mother, without looking at the door, without looking at her daughter, without looking at anybody, began: 2. “This very instant your child’s eye and ear are watching you through the keyhole and putting you at a distance, because she dreads your destructiveness. For you did the same with me. 3. Which is why from my knees and with my hair hanging loose, I cursed you out of my bitter soul just when all the bells were pealing on Easter Sunday. 4. I cursed you again an hour before I died. And now I curse you again, mean and wicked woman. 5. And this triple curse is true and powerful over your body and soul, just as the three persons of the Holy Trinity are true and powerful in both the visible and the invisible worlds.” 6. And saying this she took out a waistband that belonged to her husband, blew on it three times and threw it in her face.
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7. And the old man muttered her last words back, and the young girl stirred upon the crimson pillow just like a half-killed bird. Chapter 9: The Woman of Zante Receives Her Last Deserts 1. And everything disappeared, coffins and all, and only then could the woman find the strength to jump up. 2. And she shot straight upwards like a summer meteor that fans out into a ten fathom star in the air. 3. And she struck the mirror and the flies took off and buzzed over her face in heaps. 4. And she, thinking they were her parents, ran around 5. Opening and closing her fist in order to find something to grab, and found the waistband and began swatting with it. 6. And the more she swatted the more the flies buzzed and the more she was terrified until she finally lost her mind completely. Her senses left her, but not her vices, her suspiciousness, her ruthlessness, her malice, her mocking, etc. . . . 7. And as she ran around in her nightshirt which out of her miserliness she had cut high, she glanced at the mirror,
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8. And stopped short because she did not recognize herself, so she reached out with her finger and laughed out loud: 9. “O, body. O, body! What a shift! I do understand. Is there anyone sly enough to hide his slyness from me? It’s that shift that helps me understand how someone can feign madness in order to sin. 10. But who could that be? To tell the truth, she does look a little like her. Ah! It’s you, you vile carcass, you filthy whore, you hospice flyshit, you sow’s eyecrud, you shit, you she-ass, you foul mouth. 11. Here, at last, is everything I and your beloved friends have prophesied about you: you don’t even have a pan to panhandle with. 12. You are in my hands now. What is it you want? You want charity? Let me give it to you, and let’s see if you have any voice left to say that I am crazy.” 13. And as she said this she spun around and started dancing in a rage, her shift rising up to her face. And you would think that her locks of black and slimy hair were baby snakes tearing each other up in deadly strife. 14. And in the heat of the dance she fashioned a noose out of the waistband,
So I got up from my prayers and heard the room echo back the same
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dancing through the time it took her to make the noose. 15. And she said: “Follow me behind the mirror so I can show you some charity. I want to see if there will be any voice left in you to say that I am crazy. 16. For, any time now, that ass of a doctor will come, who will also deal with you, who got it into his head that I am sick.” 17. And she went behind the mirror, and I heard her make a lot of noise there. 18. And she burst into a belly laugh that made the room ring out as she yelled: “Here, love, here’s your charity.” 19. At that moment I fell on my knees to intercede with the Lord that she would not lose her senses and that, whatever short time she still had to live, that her maliciousness would subside.
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20. And finishing my prayer I looked down behind the mirror thinking that she might have swooned, and she was not there. 21. And I felt my blood drain from my face. 22. And my head drooped upon my chest, and I said to myself: 23. God only knows where this unfortunate woman has gone, fervently praying with all my heart and soul. 24. And I crossed the room, my head stooped and lost in thought, looking for her. 25. And I felt someone or something hitting my forehead and I fell, stunned, flat on my back.
laughter. And I went behind the mirror and saw the Woman of Zante hanging and swinging . . . And I saw a dwarf sitting crosslegged and literally mimicking that laughter . . . the only difference being that the laughter was not stopping . . . and I ran behind the mirror but I suddenly fell, scared, on my back. Because he who was laughing was the One Accursed by God. . . . And as I sang the funeral service for her I got up and wondered who might be mimicking the laughter, and I saw a dwarf sitting cross-legged with a jew’s harp. And with each strophe he alternated his horns. . . . He was accompanying the music. And with each strophe he changed horns pretending to be bowing his head as if trying to remember the music. . . . In the end he tilted his horns with amazing speed, and the tune was very fast; if you saw these goings on you would think it was a storm. . . . He kept alternating endlessly. In the end he was so manic that . . . he pulled the noose of the waistband onto himself. . . . Rather small at first, with a jew’s harp—sarcastic gaze—the horns sprouting—he gets bigger—he sticks one horn in—(I then remembered why he twisted it); he hissed like a hot iron in cold water. . . . And I sat there wondering at those small, bright and vicious eyes. And he kept casting around the way poets do who pretend to have an idea, and especially those who talk endlessly about new forms and are not able to write a decent letter to a relative. And I saw that his horns were growing slowly until one of them was long enough to penetrate the Woman’s body.
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26. And I saw the Woman of Zante who had hanged herself and was swinging to and fro. Chapter 10 1. And I got up trembling and crying “Have mercy on me, Lord; have mercy, Lord,” and I could hear the steps of people coming up the stairs. 2. And there were about fifteen people, most of them wearing masks, except for five whom I knew very well. 3. One of them (sketch all five of them). 4. And because they frequented her house, though they did not love her, they all began squealing. 5. And I, turning in their direction, told them: “Get out of here, get out of here. It is your sins that dragged you here. This place draws lightning because God hates it.”
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6. And they were slightly afraid, but would not leave. 7. And I stood silently trying to think of something to say to make them leave. 8. And I told them: “Children, hear the words of Dionysius the Monk. I am going out to pray for myself and I leave you here. 9. Search your consciences, you, M.; you, G.; you, K.; you, P.; you, T. (because the rest of you I do not know), and take stock of what may happen if you stay. The authorities know you and, finding you here, will say that you strung her up.” 10. Then I saw them all backing off, pushing each another and outrun-
. . . And as I quickly made the sign of the cross two or three times, both the dwarf and the lute grew, and the horns grew so that his right horn stiffened its tip upon the Woman’s thighs. . . . They vanished in flames, sparks, thunder and lightning leaving behind a smell of sulphur. And the vision was cut short by countless bolts of lightning, thunder and sparks, and the smell of sulphur—and found myself at the Three Wells and proceeded to Saint Lypios consoled by the fragrances of the meadows. The dwarf finally . . . transforms (himself?) ——————————–— The diminutive dwarf performs his satyr scenes with a horn of his (which makes clear why he kept twisting it), and sings his songs in iambic, fifteen syllable Martellian verses. Just like a monkey running amok; its maw Still full, it will reach out for more. She will start out a case (of interest to her)—she drops it and starts on three others. Monkeys likewise. She has this habit of jumping, in a curious way, from one thing to another, even when she is speaking about something that interests her. . . . another chestnut she would well enjoy . . . Try and see if you can fit in the comic scene of the wooden weather cock on the lookout on the roof. She would appear riding it. The winds would lash out and she would be whirling along with all their force.
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ning each other to the exit, scrambling down the stairs in complete disorder, and it seemed to me that most of them were crashing down.
Women and men using spyglasses would look and not believe.
Translation from Greek by Stavros Deligiorgis & George Economou
COMMENTARY
I have nothing in mind except liberty and language.
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D. S., in “Dialogue between the Poet and the Pedant”
(1) “He has always been a beginning,” George Seferis wrote about him, looking back from both a Greek & a Modernist perspective. A “national poet” like Mickiewicz & others (he is in fact the author of the Greek national anthem), he was also an extraordinary innovator, whose role in the revitalizing of Greek language & poetry—away from the classical & into the vernacular/oral—took effect in his own century, but whose greatest & most experimental work wasn’t recovered until seventy years after his death. He is in that sense a poet (like Smart & Blake & Dickinson) whose work, at least on an international scale, comes to fruition at a time beyond his own. Born on the Ionian island of Zante (Zakynthos) to an aristocratic Venetian father & a Greek mother, he went to Italy at the age of eight & stayed on until he was twenty. His early poems were in Italian, while many of his Greek writings show a nonconventional orthography & a sense of poetry as an oral phenomenon with prose as its ex post facto written medium. Even as he sets a standard for a new literary Greek, his own work develops what Peter Mackeridge, one of his later editors, calls “a dialogue between languages” & an overwhelming sense of the demotic. Or Solomos himself: “Every language should necessarily have words from other languages.” And again: “The nobility of languages is like the nobility of a people. . . . The kind of nobility that English words had before Shakespeare wrote, the one French words had before Racine did, the one Greek words had before Homer, and they all wrote the words of their time.” (2) The events underlying Solomos’s two great poems, “The Free Besieged” & “The Woman of Zante,” were the two Turkish sieges of Missolonghi & their repercussions, in the latter poem, on the island of Zante. Both of the longer poems were fragmentary—works in process—& both are major examples of experimental Romanticism. In “The Woman of Zante” (1826–33), Solomos turned to a form of free verse or short, numbered prose paragraphs, to carry his narrative: an account by the “monk Dionysius” of the Woman of Zante’s rejection of pleas from embattled Missolonghi
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that moves between realism & mirror-dream fantasy. But the total work, as recovered in manuscript in 1927, has a further complexity, which we have shown for only the opening and closing chapter. As translator Stavros Deligiorgis describes it: “Solomos’s neatly copied text occupies the lefthand column of the Ms., the right-hand column containing texts which all scholars and editors have relegated either to the status of foot- or end-notes or to very private memos that Solomos wrote—à propos of the primary text in the opposite column—for the purposes of an eventual elaboration. The right-hand column, however, appears to contain vignettes and episodes that, beyond amplifying and commenting on the left column, may be observed to possess a large degree of narrative autonomy. It is . . . the intention of the translation . . . to elevate this neglected parallel text to the kind of visibility that Solomos’s creative ‘intellection’ clearly prefigured.”
A leks a n d er Pu s hkin
1799–1837
THE EMPEROR NICHOLAS I
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Working wonders 100 per cent alive our new Tsar (hurrah) immediately sent 120 to Siberia. Hung 5.
Translation from Russian by Dannie Abse
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THE PROPHET
Crazed by my soul’s thirst Through a dark land I staggered. And a six-winged seraph Halted me at a crossroads. With fingers of dream He touched my eye-pupils. My eyes, prophetic, recoiled Like a startled eaglet’s. He touched my ears And a thunderous clangour filled them, The shudderings of heaven, The huge wingbeat of angels, The submarine migration of sea-reptiles And the burgeoning of the earth’s vine. He forced my mouth wide, Plucked out my own cunning Garrulous evil tongue, And with bloody fingers Between my frozen lips Inserted the fork of a wise serpent. He split my chest with a blade, Wrenched my heart from its hiding, And into the open wound Pressed a flaming coal. I lay on stones like a corpse. There God’s voice came to me: “Stand, Prophet, you are my will. Be my witness. Go Through all seas and lands. With the Word Burn the hearts of the people.” Translation from Russian by Ted Hughes, from an annotated literal translation by Daniel Weissbort
from T H E B R O N Z E H O R S E M A N
Introduction
Desolate flowed the waters: he standing upon their shore and full with the prospect of his thoughts 376 A First Gallery
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gazed distance down: the pull of the river’s sweep and breadth fronted him here: a dug-out skiff sped by in vistaed loneliness: the shores of moss and swamp let show black huts in which the wretched Finn huddles himself against the snow: and forest which the light of sun shut-back by mist had never known soughed round: his thoughts thrust on: From here our threat shall reach the Swede and here a city shall arise to spite our neighbour’s haughtiness: for we by Nature are decreed to hack out through the wooden wall a window upon Europe and firm-footed stand beside the sea: on waves to them unknown till now all the flags shall be our guests and we shall feast them all. Lapse of a century and then the young metropolis, the harsh north’s ornament and wonder from forest darkness, swamp of marsh rose up in its pride and splendour: where, in other times the Finn, woeful stepson there of Nature’s, cast worn nets to unknown waters, space now feels the living touch and crowds and kindles with the grace and bulk of palaces and towers. Speeding from all the ends of earth ships thicken at each loaded wharf: Neva has clad herself in granite: across those waters bridges span: and now the islands wear the green luxury of garden shade: before the younger capital our ancient Moscow now— a widow in imperial purple— before a new-crowned queen must fade.
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Peter’s creation, I admire your scapes both graceful and severe, the Neva’s sovereign flow, cast-iron rail and granite shapes along the banks, the nights which grow pensive in that transparent dusk, that moonless brilliance when I within my room can write and read needing no lamp, and clear out there sleep crowding, desolate streets, and bright glints the Admiralty spire: refusing to the dark its right to trespass on the golden height, the glow that’s hurrying to replace the glow that’s gone will grant no more to night itself than one half hour. I love, once cruel winter’s here, the frost and the unyielding air, sledges that take the river-course, more vivid than the rose the cheeks of girls, and all the glancing brightness, the noise and talk of dancing, the glasses seething to the brim, over the punch the flames’ blue play while young men drink the night away: I love the animation, the show of war as, square on square, infantry and horses fill the Fields of Mars, and teach the eye a beauty in monotony: the order and the undulation of threadbare flags that won their day, the glitter of the brazen casques that, bullet-holed, survived the fray. Military capital, I love your fortress’ smoke and thunder when the Tsarina of the north gives the imperial house a son, or the whole country celebrates a victory new-won: or breaking up its dark-blue ice
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the Neva bears it to the seas and, sensing spring, leaps on. Display your beauty, city, stand steadfast like our native land, and may the conquered element accept a mutual content: let the Finnish waves put by their ancient bonds, their enmity, nor vainly, rancorously break Peter’s everlasting sleep. There was a time—its shape still clear within men’s minds: a time of fear: reader, I retell it now and my tale’s a tale of woe. Translation from Russian by Charles Tomlinson
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TSAR NIKITA AND HIS DAUGHTERS
There once lived, in a bygone day An emperor, idle, rich and gay; Tsar Nikita was his name And all he touched he left the same, So scant was the effect he had, He did no good, he did no bad, Neither created nor destroyed But in his reign the realm enjoyed Unparalleled prosperity. While, as for Tsar Nikita, he Dealt now and then with state affairs And ate, and drank, and said his prayers, And fathered forty daughters too On sundry women—daughters who Were angels all, vivacious, sweet, With raven hair and dainty feet, Perfect in every outward part, Noble in spirit, and in heart, Adorable from head to foot, And in their pretty heads, to boot
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Were minds to make you lose your mind, You’d have to scour the world to find Such specimens of womanhood, Or charms less easily withstood . . . One thing was missing . . . “Is that all?” I hear you cry. ’Twas, oh, so small— Scarcely a problem—nonetheless, For all its negligibleness, It was still missing . . . how the Hell Am I explicitly to tell My readers what this one thing was? I’m not sure if I can because That pompous, pious, pea-brained dunce The censor would explode at once . . . Between their legs—oh, dear dear dear! No, even that is far too clear— Much too indecent—let me see, A little more obliquity— Let’s find a more circuitous route To lead you deftly, gently to’t— All right then: I of course adore Venus’s breasts, I love still more Her luscious lips and little feet, But those attractions can’t compete With . . . let’s just say they’re not the goal Of my desire, which is a—hem! A tiny thing, nothing, in fact— Well that’s what these princesses lacked, Poor, sweet, vivacious girls. This gap, This physiological mishap, Caused consternation in the court, Rendered their poor papa distraught, Drew from their mothers tears and curses. When word was let out by their nurses The courtiers gaped and ahed and oohed, Some were astonished, others rude, While most made do with wide-eyed wonder The rude ones laughed at nature’s blunder, Though only up their sleeves, of course, Fearing Siberia, or worse. Nikita summoned the distraught
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Nurses and mothers, and the court Before his royal presence and Pronounced the following command: “If any here should ever dare To make my poor dear girls aware Of what it is they haven’t got Or mention . . . mention God knows what Or drop a hint or wink an eye Or stick a finger up, then I— And mark me well, I promise you I jest not now, I seldom do— It’s not a thing to jest about— Will either have their tongues cut out If they are women, or if men . . . I dread to think what I’ll do then— An organ worse than tongues will go— An adjunct that can shrink and grow!” Such was his potent interdict, As right and just as it was strict, As eloquent as it was clear, And they all bowed their heads in fear, Each listened well and took it in, Resolving to preserve their skin, Keep mum no matter what it cost Lest something dearer should be lost. The wives were most concerned about Their husbands blurting something out, While husbands, weary of their wives, Now glimpsed the chance of quieter lives— “If only she would blab!” they thought. What grief they caused throughout the court, Those poor princesses, as they grew, And what compassionate tears they drew From every eye! The sad affair Was soon brought up in council, where Nikita, whispering for fear That some stray menial might hear, Quickly, succinctly, sought ideas From the assembled senior peers. They fell to wondering: was there not Some remedy, and if so what?
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At length an ancient fellow rose— He scratched his head and tapped his nose Bowed to them all and thus began: “Wise sovereign, pardon an old man If he appear impertinent, My words, if coarse, are kindly meant . . . Well then, here goes: I used to know A bawd, a long long time ago, I don’t know what she’s doing now, Perhaps still pimping—anyhow People believed she was a witch For there was not one ailment which She couldn’t cure—beyond a doubt That woman’s well worth seeking out. She’ll find a cure, if there is one, Insert . . . well, do what must be done.” “Then someone fetch her! Track her down!” The Tsar cried, and an angry frown Darkened his brow. “But should she try To trick or trap us, or to lie, And fail to give us what we want, Call me a rogue, a miscreant If I don’t have her burned—I swear As God’s my witness!” Everywhere The witch was looked for, far and wide Went secret messengers supplied With mounts as fast as any, and With passports good throughout the land. Off they all scampered, near and far Seeking the witch out for the Tsar. A year went by, a second flew And blanks were all the envoys drew, Until one zealous messenger At long, long last caught up with her In a dark forest (I dare say The Devil had pointed him that way), A wood he’d ridden into, where He found a cote, and living there Who but the ancient sorceress. Being the Tsar’s envoy, no less,
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Dispensing with formalities He went in boldly as you please And told her of his sovereign’s plight— How the princesses weren’t quite right In one respect. Immediately The old witch grasped what that must be. “Be off with you at once!” she said “And don’t look back or else you’re dead! You’ll catch a fever! But return In three days’ time and then you’ll learn What I prescribe; I’ll have for you A package to deliver. Shoo! Dawn on the fourth day—not before.” With that she pushed him out the door. The old witch locked herself away With coal to last till the fourth day, And for the next three nights and days Conjured the Devil in sundry ways Being versed in every single spell That ever drew him out of Hell. At length he came to her, and brought A box containing every sort Of what we sinful men adore, Yes, every taste was catered for, Every shape and size was there, Each with its tufts of curly hair. Each one her expert eye assessed, She then picked out the forty best, Wrapped them in a napkin and Stowed them in Satan’s box. As planned The envoy was dispatched with these And with a rouble, if you please, A silver rouble for the road. He took them and away he rode. He galloped on till day was done And, when he saw the setting sun, Resolved to eat and quench his thirst Before he went another verst. He was an adept of the road And in his travel bag had stowed Food, vodka, cutlery—had thought
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Of all necessities, in short, So now he tethered up his horse And started on the opening course. His horse grazed quietly, while he Day-dreamed of new prosperity, Promotion from the Tsar, to count Or prince. As expectations mount A question forms in his dull brain: “What might the magic box contain? What has the old witch sent the Tsar? Oh, what a nuisance padlocks are!” The need to know may drive him mad His curiosity’s that bad; He lays an agitated ear Against the lid but cannot hear An odour he knows all too well. “What’s in this box? I have to know! There’s no alternative!” And so The silly fellow took his life Into his hands, and with a knife Prised the box open . . . as he did, As soon as he’d removed the lid, The forty . . . improprieties Flew out and perched up in the trees Flashing their tails like mating fowl. The messenger let out a howl Then called to them, until his head Was throbbing, tried with bits of bread And crumbs to lure them down, in vain. “They don’t eat bread, that much is plain,” He thinks. They chirrup in the trees, Enjoy themselves and take their ease, The box is not their cup of tea They’d rather perch up in a tree. Then up there plods along the road An ancient crone all bent and bowed With age, and leaning on a stick. The messenger, by now frantic, Fell at the beldame’s feet and said: “Please help me or I’ll lose my head! Please, mother! Look what’s happened here!
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They won’t come back! I’m sick with fear!” The hag looked up and hissed and spat. “You ninny, carrying on like that! It serves you right! Still, don’t you fret, Show them your whatsit, quick, my pet, They’ll all come down when they see that And sharpish, or I’ll eat my hat!” No sooner was the whatsit shown Than all the thingummies flew down. They settled in their box once more And promptly making it secure He headed home without delay. The forty things were stowed away Where they belonged—that is to say Between Nikita’s daughters’ legs. To celebrate their new-found sex Their father held a sumptuous feast. A week-long banquet; all work ceased For one whole month; rewards there were Not only for the messenger But all the councillors as well— That’s almost all there is to tell— The witch was not forgotten either, Two poisonous snakes preserved in ether From the museum, handsome ones, Also two lovely skeletons Were her reward. And that’s the end. Now carp at me. I don’t intend To justify this tale to you. Why tell it? Well, I wanted to! Translation from Russian by Ranjit Bolt
from E U G E N E O N E G I N
Onegin at the Theater
The house is full, the boxes shining, the audience impatiently is seething. Now the curtain’s rising,
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there’s clapping in the gallery! Ethereal and quite resplendent a throng of nymph and elf attendants, to violins’ alluring sound, advance and daintily surround Istómina, who’s slowly spinning, as light as air, a piece of fluff that floats upon a zephyr’s puff, a ballerina, graceful, winning; her twirling feet appear to fly and lissom leaps enchant the eye.
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Applause rings out. Onegin enters. He treads upon the people’s toes and looks about, his lorgnette centres upon the ladies whom he knows. He scans the tiers, a sea of faces, salutes the men, goes through his paces. Observing how the girls are dressed, he certainly is not impressed; while lost in sober contemplation he glances round him with a yawn and what he sees fills him with scorn. He thinks with mounting indignation that he has really had enough of Didelot’s insipid stuff. The stage is full of cupids, serpents and dancing devils, such-like folk, while in the porch the tired servants are sleeping on their master’s cloak. The audience is busy coughing or clapping, laughing, loudly scoffing, and outside, inside, everywhere bright lanterns light the winter air. The horses fidget, bored and freezing, the coachmen warm their hands and wait, they curse their masters, it’s so late, and soon they too are also sneezing. But our Onegin’s long since gone, he’s got some new clothes to try on.
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May I describe, with your permission, Eugene’s secluded dressing-room in which that devotee of fashion would dress, undress, spray on perfume? The novelties London produces are sent to Russia to seduce us, all in exchange for wax and wood which we export for tawdry goods. Whatever comes from modish Paris, the fripperies for every taste and those with cash enough to waste, creations of Parisian prowess, they all were purchased by our sage, so wise at eighteen years of age. There lies a pipe of finest amber, an artefact of Istanbul, aromas which he used to pamper himself, intense and plentiful, some files and combs, assorted scissors, and thirty brushes, diverse clippers, fine bronzes and rich porcelain, the very best he could obtain. Rousseau (forgive me the digression) could never understand how Grimm dared clean his nails in front of him, the crackpot with his odd obsessions; our advocate of liberty was wrong, and that entirely! A man can be indeed efficient and yet ensure his nails are clean; it’s you, not fashion that’s deficient, for custom’s always ruled the scene! Afraid of jealous condescension, Onegin paid supreme attention to how he looked, and how he dressed. A fop, he only wore the best, he’d spend three hours at his mirror assuaging his sartorial urge till he was ready to emerge appearing every inch a winner,
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a manly Venus on parade while mincing to a masquerade.
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From head to foot he was attired in clothes of greatest elegance, which those around him much admired and would engage your curious glance. How I would love to paint his picture and not arouse your angry stricture; a writer’s job is to describe, I can already hear you gibe. My style’s too poor, I must admit it, for “pantaloons,” “waistcoat” and “frock,” they are not words of Russian stock, and so in every way unfitted for verse: I’ve had a look to see and they’re not in the dictionary. But that’s not our concern at present, we’d better hurry to the ball: Onegin’s gone to have a pleasant soirée before the curtains fall. We pass a row of slumbering houses, along a street which gently drowses, the gleaming lamps of smart coupés all travelling their different ways, some passing by a splendid villa, projecting rainbows on the snow which seem to make it warmly glow. Behind the lighted windows glimmer bejewelled ladies showing off and shadows of a foppish toff. Our hero has now reached the entrance and, rushing up the palace stair, impatient almost past endurance, he runs his fingers through his hair. The ballroom’s full of dancers swaying, by now the band is sick of playing, mazurkas make the dancers flush and almost faint beneath the crush. We hear the sound of spurs that jingle
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as officers and ladies dance, each casts a captivating glance at socialites who blithely mingle: their jealous whispering is drowned by clamouring orchestral sound.
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In days of gaiety and longing I loved to go to every ball, where passing notes amidst the thronging array’s not difficult at all, while vowing love is oh so easy among the dancers, bright and breezy . . . Respected husbands, please beware, and all you mothers take good care to mark my words or you’ll be sorry. Observe your daughters, never let them out of range of your lorgnette or else . . . may God spare you the worry! I’ll lay the law down hard and fast because my sins lie in the past! I have, alas, had lots of pleasure, have often squandered day and night, and had my morals in some measure not suffered, I would still delight in balls with all their frenzied madness, the crush, the glitter and the gladness of girls and ladies choicely dressed, I love their little feet the best. In all of Russia you will never locate three pairs of ladies’ feet which are both feminine and neat, but I’ll remember two for ever, two little feet . . . they haunt my thought at night when I am overwrought. Oh little feet, where are you strolling? I’m such a fool, let me forget! Oh little feet, are you extolling the verdant springtime flowers yet? Brought up in oriental warmness, you loved the luxury of flawless
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and yielding rugs beneath your toes, which left no marks on northern snows. Have I forgotten my obsession, my longing for a poet’s fame, abandoned hope to make my name for you, borne exile and oppression? The happiness of youth, alas! has passed like footsteps on the grass.
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Ah, Flora’s cheeks, Diana’s bosom are fetching, as you know, my friends! Terpsichore’s small feet are winsome, yes, they’re the ones I most commend, for they are full of priceless promise, of pleasure, charm, and luscious longings. Those are the feet which I adore and think of daily more and more: beneath the tablecloth’s soft billows, (cloth made of damask, edged with lace), in winter by the fireplace, in springtime leas, by greening willows, at brilliant, incandescent balls, near thunderous waves on sea-girt walls. When I recall the tempests blowing I envy each and every wave that’s lovingly and wildly flowing towards those feet I also crave. Oh how I longed to join those waters and kiss those feet, so dear and faultless! No, never in those fiery days when I indulged in youthful ways, did I experience such a torment, desire to kiss Armidas’ lips, their pining breasts, their rounded hips, those ruby cheeks, so soft and fervent. No, never did such great distress afflict me then, I must confess! And there are times when I remember with trepidation now and then, a foot, a stirrup, cherished, tender,
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which I once held . . . both where and when . . . Again in my imagination I touch that foot in fascination; the blood is surging in my heart, now wizened, wasted as it smarts . . . But that’s enough! I’ve sung their praises too much upon my babbling lyre, yet they’re not worth what they inspire, my verses for those haughty ladies, whose words and gazes speak deceit as much as do their little feet. Translation from Russian by Tom Beck
COMMENTARY
There comes a time in a mature literature when minds grown tired of monotonous works of art and of conventional and refined vocabulary address themselves to fresh popular fantasies and to unfamiliar vernacular expressions, which were previously despised. . . . The ghost scene in Hamlet is all written in jocular and even vulgar language, but one’s hair stands on end at Hamlet’s jokes.
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A. P., “Of Poetic Diction”
(1) What is clear too is how Pushkin fit the role of the Romantic poet & how much of the future of Russian writing—fiction & drama as well as poetry—would be attributed to him. His reputation in that context was as the greatest of the Byronic or post-Byronic poets &, in his invention or fleshing out of a popular/colloquial Russian idiom, as one of the great language makers & national poets of nineteenth-century Europe. (The influence of his Eugene Onegin on the verse structure & thematics of a recent American work, Lyn Hejinian’s Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, might also be worth noting.) The other side of his legend was that of the marginalized outsider & rebel, beginning with a touch (strongly endorsed by him) of African ancestry: a maternal great-grandfather, born in Africa, who was brought as a young slave to the court of Peter the Great & became a military engineer, a general, & a close confidant to the czar. An epic writer with an improvisational comic/sardonic edge—the mark of his too easily attributed Byronism—his early work played with atheism & blasphemy among other themes, a stance concerning which he wrote a little later: “I am composing colorful stanzas of a romantic poem and am taking lessons in pure Atheism.” This, along with his reputation for liberalism & a number of close friendships with revolutionary Decembrists & other activists of the 1820s, resulted in several years of exile in the Russian South &
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two more of confinement to his parents’ estate in Pskov province, during which, however, his reputation & influence grew & continued to grow. Ten years after his release, his death in a duel, defending his wife’s honor (or more likely his own), brought an end prefigured in his writings (Eugene Onegin—his “free novel” from the 1820s, written in fourteen-line rhyming stanzas—the primary example) & in his earlier behavior.
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(2) The question of Pushkin’s untranslatability has often been raised, not only as a block to reading him across languages but also because it obscures his position as a major language innovator, who turned literary Russian as he found it in an irreversibly demotic/vernacular direction. The markers of his style, connected, as he himself points out, to Wordsworth’s & Coleridge’s “language of honest, ordinary men” (Pushkin’s paraphrase of Wordsworth’s “real language of men”), were its apparent simplicity & lack of ornament, which have “always made him peculiarly resistant to translation.” Thus: poet & biographer Elaine Feinstein, who adds: “He uses little imagery, relying instead on an effortless, colloquial vigour and an extraordinary felicity of form. This felicity is hard to capture without the Russian case structure, which preserves a clear meaning wherever words are placed in a line of verse.” And Renato Poggioli: “It is the utter simplicity of [his] compositions that explains why Pushkin’s art loses its virtues when translated, thus disappointing most Western readers, who may well echo Flaubert’s protest to Turgenev: Mais il est plat, votre poète! Pushkin’s simplicity conceals the complex workings of a supreme artistic intelligence, wise enough to realize the truth the poet once uttered in a cry of the heart that we find written down in one of his letters: La poésie, parbleu, doit être quelque peu bête.”
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B O O K
O F
O R I G I N S
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A
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
PROLOGUE
Through me many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff, And of the rights of them the others are down upon, Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised, Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
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WA LT WHITMAN, FROM S O NG O F M YS ELF
If it was the century after that finally produced a fullblown ethnopoetics—& the fullness even now is far from complete—the earlier openings coincided with the Romantics’ search for new origins, an inheritance in turn from the generations that immediately preceded theirs. Something had happened—Enlightenment or Revolution or, on its more doubtful side, Imperium—that brought other worlds into view & put the inherited past into question. It was a measure of the new liberty & the new science that what had long been lost or repressed or concealed now came to the surface. The first openings here were to ancient European & Mediterranean worlds & then to traditional worlds, both ancient & contemporaneous, outside the European orbit. (At the same time, Europe in its old & new guises was impacting the worlds of the others.) In an age filled like all ages with contradictions, the search once begun was twofold: on native grounds toward sources for a new national literature, and in the larger world an awakening to a transhuman inheritance that put the narrow nationalisms into question. Alongside the official ideologies that shoved European man to the apex of the human pyramid, there were some artists & thinkers who found ways of doing & knowing among other peoples as complex as any in Europe & often virtually erased from European consciousness. As the nineteenth century progressed, cultures
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described as “primitive” & “savage”—a stage below “barbarian”—were simultaneously the models for political & social experiments, religious & visionary revivals, & forms of art & poetry so different from European norms as to seem revolutionary from a later Western perspective. It was almost, looking back at it, as if every radical innovation in the West were revealing a counterpart—or series of counterparts—somewhere in the traditional worlds the West was savaging. In this way originality—often taken as a marker of Romanticism—returned to a sense of origins from which the word derived. What follows, then, is a selection of what could be taken as old, originary—whether in an actual past or in a fictive present disguised & (mis) interpreted as timeless. The unsealing of languages (ancient, occulted) moved apace: Sanskrit, Egyptian, Sumerian, Mayan came to light along with their attendant literatures. In a line with these were new recoveries from the Western foundational languages—Greek, Latin, Hebrew—& first translations from classical literatures outside the West as such. The result was not only literary shock for those who sought it, but also the raising of heretical & gnostic ghosts, banished for centuries, & the translation & dissemination of sacred texts—Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, & so on—on an unprecedented & rapidly expanding scale. And at the same time poets & others continued an engagement with unwritten poetries & with folk & dialect traditions closer to home. On the level of science a new anthropology arose, still closely linked to a poetics; dreamworks before Freud & the Surrealists laid the groundwork for the construction of an originary energy toward a full imaginative life; & biological/ecological breakthroughs by Charles Darwin & others brought the totality of the living world into a dance of origins. In the pages that follow, then, some prominence is given to the translators and compilers of the originary works (Jones for Sanskrit, Budge for Egyptian, Fitzgerald for Persian, Brinton for Aztec, & so on), with a recognition of the force of their constructions & retellings, but with no intention to hide their excesses or to diminish the independence & power of the translated works themselves. (For which see also the selections from Macpherson’s Ossian & Lönnrot’s Kalevala.)
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Willia m Blake
1757–1827
from T H E M A R R I A G E O F H E A V E N A N D H E L L
The Ancient Poets
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
E . A . Wallis Bu d ge
1857–1934
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from T H E E G Y P T I A N B O O K O F T H E D E A D
The Chapter of Changing into Ptah
Saith Osiris Ani, triumphant: “I eat bread, I drink ale, I put on apparel, I fly like a hawk, I cackle like a goose, and I alight upon the path hard by the hill of the dead on the festival of the great Being. That which is abominable, that which is abominable, have I not eaten; and that which is foul have I not swallowed. That which my ka doth abominate hath not entered into my body.
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 397 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
I have lived according to the knowledge of the glorious gods. I live and I get strength from their bread, I get strength when I eat it beneath the shade of the tree of Hathor, my lady. I make an offering, and I make bread in Tattu, and oblations in Annu. I array myself in the robe of the goddess Matait, and I rise up and I sit me down wheresoever my heart desireth. My head is like unto the head of Ra; when my limbs are gathered together, I am like unto Tmu. The four regions of Ra are the limits of the earth. I come forth; my tongue is like unto the tongue of Ptah, my throat is even as that of Hathor, and I tell forth the words of my father Tmu with my lips. He it is who constrained the handmaid, the wife of Seb; and unto him are bowed all heads, and there is fear of him.
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Hymns of praise are sung in honour of my mighty deeds, and I am accounted the heir of Seb, the lord of the earth, the protector. The god Seb giveth cool water, he maketh his dawnings to be mine. They who dwell in Annu bow down their heads before me, for I am their bull. I grow strong from moment to moment; my loins are made strong for millions of years.” Lineation by Jerome Rothenberg
G. R . S. M ea d
1863–1933
from P I S T I S S O P H I A : O L I G H T O F L I G H T S
[Coptic Gnostic]
The perfect Saviour said: Son of Man consented with Sophia, his consort, and revealed a great androgynous light. Its male name is designated “Saviour,
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begetter of all things.” Its female name is designated “All-begettress Sophia.” Some call her “Pistis [Faith].” .......
And Pistis Sophia cried out most exceedingly, she cried to the Light of lights which she had seen from the beginning, in which she had had faith, and uttered this repentance, saying thus: “O Light of lights, in whom I have had faith from the beginning, hearken now then, O Light, unto my repentance. Save me, O Light, for evil thoughts have entered into me. “I gazed, O Light, into the lower parts and saw there a light, thinking: I will go to that region, in order that I may take that light. And I went and found myself in the darkness which is in the chaos below, and I could no more speed thence and go to my region, for I was sore pressed by all the emanations of Self-willed, and the lion-faced power took away my light in me.
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“And I cried for help, but my voice hath not reached out of the darkness. And I looked unto the height, that the Light, in which I had had faith, might help me. “And when I looked unto the height, I saw all the rulers of the æons, how in their numbers they looked down on me and rejoiced over me, though I had done them no ill; but they hated me without a cause. And when the emanations of Self-willed saw the rulers of the æons rejoicing over me, they knew that the rulers of the æons would not come to my aid; and those emanations which sore pressed me with violence, took courage, and the light which I had not taken from them, they have taken from me. “Now, therefore, O Light of Truth, thou knowest that I have done this in my innocence, thinking that the lion-faced light-power belonged to thee; and the sin which I have done is open before thee. “Suffer me no more to lack, O Lord, for I have had faith in thy light from the beginning; O Lord, O Light of the powers, suffer me no more to lack my light. “For because of thy inducement and for the sake of thy light am I fallen into this oppression, and shame hath covered me. “And because of the illusion of thy light, I am become a stranger to my brethren, the invisibles, and to the great emanations of Barbelo.
from Pistis Sophia 399 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
“This hath befallen me, O Light, because I have been zealous for thy abode; and the wrath of Self-willed is come upon me—of him who had not hearkened unto thy command to emanate from the emanation of his power—because I was in his æon without performing his mystery. “And all the rulers of the æons mocked me. “And I was in that region, mourning and seeking after the light which I had seen in the height. “And the guards of the gates of the æons searched for me, and all who remain in their mystery mocked me. “But I looked up unto the height towards thee and had faith in thee. Now, therefore, O Light of lights, I am sore pressed in the darkness of chaos. If now thou wilt come to save me,—great is thy mercy,—then hear me in truth and save me. “Save me out of the matter of this darkness, that I may not be submerged therein, that I may be saved from the emanations of god Self-willed which press me sore, and from their evil doings. “Let not this darkness submerge me, and let not this lion-faced power entirely devour the whole of my power, and let not this chaos shroud my power.
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“Hear me, O Light, for thy grace is precious, and look down upon me according to the great mercy of thy Light. “Turn not thy face from me, for I am exceedingly tormented. “Haste thee, hearken unto me and save my power. “Save me because of the rulers who hate me, for thou knowest my sore oppression and my torment and the torment of my power which they have taken from me. They who have set me in all this evil are before thee; deal with them according to thy good pleasure. “My power looked forth from the midst of the chaos and from the midst of the darkness, and I waited for my pair, that he should come and fight for me, and he came not, and I looked that he should come and lend me power, and I found him not. “And when I sought the light, they gave me darkness; and when I sought my power, they gave me matter.
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“Now, therefore, O Light of lights, may the darkness and the matter which the emanations of Self-willed have brought upon me, be unto them for a snare, and may they be ensnared therein, and recompense them and may they be made to stumble and not come into the region of their Self-willed. “May they remain in the darkness and not behold the light; may they behold the chaos for ever, and let them not look unto the height. “Bring upon them their revenge, and may thy judgment lay hold upon them. “Let them not henceforth come into their region to their god Self-willed, and let not his emanations henceforth come into their regions; for their god is impious and self-willed, and he thought that he had done this evil of himself, not knowing that, had I not been brought low according to thy command, he would not have had any authority over me. “But when thou hadst by thy command brought me low, they pursued me the more, and their emanations added pain to my humiliation. “And they have taken light-power from me and fallen again to pressing me sore, in order to take away all the light in me. Because of this in which they have set me, let them not ascend to the thirteenth æon, the region of Righteousness.
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“But let them not be reckoned in the lot of those who purify themselves and the light, and let them not be reckoned with those who will quickly repent, that they may quickly receive mysteries in the Light. “For they have taken my light from me, and my power hath begun to cease in me and I am destitute of my light. “Now, therefore, O Light, which is in thee and is with me, I sing praises to thy name, O Light, in glory. “May my song of praise please thee, O Light, as an excellent mystery, which leadeth to the gates of the Light, which they who shall repent will utter, and the light of which will purify them. “Now, therefore, let all matters rejoice; seek ye all the Light, that the power of the stars which is in you, may live. “For the Light hath heard the matters, nor will it leave any without having purified them.
from Pistis Sophia 401 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
“Let the souls and the matters praise the Lord of all æons, and [let] the matters and all that is in them [praise him]. “For God shall save their soul from all matters, and a city shall be prepared in the Light, and all the souls who are saved, will dwell in that city and will inherit it. “And the soul of them who shall receive mysteries will abide in that region, and they who have received mysteries in its name will abide therein.”
S ir Willia m Jon es
1746–1794
TWO FROM SANSKRIT from The Yarjurveda
1. As a tree, the lord of the forest, even so, without fiction, is man: his hairs are as leaves; his skin, as exterior bark. 2. Through the skin flows blood; through the rind, sap: from a wounded man, therefore, blood gushes, as the vegetable fluid from a tree that is cut.
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3. His muscles are as interwoven fibres; the membrane round his bones as interior bark, which is closely fixed: his bones are as the hard pieces of wood within: their marrow is composed of pith. 4. Since the tree, when felled, springs again, still fresher, from the root, from what root springs mortal man when felled by the hand of death? 5. Say not, he springs from seed: seed surely comes from the living. A tree, no doubt, rises from seed, and after death has a visible renewal. 6. But a tree which they have plucked up by the root, flourishes individually no more. From what root then springs mortal man when felled by the hand of death? 7. Say not he was born before; he is born: who can make him spring again to birth? 8. GOD, who is perfect wisdom, perfect happiness, He is the final refuge of the man, who has liberally bestowed his wealth, who has been firm in virtue, who knows and adores that Great One.
402 A Book of Origins Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
A Hymn to the Night
Night approaches illumined with stars and planets, and looking on all sides with numberless eyes, overpowers all meaner lights. The immortal goddess pervades the firmament covering the low valleys and shrubs and the lofty mountains and trees, but soon she disturbs the gloom with celestial effulgence. Advancing with brightness, at length she recalls her sister Morning; and the nightly shade gradually melts away. May she, at this time, be propitious! She, in whose early watch, we may calmly recline in our mansion, as birds repose on the tree. Mankind now sleep in their towns; now herds and flocks peacefully slumber, and winged creatures, even swift falcons and vultures. O Night, avert from us the she-wolf and the wolf; and oh! suffer us to pass thee in soothing rest! O Morn, remove, in due time, this black, yet visible, overwhelming darkness which at present infolds me, as thou enablest me to remove the cloud of their debts.
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Daughter of heaven, I approach thee with praise, as the cow approaches her milker; accept, O Night, not the hymn only, but the oblation of thy suppliant, who prays that his foes may be subdued.
Edwa rd Fit z G erald
1809–1883
from T H E R U B A I Y A T O F O M A R K H A Y Y A M
[Farsi] 1
Wake! For the Sun, who scatter’d into flight The Stars before him from the Field of Night, Drives Night along with them from Heav’n, and strikes The Sultan’s Turret with a Shaft of Light. 2
Before the phantom of False morning died, Methought a Voice within the Tavern cried,
from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 403 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
“When all the Temple is prepared within, Why nods the drowsy Worshiper outside?” 3
And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before The Tavern shouted—“Open then the Door! You know how little while we have to stay, And, once departed, may return no more.” 4
Now the New Year reviving old Desires, The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires, Where the WHITE HAND OF MOSES on the Bough Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires. 5
Iram indeed is gone with all his Rose, And Jamshyd’s Sev’n-ring’d Cup where no one knows; But still a Ruby kindles in the Vine, And many a Garden by the Water blows. 6
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And David’s lips are lockt; but in divine High-piping Pehlevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine! Red Wine!”—the Nightingale cries to the Rose That sallow cheek of hers to incarnadine. 7
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring Your Winter garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing. ....... 17
Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day, How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp Abode his destined Hour, and went his way.
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18
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep: And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep. 19
I sometimes think that never blows so red The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled; That every Hyacinth the Garden wears Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head. 20
And this reviving Herb whose tender Green Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean— Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen! 21
Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears: To-morrow—Why, To-morrow I may be Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n thousand Years.
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22
For some we loved, the loveliest and the best That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest, Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before, And one by one crept silently to rest. 23
And we, that now make merry in the Room They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom, Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth Descend—ourselves to make a Couch—for whom?
from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 405 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Da n iel G. Brin t on
1837—1899
from R I G V E D A A M E R I C A N U S : T W O F O R T H E G O D D E S S
[Aztec] A Hymn to the Mother of the Gods
1. Hail to our mother, who caused the yellow flowers to blossom, who scattered the seeds of the maguey, as she came forth from Paradise. 2. Hail to our mother, who poured forth flowers in abundance, who scattered the seeds of the maguey, as she came forth from Paradise. 3. Hail to our mother, who caused the yellow flowers to blossom, she who scattered the seeds of the maguey, as she came forth from Paradise. 4. Hail to our mother, who poured forth white flowers in abundance, who scattered the seeds of the maguey, as she came forth from Paradise. 5. Hail to the goddess who shines in the thorn bush like a bright butterfly. 6. Ho! she is our mother, goddess of the earth, she supplies food in the desert to the wild beasts, and causes them to live.
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7. Thus, thus, you see her to be an ever-fresh model of liberality toward all flesh. 8. And as you see the goddess of the earth do to the wild beasts, so also does she toward the green herbs and the fishes. Hymn to Cihuacoatl the Mother of Mortals
1. Quilaztli, plumed with eagle feathers, with the crest of eagles, painted with serpents’ blood, comes with her hoe, beating her drum, from Colhuacan. 2. She alone, who is our flesh, goddess of the fields and shrubs, is strong to support us. 3. With the hoe, with the hoe, with hands full, with the hoe, with hands full, the goddess of the fields is strong to support us. 4. With a broom in her hands the goddess of the fields strongly supports us.
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5. Our mother is as twelve eagles, goddess of drum-beating, filling the fields of tzioac and maguey like our lord Mixcoatl. 6. She is our mother, a goddess of war, our mother, a goddess of war, an example and a companion from the home of our ancestors (Colhuacan). 7. She comes forth, she appears when war is waged, she protects us in war that we shall not be destroyed, an example and companion from the home of our ancestors. 8. She comes adorned in the ancient manner with the eagle crest, in the ancient manner with the eagle crest.
H en ry Wad swort h L on g f e l low 1 8 0 7 – 1 8 8 2 H en ry Rowe S choolcra ft 1 7 9 3 – 1 8 6 4 SONG OF THE OWL [Ojibwa]
The owl,— Au The owl Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Au The great black Owl Au Hi! a! haa!
Song of the Owl 407 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Wa s hin g t on M at t hew s
1843–1905
from T H E N I G H T C H A N T
[Navajo]
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Prayer of the First Dancers
In Tse‘gíhi, In the house made of the dawn, In the house made of the evening twilight, In the house made of the dark cloud, In the house made of the he-rain, In the house made of the dark mist, In the house made of the she-rain, In the house made of pollen, In the house made of grasshoppers, Where the dark mist curtains the doorway, The path to which is on the rainbow, Where the zigzag lightning stands high on top, Where the he-rain stands high on top, Oh, male divinity! With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us. With your leggings of dark cloud, come to us. With your shirt of dark cloud, come to us. With your head-dress of dark cloud, come to us. With your mind enveloped in dark cloud, come to us. With the dark thunder above you, come to us soaring. With the shapen cloud at your feet, come to us soaring. With the far darkness made of the dark cloud over your head, come to us soaring. With the far darkness made of the he-rain over your head, come to us soaring. With the far darkness made of the dark mist over your head, come to us soaring. With the far darkness made of the she-rain over your head, come to us soaring. With the zigzag lightning flung out on high over your head, come to us soaring. With the rainbow hanging high over your head, come to us soaring. With the far darkness made of the dark cloud on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring.
408 A Book of Origins Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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With the far darkness made of the he-rain on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring. With the far darkness made of the dark mist on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring. With the far darkness made of the she-rain on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring. With the zigzag lightning flung out on high on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring. With the rainbow hanging high on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring. With the near darkness made of the dark cloud, of the he-rain, of the dark mist and of the she-rain, come to us. With the darkness on the earth, come to us. With these I wish the foam floating on the flowing water over the roots of the great corn. I have made your sacrifice. I have prepared a smoke for you. My feet restore for me. My limbs restore for me. My body restore for me. My mind restore for me. My voice restore for me. To-day, take out your spell for me. To-day, take away your spell for me. Away from me you have taken it. Far off from me it is taken. Far off you have done it. Happily I recover. Happily my interior becomes cool. Happily my eyes regain their power. Happily my head becomes cool. Happily my limbs regain their power. Happily I hear again. Happily for me the spell is taken off. Happily I walk. Impervious to pain, I walk. Feeling light within, I walk. With lively feelings, I walk. Happily abundant dark clouds I desire. Happily abundant dark mists I desire. Happily abundant passing showers I desire.
from The Night Chant 409 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Happily an abundance of vegetation I desire. Happily an abundance of pollen I desire. Happily abundant dew I desire. Happily may fair white corn, to the ends of the earth, come with you. Happily may fair yellow corn, to the ends of the earth, come with you. Happily may fair blue corn, to the ends of the earth, come with you. Happily may fair corn of all kinds, to the ends of the earth, come with you. Happily may fair plants of all kinds, to the ends of the earth, come with you. Happily may fair goods of all kinds, to the ends of the earth, come with you. Happily may fair jewels of all kinds, to the ends of the earth, come with you. With these before you, happily may they come with you. With these behind you, happily may they come with you. With these below you, happily may they come with you. With these above you, happily may they come with you. With these all around you, happily may they come with you. Thus happily you accomplish your tasks. Happily the old men will regard you. Happily the old women will regard you. Happily the young men will regard you. Happily the young women will regard you. Happily the boys will regard you. Happily the girls will regard you. Happily the children will regard you. Happily the chiefs will regard you. Happily, as they scatter in different directions, they will regard you. Happily, as they approach their homes, they will regard you. Happily may their roads home be on the trail of pollen. Happily may they all get back. In beauty I walk. With beauty before me, I walk. With beauty behind me, I walk. With beauty below me, I walk. With beauty above me, I walk. With beauty all around me, I walk. It is finished again in beauty, It is finished in beauty, It is finished in beauty, It is finished in beauty. 410 A Book of Origins
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
F ran cis J. C hild
1825–1896
S I R PAT R I C K S P E N C E
The king sits in Dumferling toune, Drinking the blude-reid wine: “O whar will I get guid sailor, To sail this schip of mine?” Up and spak an eldern knicht, Sat at the kings richt kne: “Sir Patrick Spence is the best sailor That sails upon the se.” The king has written a braid letter, And signd it wi his hand, And sent it to Sir Patrick Spence, Was walking on the sand. The first line that Sir Patrick red, A loud lauch lauched he; The next line that Sir Patrick red, The teir blinded his ee.
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“O wha is this has don this deid, This ill deid don to me, To send me out this time o’ the yeir, To sail upon the se! “Mak haste, mak haste, my mirry men all, Our guid schip sails the morne”: “O say na sae, my master deir, For I feir a deadlie storme. “Late late yestreen I saw the new moone, Wi the auld moone in hir arme, And I feir, I feir, my deir master, That we will cum to harme.” O our Scots nables wer richt laith To weet their cork-heild schoone; Bot lang owre a’ the play wer playd, Their hats they swam aboone.
Sir Patrick Spence 411 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
O lang, lang may their ladies sit, Wi thair fans into their hand, Or eir they se Sir Patrick Spence Cum sailing to the land. O lang, lang may the ladies stand, Wi thair gold kems in their hair, Waiting for thair ain deir lords, For they’ll se thame na mair. Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour, It’s fiftie fadom deip, And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spence, Wi the Scots lords at his feit. [after Percy’s Reliques]
Percy Bys s he S helley
1792–1822
HOMER’S HYMN TO THE MOON
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[Greek]
Daughters of Jove, whose voice is melody, Muses, who know and rule all minstrelsy Sing the wide-winged Moon! Around the earth, From her immortal head in Heaven shot forth, Far light is scattered—boundless glory springs; Where’er she spreads her many-beaming wings The lampless air glows round her golden crown. But when the Moon divine from Heaven is gone Under the sea, her beams within abide, Till, bathing her bright limbs in Ocean’s tide, Clothing her form in garments glittering far, And having yoked to her immortal car The beam-invested steeds whose necks on high Curve back, she drives to a remoter sky A western Crescent, borne impetuously. Then is made full the circle of her light, And as she grows, her beams more bright and bright
412 A Book of Origins Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Are poured from Heaven, where she is hovering then, A wonder and a sign to mortal men. The Son of Saturn with this glorious Power Mingled in love and sleep—to whom she bore Pandeia, a bright maid of beauty rare Among the Gods, whose lives eternal are. Hail Queen, great Moon, white-armed Divinity, Fair-haired and favourable! thus with thee My song beginning, by its music sweet Shall make immortal many a glorious feat Of demigods, with lovely lips, so well Which minstrels, servants of the Muses, tell. 8th–5th century B.C.
Vu k Ka rad ž ic´
1787–1864
A POEM FOR THE GODDESS HER CITY & THE MARRIAGE OF HER SON & DAUGHTER
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[Serbian]
she builds her city the white goddess builds it not on the sky or earth but on a cloud branch builds three gates to enter it one gate she builds in gold the second pearls the third in scarlet where the gate is dry gold there the goddess’ son is wedded where the gate
A Poem for the Goddess 413 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
is pearl
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the goddess’ daughter is the bride & where the gate is scarlet solitary sits the goddess solitary glances everywhere she sees the lightning playing with the thunder the precious sister with two brothers & the bride plays with the bridegroom’s brothers there the goddess sees the lightning win it all the precious sister over her two brothers & the bride over her bridegroom’s brothers & the goddess was enchanted by it Translation from Serbian by Jerome Rothenberg & Miodrag Pavlovic´
Lad y C ha rlot t e G u es t
1812–1895
HANES TALIESIN / THE TALE OF TALIESIN [Welsh]
Primary chief bard am I to Elphin, And my original country is the region of the summer stars; Idno and Heinin called me Merddin, At length every king will call me Taliesin.
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I was with my Lord in the highest sphere, On the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell I have borne a banner before Alexander; I know the names of the stars from north to the south; I have been on the Galaxy at the throne of the Distributor; I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain; I conveyed Awen [the Divine Spirit] to the level of the vale of Hebron; I was in the court of Dôn before the birth of Gwydion. I was instructor to Eli and Enoch; I have been winged by the genius of the splendid crozier; I have been loquacious prior to being gifted with speech; I was at the place of the crucifixion of the merciful son of God; I have been three periods in the prison of Arianrhod; I have been the chief director of the work of the tower of Nimrod; I am a wonder whose origin is not known.
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I have been in Asia with Noah in the Ark, I have witnessed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; I have been in India when Rome was built; I am now come here to the remnant of Troia. I have been with my Lord in the manger of the ass; I strengthened Moses through the waters of Jordan; I have been in the firmament with Mary Magdalene; I have obtained the muse from the Cauldron of Caridwen; I have been bard of the harp to Lleon of Lochlin. I have been on the White Hill, in the court of Cynvelyn, For a year and a day in stocks and fetters, I have suffered hunger for the Son of the Virgin, I have been fostered in the land of the Deity, I have been teacher to all intelligences, I am able to instruct the whole universe. I shall be until the day of doom on the face of the earth; And it is not known if my body is flesh or fish. Then I was for nine months In the womb of the hag Caridwen; I was originally little Gwion, And at length I am Taliesin.
Hanes Taliesin 415 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
E s aia s Tegn ér 1 7 8 2 – 1 8 4 6 H en ry Wa d swort h L on g f ellow 1 8 0 7 – 1 8 8 2 from F R I T H I O F ’ S S A G A
[Icelandic / Swedish]
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Frithiof ’s Homestead
Three miles extended around the fields of the homestead, on three sides Valleys and mountains and hills, but on the fourth side was the ocean. Birch woods crowned the summits, but down the slope of the hillsides Flourished the golden corn, and man-high was waving the rye-field. Lakes, full many in number, their mirror held up for the mountains, Held for the forests up, in whose depths the high-horned reindeers Had their kingly walk, and drank of a hundred brooklets. But in the valleys widely around, there fed on the greensward Herds with shining hides and udders that longed for the milk-pail. ’Mid these scattered, now here and now there, were numberless flocks of Sheep with fleeces white, as thou seest the white-looking stray clouds, Flock-wise spread o’er the heavenly vault when it bloweth in springtime. Coursers two times twelve, all mettlesome, fast fettered storm-winds, Stamping stood in the line of stalls, and tugged at their fodder. Knotted with red were their manes, and their hoofs all white with steel shoes. Th’ banquet-hall, a house by itself, was timbered of hard fir. Not five hundred men (at ten times twelve to the hundred) Filled up the roomy hall, when assembled for drinking, at Yule-tide. Through the hall, as long as it was, went a table of holm-oak, Polished and white, as of steel; the columns twain of the High-seat Stood at the end thereof, two gods carved out of an elm-tree: Odin with lordly look, and Frey with the sun on his frontlet. Lately between the two, on a bear-skin (the skin it was coal-black, Scarlet-red was the throat, but the paws were shodden with silver), Thorsten sat with his friends, Hospitality sitting with Gladness. Oft, when the moon through the cloudrack flew, related the old man Wonders from distant lands he had seen, and cruises of Vikings Far away on the Baltic, and Sea of the West and the White Sea. Hushed sat the listening bench, and their glances hung on the graybeard’s Lips, as a bee on the rose; but the Scald was thinking of Brage, Where, with his silver beard, and runes on his tongue, he is seated
416 A Book of Origins Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Under the leafy beech, and tells a tradition by Mimer’s Ever-murmuring wave, himself a living tradition. Midway the floor (with thatch was it strewn) burned ever the fire-flame Glad on its stone-built hearth; and thorough the wide-mouthed smoke-flue Looked the stars, those heavenly friends, down into the great hall. Round the walls, upon nails of steel, were hanging in order Breastplate and helmet together, and here and there among them Downward lightened a sword, as in winter evening a star shoots. More than helmets and swords the shields in the hall were resplendent, White as the orb of the sun, or white as the moon’s disk of silver. Ever and anon went a maid round the hoard, and filled up the drink-horns, Ever she cast down her eyes and blushed; in the shield her reflection Blushed, too, even as she; this gladdened the drinking champions. Adapted from Icelandic (Old Norse) by Esaias Tegnér and translated from Tegnér’s Swedish by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Chris t mas G ys a rt s [M u m m e rs ] Pl ay fro m Bowde n
1815
Scene first. Enter a servant with a besom who sweeps the floor, singing as follows: Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
servant
Redd up stocks redd up stools Here comes in a pack o’ fools A pack o’ fools was never here before Meikle head and little wit stands behind the door. redd room
Redd room, and redd room And gie’s room to sing We’ll shew ye the best sport Acted at Christmas time. Sometimes one and sometimes all of them repeat at the same time, when they first enter into a house, the preceding verse. Enter the commander of the band. commander
Activous and activage, I’ll shew you the best sport Christmas Gysarts [Mummers] Play 417 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Ever acted on any stage If you don’t believe the word I say Call for Alexander of Macedon And he will shew ye the way. Enter Alexander of Macedon alexander of macedon
Here comes I, Alexander of Macedon Who conquered the world, all, but Scotland alone, And when I came to Scotland My heart it grew cold, my heart it grew cold To see that little nation, sae crowse and sae bold, Sae crowse and sae bold, sae frank and sae free, A call for Galashen, and he will fight wi’ me. Sometimes I have heard Galashen pronounced Slashen. Enter Galashen who kills Alexander.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
galashen
Here comes I, Galashen Galashen is my name Wi’ sword and buckler by my side I hope to win the game, My head is clothed in iron My body’s clothed wi’ steel, My buckler’s made o’ knuckle-bone [huckle-bone] My sword is made o’ steel. I call for great St George of England and he will fight wi’ me. Some Gysarts in the character of Galashen, repeat the lines thus. “My head is made o’ iron, my body’s made o’ steel, my a-e is made o’ knucklebone” etc. Galashen is next killed by St George. Enter St George of England st george
Here comes I, great George of England, See my bloody weapon, it shines clear, It reaches up to my very ear, Let any man come fence me here. Enter a boy boy
As I was at a fencing school, I saw a boy turn out a fool
418 A Book of Origins Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
A fool, a fool, as you may see, I deliver him up to fight wi’ thee. This dragon, of a boy, enters the list with St George and stabs him, to the astonishment of the party present. He falls down on his knees, repeating as he looks at the dead body of St George. boy
Ohon, ohon, I’ve kill’d a man, I’ve killed my brother’s eldest son. The servants are ordered to take up the body of St George, but, to their surprise, he says: st george
I am, I am, I am not slain, For I’ll rise and fight that boy again. The boy says to him: boy
To fight wi’ me ye are not able, For my sword will split your haly table. The boy transfixes him with his spear, as he is in the act of rising to fight him. A Doctor is next called for, by another of the company, and a second cries “fifty pounds for a doctor.” Enter a doctor. Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
doctor
Here comes I, a doctor, as good a doctor as Scotland ever bred. someone
What diseases can you cure? doctor
I can cure the itch, the stitch, the maligrumphs, the lep [probably leprosy], the pip, the roan, the blaen, the merls, the nerels, the blaes, the splaes, and the burning pintle. Another asks him: another
What more diseases can you cure? doctor
I can cure a man that has lain seven years in his grave and more.
Christmas Gysarts [Mummers] Play 419 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
they
What will you take to cure this man? doctor
I will take £10 to make a complete cure. They offer him six pounds which he refuses, then eight, lastly nine. doctor
Nine and a bottle of wine will do. And immediately he touches him with a small rod or wand, orders him to doctor
rise up, Jack. The other killed chieftains are reanimated with a touch of the Doctor’s wand, and instantly spring up, all except Poor Jack, who rises slowly and complaining of a severe pain, in the lumbar regions of his back. doctor
What ails your back? jack
There is a hole in it wad hold a head of a horse three fold. doctor
This is nonsense, Jack, you must tell me a better tale than this.
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jack
I have been east, I have been west I have been at the Sherckle-dock And many were there, the warse for the wear And they tauld me, the Deel there, marries a’ the poor folk. they
What did you see at the Sherkle-dock? jack
I saw roast upo’ rungs, tits upon tongues, ladies pissing spanish needles, ten ells lang; auld wives flying in the air, like the peelings o’ ingins [onions] swine playing upo’ bagpipes; cats gaun upon pattens, and hens drinking ale.
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Scene last. At the termination of Jack’s speech, the gysarts are desired to drink with the family, after which they are presented by each person in the house with a small sum of money for their trouble. They lastly form themselves into a ring, and as they dance round, all of them sing the following carol. they
As we came by yon well we drank We laid our gloves upon yon bank By came Willie’s piper to play, Took up our gloves and ran away; We followed him from town to town, We bad him lay our bonny gloves down, He laid them down upon yon stone, Sing ye a carol, ours is done.
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Sometimes each of the gysarts sings a carol of the preceding sort. N O T E S B Y T H E C O L L E C TO R T H O M A S W I L K I E . In the southern counties of Scotland, a number of young men dress themselves in a fantastic manner and paint or disguise their faces and in this situation go through towns, villages, farmsteads etc., enter into every house, where they think the inhabitants will allow them a small pittance, for which they perform a kind of dramatic game and call themselves “Guisarts.” Tradition says that it is very unlucky to let the gysarts go out of the house, where they have performed that tragedy (which they sometimes call Galatian, or Alexander of Macedon) without giving them some money to drink to the success of the family. The Gysarts always dress themselves in white. They appear like so many dead persons, robed in their shrouds, who have risen from their narrow homes, and the simile is still improved from their faces being all painted black or dark blue: their mutches are sometimes adorned with ribbons of diverse colours, but these seldom enter into their dress, which they wear below their shroud or gown. The evening is the usual time that the Gysarts make their appearance, though I have seen them perform in the sunshine, in some villages. Every evening from Christmas to Fasterne’en is allowable for the Gysarts to make their perambulations.
Thom a s Wen t wort h Higgi n s o n
1823–1911
from N E G R O S P I R I T U A L S
Hold Your Light
“Hold your light, Brudder Robert,— Hold your light, Hold your light on Canaan’s shore.
from Negro Spirituals 421 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
“What make ole Satan for follow me so? Satan ain’t got notin’ for do wid me. Hold your light, Hold your light, Hold your light on Canaan’s shore.” I Want to Go Home
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“Dere’s no rain to wet you, O, yes, I want to go home. Dere’s no sun to burn you, O, yes, I want to go home; O, push along, believers, O, yes, &c. Dere’s no hard trials, O, yes, &c. Dere’s no whips a-crackin’, O, yes, &c. My brudder on de wayside, O, yes, &c. O, push along, my brudder, O, yes, &c. Where dere’s no stormy weather, O, yes, &c. Dere’s no tribulation, O, yes, &c.” Down in the Valley
“We’ll run and never tire, We’ll run and never tire, We’ll run and never tire, Jesus set poor sinners free. Way down in de valley, Who will rise and go with me? You’ve heern talk of Jesus, Who set poor sinners free. “De lightnin’ and de flashin’, De lightnin’ and de flashin’ De lightnin’ and de flashin’ Jesus set poor sinners free.
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I can’t stand de fire. (Thrice.) Jesus set poor sinners free, De green trees a-flamin’. (Thrice.) Jesus set poor sinners free, Way down in de valley, Who will rise and go with me? You’ve heern talk of Jesus Who set poor sinners free.” Cry Holy
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“Cry holy, holy! Look at de people dat is born of God. And I run down de valley, and I run down to pray, Says, look at de people dat is born of God. When I get dar, Cappen Satan was dar, Says, look at, &c. Says, young man, young man, dere’s no use for pray, Says, look at, &c. For Jesus is dead, and God gone away, Says, look at, &c. And I made him out a liar and I went my way, Says, look at, &c. Sing holy, holy! “O, Mary was a woman, and she had a one Son, Says, look at, &c. And de Jews and de Romans had him hung, Says, look at, &c. Cry holy, holy! “And I tell you, sinner, you had better had pray, Says, look at, &c. For hell is a dark and dismal place, Says, look at, &c. And I tell you, sinner, and I wouldn’t go dar! Says, look at, &c. Cry holy, holy! “In de mornin’, In de mornin’, Chil’en? Yes, my Lord!
from Negro Spirituals 423 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Don’t you hear de trumpet sound? If I had a-died when I was young, I never would had de race for run. Don’t you hear de trumpet sound? “O Sam and Peter was fishin’ in de sea, And dey drop de net and follow my Lord. Don’t you hear de trumpet sound? “Dere’s a silver spade for to dig my grave And a golden chain for to let me down. Don’t you hear de trumpet sound? In de mornin’, In de mornin’, Chil’en? Yes, my Lord! Don’t you hear de trumpet sound?”
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The Ship of Zion
“Dis de good ole ship o’ Zion, Dis de good ole ship o’ Zion, Dis de good ole ship o’ Zion, And she’s makin’ for de Promise Land. She hab angels for de sailors, (Thrice.) And she’s, &c. And how you know dey’s angels? (Thrice.) And she’s, &c. Good lord, shall I be de one? (Thrice.) And she’s, &c. “Dat ship is out a-sailin’, sailin’, sailin’, And she’s, &c. She’s a-sailin’ mighty steady, steady, steady, And she’s, &c. She’ll neither reel nor totter, totter, totter, And she’s, &c. She’s a-sailin’ away cold Jordan, Jordan, Jordan, And she’s, &c. King Jesus is de captain, captain, captain, And she’s making for de Promise Land.”
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We’ll Soon Be Free
“We’ll soon be free, We’ll soon be free, We’ll soon be free, When de Lord will call us home. My brudder, how long, My brudder, how long, My brudder, how long, ’Fore we done sufferin’ here? It won’t be long (Thrice.) ’Fore de Lord will call us home. We’ll walk de miry road (Thrice.) Where pleasure never dies. We’ll walk de golden street (Thrice.) Where pleasure never dies. My brudder, how long (Thrice.) ’Fore we done sufferin’ here? We’ll soon be free (Thrice.) When Jesus sets me free. We’ll fight for liberty (Thrice.) When de Lord will call us home.”
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A n onymou s SONG OF THE BALD MOUNTAIN WITCHES & MAGIC NYMPHS [Russian] 1
Kumara Nich, nich, pasalam, bada. Eschochomo, lawassa, schibboda. Kumara A.a.o.—o.o.o.—i.i.i.—e.e.e.—u.u.u.—ye.ye.ye. Aa, la ssob, li li ssob lu lu ssob. Schunschan Wichoda, kssara, gujatun, gujatun, etc. .
Song of the Bald Mountain Witches 425 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
2
io, ia,—o—io, ia, zok, io, ia, pazzo! io, ia, pipazzo! Sookatjema, soossuoma, nikam, nissam, scholda. Paz, paz, paz, paz, paz, paz, paz, paz! Pinzo, pinzo, pinzo, dynsa. Schono, tschikodam, wikgasa, mejda. Bouopo, chondyryamo, boupo, galpi. Ruachado, rassado, ryssado, zalyemo. io, ia, o. io, ia, zok. io nye zolk, io ia zolk. Wordless northern Russian incantations from an 1836 gathering, recorded by I. Sakharov & brought to later attention by Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov.
FIVE DREAM WORKS, FROM COLERIDGE TO FREUD The dream is an involuntary art of poetry. JE AN PAU L
These were once dreams; they are now signs of poetry. M AU R I CE B LANCH OT
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge: from The Notebooks
Wednesd. Morn. 3 °clock, Dec. 13, 1803. Bad dreams / How often of a sort / at the university—a mixture of Xts Hospital Church / escapes there—lose myself / trust to two People, one Maim’d, one unknown / insulted by a fat sturdy Boy of about 14, like a Bacchus / who dabs a flannel in my face, (or rather soft hair brown Shawl stuff) (was this a flannel Night-cap?) he attacks me / I call to my Friends—they come & join in the Hustle against me—out rushes a university Harlot, who insists on my going with her / offer her a shilling—seem to get away a moment / when she overtakes me again / I am not to go to another while she is “biting”—these were her words /—this will not satisfy her / I sit down on a broad open plain of rubbish with rails & a street beyond / & call out—whole Troops of people in sight—now [?cannot] awake.—Wind & the IJĮ ĮȚįȠiÇĮ pİȞıȚȜȚĮ & somewhat painful /—but what wonderful wanderings thro’ the Hall, with bad Portraits of the Emperor of Russia, the Hall belonging to the E.—the wanderings thro’ Streets, the noticing the Complex side of a noble building, & saying to my Guides “it will be long before I shall find my way here—I must endeavor to remember this” / the turning up a Lane with wall & magnificent Trees (like a quiet
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Park-garden wall). In the early part of the Dream, Boyer, & two young Students, & R. Allen: Legrice & I quizzing / N.B. arrogant sense of intellectual superiority under circumstances of depression, but no envy /— “Obsonant” The Harlot in white with her open Bosom certainly was the Cambridge Girl, —One thing noticeable in an after Dream / a little weak contemptible wretch offering his Services, & I (as before afraid to refuse them) literally & distinctly remembered a former Dream, in which I had suffered most severely, this wretch leaping on me, & grasping my Scrotum /—I therefore most politely assured him of the 3 guineas, but I meant only to get rid of him /—Again too the slight pain in my side produced a fellow knuckling me there /—My determination to awake, I dream that I got out of bed, & volition in dream to scream, which I actually to[o] did, from that volition / & the strange visual Distortions of all the bed Cloaths, some lying as on a form frame toward the fire / some one way, some another / all which, I in my dream explained as the effects of an my eyes being half-opened, & still affected by Sleep / in an half upright posture struggling, as I thought, against involuntary sinking back into Sleep, & consequent suffocation / twas then I screamed, by will / & immediately after really awoke / Mary Shelley: The King of Cats, a Ghost Narrative
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After M. G. Lewis
A gentleman journeying towards the house of a friend, who lived on the skirts of an extensive forest, in the east of Germany, lost his way. He wandered for some time among the trees, when he saw a light at a distance. On approaching it he was surprised to observe that it proceeded from the interior of a ruined monastery. Before he knocked at the gate he thought it proper to look through the window. He saw a number of cats assembled round a small grave, four of whom were at that moment letting down a coffin with a crown upon it. The gentleman startled at this unusual sight, and, imagining that he had arrived at the retreats of fiends or witches, mounted his horse and rode away with the utmost precipitation. He arrived at his friend’s house at a late hour, who sate up waiting for him. On his arrival his friend questioned him as to the cause of the traces of agitation visible in his face. He began to recount his adventures after much hesitation, knowing that it was scarcely possible that his friend should give faith to his relation. No sooner had he mentioned the coffin with the crown upon it, than his friend’s cat, who seemed to have been lying asleep before the fire, leaped up, crying out, “Then I am king of the cats”; and then scrambled up the chimney, and was never seen more.
Five Dream Works: Mary Shelley 427 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Gerard de Nerval: from Aurelia, or Dream and Life
As everybody knows, one never sees the sun in one’s dreams, even though one is often aware of a light far more luminous. Objects and bodies have a radiance all their own. I saw myself in a small park with a long row of arbours, whose arches were heavy with bunches of white and black grapes; as the lady who was guiding me moved beneath these bowers, the latticed shadows cast by the trellises again caused her body and garments to fluctuate before my eyes. She at last emerged from under the arbours, and we found ourselves in an open area where one could still see the faint traces of the ancient lanes that had once cut through here crosswise. The grounds had not been tended for many years, and fresh growths of clematis, hop, honeysuckle, jasmine, ivy and yellow creeper had sprouted all over the place, looping their fast-growing vines around the trees. Branches loaded with fruit brushed the ground and several garden flowers, having reverted to the wild, were blooming amid clumps of weeds. Stands of poplar, acacia and pine rose here and there, and within their groves were glimpses of statues blackened by time. I saw before me a mound of ivy-covered rock from which a freshwater spring gushed, its pretty plash echoing off a pool of still water half-veiled by large waterlilies. The lady I was following, her slender figure advancing at a rhythm that caused the folds of her shot taffeta dress to shimmer, twined her bare arm around a long stalk of hollyhock; then, in a bright shaft of light, she began to grow so gigantic that the entire garden took on her shape; the flowers and the trees became the rosettes and flounces of her dress, while her face and arms imprinted their outlines on the purple clouds of the sky. I lost sight of her as she went through this transfiguration, for she seemed to be vanishing into her own immensity. “No! Don’t disappear!” I shouted after her. “All of nature is dying with you.” As I uttered these words, I fought my way through the bramble, as if in pursuit of the expanding shade who was eluding my grasp, but I stumbled against a crumbling wall, at the foot of which lay the sculpted bust of a woman. Picking it up, I was convinced it was hers . . . I recognized the features I adored, and as I glanced around me, I saw that the garden now looked like a graveyard. Voices were saying: “The Universe lies in night!” Translation from French by Richard Sieburth
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Georg Büchner: from Lenz
His condition had in the meantime become more hopeless, all the peace he had derived from the nearness of Oberlin and the tranquility of the valley had vanished; the world he had wanted to benefit from had a gaping rip in it, he had no hate, no love, no hope, a horrible emptiness, and yet a tormented desire to fill it. He had nothing. Whatever he did, he did in full self-awareness, and yet some inner instinct drove him onward. When he was alone he felt so terribly lonely he constantly spoke to himself aloud, called out, then grew afraid again, it seemed to him as if the voice of a stranger had spoken to him. He often faltered in conversation, he was seized by indescribable anxiety, he had mislaid the end of his sentences; then he thought he should hold on to the last word uttered and go on talking, only with great effort did he suppress this urge. The good people were deeply alarmed when sometimes he was sitting among them in quiet moments and speaking freely and then began stammering and an indescribable anxiety descended over his features and he would violently grab at the arms of the persons sitting closest to him and only then return to his senses by and by. When he was alone or reading, things got even worse, at times all his mental activity would fix upon a single idea; if he thought about another person, or vividly pictured them, it was as if he became that person, he grew completely confused, and yet at the same time he felt the constant urge to deliberately manipulate everything around him in his mind; nature, other people, Oberlin alone excepted, everything as in a dream, cold; he amused himself by standing houses on their roofs, dressing and undressing people, coming up with the most outlandish pranks. At times he felt an irresistible urge to carry the thing out, and then he made horrid faces. Once he was sitting next to Oberlin, the cat lying across from them on a chair, suddenly his eyes locked into a stare, he fixed them upon the animal, then he slowly edged out of his chair, as did the cat, bewitched by his gaze, horribly frightened, bristling with fear, Lenz hissing back at it, his face horribly contorted, the two going at each other as if in desperation, Madame Oberlin finally getting up to pull them apart. Which again caused him to feel deeply ashamed. The incidents during the night reached a horrific pitch. Only with the greatest effort did he fall asleep, having tried at length to fill the horrible void. Then he fell into a dreadful state between sleeping and waking; he bumped into something ghastly, hideous, madness took hold of him, he sat up, screaming violently, bathed in sweat, and only gradually found himself again. He had to begin with the simplest things in order to come back to himself. In fact he was not the one doing this but rather a pow-
Five Dream Works: Georg Büchner 429 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
erful instinct for self-preservation, it was as if he were double, the one half attempting to save the other, calling out to itself; he told stories, he recited poems out loud, wracked with anxiety, until he came to his senses. Translation from German by Richard Sieburth
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Sigmund Freud: from The Dream-Work
Old Brücke must have set me some task. Strangely enough, it related to a dissection of the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and legs, which I saw before me as though in the dissecting-room, but without noticing their absence in myself and also without a trace of any gruesome feeling. Louise N. was standing beside me and doing the work with me. The pelvis had been eviscerated, and it was visible now in its superior, now in its inferior, aspect, the two being mixed together. Thick flesh-colored protuberances (which, in the dream itself, made me think of haemorrhoids) could be seen. Something which lay over it and was like crumpled silver-paper had also to be carefully fished out. I was then once more in possession of my legs and was making my way through the town. But I was tired and I took a cab. To my astonishment the cab drove in through the door of a house, which opened and allowed it to pass along a passage that turned a corner at its end and led into the open air again. Finally I was making a journey through a changing landscape with an Alpine guide who was carrying my belongings. Part of the way he carried me too, out of consideration for my tired legs. The ground was boggy; we went round the edge; people were sitting on the ground like Red Indians or gypsies—among them a girl. Before this I had been making my own way forward over the slippery ground with a constant feeling of surprise that I was able to do it so well after the dissection. At last we reached a small wooden house at the end of which was an open window. There the guide set me down and laid two wooden boards, which were standing ready, upon the window-sill, so as to bridge the chasm which had to be crossed over from the window. At that point I really became frightened about my legs, but instead of the expected crossing, I saw two grown-up men lying on wooden benches that were along the walls of the hut, and what seemed to be two children sleeping beside them. It was as though what was going to make the crossing possible was not the boards but the children. I awoke in terror. Translation from German by James Strachey
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C ha rles D a r w in
1809–1882
from T H E O R I G I N O F S P E C I E S
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It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin 431 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
A
S E C O N D
G A L L E R Y
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From Hugo & Lönnrot to Swinburne & Mallarmé
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
Vict or Hu go
1802–1885
T H E G R AV E A N D T H E R O S E
The Grave said to the Rose, “What of the dews of dawn, Love’s flower, what end is theirs?” “And what of spirits flown, The souls whereon doth close The tomb’s mouth unawares?” The Rose said to the Grave. The Rose said, “In the shade From the dawn’s tears is made A perfume faint and strange, Amber and honey sweet.” “And all the spirits fleet Do suffer a sky-change, More strangely than the dew, To God’s own angels new,” The Grave said to the Rose. Translation from French by Andrew Lang
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T H E S LO P E O F R E V E R I E
Friends, never delve into the dreams you cherish; Leave the soil of your flowering plains untouched; Whenever slumbering oceans rise before you, Swim at the surface, or play on the shore— Because thought is a dark thing! An insensible Slope links the visible world with the unseen; Its curve goes deep, and when you travel downwards It stretches out, extending endlessly; Often you meet with some fatal enigma, And return from the unknown journey pale! The other day it had been raining (summer Has been eclipsed by rain and storm this year, And May, whose glorious sunlight so allures us, Is wearing April’s mask of tears and smiles).
435 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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I raised the Gothic-colored window-blind, and Gazed at the trees and flowers far away. On the green of the lawn, the sun was toying With raindrops, and my open window brought Up from the garden, for my joyous spirit, A noise of romping boys and amorous birds. Paris, the great elms, houses, domes, and cottages Drifted before my eyes in the rich light Of this May star, whose lovely radiance lit up Diamonds tipping every blade of grass. I made no attempt to resist this threefold harmony, Spring, childhood, dawn, combined in my retreat; The Seine, like me, was nonchalantly letting Its scarlet tide follow its bent; the sun Was atomizing, on these shores, the river’s Water in vapors, and my thought in dreams. Then, in my mind, I saw my friends around me— Not indistinctly, but exactly as I see them come at evening, grave and loyal: You and your paintbrushes with sparkling tips, You letting loose your wild and flying verses, While all of us gather to hear or watch. Yes, every one was there—I saw their faces, Even those who have traveled far away. And after that, those who have died were visible, Just as they used to look when they too lived. When the eyes of my mind had, for some moments, Studied this family crowding round my hearth, I saw their faces blur and waver; slowly They paled, their colorless foreheads all dissolved, And, like a brook running into a great lake, They vanished round me into a vast crowd. A nameless crowd! steps, voices, eyes—a chaos! Those who had never yet been seen or known, Everyone living!—cities buzzing audibly More than American woods or hives of bees, Caravans camping on the burning desert, Sailors strewn on God’s ocean in their boats Plowing a path from one world to another, A bold bridge on the ship-capsizing sea—
436 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Just as a spider spins between two oak-trees Her silver threads that flutter in the air. The two poles! the whole world! the earth, the ocean, Dark-cratered Etnas and snow-headed Alps, Spring, summer, autumn, winter all together, Small valleys going down from land to sea Where they turn into gulfs, and capes—from ocean To countryside—spread out in mountain chains, And immense continents, green, misty, golden, Incessantly devoured by mighty waves, Everything—as a landscape in a dark room Lies all reflected with its shimmering streams, Its travelers, its fogs drifting like an eiderdown— Everything, in my dark mind, moved and lived! Then, riveting my eyes and thoughts with everGreater attention to the thousand scenes Opening before me all the time, in every Direction, at the winds’ blast and days’ tread, Sometimes I saw, rising from the waves suddenly Beside the living cities of two realms, Other towns whose façades were strange and alien, Desolate sepulchers from vanished times, Piled high with cluttered things, turrets and pyramids; Their feet and brows plunged in the seas and clouds. Some of them came from underneath the cities Where living people buzz and bustle still; So, from past ages to our present era, I could count three distinct layers of Rome. And while the cities of the living, raising Their troubled voices, all resounded with Murmuring nations or battalions marching, These cities of the past, silent and shut— No sounds within them, and no smoke above them— Lay still, and seemed like beehives without bees. I waited. There was a loud noise. The dead tribes In these funereal towns opened their gates; I saw them start to move like living people, And stir up even more dust in the wind. Then I saw the inside of ancient Babylons, Carthages, Tyres, Jerusalems, and Thebes—
Victor Hugo 437 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Turrets and aqueducts, pillars and pyramids— Where generations constantly arose. So I embraced it all: Earth and Cybele; Antiquity and novelty; the past, The present day; the long-dead and the living; Our whole race—as on judgment day. All spoke At once, expressed themselves: the runes of Irmensul, The sphinx of Egypt, the Pelasgian Of Orpheus, the Etruscan of Evander, The new world’s voice as ancient as the old.
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What did I see? how could it be depicted?— What can I say? It was an edifice Made out of times and places piled together; No boundaries or surroundings could be seen; On all its heights, tribes, peoples, nations, human Workers in thousands, left their vestiges Everywhere, labored day and night, climbed, scattered, Spoke their own tongues and failed to understand Each other’s. Through the flights of this world-Babel I searched for someone who could answer me. Night and the crowd both, in this dreadful reverie, Descended, and both darkened; and within These fathomless regions, the more numerous the Human race was, the deeper was the gloom. Everything became vague and doubtful; only A puff of air went by from time to time As if to show me the whole mighty anthill, And opened clefts of light within the black Far off, as a wind-blast whitens the spray on Troubled waves, or carves billows in the wheat. And soon the darkness deepened all around me, The skyline vanished, the shapes disappeared, People and things, creatures and spirits fluttered Before my breath; I became terrified. I was alone. Everything fled. The firmament Was somber. Only, far off, through the shade, I could see serried dark waves on some ocean— Enumerations piled in space and time.
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I longed to sound that double sea of time and Space, where the human ship goes to and fro Eternally—to touch its sand, to study it And search it and explore and fathom it, And bring back some strange rich thing, and say whether Its bed is made of rock or mud. So then My spirit dived into this unknown ocean, Swam down, naked, alone, to the abyss, Pressing on from ineffable to invisible— Suddenly it came back with a great cry, Dazzled, stunned, gasping, staggered and astonished: In the depths it had found eternity. Translation from French by E. H. Blackmore & A. M. Blackmore
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RUSSIA 1812
The snow fell, and its power was multiplied. For the first time the Eagle bowed its head— dark days! Slowly the Emperor returned— behind him Moscow! Its onion domes still burned. The snow rained down in blizzards—rained and froze. Past each white waste a further white waste rose. None recognized the captains or the flags. Yesterday the Grand Army, today its dregs! No one could tell the vanguard from the flanks. The snow! The hurt men struggled from the ranks, hid in the bellies of dead horses, in stacks of shattered caissons. By the bivouacs, one saw the picket dying at his post, still standing in his saddle, white with frost, the stone lips frozen to the bugle’s mouth! Bullets and grapeshot mingled with the snow, that hailed . . . The Guard, surprised at shivering, march in a dream now; ice rimes the gray mustache. The snow falls, always snow! The driving mire submerges; men, trapped in that white empire, have no more bread and march on barefoot—gaps! They were no longer living men and troops, but a dream drifting in a fog, a mystery,
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mourners parading under the black sky. The solitude, vast, terrible to the eye, was like a mute avenger everywhere, as snowfall, floating through the quiet air, buried the huge army in a huge shroud. Could anyone leave this kingdom? A crowd— each man, obsessed with dying, was alone. Men slept—and died! The beaten mob sludged on, ditching the guns to burn their carriages. Two foes. The North, the Czar. The North was worse. In hollows where the snow was piling up, one saw whole regiments fallen asleep. Attila’s dawn, Cannaes of Hannibal! The army marching to its funeral! Litters, wounded, the dead, deserters—swarm, crushing the bridges down to cross a stream. They went to sleep ten thousand, woke up four. Ney, bringing up the former army’s rear, hacked his horse loose from three disputing Cossacks . . . All night, the qui vive? The alert! Attacks; retreats! White ghosts would wrench away our guns, or we would see dim, terrible squadrons, circles of steel, whirlpools of savages, rush sabering through the camp like dervishes. And in this way, whole armies died at night. The Emperor was there, standing—he saw. This oak already trembling from the axe, watched his glories drop from him branch by branch: chiefs, soldiers. Each one had his turn and chance— they died! Some lived. These still believed his star, and kept their watch. They loved the man of war, this small man with his hands behind his back, whose shadow, moving to and fro, was black behind the lighted tent. Still believing, they accused their destiny of lese-majesté. His misfortune had mounted on their back. The man of glory shook. Cold stupefied him, then suddenly he felt terrified. Being without belief, he turned to God: “God of armies, is this the end?” he cried.
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And then at last the expiation came, as he heard some one call him by his name, some one half-lost in shadow, who said, “No, Napoleon.” Napoleon understood, restless, bareheaded, leaden, as he stood before his butchered legions in the snow. Translation from French by Robert Lowell
from T H E A R T O F B E I N G A G R A N D F A T H E R
What the Public Says five years old
Lions, that’s wolves. six years old
Bad things, animals do. five years old
Yes. six years old
Little birds, they’re dirty things—they sin. five years old
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Yes. six years old [looking at the snakes]
There’s the snakes. . . . five years old [looking at them closely]
They got a snakeskin skin. six years old
Monkey’ll get your hat. five years old [looking at the tiger]
That’s a wolf too. six years old
Let’s see the bear before they make him doze. five years old [looking at the bear]
That’s nice!
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six years old
It climbs. five years old [looking at the elephant]
Inside his mouth, he’s got Horns. six years old
I like elephants—they’re big. seven years old [interrupting their study of the elephant, and dragging them off ]
Hey, watch out!—he’s going to hit you with his nose.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
The Immaculate Conception
Everywhere, childhood. (The scene is the Tuileries.) Numbers of Georges and Jeannes; numbers of Virgin Marys; One suckling, and one sleeping; in the tree, a nightingale; A boy, big, a philosopher already, wanting to see Punch and Judy; A girl venturing her teeth into an apple; The lovely dawn of humanity in toto; Puppets and sunrise; runnings and chatterings and laughter, Conversations with Dolly (who is highly intelligent), Eatings of cakes and skippings over ropes. I’m asked a sou for the poor (let’s make it a Franc); “Thank you, grandpa!” and then the game is resumed; There’s climbing, and dancing, and singing. And how blue the sky is! “You’re the horse.’’ “All right.” “You pull the coach, I’ll be the coachman. Left . . . right . . . stop.” “Let’s play puss-in-the-corner.” “No, blind-man’s-buff.” Their sunlight warms the old man on his bench. Infantile mouths are full of murmurs, They are bright red, their breath is fresher than May’s rose-trees in the valleys, Sunrise is shimmering in their sacred hair. It’s all delightful.—No, it’s all disgusting! It’s sin! Read our missals and epistles, Abbé Pluche and apostle Paul (as Trublet annotated him)
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Not to mention Veuillot, Everything that has authority on this planet. One conception is immaculate, and one only; All cribs are black, except the one stellar cradle; Marriage, the mighty bed of the chasm, is tainted. Where people talk of “love,” heaven’s response is “sin!” All things are sullied, anyone who denies it is an atheist, Yes, every girl is Shame, with one solitary exception.
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And so this mass of children is a mass of felonies! The bird that builds its nest is building evil. Darkness is sniggering over the tender brood; the Blessed Lord winks at the devil, Says to him, “Go on, just take ’em!” So then, that innocent thing over there is my offense, O heaven! That whirl of light and joy called Childhood—that swarm of souls Sent to us by mysterious April-ripened love— Those constellations of angels in our darkness— The rosy mouth, the blonde head, The eye clear as water, The little feet scampering through the lawn, The whole lovable throng extending to the horizon And seemingly catered for by the great smiling sun— It’s all a monstrous writhing mass of wickedness! Sin—sin! In the newborn, lies evil! A sinister insult! O unfortunate priests! There they are, in the heart of the glorious sunrise, and yet they are gloomy; Behind them dangles the shapeless precipice of the shadows, And dingy night is veiled in the folds of their dogmas. Couples are bad, their fruit is vile, their seed is corrupting; Mothers are carrying ’round the children that are defiling them. They’re passing sentence, those priests, on the crime that we know as Life. Anathema! not one nuptial, not even their own, not even Their own altar is pure. Anathema! on The foreheads of women they’re casting dreadful aspersions; Crown one, and you vilify all. Lunacy! They themselves are the disobedient ones. Spittle of some kind is mingled with their incense. The insult goes deep:
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They are cursing the eye that says “I see you,” the heart that says “I love you,” And the festive soul and the flowering tree and the fiery sunrise, And the immense eternal joy of God calling out “I am the Father!”—flagrantly and unstintingly Sowing children on earth, and stars in the heavens! Translation from French by E. H. Blackmore & A. M. Blackmore
from G O D
The Threshold of the Abyss
..................................... ..................................... I could see, far above my head, a black speck.
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It came and went, like a fly on the ceiling. The darkness was sublime. Man, when he thinks, Is winged; and the abyss was drawing me Into its night steadily more and more, Like seaweed dragged by a mysterious tide, Toward this black speck drifting in the depths; I felt I was already flying off, When I was stopped by someone telling me: “Stay.” At the same instant, a hand spread out. I was already high up in the dim cloud. And I could see a strange figure appearing: A creature strewn with mouths and wings and eyes, Alive, vast, almost gloomy, almost radiant. He was in flight; some of his wings were bald. The lashes of his fulvous eyes were flickering, Sending out more noise than a flock of birds; And his wings made a sound of mighty waters. Now he resembled animal, now spirit— Now fleshly nightmare, now apostle’s vision,
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Depending on which side he showed. He seemed, In the air where my flight had overtaken him, To be producing, now light, and now darkness. He watched me calmly in the dismal mists. And I sensed something in him that was human. “Who are you then, to bar my way,” I said, “You half-seen creature shaken by these fogs?” He answered: “I am one of the feathers of night, The somber bird composed of clouds and light-rays, The spread black peacock of the constellations.” “Your name?” I asked. Said he:
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“To you, a drifter Far from the reasons, seeing just one side of things, I am the Human Spirit. My name is Legion. I am the swarm of sounds, the epidemic Of living words that pass from soul to soul. I am the Breath. I am smoke, cinder, flame, Sometimes brute instinct, sometimes divine impetus. I am the vast invincible vain passerby Called Wind; my words contain both star and spark, Because I am the breath of all—the breath, Not the mouth; breeze inflates me and deflates me; And when I have breathed out, I have said everything. I am dwarf, giant, true, false, muffled, resonant, Public in darkness, people at dawn, saying Both ‘I’ and ‘we’: I affirm, we deny. I am the flux of voices and opinions, The phantom of year, month, and week Formed by the fleeing human cloud. Within me, contradiction is incessantly Turning its hidden wheel: I am its Ixion. I, being Demos, walk, wait, roam, weep, laugh, Deny, believe: I am the demon Mob.
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I am the neutral spirit Midst—I see no Satan below, no Lord above; My number? Multitude! my being? Boundary! I oppose excess knowledge, search, discovery, Investigation, or achievement; I Am Everyone, strange enemy of Everything. I am the law that stops, constrains, hems, shuts in What goes beyond the bounds of Nature— Unbreathable clear ether on the heights; In the mute unrelenting chasm, heaviness. I am the one who says: ‘There lies your sphere. Stay; wait. Rocks, people, angels, animals— All have their bounds; without stretching their present shape, They must submit to laws tied and crossed round them. I am Limit and Center; I Guard all the gates of all the worlds. Go back.’ I take, seize, circumscribe, and quell all things. Being scared of extremes, I mistrust Folly To some extent, and Wisdom very much. I keep tight rein on the dog Impulse and The lion Zeal—harness them to humanity, To reach the Real without leaving the Proper. Since I am breath and weight, no one escapes me: All float as spirits, and all fall as bodies. Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Mirrors are snares—and are dulled by my breath. I protect thinkers—those poor fragile flies— From the intoxications of the infinite. When the blue sky takes people by the wings, I hold their feet. I am perfume and poison, Good and bad, sound and silence. In the height I am midday; in the depth I am midnight; I come and go; I am the dark alternative; I am the hour that strikes the gloom, and brings out Twelve apostles by day, by night twelve Caesars. My arts restrain the Great within the Beautiful. Men have known me—a mixed, almost profane Spirit—as Pyrrho, Lucian, Democritus, Aesop and Aristotle, Aristophanes,
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Diogenes, Timon, Pliny the Elder, Plautus, Swift, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Cervantes, Voltaire. I am the earth’s immense resultant: Reason.” There I was, pensive, troubled, silent; I listened, and the thing went on: “To us the mystery is revealed. We are part of it. I am a ghost to the abyss; to humans, I am the voice that says: ‘Go, but know where.’ I roam along the guardrails fringing nothingness. I warn.”
.
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The dreadful thing, soaring the unreachable shadows, Added: “No one should transgress his reality, Or go past what is possible for him. But since you have so rashly reached this darkness, And I have met you, I shall make an exception. Whatever your intent may be, I shall not hinder you; why, I shall help you! I do as I please, being of the infinite; My hand can shut all, hence can open all: The one who plumbs the night can plumb the daybreak, And what you want to have, I shall allow. What do you ask for? Speak.” And I, bent reed, Vile wisp of straw, kept silent, in sacred terror. “You scarcely would have come here,” said the phantom, “Without some question. Well? Do you want haloes, Flames, light-rays? What do you want from this chasm Where the fair wild dove Cloud flocks when I look down? Do you want to probe the serpent, or the worm? Do you want to be borne with me into space? I shall obey: speak up. Should you be shown How dawn comes to the meeting of flower scent
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And birdsong? Should we take the thunderstorm By its nose, should we ride the blast together, When the wind-pack is running down the sea foam, When archer Thunderbolt and huntsman Lightning Pierce the scaled surface of the sea with arrows? Should we two dip, full-handed, into terrible Illusion, into the invisible? Or should we turn our eyes on secret things— Watch nature from nearby, while she is propagating In the immense penumbra? Are you curious About those somber birth-pangs? Do you want To look inside the seed, to see how reveries Or rocks, slumbers or surges, are engendered, To catch creation in the act—the mother Of both reality and fantasy? Well? Do you want to hear the sound of birth, To watch an Eden sprout, to touch the freshness Of a new sphere, a budding globe, a light-source? Or see Idea, dazzling, proud, emerging To seek her bridegroom Genius in the far skies? Speak: do you want to see, in night or destiny, Some star or soul arising? You can choose. Ask, question, state your claim; speak: I am waiting. Should I recapture a maned comet—I Can do it—as the nights all flee, and bring it Back to you, quivering and brilliant? What do you want? To see ten—twenty—sixty Suns rise at once, in sixty universes? To see, at the gates of the wide-open heavens, Daybreak unhitching the Bear’s seven horses? Or must the worlds that turn by everlasting miracle Stop for a moment in the dark where day is born And get their breath back, So that you have the time to study them? Speak.” And the spirit, dropping his phalena-wings, Paused. The air flickered beneath my reckless feet. The bitter darkness—staring at us both, Starring itself with distant aureoles—
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Could hear this somber interchange of speeches Between strange spirit and bedazzled human: “No, none of those.” “What do you want, then?” “HIM.” “What?” cried the wraith. Everything vanished; The vague light that was gleaming in the cloud Sank, and the sky grew blacker than Arctic nights. I heard a burst of laughter, and saw nothing. Translation from French by E. H. Blackmore & A. M. Blackmore
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MA DESTINÉE
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COMMENTARY
One day, the entirety of my work will form an indivisible whole. I am making—like many other poets, I might add; the critics of the future will understand this—I am making a Bible, not a divine Bible, but a human one. A multiform book summing up an age—that is what I shall leave behind me.
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V. H.
(1) And it’s this ambition, when set beside the poetry itself, that marks him as the first & greatest of the belated French Romantics. His range in that sense was enormous—an attempt, as with a number of the Romantics & others in their wake, at a global perspective & a search for the means to bring it across. As a mark of his productivity he composed, in addition to plays such as Hernani & novels such as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame that made for his greatest celebrity, some 160,000 lines of poetry, much of it still unpublished at the time of his death. The structural procedures (not trivial) opened up forms of irregular versification, still within the frame of fixed meter & rhyme but that sometimes brought strong condemnation. Yet the real breakthroughs were in his work’s unbounded content & its often contradictory perspectives, as in his massive “trilogy” (The Legend of the Ages, The End of Satan, & God, the latter two left incomplete & posthumously published) of which God (Dieu) is the culminating section. For that last series he drew on a panoply of religious beliefs & disbeliefs (Christianity, Islam, assorted paganisms & polytheisms, satanism, atheism) in all of which he participated empathically & as a full-blooded act of the imagination. Along with these came a body of witnessing poems (the equivalents in a sense of Les Misérables) & other political/revolutionary poems & tracts that brought him into twenty years of voluntary exile (on Jersey & Guernsey in the British channel islands) from the oppressive regime of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. An exemplary & remarkably self-aware figure throughout, he upended the Romantic stereotype of the aging poet, moving from a conservative stance in youth to an increasingly radical one in middle & later life. (2) “I am the ogre, then—I am the scapegoat. In this chaotic age that wrings your withers, I trampled good taste and ye old ffrenche verse Under my feet; I, hideous creature, said: Let darkness be!—and voilà! there was darkness.” from “Reply to a Bill of Indictment,” translated by E. H. Blackmore & A. M. Blackmore
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Wrote Stéphane Mallarmé in tribute: “Pursuing his mysterious task, Hugo reduced all prose—philosophy, oratory, history—to poetry; and since he was himself poetry personified, he nearly abolished the philosopher’s, speaker’s, or historian’s right to self-expression. In that wasteland, with silence all around, he was a monument.” Or Jean Cocteau, jokingly but with an insight that holds: “Victor Hugo was a madman who believed that he was Victor Hugo.”
Elias L ön n rot
1802–1884
from K A L E V A L A
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In the Beginning
I have a good mind take into my head to start off singing begin reciting reeling off a tale of kin and singing a tale of kind. The words unfreeze in my mouth and the phrases are tumbling upon my tongue they scramble along my teeth they scatter. Brother dear, little brother fair one who grew up with me start off now singing with me begin reciting with me since we have got together since we have come from two ways! We seldom get together and meet each other on these poor borders the luckless lands of the North.
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Let’s strike hand to hand fingers into finger-gaps that we may sing some good things set some of the best things forth for those darling ones to hear for those with a mind to know among the youngsters rising among the people growing— those words we have got tales we have kindled from old Väinämöinen’s belt up from Ilmarinen’s forge from the tip of Farmind’s brand from the path of Joukahainen’s bow from the North’s furthest fields, from the heaths of Kalevala. My father used to sing them as he cut an axe handle; my mother taught them turning her distaff and I a child on the floor fidgeting before her knee a milk-bearded scamp a curd-mouthed toddler. The Sampo did not lack words nor did Louhi spells: the Sampo grew old with words and Louhi was lost with spells and with tales Vipunen died and Lemminkäinen with games. There are yet other words too and mysteries learned— snatched from the roadside plucked from the heather torn from the brushwood
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tugged from the saplings rubbed from a grass-head ripped from a footpath as I went herding as a child in the pastures on the honey-sweet hummocks on the golden knolls following black Buttercup beside Bouncy the brindled. The cold told a tale to me the rain suggested poems: another tale the winds brought the sea’s billows drove; the birds added words the treetops phrases. I wound them into a ball and arranged them in a coil slipped the ball into my sled and the coil into my sledge; I took it home in the sled in the sledge towards the kiln put it up in the shed loft in a little copper box. Long my tale’s been in the cold for ages has lain hidden: shall I take the tales out of the cold scoop the songs out of the frost bring my little box indoors the casket to the seat end under the famous roof beam under the fair roof shall I open the word-chest and unlock the box of tales unwind the top of the ball untie the knot of the coil?
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I will sing quite a good tale quite a fair one I’ll beat out after some rye bread and some barley beer. If beer is not brought and ale not offered I’ll sing from a leaner mouth after water I will lilt to cheer this evening of ours to honour the famous day or to amuse the morrow and to start the new morning.
.
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I heard it recited thus I knew how the tale was made: with us the nights come alone the days dawn alone, so was Väinämöinen born alone the eternal bard appeared from the woman who bore him from Air-daughter his mother. There was a lass, an air-girl a nice nature-daughter: she long remained holy for ever girlish in the air’s long yards on its level grounds. Her times grew weary and her life felt strange from being always alone living as a lass in the air’s long yards in the empty wastes. So now she steps further down
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launched herself upon the waves on the clear high seas upon the open expanse. There came a great gust of wind from the east nasty weather lashed the sea to foam whipped it into waves. The wind lulled the maid and the billow drove the lass about the blue main and the froth-capped waves; and the wind blew her womb full the sea makes her fat. She bore a hard womb a difficult bellyful seven hundred years nine ages of man; but no birth was born no creature was created. The lass rolled as the water-mother: she swims east, swims west swims north-west and south swims all the skylines in fiery birth-pangs in hard belly-woes; but no birth was born no creature was created. She weeps and whimpers; she uttered a word, spoke thus: “Woe, luckless me, for my days poor child, for my way of life: now I have come to something— for ever under the sky by the wind to be lulled, by billows driven on these wide waters
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upon these vast waves! Better ’twould have been to live as lass of the air than just now to toss about as water-mother: it is chilly for me to be here woeful for me to shiver in billows for me to dwell in the water to wallow. O Old Man, chief god upholder of all the sky come here when you are needed come this way when you are called: free a wench from a tight spot a woman from belly-throes; come quickly, arrive promptly most promptly where the need is!” A little time passed a moment sped by. Came a scaup, straightforward bird and it flaps about in search of a nesting-place working out somewhere to live. It flew east, flew west flew north-west and south but it finds no room not even the worst spot where it might build its nest take up residence. It glides, it hovers it thinks, considers: “Shall I build my cabin on the wind my dwelling on the billows? The wind will fell the cabin the billow will bear off my dwelling.” So then the water-mother the water-mother, air-lass
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raised her knee out of the sea her shoulderblade from the wave for the scaup a nesting-place sweet land to live on. That scaup, pretty bird glides and hovers; it spied the water-mother’s knee on the bluish main; thought it was a grass hummock a clump of fresh sward. It flutters, it glides and it lands on the kneecap. There it builds its nest laid its golden eggs: six eggs were of gold an iron egg the seventh. It began to hatch the eggs to warm the kneecap: it hatched one day, it hatched two soon it hatched a third as well. At that the water-mother the water-mother, air-lass feels that she is catching fire that her skin is smouldering; she thought her knee was ablaze all her sinews were melting. And she jerked her knee and she shook her limbs: the eggs rolled in the water sink into the sea’s billow; the eggs smashed to bits broke into pieces. The eggs don’t fall in the mud the fragments in the water. The bits changed into good things the pieces into fair things: an egg’s lower half
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became mother earth below an egg’s upper half became heaven above; the upper half that was yolk became the sun for shining the upper half that was white became the moon for gleaming; what in an egg was mottled became the stars in the sky what in an egg was blackish became the clouds of the air. Translation from Finnish by Keith Bosley
COMMENTARY
I left Lonkka early for Kivijärvi, where I changed horses to come back to Latvajärvi. I reached Latvajärvi on the 25th and spent that day and the next writing down all kinds of poems sung to me by an 80-year-old man. On the 27th, a Sunday, I asked the womenfolk of the village to gather. The house was soon full and after boiling a big kettle of water for tea for anyone who wanted any, we sang till evening. (E. L., diary, May 1, 1834) And again: All autumn I have been organizing a large collection of Finnish poems into a narrative poem I call “the Kalevala.” (Letter to J. F. Ticklen,
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November 28, 1834)
kalevala —Lönnrot’s transcription & rewriting of multiple traditional performance poems from the border region of eastern Finland & Russian Karelia into a Finnish “national epic.” väinämöinen—central figure of the Kalevala, who appears variously as god, hero, & shaman-poet. (1) Linked in the nineteenth century with movements of national discovery, the viable past moves from the Hellenic “classical” to encompass other poetries & places. (See comments on Macpherson’s Ossian, above.) As an example of “old ways” at the service of the emerging nation-state, Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1835, 1849) involved the gathering, rewriting, linking, & expansion of traditional oral poems into a Homeric-sized collage of fifty poems or “runes,” while often playing down the older numinosities in favor of a more “rational” narrative structure. What shows itself still—for all of that—is the remnant of a shamanistic performance poetry: “not a heroic epic in the usual sense of the term,” writes Felix Oinas, “but a shamanistic [one] in which great deeds are accomplished, not by feats of arms, but
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by magical means—by the power of words and incantations.” A process emerging from Romanticism that continues through early modernism into the workings of a later ethnopoetics. (For which, see A Book of Origins, above, along with other examples throughout the present volume.) On its own terms too, the reinvention &/or recovery of the epic voice—both national & personal—remained a central ambition of nineteenth-century Romanticism. (2) The oral performances from which Lönnrot drew as sometime witness were traditional in means & effects: a fixed measure (trochaic tetrameter lines—unstressed, unrhymed) &, like most traditional epics, a repertory of songs & phrases from which the singer drew freely in semi-improvised acts of reconstruction. The performances themselves were always musical, always antiphonally performed, by two men, “a lead singer and an assistant . . . ‘sit[ting] either side by side or facing each other, close enough to lock hands and knees . . . their bodies gently swaying . . . their expressions thoughtful and serious.’” (Thus translator Keith Bosley’s quotation from an eighteenth-century account of Finnish poet-singers, much like those in the section of Kalevala given here.) As with the singers themselves, Lönnrot’s art—in the act of writing it down & bringing it into literature—was like that of the Homeric performer or rhapsode—“literally a ‘stitcher together,’” as Bosley has it again, “of (presumably) separate poems into a performance, a rhapsody.” Or Kenneth Rexroth, in summary: “The most successful constructed myth in modern literature, and one of the most successful of all time.”
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T homas L ovell Bedd o e s
1803–1849
Whither should a student in the black arts, a journeyman magician, a Rosicrucian? Where is our country? You heard the herald this morning thrice invite all christian folk to follow the brave knight, Sir Wolfram, to the shores of Egypt, and there help to free from bondage his noble fellow in arms, Duke Melveric, whom, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, wild pagans captured. There, Joan, in that Sphynx land found Raimund Lully those splinters of the philosopher’s stone with which he made English Edward’s gold. There dwell hoary magicians, who have given up their trade and live sociably as crocodiles on the banks of the Nile. There can one chat with mummies in a pyramid, and breakfast on basilisk’s eggs. Thither then, Homonculus Mandrake, son of the great Paracelsus; languish no more in the ignorance, and weigh anchor for Egypt.
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D R E A M O F DY I N G
Shivering in fever, weak, and parched to sand, My ears, those entrances of word-dressed thoughts, My pictured eyes, and my assuring touch, Fell from me, and my body turned me forth From its beloved abode: then I was dead; And in my grave beside my corpse I sat, In vain attempting to return: meantime There came the untimely spectres of two babes, And played in my abandoned body’s ruins; They went away; and, one by one, by snakes My limbs were swallowed; and, at last, I sat With only one, blue-eyed, curled round my ribs, Eating the last remainder of my heart, And hissing to himself. O sleep, thou fiend! Thou blackness of the night! how sad and frightful Are these thy dreams!
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A CROCODILE
Hard by the lilied Nile I saw A duskish river-dragon stretched along, The brown habergeon of his limbs enamelled With sanguine almandines and rainy pearl: And on his back there lay a young one sleeping, No bigger than a mouse; with eyes like beads, And a small fragment of its speckled egg Remaining on its harmless, pulpy snout; A thing to laugh at, as it gaped to catch The baulking merry flies. In the iron jaws Of the great devil-beast, like a pale soul Fluttering in rocky hell, lightsomely flew A snowy trochilus, with roseate beak Tearing the hairy leeches from his throat.
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from D E A T H ’ S J E S T B O O K : T H R E E S O N G S
1. Isbrand’s Song
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Squats on a toad-stool under a tree A bodiless childfull of life in the gloom, Crying with frog voice, “What shall I be? Poor unborn ghost, for my mother killed me Scarcely alive in her wicked womb. What shall I be? shall I creep to the egg That’s cracking asunder yonder by Nile, And with eighteen toes And a snuff-taking nose Make an Egyptian crocodile? Sing, “Catch a mummy by the leg And crunch him with an upper jaw, Wagging tail and clenching claw; Take a bill-full from my craw, Neighbour raven, caw, O caw, Grunt, my crocky, pretty maw! And give a paw.” “Swine, shall I be you? Thou’rt a dear dog; But for a smile and kiss and pout, I much prefer your black-lipped snout, Little gruntless fairy hog, Godson of the hawthorn hedge. For when Ringwood snuffs me out And ’gins my tender paunch to grapple, Sing, ‘ ’Twixt your ancles visage wedge And roll up like an apple.’ “Serpent Lucifer, how do you do? Of your worms and your snakes I’d be one or two; For in this dear planet of wool and of leather ’Tis pleasant to need no shirt, breeches or shoe, And have arm, leg, and belly together. Then aches your head, or are you lazy? Sing, ‘Round your neck your belly wrap, Tail-a-top, and make your cap Any bee and daisy.’
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“I’ll not be a fool like the nightingale Who sits up all midnight without any ale, Making a noise with his nose; Nor a camel, although ’tis a beautiful back; Nor a duck, notwithstanding the music of quack, And the webby mud-patting toes. I’ll be a new bird with the head of an ass, Two pigs’ feet, two men’s feet, and two of a hen, Devil-winged, dragon-bellied, grave-jawed, because grass Is a beard that’s soon shaved and grows seldom again Before it is summer; so cow all the rest; The new Dodo is finished. O! come to my nest.” 2. A Song of the Deaths
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The Deaths, and the figures paired with them, come out of the walls, and dance fantastically to a rattling music, singing; some seat themselves at the table and drink and with mocking gestures, mask the feast, &c. Mummies and skeletons, out of your stones; Every age, every fashion, and figure of Death: The death of the giant with petrified bones; The death of the infant who never drew breath. Little and gristly, or bony and big, White and clattering, grassy and yellow; The partners are waiting, so strike up a jig, Dance and be merry, for Death’s a droll fellow. The emperor and empress, the king and the queen, The knight and the abbot, friar fat, friar thin, The gipsy and beggar, are met on the green; Where’s Death and his sweetheart? We want to begin. In circles, and mazes, and many a figure, Through clouds, over chimneys and cornfields yellow, We’ll dance and laugh at the red-nosed gravedigger, Who dreams not that Death is so merry a fellow. One with a scythe, who has stood sentinel, now sings: Although my old ear Hath neither hammer nor drum, Methinks I can hear Living skeletons come.
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The cloister re-echoes the call, And it frightens the lizard, And, like an old hen, the wall Cries “cluck! cluck! back to my gizzard; “ ’Tis warm, though it’s stony, “My chickens so bony.” So come let us hide, each with his bride, For the wicked are coming who have not yet died. The Deaths return to their places in the wall. 3. The Song That Wolfram Heard in Hell
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Old Adam, the carrion crow, The old crow of Cairo; He sat in the shower, and let it flow Under his tail and over his crest; And through every feather Leaked the wet weather; And the bough swung under his nest; For his beak it was heavy with marrow. Is that the wind dying? O no; It’s only two devils, that blow Through a murderer’s bones, to and fro, In the ghosts’ moonshine. Ho! Eve, my grey carrion wife, When we have supped on king’s marrow, Where shall we drink and make merry our life? Our nest it is queen Cleopatra’s skull, ’Tis cloven and cracked, And battered and hacked, But with tears of blue eyes it is full: Let us drink then, my raven of Cairo. Is that the wind dying? O no; It’s only two devils, that blow Through a murderer’s bones, to and fro, In the ghosts’ moonshine.
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DREAM-PEDLARY I
If there were dreams to sell, What would you buy? Some cost a passing bell; Some a light sigh, That shakes from Life’s fresh crown Only a roseleaf down. If there were dreams to sell, Merry and sad to tell, And the crier rung the bell, What would you buy? II
A cottage lone and still, With bowers nigh, Shadowy, my woes to still, Until I die. Such pearl from Life’s fresh crown Fain would I shake me down. Were dreams to have at will, This would best heal my ill, This would I buy.
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III
But there were dreams to sell, Ill didst thou buy; Life is a dream, they tell, Waking, to die. Dreaming a dream to prize, Is wishing ghosts to rise; And, if I had the spell To call the buried, well, Which one would I? IV
If there are ghosts to raise, What shall I call, Out of hell’s murky haze, Heaven’s blue hall?
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Raise my loved longlost boy To lead me to his joy. There are no ghosts to raise; Out of death lead no ways; Vain is the call. V
Know’st thou not ghosts to sue? No love thou hast. Else lie, as I will do, And breathe thy last. So out of Life’s fresh crown Fall like a rose-leaf down. Thus are the ghosts to woo; Thus are all dreams made true, Ever to last!
COMMENTARY
I ought to have been among other things a good poet; Life was too great a bore on one peg & that a bad one.
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T. L. B., following amputation of his leg after a first, botched suicide attempt
(1) Calling his favorite British Romantic poet, Shelley, an “Intellect ablaze with heavenly thoughts,” Beddoes in his own poetry also thought beyond the quotidian but not yet in heaven. The voices in his lyrics often stand on, or on the other side of, some life/death border, & the obsession with death rages throughout. At the same time the diction, like that of the Della Cruscans forty years earlier & the “Decadents” & Parnassians forty years after, is “enameled,” artificial. He pushes a Shelleyan Romanticism further from both the “heavenly” & the “natural” toward a strange, new mixture of Baudelairian “evil” (or that of Swinburne or of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market) & anticipates by some seventy-five years the archaic, tragic/mythic turbulence of the early Freudian unconscious: “My waking is a Titan’s dream, / Where a strange sun, long set, doth beam / Through Montezuma’s cypress bough . . . / Such antediluvian ocean’s stream, / Haunts shadowy my domestic mood.” His characteristic poetry is lyric, reminiscent of song embedded in Elizabethan & Jacobean drama. Obsessed, in fact, with blank-verse drama most of his career, he wrote a number of plays, most left unfinished, apparently serving the lyric poems that erupt magnificently from them, suggesting less absorption in narrative than in the unpredictably liberated possibilities of non-narrative lyric. Death’s Jest Book, his major play, was begun in 1825 & never
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finished—“a bottomless pit,” in John Ashbery’s words, “that absorbed all of Beddoes’s energies during the more than two decades till his death,” & at the same time an “infinitely expandable frame . . . [for] individual lyric poems of great beauty . . . a work that cannot be ignored, that collars the reader, insinuating its poisonous charms, its aroma of rose, sulfur, and sandalwood, into one’s nostrils from the very first speech.” (2) Often called “a poet of fragments,” Beddoes, like Mickiewicz, Norwid, & others, might more accurately be described, in the language of Pierre Joris, as “nomadic.” Like Shelley & Byron, he chose exile from England, not to the South but to Germany & Switzerland, where he wandered for most of his adult life & engaged in a range of studies, particularly in medicine—a continuation, strangely, of his concern with death. (He received a degree in medicine from Göttingen & also became active there in radical German politics.) His persistently de-centered poems remind one of Marina Tsvetaeva’s claim that a poet dwells not at home but at the crossroads. A kind of freelance poète maudit & “Decadent” avant la lettre, he committed suicide at forty-six, &, like John Clare & Emily Dickinson, most of his poetry (following his first two books by age eighteen) was not published until after his death.
Elizab et h Ba r ret t Brow n in g
1806–1861
TWO SONNETS, FOR GEORGE SAND
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To George Sand: A Recognition
True genius, but true woman! dost deny The woman’s nature with a manly scorn And break away the gauds and armlets worn By weaker women in captivity? Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry Is sobbed in by a woman’s voice forlorn, Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn Floats back dishevelled strength in agony Disproving thy man’s name: and while before The world thou burnest in a poet-fire, We see thy woman-heart beat evermore Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher, Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore Where unincarnate spirits purely aspire!
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To George Sand: A Desire
Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, Self-called George Sand! whose soul, amid the lions Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance And answers roar for roar, as spirits can: I would some mild miraculous thunder ran Above the applauded circus, in appliance Of thine own nobler nature’s strength and science, Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan, From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place With holier light! that thou to woman’s claim And man’s, mightst join beside the angel’s grace Of a pure genius sanctified from blame Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame.
A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
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What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river? Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river. He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, From the deep cool bed of the river: The limpid water turbidly ran, And the broken lilies a-dying lay, And the dragon-fly had fled away, Ere he brought it out of the river. High on the shore sat the great god Pan While turbidly flowed the river; And hacked and hewed as a great god can, With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed, Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed To prove it fresh from the river.
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He cut it short, did the great god Pan, (How tall it stood in the river!) Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notched the poor dry empty thing In holes, as he sat by the river. “This is the way,” laughed the great god Pan (Laughed while he sat by the river), “The only way, since gods began To make sweet music, they could succeed.” Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power by the river. Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! Piercing sweet by the river! Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river.
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Yet half a beast is the great god Pan, To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man: The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,— For the reed which grows nevermore again As a reed with the reeds in the river.
from S O N N E T S F R O M T H E P O R T U G U E S E
Three Sonnets
Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor, Most gracious singer of high poems! where The dancers will break footing, from the care Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more. And dost thou lift this house’s latch too poor For hand of thine? and canst thou think and bear To let thy music drop here unaware In folds of golden fulness at my door? Look up and see the casement broken in,
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The bats and owlets builders in the roof! My cricket chirps against thy mandolin. Hush, call no echo up in further proof Of desolation! there’s a voice within That weeps . . . as thou must sing . . . alone, aloof.
. I lift my heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. But if instead Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up, . . . those laurels on thine head, O my Belovèd, will not shield thee so, That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred The hair beneath. Stand farther off then! go.
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. My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string And let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said,—he wished to have me in his sight Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring To come and touch my hand . . . a simple thing, Yet I wept for it!—this, . . . the paper’s light . . . Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed As if God’s future thundered on my past. This said, I am thine—and so its ink has paled With lying at my heart that beat too fast. And this . . . O love, thy words have ill availed If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!
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from A U R O R A L E I G H
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Fifth Book [excerpt]
Aurora Leigh, be humble. Shall I hope To speak my poems in mysterious tune With man and nature,—with the lava-lymph That trickles from successive galaxies Still drop by drop adown the finger of God, In still new worlds?—with summer-days in this That scarce dare breathe, they are so beautiful?— With spring’s delicious trouble in the ground, Tormented by the quickened blood of roots, And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheaves In token of the harvest-time of flowers?— With winters and with autumns,—and beyond, With the human heart’s large seasons,—when it hopes And fears, joys, grieves, and loves?—with all that strain Of sexual passion, which devours the flesh In a sacrament of souls? with mother’s breasts Which, round the new-made creatures hanging there, Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres?— With multitudinous life, and finally With the great out-goings of ecstatic souls, Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame, Their radiant faces upward, burn away This dark of the body, issuing on a world Beyond our mortal?—can I speak my verse So plainly in tune to these things and the rest, That men shall feel it catch them on the quick, As having the same warrant over them To hold and move them, if they will or no, Alike imperious as the primal rhythm Of that theurgic nature?—I must fail, Who fail at the beginning to hold and move One man,—and he my cousin, and he my friend, And he born tender, made intelligent, Inclined to ponder the precipitous sides Of difficult questions; yet, obtuse to me,— Of me, incurious! likes me very well, And wishes me a paradise of good, Good looks, good means, and good digestion!—ay,
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But otherwise evades me, puts me off With kindness, with a tolerant gentleness,— Too light a book for a grave man’s reading! Go, Aurora Leigh: be humble. There it is; We women are too apt to look to one, Which proves a certain impotence in art. We strain our natures at doing something great, Far less because it’s something great to do, Than, haply, that we, so, commend ourselves As being not small, and more appreciable To some one friend. We must have mediators Betwixt our highest conscience and the judge; Some sweet saint’s blood must quicken in our palms, Or all the life in heaven seems slow and cold: Good only, being perceived as the end of good, And God alone pleased,—that’s too poor, we think, And not enough for us, by any means. Ay—Romney, I remember, told me once We miss the abstract, when we comprehend! We miss it most when we aspire, . . . and fail. Yet, so, I will not.—This vile woman’s way Of trailing garments, shall not trip me up: I’ll have no traffic with the personal thought In art’s pure temple. Must I work in vain, Without the approbation of a man? It cannot be; it shall not. Fame itself, That approbation of the general race. Presents a poor end, (though the arrow speed Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white.) And the highest fame was never reached except By what was aimed above it. Art for art, And good for God Himself, the essential Good! We’ll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect, Although our woman-hands should shake and fail; And if we fail . . . But must we?— Shall I fail? The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, “Let no one be called happy till his death.” To which I add,—Let no one till his death
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Be called unhappy. Measure not the work Until the day’s out and the labour done; Then bring your gauges. If the day’s work’s scant, Why, call it scant; affect no compromise; And, in that we have nobly striven at least, Deal with us nobly, women though we be, And honour us with truth, if not with praise.
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My ballads prospered; but the ballad’s race Is rapid for a poet who bears weights Of thought and golden image. He can stand Like Atlas, in the sonnet,—and support His own heavens pregnant with dynastic stars; But then he must stand still, nor take a step. In that descriptive poem called “The Hills,” The prospects were too far and indistinct. ’Tis true my critics said “A fine view, that!” The public scarcely cared to climb the book For even the finest; and the public’s right, A tree’s mere firewood, unless humanised; Which well the Greeks knew when they stirred the bark With close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs, And made the forest-rivers garrulous With babble of gods. For us, we are called to mark A still more intimate humanity In this inferior nature,—or, ourselves Must fall like dead leaves trodden underfoot By veritabler artists. Earth, shut up By Adam, like a fakir in a box Left too long buried, remained stiff and dry, A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down, Unlocked the doors, forced open the blank eyes, And used his kingly chrisms to straighten out The leathery tongue turned back into the throat: Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitates In every limb, aspires in every breath, Embraces infinite relations. Now, We want no half-gods, Panomphæan Joves, Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads and the rest, To take possession of a senseless world To unnatural vampire-uses. See the earth,
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The body of our body, the green earth, Indubitably human, like this flesh And these articulated veins through which Our heart drives blood! there’s not a flower of spring That dies ere June, but vaunts itself allied By issue and symbol, by significance And correspondence, to that spirit-world Outside the limits of our space and time, Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voice With human meanings; else they miss the thought, And henceforth step down lower, stand confessed Instructed poorly for interpreters,— Thrown out by an easy cowslip in the text.
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Even so my pastoral failed: it was a book Of surface-pictures—pretty, cold, and false With literal transcript,—the worse done, I think, For being not ill-done. Let me set my mark Against such doings, and do otherwise. This strikes me.—If the public whom we know Could catch me at such admissions, I should pass For being right modest. Yet how proud we are, In daring to look down upon ourselves! The critics say that epics have died out With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods— I’ll not believe it. I could never dream, As Payne Knight did, (the mythic mountaineer Who travelled higher than he was born to live, And showed sometimes the goitre in his throat Discoursing of an image seen through fog,) That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high. They were but men!—his Helen’s hair turned grey Like any plain Miss Smith’s, who wears a front; And Hector’s infant blubbered at a plume As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock. All men are possible heroes: every age, Heroic in proportions, double-faced, Looks backward and before, expects a morn And claims an epos. Ay, but every age Appears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle)
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Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours! The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip: A pewter age,—mixed metal, silver-washed; An age of scum, spooned off the richer past; An age of patches for old gaberdines; An age of mere transition, meaning nought, Except that what succeeds must shame it quite, If God please. That’s wrong thinking, to my mind, And wrong thoughts make poor poems. Every age, Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned By those who have not lived past it. We’ll suppose Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed, To some colossal statue of a man: The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear, Had guessed as little of any human form Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats, They’d have, in fact, to travel ten miles off Or ere the giant image broke on them, Full human profile, nose and chin distinct, Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky, And fed at evening with the blood of suns; Grand torso,—hand, that flung perpetually The largesse of a silver river down To all the country pastures. ’Tis even thus With times we live in,—evermore too great To be apprehended near. But poets should Exert a double vision; should have eyes To see near things as comprehensively As if afar they took their point of sight, And distant things, as intimately deep As if they touched them. Let us strive for this. I do distrust the poet who discerns No character or glory in his times, And trundles back his soul five hundred years, Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court, Oh not to sing of lizards or of toads Alive i’ the ditch there,—’twere excusable; But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,
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Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen, As dead as must be, for the greater part, The poems made on their chivalric bones; And that’s no wonder: death inherits death.
COMMENTARY
Let me think of form less, and the external. Trust the spirit. . . . Keep up all fire and leave the generous flames to shape themselves.
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E. B. B.
The daughter in a family that for generations owned sugar plantations in Jamaica relying on slave labor (the product often referred to as “blood sugar”), Barrett Browning grew up bitterly opposed to slavery of all sorts. She was imbued with an outsider disposition; herself part Creole, she was raised in England but, having moved to Florence with her new husband Robert Browning in 1846, became a loyalist for the Italian Risorgimento. Her poetry addresses oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, the child labor mines & mills of England, American slavery, & the patriarchal oppression of women. Aurora Leigh (thirteen editions from 1856 to 1873) is about a woman’s struggle not just to achieve success as a writer (which she does) but to “imagine that a woman can have a public existence and still perform her function as a moral repository” (Timothy Farrell). This double role of women seeks expression in the hybrid form of Barrett Browning’s experiment in the verse-novel (an important genre, at that point largely her own but with possible origins in Byron’s narrative poems Childe Harold & Don Juan, more recently practiced in the 1830s by Pushkin in Eugene Onegin, & still closer to home, Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book [1868]). Of Aurora Leigh Barrett Browning wrote (as quoted by Virginia Woolf): “My chief intention just now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem . . . running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, ‘where angels fear to tread’; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth of it out plainly.” If the passionate, quasi-visionary character of Barrett Browning’s later poetry seeks to “unsex” gender relations by Christian transcendence (“to raise men’s bodies still by raising souls”), this need not detract from or mitigate the otherwise liberatory energies of works like Sonnets from the Portuguese, The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point, A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London, & the feminist sonnets to the French novelist George Sand. But it was the realism of her verse-novel, in particular a subplot in which the condition of an unwed mother & of London’s growing population of prostitutes was sympathetically addressed, that gave the work its greatest notoriety. Wrote Barrett Browning in response: “What has given most offence in the book, more than the story of Marian—far more!—has been the reference to the condition of women in our cities, which a woman
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oughtn’t to refer to, by any manner of means, says the conventional tradition. Now I have thought deeply otherwise. If a woman ignores these wrongs, then may women as a sex continue to suffer them; there is no help for any of us.”
Aloys iu s Bert ra n d
1807–1841
from G A S P A R D D E L A N U I T : P R E F A C E A N D S I X P O E M S
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Preface
Art is a coin with two antithetical faces—one side bearing resemblance to Paul Rembrandt, and the other to Jacques Callot. Rembrandt is the philosopher with long white beard self-ensconced in his retreat, his thoughts absorbed in meditation and prayer, closing eyes to dwell within and to converse with the spirits of beauty, science, wisdom and love—consumed by the desire to penetrate the mysterious symbols of nature. Callot, on the contrary, is the blustering joker who swaggers through the town, causes disturbances in taverns, and makes love to loose women—believing in nothing but his rapier and his blunderbuss—his deepest earthly concern being to keep his moustache waxed. The author of this book has conceived of his art in terms of this double personification—but so as to avoid being too exclusive, he also presents here studies in the manner of Van Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Dürer, Peter Neef, Breughel de Velours, Breughel d’Enfer, Van-Ostade, Gérard-Dow, Salvator Rosa, Fuseli, and several other masters of various other painting-schools. And if you ask the author why he hasn’t taken it into his head to model his book according to some noble literary theory, he will be forced to respond that after all, M. Seraphin doesn’t explain the mechanism behind his Chinese shadow puppets—even to himself; and that Punch always conceals from his curious audience the wires connected to his arms. Therefore, he’s content to simply sign his work: GASPARD OF THE NIGHT.
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The Five Fingers of the Hand An honorable family, in which no one has ever gone bankrupt, in which nobody has ever been hanged T H E FAM I LY L I N E AG E O F J E AN D E N I VI L L E
The thumb is this fat Flemish innkeeper, lusty and fond of lewd jokes, smoking before his doorway, beneath the sign-board announcing the doubly-potent beers of March. The index finger is his wife, a shrew as stiff as an old dried herring, who starts each day by slapping the serving-maid of whom she is so jealous, and gently stroking the bottle of which she is so fond. The middle finger is their son, a stout lad who’d be a soldier if he weren’t already a bartender; and who’d be a horse if he weren’t a man. The ring finger is their daughter, the shapely and pert Zerbina, who sells her lacework to all the ladies, but refuses even a single smile to the soldiery. And the little finger, the “ear finger”—he’s the youngest of the family, a petulant brat perpetually clutching at his mother’s waistband and dangling from his mother’s apron-strings—a crybaby sobbing as if speared on the fang of an ogress.
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Taken together, the five fingers of this hand constitute the most resounding slap in the face ever heard in the gardens of the noble city of Haarlem. Ondine I fell asleep, and thought I heard ere long A harmony, subtle and enchanting; And close beside me, a gentle murmuring So tender and sad it can silence song. C H. BRUG NOT — T H E T W O S Y L P H S
“Listen!—Listen!—it’s me down here, Ondine, splashing all these droplets against your casement windowpanes, to make them echo, here in the dim, regretful moonlight; and up there, high above us in her black silk dress, is the chateau’s lady upon her balcony, gazing out at this beautiful starry night and at my lovely, sleeping lake. “Each ripple that you see is a water-sprite, swimming in the flowing currents; each current of each stream winds path-like towards my palace;
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and my palace, too, is a liquid domain, located well beneath the lakewaters, in the triangle of fire, and earth, and air. “Listen!—Listen!—my father stirs the croaking stream with a green birch branch, and my sisters with their foam-flecked arms embrace entire islands of iris, water-lilies, and glistening stands of grass; or, giggling, make mock of the ancient, bearded willow, as he bends his back and goes on fishing.” And when her softly murmured song was done, she begged me outright to slip her ring on my finger, and to become an Ondine’s husband; and to return with her to her palace, there to become king of the lakes. And when I told her I loved a mortal woman, she pouted, as if vexed; then shed a teardrop or two—but finally burst out into laughter, to dissolve then like radiant raindrops, streaming down the length of my blueblack windows. . . . The Gallows What’s that up there, still stirring on the gallows? FAUS T
Ah! What’s this I hear now, might it perhaps be the cold north wind whining, or a hanged man sighing his last sighs atop the gallowstree?
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Might it perhaps be some cricket singing, ensconced within the carpet of mosses and ground-ivies that so mercifully enfold the forest floor? Might it perhaps be some fly in its flight, hunting down its prey and tooting its tiny horn into ears otherwise gone deaf to the sound of triumphant trumpet-calls? Might it perhaps be some beetle in its wayward, erratic flight, plucking a single, bloodstained hair-strand from out of that dead bald skull? Or might it perhaps be some spider, weaving from a half-measure of muslin a long tie for his strangled neck? No: it’s a bell slowly tolling from the walls of some distant city beneath the horizon; and a hanged man’s corpse, swinging back and forth, reddened by rays of the setting sun. . . .
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Scarbo He searched under the bed, looked up the chimney, scoured the cupboard—nobody! He just couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten in or out. E . T. A. HO FFM ANN — N O C T URN AL T AL E S
Oh! How many times have I seen and heard Scarbo, with the moon shining bright in the midnight sky like a silver shield on an azure banner, studded with golden bees! How often have I heard the vibrations of his laughter, buzzing somewhere in the shadows of my bedroom, and the scratching of his nails raking down the length of the silk curtains around my bed! How often have I seen him descending from the ceiling, pirouetting on one leg and then spinning around in my room—like a spindle flung out from some witch’s distaff! Did I think he’d vanished? Between me and moon that dwarf would loom, like a Gothic cathedral’s belfry, with a golden bell atop his pointed cap! But soon his body turned blue, and as transparent as wax dripping down a candle, with his face turning pale as a candle-end—and then suddenly he’d be gone.
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Scarbo [2] “Dear Lord, at the hour of my death, give me the prayers of a priest, a linen shroud, a coffin made of pine, and a nice dry place.” T H E PAT E RN O S T E RS O F A G E N E RAL
“Whether you die absolved or damned,” muttered Scarbo into my ear that night, “your shroud shall be a spiderweb, and I’ll wrap up the spider right in there with you!” “Oh, let my shroud at least be”—I replied, eyes red from so much weeping—some trembling leaf in whose hollow the breezes of the lake may rock me!” “No!” snickered that scoffing dwarf, “you shall be a feast for some dungbeetle who comes creeping out at dusk to hunt down gnats blinded by the setting sun!”
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Sobbing, more in tears than ever, I bitterly replied—“I suppose you’d like it still better yet were a tarantula with a stinger the size of an elephant’s trunk to suck the living daylights out of me?” “Now, now, console yourself,” he interrupted, “for your shroud you shall have speckled bands of golden snake-skin, in which I’ll wrap you up as snug as any mummy.” “And from the shadowy crypt of Saint Benigne, where propped up against one wall we’ll bury you bolt upright, you’ll be able to hear to your heart’s content the weeping of little children in Limbo.” Departure for the Sabbath She arose with nightfall; and, after lighting a candle, anointed herself from a little bottle; then, after muttering a word or two, she was transported to the Sabbath revels. JEAN BO DI N —T H E D E M O N O LO G Y O F S O RC E RY
There were a dozen of them together there, sipping their soup from a coffin—each of them using as a spoon a dead man’s forearm-bone. The fireplace shone bright red with glowing coals, the candles mushroomed smoke, and their plates gave off odors that graves do in the springtime. And when Maribas cackled or cried, it sounded like the groaning of a bow across the three remaining strings of a broken violin.
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Meanwhile, in the tallow glow, their ringleader spread out upon the table a book of ancient spells, onto which a fried fly fell forthwith. That fly was still buzzing slightly when, dragging its great, soft, hairy belly, a spider scaled the page edges, and crawled into the margins of that magical tome. But already the sorcerers and witches had flown off up the chimney-flue, some astraddle the broom, some astraddle the fire-tongs—with Maribas alone, flying off on the handle of a frying-pan. Translations from French by Michael Benedikt
COMMENTARY
This manuscript . . . will reveal how many instruments have touched my lips prior to discovering the one which could produce the purest and
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most expressive note possible; how many paintbrushes I wore out against canvas before evoking the aurora of chiaroscuro.
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A. B., from Prologue to Gaspard de la Nuit
(1) Writes his principal translator Michael Benedikt: “Aloysius Bertrand (pen-name of Louis Bertrand)—a highly original 19th-Century poet and a precursor of both later 19th-Century French Symbolism and 20th-Century French Surrealism—was born in Northern Italy and was brought up in Belgium. He spent most of his life in France . . . and was Europe’s—and perhaps the world’s—first full-fledged prose poet, and the inspiration for the slightly later, but better-known prose poems of Baudelaire. . . . But unlike Baudelaire . . . Bertrand never used the term ‘prose poetry’ to describe any of his writings. Bertrand’s major opus, Gaspard de la Nuit . . . —a booklength series of scenes of Medieval to 17th-Century Flemish and French life—is subtitled ‘Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot.’ The first ‘Fantasies’ date from 1827; an edition replete with illustrations by the poet was planned in 1836, but the manuscript remained unfinished at the poet’s death. Bertrand had his ‘fans’ among well-known contemporary French writers of his time . . . but for the most part he remained virtually unread by even the literary public of his day. . . . Bertrand’s ‘Fantasies’ were published posthumously in 1842. . . . “A highly visual poet . . . Bertrand is also a decidedly visionary poet—seeing beyond even his own keen sense of the visual to arrive at that perhaps still higher plane. Although the ‘Fantasies’ are characterized by elegantly unruffled surfaces, and have some of the serene perfection of ‘genre’ scenes in painting which uncannily capture the spirit of particular times and places, there is much more to them than that. A major theme in the work is the disquieting presence of mysterious forces which run through life, lurking beneath the surface of even everyday, seemingly ordinary events. . . . The Surrealists of the 1920’s admired Bertrand and considered him a forerunner. ‘Bertrand is Surrealist re the past,’ André Breton wrote in his First Surrealist Manifesto (1924)—thus consigning to Bertrand quite a large piece of historical territory, and re-launching Bertrand’s reputation. To this day many prose poets—French prose poets in particular—acknowledge Bertrand’s poems as a major source of inspiration.” (2) “I have a little confession to make to you. It was while thumbing through—for the twentieth time at least—the celebrated ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ of Aloysius Bertrand (a work known to both of us and to so many of our mutual friends, that it deserves to be called ‘celebrated’ doesn’t it?) . . . that the idea came to me to try to do something analogous, and apply to . . . modern life . . . the method which Bertrand applied to painting scenes of ancient life with such strangely picturesque results” (Charles Baudelaire, from a letter to Fernand Houssaye, used as the introduction to Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen [prose poems]).
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Gerard d e Nerva l
1808–1855
Dream is a second life. I have never been able to cross through those gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world without a sense of dread. The first few instants of sleep are the image of death; a drowsy numbness steals over our thoughts, and it becomes impossible to determine the precise point at which the self, in some other form, continues to carry on the work of existence. Little by little, the dim cavern is suffused with light and, emerging from its shadowy depths, the pale figures who dwell in limbo come into view, solemn and still. Then the tableau takes on shape, a new clarity illuminates these bizarre apparitions and sets them in motion—the spirit world opens for us. Epigraph translated by Richard Sieburth
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PA N O R A M A
The eagles shrieked, the doves moaned—the eaglet’s beak was blunted by my bald pate. Far better to let this cradle drop just as the eagle (lets dragons drop) for fear of sullying its beak with their venomous blood. You shall conceive . . . just as when the daughters (of Cecrops), the Agraulian nymphs, discovered Erysichton in a basket amid a tangle of snakes. How lovely this child. The lake of stagnant waters. The chorus of hunters Melu (or Melusina). The Troglodytes—in hiding.—They do not wish to see the sun. Those who worship the night (black Virgin). We have dedicated her to the worship of the night and are raising her for the sacrifice.—He is left with three others. The slave ships of Solomon shall leave by the (red) sea. The King holding to his course—maintaining law. There is but one God—Myrilla or Mylitta—young man. This cave was hollowed out when the earth was still soft. Yes, we submit to Solomon, prince of the genii. Our people is not extinct. The King.—The people is in diamonds.—Its gods are sealed in leaden vases. They are searching for the cradle of the magus Zoroaster (Zerdust). The marble was still soft. And Babylon rises in the gigantic shadow of the ruins of Babel. The two cities.—And when Sheba—when Rama the conqueror (of the
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Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
race of Boreas) brought all the nations under the sway of his sceptre. The two great waves which—It was then that they dug the underground cities into which the population withdrew. The black races were driven into the deserts of Africa. The old men tempt him with riches. The two young (ferouer), heedless, both in love with the Queen . . . The old men told them that one of them would marry her without possessing her and that the other would possess her without marrying her. Let’s try our luck either way . . . There is an odd mystery here. He gives the papyrus to his brother—when you strike the d. (door?) you shall no longer have it. They are coming from Meroe, you thought you discovered—you shall lose it all. She will not want to marry this slave and I shall be released. If she refuses—yes—she accepts. He embraces his brother and gives him back his means. The horses glistening with gold filings . . . The oranges and the citron trees. The three old men arrive during the intermission and arrest the king, who has been ordered to appear in person . . . 4th act. A necropolis.—The Queen has been invited to descend . . . will you hand the child of Solomon over to us? Sleep in your grave and drink of your cup. (The negro, half-dead, now being fed.) She has taken refuge. They give her gold. Nothing. Memnon? The dwarf gods. All the splendours of the Queen, all the beauties of Woman. Medjnun has that dreamy sadness of a man marked by fate. There are armies in my heart—Judith. My heart got tangled up in your daughters’ blonde hair. O Eve, my mother. Ventimiglia—The women of Genoa and Florence, their white slopingshoulders . . . To both change—to love each other for ever. The blonde girl eating lemons . . . So young, so blasé. The duchess of Berry.—The Roman ladies who . . . The young man hopes that . . . In the end, holding hands at twilight before the lamps are lit, near a window.
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If only the Pope would forgive him . . . One of Mary’s tears dripping on his face. I would want to wash her in a pool as large as the ocean—thoughts of expiation—The world does not forgive. TRANSLATOR ’ S NOTES . Cecrops: Mythical founder of Athens and father of Agraulos and Erysichton. Melusina: French fairy of legend and folk-tale. ferouer: The Zoroastrian terms for doubles used in [Nerval’s] “Aurelia.” Meroë: Ancient city on the banks of the southern Nile. Mennon: King of Egypt whose statue was said to emit music when struck by the first light of day. Medjnun: Arabic name of a celebrated lover—and lunatic. Judith: While in Naples in 1834, Nerval was quite struck by Gentileschi’s painting Judith and Holofernes. The Duchess of Berry: Attempted to organize an uprising in the Vendée in 1832 and was arrested.
Translation from French by Richard Sieburth
LES CHIMÈRES The Shadow
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I am the Darkness the Widowed the Unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine in his broken tower, my only Star is dead and my lustrous lute carries a melancholy black sun in the night of Death, You who consoled me, give back the high hill above the Mediterranean, the flower which pleased my desolated heart so much, and the arbor where the vine branch unites with the rose am I Amor or Apollo? my forehead is still red from the Queen’s kiss I have dreamed in the Grotto where the Siren swims I have crossed Acheron twice, a winner, modulating the sighs of a saint and the cries of a fairy turn by turn on Orpheus’ lyre Myrtho
I think of the bewitchment on that hill without care shining with a thousand fires,
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your forehead overflowing with eastern lights, and black grapes mixed with your golden hair it is in your wineglass also that I drank drunkenness, and in the secret brightening of your eye when you saw me worship at the feet of Dionysus, for Poetry made me a son of Greece I know why the volcano over there reopened only yesterday you touched it with your quick foot, and suddenly the sky was clouded with ashes since a Norman duke smashed your gods, the woody vine with the pale flowers which do not bear twines around the green myrtle with the dark berries under Virgil’s branches of laurel
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Horus
the god Kneph’s trembling shook the universe: then, the mother rose up on her bed, Isis, moved with hatred toward her savage husband, and the old fire burned in her green eyes she spoke “Look at him, this volcanic god and king of winter is dying, this old corruption” she ordered his crooked feet bound
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and his crossed-eyes put out she said “All the world’s cold passed through his mouth” she said “Just now the eagle flew by the new ghost calls me I put on the robe of Cybele for him, the son loved by Hermes and Osiris” the goddess fled in a golden shell the sea reflected her image, the sky shone under the scarf of Iris Anteros
you ask why there is rage in my heart and an untamed head on a neck that could bend:
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because I descend from Antaeus, I turn the arrows back against the winning god yes, the Requiter breathes on me he marked my forehead with his angry lips I sometimes feel the unquenched redness of Cain under Abel’s pallor the paleness is stained the last defeated by your genius, God, cried out from the pit of hell against your power he is my forebear Belus or my father Dagon
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they dipped me three times in the waters of Cocytus protector of my plundering mother, on my own I sow again at her feet the teeth of the old dragon Delfica
do you understand this old ballad at the foot of the sycamore, or under the white laurels, do you know it, Daphne, beneath the olive, the myrtle, or the trembling willows, this love-song which always begins again?
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do you recognize the Temple with huge columns, and the sour lemons when you bit them, the cave hiding an unexpected end, part of the tale of the dragon’s seed? you shed tears over returning ghosts we read the sound of an earthquake for signs so, the sybil with dark skin is asleep under the Arch of Constantine nothing has troubled the cold gate Artemis
the thirteenth returns still the first and she is always the only one—
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or this is the only moment but are you queen, “you,” the first and last are you king, you, the only or the last lover love him who loved “you” from the cradle to the grave the only one I loved loves me dearly still she is death—or the dead one, delight torment, the rose she holds is the rose-pink hollyhock Saint of Naples with hands full of fires, or Rose with a heart of purple, or Saint Gudula’s flower, did you find your cross in the sky’s desert?
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I want the white roses to fall they attack our gods I want these white phantoms to fall from their burning sky the saint of the abyss is holier in my eyes
Christ among the Olives god is dead! the sky is empty weep, children, you no longer have a father JE AN PAU L
1
under the holy trees, the Lord lifted his thin arms to the sky, as poets do after the silence and the loss of his friends’ belief he turned towards those who waited below, lost
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in animal sleep, dreaming of themselves as kings, wisemen, prophets, but deadened he began to call, God does not exist they slept have you heard the news? I touched my forehead to the eternal arch here, sick, broken and stained for many days I cheated you in this abyss, god is missing from the altar with its victim God isn’t God is never again they always slept
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2
he began again: everything is dead I’ve wandered over worlds and lost my flight in their milky ways as far as inventive life bleeds gold and silver everywhere the dry ground bordered by waters whirlpools stir the stormy oceans, a faint breath pushes the roaming spheres, but no ghost exists in this largeness seeking the eye of God I saw only a socket, huge, black and bottomless,
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where night which inhabits it sends rays over the world and always thickens a strange rainbow encircles this darkness door-sill of the old chaos whose shadow is the emptiness, a spiral swallowing the Worlds and the Days 3
you, the fixed End of it, the mute sentinel, the cold Necessity, Chance, who advances among dead worlds under everlasting snow, who chills the whitening universe, bit by bit,
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do you know what you’re doing with your burnt-out suns, Beginner, are you sure to transmit an immortal breath between one world which dies and another being born father, is it you inside me can you live and conquer death or have you given up in a last battle with that night-time angel whom the curse struck this Myself, the tears and sickness, if I die, everything will die 4
no one heard the grief of the sacrifice, the sacrificed pour his heart out
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to the world vainly weakening and stooped he called the only one awake in Jerusalem you know the price they put on me, sell, and end this bargaining I have a sickness here on the world you have the strength of a crime, at least, in friendship Judas went away, brooding and malcontent, discovered himself poorly paid for such biting back when he read his trick written everywhere on the walls
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only Pilate, who sat watching for Caesar, turned by chance and feeling some of it, ordered his satellites to find the fool 5
it really was this fool a madman above us forgotten Icarus climbing the sky again the charioteer destroyed by lightning a lovely, murdered Atys brought back by Cybele the magician questioned the entrails of the victim the earth became drunk on the precious blood the unmoved universe
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bent on its axes the gods began to die for an instant Caesar called Jupiter Ammon to answer this new god forced on the earth— at least a daimon but he invoked a closed oracle only one in the world could open the hiding place who gave souls to the children of the slime
Golden Poem everything is alive
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P YTHAG ORAS
free of the dead, what can be thought seems to be yours in this world where it all coheres free to spend some powers, but the universe is absent from all your plans take the ghost stirring in an animal each flower, a piece of light scattering love’s mystery asleep in metal alive the coherence takes power over you in the blind wall, you fear the blindness which sees you even to matter, put to true and false uses, a word is tied Translations from French by Robin Blaser
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COMMENTARY
One never sees the sun in one’s dreams, even though one is often aware of a light far more luminous.
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G. de N., Aurelia
At the heart of Nerval’s project, then, is an erasure of the boundaries between dream & waking, vision & fiction, poetry & prose—“an overflow of dream into everyday life,” as he writes of it, & “a bold venture: to fix upon the dream and to know its secrets.” For Nerval—born Gérard Labrunie & changing his name & identity through an already fictive “généalogie fantastique”—there is a tension between madness & an assertively rational experiment with dream recording & construction. In the course of that life project he both travels out (to the exotic Orient in one instance, to the heart of European cities as another) & inward (to the limits of his own mind in extremis). Writes Richard Sieburth of the beleaguered objectivity, the protosurreality of Nerval’s world: “Nerval registers the collective dreamwork of the city, eliciting the phantasmagoria of the modern metropolis well in advance of Baudelaire, Rilke, Breton and Benjamin.” (Breton equated Nerval’s “supernaturalism” with surrealism.) And Nerval himself of his own hard-won inwardness, felt otherwise as “transfiguration,” “illumination,” even “prophecy”: “If the mind has to become completely unhinged in order to place us in communication with another world, it is clear that the mad will never be able to prove to the sane how blind they are, to say the very least.” The core of Nerval’s work was a series of experimental fictions in which prose supplemented verse as the medium of his poetry. Of these, Aurelia, composed over a ten-year period & completed only toward the end of his life, was his most extreme attempt “to write down and record all the impressions [dreams, reveries, etc.] occasioned by my illness”; in other words, an experiment in the most basic sense, or, as Nerval put it, “a study not without utility for science and first-hand observation.” A similar montage of shifting images & impressions informs the short piece “Panorama,” originally titled “Voyage d’Italie / Panorama” & applied here to a succession of largely mythological & exotic fragments. But Nerval’s bestknown poetic work remains Les Chimères, where his concerns are transferred—formally—to a revitalization of the sonnet (freely relineated here by Robin Blaser), his real & fictive “I” speaking among the ruins of the old world &, in the great Christ poems, embodying his reaction to the “death of God”—a first response to the theme set out by Jean Paul (above) & later amplified by Nietzsche. Initiated & continued during two of Nerval’s longer confinements, the last of the Chimères came a year or two before his suicide by hanging. His final enigmatic words to his guardian: “Don’t wait up for me tonight, for the night will be black and white.” For more of Nerval, see pages 317–319 and 428.
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Ralp h Wa ld o E mers on
1809–1882
DAYS
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.
WOODS
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A Prose Sonnet
Wise are ye, O ancient woods! Wiser than man. Whoso goeth in your paths or into your thickets where no paths are, readeth the same cheerful lesson whether he be a young child or a hundred years old. Comes he in good fortune or bad, ye say the same things, & from age to age. Ever the needles of the pine grow & fall, the acorns on the oak, the maples redden in autumn, & all times of the year the ground pine & the pyrola bud & root under foot. What is called fortune & what is called Time by men—ye know them not. Men have not language to describe one moment of your eternal life. This I would ask of you, O sacred Woods, when ye shall next give me somewhat to say, give me also the tune wherein to say it. Give me a tune of your own like your winds or rains or brooks or birds; for the songs of men grow old when they have been often repeated, but yours, though a man have heard them for seventy years, are never the same, but always new, like time itself, or like love.
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from T H E N O T E B O O K S : “ T U R T L E I N S W A M P ”
Turtle in swamp wader on beaches camel in sand goat on mountain fish in sea eyes in light Every Zone its flora & fauna animals hybernate, or wake when dinner is ready food, parasite, enemy, census, Same fitness between a man & his time & event Man comes when world is ready for him. And things ripen, new men Hercules comes first, & St John afterwards. & Shakspeare at last.
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H A M AT R E YA
Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint, Possessed the land which rendered to their toil Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood. Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm, Saying, “’Tis mine, my children’s and my name’s. How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees! How graceful climb those shadows on my hill! I fancy these pure waters and the flags Know me, as does my dog: we sympathize; And, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil.” Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds: And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough. Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave. They added ridge to valley, brook to pond, And sighed for all that bounded their domain; “This suits me for a pasture; that’s my park; We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge,
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And misty lowland, where to go for peat. The land is well—lies fairly to the south. ’Tis good, when you have crossed the sea and back, To find the sitfast acres where you left them.” Ah! the hot owner sees not Death, who adds Him to his land, a lump of mold the more. Hear what the Earth says: Earth-Song
“Mine and yours; Mine, not yours. Earth endures; Stars abide— Shine down in the old sea; Old are the shores; But where are old men? I who have seen much, Such have I never seen.
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“The lawyer’s deed Ran sure, In tail, To them, and to their heirs Who shall succeed, Without fail, Forevermore. “Here is the land, Shaggy with wood, With its old valley, Mound and flood. But the heritors? Fled like the flood’s foam. The lawyer, and the laws, And the kingdom, Clean swept herefrom. “They called me theirs, Who so controlled me; Yet every one
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Wished to stay, and is gone, How am I theirs, If they cannot hold me, But I hold them?” When I heard the Earth-song, I was no longer brave; My avarice cooled Like lust in the chill of the grave.
O D E , I N S C R I B E D T O W. H . C H A N N I N G
Though loath to grieve The evil time’s sole patriot, I cannot leave My honied thought For the priest’s cant, Or statesman’s rant.
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If I refuse My study for their politique, Which at the best is trick, The angry Muse Puts confusion in my brain. But who is he that prates Of the culture of mankind, Of better arts and life? Go, blindworm, go, Behold the famous States Harrying Mexico With rifle and with knife! Or who, with accent bolder, Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer? I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook! And in thy valleys, Agiochook! The jackals of the Negro-holder. The God who made New Hampshire Taunted the lofty land With little men;
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Small bat and wren House in the oak: If earth-fire cleave The upheaved land, and bury the folk, The southern crocodile would grieve. Virtue palters; Right is hence; Freedom praised, but hid; Funeral eloquence Rattles the coffin-lid. What boots thy zeal, O glowing friend, That would indignant rend The northland from the south? Wherefore? to what good end? Boston Bay and Bunker Hill Would serve things still; Things are of the snake.
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The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; ’Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled, Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking. ’Tis fit the forest fall, The steep be graded, The mountain tunnelled, The sand shaded, The orchard planted, The glebe tilled, The prairie granted, The steamer built.
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Let man serve law for man; Live for friendship, live for love, For truth’s and harmony’s behoof; The state may follow how it can, As Olympus follows Jove.
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Yet do not I implore The wrinkled shopman to my sounding woods, Nor bid the unwilling senator Ask votes of thrushes in the solitudes. Every one to his chosen work; Foolish hands may mix and mar; Wise and sure the issues are. Round they roll till dark is light, Sex to sex, and even to odd; The over-god Who marries Right to Might, Who peoples, unpeoples, He who exterminates Races by stronger races, Black by white faces, Knows to bring honey Out of the lion; Grafts gentlest scion On pirate and Turk. The Cossack eats Poland, Like stolen fruit; Her last noble is ruined, Her last poet mute: Straight, into double band The victors divide; Half for freedom strike and stand; The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side.
BLIGHT
Give me truths; For I am weary of the surfaces, And die of inanition. If I knew
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Only the herbs and simples of the wood, Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony, Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras, Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew, And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods Draw untold juices from the common earth, Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply By sweet affinities to human flesh, Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,— O, that were much, and I could be a part Of the round day, related to the sun And planted world, and full executor Of their imperfect functions. But these young scholars, who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names. The old men studied magic in the flowers, And human fortunes in astronomy, And an omnipotence in chemistry, Preferring things to names, for these were men, Were unitarians of the united world, And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell, They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars, And strangers to the mystic beast and bird, And strangers to the plant and to the mine. The injured elements say, “Not in us”; And night and day, ocean and continent, Fire, plant and mineral say, “Not in us”; And haughtily return us stare for stare. For we invade them impiously for gain; We devastate them unreligiously, And coldly ask their pottage, not their love. Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us Only what to our griping toil is due; But the sweet affluence of love and song, The rich results of the divine consents Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
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The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld; And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves And pirates of the universe, shut out Daily to a more thin and outward rind, Turn pale and starve. Therefore, to our sick eyes, The stunted trees look sick, the summer short, Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay, And nothing thrives to reach its natural term; And life, shorn of its venerable length, Even at its greatest space is a defeat, And dies in anger that it was a dupe; And, in its highest noon and wantonness, Is early frugal, like a beggar’s child; Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims And prizes of ambition, checks its hand, Like Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped, Chilled with a miserly comparison Of the toy’s purchase with the length of life.
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BACCHUS
Bring me wine, but wine which never grew In the belly of the grape, Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through Under the Andes to the Cape, Suffer no savor of the earth to scape. Let its grapes the morn salute From a nocturnal root, Which feels the acrid juice Of Styx and Erebus; And turns the woe of Night, By its own craft, to a more rich delight. We buy ashes for bread; We buy diluted wine; Give me of the true, Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled Among the silver hills of heaven Draw everlasting dew;
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Wine of wine, Blood of the world, Form of forms, and mold of statures, That I intoxicated, And by the draught assimilated, May float at pleasure through all natures; The bird-language rightly spell, And that which roses say so well. Wine that is shed Like the torrents of the sun Up the horizon walls, Or like the Atlantic streams, which run When the South Sea calls.
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Water and bread, Food which needs no transmuting, Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting, Wine which is already man, Food which teach and reason can. Wine which Music is, Music and wine are one, That I, drinking this, Shall hear far Chaos talk with me; Kings unborn shall walk with me; And the poor grass shall plot and plan What it will do when it is man. Quickened so, will I unlock Every crypt of every rock. I thank the joyful juice For all I know; Winds of remembering Of the ancient being blow, And seeming-solid walls of use Open and flow. Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine; Retrieve the loss of me and mine! Vine for vine be antidote, And the grape requite the lote! Haste to cure the old despair, Reason in Nature’s lotus drenched,
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The memory of ages quenched; Give them again to shine; Let wine repair what this undid; And where the infection slid, A dazzling memory revive; Refresh the faded tints, Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures with the pen Which on the first day drew, Upon the tablets blue, The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.
COMMENTARY
I am born a poet, of a low class without doubt, yet a poet. That is my nature and vocation. My singing, be sure, is very husky, and is for the most part in prose. Still am I a poet in the sense of a perceiver & dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul & in matter, & especially of the correspondences between these & those.
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R. W. E., in a letter to Lydia Jackson, February 1835
(1) Yet it was this that was almost lost in the distinction, too narrowly drawn, between poetry & prose, nor was it his singing-in-prose that was most relevant, rather the calling to which he gave himself—to be a poet—& where that would take him. In that quest the poems as such, as we would see & show them, need no apology, but there is something here, as with others in these pages, that goes beyond verse & that informs his total work & thought. (Language itself he defined as “fossil poetry” and led us to seek its presence everywhere.) For this, transcendentalism, with which he’s so closely connected, might offer the key, but at the peril of losing his particulars. For, as Sherman Paul once wrote of him: “Emerson was not a mystic in the usual ‘visionary’ sense of the word. He was not seeking in the angle of vision an escape from the world; as it formed, the angle of vision was to make ‘use’ of the world. But the mystical union, for him, was an epistemological necessity. Vision, he said of the inner seeing of the mind, is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with the things known” (Sherman Paul, The Angle of Vision, 1952). Or Emerson again: “The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event and event person.” (2) Though spending most of his life in Massachusetts (& giving more than 1,500 public lectures across the country & in England during his career), he knotted together in his own writings varied, nearly global vitalizing traditions represented elsewhere in this volume—the British Romantic (particularly Wordsworth & Coleridge), the German Romantic (particularly Goethe), the French Romantic (Rousseau, Staël, & Fourier), & the Orient
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writ large (Hindu & Buddhist philosophy & poetry written in Sanskrit, Persian, & Arabic)—in order to work them forward into a new, radically democratic American Romanticism & later Modernism. “The whole Creation was rather an energy than a work,” said Sir William Jones about “A Hymn to Na’ra’yena,” a Sanskrit poem that Jones translated & which was probably a source for Emerson’s “oversoul.” But the Emersonian principle of animating the soul & the Creation also stems from his interest in Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants & other Romantic writings. Thus Emerson in his highly poetic essay “Circles” (itself an extended poem): “The soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; . . . is not a faculty but a light.” And: “The heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.” From here it was a short step to Whitman’s ceaseless movement through the multiplicity of being, to a proliferative, open-form poetics of contiguities, & thus of democracy. Wrote Emerson in a voice more familiar to us from its later use by Whitman, who addressed him at the start as “friend and master”: “America is a poem in our eyes.” Like Blake & many other nineteenth-century visionaries, Emerson (who began his career as a Unitarian minister until he quit because of doctrinal disputes with superiors) attempted to replace the mental tyrannies imposed by institutional religion with the possibility of a radical spiritual conscience.
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(3) “Take the smoothest curled courtier in London or Paris . . . [he] lives, makes, [and] alters, by omnipotent modes, and is directly related there, amid essences and billets doux, to Himmaleh mountain chains, wild cedar swamps, and the interior fire, the molten core of the globe” (from The Notebooks). A voice in that sense for poetry & for nature, he hammered them into our own thoughts & made manifest the linkage between them that the earlier Romantics had first proclaimed.
E d gar A llan Poe
1809–1849
S O N N E T— S I L E N C E
There are some qualities—some incorporate things, That have a double life, which thus is made A type of that twin entity which springs From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade. There is a two-fold Silence—sea and shore— Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places, Newly with grass o’ergrown; some solemn graces, Some human memories and tearful lore,
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Render him terrorless: his name’s “No More.” He is the corporate Silence: dread him not! No power hath he of evil in himself; But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!) Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf, That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod No foot of man,) commend thyself to God!
T H E H AU N T E D PA LAC E
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In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace— Radiant palace—reared its head. In the monarch Thought’s dominion— It stood there! Never seraph spread a pinion Over fabric half so fair! Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow— (This—all this—was in the olden Time long ago) And every gentle air that dallied, In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid, A wingéd odor went away. Wanderers in that happy valley, Through two luminous windows, saw Spirits moving musically, To a lute’s well-tunéd law, Round about a throne where, sitting, Porphyrogene, In state his glory well befitting The ruler of the realm was seen. And all with pearl and ruby glowing Was the fair palace door, Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing, And sparkling evermore,
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A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty Was but to sing, In voices of surpassing beauty, The wit and wisdom of their king. But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch’s high estate. (Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old-time entombed. And travellers, now, within that valley, Through the encrimsoned windows see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody, While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh—but smile no more.
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from E U R E K A , A P R O S E P O E M
. . . the poetical essence of the Universe [1] Preface
To the few who love me and whom I love—to those who feel rather than to those who think—to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities—I offer this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:—let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem. “What I here propound is true:—therefore it cannot die:—or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will ‘rise again to the Life Everlasting.’ “Nevertheless it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead.”
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[2] An Excerpt
If the propositions of this Discourse are tenable, the “state of progressive collapse” is precisely that state in which alone we are warranted in considering All Things; and, with due humility, let me here confess that, for my part, I am at a loss to conceive how any other understanding of the existing condition of affairs, could ever have made its way into the human brain. “The tendency to collapse” and “the attraction of gravitation” are convertible phrases. In using either, we speak of the rëaction of the First Act. Never was necessity less obvious than that of supposing Matter imbued with an ineradicable quality forming part of its material nature—a quality, or instinct, forever inseparable from it, and by dint of which inalienable principle every atom is perpetually impelled to seek its fellow. Never was necessity less obvious than that of entertaining this unphilosophical idea. Going boldly behind the vulgar thought, we have to conceive, metaphysically, that the gravitating principle appertains to Matter temporarily—only while diffused—only while existing as Many instead of as One—appertains to it by virtue of its state of radiation alone—appertains, in a word, altogether to its condition, and not in the slightest degree to itself. In this view, when the radiation shall have returned into its source—when the rëaction shall be completed—the gravitating principle will no longer exist. And, in fact, astronomers, without at any time reaching the idea here suggested, seem to have been approximating it, in the assertion that “if there were but one body in the Universe, it would be impossible to understand how the principle, Gravity, could obtain”:—that is to say, from a consideration of Matter as they find it, they reach a conclusion at which I deductively arrive. That so pregnant a suggestion as the one just quoted should have been permitted to remain so long unfruitful, is, nevertheless, a mystery which I find it difficult to fathom. It is, perhaps, in no little degree, however, our propensity for the continuous—for the analogical—in the present case more particularly for the symmetrical—which has been leading us astray. And, in fact, the sense of the symmetrical is an instinct which may be depended on with an almost blindfold reliance. It is the poetical essence of the Universe—of the Universe which, in the supremeness of its symmetry, is but the most sublime of poems. Now symmetry and consistency are convertible terms:—thus Poetry and Truth are one. A thing is consistent in the ratio of its truth—true in the ratio of its consistency. A perfect consistency, I repeat, can be nothing but an absolute truth. We may take it for granted, then, that Man cannot long or widely err, if he suffer himself to be guided
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by his poetical, which I have maintained to be his truthful, in being his symmetrical, instinct. He must have a care, however, lest, in pursuing too heedlessly the superficial symmetry of forms and motions, he leave out of sight the really essential symmetry of the principles which determine and control them. That the stellar bodies would finally be merged in one—that, at last, all would be drawn into the substance of one stupendous central orb already existing—is an idea which, for some time past, seems, vaguely and indeterminately, to have held possession of the fancy of mankind. It is an idea, in fact, which belongs to the class of the excessively obvious. It springs, instantly, from a superficial observation of the cyclic and seemingly gyrating, or vorticial movements of those individual portions of the Universe which come most immediately and most closely under our observation. There is not, perhaps, a human being, of ordinary education and of average reflective capacity, to whom, at some period, the fancy in question has not occurred, as if spontaneously, or intuitively, and wearing all the character of a very profound and very original conception. This conception, however, so commonly entertained, has never, within my knowledge, arisen out of any abstract considerations. Being, on the contrary, always suggested, as I say, by the vorticial movements about centres, a reason for it, also,—a cause for the ingathering of all the orbs into one, imagined to be already existing, was naturally sought in the same direction—among these cyclic movements themselves. Thus it happened that, on announcement of the gradual and perfectly regular decrease observed in the orbit of Encke’s comet, at every successive revolution about our Sun, astronomers were nearly unanimous in the opinion that the cause in question was found—that a principle was discovered sufficient to account, physically, for that final, universal agglomeration which, I repeat, the analogical, symmetrical or poetical instinct of Man had predetermined to understand as something more than a simple hypothesis. This cause—this sufficient reason for the final ingathering—was declared to exist in an exceedingly rare but still material medium pervading space; which medium, by retarding, in some degree, the progress of the comet, perpetually weakened its tangential force; thus giving a predominance to the centripetal; which, of course, drew the comet nearer and nearer at each revolution, and would eventually precipitate it upon the Sun.
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COMMENTARY
The highest order of the imaginative intellect is always preeminently mathematical; and the converse.
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E. A. P.
(1) The reception of Poe on the French side was, as we know, far greater than on native grounds, & whether they got it right or wrong, there is no doubt but that they got it. For there is with him, far more than with most of his Postromantic contemporaries, the sense of a new opening & of possibilities imbedded in language & mind that he or others will make it their business to explore, whether achieved or not. Placing him in the penultimate spot in his radical study of poets & others thinking & writing “in the American grain,” William Carlos Williams wrote as an isolated act of rehabilitation: “On him is founded a literature—typical, an anger to sweep out the unoriginal, that became ill-tempered, a monomaniacal driving to destroy, to annihilate the copied, the slavish, the false literature about him: this is the major impulse in his notes.” And Baudelaire, who devoted himself to extensive translations from Poe, both the verse & fiction, & to a number of biographical & critical assessments, described him as “the man . . . who throughout a life that resembled a tempest with no calm, had invented new forms, unknown avenues to astonish the imagination, to captivate all minds desiring beauty.” To which he added: “Diderot, to choose one example in a hundred, is a red-blooded author; Poe was a writer of nerves, and of much more—and the best writer I know.” Poe’s advocacy of a poetics based on near-mathematical precision & absolute verbal condensation—or so he hoped—was accompanied by a devotion to the fantastic (often too to what Jean Paul called the humoristic) & by a life & temperment that prefigured the poète maudit & the “Decadent” & symboliste writings of the later nineteenth century, where his poetic stature outside the United States remained strong. (See, for example, Mallarmé’s sonnet, below, & André Breton’s assessment of Poe as a Surrealist forerunner [“a surrealist in adventure”] & as a master of what Breton elsewhere named “black humor.”) (2) Working between genres, Poe was quick to realize that the boundaries of poetry didn’t stop at the border with prose, & while his sense of the “lyric” drew him toward the intense single moment (the meaning-charged fragment as a carryover from Romanticism) & to a rejection of the “long poem,” his own long prose work Eureka (1848)—devoid of any resemblance to “poetic” diction—was for him not only an extended essay on cosmology & his excursus into scientific speculation, but, as he specifically named it, “a prose poem.” In one of the more daring / dazzling moves of the nineteenth century, he effectively erased, beyond the work of other or earlier practitioners, the long-standing boundaries between poetry & prose.
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A lf red Ten nys on
1809–1892
“ F LO W E R I N T H E C R A N N I E D W A L L”
Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.
THE HESPERIDES Hesperus and his daughters three, That sing about the golden tree.
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COMUS [M I LTO N]
The North-wind fall’n, in the new-starréd night Zidonian Hanno, voyaging beyond The hoary promontory of Soloë Past Thymiaterion, in calméd bays, Between the southern and the western Horn, Heard neither warbling of the nightingale, Nor melody of the Libyan lotus flute Blown seaward from the shore; but from a slope That ran bloom-bright into the Atlantic blue, Beneath a highland leaning down a weight Of cliffs, and zoned below with cedar shade, Came voices, like the voices in a dream, Continuous, till he reached the outer sea. Song 1
The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit, Guard it well, guard it warily, Singing airily, Standing about the charméd root. Round about all is mute, As the snow-field on the mountain-peaks, As the sand-field at the mountain-foot. Crocodiles in briny creeks 510 A Second Gallery
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Sleep and stir not: all is mute. If ye sing not, if ye make false measure, We shall lose eternal pleasure, Worth eternal want of rest. Laugh not loudly: watch the treasure Of the wisdom of the West. In a corner wisdom whispers. Five and three (Let it not be preached abroad) make an awful mystery. For the blossom unto threefold music bloweth; Evermore it is born anew; And the sap to threefold music floweth, From the root Drawn in the dark, Up to the fruit, Creeping under the fragrant bark, Liquid gold, honeysweet, thro’ and thro’. Keen-eyed Sisters, singing airily, Looking warily Every way, Guard the apple night and day, Lest one from the East come and take it away.
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2
Father Hesper, Father Hesper, watch, watch, ever and aye, Looking under silver hair with a silver eye. Father, twinkle not thy steadfast sight; Kingdoms lapse, and climates change, and races die; Honor comes with mystery; Hoarded wisdom brings delight. Number, tell them over and number How many the mystic fruit-tree holds Lest the red-combed dragon slumber Rolled together in purple folds. Look to him, father, lest he wink, and the golden apple be stol’n away, For his ancient heart is drunk with overwatchings night and day, Round about the hallowed fruit-tree curled— Sing away, sing loud evermore in the wind, without stop, Lest his scaléd eyelid drop, For he is older than the world. If he waken, we waken, Rapidly levelling eager eyes. If he sleep, we sleep, Alfred Tennyson 511
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Dropping the eyelid over the eyes. If the golden apple be taken, The world will be overwise. Five links a golden chain, are we, Hesper, the dragon, and sisters three, Bound about the golden tree. 3
Father Hesper, Father Hesper, watch, watch, night and day, Lest the old wound of the world be healéd, The glory unsealéd, The golden apple stolen away, And the ancient secret revealéd. Look from west to east along: Father, old Himala weakens, Caucasus is bold and strong. Wandering waters unto wandering waters call; Let them clash together, foam and fall. Out of watchings, out of wiles, Comes the bliss of secret smiles. All things are not told to all. Half-round the mantling night is drawn, Purple fringéd with even and dawn. Hesper hateth Phosphor, evening hateth morn.
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4
Every flower and every fruit the redolent breath Of this warm sea-wind ripeneth, Arching the billow in his sleep; But the land-wind wandereth, Broken by the highland-steep, Two streams upon the violet deep; For the western sun and the western star, And the low west-wind, breathing afar, The end of day and beginning of night Make the apple holy and bright; Holy and bright, round and full, bright and blest, Mellowed in a land of rest; Watch it warily day and night; All good things are in the west. Till mid noon the cool east light Is shut out by the round of the tall hillbrow.
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But when the full-faced sunset yellowly Stays on the flowering arch of the bough, The lucious fruitage clustereth mellowly, Golden-kernelled, golden-cored, Sunset-ripened above on the tree. The world is wasted with fire and sword, But the apple of gold hangs over the sea Five links, a golden chain are we, Hesper, the dragon, and sisters three, Daughters three, Bound about All round about The gnarléd bole of the charméd tree. The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit, Guard it well, guard it warily, Watch it warily, Singing airily, Standing about the charméd root.
from M A U D , O R T H E M A D N E S S
“Come into the garden, Maud”
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1
Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown. 2
For a breeze of morning moves, And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves On a bed of daffodil sky, To faint in the light of the sun she loves, To faint in his light, and to die.
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3
All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon. 4
I said to the lily, “There is but one, With whom she has heart to be gay. When will the dancers leave her alone? She is weary of dance and play.” Now half to the setting moon are gone, And half to the rising day; Low on the sand and loud on the stone The last wheel echoes away. 5
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I said to the rose, “The brief night goes In babble and revel and wine. O young lord-lover, what sighs are those, For one that will never be thine? But mine, but mine,” so I sware to the rose, “For ever and ever, mine.” 6
And the soul of the rose went into my blood, As the music clash’d in the hall; And long by the garden lake I stood, For I heard your rivulet fall From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood, Our wood, that is dearer than all. 7
From the meadow your walks have left so sweet That whenever a March-wind sighs He sets the jewel-print of your feet In violets blue as your eyes, To the woody hollows in which we meet And the valleys of Paradise.
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8
The slender acacia would not shake One long milk-bloom on the tree; That white lake-blossom fell into the lake As the pimpernel dozed on the lea; But the rose was awake all night for your sake, Knowing your promise to me; The lilies and roses were all awake, They sigh’d for the dawn and thee. 9
Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, Come hither, the dancers are done, In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, Queen lily and rose in one; Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, To the flowers, and be their sun.
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10
There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate. The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near;” And the white rose weeps, “She is late;” The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear;” And the lily whispers, “I wait.” 11
She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead, Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.
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“Dead, long dead” 1
Dead, long dead, Long dead! And my heart is a handful of dust, And the wheels go over my head, And my bones are shaken with pain, For into a shallow grave they are thrust, Only a yard beneath the street, And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, The hoofs of the horses beat, Beat into my scalp and my brain, With never an end to the stream of passing feet, Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying, Clamor and rumble, and ringing and clatter; And here beneath it is all as bad, For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so. To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad? But up and down and to and fro, Ever about me the dead men go; And then to hear a dead man chatter Is enough to drive one mad.
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2
Wretchedest age, since Time began, They cannot even bury a man; And tho’ we paid our tithes in the days that are gone, Not a bell was rung, not a prayer was read. It is that which makes us loud in the world of the dead; There is none that does his work, not one. A touch of their office might have sufficed, But the churchmen fain would kill their church, As the churches have kill’d their Christ. 3
See, there is one of us sobbing, No limit to his distress; And another, a lord of all things, praying To his own great self, as I guess; And another, a statesman there, betraying
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His party-secret, fool, to the press; And yonder a vile physician, blabbing The case of his patient—all for what? To tickle the maggot born in an empty head, And wheedle a world that loves him not, For it is but a world of the dead. 4
Nothing but idiot gabble! For the prophecy given of old And then not understood, Has come to pass as foretold; Not let any man think for the public good, But babble, merely for babble. For I never whisper’d a private affair Within the hearing of cat or mouse, No, not to myself in the closet alone, But I heard it shouted at once from the top of the house; Everything came to be known. Who told him we were there? 5
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Not that gray old wolf, for he came not back From the wilderness, full of wolves, where he used to lie; He has gather’d the bones for his o’ergrown whelp to crack— Crack them now for yourself, and howl, and die. 6
Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip, And curse me the British vermin, the rat; I know not whether he came in the Hanover ship, But I know that he lies and listens mute In an ancient mansion’s crannies and holes. Arsenic, arsenic, sure, would do it, Except that now we poison our babes, poor souls! It is all used up for that. 7
Tell him now: she is standing here at my head; Not beautiful now, not even kind; He may take her now; for she never speaks her mind,
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But is ever the one thing silent here. She is not of us, as I divine, She comes from another stiller world of the dead, Stiller, not fairer than mine. 8
But I know where a garden grows, Fairer than aught in the world beside, All made up of the lily and rose That blow by night, when the season is good, To the sound of dancing music and flutes: It is only flowers, they had no fruits, And I almost fear they are not roses, but blood; For the keeper was one, so full of pride, He linkt a dead man there to a spectral bride; For he, if he had not been a Sultan of brutes, Would he have that hole in his side? 9
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But what will the old man say? He laid a cruel snare in a pit To catch a friend of mine one stormy day; Yet now I could even weep to think of it; For what will the old man say When he comes to the second corpse in the pit? 10
Friend, to be struck by the public foe, Then to strike him and lay him low, That were a public merit, far, Whatever the Quaker holds, from sin; But the red life spilt for a private blow— I swear to you, lawful and lawless war Are scarcely even akin. 11
O me, why have they not buried me deep enough? Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough, Me, that was never a quiet sleeper? Maybe still I am but half-dead; Then I cannot be wholly dumb.
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I will cry to the steps above my head And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come To bury me, bury me Deeper, ever so little deeper.
COMMENTARY
This poem of Maud or the Madness is a little Hamlet, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age.
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A. T.
It was in the twentieth-century swerving from Victorian Postromanticism that Tennyson, who was Victoria’s poet laureate & successor to Wordsworth, fell into the greatest disregard. Where the earlier Romantics remained a presence in the century that followed—Wordsworth & Coleridge for some, Shelley & Keats for others—the decline of Tennyson was exemplified by W. H. Auden’s observation (kinder than some) that while Tennyson had the “finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet, he was also undoubtedly the stupidest.” (This was in the introduction to Auden’s 1946 selection of poems by Tennyson.) If both of Auden’s assessments now seem over the top, an alternative reading of Tennyson discloses a range that emulates & extends the “romantic” line of Keats & the “pure aestheticism” of much of Tennyson’s earlier work (“The Palace of Art,” “The Lady of Shalott,” etc.), while introducing, within the confines of traditional prosody, a sometimes gnarlier measure & themes, as in Maud (1855) or in the quantitative experiments & ambiguities of a suppressed & never republished early poem like The Hesperides, that resemble (here at least) those of Beddoes, Poe, or even Baudelaire. Indeed, in his too-often neglected “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry” (1831), Arthur Hallam linked Shelley and Keats to the early Tennyson by calling the three (mistakenly or not) “poets of sensation rather than reflection.” It is now possible in fact to read his “monodrama” Maud (originally subtitled The Madness) as he did—as a complex experimental work (“a new form of poem altogether”—A. T.), in which, so Tennyson tells us, “the peculiarity of this poem is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters” & new techniques of fragmentation & montage transform an otherwise banal narrative into a representation of extreme states of mind & of a zeitgeist likewise in extremis. Written as the first work of his laureateship & shortly after his other great poem of that time, In Memoriam, its opaque, unsettled form & disruptive, even transgressive subjects (illicit love, jealousy, murder) & political rant caused a string of negative reactions, as if the work had gotten ahead of Tennyson & had made him a “cameleon poet” (Keats, below, in Manifestos & Poetics) in spite of himself. Freed of Victorian cant, the “phases of passion” in
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the narrator & even Tennyson’s attempt at a redemptive ending (a glorification of patriotism & war, again in the narrator’s voice) can be read as a reflection of the darker side of his time & our own. As his younger contemporary Whitman wrote of him—with unflinching admiration that included, obviously, more than Maud: “His very faults, doubts, swervings, doublings upon himself, have been typical of our age.”
Rob ert Brow n in g
1812–1889
“HEAP CASSIA, SANDAL-BUDS AND STRIPES” Song from Paracelsus
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Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes Of labdanum, and aloe-balls, Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes From out her hair: such balsam falls Down sea-side mountain pedestals, From tree-tops where tired winds are fain, Spent with the vast and howling main, To treasure half their island-gain. And strew faint sweetness from some old Egyptian’s fine worm-eaten shroud Which breaks to dust when once unrolled; Or shredded perfume, like a cloud From closet long to quiet vowed, With mothed and dropping arras hung, Mouldering her lute and books among, As when a queen, long dead, was young.
CALIBAN UPON SETEBOS, OR N AT U R A L T H E O LO G Y I N T H E I S L A N D Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself. DAV I D, P SALM S 5 0 : 2 1
[’Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
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And feels about his spine small eft-things course, Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: And while above his head a pompion-plant, Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, And now a flower drops with a bee inside, And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,— He looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross And recross till they weave a spider-web (Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times) And talks to his own self, howe’er he please, Touching that other, whom his dam called God. Because to talk about Him, vexes—ha, Could He but know! and time to vex is now, When talk is safer than in winter-time. Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep In confidence he drudges at their task, And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe, Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.]
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Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos! ’Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon. ’Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match, But not the stars; the stars came otherwise; Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that: Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon, And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same. ’Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease: He hated that He cannot change His cold, Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fish That longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived, And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave; Only, she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun) Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, And in her old bounds buried her despair, Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.
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’Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle, Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing. Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, And says a plain word when she finds her prize, But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks About their hole—He made all these and more, Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else? He could not, Himself, make a second self To be His mate; as well have made Himself: He would not make what he mislikes or slights, An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains: But did, in envy, listlessness or sport, Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be— Weaker in most points, stronger in a few, Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while, Things He admires and mocks too,—that is it. Because, so brave, so better though they be, It nothing skills if He begin to plague. Look now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash, Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived, Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,— Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all, Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain; Last, throw me on my back i’ the seeded thyme, And wanton, wishing I were born a bird. Put case, unable to be what I wish, I yet could make a live bird out of clay: Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban Able to fly?—for, there, see, he hath wings, And great comb like the hoopoe’s to admire, And there, a sting to do his foes offence, There, and I will that he begin to live, Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns Of grigs high up that make the merry din, Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not.
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In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay, And he lay stupid-like,—why, I should laugh; And if he, spying me, should fall to weep, Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong, Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,— Well, as the chance were, this might take or else Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry, And give the mankin three sound legs for one, Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg, And lessoned he was mine and merely clay. Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme, Drinking the mash, with brain become alive, Making and marring clay at will? So He.
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’Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him, Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord. ’Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs That march now from the mountain to the sea, ’Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. ’Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off; ’Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, And two worms he whose nippers end in red; As it likes me each time, I do: so He. Well then, ’supposeth He is good i’ the main, Placable if His mind and ways were guessed, But rougher than His handiwork, be sure! Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself, And envieth that, so helped, such things do more Than He who made them! What consoles but this? That they, unless through Him, do nought at all, And must submit: what other use in things? ’Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder joint That, blown through, gives exact the scream o’ the jay When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue: Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay Flock within stone’s throw, glad their foe is hurt: Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth “I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing, I make the cry my maker cannot make
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With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!” Would not I smash it with my foot? So He. But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease? Aha, that is a question! Ask, for that, What knows,—the something over Setebos That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought, Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance. There may be something quiet o’er His head, Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief, Since both derive from weakness in some way. I joy because the quails come; would not joy Could I bring quails here when I have a mind: This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth. ’Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch, But never spends much thought nor care that way. It may look up, work up,—the worse for those It works on! ’Careth but for Setebos The many-handed as a cuttle-fish, Who, making Himself feared through what He does, Looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar To what is quiet and hath happy life; Next looks down here, and out of very spite Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real, These good things to match those as hips do grapes. ’Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport. Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle: Vexed, ’stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped, Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words; Has peeled a wand and called it by a name; Weareth at whiles for an enchanter’s robe The eyed skin of a supple oncelot; And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole, A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch, Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye, And saith she is Miranda and my wife: ’Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge; Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared, Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame, And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
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In a hole o’ the rock and calls him Caliban; A bitter heart that bides its time and bites. ’Plays thus at being Prosper in a way, Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He.
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His dam held that the Quiet made all things Which Setebos vexed only: ’holds not so. Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex. Had He meant other, while His hand was in, Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick, Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow, Or overscale my flesh ’neath joint and joint, Like an orc’s armour? Ay,—so spoil His sport! He is the One now: only He doth all. ’Saith, He may like, perchance, what profits Him. Ay, himself loves what does him good; but why? ’Gets good no otherwise. This blinded beast Loves whoso places flesh-meat on his nose, But, had he eyes, would want no help, but hate Or love, just as it liked him: He hath eyes. Also it pleaseth Setebos to work, Use all His hands, and exercise much craft, By no means for the love of what is worked. ’Tasteth, himself, no finer good i’ the world When all goes right, in this safe summer-time, And he wants little, hungers, aches not much, Than trying what to do with wit and strength. ’Falls to make something: ’piled yon pile of turfs, And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk, And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each, And set up endwise certain spikes of tree, And crowned the whole with a sloth’s skull a-top, Found dead i’ the woods, too hard for one to kill. No use at all i’ the work, for work’s sole sake; ’Shall some day knock it down again: so He. ’Saith He is terrible: watch His feats in proof! One hurricane will spoil six good months’ hope. He hath a spite against me, that I know, Just as He favours Prosper, who knows why? So it is, all the same, as well I find. ’Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm
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With stone and stake to stop she-tortoises Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave, Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck, Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue, And licked the whole labour flat: so much for spite. ’Saw a ball flame down late (yonder it lies) Where, half an hour before, I slept i’ the shade: Often they scatter sparkles: there is force! ’Dug up a newt He may have envied once And turned to stone, shut up inside a stone. Please Him and hinder this?—What Prosper does? Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He! There is the sport: discover how or die! All need not die, for of the things o’ the isle Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees; Those at His mercy,—why, they please Him most When . . . when . . . well, never try the same way twice! Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth. You must not know His ways, and play Him off, Sure of the issue. ’Doth the like himself: ’Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears But steals the nut from underneath my thumb, And when I threat, bites stoutly in defence: ’Spareth an urchin that contrariwise, Curls up into a ball, pretending death For fright at my approach: the two ways please. But what would move my choler more than this, That either creature counted on its life To-morrow and next day and all days to come, Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart, “Because he did so yesterday with me, And otherwise with such another brute, So must he do henceforth and always.”—Ay? Would teach the reasoning couple what “must” means! ’Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He. ’Conceiveth all things will continue thus, And we shall have to live in fear of Him So long as He lives, keeps His strength: no change, If He have done His best, make no new world To please Him more, so leave off watching this,— If He surprise not even the Quiet’s self
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Some strange day,—or, suppose, grow into it As grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we, And there is He, and nowhere help at all.
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’Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop. His dam held different, that after death He both plagued enemies and feasted friends: Idly! He doth His worst in this our life, Giving just respite lest we die through pain, Saving last pain for worst,—with which, an end. Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire Is, not to seem too happy. ’Sees, himself, Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink, Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both. ’Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball On head and tail as if to save their lives: Moves them the stick away they strive to clear. Even so, ’would have Him misconceive, suppose This Caliban strives hard and ails no less, And always, above all else, envies Him; Wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights, Moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh, And never speaks his mind save housed as now: Outside, ’groans, curses. If He caught me here, O’erheard this speech, and asked “What chucklest at?” ’Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off, Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best, Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree, Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste: While myself lit a fire, and made a song And sung it, “What I hate, be consecrate To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?” Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend, Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime, That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch And conquer Setebos, or likelier He Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die. [What, what? A curtain o’er the world at once! Crickets stop hissing; not a bird—or, yes, Robert Browning 527 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
There scuds His raven that has told Him all! It was fool’s play, this prattling! Ha! The wind Shoulders the pillared dust, death’s house o’ the move, And fast invading fires begin! White blaze— A tree’s head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there, His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him! Lo! ’Lieth flat and loveth Setebos! ’Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape!]
S O L I LO Q U Y O F T H E S PA N I S H C LO I S T E R
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Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence! Water your damned flower-pots, do! If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, God’s blood, would not mine kill you! What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming? Oh, that rose has prior claims— Needs its leaden vase filled brimming? Hell dry you up with its flames! At the meal we sit together: Salve tibi! I must hear Wise talk of the kind of weather, Sort of season, time of year: Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt: What’s the Latin name for “parsley”? What’s the Greek name for Swine’s Snout? Whew! We’ll have our platter burnished, Laid with care on our own shelf! With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished, And a goblet for ourself, Rinsed like something sacrificial Ere ’tis fit to touch our chaps— Marked with L. for our initial! (He-he! There his lily snaps!) Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores Squats outside the Convent bank 528 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
With Sanchicha, telling stories, Steeping tresses in the tank, Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs, —Can’t I see his dead eye glow, Bright as ’twere a Barbary corsair’s? (That is, if he’d let it show!) When he finishes refection, Knife and fork he never lays Cross-wise, to my recollection, As do I, in Jesu’s praise. I the Trinity illustrate, Drinking watered orange-pulp— In three sips the Arian frustrate; While he drains his at one gulp.
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Oh, those melons? If he’s able We’re to have a feast! so nice! One goes to the Abbot’s table, All of us get each a slice. How go on your flowers? None double? Not one fruit-sort can you spy? Strange!—And I, too, at such trouble, Keep them close-nipped on the sly! There’s a great text in Galatians, Once you trip on it, entails Twenty-nine distinct damnations, One sure, if another fails: If I trip him just a-dying, Sure of heaven as sure can be, Spin him round and send him flying Off to hell, a Manichee? Or, my scrofulous French novel On grey paper with blunt type! Simply glance at it, you grovel Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe: If I double down its pages At the woeful sixteenth print, When he gathers his greengages, Ope a sieve and slip it in’t? Or, there’s Satan!—one might venture Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave Robert Browning 529 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Such a flaw in the indenture As he’d miss till, past retrieve, Blasted lay that rose-acacia We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine . . . ’St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratia Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r—you swine!
COMMENTARY
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Let the rank tongue blossom into speech. (R. B., “Caliban upon Setebos”) Or Ezra Pound re Browning in Canto Two: “Say I take your whole bag of tricks, / Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s an art-form, / . . . and that the modern world / Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thoughts in . . .” (1) Pound, of course, catapults Browning past the otherwise dismissed Victorian poets into the early twentieth century with his loaded praise for Sordello, both in the early Cantos (with its “barrel full of allusions”) & in the following: “You may well have to retire as far as the Divina Commedia for continued narrative having such clarity of outline without clog and verbal impediment.” But his praise continues over the years with Browning’s signature genre, the dramatic monologue, which Pound called “the most vital form of that period of English.” In these poems Browning “raises the dead” (Pound) with figures revived from the late Middle Ages & the Renaissance, giving them a “rebirth” not humanist & spiritualized but often appetitive, infernal in the Dantean sense, rooted in heavy, sensual bodies that blossom in a burdened fancy. And just as his characters dwell in a “natural theology” of the body, so his language exhibits a thick materiality; note how, from the beginning of “Caliban upon Setebos” & thereafter, he drops the personal pronoun (indicating the omissions by an apostrophe), while pushing deep into the body of the sentence itself (a practice Pound imitated in his second Canto & elsewhere). In a similar vein the bulk of his dramatic monologues insists upon a lyric/dramatic voice not identifiable with that of the poet or anonymous lyric subject. Thus they contribute to a recovery of repressed voices, or of the repressed side of voices—a powerful & prolific instance of de-familiarization in Postromantic poetry. (2) “If the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age, the objective, in the strictest state, must still retain its original value. For it is with this world, as starting point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned. The spiritual comprehension may be infinitely subtilized, but the raw material it operates upon, must remain. There may be no end of the poets who communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever” (R. B., “An Essay on Shelley”). 530 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Edwa rd L ear
1812–1888
EIGHT LIMERICKS
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There was an Old Man in a tree, Whose whiskers were lovely to see; But the birds of the air pluck’d them perfectly bare, To make themselves nests in that tree.
There was an Old Person of Wick, Who said, “Tick-a-Tick, Tick-a-Tick, Chickabee, Chickabaw.” And he said, nothing more, That laconic Old Person of Wick. Edward Lear 531
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There was an Old Person of Newry, Whose manners were tinctured with fury; He tore all the rugs, and broke all the jugs Within twenty miles’ distance of Newry.
There was an Old Person of Nice, Whose associates were usually Geese; They walked out together, in all sorts of weather, That affable Person of Nice!
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There was a Young Lady of Firle, Whose hair was addicted to curl; It curled up a tree, and all over the sea, That expansive Young Lady of Firle.
There was an Old Man of Girgenti, Who lived in profusion and plenty; He lay on two chairs, and ate thousands of pears, That susceptible Man of Girgenti.
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There was an Old Man of Whitehaven, Who danced a quadrille with a Raven; But they said—“It’s absurd, to encourage this bird!” So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.
There was an Old Man in a tree, Who was horribly bored by a Bee; When they said, “Does it buzz?” he replied, “Yes it does! It’s a regular brute of a Bee!”
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M R A N D M R S D I S C O B B O LO S
Mr and Mrs Discobbolos Climbed to the top of a wall, And they sate to watch the sunset sky And to bear the Nupiter Piffkin cry And the Biscuit Buffalo call. They took up a roll and some Camomile tea, And both were as happy as happy could be— Till Mrs Discobbolos said— “Oh! W! X! Y! Z! It has just come into my head— Suppose we should happen to fall!!!!! Darling Mr Discobbolos!
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“Suppose we should fall down flumpetty Just like pieces of stone! On to the thorns,—or into the moat! What would become of your new green coat? And might you not break a bone? It never occurred to me before— That perhaps we shall never go down any more!” And Mrs Discobbolos said— “Oh! W! X! Y! Z! What put it into your head To climb up this wall?—my own Darling Mr Discobbolos?” Mr Discobbolos answered,— “At first it gave me pain,— And I felt my ears turn perfectly pink When your exclamation made me think We might never get down again! But now I believe it is wiser far To remain for ever just where we are.”— And Mr Discobbolos said, “Oh! W! X! Y! Z! It is just come into my head— —We shall never go down again— Dearest Mrs Discobbolos!”
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So Mr and Mrs Discobbolos Stood up, and began to sing, “Far away from hurry and strife Here we will pass the rest of life, Ding a dong, ding dong, ding! We want no knives nor forks nor chairs, No tables nor carpets nor household cares, From worry of life we’ve fled— Oh! W! X! Y! Z! There’s no more trouble ahead, Sorrow or any such thing— For Mr and Mrs Discobbolos!”
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LET TER TO MRS STUART WORTLEY: THE MOON JOURNEY
My dear Mrs Stuart Wortley, In the first place observe the Envellope, for the appearance of which an oppology is kneaded, the fact being that there was only this one in the house large enough, & so, though it was originally addressed to the Hon. J. Warren, I altered it to what it now is. Secondly, I thought it so kind of you to have purchased the Mte Generoso drawing, that I wanted you to have 2 scraps to remind you of “Simla,” and “Ravenna forest.” Which two I enclose, hoping you may think them worth a corner in some Album. I also send 2 still smaller,—one for each of the young Ladies. These are of singular—I may say bingular value,—as they were done in the Moon, to which I lately went one night, returning next morning on a Moonbeam. As the Signorine Blanche & Katherine appreciate nonsense, I will add some few notes concerning the 2 subjects which I got with great rapidity during my visit, nothing being easier in that wonderful country than to travel thousands of miles in a minute. And these journeys are all done by means of Moonbeams, which, far from being mere portions of light, are in reality living creatures, endowed with considerable sogassity, & a long nose like the truck of a Nelliphant, though this is quite imperceptible to the naked eye. You have only to whisper to the Moonbeam what you wish to see, & you are there in a moment, & its nose or trunk being placed round your body, you cannot by any possibility fall. The first view it is of the Jizzdoddle rocks, with 2 of the many remarkable planets which surround the moon rising or riz in the distance; these orange-coloured & peagreen orbs leaving a profound impression of sensational surprise on the mind of the speckletator who first beholds them. The second view
536 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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represents the Rumbytumby ravine, with the crimson planet Buzz and its 5 Satanites on the horizon. In the foreground on the left is a Blompopp tree, so called from the Blompopp, a gigantic and gorgeous bird which builds on its summit. To the left are the tall Vizzikilly trees, the most common vegetation of the Lunar hummysphere. These trees grow to an immense height, & bloom only once in 15 years, when they produce a large crop of immemorial soapbubbles, submarine sucking-pigs, songs of sunrise, & silver sixpences, —which last are ground into powder by the Lunar population, & drunk in warm water without any sugar. So little is known of the inhabitants of the moon, that a few descriptive but accurate notices relating to them may be interesting. They do not in the least resemble the people of our world,—as for instance they are all much broader than they are high; they have no hair on their heads,—but on the contrary a beautiful crest of yellow feathers which they can raise or depress at will, like that of the ordinary Cockatoo. And from the tip of their nose depends an elegant and affecting bunch of hair, sometimes extending to as much as 20 miles in length, and as it is considered sacrilegious to cut it, it is gradually wound round a silvergilt post firmly placed in the ground, but removable at pleasure. The faces of the more educated classes have a pensively perverse and placid expression,—not unlike the countenance of an Oyster, while frequently a delicately doubleminded semi-visual obliquity adds a pathos to their pungent physiognomy. These remarkable people, so unlike ourselves, pass 18 months of their year (which consists of 22) in the strictest seclusion,—suspended with their heads downwards, and held carefully in crimson silk bags,—which are severely & suddenly shaken from time to time by select servants. Thus,—exempt from the futile & fluctuating fatuity of fashion, these estimable creatures pass an indigenous life of indefinite duration surrounded by their admiring ancestors, & despised by their incipient posterity. Their servants are not natives of the Moon, but are brought at great expense from a negative although nutritious star at a remote distance, and are wholly of a different species from the Lunar population, having 8 arms & 8 legs each, but no head whatever;—only a chin in the middle of which are their eyes,—their mouths, (of which each individual possesses 8,) being one in each little toe, & with these they discourse with an overpowering volubility & an indiscriminating alacrity surprising to contemplate. The conduct of these singular domestics is usually virtuous & voluminous, & their general aspic highly mucilaginous & meritorious. I have no time at present to dilate further on other particulars of Lunar Natural History;—the prevalence of 2 sorts of gales, gales of wind and nightingales;—the general inebriety of the Atmosphere;—or the devo-
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tional functions of the inhabitants, consisting chiefly in the immense consumption of Ambleboff pies. Hoping that I may see you & the 2 two young ladies on Wednesday, Believe me, Yours sincerely, Edward Lear.
“HOW PLEASANT TO KNOW MR LEAR"”
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From a Photograph.
“How pleasant to know Mr Lear!” Who has written such volumes of stuff! Some think him ill-tempered and queer, But a few think him pleasant enough. His mind is concrete and fastidious;— His nose is remarkably big;— His visage is more or less hideous;— His beard it resembles a wig. He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,— (Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;) Long ago he was one of the singers, But now he is one of the dumms. He sits in a beautiful parlour, With hundreds of books on the wall;
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He drinks a great deal of Marsala, But never gets tipsy at all. He has many friends, laymen and clerical; Old Foss is the name of his cat; His body is perfectly spherical;— He weareth a runcible hat. When he walks in a waterproof white The children run after him so! Calling out,—“He’s come out in his nightgown, that crazy old Englishman,—O!” He weeps by the side of the ocean, He weeps on the top of the hill; He purchases pancakes and lotion, And chocolate shrimps from the mill. He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish; He cannot abide ginger-beer.— Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,— “How pleasant to know Mr Lear!”
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COMMENTARY
Thrippsy pillivinx, // Inky tinky pobblebockle abblesquabs?—Flosky! Beebul trimble flosky!—Okul scratchabibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-a-tog, ferrymoyassity amsky flamsky ramsky damsky crocklefether squiggs, // Flinkywisty pomm, / Slushypipp. E. L., letter to Evelyn Baring, 1862
(1) The gap between Lear’s nonsense & the Russian Futurists’ beyondsense (za-um) is akin to the distance of both from the nonsense rhymes & glossolalia that were a central part of popular/folk soundings & doings over centuries, even millennia. On the avant-garde side, a kinship with the two major British nonsense poets (Lear & Lewis Carroll) has long been recognized by a diverse range of poets—if not directly, then in the way that they’ve colored the imaginings & soundings of those like Tzara, Breton, or Artaud, the last of whom attempted a French translation of Carroll’s Jabberwocky, though he dropped it, he said, “out of boredom.” It’s Lear, though, who most brings language & thought into question—both the rational & the sentimental—& in the process creates new forms of languaging, as any Dada or Fluxus artist might do thereafter. The results are intimations of sound poetry & a kind of comic surrealism that would have made him their forerunner or, as Breton described Carroll, “a surrealist
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in nonsense.” Lear’s is also a questioning of inherited forms, starting with parodies of the Romantic & Postromantic poetry of his time & moving close to areas where language is taken to a place “beyond sense” (= logic)— & beyond fantasy as well. It’s in such areas that Lear—a subversive by stealth—interrogates those in his world (identified only but consistently as “they”), whose literalism & sense of a legislated reality puts all free acts into doubt. For all of that, the tone of Lear’s work expresses, as George Orwell described it many years ago, “a kind of amiable lunacy, a natural sympathy with whatever is weak and absurd,” but with a tragic undercurrent ready to disrupt & shred the comic & fancyfull façade. A skilled artist & craftsman, Lear produced ornithological paintings on a par with those of Audubon, say, in America, but more to our point, created, like Blake before him, a mix of visual & verbal forms—a new visual poetry or poetry of mixed means, as some would say, avant la lettre. (The differences from Blake are also more than obvious, to neither’s discredit.) For more of which, check the selections in A Book of Extensions, below. (2) Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses— As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon— Rationalists would wear sombreros.
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Wallace Stevens, from “Six Significant Landscapes”
S øren Kierkegaard
1813–1855
THE ILLEGIBLE LETTER To what shall we compare the pathos of grieving loneliness?
If a man possessed a letter which he knew, or believed, contained information bearing upon what he must regard as his life’s happiness, but the writing was pale and fine, almost illegible—then would he read it with restless anxiety and with all possible passion, in one moment getting one meaning, in the next another, depending on his belief that, having made out one word with certainty he could interpret the rest thereby; but he would never arrive at anything except the same uncertainty with which he
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began. He would stare more and more anxiously, but the more he stared, the less he would see. His eyes would sometimes fill with tears; but the oftener this happened the less he would see. In the course of time, the writing would become fainter and more illegible, until at last the paper itself would crumble away, and nothing would be left to him except the tears in his eyes. Translation from Danish by Thomas C. Oden
from E I T H E R / O R
¨IAȌAȁMATA Diapsalmata
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ad se ipsum [to himself ]
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. It is with him as with the poor wretches in Phalaris’s bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow fire; their screams could not reach the tyrant’s ears to terrify him; to him they sounded like sweet music. And people crowd around the poet and say to him, “Sing again soon”—in other words, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before, because your screams would only alarm us, but the music is charming. And the reviewers step up and say, “That is right; so it must be according to the rules of esthetics.” Now of course a reviewer resembles a poet to a hair, except that he does not have the anguish in his heart, or the music on his lips. Therefore, I would rather be a swineherd out on Amager and be understood by swine than be a poet and be misunderstood by people. It is common knowledge that the first question in the first and most compendious instruction given to a child is this: What does baby want? The answer is: Da-da. And with such observations life begins, and yet we deny hereditary sin. And yet whom does the child have to thank for his first thrashings, whom else but his parents? I prefer to talk with children, for one may still dare to hope that they may become rational beings; but those who have become that—good Lord! How unreasonable people are! They never use the freedoms they have but demand those they do not have; they have freedom of thought—they demand freedom of speech.
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I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t feel like riding—the motion is too powerful; I don’t feel like walking—it is too tiring; I don’t feel like lying down, for either I would have to stay down, and I don’t feel like doing that, or I would have to get up again, and I don’t feel like doing that, either. Summa Summarum: I don’t feel like doing anything. There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death. Translation from Danish by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong
NEBUCHADNEZZAR
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How is human pride and power changed when it stands in awe of the power and majesty of God?
1. Recollections of my life when I was a beast and ate grass. I, Nebuchadnezzar, to all peoples and tongues. 2. Was not Babel the great city, the greatest of all the cities of the nations? I, I Nebuchadnezzar, have built it. 3. No city was so renowned as Babel, and no king so renowned through Babel, the glory of my majesty. 4. My royal house was visible unto the ends of the earth, and my wisdom was like a dark riddle which none of the wise men could explain. 5. So they could not tell what it was I had dreamed. 6. And the word came to me that I should be transformed and become like a beast which eateth the grass of the field while seven seasons changed over me. 7. Then I assembled all my princes with their armies and disposed that I should be forewarned when the enemy came as the word indicated. 8. But no one dared approach proud Babel, and I said, “Is not this proud Babel which I have built?” 9. Now there was heard a voice suddenly, and I was transformed as quickly as a woman changeth color. 10. Grass was my food, and dew fell upon me, and no one knew who I was. 11. But I knew Babel and cried, “Is not this Babel?” But no one heeded my word, for when it sounded it was like the bellowing of a beast.
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12. My thoughts terrified me, my thoughts in my mind, for my mouth was bound, and no one could perceive anything but a voice in likeness as a beast’s. 13. And I thought, Who is that Mighty One, the Lord, the Lord, whose wisdom is like the darkness of the night, and like the deep sea unfathomable? 14. Yea, like a dream which He alone understandeth, and the interpretation of which He hath not delivered into any man’s power, when suddenly He is upon one and holds one in His powerful arms. 15. No one knoweth where this Mighty One dwelleth, no one could point and say, “Behold, here is His throne,” so that one could travel through the land till it was said, “Behold, here is the confine of His dominion.” 16. For He dwelleth not on the confines of my kingdom as my neighbor, neither from the uttermost sea unto the confines of my kingdom like a bulwark round about. 17. And neither doth He dwell in His Temple, for I, I Nebuchadnezzar, have taken His vessels of gold and vessels of silver, and have laid His Temple waste. 18. And no one knoweth anything of Him, who was His father, and how He acquired His power, and who taught Him the secret of His might. 19. And He hath no counselors, that one might buy His secret for gold; no one to whom He says, “What shall I do?” and no one who says to Him, “What doest thou?” 20. Spies He has not, to spy after the opportunity when one might catch Him; for He doth not say, “Tomorrow,” but He saith, “Today.” 21. For He maketh no preparations like a man, and His preparations give the enemy no respite; for He saith, “Let it be done,” and it cometh to pass. 22. He sitteth still and speaketh with Himself, one knoweth not that He is present until it cometh to pass. 23. This hath He done against me. He aimeth not like the bowman, so that one might flee from His arrow; He speaketh with Himself, and it is done. 24. In His hand the brain of kings is like wax in the smelting oven, and their potency is like a feather when He weigheth it. 25. And yet He dwelleth not on earth as the Mighty One, that He might take from me Babel and leave me a small residue, or that He might take from me all and be the Mighty One in Babel.
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26. So did I think in the secrecy of my mind, when no one knew me, and my thoughts terrified me, that the Lord, the Lord was such as that. 27. But when the seven years were past I became again Nebuchadnezzar. 28. And I called together all the wise men that they might explain to me the secret of that power, and how I had become a beast of the field. 29. And they all fell down upon their faces and said, “Great Nebuchadnezzar, this is an imagination, an evil dream! Who could be capable of doing this to thee?” 30. But my wrath was kindled against the wise men in the whole land, and I had them cut down in their folly. 31. For the Lord, the Lord possesseth all might, as no man doth possess it, and I will not envy Him His power, but will laud it and be next to Him, for I have taken His vessels of gold and vessels of silver. 32. Babel is no more the renowned Babel, and I, Nebuchadnezzar, am no more Nebuchadnezzar, and my armies protect me no more, for no one can see the Lord, the Lord, and no one can recognize Him. 33. Though He were to come, and the watchmen were to give warning in vain, because already I should have become like a bird in the tree, or like a fish in the water, known only to the other fish. 34. Therefore I desire no longer to be renowned through Babel, but every seventh year there shall be a festival in the land, 35. A great festival among the people, and it shall be called the Feast of the Transformation. 36. And an astrologer shall be led through the streets and be clad like a beast, and his calculations shall he carry with him, torn to shreds like a bunch of hay. 37. And all the people shall cry, “The Lord, the Lord, the Lord is the Mighty One, and His deed is swift like the leap of the great fish in the sea.” 38. For soon my days are told, and my dominion gone like a watch in the night, and I know not whither I go hence, 39. Whether I come to the invisible land in the distance where the Mighty One dwelleth, that I might find grace in His eyes; 40. Whether it be He that taketh from me the breath of life, that I become as a cast-off garment like my predecessors, that he might find delight in me. 41. This have I, I Nebuchadnezzar, made known to all peoples and tongues, and great Babel shall carry out my will. Translation from Danish by Thomas C. Oden
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COMMENTARY
I am like a spy in a higher service, the service of the idea. I have nothing new to proclaim; I am without authority, being myself hidden in a deceit; I do not go to work straightforwardly but with indirect cunning; I am not a holy man; in short, I am a spy who in his spying, in learning to know all about questionable conduct and illusions and suspicious characters, all the while he is making inspection is himself under the closest inspection. (S. K., The Point of View for My Work as an Author) Or Ludwig Wittgenstein, in praise: “Kierkegaard was a saint.”
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(1) A foundational figure for twentieth-century existentialism—both philosophical & religious—he was by his own account first & foremost a poet. In that self-evaluation he moved beyond a reliance on formal verse-writing or lineation, whether closed or open, “to produce a lyrical effect in prose better than it can be done in verse” (in On Authority and Revelation). The emphasis here is on language—“the musicality of language,” he writes, “regarded as a medium . . . the medium absolutely qualified by spirit, and . . . therefore the authentic medium of the idea.” Or further, & in a still more audacious sense: “to provide the existential-corrective by poetically presenting the ideas and inciting people about the established order, with which I collaborate by criticizing all the false reformers and the opposition who simply are evil—and whom my own ideas can halt.” (2) In his work as a poet—in short, as an artist of language—Kierkegaard employs a number of strategies that draw from previous romanticisms or look forward to the strategies of the century to come. The larger works (Either/Or [1843] the major example) are often composed of shorter sections that break them—in the mode of the German Romantics before him—into fragmented parts: “prefaces, preludes, interludes, postscripts, letters to the reader, collations by pseudonymous editors of pseudonymous sections, divisions and subdivisions—so that the reader is left with no authoritative point of view, but is forced to make an individual judgment about meaning” (thus: William McDonald in summation). It is with the pseudonymous works in particular—the bulk of his writings are under names such as Johannes de Silentio, Victor Eremita, Constantin Constantius, Johannes Climacus, and Johannes Anti-Climacus, or simply “A”—that Kierkegaard, who otherwise wrote famously that “subjectivity is truth,” calls authorship & identity into question. In that sense he prefigures Fernando Pessoa’s later use of “heteronyms” (Poems for the Millennium, volume one) or extends Keats’s vision of the “camelion poet” (see below, page 904). That he often writes comically & initiates a literature of the absurd is also to be noted: “What does the baby want? The answer is: Da-da.”
Søren Kierkegaard 545 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
S OM E
O U T SI D E R
P OE T S
Prologue Is there for honest poverty That hings his head, an a’ that? The coward slave, we pass him by— We dare be poor for a’ that! For a’ that, an a’ that! Our toils obscure, an a’ that, The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, The man’s the gowd for a’ that.
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ROB E RT B U RN S
While the idea of a poetry outside-of-literature insinuated itself into the thinking of many within the nineteenth-century literary world, an actual but largely undervalued outsider poetry (many such poetries, in fact) maintained its own semiautonomous existence. With this split in the fabric of nineteenth-century consciousness (never wholly repaired up to the present) we enter the domain of the “self-taught poet,” separated from acknowledged literature by the accidents of class & region. Yet it was here where the bulk of poetry was written—or spoken & memorized—or where other works of language were created that did what poetry does but without a claim to being poetry as such. Though much of this—like most literature & poetry—was markedly derivative, there were also notable outcroppings of otherness & innovation, & in many instances a classoriented political poetry that matched the workings of more established forerunners & contemporaries. In the cluster of poems that follows we present a range of such works as written—with one notable exception—in English. That exception, who called himself “Raifteiri the Poet,” descended (not uniquely) from a line of bards outside the politically dominant English tradition but with autochthonous (Irish/Gaelic) sources of its own. Others, similarly situated, wrote in variants of English (dialects & creoles) that were themselves a challenge to the linguistic hegemonies around them. Yet something of that self-assertion also colored the writings of as purely English a poet as John Clare (too often taken as the stereotypical “outsider”), whose declaration of linguistic & grammatical independence is covered elsewhere in these pages. But the deeper incursions of outsider poets are exemplified here by the excerpts from Ernest Jones (1819–69) & Thomas
546 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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1784–1835
I AM RAIFTEIRÍ
Mise Raifteirí, an file, lán dóchais is grá le súile gan solas, ciúineas gan crá, ag dul síos ar m’aistear le solas mo chroí, fann agus tuirseach go deireach mo shlí; féach anois me lem aghaidh ar Bhalla ag seinm cheoil do phócaí falamh’ I am Raifteirí, the poet, full of courage and love, my eyes without light, in calmness serene,
Antoine Ó Reachtabhra [Blind Raftery] 547 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
POE T S
[Blind Rafte ry]
OUT S I DE R
A n t oin e Ó R ea chta b h ra
S OM E
Cooper (1805–92)—both of them political radicals but engaged concurrently in an attempt to participate in or to capture the high ground of literature as normatively practiced. For this their context was the midcentury Chartist movement of British laborers & artisans, that drew as well from the poetry & poetics of canonical figures such as Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, & most notably Shelley. (The Chartists’ publication of Shelley’s Queen Mab & its accompanying notes & essays led to its later reputation as “the Chartists’ Bible.”) Still others, whom we might now think of as outsiders if not outsider poets, are represented here by the anonymous author of an American Revolutionary tract in Old Testament style; by the Nez Percé author of an 1880 history of his nation deposited in the cornerstone of a local tribal school & only recovered much later; & by “Uncle Jake” Carpenter, who composed a series of beautifully lineated “obituaries” to celebrate deaths in the town of Three-Mile Creek, Avery County, in the western mountains of North Carolina (a kind of outsider’s Spoon River Anthology, as one of us once described them). In a more familiar mode, “The Boasting Drunk in Dodge” is a further example of anonymous, essentially oral/ musical poems, while “The Honest Farmer’s Declaration” (1853) shows a divergent impulse toward typographical composition as practiced in a place far removed from any avant-garde pressures. And finally, the brief selection from Joanna Southcott’s prophetic writings—her poetry a vehicle for prophecy—gives a sense of the highly charged religious basis for what has come in our time to be named or misnamed “outsider art.”
Translation from Irish by Thomas Kinsella
POE T S S OM E
OUT S I DE R
taking my way to the light of my heart, feeble and tired to the end of the road: look at me now, my face toward Balla, playing my music to empty pockets!
An ony mou s R evolu t ion ary Pa m p h l e t
1775
from T H E F I R S T B O O K O F T H E A M E R I C A N C H R O N I C L E S
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OF THE TIMES
1. And behold! when the tidings came to the great city that is afar off, the city that is in the land of Britain, how the men of Boston, even the Bostonites, had arose, a great multitude, and destroyed the Tea, the abominable merchandise of the east, and cast it into the midst of the sea: 2. That the Lord the King waxed exceeding wroth, insomuch that the form of his visage was changed, and his knees smote one against the other. 3. Then he assembled together the Princes, the Nobles, the Counselors, the Judges, and all the Rulers of the people, even the great Sanhedrim, and when he had told them what things were come to pass, 4. They smote their breasts and said, these men fear thee not, O King, neither have they obeyed the voice of our Lord the King, nor worshipped the Tea-Chest, which thou hast set up, whose length was three cubits, and the breadth thereof one cubit and a half. 5. Now, therefore, make a decree that their harbours be blocked up, and ports shut, that their merchants may be broke, and their multitudes perish, that there may be no more the voice of merchandise heard in the land, that their ships that goeth upon the waters, may be sunk in the depths thereof, and their mariners dwindle away to nought, that their cods and their oil may stink, and the whale, the great Leviathan, may be no more troubled, for that they have rebelled against thee. 6. And it came to pass that the King hearkened unto the voice of these sons of Belial. 7. Then arose Mordecai, the Benjamite, who was four-score and five years old, an aged man whom the Lord loved, a wise man, a
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12.
13.
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14.
J ames R eu b e n HISTORY OF NEZ PERCÉ INDIANS FROM 1805 UP TO THE PRESENT TIME, 1880
They lived and enjoyed the happiness and freedom and lived just as happy as any other Nation in the World. But alas the day was coming when all their happy days was to be turned into day of sorrow and moening. Their days of freedom was turned to be the day of slavery.
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POE T S
11.
OUT S I DE R
10.
S OM E
8. 9.
soothsayer, an astrologer, in whom was wisdom from above, and he said unto the King, I pray thee, O King, let thy servant speak. And the King commanded that he should speak. Then Mordecai spake aloud, in the presence of all the Princes, the Nobles, the Counselors, the Judges, and the Rulers of the people, and said, O King, live for ever. Thy throne, O King, is encompassed about with lies, and thy servants, the Bernardites, and the Hutchinsonians, are full of deceit; for be it known unto thee, O King, they hide the truth from thee, and wrongfully accuse the men of Boston; for behold, these letters in mine hand witnesseth sore against them; O King, if thou art wise, thou wilt understand these things. And there was present one of the King’s Counselors, a Jacobite, a vagabond, a Wedderburnite, and he used foul language, and said unto Mordecai, Thou liest; and Mordecai answered and said unto him, God will smite thee, thou whited wall; and Mordecai departed from amongst them. And behold the Princes, the Nobles, the Counselors, the Judges, and all the Rulers of the people, cried out vehemently against Mordecai, for they were in fear because of Mordecai’s wisdom. And they besought the King that he would take from Mordecai his post, for he was in high honour before that time. So they prevailed on the King and he took from Mordecai his post and all that he had, and Mordecai was persecuted yet more and more; but he bore it patiently, for Job was his grandfather’s greatgrandfather; moreover, he knew the times must alter, and the King’s eyes would be opened anon.
POE T S OUT S I DE R S OM E
Their days of victory was turned to be conquered, and their rights to the country was disregarded by another nations which is called “Whiteman” at present day. In 1855 a treaty was made between Nez Perce Nation and United States. Wal-la-mot-kin (Hair tied on forehead) or Old Joseph, Hul-lal-ho-sot or (Lawyer), were the two leading Chiefs of the Nez Perce Nation in 1855, both of these two Chiefs consented to the treaty and Nez Perce sold to the United States part of their country. In 1863 another treaty was made in which Lawyer and his people consented but Joseph and his people refused to make the second treaty from that time Joseph’s people were called None-treaty Nez Perce. The treaty Nez Perce number 1800 None-treaty numbered 1000
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The Nez Perce decreased greatly since 1805 up to 1863. The smallpox prevailed among the tribe which almost destroyed the tribe. Lawyer’s people advanced in civilization and became farmers ec. They had their children in schools. While Joseph’s people refused all these things they lived outside what was called Nez Perce Reservation 1877 Government undertook to move Young Joseph people on the Res. At this date Young Joseph was the ruling chief son of Old Chief Joseph who died in 1868, and left his people in charge of his own Son Joseph and his followers broke out and there was Nez Perce War bloody one nine great battles fought the last battle lasted five days which Joseph surrendered with his people
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1000 Indians had went on the war path but when Joseph surrendered there was only 600
OUT S I DE R
400 killed during the wars or went to other tribes.
at present Joseph people numbers 350 out of 600 all are suffering on account of this Southern climate result is he and his people will live and die in this country exiled from home Take it in the right light— Nez Perce have been wrongly treated by the Government it cannot be denied not Nez Perce only but all other Indian Nations in America. I wrote this about my own people. I am a member of Nez Perce Tribe and Nephew of Chief Joseph
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When this is opened and read may be understood how the Indians have been treated by the Whiteman.
J a cob C arp en t er
1833–1920
from D E A T H S O N T H R E E - M I L E C R E E K : 1 8 4 1 – 1 9 1 5
Wm Davis age 100.8 dide oc 5 1841 wars old soldier in rev ware and got his thie brok in last fite at Kinge’s monte he wars farmer and made brandy and never had Drunker in famly Franky Davis his wife age 87 dide Sep 10 1842 she had nirve fite wolves all nite at shogar camp to save her caff throde fier chonks the camp wars half mile from home noe she must have nirv to fite wolf all nite
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POE T S
after the capture Joseph was brought to this Territory as captives.
POE T S OUT S I DE R S OM E
Charley Kiney age 72 dide may 10 1852 wars farmer live in mt on bluey rige at kiney gap he had 4 wimmin cors marid to one rest live on farme all went to felde work to mak grain all wen to crib for ther bread all went smok hous for there mete he cilde bote 75 to 80 hoges every yere and wimen never had wordes bout him haven so many wimin if he wod be living this times wod be hare pulde thar wars 42 children blong to him they all wento preching togethern nothing sed des aver body go long smoth help one nother never had any foes got along smoth with avery bodi I nod him
A n onymou s
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THE BOASTING DRUNK IN DODGE [1883]
Raised on six-shooters till I get big enough to eat ground shotguns, When I’m cool I warm the Gulf of Mexico and bathe therein, When I’m hot there’s an equinoxical breeze that fans me fevered brow, The moans of widows and orphans is music to me melancholy soul. Me the boy that chewed the wad the goat eat that butted the goat off the bridge, Born in the Rocky Mountains, suckled by a grizzly bear, Ninety-nine rows of jaw teeth and not a single hair. Thirty-two inches ’tween the eyes and they feed me with a shovel, Mount the wild ass and leap from crag to crag, And roar like laughter in a tomb, Jump from precipice to precipice and back to pice again. Snatched him bald-headed and spit on the place where the hair come off; Take a leg off him and beat him over the head with the bloody end of it,
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Slap his head up to a peak and then knock the peak off, Take his eye out and eat it for a grape.
E rn es t Jon es
1819–1869
T H E S O N G O F T H E LOW
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We’re low—we’re low—we’re very, very low, As low as low can be; The rich are high—for we make them so— And a miserable lot are we! And a miserable lot are we! are we! A miserable lot are we! We plough and sow—we’re so very, very low, That we delve in the dirty clay, Till we bless the plain with the golden grain, And the vale with the fragrant hay. Our place we know—we’re so very low, ’Tis down at the landlord’s feet: We’re not too low—the bread to grow But too low the bread to eat. We’re low—we’re low—we’re very, very low, As low as low can be; The rich are high—for we make them so— And a miserable lot are we! And a miserable lot are we! are we! A miserable lot are we!
Ernest Jones 553 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
POE T S
I’ll lick him on a sheep hide and never tromp on the tail, Knock a belch out of him that’ll whiz like a nail, Knock a belch out of him longer’n a rail, Sharp enough to stick a pig with.
OUT S I DE R
Gimme one hundred yards start and I’ll run plumb to Honolulu without even wettin’ my feet, Shoulder five hundred bushel of shot and wade through solid rocks up to my shoulder blades. Any damn man don’t believe it . . .
POE T S OUT S I DE R S OM E
Down, down we go—we’re so very, very low To the hell of the deep sunk mines. But we gather the proudest gems that glow, When the crown of a despot shines; And whenever he lacks—upon our backs Fresh loads he deigns to lay, We’re far too low to vote the tax But we’re not too low to pay. We’re low—we’re low—we’re very, very low, As low as low can be; The rich are high—for we make them so— And a miserable lot are we! And a miserable lot are we! are we! A miserable lot are we!
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
We’re low, we’re low—mere rabble, we know, But at our plastic power, The mould at the lordling’s feet will grow Into palace and church and tower— Then prostrate fall—in the rich man’s hall, And cringe at the rich man’s door, We’re not too low to build the wall, But too low to tread the floor. We’re low—we’re low—we’re very, very low, As low as low can be; The rich are high—for we make them so— And a miserable lot are we! And a miserable lot are we! are we! A miserable lot are we! We’re low, we’re low—we’re very, very low, Yet from our fingers glide The silken flow—and the robes that glow, Round the limbs of the sons of pride. And what we get—and what we give, We know—and we know our share We’re not too low the cloth to weave— But too low the cloth to wear. We’re low—we’re low—we’re very, very low, As low as low can be; The rich are high—for we make them so—
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And a miserable lot are we! And a miserable lot are we! are we! A miserable lot are we!
OUT S I DE R POE T S
We’re low, we’re low—we’re very, very low, And yet when the trumpets ring, The thrust of a poor man’s arm will go Through the heart of the proudest king! We’re low, we’re low—our place we know, We’re only the rank and file, We’re not too low—to kill the foe, But too low to touch the spoil. We’re low—we’re low—we’re very, very low, As low as low can be; The rich are high—for we make them so— And a miserable lot are we! And a miserable lot are we! are we! A miserable lot are we!
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THE SONG OF THE GAGGERS
Gag—gag—gag! Is the cry of the traitor band, While they try, with a printed rag, To ride like a midnight hag On the breast of a sleeping land. Come—knave and villain, informer and spy, To the government mint, where you coin a lie! Gold—gold—gold! Is the pay for the ready slave, Whose word at a breath can destroy the bold, In the halls where justice is bought and sold, And the whithering glance falls keen and cold On the heart of the true and brave. Gag—gag—gag! Is the cry of the traitor band While they try, with a printed rag, To ride like a midnight hag On the breast of a sleeping land.
Ernest Jones 555 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
POE T S OUT S I DE R S OM E
We’ll stay the stream in its fullest force, We’ll stop the world in its onward course— Gag—gag—gag! The voice of six thousand years Shall begin at our bidding to fail and flag Not a lip shall breathe, not a tongue shall wag And history’s page be an idle brag, Compared to Russell’s fears. Gag—gag—gag! Is the cry of the traitor band, While they seek with a printed rag, To ride like a midnight hag, On the breast of a sleeping land.
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In vain shall the blood of an Emmett have flowed, In vain shall the breast of a miser have glowed! Gag—Gag—Gag! The thought in the teeming brain! The pulse in the heart of the world shall lag, And nations the burden of misery drag, And Lilliput trample on Brobdingnag. As long as a Russell shall reign. Gag—gag—gag! Is the cry of the traitor band, While they seek, with a printed rag, To ride like a midnight hag On the breast of a sleeping land.
T homa s C oop er
1805–1892
from T H E P U R G A T O R Y O F S U I C I D E S ,
A PRISON-RHYME IN TEN BOOKS The Hall of the Suicide Kings
I had a vision, on my prison-bed, Which took its tinct from the mind’s waking throes. Of patriot blood on field and scaffold shed;
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Of martyrs’ ashes; of the demon foes Ubiquitous, relentless, that oppose And track, through life, the footsteps of the brave Who champion Truth; of Evil that arose Within the universe of Good, and gave To sovereign Man the soul to live his brother’s slave;
OUT S I DE R POE T S
Of knowledge which, from sire to son bequeathed, Hath ever on the Few with bounty smiled; But, on the Many, wastingly hath breathed A pestilence, from the scourged crowd that piled, Of yore, the pyramids, to the dwarfed child Whose fragile bloom steam and starvation blast; Of specious arts, whereby the bees beguiled, Yield to the sable drones their sweet repast, And creep, themselves, the path to heaven by pious fast;
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Of infamy for him who gives himself A sacrifice to stem the tyrant’s rage; And, for the tyrant’s pandar,—peerage, pelf, And honours blazed with lies on history’s page; Of giant Wrong who, fed, from age to age, With man’s best blood and woman’s purest tears, Seems with our poor humanity to wage Exterminating war; of hopes and fears That mock the human worm from youth to grayest years; I, waking, thought or dreamt,—for thoughts are dreams At best,—until, in weariness of heart, I cried—Is life worth having? Earth but teems With floods of evil: ’tis one sordid mart Where consciences for gold, without a smart, Are sold; and holiest names are gravest cheats: Men from their cradles, learn to play a part At plundering each other: He who beats, On his weak neighbour, swift, the plundering trick repeats.
. Anon, we entered where the travellers took Their silent way, each to some several home. Light fled; and dim funereal gloom rewoke
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POE T S OUT S I DE R S OM E
A solemn sadness through my essence. Dome, Or cupola, scooped in mid rock, like tomb Primeval, high above me stretched its span Gigantic, vague,—appearing to enwomb A space so vast that there old Death divan Might hold, in mausoleum metropolitan. Innumerable aisles their paths diverse Forth from this sombrous centre led. And now, I first perceived, from law which did coerce The vagrant ghosts who reached these realms of woe My spirit grew exempt. Sad, gloomy, slow, The forms, of late my fellows, I descried Journeying along those aisles,—deep, lasting throe To inchoate, for sin of suicide,— In clime apportioned to their gloom, or hate, or pride.
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No words revealed to me the end or cause For which those spirits hither came or went; Nor know I if I knew that region’s laws By some strange influences incident Unto its clime; or whether, now unblent With earth’s gross mould, deep intuition filled The regal mind,—and thus, plenipotent, She saw and knew. Suffice it, what she willed To know, that knowledge swift throughout her essence thrilled. Conscious of this her high prerogative, The soul for mystic travel girt her thews, Intent on viewing shapes she knew must live In land where penance rebel-thought subdues Of human worms who venture to refuse The gift of life probational, and death Procure by their own hand, daring accuse The Giver, and defying threatened wrath,— Or worn and wearied with the toil of drawing breath. Methought I sped across the gloomy space From whence diverged each subterranean aisle, Thinking the dome vast porch unto some place Of emblemed sovereignty or typic pile Where sceptred suicides in kingly style Might sit, as in some high imperial hall,
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And there eternity itself beguile With pregnant descant on their earthly fall, On fate, and mortal change, and being spiritual.
OUT S I DE R POE T S
When lo!—as if these new imaginings Flowed from the soul with architectural power, Or talisman of ancient Magian kings Were there the unbound mind’s mysterious dower— Forthwith disclosed, in high investiture Of purple, sceptres, thrones, and diadems, A hall of kings assembled gleamed obscure,— Fair,—and then bright,—until refulgent streams Of splendour issued from their brows begirt with gems.
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Mingled with these sat ancient forms unnamed Monarchal, but by badge or cognisance Vice-regal known, or whose sage look proclaimed The god-like legislator, or proud glance Betokened bold ambition’s heritance On earth of sway despotic. Deeply fraught With wisdom’s lessoning the soul her trance Perceived to be,—’mid thrones with sculptures wrought Mythic or parabolic, from earth’s legends caught. By beam or rafter architectonic Undarkened,—with a roof of rainbows graced, Smiled that wide palace-hall: yet, upward, quick And timorous looks old shapes columnar cast, That stretched their sinews, as with effort vast, To prop the heavenly arch whose fall they feared. Distorted things—abortions of the Past— They were: Satyrs, with wild-goats’ legs and beard, And one-eyed Arimasp and Cyclops, there appeared; Scythians, with heel in front, and toes behind, On old Imäus known; and Ethiops dark And headless, wearing mouth and eyes enshrined In their huge breasts; and countless monsters stark And staring, hymned divine by hierarch Of Ganges and old Nile, with heads, tails, arms, Tusks, horns, confused, of elephant, ape, shark, Serpent, dog, crocodile, or ox: vile swarms Of hideous phantasies, half-sharing human forms.
Thomas Cooper 559 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
POE T S OUT S I DE R S OM E
In triple colonnade around the immense Ellipsis of that hall these creatures stood,— Colossal images of ache intense And apprehensive dread; while o’er them bowed The arch that still in jewelled beauty glowed. Such horror, blent with grace, Apollo’s priest ’Mid strangling folds of Neptune’s serpents showed,— And still doth show—enmarbled, undeceased,— That breathing stone the Past to gem the Future leased. Stafford Gaol 1845
Joan n a S ou t hcot t
1750–1814
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
from T H E S T R A N G E E F F E C T S O F F A I T H
“But now I will come to Pilate’s question, ‘Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you?’ the serpent, or the woman? Here is as just an inquiry as Pilate made. One of the two must be cast, before your full redemption can be accomplished. Now answer for thyself, O man! and I will for the woman. Did I not bear all the blame man cast on ME? (This refers to the Fall: ‘The woman thou gavest to be with me, she tempted me and I did eat.’) And is it not just, the serpent should bear the blame the woman cast on him? If ye judge this simple, read back, your Bibles, and ye will find all as simple. Simple was My coming into the world, and My manner through the world, and My going out of the world; all was as simple to the Jews as this appears to the Gentiles. Was I not born of simple parents, laid in a manger, and simply warned the wise men to return another way for fear of Herod, when I could have destroyed him? Did I not simply fly into Egypt, and full as simply returned again? For a God to be afraid of man, you must confess a simple thing.” And now in verse I shall begin To echo back the lines to men. Of simple parents I was born, And worldly wise men did Me scorn; Simply to Egypt I did fly And simply all was done,
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OUT S I DE R POE T S
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
S OM E
And simply another way I did turn back again; Simply I oft Myself did hide When man I could destroy; Simply the manger made My bed, While mankind did enjoy Their beds of down, and wore their crown, While I was forced to flee; And simply shall their pride come down, That every soul shall see. Simple among the sons of men I always did appear; And simple in the woman’s form I’ve surely acted here. Simple as these appear to be, So simply all was done, When on the Cross at Calvary I gave My life for man. For oh! how few regard My love, Or to the manger go, Just like the shepherds you have heard, To know if it be true. The manger here doth now appear As much despised by man; They cannot see the mystery clear— The servant cannot come No greater here for to appear— Than was her Lord before; And like the Jews the Gentiles are, And open every pore. Do I not see as well as thee Thy poverty despised? For like the Jews the Gentiles be, And pride hath dimmed their eyes. So now take care, I warn you here, The natural branch did fall; Then the wild olive sure must fear, If none can judge the call.
Joanna Southcott 561 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
T H E H ON E S T FA R M E R ’ S D E C LA R AT I ON [ 1 8 53 ] Printed Verbatim from His Own Mouth
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S OM E
OUT S I DE R
POE T S
A n onymou s
From New Paisley Repository (Scotland)
562 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
M ikhail L ermon t ov
1814–1841
MY DEMON
To line up his evils & yours is his pleasure black clouds smoke drifting by. How he loves these ill-fated storms, this white water, those oak groves that rattle & roll. Among its sere leaves a throne planted deep in the earth unmoving he sits there serenely scowling, inciting mistrust, holds sweet love in contempt, will not heed those who beseech him, unmoved at sight of their blood
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& the sounds of our loftier natures he rends, his voice swift & awful. The muse who should have provoked him recoils, sees the horror aglow in his unearthly eyes. Translation from Russian by Jerome Rothenberg & Milos Sovak
UNTITLED POEM
spleen & sadness, not a hand held out & heartsick craving it! & what’s the good if any, ever? Mikhail Lermontov 563
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Or forever—years lost & the best of years! Or maybe love with whom? the time too short, not worth it & forever love impossible to look inside you deep down, not a trace of lost time joys & miseries turned into nothing asking: what is passion that sweet sickness & how long & whether it will last or fade when brought back to your senses
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& life too? just wait & take a long hard look & see it like it is an empty stupid joke Translation from Russian by Jerome Rothenberg & Milos Sovak
A DREAM
noon heat ablaze here in this gorge in Dagestan lead in my chest I lie unmoving deep wound steaming up a trace of smoke
564 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
& drop by drop my blood escaping sand fills the gorge I lie alone the ragged edges of its cliffs encircle me the circle closing & the sun is battering the yellow summits scorching me asleep inside my dream that’s dead
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& in my dream I dreamed a night of shining lights an evening feast down home into & out of which a company of women garlanded with flowers circling spoke about me gaily gaily only one girl who didn’t speak or laugh apart from all of them alone but sat & pondered sunk into her dream what sadness made its way into her soul god knows what thoughts her thoughts were raising when a gorge in Dagestan broke through her dream
Mikhail Lermontov 565 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
a body that she knew lay in that gorge & on his breast an open wound still steaming turning black now & the black blood flowing in a stream & getting colder colder still & colder Translation from Russian by Jerome Rothenberg & Milos Sovak
NEW YEAR’S POEM
how many times encircled by a motley crowd in front of me as in a dream
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cacophanies of dance & music speeches learned by heart in phatic whispers mixing with shapes of people absent a mind or soul grimacing masks yet so fastidious much as they touch my cold hands with uncaring boldness beauties of the town hands spared a tremor over lengths of time outwardly absorbed by gauds & vanitas I cherish in my soul an ancient wistfulness
566 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
for sacred sounds of years long gone & if in any way it comes to me that bird-like I dissolve in flight remembering the shallow past myself a child surrounded by familiar places high manor house & orchard bower left in ruins a green net of grasses as a cover for the sleeping pond & out beyond it hidden in haze like smoke a distant village fog across the fields
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I’ll walk here, here I’ll enter a dark passage through these bushes where this evening light peers & the sere leaves crackle under foot my every step demurring & in my chest already wistful, strange a squeezing sound the more I think of her desiring & weeping how I love this creature of my dreams eyes full of azure fire & rosy little smile like early morn past hedgerows,
Mikhail Lermontov 567 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
shows a fresh demise of color like a magic kingdom’s mighty lord I pine here through long hours lonely days under a storm, a heavy load of doubts & passions like a new-risen isle an innocent in midst of oceans blooming in that briny wilderness & having recognized myself I recognize my own delusions hear the crowd of humans with its noises scattering my dreams an uninvited guest
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how I would like to blast their gayety their feast day hold them in contempt & blind them with my iron verses bursting with bitterness & rage Translation from Russian by Jerome Rothenberg & Milos Sovak
COMMENTARY
Will you awaken again, ridiculed prophet! / Or never, to the voice of revenge, / Will you not withdraw from its gold sheath your blade, / Covered with the rust of contempt? M. L., from “The Poet”
But it is just this note of contempt, as in his “iron verses / bursting with bitterness / & rage,” above, that marks him as a poet who displays, as Nietzsche wrote of Heine, “that divine malice without which I cannot conceive
568 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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perfection.” Awakening into a world of absolute autocracy & the abortive military revolt by the Decembrists (1825) & having himself enlisted in the czar’s army, he wrote a characteristically “Romantic,” “alienated” response to this repressive political climate. His best-known poem of outrage, “The Death of the Poet,” describing the tragic/pathetic results of the duel into which Pushkin had been fatally drawn (like Lermontov himself several years later), railed against the repressions of Czar Nicholas I & his implied culpability in Pushkin’s death. Sent into exile in the Caucasus, Lermontov, both in his poems & in his groundbreaking novel, A Hero of Our Time, often elaborated that wild, mountainous region as the national (Russian) version of the Orient, with all of its exoticism, violence, & eroticism. Along with a romanticized view of those like the Chechens against whom he fought (“Freedom is their god, and war their law”), Lermontov drew on the ethnicity of this region, easily incorporating elements of Chechen, Circassian, & Daghestani folklore into his poetry. Writing a preface to a selection of Lermontov’s poetry in 1920, Boris Pasternak was warned by the Soviet censors not to say that Lermontov was more important for his dreams than for his role as an “agent of progress.” Pasternak, however, dedicated his book Sister My Life to Lermontov, opening with a poem about Lermontov’s ever-popular demon (“[The demon] swore by the ice of the peaks: / ‘Beloved sleep! I will return with the avalanche!’”) & linking the Russian Romantic with two other potent influences of visionary imagination, Byron & Poe. On his formal side too, Lermontov, while writing in the wake of Pushkin & Pushkin’s generation of the 1820s & early 1830s, responded not by breaking from their prosodic constraints but by practicing a montage poetry of quotation from recent Russian poets & from foreign ones (Goethe, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, among others). In doing so, wrote the Russian formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum, Lermontov exhibited in his constructions “a freshness that does not and could not exist in the verse creations of a later period.”
Walt Whit ma n
1819–1892
FRAGMENT FROM “THE SLEEPERS”
Pier that I saw dimly last night when I looked from the windows, Pier out from the main, let me catch myself with you and stay . . . I will not chafe you: I feel ashamed to go naked about the world And am curious to know where my feet stand . . . and what is this flooding me, childhood or manhood . . . and the hunger that crosses the bridge between.
Walt Whitman 569 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The cloth laps a first sweet eating and drinking, Laps life-swelling yolks . . . laps ear of rose-corn, silky and just ripened: The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness, And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching glasses, and the best liquor afterwards. EDITORS ’ NOTE .
Deleted by Whitman from Leaves of Grass.
from S O N G O F M Y S E L F : “ I H A V E H E A R D W H A T THE TALKERS WERE TALKING”
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world.
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Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn. Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age, Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.
570 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing; As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?
THIS COMPOST 1
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Something startles me where I thought I was safest, I withdraw from the still woods I loved, I will not go now on the pastures to walk, I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea, I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me. O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken? How can you be alive you growths of spring? How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you? Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead? Where have you disposed of their carcasses? Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d, I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath, I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
Walt Whitman 571 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
2
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Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches, The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests, The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs, The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves, Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards, The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead. What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious, That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, That all is clean forever and forever, That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
572 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
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RESPONDEZ" OR POEM OF THE PROPOSITIONS OF NAKEDNESS
RESPONDEZ! Respondez! (The war is completed—the price is paid—the title is settled beyond recall;) Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade! Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking? Let me bring this to a close—I pronounce openly for a new distribution of roles; Let that which stood in front go behind! and let that which was behind advance to the front and speak; Let murderers, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions! Let the old propositions be postponed! Let faces and theories be turn’d inside out! let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results! Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery! Let none be pointed toward his destination! (Say! do you know your destination?) Let men and women be mock’d with bodies and mock’d with Souls! Let the love that waits in them, wait! let it die, or pass still-born to other spheres! Let the sympathy that waits in every man, wait! or let it also pass, a dwarf, to other spheres! Let contradictions prevail! let one thing contradict another! and let one line of my poems contradict another! Let the people sprawl with yearning, aimless hands! let their tongues be broken! let their eyes be discouraged! let none descend into their hearts with the fresh lusciousness of love! (Stifled, O days! O lands! in every public and private corruption! Smother’d in thievery, impotence, shamelessness, mountain-high; Brazen effrontery, scheming, rolling like ocean’s waves around and upon you, O my days! my lands! For not even those thunderstorms, nor fiercest lightnings of the war, have purified the atmosphere;)
Walt Whitman 573 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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—Let the theory of America still be management, caste, comparison! (Say! what other theory would you?) Let them that distrust birth and death still lead the rest! (Say! why shall they not lead you?) Let the crust of hell be neared and trod on! let the days be darker than the nights! let slumber bring less slumber than waking time brings! Let the world never appear to him or her for whom it was all made! Let the heart of the young man still exile itself from the heart of the old man! and let the heart of the old man be exiled from that of the young man! Let the sun and moon go! let scenery take the applause of the audience! let there be apathy under the stars! Let freedom prove no man’s inalienable right! every one who can tyrannize, let him tyrannize to his satisfaction! Let none but infidels be countenanced! Let the eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency, impotence, lust, be taken for granted above all! let writers, judges, governments, households, religions, philosophies, take such for granted above all! Let the worst men beget children out of the worst women! Let the priest still play at immortality! Let death be inaugurated! Let nothing remain but the ashes of teachers, artists, moralists, lawyers, and learn’d and polite persons! Let him who is without my poems be assassinated! Let the cow, the horse, the camel, the garden-bee—let the mud-fish, the lobster, the mussel, eel, the sting-ray, and the grunting pig-fish—let these, and the like of these, be put on a perfect equality with man and woman! Let churches accommodate serpents, vermin, and the corpses of those who have died of the most filthy of diseases! Let marriage slip down among fools, and be for none but fools! Let men among themselves talk and think forever obscenely of women! and let women among themselves talk and think obscenely of men! Let us all, without missing one, be exposed in public, naked, monthly, at the peril of our lives! let our bodies be freely handled and examined by whoever chooses! Let nothing but copies at second hand be permitted to exist upon the earth! Let the earth desert God, nor let there ever henceforth be mention’d the name of God!
574 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Let there be no God! Let there be money, business, imports, exports, custom, authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief! Let judges and criminals be transposed! let the prison-keepers be put in prison! let those that were prisoners take the keys! (Say! why might they not just as well be transposed?) Let the slaves be masters! let the masters become slaves! Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling! let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands! Let the Asiatic, the African, the European, the American, and the Australian, go armed against the murderous stealthiness of each other! let them sleep armed! let none believe in good will! Let there be no unfashionable wisdom! let such be scorn’d and derided off from the earth! Let a floating cloud in the sky—let a wave of the sea—let growing mint, spinach, onions, tomatoes—let these be exhibited as shows, at a great price for admission! Let all the men of These States stand aside for a few smouchers! let the few seize on what they choose! let the rest gawk, giggle, starve, obey! Let shadows be furnish’d with genitals! let substances be deprived of their genitals! Let there be wealthy and immense cities—but still through any of them, not a single poet, savior, knower, lover! Let the infidels of These States laugh all faith away! If one man be found who has faith, let the rest set upon him! Let them affright faith! let them destroy the power of breeding faith! Let the she-harlots and the he-harlots be prudent! let them dance on, while seeming lasts! (O seeming! seeming! seeming!) Let the preachers recite creeds! let them still teach only what they have been taught! Let insanity still have charge of sanity! Let books take the place of trees, animals, rivers, clouds! Let the daub’d portraits of heroes supersede heroes! Let the manhood of man never take steps after itself! Let it take steps after eunuchs, and after consumptive and genteel persons! Let the white person again tread the black person under his heel! (Say! which is trodden under heel, after all?) Let the reflections of the things of the world be studied in mirrors! let the things themselves still continue unstudied!
Walt Whitman 575 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Let a man seek pleasure everywhere except in himself! Let a woman seek happiness everywhere except in herself! (What real happiness have you had one single hour through your whole life?) Let the limited years of life do nothing for the limitless years of death! (What do you suppose death will do, then?)
I S I N G T H E B O DY E L E C T R I C .
1
I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves? And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
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2
The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect. The expression of the face balks account, But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him, The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth, To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more, You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards,
576 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water, The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle, Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances, The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinnerkettles, and their wives waiting, The female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cowyard, The young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd, The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, goodnatured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown after work, The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance, The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes; The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps, The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert, The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d neck and the counting; Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child, Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count. 3
I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons, And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons. This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person, The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners, These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also, He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome, They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him, They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love, He drank water only, the blood show’d like scarlet through the clearbrown skin of his face, Walt Whitman 577
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail’d his boat himself, he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him, When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang, You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other. 4
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well, All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.
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5
This is the female form, A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot, It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction, I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it, Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed, Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable, Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused, Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice, Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, Undulating into the willing and yielding day, Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.
578 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
This the nucleus—after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman, This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the outlet again. Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest, You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul. The female contains all qualities and tempers them, She is in her place and moves with perfect balance, She is all things duly veil’d, she is both passive and active, She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters. As I see my soul reflected in Nature, As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty, See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.
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6
The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place, He too is all qualities, he is action and power, The flush of the known universe is in him, Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well, The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost become him well, pride is for him, The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul, Knowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to the test of himself, Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail he strikes soundings at last only here, (Where else does he strike soundings except here?) The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred, No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborers’ gang? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you, Each has his or her place in the procession. (All is a procession, The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.)
Walt Whitman 579 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant? Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has no right to a sight? Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts, For you only, and not for him and her? 7
A man’s body at auction, (For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,) I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business. Gentlemen look on this wonder, Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it, For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant, For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d. In this head the all-baffling brain, In it and below it the makings of heroes.
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Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve, They shall be stript that you may see them. Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition, Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs, And wonders within there yet. Within there runs blood, The same old blood! the same red-running blood! There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations, (Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?) This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.
580 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries? (Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?) 8
A woman’s body at auction, She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers, She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers. Have you ever loved the body of a woman? Have you ever loved the body of a man? Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth? If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted, And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face. Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body? For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.
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9
O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you, I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems, Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems, Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue, Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest, Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
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Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, fingerjoints, finger-nails, Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side, Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone, Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg, Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel; All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female, The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity, Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings, The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud, Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming, Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening, The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes, The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair, The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body, The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out, The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees, The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, The exquisite realization of health; O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul!
GOOD-BYE MY FANCY"
Good-bye my Fancy! Farewell dear mate, dear love!
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I’m going away, I know not where, Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again, So Good-bye my Fancy. Now for my last—let me look back a moment; The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me, Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping. Long have we lived, joy’d, caress’d together; Delightful!—now separation—Good-bye my Fancy. Yet let me not be too hasty, Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter’d, become really blended into one; Then if we die we die together, (yes, we’ll remain one,) If we go anywhere we’ll go together to meet what happens, May-be we’ll be better off and blither, and learn something, May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who knows?) May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning—so now finally, Good-bye—and hail! my Fancy.
COMMENTARY
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I sometimes think the Leaves is only a language experiment—that is, an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new potentialities of speech. (W. W.) Or again, in a Chomskyan frame: As humanity is one under its amazing diversities, language is one under its. (1) Like Blake & Solomos before him, Whitman cast aside the restrictions of the old line, to set the standard for the century to come, both in America & outside it—a natural measure, he shows us, “like the invisible influence [of the sea] in my composition . . . perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon [the shore], with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums.” His task beyond that was to use the new means to revive the vatic function, to employ the total language & range of human identities—body and soul, evil and good—toward a poetry that would be actualized only after his own time, by “poets [yet] to come.” In doing this his aim was to bring “self” and “world”—but also self & selves—into a new alignment, the singular pronoun of his poetry, its “I,” used with a new freedom, to summon up a range of real & fictive selves: “All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe.” And along with that, a radical opening of the poet’s vocabulary to “all words that exist in use,” for “All words are spiritual. Nothing is more spiritual than words” (An American Primer). The political aspect of the
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“democratic vistas” he thus opened in both poetry & life was also central to his vision—as it still may be to ours. In the poems presented here, as elsewhere in Whitman, the poet is invested with a consciousness of Earth & of a mind-&-body continuum that points back to old shamanic functions & forward to the degradation, as we have come to know it, of Earth & of its sentient beings. It is in this sense both a culmination of nineteenth-century nature poetry & a premonition of a later view—in Gary Snyder’s words—of “poetry as an ecological survival technique” & the “shaman-poet” as the one “whose mind reaches easily out into all manners of shapes and other lives, and gives song to dreams.” But even here the range & depth of Whitman’s recoveries—political, social, sexual, as well as poetic—are far from exhausted. The result, as Japanese poet Ooka Makoto had it for his own post–World War II generation: “To bring totality back into poetry.”
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(2) “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?” (Allen Ginsberg, from “A Supermarket in California”). Or Robert Duncan, counting up the losses, then to now: It is across great scars of wrong I reach toward the song of kindred men and strike again the naked string old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake! that cried: “The theme is creative and has vista.” “He is the president of regulation.” I see always the under side turning, fumes that injure the tender landscape. From which up break lilac blossoms of courage in daily act striving to meet a natural measure. The Opening of the Field, 1960
Herman M elville
1819–1891
L I N E S—A F T E R S H A K E S P E A R E
Ego non baptizo te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti—sed in nomine Diaboli—madness is undefinable—
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It & right reason extremes of one, —not the (black art) Goetic but Theurgic magic— seeks converse with the Intelligence, Power, the Angel. EDITORS ’ NOTE .
Written on the last flyleaf of the last volume of Melville’s Shakespeare, the Latin reappearing, spoken by Ahab in Moby Dick. Writes Charles Olson in Call Me Ishmael: “Ahab is Conjur Man. He invokes his own evil world. He himself uses black magic to achieve his vengeful ends.”
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THE MALDIVE SHARK
About the Shark, phlegmatical one, Pale sot of the Maldive sea, The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim, How alert in attendance be. From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw They have nothing of harm to dread, But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank Or before his Gorgonian head; Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth In white triple tiers of glittering gates, And there find a haven when peril’s abroad, An asylum in jaws of the Fates! They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey, Yet never partake of the treat— Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull, Pale ravener of horrible meat.
from M O B Y D I C K
Father Mapple’s Hymn
. . . In prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn. . . . The ribs and terrors in the whale Arched over me a dismal gloom, While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And left me deepening down to doom.
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I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I was plunging to despair. In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints— No more the whale did me confine. With speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God. My song for ever shall record That terrible, that joyful hour; I give the glory to my God, His all the mercy and the power. The Cabin
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(Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow.) “Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.” “No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.” “Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again.” “They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye.” “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.” “Oh good master, master, master!” “Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. 586 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will befall.” (Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.)
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“Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone. Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the transom, in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!—Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?—a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and let’s drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.—Hist! above there, I hear ivory—Oh, master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I’ll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me.” A Squeeze of the Hand
That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod’s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case. While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon. It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a Herman Melville 587
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favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize. As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever. Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
from B I L LY B U D D : B I L LY I N T H E D A R B I E S
Good of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay And down on his marrow-bones here and pray For the likes just o’ me, Billy Budd.—But look:
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Through the port comes the moon-shine astray! It tips the guard’s cutlass and silvers this nook; But ’twill die in the dawning of Billy’s last day. A jewel-block they’ll make of me tomorrow, Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol Molly— O, ’tis me, not the sentence they’ll suspend. Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up too Early in the morning, aloft from alow. On an empty stomach, now, never it would do. They’ll give me a nibble—bit o’ biscuit ere I go. Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup; But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay, Heaven knows who will have the running of me up! No pipe to those halyards.—But aren’t it all sham? A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am. A hatchet to my hawser? All adrift to go? The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know? But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank; So I’ll shake a friendly hand ere I sink. But—no! It is dead then I’ll be, come to think.— I remember Taft the Welshman when he sank. And his cheek it was like the budding pink[.] But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep. Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep. I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there? Just ease these darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair, I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.
COMMENTARY
Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. (Moby Dick, XLII) And again: I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. (H. M., letter to Hawthorne concerning Moby Dick, November 1851)
(1) But it was also a work of poetry & a book in which the wickedness as such—the “evil” as Blake or Baudelaire might have it—was indivisible from Melville’s depictions of extreme states-of-mind & what such states-of-mind (= visions & obsessions) might entail. His project, then, was less a turning from Romanticism than a fulfillment—on American grounds—of the longing & dread at Romanticism’s core. In Moby Dick, as elsewhere in his work
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(including much of his lineated poetry), the visions are pervasive, reinforced in his prose by the best approximation to Shakespearean language in an age when Shakespeare loomed most large, as an undisputed master voice & presence. Add to that the following: the depiction therein of a congeries of native & foreign voices, democratic & surreal, resembling that other “piebald parliament” in Melville’s The Confidence Man: “an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man”; &, as important, an unprecedented sense within a work so mythic & poetic of factual particulars & what our contemporary Ed Sanders called an “investigative poetry” built up from “data clusters” (see Poems for the Millennium, volume two)—a mix, in short, of myth with history, biology, & economics, inter alia. (2) A man of the sea himself, Melville brought the experience of ocean into his work (from early Typee to Moby Dick to final Billy Budd), & with it the accompanying theme of SPACE, which, Charles Olson proposed a hundred years later, was “the central fact to man born in America” (Call Me Ishmael, 1947). In a key passage in Moby Dick, space & ocean translate into a poetic/existential/nomadic sense of “landlessness,” where the narrator Ishmael addresses his elusive, nearly absent shipmate Bulkington:
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Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis! All of this, combined, led to Melville’s high status among American poets & writers of a later time.
Cyp rian Nor w id
1821–1883
THE SPHINX
The Sphinx barred my way in a dark cave Ever hungry for truths Like a taxman, beggar or knave Molesting travellers with cries of “Truth!”
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“Man? . . . he’s an ignorant callow Priest . . .” I replied
. And marvelling saw The Sphinx pressed against the rock: I slipped past alive! Translation from Polish by Adam Czerniawski
W H AT D I D YO U D O TO AT H E N S, S O C R AT E S ?
What did you do to Athens, Socrates, That the people erected a golden statue to you, Having first poisoned you? What did you do to Italy, Alighieri, That the insincere people built two graves for you, Having first driven you out?
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What did you do to Europe, Columbus, That they dug you three graves in three places Having first shackled you? What did you do to your people, Camoens, That the sexton had to cover your grave twice, After you had starved? What in the world are you guilty of, Kosciuszko, That two stones in two places bear down on you, Having first had no burial place? What did you do to the world, Napoleon, That you were confined to two graves after your demise, Having first been confined? What did you do to the people, Mickiewicz? Translation from Polish by Walter Whipple
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CHOPIN’S PIANO La musique est une chose étrange! B Y RO N
L’arte? . . . c’est l’art—et puis, Voilà tout. B É R ANG E R
1
Bound to your place those penultimate days Whose plot was impenetrable— —Myth-full, Dawn-pallid . . . —Life’s end a whisper summons its start: “I will not render you—no! I will raise you! . . .”
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2
Bound to your place, those days so penultimate Once when you mirrored—each moment, each moment— That lyre that Orpheus lent us, Whose force like a missile struggles with song, And its four strings commune with Each, striking each other, By twos—and by twos— A murmur slipping toward silence: “Did he begin To pound out a note? . . . Of what sound was he Maestro! whose playing’s repelling? . . .” 3
Bound to your place in those days, oh Frederic! You with your hand alabastered In whiteness—possessing—and shuffling— Your touch scarce a touch—ostrich feather like— Brushing me blurred in my eyes with your ivory Keyboard . . . And you like that figure From marble’s own womb As if hammered Would pull back your chisel Your genius—eternal Pygmalion!
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4
What in that, in what you have played, and then what?— A first note recited—and what? he’ll express it However its echoes set themselves up, will be different From when with your own hand you blessed Every chord— And played it through, simple And perfect like Pericles, Like a virtue drawn from a deep past, Set foot in a village, a log cabin home, Told herself as she entered: I was reborn in heaven, Whose gate changed into my harp, A ribbon—a path . . . Where the Host—I could spy through pale wheatblades— Emanuel he who now dwells On Mount Tabor! 5
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And Poland within, from that zenith Perfections of history, ancient, arrayed Rainbow’s ravishment—Poland— Wheelwrights transformed! Selfsame, certain, Gold bee! 6
And—now—you’ve ended the song—And I No longer can see you—only—can hear Hearing what?—like when boys baffle boys— —The keys still resisting The source of their yearnings unsung They softly push back on their own By eighths—then by fifths— And murmuring: “He—has he started to play? Or uncaring—cast us aside?” 7
Oh You! Love’s profile Fulfillment your name:
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These—Art dubs them style, Who penetrate song, who shape stones . . . Oh! You—who in chronicles sign yourself Era, Where you are, aren’t, history’s Zenith, Are Spirit and Letter in one, “Consumatum Est” . . . You! Oh—Exquisite fulfillment, Whichever you are, And where? . . . Are a sign . . . In Phidias? David? Or Chopin? Or a scene out of Aeschylus? . . . Evermore—vengeance upon you: PRIVATION! . . . Globe’s Stigma—penury: How it hurts him! . . . Fulfillment? . . . He—who prefers to begin Forever to throw out before him—down payed! —“Ear of Corn”? . . . like a gold comet ripened, Wind’s breath barely stirs it, A rain of wheat sprinkles down grains Perfection alone sweeps away . . .
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8
Over here—Frederic, look! . . . This is—Warsaw: Under a star blazing forth A crazed brightness— —Attend to it, organs in parish halls; look! it’s Your nest: It’s elsewhere—old houses patrician As commonwealths, Pavements of squares deaf and grey, And Sigismund’s sword in a cloud. 9
Look! . . . from alley to alley Caucasian horses break forth Like swallows ahead of a storm, Ahead of their regiments, darting, By hundreds—by hundreds— —The town house caught fire, died down, Then flared up again—And there—Under the wall Saw the foreheads of widows in mourning Pushed back by rifle butts—
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And again, smokeblinded, I saw, As it moved past the portal, the pillars, A contraption that looked like a coffin They were heaving out . . . crashing and crushing—your piano! 10
That one! . . . that championed Poland, he from the heights All-Perfections of history People-bound, anthem ecstatic— O Poland—of wheelwrights transformed; That same one—crushed on the granite squares! —Over there: as the thoughts of the just man Are drowned in the popular anger Or as, from age unto age, All its angers awaken! And right there—like Orpheus’ body, A thousand nailed passions tear him to shreds And each one howling: “Not me! . . . Not me!”—with a clatter and chatter of teeth— — Is it you?—is it me?—then let’s strike up a Judgment Day song, Urge them on: “Rejoice, o you child who will be! . . . With groaning—stories gone deaf: The Ideal—now brought low on the pavement”— —
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Translation from Polish by Jerome Rothenberg & Arie Galles
COMMENTARY
All things in this world become beautiful in their patterning after a beauty of a higher order, after non-material beauty. Only when they attain the metaphysical grounding, do they attain their own real being—an infused spiritual beauty, a beauty infused by God. In this manner then, aesthetic beauty becomes fused with moral beauty, with Goodness, with Good itself. C. N.
(1) In the search for which, Norwid developed a complex surface in his poems—hard to conceive for those of us cut off from him by language—whose darkness, verging on a self-proclaimed obscurity (sancta obscuritas he called it), brought him ineluctably to a new knowledge & practice of reality. If that was his goal, the means he used involved a panoply of what the twentieth-century Russian (Chuvash) poet Gennady Aygi called Norwid’s “poetry of sound,” or Czeslaw Milosz: “the impenetrable obscu-
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rity of his style and his jarring syntax, until no one would publish him.” Writes Danuta Zamojska-Hutchins of the range displayed here: “Latinizing syntax, ellipses, foreign language infusions, multiple neologisms, twisted sentences often contrary to the grammar of the Polish language, the use of inversions and punctuation antics, but, above all, variations of the morphological and syntactic functions, the exploitation of the rhythmophonic and expressive qualities of language, all of these are the key emblems of Norwid’s poetics of darkness.” (Italics ours.) But the attempt here, in a line from the Romantics to the present, was not only to make the writing new, but to renew the language—or language itself—by repeated & precise acts of defamiliarization, & through that altered, often nonabsorptive language to renew our image of the world. A poet of “Socratic Christliness,” as Bogdan Czaykowski names him, “he thought of himself as a reader of signs, of traces left by God for human beings to recognize and decipher.” The comparison to Hopkins (below), often made, seems to hold true on many levels. (2) Like other Polish Romantic artists including Adam Mickiewicz (above), Norwid—poet, dramatist, painter, sculptor—spent a life in voluntary exile, a Polish nationalist at a distance, leaving Poland at twenty-one, wandering through Europe & even the U.S., settling at length in Paris, where he died in poverty. In that Paris milieu, however, he became an intimate of Frederic Chopin, who fulfilled for him the definition of a modern artist—Norwid wrote about him in at least three pieces—totally absorbed in the lyric “perfection” of the composer’s work, which nonetheless, he thought, “voiced Poland,” vulnerable to contemporary brutality yet impervious to it over time. And his remarkable free-verse experiment “Chopin’ s Piano,” included here, dramatizes the impinging turbulence that modifies but does not destroy Chopin’s music as his piano is (actually was) hurled to the Warsaw streets by the army of the Russian czar. Little of Norwid’s poetry appeared during his lifetime; indeed, scholars published the complete edition of his poems only in 1962.
Charles Ba u d ela ire
1821–1867
CORRESPONDENCES
Nature is a temple whose living colonnades Breathe forth a mystic speech in fitful sighs; Man wanders among symbols in those glades Where all things watch him with familiar eyes. Like dwindling echoes gathered far away Into a deep and thronging unison
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Huge as the night or as the light of day, All scents and sounds and colors meet as one. Perfumes there are as sweet as the oboe’s sound, Green as the prairies, fresh as a child’s caress, —And there are others, rich, corrupt, profound And of an infinite pervasiveness, Like myrrh, or musk, or amber, that excite The ecstasies of sense, the soul’s delight. Translation from French by Richard Wilbur
TWO PROSE POEMS
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Get Drunk
One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite. Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk. And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: “It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.” Translation from French by Louise Varèse
One O’Clock in the Morning
At last! I am alone! Nothing can be heard but the rumbling of a few belated and weary cabs. For a few hours at least silence will be ours, if not sleep. At last! the tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and now there will be no one but myself to make me suffer. At last! I am allowed to relax in a bath of darkness! First a double turn of the key in the lock. This turn of the key will, it seems to me, increase
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my solitude and strengthen the barricades that, for the moment, separate me from the world. Horrible life! Horrible city! Let us glance back over the events of the day: saw several writers, one of them asking me if you could go to Russia by land (he thought Russia was an island, I suppose); disagreed liberally with the editor of a review who to all my objections kept saying: “Here we are on the side of respectability,” implying that all the other periodicals were run by rascals; bowed to twenty or more persons of whom fifteen were unknown to me; distributed hand shakes in about the same proportion without having first taken the precaution of buying gloves; to kill time during a shower, dropped in on a dancer who asked me to design her a costume for Venustre; went to pay court to a theatrical director who in dismissing me said: “Perhaps you would do well to see Z. . . . ; he is the dullest, stupidest and most celebrated of our authors; with him you might get somewhere. Consult him and then we’ll see”; boasted (why?) of several ugly things I never did, and cravenly denied some other misdeeds that I had accomplished with the greatest delight; offense of fanfaronnade, crime against human dignity; refused a slight favor to a friend and gave a written recommendation to a perfect rogue; Lord! let’s hope that’s all! Dissatisfied with everything, dissatisfied with myself, I long to redeem myself and to restore my pride in the silence and solitude of the night. Souls of those whom I have loved, souls of those whom I have sung, strengthen me, sustain me, keep me from the vanities of the world and its contaminating fumes; and You, dear God! grant me grace to produce a few beautiful verses to prove to myself that I am not the lowest of men, that I am not inferior to those whom I despise. Translation from French by Louise Varèse
A CARRION
Remember now, my Love, what piteous thing We saw on a summer’s gracious day: By the roadside a hideous carrion, quivering On a clean bed of pebbly clay, Her legs flexed in the air like a courtesan, Burning and sweating venomously, Calmly exposed its belly, ironic and wan, Clamorous with foul ecstasy.
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The sun bore down upon this rottenness As if to roast it with gold fire, And render back to nature her own largess A hundredfold of her desire. Heaven observed the vaunting carcass there Blooming with the richness of a flower; And that almighty stink which corpses wear Choked you with sleepy power! The flies swarmed on the putrid vulva, then A black tumbling rout would seethe Of maggots, thick like a torrent in a glen, Over those rags that lived and seemed to breathe. They darted down and rose up like a wave Or buzzed impetuously as before; One would have thought the corpse was held a slave To living by the life it bore!
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This world had music, its own swift emotion Like water and the wind running, Or corn that a winnower in rhythmic motion Fans with fiery cunning. All forms receded, as in a dream were still, Where white visions vaguely start From the sketch of a painter’s long-neglected idyl Into a perfect art! Behind the rocks a restless bitch looked on Regarding us with jealous eyes, Waiting to tear from the livid skeleton Her loosed morsel quick with flies. And even you will come to this foul shame, This ultimate infection, Star of my eyes, my being’s inner flame, My angel and my passion! Yes: such shall you be, O queen of heavenly grace, Beyond the last sacrament, When through your bones the flowers and sucking grass Weave their rank cerement.
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Speak, then, my Beauty, to this dire putrescence, To the worm that shall kiss your proud estate, That I have kept the divine form and the essence Of my festered loves inviolate! Translation from French by Allen Tate
L I TA N I E S O F S ATA N
O toi, le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges . . . O Thou, most knowing and most beautiful of Angels, God betrayed by fate, denied praise, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
O Prince of Exile, wronged, Who, vanquished, stands up again (stronger!) O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
You who know everything, great king of the underground, Familiar healer of human agonies, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
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You who, even to lepers, to damned pariahs, Teach through love the taste for Paradise, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
You, who begot Hope—that charming madwoman!— On your old and powerful lover, Death, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
You who give to the outlaw a look so high and calm and bold It damns the people beneath the scaffold, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
You who know in what corners of envious lands The jealous GOD hid precious stones, O Satan, take pity on my long misery! You whose clear eye knows the deep arsenals Where sleep, shrouded, the people of metals, 600 A Second Gallery
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[poverty]
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
You, whose vast hand hides the precipices From the sleepwalker wandering on the edge of edifices, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
You who make supple again the old bones Of the drunkard out late and trampled by horses, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
You who, to console frail man who suffers, Teach us to mix saltpeter and sulphur, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
You who place your mark, O subtle accomplice, On the brow of the pitiless, vile Croesus, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
You who put in the eyes and heart of girls The cult of the wound and the love of rags, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
Staff of exiles, lamp of inventors, Confessor of the hanged and of conspirators,
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O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
Adoptive father of those who in His black and angry guise God the Father drove from the Earthly Paradise, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
[poverty]
Prayer
Glory and praise to you, Satan, in the heights Of the sky where you reigned, and in the depths Of Hell, where, vanquished, you dream in silence! Allow my soul to rest near you one day, under the Tree of Knowledge, At the hour when, on your brow Like a new Temple / its branches GROW! Translation from French by Jack Foley
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T H E VOYAG E I
For the boy playing with his globe and stamps, the world is equal to his appetite— how grand the world in the blaze of the lamps, how petty in tomorrow’s small dry light! One morning we lift anchor, full of brave prejudices, prospects, ingenuity— we swing with the velvet swell of the wave, our infinite is rocked by the fixed sea. Some wish to fly a cheapness they detest, others, their cradles’ terror—others stand with their binoculars on a woman’s breast, reptilian Circe with her junk and wand. Not to be turned to reptiles, such men daze themselves with spaces, light, the burning sky; cold toughens them, they bronze in the sun’s blaze and dry the sores of their debauchery.
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But the true voyagers are those who move simply to move—like lost balloons! Their heart is some old motor thudding in one groove. It says its single phrase, “Let us depart!” They are like conscripts lusting for the guns; our sciences have never learned to tag their projects and designs—enormous, vague hopes grease the wheels of these automatons! II
We imitate, oh horror! tops and bowls in their eternal waltzing marathon; even in sleep, our fever whips and rolls— like a black angel flogging the brute sun. Strange sport! where destination has no place or name, and may be anywhere we choose— where man, committed to his endless race, runs like a madman diving for repose!
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Our soul is a three-master seeking port: a voice from starboard shouts, “We’re at the dock!” Another, more elated, cries from port, “Here’s dancing, gin and girls!” Balls! it’s a rock! The islands sighted by the lookout seem the El Dorados promised us last night; imagination wakes from its drugged dream, sees only ledges in the morning light. What dragged these patients from their German spas? Shall we throw them in chains, or in the sea? Sailors discovering new Americas, who drown in a mirage of agony! The worn-out sponge, who scuffles through our slums sees whiskey, paradise and liberty wherever oil-lamps shine in furnished rooms— we see Blue Grottoes, Caesar and Capri. III
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Stunningly simple Tourists, your pursuit is written in the tear-drops in your eyes! Spread out the packing cases of your loot, your azure sapphires made of seas and skies! We want to break the boredom of our jails and cross the oceans without oars or steam— give us visions to stretch our minds like sails, the blue, exotic shoreline of your dream! Tell us, what have you seen? IV
“We’ve seen the stars, a wave or two—we’ve also seen some sand; although we peer through telescopes and spars, we’re often deadly bored as you on land. The shine of sunlight on the violet sea, the roar of cities when the sun goes down: these stir our hearts with restless energy; we worship the Indian Ocean where we drown!
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No old chateau or shrine besieged by crowds of crippled pilgrims sets our souls on fire, as these chance countries gathered from the clouds. Our hearts are always anxious with desire. Desire, that great elm fertilized by lust, gives its old body, when the heaven warms its bark that winters and old age encrust; green branches draw the sun into its arms. Why are you always growing taller, Tree— Oh longer-lived than cypress! Yet we took one or two sketches for your picture-book, Brothers who sell your souls for novelty! We have salaamed to pagan gods with horns, entered shrines peopled by a galaxy of Buddhas, Slavic saints, and unicorns, so rich Rothschild must dream of bankruptcy! Priests’ robes that scattered solid golden flakes, dancers with tatooed bellies and behinds, charmers supported by braziers of snakes . . .” V
Yes, and what else?
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VI
Oh trivial, childish minds! You’ve missed the more important things that we were forced to learn against our will. We’ve been from top to bottom of the ladder, and see only the pageant of immortal sin: there women, servile, peacock-tailed, and coarse, marry for money, and love without disgust horny, pot-bellied tyrants stuffed on lust, slaves’ slaves—the sewer in which their gutter pours! old maids who weep, playboys who live each hour, state banquets loaded with hot sauces, blood and trash, ministers sterilized by dreams of power, workers who love their brutalizing lash;
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and everywhere religions like our own all storming heaven, propped by saints who reign like sybarites on beds of nails and frown— all searching for some orgiastic pain! Many, self-drunk, are lying in the mud— mad now, as they have always been, they roll in torment screaming to the throne of God: “My image and my lord, I hate your soul!” And others, dedicated without hope, flee the dull herd—each locked in his own world hides in his ivory-tower of art and dope— this is the daily news from the whole world! VII
How sour the knowledge travellers bring away! The world’s monotonous and small; we see ourselves today, tomorrow, yesterday, an oasis of horror in sands of ennui!
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Shall we move or rest? Rest, if you can rest; move if you must. One runs, but others drop and trick their vigilant antagonist. Time is a runner who can never stop, the Wandering Jew or Christ’s Apostles. Yet nothing’s enough; no knife goes through the ribs of this retarius throwing out his net; others can kill and never leave their cribs. And even when Time’s heel is on our throat we still can hope, still cry, “On, on, let’s go!” Just as we once took passage on the boat for China, shivering as we felt the blow, so we now set our sails for the Dead Sea, light-hearted as the youngest voyager. If you look seaward, Traveller, you will see a spectre rise and hear it sing, “Stop, here, and eat my lotus-flowers, here’s where they’re sold. Here are the fabulous fruits; look, my boughs bend; eat yourself sick on knowledge. Here we hold time in our hands, it never has to end.”
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We know the accents of this ghost by heart; Our comrade spreads his arms across the seas; “On, on, Orestes. Sail and feast your heart— Here’s Clytemnestra.” Once we kissed her knees. VIII
It’s time. Old Captain, Death, lift anchor, sink! The land rots; we shall sail into the night; if now the sky and sea are black as ink, our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light. Only when we drink poison are we well— we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue, to drown in the abyss—heaven or hell, who cares? Through the unknown, we’ll find the new. Translation from French by Robert Lowell
TO THE READER
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Stupidity, error, sin, cupidity—they squat in our minds and torment our bodies, while we nourish our comforting remorse, the way beggars feed their lice. Our sins are headstrong, our repentance fainthearted. We make our confession firm and full and saunter back into the mire, confident in cheap tears to rinse us clean. On the pillow of perdition Satan Trismegistus lulls the mind, spellbinds it, and the fine metal of our will is quite vaporized by this clever chemist. It’s the Devil holds the strings that move us! We find allure in loathsome objects, each day another step toward hell, unhorrified, downward through stinking shadows. Like some rake, sunk to slobbering, gumming the brutalized tit of a superannuated whore, we grasp in passing a clandestine pleasure to squeeze hard, as on an overripe orange. Huddled, teeming, like gut-worms by the million, a clutch of Demons make whoopee in our brain and, when we breathe, Death floods our lungs, an invisible torrent, muffled in groans.
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Rape, poison, the knife, fire—if these have not yet embroidered with absurd design the banal story of our sorry destiny, it’s merely that our soul is, alas! not bold enough. But among jackals, panthers, bitch hounds, apes, scorpions, vultures, serpents—monsters yapping, howling, grumbling, crawling—in the foul menagerie of our vices there is one still uglier, meaner, filthier! Who without grand gesture, without a yawp, would gladly shiver the earth, swallow up the world, in a yawn. Who? Ennui! Eye brimming with involuntary tears, dreaming of gallows while puffing on his hookah. You know him, reader, this dainty monster—hypocrite reader,—my fellow,—my brother! Translation from French by Keith Waldrop
COMMENTARY
When I’ve aroused universal horror and disgust, I shall have conquered solitude.
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C. B., Fusées
(1) If the terms still hold meaning for us here & now, the move with Baudelaire is from Romanticism into Postromanticism—that aspect of the latter with closest links to the work of later avant-garde & modernist poets. Against the idealism of some of his contemporaries, there was with Baudelaire an acceleration of the antinomian undercurrent in Romanticism & in consciousness—the foregrounding of “evil” and of the self as an antiheroic or problematic presence. Whatever certainties had been called into question by Keats (“negative capability”) & others were torn further apart, the vision (or antivision) of Keats’s poetics brought toward its limits & into the life of the poem. Or, in the shadow of De Sade: “The supreme and unique pleasure (volupté) of love lies in the certainty that one is doing evil” (C. B.). A dangerous & persistent inheritance. In his journeys & searchings around Paris, Baudelaire may have been “the first true city poet”—one with a vision of the city & its people, not as an easy stroller (flaneur), but with a sense of anomie (ennui, or boredom) & personal disaster (spleen, or depression of the spirit), as prefigured by Shelley (see “Hell,” page 262) or Blake, among others. Self-invented, he was, as Pierre Joris wrote of him in an earlier installment, “the quintessentially rebellious & anti-heroic figure of the disaffiliated ‘dandy,’ the experimenter with hashish & opium, who is censored [for his great work The Flowers of Evil (1857)] & put on trial by the bourgeois state for his alleged obscenity & blasphemies” (Poems for the Millennium, volume one). But as
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with Shelley again—& Blake too—there was a visionary expansiveness & an abiding sense of “the tempestuous loveliness of terror” (page 252), of which for many years his work remained the prime example. His ambiguous stature here—on the cusp between movements & times—was recognized early on by Rimbaud in a critique of the preceding Romanticism: “Baudelaire is therefore first among seers, the king of poets, a true God. And yet even he lived in too aestheticized a world; and the forms for which he is praised are really quite trite: the inventions of the unknown demand new forms” (below, page 794). Yet for all of his (relative) adherence to closed forms, it was Baudelaire who first gave status to the prose poem, & it is that along with his stancetoward-reality that sets him high among the earlier Romantics & the modern poets who followed, that lets us read him as a certain kind of “seer” (voyant) in Rimbaud’s sense. For such breakthroughs of form & content, he drew on predecesors like Bertrand (above) & on contemporararies, wherever found, like Poe & De Quincey, whose Confessions of an Opium Eater was the basis of Baudelaire’s prose transcreation, Artificial Paradises, subtitled On Hashish and Wine as Means of Expanding Individuality. (2) “Dante’s muse looked dreamily on the Inferno; that of Les Fleurs du Mal breathes it in through inflamed nostrils, as a horse inhales shrapnel” (Baudelaire’s contemporary Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly [1862], as quoted in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project).
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S án d or Pet öf i
1822–1849
THE MADMAN
Why do you keep pestering me? Can’t you all leave me alone! I’ve got work to do—a lot, and quick. I’m plaiting the sun’s rays into a whip, a flame-whip, a whip I’ll lash the world with! What weeping and wailing there’ll be for me to laugh at, as the world laughed at my weeping and wailing! Ha ha ha! What else is life? You wail, you laugh. Only death says: shh! But you know I died once before. Those who’d drunk my wine mixed poison into my water. And then what did my killers do to conceal the crime? 608 A Second Gallery
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I was no sooner laid out than they threw themselves weeping on my body. I’d have enjoyed jumping up to snap off their noses, but no, I thought, I won’t: I’ll leave them their noses to appreciate the rotting of my corpse, and choke on it. Ha ha ha! And where did they bury me? Africa. Couldn’t have better luck, a hyena clawed me from my grave. Who ever helped me more than that? But I tricked even him. He was ready to sink his fangs in my thigh and I gave him my heart instead— it was so bitter it killed him. Ha ha ha! Well, the one who does his neighbour a good turn ends like this. What is man? Some say: the root of a flower that blooms in heaven. But that’s not true. Man is a flower whose root is down below in hell. Or so a wise man told me, wise idiot! for he starved to death. Couldn’t he steal? Couldn’t he rob someone? Ha ha ha! But why laugh? Am I not a fool too? Shouldn’t I be crying instead, crying for the world’s badness? God himself often does, with his cloud-eyes, sorry he even created us; but what use are tears in heaven? They fall on the earth, on this wretched earth where people tramp them down, and what’s left then? What are heaven’s tears but mud? Ha ha ha! Oh, sky, oh, sky, old soldier sky, the sun’s medal on your chest
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and the ragged clouds are your coat. And that’s how a veteran is discharged, with medal and ragged clothes and thanks for his long service. Ha ha ha! And do you know what it means in words when the quail says: peep-beep? It means you watch out for women! A woman draws men into her as the sea draws rivers. And why? to engulf them. The female animal is a beautiful animal, beautiful and dangerous. And love—I have drunk you!— is a poisoned drink in a golden cup. One dewdrop of you tastes sweeter than a whole sea of honey, yet a dewdrop of you is more fatal than a whole sea of poison. Have you seen the sea ploughed in furrows by storm for death to be sown? Have you seen the storm, that swarthy peasant with his lightning-goad under his arm? Ha ha ha! When the fruit is ripe, it falls from the tree. Earth, you are a ripe fruit ready to fall. Well, I shall give it till tomorrow: no Last Judgment then, I’ll burrow to the centre of this world with gunpowder and blow it all to smithereens . . . ha ha ha! Translation from Hungarian by Edwin Morgan
HOMER AND OSSIAN
Where have the Greeks gone, where have the Celts gone? They vanished like
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two cities drowned by the ocean-streams with only their topmost pinnacles breaking the water . . . These topmost pinnacles are two: Homer and Ossian. One was a beggar and one was a king’s son. Worlds apart! But in this they come together: both of them were blind. Perhaps the light of their eyes was lost in the fierce fire of their souls, outshone and extinguished by glory itself?
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Great spirits these! enchanted hands brushing the lyre-strings, they reenact the divine word creating a world for men which is wonderfully beautiful and wonderfully great.— Can you hear Homer? In his song the sky’s dome is an eternal smile of the stillness of joy, and the violet of dawn and the gold of the midday sun-ray pour down from it with such grace on the blond waves of the sea and their green islands where gods delightedly mingling with men and women pursue your dazzling game, o love! And can you see Ossian there? In the land of endless North Sea mists with storms massed over savage rocks he roars his song in the chaos of the night-time. And the moon comes up as blood-red as the sun that goes down and throws its stark light over a wilderness haunted by roving clusters of spirits, dead warriors mourning their last battle.
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Everything that is bright, everything that is blooming is in your song, oldest of beggars, Homer! Everything that is black, everything that is barren is in your song, king’s son, Ossian!— Go on then singing, pluck the lyre, the divine lyre, Homer and Ossian! The years are waiting— centuries, milleniums—to set their feet on everything without mercy, oh but you escape them like things sacred; their jaundiced fetid breath burns up the world except where the laurel on your grey heads is evergreen! Translation from Hungarian by Edwin Morgan
from T H E A P O S T L E [ 1 , 3 , 4 ]
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1
Dark city, night. The moon wanders in other regions, and the stars close their golden eyes. The world is dark like a hired conscience. One light strung distant and dying like the eye of a sick dream, a last hope. An attic, and someone keeps watch in the half worlds of poverty and strength. How great this poverty. It hardly fits the room
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that is small as a swallow’s nest and as plain. The walls are bare, only mould and watermarks of rain like the wiring in homes of the rich. The room is dull with sighs and a musty smell. The dogs of the wealthy have kennels and die in places like this.
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The pine bed and table would not sell at a flea market. A straw chair or two: at the foot of the bed an old pallet; and at the head, a wormy chest— complete furniture. Mist and light contend in the pale arena of the candle, and the figures are washed away like the flicker of a dream in the halfdark. A candle deludes the eye. Or are those under this roof so pale so ghostly? A family of the poor, a family of the poor. The mother sits on the chest with her babe. The unhappy child whines sucking her dried breast. She is deep in thoughts that must be filled with pain, and like snow melting from the eaves her tears are rolling down on the babe . . . Is she really thinking?
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Tears might fall from habit, without reason, like water from stones.
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The elder child is asleep (or is he?) on a wall bed, the straw sticking from a sack. Sleep, little child, sleep and dream into your thin hands a piece of bread, and your sleep will be great! The young father sits by the table, his face black with the darkness filling the room; his brow a book where the agonies of the world are written, a picture where the poverty of millions is painted. But his eyes flame like two comets, fearing no one, and everyone fearing. He looks far and high until his eye is lost in the infinite like an eagle in the clouds. ..................... 3
What are the ways of this man’s soul? What course has he chosen, what goal, wandering where only madmen and demigods dare or can soar? He cast off the cares of the day like a bird its shell. This was a birth and a soaring. The man died and a citizen was born,
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one moment his family’s, now the world’s. One moment he mingled only with three, and now with millions of men. His wings clattered where the world is a small spark on the paper ash of night. As he swished by the stars, they trembled like candlelight in a breath of air.
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He soared and soared. One star is millions and millons of miles from another, and still he left them swiftly behind like a rider who gallops by the trees of a forest. He passed billions of stars and reached . . . and reached . . . not the limit of infinity but the center. And he stood before the Being who governs the worlds with a glance, whose essence is light and in the radiance of whose eyes planets and moons revolve around the suns. He spoke bathed in protolight like a swan in the transparence of a lake— “O worshipful and hallowed God! A speck of dust has risen to bow in your presence. I am your faithful son. You sent me on a difficult course, Father, but I shall not rebel. I adore you
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for showing me your love. The peoples of earth are wicked and turned from you to become slaves . . . Slavery is the parent evil, and the others are its children. Man bowing to man belittles you, O God! You are mocked, but your glory shall be restored.
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You have given me one life, Father, and I consecrate it to your service. What is the reward? Or is there one? I will not ask. The worst servant will lift a finger for pay. I have worked without need or hope for reward, and I shall go on. I shall be rewarded when I see men as men who rose from slaves, because I love them though they are sinful. Give me light and strength, O God, to work for my fellow man.” He returned to earth and the room where his cold body waited. The man awoke, a shiver passing through him. Sweat on his brow . . . He could hardly tell whether he was awake or asleep . . . awake, because he was sleepy and his eyelids were heavy. He rose and staggered to the straw sack.
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A man who walks heaven sleeps on the floor! Hangmen lay their heads on silken pillows, and the benefactor of the world crashes on a pallet. The candle flickered and died. Night dissolved like a secret passing on lip to lip. —— The first ray of the rising sun fell on the face of a sleeping man like a wreath of gold, like a warm kiss from the mouth of God.
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4
Who is that strange creature? Who are you, man? The raiment of your soul is a robe of starlight, but the clothes on your body are rags. Your family hungers, and you. When there is a piece of decent bread on your bare table, you celebrate. What you cannot gain for yourself and yours, you want for the wide world. You are free to enter heaven, but knock on a great man’s door and he has you driven away. You while time with God, but speak to a gentleman and he cuts you short. Some call you The Apostle, and others say you are a damned criminal. Who are you? Your parents,
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are they proud of you, or do they redden at the mention of your name? Were you born on sack or velvet? Here is the story, the life, of this man— If I were to paint it, I would show a brook which erupts from an unknown fastness, cuts across a dark, narrow canyon filled with crows, and stumbles on endless stones, moaning in eternal pain. Translation from Hungarian by Anton N. Nyerges
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COMMENTARY
“Come with me,” I said taking his hand. “My carriage is stationed nearby and we can escape. On foot, they will kill you or take you prisoner.” “Do you think,” he replied, “that there is anyone mad enough to dare hold his ground in this hell. Your driver has run away like the others. Look . . . (and with that he pointed to a troop of mounted soldiers who were riding riding up) we can’t escape that way, don’t worry about your carriage, come aside and perhaps we can go free.” Seeing my hesitation, he pulled his hand from mine and said, “There is no time to think. I am going. God be with you.” He jumped from the embankment and rushed off. Petöfi’s reported last words at the Battle of Segesvár, July 31, 1849
Like Solomos, Mickiewicz, Martí, & others in these pages, he was not only the originator of a new poetry & literary language but an active player in the revolutions & wars of national liberation that challenged the dominance of the larger European empires. Writes Enikö Bollobás in summary: “In spite of his surprisingly short career (spanning only seven years!), Sándor Petöfi has been central to the Hungarian literary canon for over 150 years. A true romantic, he embraced three grand roles: that of the unerringly individualist confessional poet, that of the ‘natural’ poet capable of fully identifying with nature and his community (the poor, the literati, revolutionaries, the young, the nation), and that of the prophet to lead his people to freedom and redemption. He was a formal innovator, too, who refused to follow the age’s prescription for elaborate forms; instead, both his short lyric pieces and his longer epic poems are characterized by simple
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diction and casual rhythm adapted from folk songs and folk poetry (the popular, or ‘low,’ genres of the age). He was the first professional poet, who not only lived on what he earned by publishing (having a fine talent for exploiting the literary industry), but supported a family as well. He is also known as the poet of married love—writing love poems to his wife! “Today, the nature of the Petöfi cult seems to be a hot topic: why his life had been made into myth and legend while he was still alive; why he took the role of the superhuman genius, an incomparable, exceptional, radically oppositional, sovereign person; why so few facts are known from his life (his birth date, the exact date & circumstances of his death—all unknown). Yet everyone seems to have a personal relationship with Petöfi. How contemporary journalism, the tabloids of the time, followed his every move: his love life, his private life, his politics, his poetry. Probably he was the first media star, whose death remained unaccepted, unacknowledged, by Hungarians for many decades: every once in a while people came forward attesting to having seen him in person, others testified to meeting the Russian wife he had in Siberia after he was taken prisoner-of-war by the Russians in 1849 . . . where he actually fell, in the battle of Segesvár, July 1849. (Which possibility is repeatedly defeated: although we have no evidence, he most certainly died on the battlefield.) Only 15 years ago a Hungarian businessman funded a research project in Siberia trying to find his grave.”
Dan t e G a b riel Ros s et t i
1828–1882
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from D A N T E ’ S N E W L I F E : H I S P I T I F U L S O N G
The eyes that weep for pity of the heart Have wept so long that their grief languisheth And they have no more tears to weep withal: And now, if I would ease me of a part Of what, little by little, leads to death, It must be done by speech, or not at all. And because often, thinking, I recall How it was pleasant, ere she went afar, To talk of her with you, kind damozels, I talk with no one else, But only with such hearts as women’s are. And I will say,—still sobbing as speech fails,— That she hath gone to Heaven suddenly, And hath left Love below, to mourn with me.
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Beatrice is gone up into high Heaven, The kingdom where the angels are at peace; And lives with them; and to her friends is dead. Not by the frost of winter was she driven Away, like others; nor by summer-heats; But through a perfect gentleness, instead. For from the lamp of her meek lowlihead Such an exceeding glory went up hence That it woke wonder in the Eternal Sire, Until a sweet desire Entered Him for that lovely excellence, So that He bade her to Himself aspire: Counting this weary and most evil place Unworthy of a thing so full of grace. Wonderfully out of the beautiful form Soared her clear spirit, waxing glad the while; And is in its first home, there where it is. Who speaks thereof, and feels not the tears warm Upon his face, must have become so vile As to be dead to all sweet sympathies. Out upon him! an abject wretch like this May not imagine anything of her,— He needs no bitter tears for his relief. But sighing comes, and grief, And the desire to find no comforter, (Save only Death, who makes all sorrow brief), To him who for a while turns in his thought How she hath been among us, and is not. With sighs my bosom always laboureth On thinking, as I do continually, Of her for whom my heart now breaks apace; And very often when I think of death, Such a great inward longing comes to me That it will change the colour of my face; And, if the idea settles in its place, All my limbs shake as with an ague-fit; Till, starting up in wild bewilderment, I do become so shent
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That I go forth, lest folk misdoubt of it. Afterward, calling with a sore lament On Beatrice, I ask, “Canst thou be dead?” And calling on her, I am comforted. Grief with its tears, and anguish with its sighs, Come to me now whene’er I am alone; So that I think the sight of me gives pain. And what my life hath been, that living dies, Since for my lady the New Birth’s begun, I have not any language to explain. And so, dear ladies, though my heart were fain, I scarce could tell indeed how I am thus. All joy is with my bitter life at war; Yea, I am fallen so far That all men seem to say, “Go out from us,” Eyeing my cold white lips, how dead they are. But she, though I be bowed unto the dust, Watches me; and will guerdon me, I trust.
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Weep, piteous Song of mine, upon thy way, To the dames going, and the damozels For whom and for none else Thy sisters have made music many a day. Thou, that art very sad and not as they, Go dwell thou with them as a mourner dwells.
T R OY TOW N
Heavenborn Helen, Sparta’s queen, (O Troy Town!) Had two breasts of heavenly sheen, The sun and moon of the heart’s desire: All Love’s lordship lay between. (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!) Helen knelt at Venus’ shrine, (O Troy Town!)
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Saying, “A little gift is mine, A little gift for a heart’s desire. Hear me speak and make me a sign! (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!) “Look, I bring thee a carven cup; (O Troy Town!) See it here as I hold it up,— Shaped it is to the heart’s desire, Fit to fill when the gods would sup. (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!)
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“It was moulded like my breast (O Troy Town!) He that sees it may not rest, Rest at all for his heart’s desire. O give ear to my heart’s behest! (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!) “See my breast, how like it is; (O Troy Town!) See it bare for the air to kiss! Is the cup to thy heart’s desire? O for the breast, O make it his! (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!) “Yea, for my bosom here I sue; (O Troy Town!) Thou must give it where ’tis due, Give it there to the heart’s desire. Whom do I give my bosom to? (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!) “Each twin breast is an apple sweet (O Troy Town!) Once an apple stirred the beat Of thy heart with the heart’s desire:—
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Say, who brought it then to thy feet? (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!) “They that claimed it then were three: (O Troy Town!) For thy sake two hearts did he Make forlorn of the heart’s desire. Do for him as he did for thee! (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!) “Mine are apples grown to the south, (O Troy Town!) Grown to taste in the days of drouth, Taste and waste to the heart’s desire: Mine are apples meet for his mouth.” (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!)
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Venus looked on Helen’s gift, (O Troy Town!) Looked and smiled with subtle drift, Saw the work of her heart’s desire:— “There thou kneel’st for Love to lift!” (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!) Venus looked in Helen’s face, (O Troy Town!) Knew far off an hour and place, And fire lit from the heart’s desire; Laughed and said, “Thy gift hath grace!” (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!) Cupid looked on Helen’s breast, (O Troy Town!) Saw the heart within its nest, Saw the flame of the heart’s desire,— Marked his arrow’s burning crest. (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!)
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Cupid took another dart, (O Troy Town!) Fledged it for another heart, Winged the shaft with the heart’s desire, Drew the string and said, “Depart!” (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!) Paris turned upon his bed, (O Troy Town!) Turned upon his bed and said, Dead at heart with the heart’s desire,— “O to clasp her golden head!” (O Troy’s down, Tall Troy’s on fire!)
THE BLESSED DAMOZEL
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A Double Work of Art
The blessed damozel leaned out From the gold bar of Heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even; She had three lilies in her hand, And the stars in her hair were seven. Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem, No wrought flowers did adorn, But a white rose of Mary’s gift For service meetly worn; Her hair that lay along her back Was yellow like ripe corn. Herseemed she scarce had been a day One of God’s choristers; The wonder was not yet quite gone From that still look of hers; Albeit, to them she left, her day Had counted as ten years.
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(To one, it is ten years of years: . . . Yet now, and in this place Surely she leaned o’er me—her hair Fell all about my face. . . . Nothing: the autumn fall of leaves. The whole year sets apace.) It was the rampart of God’s house That she was standing on; By God built over the sheer depth The which is Space begun; So high, that looking downward thence She scarce could see the sun. It lies in Heaven, across the flood Of ether, as a bridge. Beneath, the tides of day and night With flame and darkness ridge The void, as low as where this earth Spins like a fretful midge.
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Heard hardly, some of her new friends Amid their loving games Spake evermore among themselves Their virginal chaste names; And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames. And still she bowed herself and stooped Out of the circling charm; Until her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm, And the lilies lay as if asleep Along her bended arm. From the fixed place of Heaven she saw Time like a pulse shake fierce Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove Within the gulf to pierce Its path: and now she spoke as when The stars sang in their spheres.
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The sun was gone now; the curled moon Was like a little feather Fluttering far down the gulf; and now She spoke through the still weather. Her voice was like the voice the stars Had when they sang together. (Ah sweet! Even now, in that bird’s song, Strove not her accents there, Fain to be hearkened? When those bells Possessed the mid-day air, Strove not her steps to reach my side Down all the echoing stair?) “I wish that he were come to me, For he will come,” she said. “Have I not prayed in Heaven?—on earth, Lord, Lord, has he not pray’d? Are not two prayers a perfect strength? And shall I feel afraid?
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“When round his head the aureole clings, And he is clothed in white, I’ll take his hand and go with him To the deep wells of light; We will step down as to a stream, And bathe there in God’s sight. “We two will stand beside that shrine, Occult, withheld, untrod, Whose lamps are stirred continually With prayer sent up to God; And see our old prayers, granted, melt Each like a little cloud. “We two will lie i’ the shadow of That living mystic tree Within whose secret growth the Dove Is sometimes felt to be, While every leaf that His plumes touch Saith His Name audibly.
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“And I myself will teach to him, I myself, lying so, The songs I sing here; which his voice Shall pause in, hushed and slow, And find some knowledge at each pause, Or some new thing to know.” (Alas! We two, we two, thou say’st! Yea, one wast thou with me That once of old. But shall God lift To endless unity The soul whose likeness with thy soul Was but its love for thee?) “We two,” she said, “will seek the groves Where the lady Mary is, With her five handmaidens, whose names Are five sweet symphonies, Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, Margaret and Rosalys.
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“Circlewise sit they, with bound locks And foreheads garlanded; Into the fine cloth white like flame Weaving the golden thread, To fashion the birth-robes for them Who are just born, being dead. “He shall fear, haply and be dumb: Then will I lay my cheek To his, and tell about our love, Not once abashed or weak: And the dear Mother will approve My pride, and let me speak. “Herself shall bring us, hand in hand, To Him round whom all souls Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered heads Bowed with their aureoles: And angels meeting us shall sing To their citherns and citoles.
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“There will I ask of Christ the Lord Thus much for him and me:— Only to live as once on earth With Love,—only to be, As then awhile, for ever now Together, I and he.” She gazed and listened and then said, Less sad of speech than mild,— “All this is when he comes.” She ceased. The light thrilled towards her, fill’d With angels in strong level flight. Her eyes prayed, and she smil’d. (I saw her smile.) But soon their path Was vague in distant spheres: And then she cast her arms along The golden barriers, And laid her face between her hands, And wept. (I heard her tears.)
from A T R I P T O P A R I S A N D B E L G I U M
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London to Folkstone (Half-past one to half-past five)
A constant keeping-past of shaken trees, And a bewildered glitter of loose road; Banks of bright growth, with single blades atop Against white sky; and wires—a constant chain— That seem to draw the clouds along with them (Things which one stoops against the light to see Through the low window; shaking by at rest, Or fierce like water as the swiftness grows); And, seen through fences or a bridge far off, Trees that in moving keep their intervals Still one ’twixt bar and bar; and then at times Long reaches of green level, where one cow,
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Feeding among her fellows that feed on, Lifts her slow neck, and gazes for the sound. There are six of us: I that write away; Hunt reads Dumas, hard-lipped, with heavy jowl And brows hung low, and the long ends of hair Standing out limp. A grazier at one end (Thank luck not my end!) has blocked out the air, And sits in heavy consciousness of guilt. The poor young muff who’s face to face with me Is pitiful in loose collar and black tie, His latchet-button shaking as we go. There are flowers by me, half upon my knees, Owned by a dame who’s fair in soul, no doubt: The wind that beats among us carries off Their scent, but still I have them for my eye.
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Fields mown in ridges; and close garden-crops Of the earth’s increase; and a constant sky Still with clear trees that let you see the wind; And snatches of the engine-smoke, by fits Tossed to the wind against the landscape, where Rooks stooping heave their wings upon the day. Brick walls we pass between, passed so at once That for the suddenness I cannot know Or what, or where begun, or where at end. Sometimes a Station in grey quiet; whence, With a short gathered champing of pent sound, We are let out upon the air again. Now nearly darkness; knees and arms and sides Feel the least touch, and close about the face A wind of noise that is alone like God. Pauses of water soon, at intervals, That has the sky in it;—the reflexes O’ the trees move towards the bank as we go by, Leaving the water’s surface plain. I now Lie back and close my eyes a space; for they Smart from the open forwardness of thought Fronting the wind—
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—I did not scribble more, Be certain, after this; but yawned, and read, And nearly dozed a little, I believe; Till, stretching up against the carriage-back, I was roused altogether, and looked out To where, upon the desolate verge of light, Yearned, pale and vast, the iron-coloured sea. Boulogne to Amiens and Paris (3 to II p.m.; 3rd class)
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Strong extreme speed, that the brain hurries with, Further than trees, and hedges, and green grass Whitened by distance,—further than small pools Held among fields and gardens,—further than Haystacks and windmill-sails and roofs and herds,— The sea’s last margin ceases at the sun. The sea has left us, but the sun remains. Sometimes the country spreads aloof in tracts Smooth from the harvest; sometimes sky and land Are shut from the square space the window leaves By a dense crowd of trees, stem behind stem Passing across each other as we pass: Sometimes tall poplar-wands stand white, their heads Outmeasuring the distant hills. Sometimes The ground has a deep greenness; sometimes brown In stubble; and sometimes no ground at all, For the close strength of crops that stand unreaped. The water-plots are sometimes all the sun’s,— Sometimes quite green through shadows filling them, Or islanded with growths of reeds,—or else Masked in grey dust like the wide face o’ the fields. And still the swiftness lasts; that to our speed The trees seem shaken like a press of spears. There is some count of us:—folks travelling-capped, Priesthood, and lank hard-featured soldiery, Females (no women), blouses, Hunt, and I. We are relayed at Amiens. The steam
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Snorts, chafes, and bridles, like three-hundred horse, And flings its dusky mane upon the air. Our company is thinned, and lamps alight: But still there are the folks in travelling-caps— No priesthood now, but always soldiery, And babies to make up for show in noise, Females (no women), blouses, Hunt, and I. Our windows at one side are shut for warmth; Upon the other side, a leaden sky, Hung in blank glare, makes all the country dim, Which too seems bald and meagre,—be it truth, Or of the waxing darkness. Here and there The shade takes light, where in thin patches stand The unstirred dregs of water. Hunt can see A moon, he says; but I am too far back. Still the same speed and thunder. We are stopped Again, and speech tells clearer than in day.
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Hunt has just stretched to tell me that he fears I and my note-book may be taken for The stuff that goes to make an “émissaire De la perfide.” Let me abate my zeal: There is a stout gendarme within the coach. This cursed pitching is too bad. My teeth Jingle together in it; and my legs (Which I got wet at Boulogne this good day Wading for star-fish) are so chilled that I Would don my coat, were not these seats too hard To spare it from beneath me, and were not The love of ease less than the love of sloth. Hunt has just told me it is nearly eight: We do not reach till half-past ten. Drat verse, And steam, and Paris, and the fins of Time! Marry, for me, look you, I will go sleep. Most of them slept; I could not—held awake By jolting clamour, with shut eyes; my head
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Willing to nod and fancy itself vague. Only at Stations I looked round me, when Short silence paused among us, and I felt A creeping in my feet from abrupt calm. At such times Hunt would jerk himself, and then Tumble uncouthly forward in his sleep. This lasted near three hours. The darkness now Stayeth behind us on the sullen road, And all this light is Paris. Dieu merci. Paris. Saturday Night, 29. Send me, dear William, by return of post, As much as you can manage of that rhyme Incurred at Ventnor. Bothers and delays Have still prevented me from copying this Till now; now that I do so, let it be Anticipative compensation. Numéro 4 Rue Geoffroy Marie, Faubourg Montmartre, près des Boulevards. Dear William, labelled thus the thing will reach.
COMMENTARY
The motive powers of art reverse the requirement of science, and demand first of all an inner standing-point. The heart of such a mystery as this must be plucked from the very world in which it beats or bleeds. Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
D. G. R.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was formed in 1848 by artists William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, &—at its center—painter & poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Their goal: to reawaken modern painting through a rejection of the art of the Royal Academy with its high Renaissance predispositions in favor of an earlier (pre-Raphaelite) attention to what they saw as a “humbler,” more direct, & therefore more visionary encounter with an animated world. With this came Rossetti’s insistence upon the artist’s “inner standing-point” (italics his) as the particular “motive power” of all art, poesy included, in contrast to that of science, thus effectively rejecting that interplay of poetry & science found in poets like Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, & Poe. What emerged was a (paradoxically) backward-looking sense of modernity, in which the PRB artists were not so much apolitical as proponents of an aesthetic approach to life that was itself a form of political or social critique. In this sense too
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the Brotherhood extended & redefined a tradition of adversarial cultural collectives that reached back to the more informal “Cockney School’’ of Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Keats, et al. (page 313), & forward perhaps to the great experimental art movements of the early twentieth century. (Their short-lived but influential magazine, The Germ, carried as its manifesto-like subtitle “Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art.”) But Rossetti’s brilliant translations of The Early Italian Poets (1861, 1874) reconstructed a yet earlier poetry collective with which the PRB identified, that of “Dante and his circle.” It was translation in fact—“the most direct form of commentary,” he called it—that played a pivotal role in Rossetti’s reconfiguration of poetic priorities. Here too there was the sense of an “inner standing-point” that allowed him to bring translation into the domain of composition &, in his writing-through of Dante Alighieri, to “literally become,” as Jerome McGann describes it, “‘Dante Rossetti,’ the resurrected figure of the great Florentine and, as such, the living sign of the deathless character of art.” If this internalization of translation was one of Rossetti’s major breakthroughs, the other, still more radical move was what he called “the double work of art,” a kind of self-ekphrasis in which, having painted a visual image or allegory, he followed with a poem about it. More rarely, as with “The Blessed Damozel,” the poem came first & the painting after, but always poem & painting would speak across a “gap,” as an interanimating commentary & visionary synergism, “allegorizing on one’s own hook,” as he put it, or, in the words of a later dispensation, bringing the boundaries between the arts into question. And finally, like other experimental poets of his time, he pushes still more against our expectations for nineteenth-century poetry. In the early sequence of poems, A Trip to Paris and Belgium, written in 1849 as letters to his PRB companions & published after his death by his brother William Michael Rossetti, he leaps into a poetry filled with quotidian observations & composed in a language free of archaisms & poetic diction—a counterpoetics in that sense for his own poetry as well.
E mily D ickin s on
1830–1886
#1249
Had I not seen the Sun I could have borne the shade But light a newer Wilderness My Wilderness has made –
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POEM FRAGMENT “WE DO NOT THINK / ENOUGH OF THE / DEAD”
Transcribed from manuscript by Marta L. Werner
#627
I think I was enchanted When first a +somber Girl – I read that Foreign Lady – The Dark – felt beautiful – And whether it was noon at night – Or only Heaven – at noon –
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For very Lunacy of Light I had not power to tell – The Bees – became as Butterflies – The Butterflies – as +Swans – Approached – and spurned the narrow Grass – And just the +meanest Tunes That Nature murmured to herself To keep herself in Cheer – I took for Giants – practicing Titanic Opera – The Days – to Mighty Metres stept – The Homeliest – adorned As if unto a +Jubilee ’Twere suddenly +confirmed – I could not have defined the change – Conversion of the Mind Like Sanctifying in the Soul – Is witnessed – not explained –
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’Twas a Divine Insanity – The +Danger to be sane Should I again experience – ’Tis Antidote to turn – To Tomes of Solid Witchcraft – Magicians be asleep – But Magic – hath an element Like Deity – to keep –
+ little Girl + As Moons – Lit – up the low – inferior Grass – + Common Tunes – faintest – + Sacrament + ordained + sorrow
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# 76 4
My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – In Corners – till a Day The Owner passed – identified – And carried Me away – And now We roam in Sovreign Woods – And now We hunt the Doe – And every time I speak for Him – The Mountains straight reply – And do I smile, such cordial light Opon the Valley glow – It is as a Vesuvian face Had let its pleasure through – And when at Night – Our good Day done – I guard My Master’s Head – ’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s Deep Pillow – to have shared –
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To foe of His – I’m deadly foe – None stir the second time – On whom I lay a Yellow Eye – Or an emphatic Thumb – Though I than He – may longer live He longer must – than I – For I have but the power to kill, Without – the power to die –
#706
I cannot live with You – It would be Life – And Life is over there – Behind the Shelf The Sexton keeps the Key to – Putting up
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Our Life – His porcelain – Like a Cup – Discarded of the Housewife – Quaint – or Broke – A newer Sevres pleases – Old Ones crack – I could not die – with You – For One must wait To shut the Other’s Gaze down – You – could not – And I – Could I stand by And see You – freeze – Without my Right of Frost – Death’s privilege? Nor could I rise – with You – Because Your Face Would put out Jesus’ – That New Grace
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Glow plain – and foreign On my homesick Eye – Except that You than He Shone closer by – They’d judge Us – How – For You – served Heaven – You know, Or sought to – I could not – Because You saturated Sight – And I had no more Eyes For sordid excellence As Paradise And were You lost, I would be – Though My Name Rang loudest On the Heavenly fame –
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And were You – saved – And I – condemned to be Where You were not – That self – were Hell to Me – So We must meet apart – You there – I – here – With just the Door ajar That Oceans are – and Prayer – And that White Sustenance – Despair –
#778
Four Trees – opon a solitary Acre – Without Design Or Order, or Apparent +Action – +Maintain –
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The Sun – opon a Morning meets them – The Wind – No nearer Neighbor – have they – But God – The Acre gives them – Place – They – Him – Attention of Passer by – Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply – Or Boy – What Deed +is Their’s unto the General Nature – What Plan They severally – +retard – or further – Unknown –
+ signal – notice + Do reign – + they bear + promote – or hinder –
Emily Dickinson 639 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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VISUAL POEM: A POOR – TORN HEART – A TAT T E R E D H E A RT
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[TEXT FOR THE PRECEDING]
A poor – torn heart – a tattered heart – That sat it down to rest – Nor noticed that the ebbing Day Flowed silver to the west – Nor noticed night did soft descend – Nor Constellation burn – Intent upon the vision Of latitudes unknown. The angels – happening that way This dusty heart espied – Tenderly took it up from toil And carried it to God – There – sandals for the Barefoot – There – gathered from the gales – Do the blue havens by the hand Lead the wandering Sails.
TO RECIPIENT UNKNOWN
Master.
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If you saw a bullet hit a Bird – and he told her he was’nt shot – you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word. One drop more from the gash that stains your Daisy’s bosom – then would you believe? Thomas’ faith in Anatomy, was stronger than his faith in faith. God made me – [Sir] Master – I didn’t be – myself. I don’t know how it was done. He built the heart in me – Bye and bye it outgrew me – and like the little mother – with the big child – I got tired holding him. I heard of a thing called “Redemption” – which rested men and women. You remember I asked you for it – you gave me something else. I forgot the Redemption [in the Redeemed – I did’nt tell you for a long time, but I knew you had altered me – I] and was tired no more – [so dear did this stranger become that were it, or my breath – the Alternative – I had tossed the fellow away with a smile.] I am older – tonight, Master – but the love is the same – so are the moon and the crescent. If it had been God’s will that I might breathe where you breathed – and find the place – myself – at night – if I (can) never forget that I am not with you – and that sorrow and frost are nearer than I – if I wish with a might I cannot repress – that
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mine were the Queen’s place – the love of the Plantagenet is my only apology – To come nearer than presbyteries – and nearer than the new Coat – that the Tailor made – the prank of the Heart at play on the Heart – in holy Holiday – is forbidden me – You make me say it over – I fear you laugh – when I do not see – [but] “Chillon” is not funny. Have you the Heart in your breast – Sir – is it set like mine – a little to the left – has it the misgiving – if it wake in the night – perchance – itself to it – a timbrel is it – itself to it a tune? These things are [reverent] holy, Sir, I touch them [reverently] hallowed, but persons who pray – dare remark [our] “Father”! You say I do not tell you all – Daisy confessed – and denied not.
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Vesuvius don’t talk – Etna – don’t – [Thy] one of them – said a syllable – a thousand years ago, and Pompeii heard it, and hid forever – She could’nt look the world in the face, afterward – I suppose – Bashful Pompeii! “Tell you of the want” – you know what a leech is, don’t you – and [remember that] Daisy’s arm is small – and you have felt the horizon haven’t you – and did the sea – never come so close as to make you dance? I don’t know what you can do for it – thank you – Master – but if I had the Beard on my cheek – like you – and you – had Daisy’s petals – and you cared so for me – what would become of you? Could you forget me in fight, or flight – or the foreign land? Could’nt Carl, and you and I walk in the meadows an hour – and nobody care but the Bobolink – and his – a silver scruple? I used to think when I died – I could see you – so I died as fast as I could – but the “Corporation” are going Heaven too so [Eternity] wont be sequestered – now [at all] – Say I may wait for you – say I need go with no stranger to the to me – untried [country] fold – I waited a long time – Master – but I can wait more – wait till my hazel hair is dappled – and you carry the cane – then I can look at my watch – and if the Day is too far declined – we can take the chance [of] for Heaven – What would you do with me if I came “in white?” Have you the little chest to put the Alive – in? I want to see you more – Sir – than all I wish for in this world – and the wish – altered a little – will be my only one – for the skies. Could you come to New England – [this summer – could] would you come to Amherst – Would you like to come – Master? [Would it do harm – yet we both fear God –] Would Daisy disappoint you – no – she would’nt – Sir – it were comfort forever – just to look in your face, while you looked in mine – then I could play in the woods till
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Dark – till you take me where Sundown cannot find us – and the true keep coming – till the town is full. [Will you tell me if you will?] I didn’t think to tell you, you did’nt come to me “in white”, nor ever told me why, No rose, yet felt myself a’bloom, No bird – yet rode in Ether. EDITORS ’ NOTE .
From manuscript: words that Dickinson crossed out are here enclosed in brackets; alternative readings are in parenthesis.
COMMENTARY
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When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person. (E. D., July 1862) And again—in an often cited statement: If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way. (E. D., August 1862) (1) While Dickinson has moved from an almost self-imposed obscurity (“a poet who never willingly consented to print”—R. W. Franklin) to recognition alongside Whitman as one of the two major American poets of her time, the reach & ferocity of her work belies the frail, reclusive image of her life-&-work-made-myth. Against the normative metric of her poems (a still recognizable ballad form or Protestant hymn measure) she launched a radical barrage of deformations, splintering her lines with dashes & with nervous runovers that could be read as line breaks or as grammatically “lawless” but musically articulate silences & speechlike gaps; marking off alternative readings for certain words set beneath her poems like footnotes; & even, as in the version presented here of “A poor – torn Heart – a tattered heart,” adding collaged images (actually sewn by her to the text with string) that partially obscure the text & thus create an unanticipated visual poetry. For this her mode of “publication” was a series of handwritten & hand-stitched fascicles, which formed the early portion of the nearly 1,800 poems & poem fragments now gathered as her oeuvre. Together with her surviving letters, these can be read (by those venturing to do so) as a single continuous poem, an unsent “letter to the world” that ends not in aesthetic time but with the end of life itself. In all of which she was a poet, in Susan Howe’s phrase (from Heidegger), “on the trace of the holy,” the formal disruptions and gaps in her poems reflecting, precisely, the struggle to wrest meaning in a space “. . . like chaos – stopless, cool, – / Without a chance or spar, / Or even a report of land / To justify despair.”
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(2) Writes Howe, whose book My Emily Dickinson (1985) set the pace for poets & readers in pursuit of Dickinson: “In prose and in poetry she explored the implications of breaking the law just short of breaking off communication with a reader. Starting from scratch, she exploded habits of standard human intercourse in her letters, as she cut across the customary chronological linearity of poetry. . . . An artist as obsessed, solitary, and uncompromising as Cézanne . . . like him ignored and misunderstood by her own generation, because of the radical nature of her work.” And Camille Paglia (1990), with a sense of the still darker, even “Sadean” implications of that work & its “stupefying energy”: “Words are rammed into lines with such force that syntax shatters and collapses into itself. The relation of form to content is aggressive and draconian. . . . Dickinson’s poetry is like the shrinking room of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, a torture chamber and arena of extremity.” Or again, as the directive, let’s say, for a radically new poetic reading: “She uses metaphors more literally than anyone else in major literature.” N.B. In bringing Dickinson’s poems into these pages, we have followed the numbering system established by R. W. Franklin, here using it for titling her otherwise untitled poems. We have also included, where applicable, the alternative readings that she marked off with crosses or pluses & placed beneath poems in her fascicles. But even so, her own handworked versions may in the end be the best key we have for charting her intensities.
C hris t in a Ros s et t i
1830–1894
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MY DREAM
Hear now a curious dream I dreamed last night, Each word whereof is weighed and sifted truth. I stood beside Euphrates while it swelled Like overflowing Jordan in its youth: It waxed and coloured sensibly to sight, Till out of myriad pregnant waves there welled Young crocodiles, a gaunt blunt-featured crew, Fresh-hatched perhaps and daubed with birthday dew. The rest if I should tell, I fear my friend, My closest friend would deem the facts untrue; And therefore it were wisely left untold; Yet if you will, why, hear it to the end.
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Each crocodile was girt with massive gold And polished stones that with their wearers grew: But one there was who waxed beyond the rest, Wore kinglier girdle and a kingly crown, Whilst crowns and orbs and sceptres starred his breast. All gleamed compact and green with scale on scale, But special burnishment adorned his mail And special terror weighed upon his frown; His punier brethren quaked before his tail, Broad as a rafter, potent as a flail. So he grew lord and master of his kin: But who shall tell the tale of all their woes? An execrable appetite arose, He battened on them, crunched, and sucked them in. He knew no law, he feared no binding law, But ground them with inexorable jaw: The luscious fat distilled upon his chin, Exuded from his nostrils and his eyes, While still like hungry death he fed his maw; Till every minor crocodile being dead And buried too, himself gorged to the full, He slept with breath oppressed and unstrung claw. Oh marvel passing strange which next I saw: In sleep he dwindled to the common size, And all the empire faded from his coat. Then from far off a wingèd vessel came, Swift as a swallow, subtle as a flame: I know not what it bore of freight or host, But white it was as an avenging ghost. It levelled strong Euphrates in its course; Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote It seemed to tame the waters without force Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat: Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands, The prudent crocodile rose on his feet And shed appropriate tears and wrung his hands. What can it mean? you ask. I answer not For meaning, but myself must echo, What? And tell it as I saw it on the spot.
Christina Rossetti 645 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
THE CONVENT THRESHOLD
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There’s blood between us, love, my love, There’s father’s blood, there’s brother’s blood; And blood’s a bar I cannot pass: I choose the stairs that mount above, Stair after golden skyward stair, To city and to sea of glass. My lily feet are soiled with mud, With scarlet mud which tells a tale Of hope that was, of guilt that was, Of love that shall not yet avail; Alas, my heart, if I could bare My heart, this selfsame stain is there: I seek the sea of glass and fire To wash the spot, to burn the snare; Lo, stairs are meant to lift us higher: Mount with me, mount the kindled stair. Your eyes look earthward, mine look up. I see the far-off city grand, Beyond the hills a watered land, Beyond the gulf a gleaming strand Of mansions where the righteous sup; Who sleep at ease among their trees, Or wake to sing a cadenced hymn With Cherubim and Seraphim; They bore the Cross, they drained the cup, Racked, roasted, crushed, wrenched limb from limb, They the offscouring of the world: The heaven of starry heavens unfurled, The sun before their face is dim. You looking earthward, what see you? Milk-white, wine-flushed among the vines, Up and down leaping, to and fro, Most glad, most full, made strong with wines, Blooming as peaches pearled with dew, Their golden windy hair afloat, Love-music warbling in their throat, Young men and women come and go. You linger, yet the time is short: Flee for your life, gird up your strength 646 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
To flee; the shadows stretched at length Show that day wanes, that night draws nigh; Flee to the mountain, tarry not. Is this a time for smile and sigh, For songs among the secret trees Where sudden blue birds nest and sport? The time is short and yet you stay: Today while it is called today Kneel, wrestle, knock, do violence, pray; Today is short, tomorrow nigh: Why will you die? why will you die?
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You sinned with me a pleasant sin: Repent with me, for I repent. Woe’s me the lore I must unlearn! Woe’s me that easy way we went, So rugged when I would return! How long until my sleep begin, How long shall stretch these nights and days? Surely, clean Angels cry, she prays; She laves her soul with tedious tears: How long must stretch these years and years? I turn from you my cheeks and eyes, My hair which you shall see no more— Alas for joy that went before, For joy that dies, for love that dies. Only my lips still turn to you, My livid lips that cry, Repent. Oh weary life, Oh weary Lent, Oh weary time whose stars are few. How should I rest in Paradise, Or sit on steps of heaven alone? If Saints and Angels spoke of love Should I not answer from my throne: Have pity upon me, ye my friends, For I have heard the sound thereof: Should I not turn with yearning eyes, Turn earthwards with a pitiful pang? Oh save me from a pang in heaven. By all the gifts we took and gave, Repent, repent, and be forgiven:
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This life is long, but yet it ends; Repent and purge your soul and save: No gladder song the morning stars Upon their birthday morning sang Than Angels sing when one repents. I tell you what I dreamed last night: A spirit with transfigured face Fire-footed clomb an infinite space. I heard his hundred pinions clang, Heaven-bells rejoicing rang and rang, Heaven-air was thrilled with subtle scents, Worlds spun upon their rushing cars: He mounted shrieking: “Give me light.” Still light was poured on him, more light; Angels, Archangels he outstripped Exultant in exceeding might, And trod the skirts of Cherubim. Still “Give me light,” he shrieked; and dipped His thirsty face, and drank a sea, Athirst with thirst it could not slake. I saw him, drunk with knowledge, take From aching brows the aureole crown— His locks writhed like a cloven snake— He left his throne to grovel down And lick the dust of Seraphs’ feet: For what is knowledge duly weighed? Knowledge is strong, but love is sweet; Yea all the progress he had made Was but to learn that all is small Save love, for love is all in all. I tell you what I dreamed last night: It was not dark, it was not light, Cold dews had drenched my plenteous hair Thro’ clay; you came to seek me there. And “Do you dream of me?” you said. My heart was dust that used to leap To you; I answered half asleep: “My pillow is damp, my sheets are red, There’s a leaden tester to my bed: Find you a warmer playfellow, A warmer pillow for your head, 648 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
A kinder love to love than mine.” You wrung your hands; while I like lead Crushed downwards thro’ the sodden earth: You smote your hands but not in mirth, And reeled but were not drunk with wine.
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For all night long I dreamed of you: I woke and prayed against my will, Then slept to dream of you again. At length I rose and knelt and prayed: I cannot write the words I said, My words were slow, my tears were few; But thro’ the dark my silence spoke Like thunder. When this morning broke, My face was pinched, my hair was grey, And frozen blood was on the sill Where stifling in my struggle I lay. If now you saw me you would say: Where is the face I used to love? And I would answer: Gone before; It tarries veiled in paradise. When once the morning star shall rise, When earth with shadow flees away And we stand safe within the door, Then you shall lift the veil thereof. Look up, rise up: for far above Our palms are grown, our place is set; There we shall meet as once we met And love with old familiar love.
from G O B L I N M A R K E T
Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheeked peaches, Christina Rossetti 649
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Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries, Pine-apples, blackberries, Apricots, strawberries;— All ripe together In summer weather,— Morns that pass by, Fair eves that fly; Come buy, come buy: Our grapes fresh from the vine, Pomegranates full and fine, Dates and sharp bullaces, Rare pears and greengages, Damsons and bilberries, Taste them and try: Currants and gooseberries, Bright-fire-like barberries, Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye; Come buy, come buy.” Evening by evening Among the brookside rushes, Laura bowed her head to hear, Lizzie veiled her blushes: Crouching close together In the cooling weather, With clasping arms and cautioning lips, With tingling cheeks and finger tips. “Lie close,” Laura said, Pricking up her golden head: “We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots?” “Come buy,” call the goblins Hobbling down the glen. “Oh,” cried Lizzie, “Laura, Laura, You should not peep at goblin men.” Lizzie covered up her eyes,
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Covered close lest they should look; Laura reared her glossy head, And whispered like the restless brook: “Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie, Down the glen tramp little men. One hauls a basket, One bears a plate, One lugs a golden dish Of many pounds weight. How fair the vine must grow Whose grapes are so luscious; How warm the wind must blow Thro’ those fruit bushes.” “No,” said Lizzie: “No, no, no; Their offers should not charm us, Their evil gifts would harm us.” She thrust a dimpled finger In each ear, shut eyes and ran: Curious Laura chose to linger Wondering at each merchant man. One had a cat’s face, One whisked a tail, One tramped at a rat’s pace, One crawled like a snail, One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry, One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry. She heard a voice like voice of doves Cooing all together: They sounded kind and full of loves In the pleasant weather. Laura stretched her gleaming neck Like a rush-imbedded swan, Like a lily from the beck, Like a moonlit poplar branch, Like a vessel at the launch When its last restraint is gone. Backwards up the mossy glen Turned and trooped the goblin men, With their shrill repeated cry, “Come buy, come buy.” When they reached where Laura was Christina Rossetti 651
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
They stood stock still upon the moss, Leering at each other, Brother with queer brother; Signalling each other, Brother with sly brother. One set his basket down, One reared his plate; One began to weave a crown Of tendrils, leaves and rough nuts brown (Men sell not such in any town); One heaved the golden weight Of dish and fruit to offer her: “Come buy, come buy,” was still their cry.
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Laura stared but did not stir, Longed but had no money: The whisk-tailed merchant bade her taste In tones as smooth as honey, The cat-faced purr’d, The rat-paced spoke a word Of welcome, and the snail-paced even was heard; One parrot-voiced and jolly Cried “Pretty Goblin” still for “Pretty Polly”;— One whistled like a bird. But sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste: “Good folk, I have no coin; To take were to purloin: I have no copper in my purse, I have no silver either, And all my gold is on the furze That shakes in windy weather Above the rusty heather.” “You have much gold upon your head,” They answered all together: “Buy from us with a golden curl.” She clipped a precious golden lock, She dropped a tear more rare than pearl, Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red: Sweeter than honey from the rock. Stronger than man-rejoicing wine, Clearer than water flowed that juice; She never tasted such before, 652 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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How should it cloy with length of use? She sucked and sucked and sucked the more Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; She sucked until her lips were sore; Then flung the emptied rinds away But gathered up one kernel-stone, And knew not was it night or day As she turned home alone. Lizzie met her at the gate Full of wise upbraidings: “Dear, you should not stay so late, Twilight is not good for maidens; Should not loiter in the glen In the haunts of goblin men. Do you not remember Jeanie, How she met them in the moonlight, Took their gifts both choice and many, Ate their fruits and wore their flowers Plucked from bowers Where summer ripens at all hours? But ever in the noonlight She pined and pined away; Sought them by night and day, Found them no more but dwindled and grew grey; Then fell with the first snow, While to this day no grass will grow Where she lies low: I planted daisies there a year ago That never blow. You should not loiter so.” “Nay, hush,” said Laura: “Nay, hush, my sister: I ate and ate my fill, Yet my mouth waters still; Tomorrow night I will Buy more”: and kissed her: “Have done with sorrow; I’ll bring you plums tomorrow Fresh on their mother twigs, Cherries worth getting; You cannot think what figs
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My teeth have met in, What melons icy-cold Piled on a dish of gold Too huge for me to hold, What peaches with a velvet nap, Pellucid grapes without one seed: Odorous indeed must be the mead Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink With lilies at the brink, And sugar-sweet their sap.”
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Golden head by golden head, Like two pigeons in one nest Folded in each other’s wings, They lay down in their curtained bed: Like two blossoms on one stem, Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow, Like two wands of ivory Tipped with gold for awful kings. Moon and stars gazed in at them, Wind sang to them lullaby, Lumbering owls forbore to fly, Not a bat flapped to and fro Round their rest: Cheek to cheek and breast to breast Locked together in one nest.
COMMENTARY
Perhaps some languid summer day, / When drowsy birds sing less and less, / And golden fruit is ripening to excess, / If there’s not much sun nor too much cloud, / And the warm wind is neither still nor loud, / Perhaps my secret I may say, / Or you may guess. C. R., “Winter: My Secret”
Her uncanny & sensuous Goblin Market has often been taken, with her contrastingly spare & devotional religious verse, as the two polar opposites of her work as a whole. Coming at her anew we can now see a richer palette, thicker & tougher, & with a range of concerns that draws initially from her intimate connections to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (above, page 633) & includes a critique of gender roles, linguistic play & experimentation, interest in bodily protrusions & secretions, abjection, children’s songs, bizarre dream vision, & ecologically sensitive pieces, along with renovative devotional poems. Her 1862 Goblin Market and Other Poems is a major
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collection in mid-nineteenth-century poetry. “When the poems not only foreground the refusal to participate in commodity culture (and marriage as part of that), but also perform a refusal of meaning, they insist on the possibility of there being alternate systems or economies of meaning, such as the all-female world at the end of Goblin Market” (Julie Carr). “My Dream” (recalling lyrics from Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-book) is a more or less uncensored dream featuring the grotesque, the psycho-sexual, & the visceral, as is, with a more elaborate narrative, “The Convent Threshold.” But it’s Goblin Market itself, illustrated in an early edition by her brother Dante Gabriel, that gives her an increasing position of regard alongside the male participants in the Brotherhood. The poem, which develops a heightened sense of sexual nightmare & redemption after the opening pages given here, is a display as well of Rossetti’s surprisingly wide range of both conventional & strikingly innovative techniques: “restricted phrasal emphasis, long vowel sounds, heavy caesuras, tolling regularity of beat . . . [and] displaced beats . . . [to which] must be added her calculated uses of abnormal syntax, frequent punning, deliberately archaic verbal and pronominal forms, intentional anticlimax, verbal repetition as musical (and thematic) leitmotiv, paradox, oxymoron, dialectical progressions, and rhetorical questioning. The ‘perfect surfaces’ of her poems, so often acknowledged by critics, result from these techniques, but so do perfect thematic, psychological, and literaryhistorical or parodic ‘depths’” (thus: Anthony H. Harrison in summary). And Joyce Carol Oates, of Goblin Market in particular: “Like most powerful poetry, Goblin Market eludes absolute meanings. It remains a haunting aesthetic creation very like the lush, dreamlike, and technically accomplished and ornamental romantic mystic art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with which Christina Rossetti was associated; the poem is enhanced by the vivid, sensuous images of Dante Gabriel Rossetti that express so poignantly the soul’s urgent and unspeakable yearnings.”
S ou s ân d ra d e [ Jo aqu im de So u s a An drad e]
1832–1902
from O G U E S A E R R A N T E : T H E W A L L S T R E E T I N F E R N O
(Guesa having crossed the Antilles, believes himself rid of the xeques and enters the New-York-Stock-Exchange; the Voice, from the wilderness:)
—Orpheus, Dante, Aeneas, to hell Descended; the Inca must ascend . . . = Ogni sp’ranza lasciate, Che entrate . . . —Swedenborg, do future worlds impend? 655
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(Xeques appearing, laughing and disguised as Railroad-managers, Stockjobbers, Pimpbrokers, etc., etc., ballyhooing:)
—Harlem! Erie! Central! Pennsylvania! = Million! hundred million!! ten digits!!! —Young is Grant! Jackson, Atkinson! Vanderbilts, Jay Goulds are midgets! 656
(The Voice barely heard in the tumult:) 656
—Fulton’s Folly, Codezo’s Forgery . . . The nation cries swindle and cheat! They can’t fathom odes Railroads; Chattam’s parallel to Wall Street . . . (Brokers continuing:)
656
—Dwarves, Brown Brothers! Bennett! Stewart! Rothschild and Astor the redtop!! = Giants, slaves, this prevails Just if nails Effuse light, just if the pains stop! . . .
(Norris, attorney; Codezo, inventor; Young, Esq., manager; Atkinson, agent; Armstrong, agent; Rhodes, agent; p. Offman & Voldo, agents; hubbub; mirage; in the middle, Guesa:)
—Two! three! five thousand! by gambling, Sir, you’ll five million dollars win! = He won! ha! haa! haaa! —Hurrah! ah! . . . —Vanished . . . were they confidence men?
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656
(j. Miller on the roof of tammany wigwam unrolling the garibaldian mantle:) 656
—Bloodthirsties! oh Sioux! oh Modocs! To the White House! Save the nation, From Jews! from aberrant Goth errant! From most corrupt agitation! (Violated mob:)
—Mistress Tilton, Sir Grant, Sir Tweed, Adultery, royalty, outlaw,
656
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Knot masked (grim faces) Disgraces, Let them dance th’eternal Lynch law! (Rt. Rev. Beecher preaching:) 657
—Just Tennyson and Longfellow, Good morals inspired in us all: Not Donahues, Arthurs Strikers, Nor John Byron, nor Juvenal!
(Tilton moaning with the head pains of Jupiter:)
—Pallas! Pallas! Satan’s sermon! The cuckold moral of Beecher! Fiery sermons! moan! Brimstone! She heard from the Plymouth preacher! 657
(Joannes-Theodorus-Golhemus preaching in Brooklyn:) 657
—Rugged rocks of New Malborough! Mammoth Cave! rather gab a lot With Mormons I advise! You despise The pulpit where Maranhão taught!
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(Beecher-Stowe and h. Beecher:)
—Brother Laz’rus, I repent of The rock that at Byron I threw . . . = Gypsy sis, I agree ’Cause it hit me! He gets glory, and me they sue! ....... Newton’s Principia, Shak’spear’, Milton, The Ormazd, the Vedas, Koran, The Thousand-One Nights, And whip bites Christ dealt out and had to withstand: There is twixt Harold and Guesa A greatly diverse circumstance, One’s voice, strong output,
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But bot foot; The other, “tweak voice” and firm stance. And comets to meteorites comment As they pass by shaking the air . . . = Look at each old Miniworld That flaunts whirling and shining there! (La Fontaine using in a fable the killers of Ines de Castro:)
—Ants are not fond of grasshoppers, The vampires are Luís Varela’s; They’re not Pedros’ crude; They’re lewd Goats, rodents, and monkeys, and ’dillos. (Zoiluses:)
—Jur’paripirás (not Evang’line) The Governor of Maranhão, Baia’s spicy girls Of the world, Transferred, and this is his crown.
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(O Novo Mundo:)
—Good vates, there’s naught so opposed To the preservation of life Than as some rogues do, To woo (Manu’s law) another man’s wife! (Longfellow complaining; trio of parents:)
—Woe! woe! woe! what this perverse world Does to those that we love so well! Our daughters beguiled And defiled! = They howl as they journey to hell! (Octogenarian Bryant working:)
—The crows sing so well, Jehovah! Jehovah! Ku-Klux robed in white Making other worlds so
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Deep below, They made darkness . . . out of the light! Pharsalus’ matinée is dark, Wolfgang, And its sizeable price would astound! No notable verse can Cost more than Guesa, which insolv’ble was found! (Episcopalians with the church full of faithful and going bankrupt:)
—Vast congregations could rebuild Their churches in one day alone . . . The dollars falter! . . . The altar, Cross, everything, creditors own! (Catholics, fearing the glory of bankruptcy, close the door to beggars:)
—If they don’t pay cash they can’t enter! Latin Mass, Pope, Heaven too! Such confessionals! . . . Transgressionals Only burnt do they give God what’s due!
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(Pan-Presbeterians chamberlainizing:)
—Sinagogue of the Devil! Incubussed wife of the Lamb! You’re ’pocalyptic, Breck’nridgic Herr Gallant’s romancing you, ma’am! (Out-laws Unitarians:)
—Won’t honor Messiah’s parents Only he who dishonors his own: As teachers of value And love, you The King of the Jews dethrone. —Just the loyal, never Loyola, Can in noble hearts trust produce: Volcano’s yawn, Acheron . . . “Water-head”?’s Tom-Tom mother-Goose!
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(Bad-sinners good-apostles, enlightened with the beliefs of remission and resurrection of the dead, seeing Jerry McCaulay and reseeing Frothingham in “Christ would not suit our times”:)
—Peccavi says one, and transforms Pagoda to Christian mission; In a church the other: Holy Mother! “Christianity’s superstition!” Reserved is the world, in which man Bears the seal of the Begetter And broken . . . Frothingham Or Brigham, Mirrors; and Beecher is better. (Epicurus teaching between Chemistry and Psychology:)
—Poor ideal God . . . fleshly flower, Satan’s garden: ergo, betray; Hunger is dark And have a lark The vermin, because of decay.
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(Stokers of the furnace reducing the original sin to algebraic formulas and to the “New Faith” (“moral rapid transit”) the “In God we trust” of the five cents:)
—Cold, industry, practical life, Go ahead! oh, oh, such a heart! . . . To this air, vital vent Spiraling sent, Breeze or Bull-hurricane or fart! (Saint Ignatius founding his Order:)
—Just the cadaver’s majestic, Such ideal to the real descends; Ice is fire . . . and each divus Alive Just to its animal attends. (Reporters:)
—What’s that long, sad, striped procession Coiling through Blackwell in chains? Carrere, Boss Tweed,
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Proceed Waist-linked . . . cruel justice reigns! = Cuban Codezo, Young Esquire, Each other do cheat and ensnare, Mistic Proteus cult Occult Of Hudson-Canal-Delaware! Norris, Connecticut’s blue laws! Clevelands, attorney-Cujas, Changed to zebras and made To parade Two by two, a hundred Barrabas! (Friends of the lost kings:)
—Humb of railroad and tel’graph, Tried to steal the heavenly flame, That the world throughout Should sprout The Spangled Star and her acclaim!
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(A rebel sun founding a planetary center:)
—“George Washington, etc., etc., Answer Royal-George-Third” you bloke! = You tell him, Lord Howe, I’m royal now . . . (And the Englishman’s nose they broke). (Satellites hailing Jove’s thunderbolts:)
—“The universe salutes the queen” . . . And Patriarchs laud and admire . . . (With a liberal king, The worst thing, They established a moon empire). (Reporters:)
—A sad role on earth is performed By kings and bards, heav’n’s company, (And Strauss waltzing) Singing In Hippodrome or Jubilee.
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(Brokers finding the cause of the slump in the Wall-Street exchange:)
—Exeunt Dom Pedro, Dom Grant, Dom Guesa, brave voyagers three: Each with golden till They still The Moor of the turbulent sea. (International procession, people of Israel, Orangemen, Fenians, Buddhists, Mormons, Communists, Nihilists, Pallbearers, Railroad-Strikers, All-brokers, All-saints, All-devils, lanterns, music, sensation; Reporters: in London the “assassin” of the Queen and in Paris “Lot” the fugitive of Sodom pass by:)
—The Holy Spirit of slavery Is a single-Emperor state; That of the free, verse Reverse, Doth all mankind coronate! Translation from Portuguese by Robert E. Brown
COMMENTARY
Someone told me I would only be read 50 years from now. I grew sad. The disillusion of one who wrote 50 years too soon.
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Sousândrade, from Preface to the first edition of O Guesa Errante, as quoted by Augusto de Campos
The great Brazilian poet Sousândrade, nearly forgotten after his own time, was brought back through the enthusiasm of Haroldo & Augusto de Campos, to become, in Latin American terms at least, the epitome of a late experimental romanticism & a prefigurer of new poetries to come. “In 1877”—thus the Cuban novelist Severo Sarduy in summary—“this contemporary of Baudelaire, who lived in the United States for ten years, wrote what Haroldo de Campos regards as the foundation stone of concretude [concrete poetry]: a long poem entitled O guesa errante [The Wandering Guesa], which culminates in an astonishing sequence—‘The Wall Street Inferno’—that might be described as textual marquetry or polyphony, in which layout, neologisms, verbal montage, and sudden changes in tone evoke the newspapers of that period and the hectic world of the stock market. It is a typographical explosion in a pre-Poundian expanding universe.” Or Haroldo de Campos himself, of Sousândrade as part of a Brazilian “tradition of rupture”: “Our poet, the one who made the great Romantic poetry in our language, was Sousândrade. Especially when he wrote O Guesa, he
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led the models of the time to total disorder and was not understood by his contemporaries. It’s clear that if we didn’t have the standards of modern poetry, we wouldn’t have the standards to evaluate Sousândrade.” In an unfinished sequence of thirteen cantos, then, Sousândrade engages in what Augusto de Campos calls “a trans-American periplum (with interludes in Europe, Africa) from Brazil (Maranhão) to Colombia, Venezuela, Peru . . . Central America, the Antilles, and to the USA.” At the journey’s center is the Guesa, a legendary figure of the Muisca Indians of Colombia, destined from childhood for ritual immolation. To escape the xeques or priests who would carry out the sacrifice, the Guesa (or Sousândrade speaking for him), makes his own pilgrimage, “to end sacrificed in Wall Street, surrounded by stockbrokers’ cries.” To bring this across, Sousândrade invents & reinvents within a framework of decasyllabics & alternative rhymed lines of four to eight syllables: “montage and collage techniques that include ‘faits divers’ from NY press (THE SUN, THE NEW YORK HERALD), especially political news, quotations from several languages, cacaphonic sounds, neologisms . . . [that] make the poem incredibly new, a forerunner of EP’s Cantos and of many other modern poets” (A. de C.).
A d a h I s aacs M en ken
1835–1868
JUDITH Repent, or I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight thee with the sword of my mouth.
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R E V E LAT I O N ii. 1 6
I
Ashkelon is not cut off with the remnant of a valley. Baldness dwells not upon Gaza. The field of the valley is mine, and it is clothed in verdure. The steepness of Baal-perazim is mine; And the Philistines spread themselves in the valley of Rephaim. They shall yet be delivered into my hands. For the God of Battles has gone before me! The sword of the mouth shall smite them to dust. I have slept in the darkness— But the seventh angel woke me, and giving me a sword of flame, points to the blood-ribbed cloud, that lifts his reeking head above the mountain. Thus am I the prophet.
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I see the dawn that heralds to my waiting soul the advent of power. Power that will unseal the thunders! Power that will give voice to graves! Graves of the living; Graves of the dying; Graves of the sinning; Graves of the loving; Graves of despairing; And oh! graves of the deserted! These shall speak, each as their voices shall be loosed. And the day is dawning.
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II
Stand back, ye Philistines! Practice what ye preach to me; I heed ye not, for I know ye all. Ye are living burning lies, and profanation to the garments which with stately steps ye sweep your marble palaces. Your palaces of Sin, around which the damning evidence of guilt hangs like a reeking vapor. Stand back! I would pass up the golden road of the world. A place in the ranks awaits me. I know that ye are hedged on the borders of my path. Lie and tremble, for ye well know that I hold with iron grasp the battle axe. Creep back to your dark tents in the valley. Slouch back to your haunts of crime. Ye do not know me, neither do ye see me. But the sword of the mouth is unsealed, and ye coil yourselves in slime and bitterness at my feet. I mix your jeweled heads, and your gleaming eyes, and your hissing tongues with the dust. My garments shall bear no mark of ye. When I shall return this sword to the angel, your foul blood will not stain its edge. It will glimmer with the light of truth, and the strong arm shall rest. III
Stand back! I am no Magdalene waiting to kiss the hem of your garment.
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It is mid-day. See ye not what is written on my forehead? I am Judith! I wait for the head of my Holofernes! Ere the last tremble of the conscious death-agony shall have shuddered, I will show it to ye with the long black hair clinging to the glazed eyes, and the great mouth opened in search of voice, and the strong throat all hot and reeking with blood, that will thrill me with wild unspeakable joy as it courses down my bare body and dabbles my cold feet! My sensuous soul will quake with the burden of so much bliss. Oh, what wild passionate kisses will I draw up from that bleeding mouth! I will strangle this pallid throat of mine on the sweet blood! I will revel in my passion. At midnight I will feast on it in the darkness. For it was that which thrilled its crimson tides of reckless passion through the blue veins of my life, and made them leap up in the wild sweetness of Love and agony of Revenge! I am starving for this feast. Oh forget not that I am Judith! And I know where sleeps Holofernes.
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B AT T L E O F T H E S TA R S [ A F T E R O S S I A N ]
Alone on the hill of storms The voice of the wind shrieks through the mountain. The torrent rushes down the rocks. Red are hundred streams of the light-covered paths of the dead. Shield me in from the storm, I that am a daughter of the stars, and wear the purple and gold of bards, with the badges of Love on my white bosom. I heed not the battle-cry of souls! I that am chained on this Ossa of existence. Sorrow hath bound her frozen chain about the wheels of my chariot of fire wherein my soul was wont to ride. Stars, throw off your dark robes, and lead me to the palace where my Eros rests on his iron shield of war, his gleaming sword in the scabbard, his hounds haunting around him. The water and the storm cry aloud.
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I hear not the voice of my Love. Why delays the chief of the stars his promise? Here is the terrible cloud, and here the cloud of life with its manycolored sides. Thou didst promise to be with me when night should trail her dusky skirts along the borders of my soul. O wind! O thought! Stream and torrent, be ye silent! Let the wanderer hear my voice. Eros, I am waiting. Why delay thy coming? It is Atha calls thee. See the calm moon comes forth. The flood is silver in the vale. The rocks are gray on the steep. I see him not on the mountain brow; The hounds come not with the glad tidings of his approach. I wait for morning in my tears. Rear the tomb, but close it not till Eros comes: Not unharmed will return the eagle from the field of foes. But Atha will not mark thy wounds, she will be silent in her blood. Love, the great Dreamer, will listen to her voice, and she will sleep on the soft bosom of the hills. O Love! thou Mighty Leveler, Thou alone canst lay the shepherd’s crook beside the sceptre, Thou art the King of the Stars. Music floats up to thee, receives thy breath, thy burning kisses, and comes back with messages to children of earth. Thou art pitiful and bountiful. Although housed with the golden-haired Son of the Sky, with stars for thy children, dwelling in the warm clouds, and sleeping on the silver shields of War, yet ye do not disdain the lonely Atha that hovers round the horizon of your Grand Home. You awake and come forth arrayed in trailing robes of glory, with blessing and with song to greet her that seeketh thy mighty presence. Thy hand giveth Morn her power; Thy hand lifteth the mist from the hills; Thy hand createth all of Beauty; Thy hand giveth Morn her rosy robes; Thy hands bound up the wounds of Eros after the battle: Thy hands lifted him to the skirts of the wind, like the eagle of the forest. Thy hands have bound his brow with the spoils of the foe. Thy hands have given to me the glittering spear, and helmet of power and might;
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Nor settles the darkness on me. The fields of Heaven are mine. I will hush the sullen roar of the enemy. Warriors shall lift their shields to me. My arm is strong, my sword defends the weak. I will loose the thong of the Oppressed, and dash to hell the Oppressor. A thousand warriors stretch their spears around me. I battle for the stars. It was thy hands, O Love, that loosed my golden tresses, and girded my white limbs in armor, and made me leader of the armies of Heaven. Thy voice aroused the sluggard soul. Thy voice calleth back the sleeping dead. Thou alone, O Mighty Ruler, canst annihilate space, hush the shrieking wind, hide the white-haired waves, and bear me to the arms and burning kisses of my Eros. And it is thou who makest beautiful the prison-houses of earth. I once was chained to their darkness, but thou, O Love, brought crimson roses to lay on my pale bosom, and covered the cold damp walls with the golden shields of the sun, and left thy purple garments whereon my weary bleeding feet might rest. And when black-winged night rolled along the sky, thy shield covered the moon, and thy hands threw back the prison-roof, and unfolded the gates of the clouds, and I slept in the white arms of the stars. And thou, O Beam of Life! didst thou not forget the lonely prisoner of Chillon in his gloomy vault? thy blessed ray of Heaven-light stole in and made glad his dreams. Thou hast lifted the deep-gathered mist from the dungeons of Spielberg; Ugolino heard thy voice in his hopeless cell: Thy blessed hand soothed Damiens on his bed of steel; It is thy powerful hand that lights up to Heaven the inspired life of Garibaldi. And it is thy undying power that will clothe Italy in the folds of thy wings, and rend the helmet from the dark brow of old Austria, and bury her in the eternal tomb of darkness. Thou didst not forget children of earth, who roll the waves of their souls to our ship of the sky. But men are leagued against us—strong mailed men of earth, Around the dwellers in the clouds they rise in wrath. No words come forth, they seize their blood-stained daggers. Each takes his hill by night, at intervals they darkly stand counting the power and host of Heaven.
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Their black unmuzzled hounds howl their impatience as we come on watch in our glittering armor. The hills no longer smile up to greet us, they are covered with these tribes of earth leading their war-dogs, and leaving their footprints of blood. Unequal bursts the hum of voices, and the clang of arms between the roaring wind. And they dare to blaspheme the very stars, and even God on His high throne in the Heaven of Heavens, by pleading for Love. Love sacrifices all things to bless the thing it loves, not destroy. Go back to your scorching homes; Go back to your frozen souls; Go back to your seas of blood; Go back to your chains, your loathsome charnel houses; Give us the green bosom of the hills to rest upon; Broad over them rose the moon. O Love, Great Ruler, call upon thy children to buckle on the armor of war, for behold the enemy blackens all earth in waiting for us. See the glittering of their unsheathed swords. They bear blood-stained banners of death and destruction. And, lo, their Leader comes forth on the Pale Horse. His sword is a green meteor half-extinguished. His face is without form, and dark withal, dark as the tales of other times, before the light of song arose. Mothers, clasp your new-born children close to your white bosoms! Daughters of the stars, sleep no more, the enemy approacheth! Look to your white shields! Bind up your golden tresses! See the blood upon the pale breasts of your sisters. Where are your banners? O sluggards, awake to the call of the Mighty Ruler! Hear ye not the clash of arms? Arise around me, children of the Land Unknown. Up, up, grasp your helmet and your spear! Let each one look upon her shield as the ruler of War. Come forth in your purple robes, sound your silver-tongue trumpets; Rush upon the enemy with your thousands and thousands of burnished spears! Let your voices ring through the Universe, “Liberty, liberty for the stars.” Thunder it on the ears of the guilty and the doomed! Sound it with the crash of Heaven’s wrath to the hearts of the
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Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
branded—God-cursed things who have stood up and scorned their Maker with laughing curses, as they dashed the crown from her brow, and hurled her into Hell. Pray ye not for them, hills! Heed ye not, O winds, their penitence is feigned! Let your voices, O floods, be hushed! stars, close your mighty flanks, and battle on them! Chain them down close to the fire! They were merciless, bind their blood-stained hands. They are fiends, and if ye loose them they will tear children from their mothers, wives from their husbands, sisters from their brothers, daughters from their fathers. And these fiends, these children of eternal damnation, these men will tear souls from bodies, and then smear their hands with blood, and laugh as they sprinkle it in the dead up-turned faces of their victims. It is Atha thy leader that calls to you. Beat them down, beat them down. I know these war-dogs. They strangled my warrior, Eros! Warrior of my soul; Warrior of the strong race of Eagles! His crimson life crushed out on the white sails of a ship. Battle them down to dust. Battle them back into their own slimy souls; Battle them, ye starry armies of Heaven, down into the silent sea of their own blood; Battle on, the wind is with ye; Battle on, the sun is with ye; Battle on, the waves are with ye; The Angels are with ye; God is with us!
SALE OF SOULS I
Oh, I am wild—wild! Angels of the weary-hearted, come to thy child. Spread your white wings over me! Tenderly, tenderly,
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Lovingly, lovingly, Plead for me, plead for me! II
Souls for sale! souls for sale! Souls for gold! who’ll buy? In the pent-up city, through the wild rush and beat of human hearts, I hear this unceasing, haunting cry: Souls for sale! souls for sale! Through mist and gloom, Through hate and love, Through peace and strife, Through wrong and right, Through life and death, The hoarse voice of the world echoes up the cold gray sullen river of life. On, on, on! No silence until it shall have reached the solemn sea of God’s for ever; No rest, no sleep; Waking through the thick gloom of midnight, to hear the damning cry as it mingles and clashes with the rough clang of gold. Poor Heart, poor Heart, Alas! I know thy fears.
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III
The hollow echoes that the iron-shod feet of the years throw back on the sea of change still vibrate through the grave-yard of prayers and tears;— Prayers that fell unanswered, Tears that followed hopelessly. But pale Memory comes back through woe and shame and strife, bearing on her dark wings their buried voices; Like frail helpless barks, they wail through the black sea of the crowded city, Mournfully, mournfully. IV
Poor Heart, what do the waves say to thee? The sunshine laughed on the hill sides. The link of years that wore a golden look bound me to woman-life by the sweet love of my Eros, and the voice of one who made music to call me mother.
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Weak Heart, weak Heart! Oh, now I reel madly on through clouds and storms and night. The hills have grown dark, They lack the grace of my golden-haired child, to climb their steep sides, and bear me their smiles in the blue-eyed violets of our spring-time. Sad Heart, what do the hills say to thee? They speak of my Eros, and how happily in the dim discolored hours we dreamed away the glad light, and watched the gray robes of night as she came through the valley, and ascended on her way to the clouds. Kisses of joy, and kisses of life, Kisses of heaven, and kisses of earth, Clinging and clasping white hands; Mingling of soft tresses; Murmurings of love, and murmurings of life, With the warm blood leaping up in joy to answer its music; The broad shelter of arms wherein dwelt peace and content, so sweet to love. All, all were mine. Loving Heart, loving Heart, Hush the wailing and sobbing voice of the past; Sleep in thy rivers of the soul, Poor Heart.
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V
Souls for sale! The wild cry awoke the god of ambition, that slumbered in the bosom of Eros; From out the tents he brought forth his shield and spear, to see them smile back at the sun; Clad in armor, he went forth to the cities of the world, where brave men battle for glory, and souls are bartered for gold. Weeping and fearing, haggard and barefoot, I clung to him with my fainting child. Weary miles of land and water lay in their waste around us. We reached the sea of the city. Marble towers lifted their proud heads beyond the scope of vision. Wild music mingled with laughter. The tramp of hoofs on the iron streets, and the cries of the drowning, and the curses of the damned were all heard in that Babel, where the souls of men can be bought for gold. All the air seemed dark with evil wings.
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And all that was unholy threw their shadows everywhere, Shadows on the good, Shadows on the bad, Shadows on the lowly, Shadows on the lost! All tossing upon the tide of rushing, restless destiny; Upon all things written: Souls for sale! Lost Heart, lost Heart!
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VI
A soul mantled in glory, and sold to the world; O horrible sale! O seal of blood! Give back my Eros. His bowstring still sounds on the blast, yet his arrow was broken in the fall. Oh leave me not on the wreck of this dark-bosomed ship while Eros lies pale on the rocks of the world. Driven before the furious gale by the surging ocean’s strife; The strong wind lifting up the sounding sail, and whistling through the ropes and masts; waves lash the many-colored sides of the ship, dash her against the oozy rocks. The strength of old ocean roars. The low booming of the signal gun is heard above the tempest. Oh how many years must roll their slow length along my life, ere the land be in sight! When will the morning dawn? When will the clouds be light? When will the storm be hushed? It is so dark and cold. Angels of the weary-hearted, come to your child! Build your white wings around me. Tenderly, tenderly, Pity me, pity me.
COMMENTARY
I have written these wild soul-poems in the stillness of midnight, and when waking to the world the next day, they were to me the deepest mystery. I could not understand them; did not know but what I ought to laugh
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at them; feared to publish them, and often submitted them privately to literary friends to tell me if they could see a meaning in their wild intensity.
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A. I. M., from Notes on My Life, 1868
For Menken, probably born as Adelaide McCord in Milneburg, Louisiana, or possibly Philomène Croi Théodore or Dolores Adios Los Fiertes in New Orleans, there was an ongoing play of identities: multiple versions of her birth, her parentage, her ethnicity. Her ongoing artwork in that sense was an elaborate self-construction—assertively Jewish in her earlier writings, militantly feminist later on. As such the work developed a rare female violence & eroticism: “wild soul-poems” in the writing but mirrored as well in her stage presence, an actress who famously played the young male lead in an adaptation of Byron’s poem Mazeppa—transgendered & shockingly nude (or appearing to be so in flesh-colored tights) as she made her exit from the stage, helpless & strapped astride a “fiery untamed steed” (thus Mark Twain’s 1863 account of it, while quoting Byron). This was her principal & very real celebrity, which carried her across America (New York first, then San Francisco) & established her soon thereafter in London & Paris. But her formal innovation as a poet, like that of Walt Whitman, whom she knew from the New York café scene of the early 1860s, was in the open/projective/free verse line of her later poetry. In this she need no longer be viewed as an imitator of Walt but as someone drawing like him from the Bible and Ossian (which, in her version, she makes contemporary & erotic) while driven by a very different sense of mind & body. Nor was she a recluse or an isolate—like Dickinson—but a public person moving in the company of still more public figures—Charles Dickens, to whom her first & only book was dedicated, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Sand, & Alexandre Dumas, with the last three of whom she was rumored to have had sexual encounters as well as friendships. Her book of largely free-verse poems, Infelicia, published shortly after her early death, caused astonishment & bewilderment, & only now may appear as what it surely was: the emergence of an unfettered woman artist & poet. In that regard, her best-known poem, “Judith,” covers a theme celebrated today in painters such as Artemesia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, & Elisabetta Sirani but seldom, if ever, among premodern women poets. Menken’s own cry of independence: O horrible sail! O seal of blood! Give back my Eros! Or in a feminist essay called Self Defence: “A woman can be strong and free only as men and nations obtain their freedom, viz.: that of showing herself capable of obtaining and holding it. He who cut the Gordian knot told the whole secret of human success—if the knot will not be unraveled, cut it!”
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Algernon C ha rles Sw in bu rn e
1837–1909
S E C O N D C H O R U S F R O M A T A L A N T A I N C A LY D O N
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Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time, with a gift of tears; Grief, with a glass that ran; Pleasure, with pain for leaven; Summer, with flowers that fell; Remembrance fallen from heaven, And madness risen from hell; Strength without hands to smite; Love that endures for a breath: Night, the shadow of light, And life, the shadow of death. And the high gods took in hand Fire, and the falling of tears, And a measure of sliding sand From under the feet of the years; And froth and drift of the sea; And dust of the labouring earth; And bodies of things to be In the houses of death and of birth; And wrought with weeping and laughter, And fashioned with loathing and love, With life before and after And death beneath and above, For a day and a night and a morrow, That his strength might endure for a span With travail and heavy sorrow, The holy spirit of man. From the winds of the north and the south They gathered as unto strife; They breathed upon his mouth, They filled his body with life; Eyesight and speech they wrought For the veils of the soul therein, A time for labour and thought, A time to serve and to sin;
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They gave him light in his ways, And love, and a space for delight, And beauty and length of days, And night, and sleep in the night. His speech is a burning fire; With his lips he travaileth; In his heart is a blind desire, In his eyes foreknowledge of death; He weaves, and is clothed with derision; Sows, and he shall not reap; His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep.
A BALLAD OF BURDENS
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The burden of fair women. Vain delight, And love self-slain in some sweet shameful way, And sorrowful old age that comes by night As a thief comes that has no heart by day, And change that finds fair cheeks and leaves them grey, And weariness that keeps awake for hire, And grief that says what pleasure used to say; This is the end of every man’s desire. The burden of bought kisses. This is sore, A burden without fruit in childbearing; Between the nightfall and the dawn threescore, Threescore between the dawn and evening. The shuddering in thy lips, the shuddering In thy sad eyelids tremulous like fire, Makes love seem shameful and a wretched thing. This is the end of every man’s desire. The burden of sweet speeches. Nay, kneel down, Cover thy head, and weep; for verily These market-men that buy thy white and brown In the last days shall take no thought for thee. In the last days like earth thy face shall be, Yea, like sea-marsh made thick with brine and mire, Sad with sick leavings of the sterile sea. This is the end of every man’s desire.
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The burden of long living. Thou shalt fear Waking, and sleeping mourn upon thy bed; And say at night “Would God the day were here,” And say at dawn “Would God the day were dead.” With weary days thou shalt be clothed and fed, And wear remorse of heart for thine attire, Pain for thy girdle and sorrow upon thine head; This is the end of every man’s desire. The burden of bright colours. Thou shalt see Gold tarnished, and the grey above the green; And as the thing thou seest thy face shall be, And no more as the thing beforetime seen. And thou shalt say of mercy “It hath been,” And living, watch the old lips and loves expire, And talking, tears shall take thy breath between; This is the end of every man’s desire.
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The burden of sad sayings. In that day Thou shalt tell all thy days and hours, and tell Thy times and ways and words of love, and say How one was dear and one desirable, And sweet was life to hear and sweet to smell, But now with lights reverse the old hours retire And the last hour is shod with fire from hell; This is the end of every man’s desire. The burden of four seasons. Rain in spring, White rain and wind among the tender trees; A summer of green sorrows gathering, Rank autumn in a mist of miseries, With sad face set towards the year, that sees The charred ash drop out of the dropping pyre, And winter wan with many maladies; This is the end of every man’s desire. The burden of dead faces. Out of sight And out of love, beyond the reach of hands, Changed in the changing of the dark and light, They walk and weep about the barren lands Where no seed is nor any garner stands, Where in short breaths the doubtful days respire,
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And time’s turned glass lets through the sighing sands; This is the end of every man’s desire. The burden of much gladness. Life and lust Forsake thee, and the face of thy delight; And underfoot the heavy hour strews dust, And overhead strange weathers burn and bite; And where the red was, lo the bloodless white, And where truth was, the likeness of a liar, And where day was, the likeness of the night; This is the end of every man’s desire. L’envoy
Princes, and ye whom pleasure quickeneth, Heed well this rhyme before your pleasure tire; For life is sweet, but after life is death. This is the end of every man’s desire.
ANACTORIA IJȓȞȠȢ ĮÔ IJÁ ʌİȚșȠÇȚ ȝåȥ ıĮȖȘȞİȪıĮȢ ijȚȜȩIJĮIJĮ; From whom by persuasion have you vainly caught love?
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SAP P HO
My life is bitter with thy love; thine eyes Blind me, thy tresses burn me, thy sharp sighs Divide my flesh and spirit with soft sound, And my blood strengthens, and my veins abound. I pray thee sigh not, speak not, draw not breath; Let life burn down, and dream it is not death. I would the sea had hidden us, the fire (Wilt thou fear that, and fear not my desire?) Severed the bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves, And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves. I feel thy blood against my blood: my pain Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein. Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower, Breast kindle breast, and either burn one hour.
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Why wilt thou follow lesser loves? are thine Too weak to bear these hands and lips of mine? I charge thee for my life’s sake, O too sweet To crush love with thy cruel faultless feet, I charge thee keep thy lips from hers or his, Sweetest, till theirs be sweeter than my kiss: Lest I too lure, a swallow for a dove, Erotion or Erinna to my love. I would my love could kill thee; I am satiated With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead. I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat, And no mouth but some serpent’s found thee sweet. I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, Intense device, and superflux of pain; Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache; Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill, Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill; Relapse and reluctation of the breath, Dumb tunes and shuddering semitones of death. I am weary of all thy words and soft strange ways, Of all love’s fiery nights and all his days, And all the broken kisses salt as brine That shuddering lips make moist with waterish wine, And eyes the bluer for all those hidden hours That pleasure fills with tears and feeds from flowers, Fierce at the heart with fire that half comes through, But all the flowerlike white stained round with blue; The fervent underlid, and that above Lifted with laughter or abashed with love; Thine amorous girdle, full of thee and fair, And leavings of the lilies in thine hair. Yea, all sweet words of thine and all thy ways, And all the fruit of nights and flower of days, And stinging lips wherein the hot sweet brine That Love was born of burns and foams like wine, And eyes insatiable of amorous hours, Fervent as fire and delicate as flowers, Coloured like night at heart, but cloven through Like night with flame, dyed round like night with blue, Clothed with deep eyelids under and above—
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Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love; Thy girdle empty of thee and now not fair, And ruinous lilies in thy languid hair. Ah, take no thought for Love’s sake; shall this be, And she who loves thy lover not love thee? Sweet soul, sweet mouth of all that laughs and lives, Mine is she, very mine; and she forgives. For I beheld in sleep the light that is In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss Of body and soul that mix with eager tears And laughter stinging through the eyes and ears; Saw Love, as burning flame from crown to feet, Imperishable, upon her storied seat; Clear eyelids lifted toward the north and south, A mind of many colours, and a mouth Of many tunes and kisses; and she bowed, With all her subtle face laughing aloud, Bowed down upon me, saying, “Who doth thee wrong, Sappho?” but thou—thy body is the song, Thy mouth the music; thou art more than I, Though my voice die not till the whole world die; Though men that hear it madden; though love weep, Though nature change, though shame be charmed to sleep. Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead? Yet the queen laughed from her sweet heart and said: “Even she that flies shall follow for thy sake, And she shall give thee gifts that would not take, Shall kiss that would not kiss thee” (yea, kiss me) “When thou wouldst not”—when I would not kiss thee! Ah, more to me than all men as thou art, Shall not my songs assuage her at the heart? Ah, sweet to me as life seems sweet to death, Why should her wrath fill thee with fearful breath? Nay, sweet, for is she God alone? hath she Made earth and all the centuries of the sea, Taught the sun ways to travel, woven most fine The moonbeams, shed the starbeams forth as wine, Bound with her myrtles, beaten with her rods, The young men and the maidens and the gods? Have we not lips to love with, eyes for tears, And summer and flower of women and of years?
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Stars for the foot of morning, and for noon Sunlight, and exaltation of the moon; Waters that answer waters, fields that wear Lilies, and languor of the Lesbian air? Beyond those flying feet of fluttered doves, Are there not other gods for other loves? Yea, though she scourge thee, sweetest, for my sake, Blossom not thorns and flowers not blood should break. Ah that my lips were tuneless lips, but pressed To the bruised blossom of thy scourged white breast! Ah that my mouth for Muses’ milk were fed On the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds had bled! That with my tongue I felt them, and could taste The faint flakes from thy bosom to the waist! That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet Thy body were abolished and consumed, And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed! Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites, Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites. Ah sweet, and sweet again, and seven times sweet, The paces and the pauses of thy feet! Ah sweeter than all sleep or summer air The fallen fillets fragrant from thine hair! Yea, though their alien kisses do me wrong, Sweeter thy lips than mine with all their song; Thy shoulders whiter than a fleece of white, And flower-sweet fingers, good to bruise or bite As honeycomb of the inmost honey-cells, With almond-shaped and roseleaf-coloured shells And blood like purple blossom at the tips Quivering; and pain made perfect in thy lips For my sake when I hurt thee; O that I Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die, Die of thy pain and my delight, and be Mixed with thy blood and molten into thee! Would I not plague thee dying overmuch? Would I not hurt thee perfectly? not touch Thy pores of sense with torture, and make bright Thine eyes with bloodlike tears and grievous light? Strike pang from pang as note is struck from note, Catch the sob’s middle music in thy throat, 680 A Second Gallery
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Take thy limbs living, and new-mould with these A lyre of many faultless agonies? Feed thee with fever and famine and fine drouth, With perfect pangs convulse thy perfect mouth, Make thy life shudder in thee and burn afresh, And wring thy very spirit through the flesh? Cruel? but love makes all that love him well As wise as heaven and crueller than hell. Me hath love made more bitter toward thee Than death toward man; but were I made as he Who hath made all things to break them one by one, If my feet trod upon the stars and sun And souls of men as his have alway trod, God knows I might be crueller than God. For who shall change with prayers or thanksgivings The mystery of the cruelty of things? Or say what God above all gods and years With offering and blood-sacrifice of tears, With lamentation from strange lands, from graves Where the snake pastures, from scarred mouths of slaves, From prison, and from plunging prows of ships Through flamelike foam of the sea’s closing lips— With thwartings of strange signs, and wind-blown hair Of comets, desolating the dim air, When darkness is made fast with seals and bars, And fierce reluctance of disastrous stars, Eclipse, and sound of shaken hills, and wings Darkening, and blind inexpiable things— With sorrow of labouring moons, and altering light And travail of the planets of the night, And weeping of the weary Pleiads seven, Feeds the mute melancholy lust of heaven? Is not his incense bitterness, his meat Murder? his hidden face and iron feet Hath not man known, and felt them on their way Threaten and trample all things and every day? Hath he not sent us hunger? who hath cursed Spirit and flesh with longing? filled with thirst Their lips who cried unto him? who bade exceed The fervid will, fall short the feeble deed, Bade sink the spirit and the flesh aspire, Pain animate the dust of dead desire, Algernon Charles Swinburne 681
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And life yield up her flower to violent fate? Him would I reach, him smite, him desecrate, Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath, And mix his immortality with death. Why hath he made us? what had all we done That we should live and loathe the sterile sun, And with the moon wax paler as she wanes, And pulse by pulse feel time grow through our veins? Thee too the years shall cover; thou shalt be As the rose born of one same blood with thee, As a song sung, as a word said, and fall Flower-wise, and be not any more at all, Nor any memory of thee anywhere; For never Muse has bound above thine hair The high Pierian flower whose graft outgrows All summer kinship of the mortal rose And colour of deciduous days, nor shed Reflex and flush of heaven about thine head, Nor reddened brows made pale by floral grief With splendid shadow from that lordlier leaf. Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine, Except these kisses of my lips on thine Brand them with immortality; but me— Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea, Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold Cast forth of heaven, with feet of awful gold And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind, Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown, But in the light and laughter, in the moan And music, and in grasp of lip and hand And shudder of water that makes felt on land The immeasurable tremor of all the sea, Memories shall mix and metaphors of me. Like me shall be the shuddering calm of night, When all the winds of the world for pure delight Close lips that quiver and fold up wings that ache; When nightingales are louder for love’s sake, And leaves tremble like lute-strings or like fire; Like me the one star swooning with desire Even at the cold lips of the sleepless moon,
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As I at thine; like me the waste white noon, Burnt through with barren sunlight; and like me The land-stream and the tide-stream in the sea. I am sick with time as these with ebb and flow, And by the yearning in my veins I know The yearning sound of waters; and mine eyes Burn as that beamless fire which fills the skies With troubled stars and travailing things of flame; And in my heart the grief consuming them Labours, and in my veins the thirst of these, And all the summer travail of the trees And all the winter sickness; and the earth, Filled full with deadly works of death and birth, Sore spent with hungry lusts of birth and death, Has pain like mine in her divided breath; Her spring of leaves is barren, and her fruit Ashes; her boughs are burdened, and her root Fibrous and gnarled with poison; underneath Serpents have gnawn it through with tortuous teeth Made sharp upon the bones of all the dead, And wild birds rend her branches overhead. These, woven as raiment for his word and thought, These hath God made, and me as these, and wrought Song, and hath lit it at my lips; and me Earth shall not gather though she feed on thee. As a shed tear shalt thou be shed; but I— Lo, earth may labour, men live long and die, Years change and stars, and the high God devise New things, and old things wane before his eyes Who wields and wrecks them, being more strong than they— But, having made me, me he shall not slay. Nor slay nor satiate, like those herds of his Who laugh and live a little, and their kiss Contents them, and their loves are swift and sweet, And sure death grasps and gains them with slow feet, Love they or hate they, strive or bow their knees— And all these end; he hath his will of these. Yea, but albeit he slay me, hating me— Albeit he hide me in the deep dear sea And cover me with cool wan foam, and ease This soul of mine as any soul of these,
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And give me water and great sweet waves, and make The very sea’s name lordlier for my sake, The whole sea sweeter—albeit I die indeed And hide myself and sleep and no man heed, Of me the high God hath not all his will. Blossom of branches, and on each high hill Clear air and wind, and under in clamorous vales Fierce noises of the fiery nightingales, Buds burning in the sudden spring like fire, The wan washed sand and the waves’ vain desire, Sails seen like blown white flowers at sea, and words That bring tears swiftest, and long notes of birds Violently singing till the whole world sings— I Sappho shall be one with all these things, With all high things for ever; and my face Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place, Cleave to men’s lives, and waste the days thereof With gladness and much sadness and long love. Yea, they shall say, earth’s womb has borne in vain New things, and never this best thing again; Borne days and men, borne fruits and wars and wine, Seasons and songs, but no song more like mine. And they shall know me as ye who have known me here, Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year When I love thee; and they shall praise me, and say “She hath all time as all we have our day, Shall she not live and have her will”—even I? Yea, though thou diest, I say I shall not die. For these shall give me of their souls, shall give Life, and the days and loves wherewith I live, Shall quicken me with loving, fill with breath, Save me and serve me, strive for me with death. Alas, that neither moon nor snow nor dew Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through, Assuage me nor allay me nor appease, Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease; Till time wax faint in all his periods; Till fate undo the bondage of the gods, And lay, to slake and satiate me all through, Lotus and Lethe on my lips like dew, And shed around and over and under me Thick darkness and the insuperable sea. 684 A Second Gallery
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COMMENTARY
. . . to bear witness how, more than any other’s, her [Sappho’s] verses strike and sting the memory in lonely places, or at sea, among all loftier sights and sounds—how they seem akin to fire and air, being themselves “all air and fire”; other element there is none in them.
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A. C. S., defending attacks on his poetry, in particular, “Anactoria”
(1) Of all the nineteenth-century, & particularly Victorian, poets who found Sappho paradigmatic of lyric’s emanation from personal passion & pain, Swinburne may have pushed furthest the implications of her poetry—the transformative intensities of the sensuous, passionate fragment—for visionary poetics. In the then scandalous Sapphic dramatic monologue “Anactoria,” the Romantic poetry of the lyric subject (practiced most obviously by Wordsworth, Coleridge, & Keats) erupts, says Jerome McGann, as “a diffusion of poetic subjectivity into the energy field of the poem.” An eroticism often tinged with cruelty proliferates from the self into the world, showing a deference to Sade, say—“from whom the theology of my poem is derived”—well beyond that of most of his contemporaries. The title of his second major collection, Songs before Sunrise (1871), intimates a poetry before, or beyond, the dawn of individuated identity, a poetry of the earth mother & a Blakean recasting of divinity & creation in & from the “human breast.” Lover for a time of Adah Isaacs Menken (above), & often crippled with alcoholism, his personal extravagances seem of a piece not only with his excessive, proliferating poetry but with his synoptic & highly poetic criticism of nineteenth-century poets, from his favorite & clearly influential English Romantics Blake & Shelley to Baudelaire, the Brontës, Whitman, & his close friend D. G. Rossetti. His essay yoking together Blake & Whitman, for example, establishes the basis for thinking about a twentieth-century poetry of aperture in the visionary service of social transformation. (2) From Swinburne, in William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868), an overthe-top encomium for Blake & Whitman: “A sound as of a sweeping wind; a prospect as over dawning continents at the fiery instant of a sudden sunrise; a splendour now of stars and now of storms; an expanse and exultation of wing across strange spaces of air and above shoreless stretches of sea; a resolute and reflective love of liberty in all times and in all things where it should be; a depth of sympathy and a height of scorn which complete and explain each other, as tender and as bitter as Dante’s; a power, intense and infallible, of pictorial concentration and absorption, most rare when combined with the sense and enjoyment of the widest and the highest things; an exquisite and lyrical excellence of form when the subject is well in keeping with the poet’s tone of spirit; a strength and security of touch in small sweet sketches of colour and outline, which bring before the eyes of their student a clear glimpse of the thing designed—some little inlet of sky lighted by moon or star, some dim reach of windy water or gentle growth of meadow-land or wood; these are qualities common to the work of either.”
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St ép ha n e M allarmé
1842–1898
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“CETTE ADORABLE BAGUE”
This / adorable RING / / flung / like the doges’ / in the sea / and / ’mongst / the / fury / of / romantic / waves / devoured / APPEARS NOW / on the tide / by limpid swell / retrieved EDITORS ’ NOTE . Typographical version of a poem sketched as a tombeau for Aloysius Bertrand in a letter from Mallarmé to Victor Pavie, February 1866, & transmitted in this form by Mitsou Ronat, ca. 1980.
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THE TOMB OF EDGAR POE
As into Himself at last eternity changes him The Poet wakens with a naked sword His century dismayed not to have known That death was triumphant in this strange voice! Like a Hydra’s vile spasm once hearing the angel Give a purer sense to the words of the tribe They proclaimed with loud cries the sortilege drunk From the dishonored depths of some black brew. From hostile soil and cloud, alas, If our concept does not sculpt a bas-relief To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe, Calm block here fallen from a dark disaster, Let this granite at least mark bounds forever To the dark flights of Blasphemy dispersed in the future. Translation from French by Mary Ann Caws
IGITUR This Story is addressed to the Intelligence of the reader which stages things itself.
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S.M.
Old Study
When the breath of his ancestors wants to blow out the candle (thanks to which, perhaps, the characters continue to exist in the book of spells)—he says “Not yet!” At last he himself, when the noises are silenced, will forecast something great (no stars? chance annulled?) from this simple fact that he can bring about shadow by blowing on the light— Then, since he will have spoken according to the absolute—which denies immortality, the absolute will exist outside—moon, above time: and he will raise the curtains opposite. Igitur, a very young child, reads his assignment to his ancestors. Stéphane Mallarmé 687
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4 Pieces
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1. Midnight 2. The Stairs 3. The Dice Throw 4. Sleep on the Ashes, after the Candle is Snuffed Out. More or less what follows: Midnight sounds—the Midnight when the dice must be cast. Igitur descends the stairs of the human mind, goes to the depths of things: as the “absolute” that he is. Tombs—ashes (not feeling, nor mind) dead center. He recites the prediction and makes the gesture. Indifference. Hissings on the stairs. “You are wrong”: no emotion. The infinite emerges from chance, which you have denied. You mathematicians expired—I am projected absolute. I was to finish an Infinite. Simply word and gesture. As for what I am telling you, in order to explain my life. Nothing will remain of you—The infinite at last escapes the family, which has suffered from it—old space—no chance. The family was right to deny it—its life—so that it stayed the absolute. This was to take place in the combinations of the Infinite face to face with the Absolute. Necessary—the extracted Idea. Profitable madness. There one of the acts of the universe was just committed. Nothing else, the breath remained, the end of word and gesture united—blow out the candle of being, by which all has been. Proof. (Think on that) I
Midnight
Certainly a presence of Midnight subsists. The hour did not disappear through a mirror, did not bury itself in curtains, evoking a furnishing by its vacant sonority. I remember that its gold was going to feign in its absence a null jewel of reverie, rich and useless survival, except that upon the marine and stellar complexity of a worked gold the infinite chance of conjunctions was to be read. A revealer of midnight, it had never yet indicated such a conjuncture, for here is the single hour it had 688 A Second Gallery
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created; and so from the Infinite constellations and the sea are separated, remaining reciprocal nothingness on the outside, to permit its essence, united to the hour, to form the absolute present of things. And the presence of Midnight remains in the vision of a room of time where the mysterious furnishing arrests a vague quiver of thought, a luminous break of the return of its waves and their first expansion, while (within a moving limit) the former place of the hour’s fall is immobilized in a narcotic calm of the pure self long dreamed-of; but whose time is resolved in draperies upon which is arrested the quivering now subsided, adding its splendor to those draperies in a forgetfulness, like hair languishing about the host’s face, lit with mystery, with eyes null like the mirror, stripped of any meaning other than presence. It is the pure dream of a Midnight disappeared into itself, whose Brightness recognized and alone remaining in the center of its accomplishment plunged into the shadow, sums up its sterility on the pallor of an open book presented by the table; ordinary page and setting of the Night except that the silence of an antique utterance it proffered still subsists, in which this returned Midnight evokes its shadow, finite and null, with these words: I was the hour which is to make me pure. Long since dead, a dead idea contemplates itself as idea by the brightness of the chimera in which its dream agonized, and recognizes itself in the immemorial vacant gesture with which it invites itself, in order to finish the antagonism of this polar dream, with both a chimerical clarity and the re-closed text, to go toward the miscarried Chaos of the dark and the utterance which absolved Midnight, and surrender to them. Useless, from the accomplished furnishing which will pile up in the darkness like draperies, already made heavy in a permanent form while in a virtual glimmer, produced by its own apparition in the mirroring of obscurity, the pure fire of the clock diamond glitters, the sole survivor and jewel of eternal Night: the hour is formulated in this echo, at the threshold Stéphane Mallarmé 689
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of the panels opened by its act of Night: “Farewell, night that I was, your own sepulchre, but which, the shadow surviving, will metamorphose into Eternity.” II
He Leaves the Room and Is Lost on the Stairs
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(instead of sliding down the banister) The shadow having disappeared into obscurity, Night remained with a dubious perception of a pendulum about to be extinguished and expire there; but by whatever gleams and is about to be extinguished and expire, night sees itself bearing the pendulum; doubtless it was thus the source of the detected beating, whose sounds, complete and ever bare, fell into its past. If on one hand the ambiguity ceased, on the other a motion persists, marked as more pressing by a double blow which no longer attains its notion or not yet, and whose present brushing, such as must have taken place, confusingly fills the ambiguity or its cessation: as if the complete fall, which the single shock of the tomb doors has been, did not stifle the guest irremediably; and in the uncertainty the affirmative cast probably caused, prolonged by the reminiscence of the sepulchral emptiness of the blow in which clarity is confused, comes a vision of the interrupted fall of the panels, as if it were one who, endowed with the suspended motion, turned it back on itself in the resulting dizzy spiral; and the spiral would have escaped indefinitely if some progressive oppression—a gradual weight of what was not realized although it had on the whole been explicated—had not implied the certain escape in an interval, the cessation; when at the moment the blow expired and oppression and escape were mixed, nothing was heard further: except for the beating of absurd wings of some terrified denizen of the night, startled in his heavy slumber by the brightness, and prolonging his indefinite flight. For, the gasping which had grazed this place was not some last doubt of the self, which by chance
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stirred its wings in passing, but the familiar and continual friction of a superior age, of which many a genius was careful to gather all the secular dust into his sepulchre in order to look into a clean self, and so that no suspicion might climb back up the spidery thread—so that the last shadow might look into its proper self and recognize itself in the crowd of its apparitions understood by the nacreous star of their nebulous science held in one hand and by the golden sparkle of the heraldic clasp of their volume held in the other; the volume of their nights; such at present, seeing themselves so that it might see itself, the Shadow, pure and having its last form that it treads on left lying down behind, and then before it in a well, the stretch of layers of shadow, returned to pure night, of all its similar nights, its layers forever separated from them and which they probably did not recognize—which is no other, I know, than the absurd prolongation of the sound of the sepulchral door closing, of which the entrance to this well is reminiscent. This time, no more doubt; certainty is reflected in the evidence: in vain, the memory of a lie whose consequence was itself, did the vision of a place appear again, such for example as the awaited interval was to be, having in fact for lateral walls the double opposition of the panels, and for the front and back, the opening of a void doubt echoed by the prolongation of the noise of the panels, where the plumage took flight, and doubled by the ambiguity explored, the perfect symmetry of the foreseen deductions denied its reality; no possible mistaking, it was the consciousness of self (for which even the absurd itself was to serve as a place)—succeeding. It is present equally in one and the other surface of the shining and secular walls, retaining only in one hand the opal brightness of its knowledge, and in the other, its volume, the volume of its nights, now closed, of the past and the future which the pure shadow, having attained the pinnacle of myself, perfectly dominates, and finished, outside themselves. While before and behind is prolonged the explored lie of the Stéphane Mallarmé 691
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infinite, the darkness of all my apparitions gathered together now that time has ceased and divides them no longer, fallen back into a massive, heavy slumber (at the time of the sound first heard), in the void of which I hear the pulsations of my own heart. I do not like this sound: this perfection of my certainty bothers me; all is too clear, the clarity reveals a desire to escape. Everything gleams too brightly; I should like to return to my anterior uncreated Shadow, and through thought to rid myself of the disguise which necessity has imposed upon me, inhabiting the heart of this race (which I hear beating here) the sole remains of ambiguity. In truth, in this disturbing and beautiful symmetry of my dream’s construction, which of the two openings to take, because the future is represented no longer by one of them? Are they not both forever equivalent, my reflection? Must I still fear chance, that antique enemy which divided me into darkness and created time, both pacified there in the same slumber? and is it not itself annulled by the end of time, which brought about that of darkness?
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(whispering) Indeed, the first spiral to come reflects the preceding one: the same rhythmical sound—and the same brushing; but since everything has ended, nothing can any longer frighten me; my fright which had made the first move in the form of a bird is far distant: has it not been replaced by the apparition of what I had been? and which I like to reflect now, in order to disengage my dream from that costume? Was not this scansion the sound of the progress of my character which now continues it in the spiral, and this brushing the brushing of its duality? Finally, it is not the hairy stomach of some inferior guest within me, whose doubt the light struck and who fled with a flutter, but the velvet bust of an anterior race the light annoyed and who breathes in a stifling air, of a character whose thought has no consciousness of itself, of my last figure, separated from its
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person by a spider’s ruff and who does not know itself; so, now that his duality is forever separated and I do not even hear any longer through him the sound of his progress, I shall forget myself through him, and dissolve myself in me. Its impact becomes unsteady once more as it did before having had the perception of itself: it was the scansion of my measure whose memory came back to me prolonged both by the sound in the temporal corridor of the door to my sepulchre, and by hallucination: and just as it was really closed, even so it must open now for my dream to have been explained itself. The hour of my leaving has sounded, the purity of the mirror will be established, without this character, a vision of myself—but he will take away the light!—the night! Over the vacant furniture, the Dream has agonized in this glass flask, purity which encloses the substance of Nothingness.
He leaves the room
III
Igitur’s Life
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(Schema) Listen, my race, before snuffing out my candle—to the account of my life I have to render you—Here: neurosis, boredom (or Absolute!). I have always lived with my soul fixed upon the clock. Indeed, I have tried for the time it sounded to remain present in the room, its becoming for me both nourishment and life—I made the curtains thicker, and as I was obliged to be seated across from this mirror, in order not to doubt myself, I gathered up preciously the least atoms of time in cloths ceaselessly made thicker.—The clock has often done me a great deal of good.
Empty hours, purely negative
(That before his Idea had been completed? Indeed, Igitur was projected out of time by his race.) Here in sum is Igitur, since his Idea has been completed: —The understood past of his race weigh-
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ing on him in the feeling of the finite, the hour of the clock precipitating this boredom in a heavy and stifling time, and his expectation of future accomplishment, all form pure time, or boredom, rendered unstable by the malady of ideality: this boredom, not able to be, becomes, as in the beginning, its elements once more, all the furniture closed up and full of its secret; and Igitur, as if menaced by the torture of being eternal of which he has a vague foretaste, seeking himself in the mirror become boredom, and seeing himself vague and about to disappear as if he were going to fade away into time, then evoking himself; then at the moment when he has recovered from all this boredom of time, seeing the mirror horribly null, seeing himself there surrounded by a rarefaction, an absence of atmosphere, and the furniture twisting its chimeras in the void, and the curtains invisibly trembling, uneasy; then, he opens the furniture to free its mystery, the unknown, its memory, its silence, human faculties and impressions—and when he believes he has become himself once more, his soul fixedly contemplates the clock, whose hour disappears through the mirror spilling over it or goes to burrow in the curtains, overflowing, not even leaving him to the boredom he implores and dreams of. Impotent even of boredom. He separates from time indefinite, and he is! And this time will not stop, as formerly, with a grey shiver on the massive ebonies whose chimeras closed their lips with a wearying feeling of the finite, and no longer mixing with the saturated and weighted draperies, will not fill a mirror with boredom, where suffocating and stifled, I begged a vague figure disappearing completely, fused with the glass, to remain; until finally, when my hands were removed an instant from my eyes where I had placed them so as not to see it disappear in a frightful sensation of eternity in which the room seemed to expire, it appeared to me like the horror of that eternity. And when I opened my eyes in the depths of this mirror, I saw the character of horror, the phantom of horror absorb little
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by little what remained in the mirror of feeling and pain, nourishing his horror with the supreme shivers of chimeras and the instability of the draperies, and form himself making the mirror rarer until it reached an unbelievable purity—until he was detached, permanent, from the mirror absolutely pure, as if frozen—until at last the furniture, its monsters having succumbed with their convulsive rings, lay dead in a severe and isolated posture, projecting their hard lines in an absence of struggle, and the curtains fell, their unrest quieted, in a position they were to hold forever. IV
The Dice Throw in the Tomb
(Schema)
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Briefly, in an act where chance is in play, chance always accomplishes its own Idea in affirming or negating itself. Confronting its existence, negation and affirmation fail. It contains the Absurd—implies it, but in the latent state, and prevents it from existing: which permits the Infinite to be. The Dice Horn is the unicorn’s Horn—the onehorned. But the Act accomplishes itself. Then his self is manifested in his reassuming Madness, admitting the act, and voluntarily reassuming the Idea as Idea, and the Act (whatever the power that guided it) having denied chance, he concludes from it that the Idea has been necessary. Then he conceives that there is, to be sure, madness in admitting it absolutely: but at the same time he can say that since through this madness, chance was denied, this madness was necessary. For what? (No one knows that he is isolated from humanity.) All there is to it is that his race has been pure: that it took from the Absolute its purity to be so, and to leave of it only an Idea itself ending up in Necessity;
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and that as for the Act, it is perfectly absurd except as movement (personal) returned to the Infinite: but that the Infinite is at last fixed. Igitur simply shakes the dice—a motion, before going to rejoin the ashes, the atoms of his ancestors: the movement, which is in him, is absolved. It is understood what its ambiguity means. He closes the book—snuffs out the candle—with his breath which contained chance: and, folding his arms, lies down on the ashes of his ancestors. Folding his arms—the Absolute has disappeared, in the purity of his race (for that is necessary, because the sound ceases). Immemorial race, whose burdensome time has fallen, excessive, into the past, and which race, full of chance, has lived, then, only on its future.—This chance denied with the aid of an anachronism, a character as a supreme incarnation of this race—who feels in himself, thanks to the absurd, the existence of the Absolute, has only forgotten human speech within the book of spells, and the thought in a luminary one announcing this negation of chance, the other clarifying the dream where it has arrived. The character who, believing in the existence of the sole Absolute, imagines he is everywhere in a dream (he acts from the Absolute point of view), finds the act useless, for there is and is not chance—he reduces chance to the Infinite—which, he says, must exist somewhere.
THEATER STAGE, ANCIENT IGITUR A throw of the dice which accomplishes a prediction, on which depended the life of a race. “Don’t hiss,” to the winds, to the shadows—If I plan, as an actor, to play the trick—the 12—no chance in any sense. He proffers the prediction, about which he secretly does not care. There has been madness.
V
He Lies Down in the Tomb
Upon the ashes of stars, the undivided ones of the family, lay the poor character, after having drunk the drop of nothingness lacking to the sea. (The empty flask, madness, all that remains of the castle?) Nothingness having departed, there remains the castle of purity.
or the dice—chance absorbed
Translation from French by Mary Ann Caws
696 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
from A T O M B F O R A N A T O L
to find only absence — — in presence of little clothes — etc — mother.
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little sailor — sailor suit what! — for enormous crossing a wave will carry you ascetic sea, (+ +)
(1 fiction of absence maintained by mother — apartment (no) “I do not know what they have done — (I have not) in the trouble and tears of that time — I only —— but she followed to the cemetery.
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(2 know that he is no longer here and if, he is there — absent — from which mother herself has become phantom — spiritualized by habit of living with a vision
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(3 while he father — who was building the tomb — will wall up . . . . . knows — and won’t his spirit go looking for the traces of and transdestruction — mute into pure spirit?
(4 with the result that purity emerges from corruption!
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no — I will not give up nothingness —— father — — — I feel nothingness invade me
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and if at least — spirit — I have not given adequate blood — — that my thought make for him a purer more beautiful life. ——— — and like his fear of me — who thinks — beside him —
What, the thing I am saying is true — it is not only music —— etc.
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bouquets we feel obliged to throw into this earth that opens in front of the child — the most beautiful bouquets — the (flowers) most beautiful products, of this earth — sacrificed — to veil
(2 (or pay for him what he owes — ——
(1
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II
struggle of the two father and son the one to preserve son in thought — ideal — the other to live, rising up again etc — — interruptions deficiency) —
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(2 thus and mother cares for him well — cares of mother interrupting thought —and child between father who thinks him dead, and mother life — —— “cares for him well etc. —from which
(3
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It is only in III that burst of this (shattering) caused by cry of I — (and) little by little fits together — all finished
child (m destiny earth calls it consoling —
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The grave father he belongs to me not having given being to let it be lost — trouble and mother — I do not want him to stop (idea there!)
appeared! — shadow my mother mother and son up to +
(1
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from the wretched day and which I do not doubt
(2 if it is not punishment the children of other classes ——— so that furious against + vile society that had to crush him perhaps
702 A Second Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
by recovering from an illness for me to recapture that p. haps Translation from French by Paul Auster
COMMENTARY
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. . . When I say: “a flower!” then from that forgetfulness to which my voice consigns all floral form, something different from the usual calyces arises, something all music, essence, and softness: the flower which is absent from all bouquets. (S. M., Crise de vers, trans. Bradford Cook) And again: Out of a number of words, poetry fashions a single new word which is total in itself and foreign to the language—a kind of incantation. (1) A dominant figure of the second half of the nineteenth century, Mallarmé crystallized the Symbolists’ absorption with the powers of suggestion to coax out a reality almost beyond the limits of human understanding. His was in that sense one of the culminations of changes in poetry (a crisis, even “an exquisite crisis,” in his view of it) that the earlier Romantics had set in motion. Along with that came a stress on musicality, the language & form of the poem, leading inevitably to Un coup de dés (Poems for the Millennium, volume one) at the cusp & turning of the century. The greatest of the Symbolist poets, his “symbolism” was imbedded within the company of those whom Verlaine had named poétes maudits (below, page 759) & with whom Mallarmé shared a sense of mystery & a fruitful tension with a poetry of names & things developing alongside it & into the century ahead. Of his poetics at one extreme he wrote: “I believe there must only be allusion. The contemplation of objects, the images that soar from the reveries they have induced, constitute the song. . . . To name an object is to suppress three quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which derives from the pleasure of step-by-step discovery; to suggest, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of . . . mystery that constitutes the symbol. . . . There must always be enigma in poetry.” Writes our contemporary Jack Foley of Mallarmé & where this takes him: “For Mallarmé, when God says ‘flower,’ a real flower appears (‘Let there be light, and there was light!’). When the poet says ‘flower,’ however, there appears precisely ‘l’absente de tous bouquets.’ [See above.] For Mallarmé, God’s realm is the realm of Truth and Being; the poet’s realm is the realm of Non Being, Absence, Fiction—the realm, in effect, of Satan. The theme of writing as hellish, infernal, subterranean—and of the poet as a kind of unGod—haunts French poetry.” (2) Along with Rimbaud, among the poétes maudits, Mallarmé explores the proposal that “inventions of the unknown demand new forms,” mov-
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ing it still further into the breakthroughs of Un coup de dés & his projected work Le Livre, the latter both a book & an elaborate performance piece. His reckoning of poetry’s outmost limits is—in both of these—extraordinary, as it is also in the jottings for a tombeau (memorial poem) for his dead eight-year-old son, Anatole. Writes Maurice Blanchot of where this takes him: “At times his work solidifies into an immobile white virtuality, at times—and this is what matters most—it becomes animated by an extreme temporal discontinuity, given over to changes in time and to accelerations and decelerations, to fragmentary stoppages, the sign of a wholly new essence of mobility in which another [sense of] time seems to be announcing itself, as foreign to eternal permanence as to quotidian duration: [in Mallarmé’s words] ‘here moving ahead, there remembering, in the future, in the past, under a false appearance of the present.’ ” Or Robert Greer Cohn of Igitur (1869)—its throw of the dice & aleatory consciousness to be echoed in Mallarmé’s terminal work, Un coup de dés: “Then the hero will throw the dice of universal chance, accepting its absurdity as he does death-anguish, in order to find true Meaning and Life.”
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(3) “For I bring news, the most amazing and unprecedented news. We have been experimenting with verse” (Mallarmé, 1894, lecturing at Oxford).
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B O O K
O F
E X T E N S I O N S
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A
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
PROLOGUE
Poetry fetter’d fetters the Human Race.
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W. B LAK E
It was Blake’s prophecy of an unfettering—& the practice of poetry that accompanied it—that presaged what would issue finally in the revolutionsof-the-word at the heart of any/every future avant-garde. As such, the late eighteenth-century urge to “unfetter” citizens from social constraints & repressions had its counterpart in an “unfettered” version of poetry itself. The political association to the liberation or unfettering of prisoners from their chains—in, for example, the Bastille—was revisited in the visionary liberations described in some poems of the period & in the unfettering of traditional form & conventional syntax. Often conflated with “the fancy” & set in conflict with the unifying & “shaping spirit of the imagination” (S.T.C.), some key principles underscored these tactics, namely, that poetry’s language, grammar, & syntax could actively participate in the protest & revisioning of the world. In which case, poetry as fancy could also question the consoling function often ascribed to it—that is, the notion of its congruity with a stable self &, by extension, the notion of the poem itself as stable, a “monument” that withstands the buffets of the world “cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,” as Wordsworth had it. There is, in fact, a long countertradition of poetry that broke open in the late eighteenth century, exploded in the twentieth, & is currently very much alive—a tradition of self-aware, difficult, experimental work that locates poetry’s “political” role (as a means to a reawakening of human possibility) in the very elements of poetry itself. These elements, in the context of experimental poetry, are not invisible conduits of poetic “content” but reveal the constraints on the mind, while indicating the means by which to throw off those constraints. It is this notion of the experimental, under whatever name, that introduces as well the ludic spirit of play alongside a serious & often expressionistic poetics. Its markers, stretching from the late eighteenth century into the
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twentieth & beyond, are hybridization—crossover—mischung— improvisation & performance—dreamwork as poem—new forms of rhyme & lineation—prose as an instrument for poetry—first glimmerings of open verse, free verse, & words in freedom. With this as subtext, the Romantic poet adheres, characteristically, to a still traditional, if increasingly shaky, image of the poem, with its formal structure or poetic “line”; that is, most Romantic poetry is written in predictable forms—stanzas, couplets, rhymes, blank verse, sonnets—yet signs of turbulence reside within these structures, such as parataxis, excessively long blank-verse paragraphs, halfrhymes, seemingly endless tetrameter couplets, & unconventional grammar & syntax. While such devices are present throughout these pages, A Book of Extensions brings together some of the still more experimental “extremes,” accelerating toward their fuller recognition in the century to come. Embedded within Romanticism & Postromanticism, they represent an alternative road toward that visionary & liberatory goal that has defined poetry & related works from then to now. N.B. Other examples of experimental “extensions” can be found scattered throughout the present volume.
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William Blake
1757–1827
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LAOCOÖN
William Blake 709 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Two Sha ke r Vision D rawing s
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Sacred roll. 1840–1843. Anonymous. Ink & watercolor on paper.
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Spirit message. 1843. Anonymous.
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EDITORS ’ NOTE .
The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—called “Shakers”— originated in England in the mid-eighteenth century and soon centered around the person of Ann Lee (Mother Ann, or Mother Wisdom, or simply Mother), who became “the reincarnation of the Christ Spirit . . . Ann the Word . . . Bride of the Lamb.” Between 1837 and 1850 (“known as the Era of Manifestations”), the Shakers composed (or were the recipients of ) “hundreds of . . . visionary drawings . . . really [spiritual] messages in pictorial form,” writes Edward Deming Andrews (The Gift to Be Simple, 1940).
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Edwa rd L ear
1812–1888
from L E T T E R S T O E V E LY N B A R I N G
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[my dear Baring how beautifully you write! every letter is better than t’other & I wish eye could right as well! Fancy Strahan having gone to Syria! which I want to go to too only I ain’t ready yet, so couldn’t have gone in the Feeby even if I had been ax’d. Do not bother about trying to cawl on me, for you must have lots to do,—but when Strahan comes back, come & dine some evening. When did Jacob sleep five in a bed? When he slep with his 4=fathers. Say to his Excellency that I will most gladly come on Sunday if so be as I have no relapps. Believe me, Yours sincerely]
[Feb. 19. 1864 Dear Baring Please give the encloged noat to Sir Henry— (which I had just written:—& say that I shall have great pleasure in coming on Sunday. I have sent your 2 vols of Hood to Wade Brown. Many thanks for lending them to me—which they have delighted me eggstreamly Yours sincerely]
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L ew is C ar roll
1832–1898
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CONCRETE POEM: A MOUSE
Lewis Carroll 713 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
G ui lla u me A pollin aire
1880–1918
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from C A L L I G R A M S : T H E B L E E D I N G - H E A R T D O V E AND THE FOUNTAIN
Translation from French by Anne Hyde Greet
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L ew is C ar roll
1832–1898
JABBERWOCKY
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!
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One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. “And, hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
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T he S hakers S O U N D P O E M [ G LO S S O L A L I A ]
Ah pe-an t-as ke t-an te loo O ne vas ke than sa-na was-ke lon ah ve shan too Te wan-se ar ke ta-ne voo te lan se o-ne voo Te on-e-wan tase va ne woo te wan-se o-ne van Me-le wan se oo ar ke-le van te shom-ber on vas sa la too lar var sa re voo an don der on v-tar loo-cum an la voo O be me-sum ton ton ton tol a wac—er tol-a wac-er ton ton te s-er pane love ten poo By “Jack.” Holy Ground. Oct. 6th 1847 EDITORS ’ NOTE . Transmitted “in tongues” by spiritual messengers, the first Shaker songs were “wordless tunes” that preceded, like other examples given here, the experimental sound-poems of the following century. Among the “messengers” so cited were not only the founding figure of Mother Ann & other dead Shaker elders, but Indians, Blacks, Persians, Jews, Chinese, & William Penn, George Washington, Napoleon, Mahomet, Leo X, Saint Patrick, & Alexander Pope.
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A u g u s t St rin d b erg
1849–1912
from H O LY T R I N I T Y N I G H T : T H E N I G H T I N G A L E ’ S S O N G
Ih, ih, ih, ih, ih! Was it we? It was we! We it was! Quoy, oy, oy, oy, oy, oy! Look, my lovely, lull-lull-lull-lull—Was it we? Ihih! Look! my lovely! It swerves, arrrrrrrrrr-itz! Lull-lull-lull-lull-lull-lull! Was it they? See! See you, see you, see you, see you? Nanny!—Nanny! Shut, shut, shut, shut—see you, see you? Nipple; nipp, ipp, ipp, ipp, ipp, ipp! White, white, white, white, white, white, see my wee one!
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Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut, tut, sat’n, sat’n, sat’n, see! Weep, weep, weep, weep, weep, weep, eeh! So, so, so, no, no, no, say, say, say, say now! Ji, jih, goh, goh, goh, goh, god-help, nanny aitsch! Translation from Swedish by Lotta M. Löfgren
L af cad io Hea rn
1850–1904
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CHARCOAL MAN
Char–coal, Lady! Char-coal! Chah-ah-coal, Lady! Black—coalee—coalee! Coaly—coaly; coaly—coaly—coal—coal—coal. Coaly—coaly! Coal—eee! Nice! Chah—coal! Twenty-five! Whew! O Charco-oh-oh-oh-h-oh-lee! Oh—lee—eee! (You get some coal in your mout’, young fellow, if you don’t keep it shut!) Pretty coalee—oh—lee! Charcoal! Cha—ah—ahr—coal! Charbon! Du charbon, Madame! Bon charbon? Point! Ai-ai! Tonnèrre de dieu! Cha-r-r-r-r-r-r-rbon! A-a-a-a-a-a-a-aw! Vingt-cinq! Nice coalee! Coalee! Coaly-coal-coal! Pretty coaly! Charbon de Paris! De Paris, Madame; de Paris! EDITORS ’ NOTE .
New Orleans street-cries gathered by Hearn at the end of the nineteenth century and collaged by him into a sound-poem that creates an immediate aural image.
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James C laren ce M an gan
1803–1849
A R A I LW A Y O F R H Y M E Order is Heaven’s first law.
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P OP E
Now will I try a most HerculeAchievement, which I guess I shan’t adon till I finish it, for if I Succeed, I’ll count myself as great as O’Connell, or that reverend wag, DSwift; and there never yet was such a tastical rhymer since the world beFrom Cork to Rome, and thence to IspaIn Persian, Irish, or ItalAs Jonathan, which name in Dutch is My fame will far exceed that of Martony, of Homer, Cæsar, Corious, or, in short, of any mortal Even Mendez Pinto, also called FerWhose book I’ll read on getting a lThereof, because I’m told it will exd my mind, and stuff and store it with a tity of facts true as the AlcoBut first I calculate I’ll munch a dwich, which I’ll nobly wash down with a kard of stout ale, then dress like Don JAnd stroll to Cohen’s neat Cigar Di(Though smoking overmuch has made me And there I’ll hear folks talk much more like tippe than Socrates or John BunOf whom, however, I’m no parti-
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An BanCan Dan E-an FanGan, Han, Ian, Jan. K AnLanMan, Nan, O-an PanQuanRan. SanTanU-an, Van, Wan,) XanYan, Zan.
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L eig h Hu n t
1784–1859
D E F O R M AT I ON S 1
O cielo Dal gielo Tradire Languire
Morire Soffrire Non puo.
2
A Love Song
Grove, Night, Delight.
Heart, Prove, Love.
Kiss, Bliss, Rest.
EDITORS ’ NOTE .
Hunt’s Proposition: that many love poems could be represented by their obvious end-rhymes only.
A rt hu r R imb a u d
1854–1891
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VOW E LS & C O LO R S
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue, vowels, Some day I’ll tell you where your genesis lies; A—black velvet swarms of flies Buzzing above the stench of voided bowels, A gulf of shadow; E—where the iceberg rushes White mists, tents, kings, shady strips; I—purple, spilt blood, laughter of sweet lips In anger—or the penitence of lushes; U—cycle of time, rhythm of seas, Peace of the paws of animals and wrinkles On scholar’s brows, strident trinkles; O—the supreme trumpet note, peace Of the spheres of the angels. O equals X-ray of her eyes; it equals sex. EDITORS’ NOTE.
See its appearance also in Rimbaud’s “Second Delirium: Alchemy of the Word,” below.
Translation from French by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Johan n Wolf gan g von G oet h e
1749–1832
WRITING ASLANT from Conversations with Eckermann
“At times,” Goethe continued, “the experience I had with my poems was quite different. I had no impression of them in advance and no presentiment. They came over me suddenly and demanded to be made then and there, and I felt compelled to write them down on the spot, in an instinctive and dreamlike fashion. When I was in such a somnambulistic state, it often happened that the paper before me lay all aslant and that I noticed this only when everything was written, or when I found no room to go on writing. I used to have several sheets of paper written like that on the diagonal, but they gradually got lost, and I am sorry that I can no longer show examples of such poetic immersion.”
L ew is C ar roll
1832–1898
T H R E E S Y L LO G I S M S
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(a) All babies are illogical. (b) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile. (c) Illogical persons are despised. (a) None of the unnoticed things, met with at sea, are mermaids. (b) Things entered in the log, as met with at sea, are sure to be worth remembering. (c) I have never met with anything worth remembering, when on a voyage. (d) Things met with at sea, that are noticed, are sure to be recorded in the log. (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)
No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste. No modern poetry is free from affectation. All your poems are on the subject of soap-bubbles. No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste. No ancient poem is on the subject of soap-bubbles.
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Walt Whit ma n
1819–1892
WORDS
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[In An American Primer (circa 1860), Whitman announced a range of words for poetry that would move its vocabulary out of previously restrictive bounds. And if we now read his list as a poem . . . ?]
Words of the Laws of the Earth, Words of the Stars, and about them, Words of the Sun and Moon, Words of Geology, History, Geography, Words of Ancient Races, Words of the Medieval Races, Words of the progress of Religion, Law, Art, Government, Words of the surface of the Earth, grass, rocks, trees, flowers, grains and the like, Words of like climates, Words of the Air and Heavens, Words of the Birds of the air, and of insects, Words of Animals, Words of Men and Women—the hundreds of different nations, tribes, colors, and other distinctions, Words of the Sea, Words of Modern Leading Ideas, Words of Modern Inventions, Discoveries, engrossing Themes, Pursuits, Words of These States—the Year I, Washington, the Primal Compact, the Second Compact (namely the Constitution)—trades, farms, wild lands, iron, steam, slavery, elections, California, and so forth, Words of the Body, Senses, Limbs, Surface, Interior, Words of dishes to eat, or of naturally produced things to eat, Words of clothes, Words of implements, Words of furniture, Words of all kinds of Building and Constructing, Words of Human Physiology, Words of Human Phrenology, Words of Music, Words of Feebleness, Nausea, Sickness, Ennui, Repugnance, and the like. EDITORS ’ NOTE .
And again: All words are spiritual. Nothing is more spiritual than words.
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M ary S helley
1797-1851
I M P R OV I S AT I ON : CON TA D I N I A N D I M P R OV I S ATO R I
[At harvest time] the contadini [peasants] cheer themselves with songs, either singly, in harmony, or in response. . . . A man on one tree, will challenge another perched afar off, calling out the name of a flower; the challenged responds with an extempore couplet, sometimes founded on the metaphoric meaning attached, of the flower’s name, sometimes given at random, and then returns the challenge by naming another flower, which is replied to in the same manner. We have unluckily preserved but two of these impromptus, and they are both on the same flower:— Fior di cent’ erbe! Non bimbi voglion bene a loro mamma, Quanto io alla speranza mia. Fior di cent’ erbe! Se un sospiro avesse la parola, Quanto bell’ ambasciator sarebbe.
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[“Flower from a hundred seeds! / Children do not love their mother, / As much as I love my hope.” “Flower from a hundred seeds! / If a sigh would have a voice, / What a wonderful messenger it would be.”] It is this exhaustless fertility that makes Italy a paradise, and affords never-ending variety of objects to the residents. . . . We cannot give a better idea of what we mean than by instancing their improvisatori, who pour out, as a cataract does water, poetic imagery and language; but except that the genial moisture somewhat fertilizes the near bordering banks, it reaches the ocean of oblivion, leaving no trace behind. [Tommaso] Sgricci may be given as an example. He is well read, and profoundly versed in the works of the Greek metaphysicians and historians, as well as their poets. The mode of his improvisation is wonderful, and different from the usual style of these exhibitions. . . . It is the custom for those who choose, to leave at the door of the theatre a slip of paper, on which is written a subject for a tragic drama. We were present at three of these performances. . . . His words were so living, that you saw them, not decked out with stage trickery, but in the true livery of death, livid, stiff, and cold. The last [of these improvisations] we heard was the Death of Hector. In it you were transported within the walls of Troy, and heard mad Cassandra denouncing its fall. Speaking afterwards to the poet, he said that he did not remember much about any other part; but he had a
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vivid recollection that when he poured forth the ravings of the prophetess, he no longer saw the theatre; Troy was around him; Troy burning; Priam stabbed at his altar, and the women dragged lamenting away in chains. From all this magical creation of talent, what resulted? The poet himself forgets all his former imaginations, and is hurried on to create fresh imagery, while the effects of his former inspirations are borne away with the breath that uttered them, never again to be recalled— Virgil, Aeneid III.451: Nec revocare situs, aut jungere carmina curat. [Nor does (the Sybil) care to recover (the leaves’) places or to unite the verses.]
Hen ry D avid T horeau
1817–1862
A TELEGRAPH HARP [1851] Sept. 3
As I went under the new telegraph wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead. It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life, a supernal life, which came down to us, and vibrated in the lattice-work of this life of ours.
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Sept. 22
Yesterday and today the stronger winds of autumn have begun to blow, and the telegraph harp has sounded loudly. I heard it especially in the Deep Cut this afternoon, the tone varying with the tension of different parts of the wire. The sound proceeds from near the posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid. I put my ear to one of the posts, and it seemed to me as if every pore of the wood was filled with music, labored with the strain—as if every fibre was affected and being seasoned or timed, rearranged according to a new and more harmonious law. Every swell and change or inflection of tone pervaded and seemed to proceed from the wood, the divine tree or wood, as if its very substance was transmuted. What a recipe for preserving wood, perchance—to keep it from rotting—to fill its pores with music! How this wild tree from the forest, stripped of its bark and set up here, rejoices to transmit its music! When no music proceeds from the wire, on applying my ear, I hear the
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drum within the entrails of the wood—the oracular tree acquiring, accumulating, the prophetic fury. The resounding wood! how much the ancients would have made of it! To have a harp on so great a scale, girdling the very earth, and played on by the winds of every latitude and longitude, and that harp were, as it were, the manifest blessing of heaven on a work of man’s! Shall we not add a tenth Muse to the immortal Nine? And that the invention thus divinely honored and distinguished—on which the Muse has condescended to smile—is this magic medium of communication for mankind! Sept. 23
The telegraph harp sounds strongly today, in the midst of the rain. I put my ear to the trees and I hear it working terribly within, and anon it swells into a clear tone, which seems to concentrate in the core of the tree, for all the sound seems to proceed from the wood. It is as if you had entered some world-famous cathedral, resounding to some vast organ. The fibres of all things have their tension, and are strained like the strings of a lyre. I feel the very ground tremble under my feet as I stand near the post. This wire vibrates with great power, as if it would strain and rend the wood. What an awful and fateful music it must be to the worms in the wood. No better vermifuge. No danger that worms will attack this wood; such vibrating music would thrill them to death.
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EDITORS ’ NOTE . Note too David Antin’s suggestion that Thoreau’s two years at Walden Pond—his experiment at “living deliberately . . . fronting only the essential facts of life”—can now be read, much like the foregoing, as an example of performance art avant la lettre.
St ép ha n e M allarmé
1842–1898
from T H È M E S A N G L A I S : I N D E F I N I T E A R T I C L E S
Article Indéfini
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
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A nod for a wise man and a rod for a fool. A man must plough with such an ox as he has. A mill, a clock and a woman always want mending. A whip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Choose a wife, rather by your ear than by your eye. A growing youth has a wolf in his belly.
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Article Indéfini
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Green woods make a hot fire. Poverty on an old man’s back is a heavy burthen. He is like a hog, never good when living. You have a handsome head of hair; pray give me a tester. A handsome hostess is bad for the purse. An old man in a house is a good sign. As fond of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wisdom prefers an unjust peace to a just war. .......................... As busy as a hen with one chick.
Article Indéfini
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It is hard for an empty bag to set upright. Who can shave an egg? Insolence puts an end to friendship. One may understand like an angel, and yet be a devil. To cut down an oak and set up a strawberry. To have an oar in every man’s boat. Undone, as a man would undo an oyster. You ask an elm tree for pears. You cannot hide an eel in a sack. You shall ride an inch behind the tail.
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Article Indéfini
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
You are an honest man, and I am your uncle: and that is two lies. Land never was lost for want of an heir. It chances in an hour, that does not come in seven years. He that lives a knave will hardly die an honest man. An hour may destroy what an age was building. An honest and diligent servant is an humble friend. An answer is a word. An apple, an egg, and a nut, you may eat after a slut. An idle brain is the devil’s workshop. Everything has an end and a pudding has two.
Article Indéfini
1. A pin a day is a groat for a year. 2. Life without a friend is death without a witness.
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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
You come with five eggs a penny and four of them are rotten. When the devil is a vicar, thou shalt be his clerk. What a dust have I raised! quoth the fly upon the coach. To give a Rowland for an Oliver. As dear as two eggs a penny.
Article Indéfini
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Walls have ears. Roses have thorns. He cries wine, and sells vinegar. For mad words deaf ears. Eat peas with the king and cherries with the beggar. A slight gift, small thanks. Deeds are fruits, words are leaves. Good ale is meat, drink and cloth. Bread of a day, ale of a month and wine of a year. After pear, wine or the priest.
EDITORS ’ NOTE .
From “Mille phrases d’anglais à apprendre par coeur,” composed by Mallarmé in his years as a teacher of English.
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L a u ren ce St ern e
1713–1768
from T H E L I F E A N D O P I N I O N S O F
T R I S T R A M S H A N D Y, G E N T L E M A N The Verbs Auxiliary
MY father took a single turn across the room, then sat down, and finished the chapter. The verbs auxiliary we are concerned in here, continued my father, are, am; was; have; had; do; did; make; made; suffer; shall; should; will; would; can; could; owe; ought; used; or is wont.—And these varied with tenses, present, past, future, and conjugated with the verb see,—or with these questions added to them;—Is it? Was it? Will it be? Would it be? May it be? Might it be? And these again put negatively, Is it not? Was it not? Ought it not?—Or affirmatively,—It is; It was; It ought to be. Or chronologically,—Has it been always? Lately? How long ago?—Or
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hypothetically,—If it was? If it was not? What would follow?—If the French should beat the English? If the Sun go out of the Zodiac? Now, by the right use and application of these, continued my father, in which a child’s memory should be exercised, there is no one idea can enter his brain, how barren soever, but a magazine of conceptions and conclusions may be drawn forth from it.—Didst thou ever see a white bear? cried my father, turning his head round to Trim, who stood at the back of his chair:—No, an’ please your honour, replied the corporal.—But thou couldst discourse about one, Trim, said my father, in case of need?—How is it possible, brother, quoth my uncle Toby, if the corporal never saw one?—’Tis the fact I want, replied my father,—and the possibility of it is as follows. A WHITE BEAR! Very well. Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to see one? Ought I ever to have seen one? Or can I ever see one? Would I had seen a white bear! (for how can I imagine it?) If I should see a white bear, what should I say? If I should never see a white bear, what then?
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If I never have, can, must, or shall see a white bear alive; have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted?—described? Have I never dreamed of one? Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters, ever see a white bear? What would they give? How would they behave? How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? Tame? Terrible? Rough? Smooth? —Is the white bear worth seeing?— —Is there no sin in it?— Is it better than a BLACK ONE?
THREE ALPHABETS Christopher Smart: from Jubilate Agno
For A is the beginning of learning and the door of heaven. For B is a creature busy and bustling.
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For C is a sense quick and penetrating. For D is depth. For E is eternity—such is the power of the English letters taken singly. For F is faith. For G is God—whom I pray to be gracious to Livemore my fellow prisoner. For H is not a letter, but a spirit—Benedicatur Jesus Christus, sic spirem! For I is identity. God be gracious to Henry Hatsell. For K is king. For L is love. God in every language. For M is music and Hebrew ʮ is the direct figure of God’s harp. For N is new. For O is open. For P is power. For Q is quick. For R is right. For S is soul. For T is truth. God be gracious to Jermyn Pratt and to Harriote his Sister. For U is unity, and his right name is Uve to work it double. For W is word. For X is hope—consisting of two check G—God be gracious to Anne Hope. For Y is yea. God be gracious to Bennet and his family! For Z is zeal. For in the education of children it is necessary to watch the words, which they pronounce with difficulty, for such are against them in their consequences. For A is awe, if pronounced full. Stand in awe and sin not. For B pronounced in the animal is bey importing authority. For C pronounced hard is ke importing to shut. For D pronounced full is day. For E is east particularly when formed little e with his eye. For F in its secondary meaning is fair. For G in a secondary sense is good. For H is heave. For I is the organ of vision. For K is keep. For L is light, and ʬ is the line of beauty. For M is meet.
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For N is nay. For O is over. For P is peace. For Q is quarter. For R is rain, or thus reign, or thus rein. For S is save. For T is take. For V is veil. For W is world. For X beginneth not, but connects and continues. For Y is young—the Lord direct me in the better way of going on in the Fifth year of my jeopardy June the 17th N.S. 1760. God be gracious to Dr YOUNG. For Z is zest. God give us all a relish of our duty.
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Victor Hugo: A Hieroglyphic Alphabet
Have you noticed how the Y is a picturesque letter with countless significations? The tree is a Y; two roads branching is a Y; the meeting of two rivers is a Y; the head of a donkey or an ox is a Y; a glass on its base is a Y; a lily on its stem is a Y; a supplicant raising his arms toward the sky is a Y. This observation can be extended to all the constituent elements of the human writing system. Everything in demotic language is poured into it from a hieratic language. The hieroglyph is the necessary root of the written character. Originally, all letters were signs, and all signs were originally letters. Human society, the world, all of mankind exists within the alphabet. Free-masonry, astronomy, philosophy, all the sciences take it as their indiscernible but genuine point of departure; and this is as it should be. The alphabet is a fountainhead. A is a roof, a gable with its crosspiece, the arch, arx; or is it the accolade of two friends who kiss each other on the cheeks and shake hands. D is the back; B is D upon D, a back on a back, the hump; C is a crescent, the moon; E is a solid foundation, the right foot, a console and a sternpost [étrave], the entire architecture of the basement in a single letter; F is the gallows, a pitchfork, Furca; G is a horn; H is the facade of a building with its two towers; I is a war machine hurling a projectile; J is the plowshare and cornucopia; K is the angle of reflection equal to the angle of incidence, one of the keys of geometry; L is the leg and foot; M is a mountain, or a camp with conjoined tents; N is a closed door with its diagonal bar; O is the sun; P is a porter, standing with his load on his back; Q is a rump with a tail; R is repose, the porter
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leaning on his staff; S is a serpent; T is a hammer; U is an urn; V is a vase (which is why we confuse them so often); I have already spoken of Y; X is crossed swords, a fight—who will be the victor? we do not know; hence, the hermetics took X for the sign of fate, the algebraists took it for the sign of the unknown; Z is a lightning flash, it is God. Thus, first there is man’s house and architecture, then man’s body, both its structure and deformities; next justice, music, the church; war, harvest, geometry; mountains; the nomadic life, the life enclosed; astronomy; work and rest; the horse and the serpent; the hammer and the urn, which can be inverted and joined to make the bell; trees, rivers, paths; finally, fate and God: there you have the contents of the alphabet. For some of those mysterious constructors of language who built the foundations of human memory, and whom memory forgets, it could be that the A, E, F, H, I, K, L, M, N, T, V, Y, X, and Z were none other than the various ribs of a temple’s framework. Translation from French by Steve McCaffery
Benjamin Paul Blood: from The Poetical Alphabet
I give here my alphabet as at first printed, with a few merely abstract sketches taken from my quite elaborate essay—little known and long forgotten. The reader shall judge whether or not it deserved its fate.
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Man’s Natural Alphabet
a: vastness, space, plane. a: flatness. b: brawn, bulk, initial force. c: soft, as s; hard, as k. ch, tch: a disgusting consistency. d: (initial) determination, violence. d: (final) solidity, end. e: convergence, intensity, concentration. h: ethereality, fineness of fibre. t: g: (hard) hardness. gl: hardness and polish. gr: hardness and roughness, grit, grain. i: thinness, slimness, fineness. i: inclining directions. k: fineness of light and sound.
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l: polish, chill, liquidity. m: monotony. n: negation, contempt. o: volume, solemnity, nobility. p: volume without fibre, pulp. q: queer, questionable. r: roughness, vibration. s: moisture. sh: wet confusion. u: crudity, absurdity. v, w, y: vehemence, general emphasis. z: haze, dry confusion. au: vaulting, curving upward. ou: roundness, downward. oi: coil—external. ei: coil—internal. ia: downward and away—flourish.
S ad a kichi Ha rt man n
1867–1944
SADAKICHI’S 1895 LIGHT SHOW
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To Students of Color Psychology
Darkness in Space
Poetical license imagines that at Buddha’s entering Nirvana, a color revery takes place in the universe. This scene, a concert of self-radiant colors, is to be represented by pyrotechny brought by chemistry, electricity, and future light-producing sciences to such perfection and beauty that it becomes the new Optic Art, in which Color will rival Sound as a vehicle of pure emotion. SCENE: Bluish-black darkness in space: a minute section of the universe, represented by a stage of at least 800 yards length and 500 yards height and depth. I. Out of darkness the earth, in the ban of the sun and followed by her pallid paramour the moon, ever revolving rolls majestically forward, displaying the phenomena of a lunar and solar eclipse, and growing larger and larger until she has become so large that one can discern: the ultramarine of the oceans, the glaucous of the steppes, the pallid gold of the
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deserts, the crystal fretwork of the poles and glaciers, and here and there the dark flyspecks of the largest cities, which become scintillant as the other colors fade in earthly night. It impresses the beholder like the colossal ideal of human vanity and then rolls backward into darkness. II. Confused tumbling of meteors through space—a symbol of man’s life, propelled from some unknown bourn and rushing to some unknown goal, proving its momentary existence merely by a luminous line, lit and extinguished without change of course. The meteors, varying continually in the rhythm of entrance and exit, mobility, richness, and intensity of fire, shoot forth in every direction, also in every possible angle, towards the audience. III. Incessant rain of luminous stellar dust, in the midst of which a battle of stars, comets, planets with rings and satellites, takes place. They rush towards each other, and recede, encircle each other and create endless variations of figures. Now and then stars crush into each other with a great explosion of fire, united into larger stars and, continuing their course, emit a light produced by a combination of their colors when separate. Suddenly the stars grow larger and larger, the smaller ones disappearing behind the larger, until a few dozens have reached the diameter of 50 yards, who in turn repeat a crescendo of concussions. An orange and a blue star collide and form a still larger one radiating a greenish light of painful hope. A roseate and blue star also collide to a violet glow of melancholy bliss. Thereupon these two collide, and before they grow into one, all the other stars crush into them, causing an incandescent firebrand that radiates the entire space with its irisating light. This fire wall is suddenly cleft in two, and in innumerable hues and palpitations melts away in “diminuendo.” Iv. The lower (¼) part of the stage represents the sea of chaos over which by some caprice the light effects of an earthly day, from a bloodred dawn to a moonlit night, are performed in color gradations of subtlest purity, accompanied by descriptive music. Intermezzo, entitled “Alhambra Arabesques.” In succession the famous patterns in luminous gold, blue, and faded red interlace, overlap, and link before the eyes of the audience, and finally change into an improvisation of new designs of the same character. (For other intermezzos the author suggests “The Shattered Jewel Casket,” “Flowers Growing in Cloudland,” etc.) v. A kaleidoscopical symphony of color effects continually changing in elation and depression, velocity, intensity, variety, and sentiment, continually developing and composing new forms and designs, not merely of mathematical symmetry, but also as suggested from the endless construc-
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tions, textures, phenomena revealed in astronomy, microscopy, mineralogy, geology, paleontology, etc., beginning with a Lhargetto in light bluish-grey, muddy yellowish-green, greenish-blue, and dark greyish-blue; followed by an Andante in color containing blue from green to purple; by an Allegretto of complementary colors with a tendency towards yellow and red; and by a Finale vivace in all colors, ending at last with a flower star, emitting rocket-like fire lines, trills, radiations of various propelling power, at first paraphrasing in the colors of the solar spectrum, and at last improvising an outburst of new colors, like ultra red and violet, for which optical instruments have first to be invented before the human eye can perceive and enjoy them.
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
A
T H I R D
G A L L E R Y
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From Hopkins & Nietzsche to Yosano & Apollinaire
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
G erard M a n ley Hop ki n s
1844–1889
STAR IMAGES: SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER 1864
Stars float from the borders of the main.
. Above The vast of heaven stung with brilliant stars.
. How looks the night? There does not miss a star. The million sorts of unaccounted motes Now quicken, sheathed in the yellow galaxy. There is no parting or bare interstice Where the stint compass of a skylark’s wings Would not put out some tiny golden centre.
.
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Stars waving their indivisible rays. Sky fleeced with the milky way.
. Night’s lantern Pointed with piercèd lights, and breaks of rays Discover’d everywhere.
. The sky minted into golden sequins. Stars like gold tufts. —— ——golden bees. —— ——golden rowels. Sky peak’d with tiny flames.
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Stars like tiny spoked wheels of fire. Lantern of night, pierced in eyelets.
. His gilded rowels Now stars of blood.
. A star most spiritual, principal, preeminent Of all the golden press.
. Or ever the early stirrings of skylark Might cover the neighbour downs with a span of singing, While Phosphor, risen upon the shallowing dark, In the ruddied county of the day’s up-bringing Stood capital, eminent, . . . gonfalon-bearer To all the starry press,—
Carrion Comfort
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Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me wring-world Thy right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan wring-earth With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoïd thee and flee? Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, È
}
È
{
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TWO SONNETS
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È
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Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer. Cheer whóm though? The héro whose héaven-handling flúng me, fóot tród Me? or mé that fóught him? O whích one? is it éach one? That níght, that yéar Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God. È
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Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves
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È
Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, | vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, | womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night. Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, | her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height Waste; her earliest stars, earlstars, | stárs principal, overbend us, Fíre-féaturing héaven. For éarth | her béing has unbóund; her dápple is at énd, asTray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; | self ín self stéepèd and páshed—qúite Disremembering, dísmémbering | áll now. Heart, you round me right With: Óur évening is óver us; óur night | whélms, whélms, ánd will énd us. Only the beakleaved boughs dragonish | damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black, Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! | Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wínd Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety | upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds—bláck, white; | ríght, wrong; réckon but, réck but, mínd But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these | twó tell, éach off the óther; of a ráck Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, | thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.
Gerard Manley Hopkins 739 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
THE LEADEN ECHO AND THE GOLDEN ECHO [Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well ] The Leaden Echo
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? How to keep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known ? some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, be˝auty, . . . from vanishing away? Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankèd wrinkles deep, ? Down? no waving off of these most mournful me˝ssengers, still me˝ssengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?— No there’s none, there’s none, O no˝ there’s none, Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fa˝ir, Do what you may do, what, do wha˝t you may, And wisdom is e˝arly to despair: Be beginning; since, no, no˝thing can be done To keep at ba˝y Age and age’s evils, hoar hair, Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, wı˝ndingsheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay; So be beginning, be begı˝nning to despair. O there’s none; no no no there’s none: Be begı˝nning to despa˝ir, to despa˝ir, Despair, despair, despair, despair. The Golden Echo
Spa˝re! There ı˝s one, yes I have one (Hu˝sh there!); Only not within se˝eing of the sun. Not within the singeing of the strong sun, Tall sun’s tı˝ngeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air, Somewhere e˝lsewhere there is (ah well where!) one, ? One. Yes I cán tell such a key, I dó know such a place, Where whatever’s prı˝zèd and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast fly˝ing of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly awa˝y with, done awa˝y with, undo˝ne, U˝ndone, done with, soon do˝ne with, and yet de˜˝arly and dangerously swe˝et Of us, the wimpledwa˝ter-dimpled, not-by-mo˝rning-matchèd face,
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The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fle˝et, ? Never fleets more, fastened with the te˝nderest truth To its o˝wn best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everla˝stingness of, O it is an a˝ll youth! Co˝me then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, ma˝idengear, gallantry and gaiety and grace, Winning ways, airs ı˝nnocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace— Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, mo˝tion them with breath, ? And with sighs soaring, so˝aring sıghs, deliver Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, delı˝ver it, early now, long before de˝ath Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, be˝auty, back to God beauty’s self and beauty’s giver. Se˝e: not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the last la˝sh lost; every hair Is, ha˝ir of the head, nu˝mbéred. Nay, what we had lı˝ghthanded left in su˝rly the mere mould Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wı˝nd what while we slept, This side, that side hu˝rling a heavyheaded hu˝ndredfold What while we, whı˝le we slu˝mbéred. O˝ then, weary then why˝ should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so˝ cáre-cóiled, cárekílled, só fágged, só fáshed, só cógged, só cu˝mbéred, When the thing we freely fo˝rfeit is kept with fo˝nder a care, Fonder a ca˝re kept than we could have kept it, ke˝pt Fa˝r with fonder a care (and we˝, we should have lost it) fı˝ner, fo˝nder A care kept.—Where kept? do but tell us whe˝re kept, where.— Yo˝nder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yo˝nder, yes yonder, yonder, Yo˝nder.
COMMENTARY
Poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake—and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on. G. M. H., ca. 1873–74
(1) Like the work of others in this gathering—Blake, Hölderlin, Dickinson, Lautréamont—Hopkins’s poetry was virtually unpublished or uncirculated during his lifetime. No matter. His conversion to Catholicism & life as a Jesuit priest concealed within it a second conversion—as a seeker for ways to foster a new & “inner” vision in the world at large, believing, as
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he wrote, “that the poetical language of an age shd. be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not (I mean normally; passing freaks and graces are another thing) an obsolete one” (1879). The visionary work proceeded through startling effects of word & sound: heightened alliterations, consonances, dissonances, words drawn from dialect or newly coined, new names for new moves: chiming, vowelling, oftening, over-and-overing, aftering; & so on. And with that came a systematic push to a new measure, a “sprung rhythm . . . less to be read than heard” & that would—for all the strangeness (“queerness”) it might seem to have—be “nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural language of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms” (1877). In the terminology he made for it, “sprung rhythm” is the praxis of an “instress,” & instress is the force that brings & binds to language that defining pattern of a thing or person, their deep identity, that he called “inscape.” In this light, he writes, “poetry is speech which afters and oftens its inscape, speech couched in a repeating figure, and verse is spoken sound having a repeated figure.” As Cézanne with landscape, the simple intention of Hopkins’s inscape led to a work of complex surface—at which he persisted—& to a radical, beautifully tangled poetics. (2) “Note on the nature and history of Sprung Rhythm—Sprung Rhythm is the most natural of things. For (1) it is the rhythm of common speech and of written prose, when rhythm is perceived in them. (2) It is the rhythm of all but the most monotonously regular music, so that in the words of choruses and refrains and in songs written closely to music it arises. (3) It is found in nursery rhymes, weather saws, and so on; because, however these may have been once made in running rhythm, the terminations having dropped off by the change of language, the stresses come together and so the rhythm is sprung. (4) It arises in common verse when reversed or counterpointed, for the same reason. “But nevertheless in spite of all this and though Greek and Latin lyric verse, which is well known, and the old English verse seen in Pierce Ploughman are in sprung rhythm, it has in fact ceased to be used since the Elizabethan age, Greene being the last writer who can be said to have recognised it. For perhaps there was not, down to our days, a single, even short, poem in English in which sprung rhythm is employed—not for single effects or in fixed places—but as the governing principle of the scansion. I say this because the contrary has been asserted: if it is otherwise the poem should be cited” (G. M. H.). Metrical marks in the poems follow the interpretations by Norman H. Mackenzie of Hopkins’s notations in his manuscripts. (3) “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” is from a projected play, St. Winefred’s Well, in celebration of Saint Winefred of Wales, whose severed head rolling downhill produced a spring of healing waters. “Star Images” is from Hopkins’s early manuscripts as published (1990) by Norman H. Mackenzie.
742 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
F ried rich Niet z s che
1844–1900
O E D I P U S : S O L I LO Q U I E S O F T H E L A S T P H I LO S O P H E R A Fragment from the History of Posterity
I call myself the last philosopher because I am the last human being. I myself am the only one who speaks with me, and my voice comes to me as the voice of someone who is dying. Let me commune with you for just one hour, beloved voice, with you, the last trace of the memory of all human happiness; with your help I will deceive myself about my loneliness and lie my way into community and love; for my heart refuses to believe that love is dead; it cannot bear the shudder of the loneliest loneliness and it forces me to speak as if I were two persons. Do I still hear you, my voice? You whisper when you curse? And yet your curse should cause the bowels of this world to burst! But it continues to live and merely stares at me all the more brilliantly and coldly with its pitiless stars; it continues to live, as dumb and blind as ever, and the only thing that dies is—the human being.—And yet! I still hear you, beloved voice! Someone other than I, the last human being, is dying in this universe: the last sigh, your sigh, dies with me, the drawn out Woe! Woe! sighing around me, Oedipus, the last of the woeful human beings.
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Translation from German by Richard T. Gray
THE DESERT GROWS: WOE TO HIM WHO HARBOURS DESERTS . . .
Ha! Solemnly! a worthy beginning! solemn in an African way! worthy of a lion or of a moral screech-ape . . . —but it is not for you, you dearest maidens, at whose feet I, a European among palm-trees, am permitted to sit. Selah. Wonderful, truly! Here I now sit, Friedrich Nietzsche 743
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beside the desert, and yet so far from the desert, and not at all devastated: for I am swallowed down by this little oasis —it simply opened, yawning, its sweetest mouth, the sweetest-smelling of all little mouths: then I fell in, down, straight through—among you, you dearest maidens! Selah.
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All hail to that whale if it made things so pleasant for its guest!—you understand my learned allusion? . . . All hail to its belly if it was as sweet an oasis-belly as this is: which, however, I call in question. Since I come from Europe, which is more sceptical than any little wife. May God improve it! Amen. Here I sit now in this smallest oasis like a date, brown, sweet, oozing golden, thirsting for a girl’s rounded mouth, but thirsting more for girlish, ice-cold, snow-white, cutting teeth: for these do the hearts of all hot dates lust. Selah. Like, all too like that aforesaid southern fruit do I lie here, by little flying insects danced and played around, and by even smaller, more foolish and more wicked desires and notions—
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besieged by you, you silent girl-kittens full of misgivings, Dudu and Suleika —sphinxed round, that I may cram much feeling into two words: (—may God forgive me this sin of speech! . . .) —I sit here sniffing the finest air, air of Paradise, truly, bright, buoyant air, gold-striped, as good air as ever fell from the moon— came it by chance, or did it happen by high spirits, as the old poets tell? I, however, call it in question, since I come from Europe, which is more sceptical than any little wife. May God improve it! Amen. Drinking in this finest air, with nostrils swollen like goblets, without future, without memories, thus do I sit here, you dearest maidens, and regard the palm-tree, and watch how, like a dancer, it bends and bows and sways at the hips —if you watch long you follow suit . . . like a dancer who, it would seem, has stood long, dangerously long, always on one little leg? —so that she has forgotten, it would seem, the other leg? At least, in vain I sought the missing twin-jewel —that is, the other leg— in the sacred vicinity
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of her dearest, daintiestfluttering, flickering, fanswirling little skirt. Yes, if you would quite believe me, you sweet maidens: she has lost it . . . Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear! oh dear! oh dear! It has gone, gone for ever, the other leg! Oh, what a shame about that other dear leg! Where—can it be now, sorrowing and forsaken, that lonely leg? Perhaps in fear before an angry, blond-maned lion-monster? or perhaps even gnawed off, broken in pieces— pitiable, alas! alas! shattered in pieces! Selah.
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Oh do not weep, gentle hearts! Do not weep, you date-hearts! milk-bosoms! You heart-caskets of sweetwood! Be a man, Suleika! Courage! Courage! Weep no more, pale Dudu! —Or would perhaps something more bracing, heart-bracing, be in place here? an anointed proverb? a solemn exhortation? . . . Ha! Up, dignity! Blow, blow again, bellows of virtue! Ha! Roar once again, roar morally, roar like a moral lion before the daughters of the desert! —For virtuous howling,
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you dearest maidens, is loved best of all by European ardour, European appetite! And here I stand already, as European I cannot do otherwise, so help me God! Amen! The desert grows: woe to him who harbours deserts! Stone grates on stone, the desert swallows down. And death that chews, whose life is chewing, gazes upon it, monstrous, glowing brown . . . Consumed by lust, O Man, do not forget: you—are the stone, the desert, you are death . . . Translation from German by R. J. Hollingdale
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O N LY A F O O L " O N LY A P O E T "
When the air grows clear, when the dew’s comfort already rains down upon the earth, invisible and unheard —for dew the comforter wears tender shoes like all that gently comforts— do you then remember, do you, hot heart, how once you thirsted for heavenly tears and dew showers, thirsted, scorched and weary, while on yellow grassy paths wicked evening eyes of sunlight ran about you through dark trees, blinding, glowing sunlight-glances, malicious? “The wooer of truth?—you?” so they jeered— “No! only a poet! an animal, cunning, preying, creeping, that has to lie, that knowingly, wilfully has to lie, lusting for prey, gaudily masked, a mask to itself, Friedrich Nietzsche 747
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a prey to itself— that—the wooer of truth? . . .
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Only a fool! Only a poet! Talking only gaudy nonsense, gaudy nonsense from a fool’s mask, climbing around on deceitful word-bridges, on mirage rainbows, between false skies, hovering, creeping— only a fool! only a poet! . . . That—the wooer of truth? . . . Not still, stiff, smooth, cold, become an image, become a god’s statue, not set up before temples, a god’s watchman: no! enemy to such statues of truth, more at home in any wilderness than in temples, full of cat’s wantonness, leaping through every window, swiftly! into every chance, sniffing out every jungle, that you may run, sinfully healthy and gaudy and fair, in jungles among gaudy-speckled beasts of prey, run with lustful lips, happily jeering, happily hellish, happily blood-thirsty, preying, creeping, lying . . . Or like the eagle staring long, long into abysses, into its own abysses . . . —oh how they circle down, under and in, into ever deeper depths!— Then, suddenly, with straight aim, quivering flight, they pounce on lambs, headlong down, ravenous, 748 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
lusting for lambs, angry at all lamb-souls, fiercely angry at all that looks virtuous, sheepish, curly-woolled, stupid with lamb’s milk kindliness . . . Thus, eaglelike, pantherlike, are the poet’s desires, are your desires under a thousand masks, you fool! you poet! . . . You who saw man as god and sheep— to rend the god in man as the sheep in man, and rending to laugh—
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that, that is your blessedness, a panther’s and eagle’s blessedness, a poet’s and a fool’s blessedness!” . . . When the air grows clear, when the moon’s sickle already creeps along, green, envious, in the purple twilight, —enemy to day, with every step secretly sickling down the hanging rose-gardens, until they sink, sink down, pale, down to night: so I myself sank once from my delusion of truth, from my daytime longings, weary of day, sick with light —sank downwards, down to evening, down to shadows, scorched and thirsty with one truth —do you remember, do you, hot heart, how you thirsted then?— that I am banished from all truth! Only a fool! Only a poet! . . . Translation from German by R. J. Hollingdale
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LET TER TO JACOB BURCKHARDT
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January 6, 1889 Dear Professor, In the end I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; but I have not dared push my private egoism so far as to desist for its sake from the creation of the world. You see, one must make sacrifices however and wherever one lives. But I have reserved myself a small student’s room, situated opposite the Palazzo Carignano (in which I was born as Vittorio Emanuele), which also permits me to hear from the desk the magnificent music below, in the Galleria Subalpina. I pay twenty-five francs, including service, buy my tea, and do all my shopping myself, suffer from torn shoes, and thank heaven every moment for the old world for which men have not been simple and quiet enough. Since I am sentenced to while away the next eternity with bad jokes, I have my writing here, which really does not leave anything to be desired—very nice and not at all exhausting. The post office is five steps from here, so I mail my letters myself to play the great feuilletonist of the grand monde. Of course, I maintain close relations with Figaro; and in order to get an idea how harmless I can be, listen to my first two bad jokes. Do not take the Prado case too hard. I am Prado; I am also father Prado; I dare say that I am Lesseps too. I wanted to give my Parisians, whom I love, a new notion: that of a decent criminal. I am also Chambige—also a decent criminal. Second joke: I salute the immortal one; Monsieur Daudet belongs to the quarante. Astu. What is disagreeable and offends my modesty is that at bottom I am every name in history. With the children I have put into the world, too, I consider with some mistrust whether it is not the case that all who come into the kingdom of God also come out of God. This fall I was blinded as little as possible when I twice witnessed my funeral, first as Conte Robilant (no, that is my son, insofar as I am Carlo Alberto, unfaithful to my nature); but Antonelli I was myself. Dear Professor, this edifice you should see: since I am utterly inexperienced in the things which I create, you are entitled to any criticism; I am grateful without being able to promise that I shall profit. We artists are incorrigible. Today I raw an operetta; Quirinal-Moorish, and on this occasion also noted with delight that Moscow as well as Rome are now grandiose affairs. You see, I am not denied considerable talent for landscapes too. Consider, now we have beautiful, beautiful chats; Turin is not far; very
750 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
serious professional obligations are lacking just now; a glass of Veltliner could be obtained. Négligé of dress, a condition of being decent. With affectionate love, your Nietzsche You may make any use of this letter which will not degrade me in the eyes of those at Basel. I have had Caiphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished. I go everywhere in my student’s coat, and here and there slap somebody on the shoulder and say, Siamo contenti? Son dio ho fatto questa caricatura. Tomorrow my son Umberto will come with the lovely Margharita, whom, however, I shall also receive here only in shirt-sleeves. The rest for Frau Cosima—Ariadne—from time to time there is magic. Translation from German by Walter Kaufmann
COMMENTARY
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What did Zarathustra once say to you? That the poets lie too much?— But Zarathustra too is a poet. Do you now believe that he spoke truth? Why do you believe it? (F. N., Thus Spoke Zarathustra) And again: Someone has said in all seriousness that the poets lie too much: he is right—we do lie too much. We know too little and are bad learners: so we have to lie. (1) There seems little doubt that Nietzsche’s force as a philosopher & thinker has overshadowed the work as a poet, which might otherwise describe but not define him. The bulk of that poetry as such runs through a number of his books—Zarathustra, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil—& encompasses a sometimes overlapping range of forms: rhymed & metrical verses, highly charged & cadenced prose, & experimental freeverse compositions that he spoke of, in Dionysian terms, as dithyrambs. On the brink of the mental collapse in 1889 that would immobilize him for the rest of his life, he put together a volume of nine such free-verse poems (three repeated from Zarathustra) under the title Dionysos-Dithyramben. And it was this “language of Dionysos” that he most often equated with poetry—the fulfillment, if we read it in those terms, of that aspect of Romanticism that emphasized the rapturous & self-transcending, sometimes self-destructive side of language & mind. Of the poet as purveyor of the Dionysian experience (“made concrete through Apollonian artifice”), he could be ferociously ironic, as in the epigraph above, or come at it unmediated & at full blast. Thus, in Ecce Homo: “Dionysos is, as one knows, also the god of darkness.—Each time a beginning which is intended to mislead, cool, scientific, even ironic, intentionally foregrounded, intentionally
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keeping in suspense. Gradually an increasing disquiet; isolated flashes of lightning; very unpleasant truths becoming audible as a full rumbling in the distance—until at last a tempo feroce is attained in which everything surges forward with tremendous tension. At the conclusion each time amid perfectly awful detonations a new truth visible between thick clouds.” Too often misread, he is a principal bridging figure between his century & the darker days to come. (2) “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?” (F. N., Thus Spoke Zarathustra). With which, compare the entries on Jean Paul & on Gerard de Nerval, above.
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Pau l Verlain e
1844–1896
CHANSON D’AUTOMNE
AUTUMN SONG
Les sanglots longs Des violons De l’automne Blessent mon cœur D’une langueur Monotone.
The long sobs of The violins Of autumn Lay waste my heart With monotones Of boredom.
Tout suffocant Et blême, quand Sonne l’heure, Je me souviens Des jours anciens Et je pleure;
Quite colourless And choking when The hour strikes I think again Of vanished days And cry.
Et je m’en vais Au vent mauvais Qui m’emporte Deçà, delà, Pareil à la Feuille morte.
And so I leave On cruel winds Squalling And gusting me Like a dead leaf Falling.
Translation from French by Martin Sorrell
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from S O N G S W I T H O U T W O R D S : S E V E N P O E M S
It’s Languor and Ecstasy The wind on the plain Ceases its flight. FAVART
It’s languor and ecstasy, It’s the sleep of love, Woods trembling In the bite of the wind, It’s small voices chorusing Over by the trees. Fresh, frail murmur! Whispers and warbles Like the sigh Of grass disturbed . . . Like the muffled roll Of pebbles under moving water.
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This soul lost In sleep-filled lamentation Surely is ours? Mine, surely, and yours, Softly breathing Low anthems on a warm evening? Brussels: Simple Frescos I
Green-tinged pink tones fade Up slopes and away up hills In the half-light of lamps which casts Question-marks on everything. In simple hollows gold Gently turns blood-red. In unseen tops of trees, somewhere A bird sings a faint song.
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I drift in languor of dreams, Becalmed in monotone air And hardly even sad, so much Does this early autumn picture fade. Brussels: Simple Frescos II
The path goes on and on Beneath the sky, sacred Because pallid. You know, we’d feel so good Here beneath the secret Of these trees. Some well-groomed gentlemen, Friends surely Of the Royers-Collards, Head towards the château. I’d find it good To be these old men.
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On the white château Ending sun declines Down one elevation; Fields on every side. Why can’t our love hide In there somewhere? Malines
Over in the fields the wind provokes The weathervanes, refinements On some worthy burgher’s country house, Red of brick and blue of tile, In the bright and endless fields . . . In a kind of make-believe, Vague leaf-sprouting ashes stand In line around the thousand Edges of the desert meadowland, Clover, lucerne, white lawns.
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Silently the train moves Through a landscape deep in peace. Sleep, cows! Lie down and rest, Sweet bulls of this immensity Below the sky’s dull uniformity. The train slides without a sound, Each coach a saloon Full of quiet talk, easy vantage-point To admire this Nature Tailor-made for Fénelon. Spleen
The roses were bright red The ivy deepest black. My love, your slightest movement Rekindles my despair. Too blue, the sky, too soft, The sea too green, too sweet the air. And still I fear you’ll vanish— Such torture, waiting!
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I’m tired of waxy-leaf holly, Of gleaming box-tree, I’m tired of this endless countryside, Of all, in fact, save you. Streets I
A jig! Let’s dance! What I loved most were her fine eyes Firmament-bright. Those eyes, malice personified. A jig! Let’s dance! She had such charming ways and means Of ruining her men She’d be forgiven everything.
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A jig! Let’s dance! But now that I no longer care What I much prefer’s The brush of her lovely lips. A jig! Let’s dance! I remember—oh and how— Those times those conversations My greatest consolations. A jig! Let’s dance! Streets II
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A river in the street! Dream apparition Flowing soundless Behind a five-foot wall. Dark yet still pure tide Threading the quiet town. The road’s so wide That death-yellow water spreads Unable to reflect More than fog Though dawn lights Black and yellow houses up. Translations from French by Martin Sorrell
OVERTURE
O whores, true priestesses of the One Deity, I’d like to be tucked inside your asses and thighs, be ye novices or pros, plain or fancy, in your cracks and crannies I’d live out my days and nights. Your marvelous feet, hot on the trail for a client, rest only when you’re stretched out with a lover, afterwards you rub them against his feet, pliant, as, breathless and weary, he nestles under the covers.
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Feet kissed, inhaled, fondled, licked from the ankles and the lakes of sluggish veins to the soles, to toes sucked one by one, feet more shapely than a heroine’s or saint’s! I worship, for their charming pranks, your mouths with tongues and lips and agile teeth that skim our tongues or maybe even go down south for pastimes almost as sweet as shoving it in. And your breasts, twin peaks of lust and pride between which my virile pride sometimes swells to graze there at ease or poke its head like a wild boar roaming Parnassus’ and Pindus’ dells. Your arms, I worship, too, those lovely snow-white arms, firm, plump, sinewy, with a dainty bloom whose whiteness like your asses wholly disarms, hot when we screw, afterwards cool as a tomb.
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And the hands that come with your arms, these I adore! Hands blessed to be both lazy and lewd, breathing new life into cocks gone cold and sore, masturbators of infinite solicitude! Yet whores, Holy of Holies, tabernacles of sex, all this pales before your asses and cunts whose odor and feel and taste and loveliness exalt your disciples to the rank of Chosen Ones. And that’s why, sisters, in your asses and thighs I bid you to tuck me in, my good old lays; be ye plain or fancy, novices or pros, in your cracks and crannies I’d live out my nights and days. Translation from French by Alan Stone
SONNET TO THE ASSHOLE [WITH ARTHUR RIMBAUD]
Like a mauve carnation puckered up and dim it breathes, meekly nestled amid the foam, damp, too, from caresses tracing the smooth dome of creamy buttocks up to the innermost rim.
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Filaments oozing like drops of milk, driven by the pitiless south wind, are blown back across the russet marl’s small stones to vanish where the white slope sucks them in. My mouth mates often with this air hole. Jealous of this carnal union, my soul fashions its nest of musky tears and sobs. It’s the drunken olive, the cajoling flute, the heavenly praline’s earthward chute, feminine Canaan mid come bursting in gobs. Translation from French by Alan Stone
THE ART OF POETRY
Let’s hear the music first and foremost, And that means no more one-two-one-twos . . . Something more vague instead, something lighter Dissolving in air, weightless as air.
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When you choose your words, no need to search In strict dictionaries for pinpoint Definitions. Better the subtle And heady Songs of Imprecision. Imagine fine eyes behind a veil, Imagine the shimmer of high noon, Imagine, in skies cooled for autumn, Blue entanglements of lucent stars. No, what we must have is more Nuance, Colour’s forbidden, only Nuance! Nuance alone writes the harmonies Of dream and dream, of woodwind and brass. Clever-clever phrases are deadly, So too are rapier Wit and cheap Laughs, Ubiquitous garlic of bad cooks, Only fit to fill blue air with tears. Grip eloquence by the throat and squeeze It to death. And while you’re about it
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You might corral that runaway, Rhyme, Or you’ll get Rhyme Without End, Amen. Who will denounce that criminal, Rhyme? Tone-deaf children or crazed foreigners No doubt fashioned its paste jewellery, Tinplate on top, hollow underneath. Music, more music, always music! Create verse which lifts and flies away, Verse of a soul that has taken off Into other stratospheres of love. You must let your poems ride their luck On the back of the sharp morning air Touched with the fragrance of mint and thyme . . . And everything else is LIT-RIT-CHER. Translation from French by Martin Sorrell
COMMENTARY
Every man [ . . . ] has two creatures within him, two creatures who hold together and yet remain at variance [ . . . ] with each other. There are an angel and a beast. . . . I wrote La Bonne Chanson and Sagesse: there’s the Angel, you see! Now I shall write a book called Parallèlement, because I must also give voice to the Beast within me. Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
P. V., quoted in Joanna Richardson, Verlaine, 1971
(1) It was Verlaine, too, who coined the term poète maudit (the literally “damned” or, by extension, “beat” poet) & in so doing gave a name & a voice to a sense of dérèglement that the surrounding milieu & many of the maudits themselves could view as purposefully transgressive, even (it thrilled some of them to say) decadent. The key figures in his anthology, Les poètes maudits (1884), were Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Corbière, and, by implication, Verlaine himself, all of them among the principal figures of French Symbolisme. Clearly rooted in international & experimental Romanticism, their lives & works combined a revitalized stance toward reality with a thrust toward new forms of verse as part of what Apollinaire a few decades later would term le nouveau esprit in poetry (= new spirit or new mind). Where others moved toward free verse (vers libre, as generally understood & practiced by poets like Laforgue, plus Mallarmé’s still more radical deformations of the page in Un coup de dés), Verlaine’s experiments with a new verbal music stayed (like those of Poe & Swinburne) within the recognizable norms of rhyme and meter (“the least theoretical, the most really instinctive, of poetical innovators,” Arthur Symons called
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him). The transgressive work, however, went beyond what was publishable in his time—a “satanic” & Sadean undercurrent in the published poems & a hidden reserve of pornoerotic poetry in restricted circulation. Still, much of the published work was answerable to anyone’s notion of beauty— Les sanglots longs Des violons De l’automne Blessent mon coeur D’une langueur Monotone & other lines reverberating for some of us across barriers of language.
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(2) The sense of the maudit erupted as well in Verlaine’s own life, his disastrous love affair with the adolescent Arthur Rimbaud the best-known event, both in his own time & in ours. Ending with his shooting of Rimbaud & a brief imprisonment, it was best chronicled in the latter’s A Season in Hell, where Verlaine is made to speak—mockingly on Rimbaud’s part—as the “foolish virgin” to Rimbaud’s “infernal bridegroom”: “Oh! that wonderful world of adventures that we found in children’s books,—won’t you give me that world? I’ve suffered so much, I deserve a reward. He can’t. I don’t know what he really wants. He says he has hopes and regrets: but they have nothing to do with me. Does he talk to God? Maybe I should talk to God myself. I am in the depths of an abyss, and I have forgotten how to pray” (translation by Paul Schmidt).
I s id ore D ucas s e, comte de Lau tré amo nt
1846–1870
I replace melancholy with courage, doubt with certainty, despair with hope, wickedness with good, complaints with duty, scepticism with faith, sophisms with the indifference of calm and arrogance with modesty. Epigraph translated by Alexis Lykiard
from P O É S I E S I
The poetic moans of this century are only sophisms. First principles must be above argument. I accept Euripides and Sophocles: but I do not accept Aeschylus. Do not display bad taste and a breach of the most basic proprieties towards the creator. 760 A Third Gallery
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Repel disbelief: you will give me pleasure. There are not two kinds of poetry; there is only one. There exists a far from tacit convention between author and reader, by which the former calls himself patient and accepts the latter as nurse. It is the poet who consoles mankind! The roles are arbitrarily reversed. I do not want to be branded poseur. I shall leave no Memoirs. Poetry is not a tempest, any more than it is a cyclone. It is a majestic and fertile river. It is only by admitting night physically that one succeeds in doing away with it morally. O Nights of Young! how many headaches have you caused me! One dreams only when one is asleep. There are words like those of dream, nothingness of life, earthly thoroughfare, the preposition perhaps, the disordered tripod, which have instilled into your souls this clammy poetry of languor, like that of putrefaction. To pass from words to ideas is but one step. The disturbances, anxieties, depravities, death, exceptions to the physical or moral order, the spirit of negation, the brutishness, the hallucinations waited upon by the will, torments, destruction, madnesses, tears, insatiabilities, slaveries, deep-thinking imaginations, novels, the unexpected, things which must not be done, the chemical peculiarities of the mysterious vulture that watches for the carcass of some dead illusion, precocious and abortive experiences, obscurities with a flea-like shell, the terrible obsession with pride, the inoculation with deep stupors, funeral orations, envies, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, bitternesses, aggressive tirades, insanity, spleen, rational terrors, strange misgivings the reader would rather not feel, grimaces, neuroses, the cruel routes through which one forces last-ditch logic, exaggerations, lack of sincerity, the nuisances, platitudes, gloom, the dismal, the childbirths worse than murders, passions, the clique of assize-court novelists, tragedies, odes, melodramas, eternally presented extremes, reason hissed off stage with impunity, the odours of wet chicken, dulled tastes, frogs, octopi, sharks, the simoom of the deserts, whatever is clairvoyant, squinting, nocturnal, narcotic, somnambulist, slimy, talking seal, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anaemic, one-eyed, hermaphrodite, bastard, albino, pederast, phenomenon of aquarium and bearded lady, the drunken hours of taciturn dejection, the fantasies, pungencies, monsters, demoralising syllogisms, the excrement, whatever is thoughtless as a child, desolation, that intellectual manchineel-tree, perfumed chancres, thighs like camellias, the guilt of a writer who rolls down the slope of nothingness and
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scorns himself with joyous cries, remorse, hypocrisies, the vague perspectives that grind you within their imperceptible mills, the sober gobs of spittle upon sacred axioms, the insinuating tickling of vermin, idiotic prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mlle de Maupin and Dumas fils, the decrepitude, impotence, blasphemies, asphyxiations, fits, rages,—before these foul charnel-houses, which I blush to name, it is time at last to react against what offends us and so imperiously bows us down. You are being driven incessantly out of your mind and caught in the trap of shadows built with coarse skill by egoism and self-esteem. ....... Elohim is made in the image of man. A number of certainties are contradicted. A number of falsehoods are uncontradicted. Contradiction is the sign of falsity. Noncontradiction is the sign of certitude. A philosophy for the sciences exists. It does not exist for poetry. I know of no moralist who is a first-rate poet. That’s odd, someone will say. It is a horrible thing to feel what one possesses slip away. One devotes oneself only to the idea of trying to find out whether anything at all is permanent. Man is a subject devoid of fallacies. Everything shows him the truth. Nothing deludes him. The two principles of truth, reason and sense, apart from the fact that they do not lack sincerity, enlighten one another. The senses make reason clearer through real appearances. The same service they render it, they receive from it. Each takes its revenge. The soul’s phenomena appease the senses, make impressions upon them which I do not guarantee to be troublesome. They do not lie. They do not vie with each other in making mistakes. Poetry should be made by all. Not by one. Poor Hugo! Poor Racine! Poor Coppée! Poor Corneille! Poor Boileau! Poor Scarron! Tics, tics, and tics. Translation from French by Alexis Lykiard
from M A L D O R O R : S H I P W R E C K A N D S H A R K S
I sought a soul that might resemble mine, and I could not find it. I scanned all the crannies of the earth: my perseverance was useless. Yet I could not remain alone. There had to be someone who would approve of my character; there had to be someone with the same ideas as myself. It was morning. The sun in all his magnificence rose on the horizon, and behold, there also appeared before my eyes a young man whose presence made
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flowers grow as he passed. He approached me and held out his hand: “I have come to you, you who seek me. Let us give thanks for this happy day.” But I replied: “Go! I did not summon you. I do not need your friendship. . . .” It was evening. Night was beginning to spread the blackness of her veil over nature. A beautiful woman whom I could scarcely discern also exerted her bewitching sway upon me and looked at me with compassion. She did not, however, dare speak to me. I said: “Come closer that I may discern your features clearly, for at this distance the starlight is not strong enough to illumine them.” Then, with modest demeanour, eyes lowered, she crossed the greensward and reached my side. I said as soon as I saw her: “I perceive that goodness and justice have dwelt in your heart: we could not live together. Now you are admiring my good looks which have bowled over more than one woman. But sooner or later you would regret having consecrated your love to me, for you do not know my soul. Not that I shall be unfaithful to you: she who devotes herself to me with so much abandon and trust—with the same trust and abandon do I devote myself to her. But get this into your head and never forget it: wolves and lambs look not on one another with gentle eyes.” What then did I need, I who rejected with such disgust what was most beautiful in humanity! I would not have known how to formulate what I needed. I was not yet accustomed to take rigorous stock of my mind’s phenomena by means of the methods philosophy recommends. I sat on a rock near the sea. A ship had just put out from shore at full sail: an imperceptible dot had appeared on the horizon and was gradually approaching, growing rapidly, pushed on by the squall. The storm was going to begin its onslaughts and already the sky was darkening, turning into a blackness almost as hideous as man’s heart. The vessel, which was a great warship, had dropped all her anchors to avoid being swept on to the rocks along the coast. The wind whistled furiously from all four points of the compass, and made mincemeat of the sails. Claps of thunder crashed amid the lightning but could not outdo the sound of wailing to be heard from the foundationless house—a floating sepulchre. The lurching masses of water had not managed to break the anchor chains, but had dashed open a way into the ship’s sides: an enormous breach, for the pumps were quite unable to expel the vast quantities of salt water which smashed foaming over the deck like mountains. The distressed ship fires off her alarm gun but slowly, majestically, founders. He who has not seen a vessel founder amid a hurricane, in intermittent lightning and deepest darkness, while those aboard are overcome by the despair with which you are familiar, knows not life’s mischances. Finally from within the ship a universal shriek of sheer woe bursts forth, while the sea redoubles
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its redoubtable attacks. Human strength giving way was the cause of that cry. Each man enfolds himself in the cloak of resignation and puts his fate into God’s hands. They huddle at bay like a flock of sheep. The distressed ship fires off her alarm gun but slowly, majestically, founders. All day long they have had the pumps in action. Futile efforts. And to cap this gracious spectacle, night has fallen, dense, implacable. Each man tells himself that once in the water he will no longer be able to breathe; for no matter how far back his memory ferrets, he owns no fish as ancestor. Yet he urges himself to hold his breath as long as possible, to prolong his life by two or three seconds: that is the vengeful irony he aims at death. The distressed ship fires off her alarm gun but slowly, majestically, founders. He is unaware that the vessel as she sinks causes a powerful convolution of swell upon swell; that miry mud mingles with the turbid waters, and that a force coming from below—backlash of the tempest raging above— drives the element to violent jolting motions. Thus despite his reserve of composure mustered beforehand, the man marked for drowning should (on further reflection) feel glad to prolong his life amid the whirlpools of the abyss by even half a normal breath, for good measure. It will be impossible for him to defy his supreme wish, death. The distressed ship fires off her alarm gun but slowly, majestically, founders. An error. She fires no more shots, she does not founder. The cockle-shell has been completely engulfed. O heaven! how can one live after tasting so many delights! It has just been my lot to witness the death-throes of several of my fellow men. Minute by minute I observed the vicissitudes of their last agonies. Heard now above the market din would be the bawling of some old woman driven mad by fear; now, the solitary yelps of a suckling infant, making nautical orders hard to hear. The vessel was too far off for me clearly to distinguish the groans borne on the gale, but by an effort of will I drew nearer to them, and the optical illusion was complete. Every quarter of an hour or so, whenever a gust of wind stronger than the rest, keening its dismal dirge amid the cries of startled petrels, struck and cracked the ship’s length and increased the moans of those about to be offered up to death-by-holocaust, I would jab a sharp iron point into my cheek, secretly thinking: “They suffer still more!” Thus, at least, I had grounds for comparison. From the shore I apostrophised them, hurling imprecations and threats at them. It seemed to me that they must have heard me! It seemed to me that my hatred and my words, covering the distance, destroyed the laws of acoustics and, distinctly, reached those ears deafened by the wrathful ocean’s roar! It seemed to me that they must have thought of me and vented their vengeance in impotent rage! From time to time I would cast my gaze towards the cities asleep upon
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terra firma, and seeing no one suspected that a few miles offshore a ship was sinking—with a crown of birds of prey and a pedestal of emptybellied aquatic giants—I took courage and regained hope. I was now certain of her loss! They could not escape! By way of extra precaution, I had been to fetch my double-barrelled musket, so that were any survivor to try swimming ashore from the rocks, thus escaping imminent death, a bullet in the shoulder would shatter his arm and prevent him from effecting his purpose. During the fiercest part of the storm I saw a forceful head, its hair on end, cleaving the waters with desperate exertions. Tossed about like a cork, it gulped litres of water and sank into the gulf, but soon reappeared, hair streaming, and fixed its gaze on the shore, seeming to defy death. His composure was admirable. A great gory wound caused by the outcrop of some hidden reef scarred his intrepid and noble countenance. He could not have been more than sixteen, for by the lightning flashes which lit the night the peachbloom on his upper lip was barely visible. And now he was no more than two hundred metres from the cliff and I could take a good look at him. What courage! What indomitable spirit! How his head’s steadiness seemed to taunt destiny while vigorously ploughing through the waves whose furrows parted intractably before him! I had resolved beforehand. I owed it to myself to keep my promise: the last hour had tolled for all, none should escape it. That was my resolution. Nothing would change it. . . . There was a sharp report and the head sank at once to reappear no more. From this murder I did not derive as much pleasure as one might think. And precisely because I was sated with perpetual killing, henceforth I would do it through sheer habit—impossible to abandon, but affording only the scantest climax. The senses were blunted, calloused. What pleasure could I feel at the death of this human being when there were more than a hundred about to present me with the spectacle of their last struggles against the waves once the ship had gone down? With this death I had not even the lure of danger, for human justice, cradled by the hurricane of this frightful night, slumbered in the houses a few steps from me. Today when the years hang heavy on me, I sincerely state for a supreme and solemn truth: I was not as cruel as men later related; but sometimes their wickedness wreaks its enduring ravages for years on end. So my fury knew no limit; I was seized with an excess of cruelty and struck awe in anyone (of my own race) who might happen to meet my haggard eyes. Were it a horse or dog, I would let it by: did you hear what I just said? Unfortunately on the night of the storm I was seized by one of my fits of wrath, my reason had flown (for as a rule I would be cruel but more discreet), and everything falling into my hands at that time had to perish. I do not intend to justify my mis-
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deeds. The fault is not entirely with my fellow men. I simply state what is, while awaiting the last judgement. (Which makes me scratch my nape in anticipation. . . . ) What care I for the last judgement! My reason never deserts me as I claimed—to mislead you. And when I commit a crime I know what I am doing: I would not wish to do otherwise! Standing on the rock while the hurricane lashed at my hair and cloak, I ecstatically watched the full force of the storm hammering away at the ship, under a starless sky. In triumphant fettle I followed all the twists and turns of the drama—from the instant the vessel cast anchors until the moment she was swallowed up within that fatal garment which dragged those whom it clothed like a cloak, down into the bowels of the sea. But the time was approaching when I myself would play a part as actor in these scenes of disordered nature. When the spot where the vessel had battled clearly showed that she had gone to spend the rest of her days in the stalls of the sea, some of those who had been borne overboard by the breakers reappeared on the surface. They clung to one another, grappling in twos and threes: this was the way not to save their lives, for their movements were hampered and they sank like cracked beakers. . . . What is this army of marine monsters swiftly slicing through the waves? There are six of them, with sturdy fins that cut a path through the heaving waves. The sharks soon make merely an eggless omelette of all the human beings who flail their four limbs in this unsteady continent, and share it out according to the law of the strongest. Blood mingles with the waters and the waters with blood. Their savage eyes sufficiently illumine the scene of carnage. . . . But what is this new turmoil in the water, yonder on the horizon? A waterspout approaching, perhaps. What strokes! I realise what it is. An enormous female shark is coming to partake of the duck liver pâté, to eat the cold boiled beef. She is raging, ravening. A battle ensues between her and the others to contest the few palpitating limbs that here and there bob silently on the surface of the crimson cream. To left and right her jaws slash, dealing mortal wounds. But three live sharks surround her still, and she is forced to thrash around in all directions to foil their manoeuvres. With a mounting emotion hitherto unknown to him the spectator upon the shore follows this new variety of naval engagement. His eyes are fixed on this valiant female shark with her vicious teeth. He hesitates no longer. Musket to shoulder, and adroit as ever, he plants his second bullet in the gills of one of the sharks as it shows itself a moment above a wave. Two sharks remain, displaying even greater tenacity. His mouth full of bile, the man throws himself off the rock’s summit into the sea and swims towards the pleasantly-tinted carpet, gripping the steel knife he always carries. From now on each shark has one enemy to reckon
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with. He heads for his weary adversary and, taking his time, buries the sharp blade in its belly. Meanwhile the mobile fortress easily disposes of her last opponent. . . . Swimmer and female shark he has rescued confront each other. For some minutes they stare warily at one another, each amazed to find such ferocity in the other’s stare. They swim, circling, neither losing sight of the other. Each thinking: “Till now I was wrong—here is someone wickeder than I!” Then of one accord, in mutual admiration, they slid toward each other—the female parting the water with her fins, Maldoror smiting the surge with his arms—and held their breaths in deepest reverence, both longing to look for the first time on their living image. Three metres separated them. Effortlessly, abruptly, they fell upon each other like magnets, and embraced with dignity and recognition, in a hug as tender as a brother’s or sister’s. Carnal desires soon followed this demonstration of affection. A pair of sinewy thighs clung to the monster’s viscous skin, close as leeches; and arms and fins entwined about the loved one’s body, surrounded it with love, while throats and breasts soon fused into a glaucous mass reeking of sea-wrack. In the midst of the tempest that continued raging. By lightning’s light. The foamy wave their nuptial couch—borne on an undertow as in a cradle—they rolled over and over towards the unknown depths of the briny abyss—and came together in a long, chaste, hideous coupling! . . . At last I had found someone who resembled me! . . . From now on I was no longer alone in life! . . . She had the same ideas as I! . . . I was facing my first love!
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Translation from French by Alexis Lykiard
COMMENTARY
It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savor this bitter fruit with impunity. I. D., C. de L.
(1) In the 1920s the work of the comte de Lautréamont (born Isidore Ducasse in Montevideo) was (re)discovered by the Surrealists, who saw it as a true precursor to their own concerns. Writes Pierre Joris: “Along with the legend of his life—in both its shortness & its mystery—they were attracted by the oneiric quality of the writing, the powerful images & their strange juxtapositions, the extreme aggressiveness of the voice (‘a system of violent energy that fractures the real in order to live out its achievement without scruple or embarrassment’—G. Bachelard), plus what André Breton would point to as Lautréamont’s radical ‘black humor.’ With later commentators & poets, the emphasis shifts to Lautréamont’s hyper-conscious (mis)-use, or mise-en-abime, of rhetoric—a foregrounding of language in which ‘every
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scene,’ writes Michel Deguy, ‘is a scene of writing.’ From being merely a formal element, rhetoric in Lautréamont is seen as the very space & substance, ‘the form-become-matter,’ of his work. In such a configuration, in which the ‘flowers of rhetoric’ turn upon themselves & became a kind of flesh-eating (= language/image-eating = monstrous) flower, Lautréamont not only foreshadows Freud—as the Surrealists would have it—but Lacan’s later formulation that ‘the unconscious itself is structured like a language’” (Poems for the Millennium, volume one). (2) Banned in France following its 1869 publication in Belgium, Maldoror didn’t appear there until four years after Lautréamont’s death. The book itself consists of six “cantos” of from five to sixteen prose “stanzas” each, each stanza in turn a kind of separate prose poem offering. The central figure—Maldoror—is like a hero out of Nietzsche or De Sade, “[whose] cruelty seems limitless, matched only by that of the Creator (whom he catches, for example, gorging on human bodies). Odd fights between hybrid creatures alternate with equally odd matings (Maldoror with a female shark, a bulldog, and a little girl). Metamorphoses of characters into animals or even monsters punctuate the narrative” (Ora Avni). The “grotesque image of the body”—revived here—both looks back to a Rabelaisian & folkloric past (“all languages, all literatures”—M. Bakhtin) & forward to the work of writers as diverse as Kafka & Artaud, Césaire & Burroughs.
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(3) Lautréamont’s comic/grotesque simile—“as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”— became the model for Surrealist definitions of the poetic “image.” The masthead of the Surrealists’ magazine, La Révolution Surréaliste, carried his words: “Poetry should be made by all, not by one.” (See excerpt from Poésies, above.)
Jos é M art í
1853–1896
U N DAT E D F R AG M E N T
To write: The Supreme Moments: (of my life, of the Life of a Man: the little that is remembered, like the peaks of a mountain: the hours that count). The afternoon of Emerson. Ingratitude. (In jail, or learning of the departure of M’s family.) The mountaintop in Guatemala. Papa’s kiss, on leaving for Guatemala in the ship—and on coming back to Mexico, in Borell’s house.
768 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The afternoon in the amphitheater: (hands on the club’s balcony:) in Catskill. Sybilla. When they showed me Pepe, just born. The letter from Adriano Páez. Translation from Spanish by Esther Allen
from N O T E B O O K 5 : M O V E M E N T I S C O N T A G I O U S
Movement is contagious. Before assembling a collection of my poems I would like to assemble a collection of my actions.
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The action of morphine. What does it put to sleep? What does it consist of? To deduce, in this way, what the soul might be? A great confederation of the countries of Latin America—not in Cuba—in Colombia (thus avoiding the danger of a forcible annexation of the Island). Tribunal of all for each one’s disputes. Monetary aid for the States at war with foreign nations. Full freedom of each of the republics to join with every country at war. Prior visit to the States of South America. Work gives me wings. Others are intoxicated by wine; myself by overwork. From wine—foam; from overwork, poems. And so many noble things that could be done in life! But we have stomachs. And that other stomach that hangs down below: which is subject to terrible hungers. In Cuba, the idea of annexation, which was born to accelerate the enjoyment of liberty, has changed in intention and motive, and today is no more than the desire to avoid a Revolution. Why do they want to be annexed? Because of the greatness of this land. And why is this land great, if not for its Revolution? But in these times, and with the relations that exist between the two parties, we will be able to enjoy the benefits
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of a Revolution without exposing ourselves to its dangers. But that is not rational: what you buy, you own. No one buys anything for another’s benefit. If they give it, it will be because they stand to profit by it. To live in exile—to sculpt clouds. Translation from Spanish by Esther Allen
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
NOT RHETORIC OR ORNAMENT
Not rhetoric or ornament But a natural verse. Here a torrent Here a dry stone. There a gilded bird Shining in green branches, Like a nasturtium among emeralds. Here the fetid, viscous trace Of a slug: its eyes mud-blisters, its belly Drab, greasy, foul. In the treetop, higher still, alone In the steel sky a constant Star; and here, below, the oven The oven that cooks the earth Flames, struggling flames, with Eye-like sockets, arm-like tongues, A man’s fury, sword-sharp: the sword of life That blaze upon blaze conquers the earth at last! It climbs, roaring from within, destroying: Man begins in flame and finishes in flight. At his triumphal passage the dirty The vile, the cowardly, the defeated, Like snakes, like lap dogs, like Crocodiles with their double rows of teeth, From here, from there, from the tree that shelters him From the soil that holds him, from the stream Where he slakes his thirst, from the very anvil Where bread is shaped, they howl and toss him, Bite at his foot, cover his face with dust and mud, Enough to blind a man on his path. With one beat of his wing he sweeps the world aside And rises through the fiery air,
770 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Dead, like a man and like the serene sun. Thus must noble poetry be: Thus, as life is: star and lap dog; The cave bitten by flame, The pine in whose fragrant branches A nest sings by moonlight, A nest sings to the splendor of moonlight. Translation from Spanish by Mark Weiss
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T WO H O M E LA N D S H AV E I
Two homelands have I, Cuba and the night. Or are they one? The sun’s majesty but now withdrawn, trailing long veils she comes to me, Cuba, in the guise of a grieving widow, holding a carnation. That blood-stained flower is my shattered breast, the hollow that held my heart. Now is the hour come to die. The night is made for parting, light and speech a barrier, the universe more eloquent than man. The red flame of the candle flutters like a flag summoning to battle. Clutching it to me I open the window. Mute as a cloud that hides the sky the widow passes, scattering flowers. Translation from Spanish by Mark Weiss
from P O W D E R F R O M T H E W I N G S O F A M O T H
Tell those who are silent, Those who laugh not, Those who are sad, Tell them that she I love is far away!
. José Martí 771
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
The sun is burning, the grass is dying, the plain’s on fire, The sea glitters. Why in the midst of this fevered summer Do I shiver with cold?
. It’s good to suffer; when in the left side Of my broken breast a cancer burns, Over the feverish wound a sweet-smelling iris, White and blue, spreads its wings.
. May my verses fly Like small, nervous Butterflies: Ah, stay, and you shall see The wonder of a butterfly Covering the Earth With its wings.
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. Oh come to me, oh come: You will leave in my life An alabaster whiteness And that lost, melancholy light That a silent star casts in the night.
. As from a fire my verses leap Like sparks of ash; Just so the bright blue shards of waters Break on the rocks.
. Cheerful shepherds, Fragrant mornings,
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Sleeping doves, And there on the regal crowns of the mountains Magnificent eagles: Come then, my friends, celebrate with me The arrival of joy to my soul. Knock at her door, Summon her softly: If she sleeps, let her sleep! For alive or asleep, or even dead, I carry her forever in my soul! Leave for her, doves, Those drops of dew That glitter on your wings: And you, my ferocious eagles, Stay at rest on your perches! If she awakes, oh shepherds, bring to her The whitest of doves in baskets of flowers! My God, what joy, My soul is as bright as the sky! Spread for her, shepherds, A bed of white garlands!
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. Muttering verses I walk the earth Like the passing breeze complaining among the honeysuckle.
. I can’t say when Verse will come: You pass by and verse Passes by as well.
. In the newspapers I read, In the passing clouds, In the invisible air, my wandering,
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Disconsolate eyes sketch your likeness. And I cover my eyes As a salve for anguish— And you come from the depths of my soul, Weeping, inconsolable, eternal, proud.
. Go then, leave. As a lovely boat Leaves its broad wake on the sea, So your image marks my strange life. Go, and my grief will curdle the foam.
. The sky has its Milky Way, But I have more: I have the memory of that evening When I saw you gaze at me on the verge of tears. Translation from Spanish by Mark Weiss
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
from S I M P L E V E R S E S : “ I A M A N H O N E S T M A N ”
I am an honest man From the land of palm trees And I wish before I meet my death To cast these verses from my soul. I come from everywhere, Towards everywhere I go: I am art among arts And in the peaks I am a peak. I know the exotic names Of herbs and flowers, And of deadly betrayals And sublime sorrows. In the dark night I have seen Rays of the pure splendor
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Of divine beauty raining down Upon my head. I have seen the sprouting of wings From the shoulders of beautiful women And the coming forth of butterflies From piles of rubble. I have seen a man who lives With a dagger in his side, Who never uttered the name Of the woman who killed him. Briefly, twice, I have seen the soul Like a reflection, when the poor Old man died, and When she said goodbye. I trembled once— At the vineyard’s gate— When the savage bee Stung my beloved’s brow.
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I rejoiced once, in my destiny, As I’d never rejoiced before, When the warden read My condemnation, and wept. I hear a sigh that’s traveled across lands and seas, And it’s not a sigh—it’s my son Awakening. If asked to choose the jeweler’s brightest gem, I would choose an honest friend And put love aside. I have seen the wounded eagle Soar through the serene sky And the viper in its den Die of its own poison. Well do I know that when the world, Pale with exhaustion, gives over
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To rest, the murmur of a tranquil brook Floats above the deep silence. I have dared to stretch my hand, Stiff with horror and joy, To the extinguished star That fell at my door. I hide within my rugged breast The sorrow that tears at me: Son of an enslaved people For which he lives, falls silent and dies. Everything is beautiful and steadfast, Everything is music and reason, And, like a diamond, everything Is coal before it’s light. I know that the foolish are buried With great pomp and great lamentation, And that no soil bears fruit Like the soil of the cemetery. I fall silent, I understand, and I remove My rhymster’s finery: I hang my scholar’s robes From a withered tree. Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Translation from Spanish by Mark Weiss
T H E S W I S S FAT H E R Little Rock, Arkansas, September 1. On Wednesday night, near Paris, in Logan County, a Swiss named Edward Schwerzmann carried his three sons, one 18 months, the others 4 and 5 years old, to the edge of a well, and threw them in, and himself afterwards. He is said to have been overcome by a fit of madness. NE W S B U LLE T I N P U B LI SH E D I N NE W YO R K
They say that a blond Swiss, With dry, hollow eyes, overwhelmed By desolate love for his three sons, Kissed their feet, their hands, their thin, Dry, flaccid, sallow hands, and suddenly,
776 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Filled with enormous rage, like an angry Tiger carrying away the hunter’s children, Threw all three, and himself after, Into a deep well—and robbed them of their lives! They say that the forest was lit With a reddish glow, and that at the mouth Of the dark well—his hair loose, like a crown of flames That the grieving king, become human, Only loosens from his brow as he enters the tomb— His calloused hand clutching a dry stump— His silent children, their nails digging Into his stony breast, held fast by his arm, like birds In the nest clustered together on a stormy night— His soul given over to God and his eye to the waste, That Swiss raised his fist to the heavens, and a hero’s light Appeared to illumine the earth around him, And the realm of shadows was shaken By the death of a giant! Sublime father, incomparable spirit, Who to spare the delicate shoulders of his sons The heavy burden of a life Without faith, without country, a joyless life Without clear course or certain goal, On his own colossal shoulders took The terrible burden of his savage crime! The trees quaked, and on his stony breast The six frightened eyes Of his pallid sons were like six Bright stars guiding their father’s pathway Through the dominion of crime! Hero, giant, loving Madman, go! and trample The venomous brambles whose poison Torments the feet of criminals in the dark kingdom Where murderers pace without end! Go—that the six bright stars May follow, and guide you, and that those Who have drunk of the bitter wine of life May ease your burden! Translation from Spanish by Mark Weiss
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COMMENTARY
Everything has already been said; but all authentic things are new. To confirm is to create. What gives birth to the world isn’t the discovery of how it’s made, but the effort of each to discover it. . . . Emotion is the motive force in poetry, a sign of the passion that moves it, and it doesn’t have to be reheated in memory, it’s the trembling of the moment, an internal wind or earthquake. What remains afterwards is lost to poetry, since it’s neither understanding nor memory that matter most in the poetic, but a confused and tempestuous spiritual state, in which mind is only an aide, taken up and abandoned, until it becomes at last music, which enters it from without.
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J. M., letter to José Joaquín Palma
Writes his translator Mark Weiss: “Martí may not be unique as a political poet-martyr (one thinks of Byron and Lorca), but he must have been one of the most politically involved. The very model of the committed artist, he was 42 when he died in one of the first engagements of the second Cuban War of Independence, of which he had been chief propagandist and one of the principal planners. He had spent his entire adult life in exile, chiefly in Mexico City and New York. “Martí’s popular sobriquet in Cuba, Apostle of the Revolution, could obscure for non-Spanish readers the revolutionary quality of his verse. He was perhaps the first practitioner of what came to be called modernismo, the Latin American adaptation of French Symbolism that was to come to full flower in the work of Darío [below]. Characteristic is his use of symbols and similes—not just the eagles and doves that in places stand in for valor or war and love or peace, but more extended symbols and similes that take on lives of their own—the grieving king, the heroic light, and the strange image of the six eyes of the children in ‘The Swiss Father,’ for instance, or the widow in ‘Two Homelands,’ or virtually all of ‘Not Rhetoric or Ornament. . . .’ (One can sense Baudelaire lurking behind the scenes.) Even the ‘Simple Verses,’ built on a series of stark contrasts, flowers and betrayal, night and splendor, butterflies and rubble, diamond and coal, an extinguished star, the cemetery’s fecundity, are far from being as simple as they first appear. “Martí’s densely figured, learned, syntactically convoluted verse gave back to Spanish poetry the muscular intensity of the Baroque, anticipating in this regard not so much the modernismo that was to follow him as the poetry of José Lezama Lima, Cuba’s greatest twentieth-century poet and fountainhead of the neobarroco, which remains a dominant force today in Latin American writing. Paradoxically, he also introduced, in ‘Simple Verses,’ a seemingly naive form reminiscent of South American coplas, the folk practice of constructing songs out of spontaneously composed quatrains, each participant in turn presenting his own variations on the theme, usually, of love or loss, and one thinks also of the gypsy ballads of Lorca that were to come 25 years later.
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“Martí was wildly prolific—his complete works come to 27 thick volumes of essays, journalism, fiction, correspondence, criticism, political writing, children’s literature, and verse. He travelled constantly, rallying the troops for the impending battle, and he was notorious as well for his many affairs. It’s difficult to imagine when he slept, let alone wrote. Everything he wrote, in fact, was written at white heat. In the letter quoted above he makes of this a virtue, clearly contrasting his practice to Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquility,’ and in so doing anticipating Allen Ginsberg’s ‘first thought best thought.’ And like Ginsberg and a great many of Ginsberg’s confrères, what he’s finally interested in, what emotion stimulates, and what the poem reveals to us, is process, rather than product, not what’s discovered, but ‘the effort of each to discover it.’”
A rt hu r R imb a u d
1854–1891
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MORNING OF DRUNKENNESS
O my Good! O my Beautiful! Appalling fanfare where I do not falter! rack of enchantments! Hurrah for the wonderful work and for the marvelous body, for the first time! It began in the midst of children’s laughter, with their laughter will it end. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, the fanfare turning, we shall be given back to the old disharmony. O now may we, so worthy of these tortures! fervently take up the superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, science, violence! They promised to bury in darkness the tree of good and evil, to deport tyrannic respectability so that we might bring hither our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust and it ends,—unable to grasp this eternity,—it ends in a riot of perfumes. Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, loathing of faces and objects here, holy be all of you in memory of this vigil. It began with every sort of boorishness, behold it ends with angels of flame and ice. Little drunken vigil, holy! if only because of the mask you have bestowed on us. We pronounce you, method! We shall not forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole life every day. Now is the time of the Assassins. Translation from French by Louise Varèse
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T H E D R U N K E N B OAT
Pulled as I was down phlegmatic Rivers, Suddenly—no longer a barge for towers! Whooping Redskins with emptied quivers Had nailed them naked to painted posts. Contemptuous? Of every kind of crew: Carriers of English cotton or Flemish wheat. The moment my shrieking towers were subdued, The Rivers let me plunge to open sea. Amidst the furious slaps of racing tides, I, last winter, blunter than children’s brains, I ran! No untied Peninsula’s Been trounced by a more triumphant din! The tempest blessed my sea-born awakenings. Lighter than cork, I skipped across rollers called The eternal loop-the-loops of victims, ten nights, Without missing the simpleton stares of lamps!
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Sweeter than tart apple flesh to kids, The green water probed my pine hull And of the stains of blue wines and vomit It scoured me, scattering rudder and grapnel. From then on, I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, Star-infused, lactescent, devouring The verdant blue; where, ghastly and ravished Flotsam, a rapt drowned man at times descends; Where, tinting instantly the bluicities, deliriums And slow rhythms under the day’s rutilations, Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres, The bitter russets of love ferment! I know the sky split with lightning, and the undertows And the currents and the waterspouts; I know the evening, The dawn as glorious as an entire nation of doves, And I’ve seen sometimes what man thought be saw! I’ve seen the sun low, spotted with mystic horrors, Raying forth long violet coagulations,
780 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Like actors in prehistoric plays the whitecaps Flickering into the distance their shutter shudders! I’ve dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows, A kiss rising through the seas’ eyes in slow motion, The circulatory flow of outrageous saps, And the bilious blue arousals of singer phosphors! I’ve followed, for months on end, swells Like exploding stables, battering the reefs, Never dreaming that the Marys’ luminescent feet Could force a muzzle onto wheezing Oceans! I’ve struck, are you aware, incredible Floridas Comingling with flowers the eyes of panthers in the skins Of men! Rainbows arched like bridle-reins Below seas’ horizons, taut to glaucous herds! I’ve seen enormous swamps fermenting, weirs Where in the reeds a whole Leviathan rots! Cave-ins of water in the midst of standing calms, The distances cataracting toward the abysses!
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Glaciers, pearly waves, suns of silver, molten skies! Hideous wrecks in the slime of fuscous gulfs Where gigantic snakes devoured by bugs Drop from twisted trees, squirting black perfumes! I would’ve liked to show children these dorados Of the blue wave, these gold, these singing fish. —Flower foam cradled my berthless driftings And at times I was winged by ineffable winds. Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones, The very sea whose sobbing made my churning sweet Proffered her yellow suckered shadow flowers And I held there, like a woman on her knees . . . Almost an island, tossing off my wales The squabbles and dung of gossipy blond-eyed birds. And so I scudded, while through my frayed Cordage drowned sailors sank sleepwards, back first!
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But now, a boat lost under the hair of coves, Flung by the hurricane into birdless ether, I whose carcass, drunk on water, no Monitor Or Hanseatic schooner would’ve fished out; Free, fuming, risen from violet mists, I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall Bearing—exquisite jam for genuine poets— Solar lichen and azure snot; Who ran, speckled with electric lunules, A crazy plank, by black sea horses escorted, When the Julys with cudgel blows were crushing The ultramarine skies into burning funnels; I who trembled, hearing, at fifty leagues, the whimpers Of Behemoth rutting and turgid Maelstroms, Eternal spinner of blue immobilities, I miss the Europe of age-worn parapets!
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I’ve seen astral archipelagos! and isles Whose raving skies open wide to the voyager: —In those bottomless nights do you sleep, are you exiled, A million golden birds, O Force of the future?— But, truly, I’ve wept too much! Dawns are harrowing. Each moon is atrocious, each sun bitter: Acrid love has swollen me with inebriating torpors. O let my keel burst! O let me be gone to the sea! If there is one Europe I long for, It’s a chill, black puddle where, at the scented end of day, A squatting child, utterly forlorn, Releases a boat fragile as a butterfly in May. No longer will I, bathed in your languors, O waves, Slip into the wakes of cotton carriers, Nor cut across the arrogance of flags and streamers, Nor swim below the prison bulks’ horrific stares. Translation from French by Clayton Eshleman
782 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
S E C O N D D E L I R I U M : A LC H E M Y O F T H E WO R D
Now for me! The story of one of my follies. For a long time I boasted of possessing every possible landscape and held in derision the celebrities of modern painting and poetry. I loved maudlin paintings, decorative panels, stage-sets, the back-drops of mountebanks, old inn signs, popular prints; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books innocent of all spelling, the novels of our ancestors, fairytales, children’s storybooks, antiquated operas, inane refrains and artless rhythms. I dreamed crusades, unrecorded voyages of discovery, republics without a history, religious wars hushed up, revolutions of customs, the displacements of races and continents: I believed in sorcery of every sort. I invented the color of vowels!—A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green.—I regulated the form and the movement of every consonant, and with instinctive rhythms I prided myself on inventing a poetic language accessible some day to all the senses. I reserved all rights of translation. At first it was an experiment. I wrote silences, I wrote the night. I recorded the inexpressible. I fixed frenzies in their flight.
.
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Far from birds and flocks and village girls, What did I drink as I knelt on the heath, A tender hazel copse around me, In the warm green mist of the afternoon? What could I drink in that young Oise, —Voiceless the trees, flowerless the grass, sky overcast!— Drink at those yellow gourds far from my cabin So dear? Liquors of gold that bring heavy sweating. I seemed a sorry sign for an inn. —A storm came chasing the sky away. And virgin sands Drank all the water of the evening woods, God’s wind blew icicles into the ponds; As I wept I saw gold,—and could not drink.
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Morning, summer, four o’clock, Deep still love’s sleep endures. While feted evening’s odors From the green bowers evaporate. Down in their vast woodyards, Under an Hesperian sun, The Carpenters—in shirt sleeves— Toil already; Calm in their Deserts of moss, Precious canopies preparing, Where the city will paint Skies fabulous and false. O, for those charming Workers, Subjects of a Babylonian king, Venus! a moment leave the Lovers Whose souls are wreathed! O queen of Shepherds, bring Spirits of wine to the workers, That their powers be appeased Awaiting the noon swim in the sea.
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. Poetic quaintness played a large part in my alchemy of the word. I became an adept at simple hallucination: in place of a factory I really saw a mosque, a school of drummers composed of angels, carriages on the highways of the sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; the title of a melodrama would raise horrors before me. Then I would explain my magic sophisms with the hallucination of words! Finally I came to regard as sacred the disorder of my mind. I was idle, full of a sluggish fever: I envied the felicity of beasts, caterpillars that represent the innocence of limbo, moles, the sleep of virginity! My temper soured. In kinds of ballads I said farewell to the world: Song of the Highest Tower
O may it come, the time of love, The time we’d be enamoured of.
784 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
I’ve been patient too long, My memory is dead, All fears and all wrongs To the heavens have fled. While all my veins burst With a sickly thirst. O may it come, the time of love, The time we’d be enamoured of. Like the meadow that is dreaming Forgetful of cares, Flourishing and flowering With incense and tares, Where fierce buzzings rise Of the very dirty flies.
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O may it come, the time of love, The time we’d be enamoured of. I loved the desert, dried orchards, faded shops and tepid drinks. I dragged myself through stinking alleys and, eyes closed, I gave myself to the sun, God of fire. “General, if on your ruined ramparts an old cannon remains, bombard us with lumps of dried mud.—On the mirrors of magnificent shops! in drawing-rooms! Make the city grovel in its dust. Oxidize the gargoyles. Fill boudoirs with the burning powder of rubies . . .” Oh! the drunken fly in the inn’s privy, enamoured of borage, dissolved by a sunbeam! Hunger
If I’ve a taste, it’s not alone For the earth and stones, Rocks, coal, iron, air, That’s my daily fare. Roam my hungers, hungers browse In the field on sound, Suck up bindweed’s gay venom Along the ground. Eat the pebbles that one breaks, Churches’ old stones;
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Gravel of ancient deluge taste, And loaves scattered in grey brakes.
. Howling underneath the leaves The wolf spits out the lovely plumes Of his feast of fowls: Like him I am consumed. Salads and fruits Await but the picking; But violets are the food Of spiders in the thicket. Let me sleep! Let me seethe At the altars of Solomon. Broth run over the rust And mix with the Cedron. At last, O happiness, O reason, I brushed from the sky the azure that is darkness, and I lived—gold spark of pure light. Out of joy I took on an expression as comical as possible:
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It is recovered! What? Eternity. It is the sea Mixed with the sun. My soul eternal, Redeem your promise, In spite of the night alone And the day on fire. Of human suffrage, Of common aspirings, You free yourself then! You fly according to . . . Hope never more, No orietur. Science and patience, Retribution is sure. No more tomorrows, Embers of satin, 786 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Your ardor is now Your duty only.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
It is recovered! What? Eternity. It is the sea Mixed with the sun. I became a fabulous opera; I saw that all creatures had a fatality for happiness: action is not life, but only a way of spoiling some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain. It seemed to me that to every creature several other lives were due. This gentleman knows not what he does: he is an angel. This family is a litter of puppies. With several men I have spoken aloud with a moment of one of their other lives. Thus it was I loved a pig. Not a single sophistry of madness—madness to confine—was forgotten: I could recite them all again, I know the system. My health was endangered. Terror came. I would fall into a slumber of days, and getting up would go on with the same sad dreams. I was ripe for death and along a road of perils my weakness led me to the borders of Cimmeria, land of whirlwinds and of darkness. I had to travel, divert the spells assembled in my brain. Over the sea, that I loved as though it were to cleanse me of a stain, I saw the comforting cross arise. I had been damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my worm: my life would always be too enormous to be devoted to force and to beauty. Happiness! Its tooth sweet unto death, warned me at the crowing of the cock,—ad matutinum, at the Christus venit,—in the darkest cities: O seasons, O castles! What soul is without sin! The magic study I’ve made, Of happiness none can evade. To it each time, good luck, We hear the Gallic cock. No more desires for me: It has taken my life in fee. Charmed body, soul and brain Delivered of every strain. O seasons, O castles!
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The hour of flight will be The hour of death for me! O seasons, O castles!
. That is over. Now I know how to greet beauty. Translation from French by Louise Varèse
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B A D B LO O D
I have the blue-white eye of my Gallic ancestors, their narrow skull and their clumsiness in fighting. I find my clothes as barbarous as theirs. Only I don’t butter my hair. The Gauls were the most inept flayers of beasts and scorchers of grass of their time. From them too: idolatry and love of sacrilege; oh! all the vices, anger, lust—lust, magnificent—above all, lying and sloth. I have a horror of all trades. Masters and workers—base peasants all. The hand that guides the pen is worth the hand that guides the plough.— What an age of hands! I shall never have my hand. Afterward domesticity leads too far. The decency of beggars sickens me. Criminals disgust like castrates: as for me, I am intact, and I don’t care. But who gave me so perfidious a tongue that ít has guided and guarded my indolence till now? Without ever making use of my body for anything, and lazier than the toad, I have lived everywhere. Not a family of Europe that I do not know.—I mean families like my own that owe everything to the Declaration of the Rights of Man.—I have known all the sons of respectable families.
. Had I but antecedents at some point in the history of France! But no, nothing. It is quite clear to me that I have always been of an inferior race. I cannot understand revolt. My race never rose except to pillage: like wolves with the beast they have not killed. I remember the history of France, eldest daughter of the Church. A villein, I must have made the journey to the Holy Land; my head is full of roads through the Swabian plains, views of Byzantium, ramparts of Jerusalem: The cult of Mary, compassion for the crucified Christ awake 788 A Third Gallery
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
in me among a thousand profane phantasmagoria.—A leper, I am seated among pot-sherds and nettles, at the foot of a sun-eaten wall.—Later, a reiter, I must have bivouacked under German stars. Ah! again: I dance the witches’ sabbath in a red clearing with old women and children. I can remember no farther back than this very land and Christianity. I shall never have done seeing myself in that past. But always alone; without family; and even the language that I spoke—what was it? I cannot see myself at the councils of Christ; nor at the councils of Lords—representatives of Christ. What was I in the last century? I find no trace again until today. No more vagabonds, no more vague wars. The inferior race has over-run everything: the people—as we say the nation, reason, science. Oh! Science! Everything has been revised. For the body and for the soul,—the viaticum,—there is medicine and philosophy,—old wives’ remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the pastimes of princes and games they proscribed! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry! . . . Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it turn? It is the vision of numbers. We are going toward the Spirit. There’s no doubt about it, an oracle, I tell you. I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.
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. Pagan blood returns! The Spirit is near; why doesn’t Christ help me by granting my soul nobility and liberty? Alas! The gospel has gone by! The gospel! The gospel. Greedily I await God. I am of an inferior race for all eternity. Here I am on the Breton shore. Let the towns light up in the evening. My day is done; I’m quitting Europe. Sea air will burn my lungs; strange climates will tan my skin. To swim, to trample the grass, to hunt, and above all to smoke; to drink liquors strong as boiling metal,—like my dear ancestors around their fires. I’ll return with limbs of iron, dark skin and furious eye; people will think to look at me that I am of a strong race. I will have gold: I will be idle and brutal. Women nurse those fierce invalids, home from hot countries. I’ll be mixed up in politics. Saved. Now I am an outcast. I loathe the fatherland. A very drunken sleep on the beach, that’s best.
. Arthur Rimbaud 789 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
We’re not going.—Back over the old roads again, laden with my vice, the vice whose roots of suffering have flourished at my side since reason dawned,—that lifts to the skies, belabours me, knocks me down, drags me along. The last innocence and the last timidity. It is said. Not to display my betrayals and disgusts to the world. Forward! The march, the burden and the desert, weariness and anger. To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies should I uphold? In what blood tread? Rather steer clear of the law.—The hard life, simple brutishness,—to lift with withered fist the coffin’s lid, to sit, to smother myself. And thus no old age, no dangers: terror is not French. —Ah! I am so utterly forsaken that to any divine image whatsoever, I offer my impulses toward perfection. O my abnegation, O my marvelous charity! here below, however! De profundis, Domine, what a fool I am!
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. Still but a child, I admired the intractable convict on whom the prison doors are always closing; I sought out the inns and rooming houses he might have consecrated by his passing; with his idea I saw the blue sky, and labour flowering the country; in cities I sensed his doom. He had more strength than a saint, more common sense than a traveler—and he, he alone! the witness of his glory and his reason. On highroads on winter nights, without roof, without clothes, without bread, a voice gripped my frozen heart: “Weakness or strength: why, for you it is strength. You do not know where you are going, nor why you are going; enter anywhere, reply to anything. They will no more kill you than if you were a corpse.” In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me. In cities, suddenly, the mud seemed red or black like a mirror when the lamp moves about in the adjoining room, like a treasure in the forest! Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke in the sky; to the right, to the left all the riches of the world flaming like a billion thunder-bolts. But to me debauch and the comradeship of women were denied. Not even a companion. I saw myself before an infuriated mob, facing the firing-squad, weeping out of pity for their being unable to understand, and forgiving!—Like Jeanne d’Arc!—“Priests, professors, masters, you are
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making a mistake in turning me over to the law. I have never belonged to this people; I have never been a Christian; I am of the race that sang under torture; laws I have never understood; I have no moral sense, I am a brute: you are making a mistake.” Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, wildmen, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drunk of the untaxed liquor of Satan’s still.—Fever and cancer inspire this people. Cripples and old men are so respectable they are fit to be boiled.—The smartest thing would be to leave this continent where madness stalks to provide hostages for these wretches. I enter the true kingdom of Ham. Do I know nature yet? Do I know myself?—No more words. I bury the dead in my belly. Shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance, dance! I cannot even see the time when, white men landing, I shall fall into nothingness. Hunger, thirst, shouts, dance, dance, dance, dance!
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. The white men are landing! The cannon! We must submit to baptism, we must put on clothes, we must work. My heart has known the stroke of grace. Ah! I did not foresee it. I have never done evil. Light will my days be and I shall be spared repentance. I shall not have known the torments of the soul half dead to good, whence like funeral candles a grave flame ascends. The fate of the sons of respectable families, the premature coffin covered with limpid tears. Certainly debauch is stupid, vice is stupid; all that is rotten must be cast aside. But the clock will not have succeeded in striking only the hour of pure pain! Am I to be carried off like a child, to play in Paradise forgetful of all sorrow? Quick! Are there other lives?—Sleep in wealth is impossible. Wealth has always been public property. The keys of knowledge are the gifts of divine love alone. I see that nature is but the display of goodness. Farewell chimeras, ideals, errors! The reasonable song of angels rises from the saviour ship: it is divine love. Two loves! I can die of earthly love, die of human devotion. I have abandoned souls whose pain will be increased by my going! Among the ship-wrecked you choose me; those who remain, they’re my friends, aren’t they? Save them!
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Reason is born to me. The world is good. I will bless life. I will love my brothers. These are no longer childish promises. Nor the hope of escaping old age and death. God is my strength and I praise God.
. Boredom is no longer my love. Rages, debauchery, madness,—I have known all their soarings and their disasters.—My whole burden is laid down. Let us contemplate undazed the extent of my innocence. I would no longer be capable of begging the solace of a bastinado. I don’t fancy myself embarked on a wedding with Jesus Christ as father-in-law. I am not a prisoner of my reason. I said: God. I want freedom in salvation: how am I to seek it? Frivolous tastes have left me. No more need of human devotion nor of divine love. No more regrets for the age of tender hearts. Each of us has his reason, scorn and charity; I reserve my place at the top of that angelic ladder of common sense. As for established happiness, domestic or not . . . no, I cannot. I am too dissipated, too weak. Life flourishing through toil, old platitude! As for me, my life is not heavy enough, it flies and floats far above action, that dear mainstay of the world. What an old maid I am getting to be, lacking the courage to be in love with death! If only God granted me celestial, aerial calm, prayer,—like the ancient Saints.—Saints, they’re the strong ones! Anchorites, artists such as are not wanted any more! Farce without end? My innocence would make me weep. Life is the farce we all have to lead.
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.
. Enough! Here is the punishment.—Forward, march! Ah! My lungs are on fire, my temples roar! In this sunlight night rolls through my eyes: Heart . . . Limbs . . . Where are we going? To battle? I am weak! The others advance. Tools, weapons . . . time! . . . Fire! Fire on me! Here! Or I surrender.—Cowards!—I’ll kill myself! I’ll throw myself under the horses’ hoofs! Ah! . . . —I shall get used to it. It would be the French way of life, the path of honor! Translation from French by Louise Varèse
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Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
FAREWELL
Autumn already!—But why regret an eternal sun if we are embarked on the discovery of divine light—far from all those who die with the seasons. Autumn. Risen through the motionless mists, our boat turns toward the port of misery, the enormous city with fire-and-mud-stained sky. Ah, the putrid rags, the rain-soaked bread, drunkenness, the thousand loves that have crucified me! Will she never have done, then, that ghoul queen of a million dead souls and dead bodies, and that will be judged! I see myself again, skin rotten with mud and pest, worms in my armpits and in my hair, and in my heart much bigger worms, lying among strangers without age, without feeling . . . I might have died there . . . Unbearable evocation! I loathe poverty. And I dread winter because it is the season of comfort! Sometimes in the sky I see endless beaches covered with white nations full of joy. Above me a great golden ship waves its multi-colored pennants in the breezes of the morning. I created all possible festivities, all triumphs, all dramas. I tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues. I thought I was acquiring supernatural powers. Well! I must bury my imagination and my memories! An artist’s and storyteller’s precious fame flung away! I! I who called myself angel or seer, exempt from all morality, I am returned to the soil with a duty to seek and rough reality to embrace! Peasant! Am I mistaken? Would charity be the sister of death for me? At last, I shall ask forgiveness for having fed on lies. And now let’s go. But no friendly hand! And where turn for help!
. Yes, the new hour is hard enough. For I can say that victory is won: the gnashing of teeth, the hissings of fire, the pestilential sighs are abating. All the noisome memories are fading. My last regrets take to their heels,—envy of beggars, thieves, of death’s friends, of the backward of all kinds. O damned ones, what if I avenged myself! One must be absolutely modern. No hymns! Hold the ground gained. Arduous night! The dried blood smokes on my face, and I have nothing behind me but that horrible bush! . . . Spiritual combat is as brutal as the battle of men: but the vision of justice is the pleasure of God alone.
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This, however, is the vigil. Welcome then, all the influx of vigor and real tenderness. And, in the dawn, armed with an ardent patience, we shall enter magnificent cities. Why talk of a friendly hand! It’s all to my advantage that I can laugh at old lying loves and put to shame those deceitful couples,—I saw the hell of women back there;—and I shall be free to possess truth in one soul and one body. Translation from French by Louise Varèse
COMMENTARY
The poet is really a thief of fire. Humanity, and even the animals, are his burden; he must make sure his inventions live and breathe; if what he finds down below has a form, he offers form: if it is formless, he offers formlessness. Find the words.
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A. R., letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871
(1) For Rimbaud that fire—in the few years before his self-prophesized burnout—brought a personalization & living-through of what for others had been the literary, generally unacted rudiments of a visionary poetics. While still an adolescent he entered a life of poetry-as-vision with an acute sense of immediate antecedents (a move, as he saw it, from poet to seer [voyant]) that he divided for the generations before him into two romanticisms; thus: “The first romantics were seers without even realizing it: their soul’s education began by accident: abandoned trains still smoking occasionally taking to the tracks. . . . The second romantics are true seers: Th. Gautier, Lec. de Lisle, Th. de Banville. But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead: Baudelaire is therefore first among seers, the king of poets, a true God. And yet even he lived in too aestheticized a world; and the forms for which he is praised are really quite trite: the inventions of the unknown demand new forms” (letter to Paul Demeny, trans. Wyatt Mason). And it was right there, in his demand for new forms as the mark of the emerging seer-poet (the prose poems of A Season in Hell and Illuminations his great contribution), that he opened poetry—much like Blake before him—to what Kenneth Rexroth describes as the idea (new & old at once) “that the poet is an all-powerful shaman and seer, capable of altering the very nature of reality.” And further (Rexroth again): “What did Rimbaud accomplish in poetry? He developed, refined, and pushed to its final forms the basic technique of all verse that has been written since in the idiom of international modernism—the radical disassociation, analysis, and recombination of all the material elements of poetry. . . . More important by far, however, the ultimate materials, psychological, descriptive, dramatic—the things the poetry is ‘about’—are shattered beyond recognition and recombined into forms that establish
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the conviction of a new and different order of reality. The subject and the poetic situation are liquidated. It is impossible to say who the actors in the room are, or where they are, or what is happening to them—not in terms of any pattern of the real world brought to the poem from previous experience. . . . The poem is closed within its own dramaturgy.” It was from this, of course, that he also retreated—away from poetry & into Africa, the gun trade, cancer, amputation, death. (2) (From letter to Georges Izambard, May 13, 1871:) “Right now I’m depraving myself as much as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working at making myself a visionary: you won’t understand at all, and I’m not even sure I can explain it to you. The problem is to attain the unknown by disorganizing all the senses. The suffering is immense, but you have to be strong, and to have been born a poet. And I have realized that I am a poet. It’s not my doing at all. It’s wrong to say: I think. Better to say: I am thought. Pardon the pun. “I is an other. So what if a piece of wood discovers it’s a violin, and the hell with those who can’t realize, who quibble over something they know nothing at all about!” (translation from French by Paul Schmidt). (For more of which, see also the letter to Paul Demeny in Manifestos & Poetics.)
J u les L a f orgu e
1860–1887
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Dans la pièce les femmes vont et viennent En parlant des maîtres de Sienne In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo Translation from French by T. S. Eliot
PIERROTS (Scène courte mais typique)
Your eyes! Since I lost their incandescence Flat calm engulphs my jibs, The shudder of Vae soli gurgles beneath my ribs. You should have seen me after the affray, I rushed about in the most agitated way Crying: My God, my God, what will she say?!
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My soul’s antennae are prey to such perturbations, Wounded by your indirectness in these situations And your bundle of mundane complications. Your eyes put me up to it. I thought: Yes, divine, these eyes, but what exists Behind them? What’s there? Her soul’s an affair for oculists. And I am sliced with loyal aesthetics. Hate tremolos and national frenetics. In brief, violet is the ground tone of my phonetics.* I am not “that chap there” nor yet “The Superb” But my soul, the sort which harsh sounds disturb, Is, at bottom, distinguished and fresh as a March herb. My nerves still register the sounds of “contra-bass,” I can walk about without fidgeting when people pass, Without smirking into a pocket-looking-glass. Yes, I have rubbed shoulders and knocked off my chips Outside your set but, having kept faith in your eyes, You might pardon such slips.
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Eh, make it up? Soothings, confessions; These new concessions Hurl me into such a mass of divergent impressions. *N.B. To amend it sometime to “. . . and yet my local color is violet.” E. P. Translation from French by Ezra Pound
COMPLAINT ON THE OBLIVION OF THE DEAD
Ladies and gentlemen Whose mother is no more, The old gravedigger Scratches at your door. Six feet down Is a dead man’s place; He hardly ever Shows his face.
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You blow smoke into your beer, You wind up your love affair, Yonder crows chanticleer, Poor dead beyond the pale! His finger at his temple, Look at Grandpa half asleep, Sister busy with her knitting, Mother turning up the lamp. One who is dead Is quite discreet, He goes to bed Right in the street. The meal was good, was it? Now how is everything? The little stillborn Get almost no fondling.
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On one side of your ledger Enter the cost of the dance; On the other, the undertaker’s fee To make your books balance. Life’s a ditty With a hey-nonny-no. Eh what, my pretty, Do you find it so? Ladies and gentlemen, Whose sister is no more, Open up for the gravedigger Who raps at your door. Show him no pity, He will come all the same To drag you out by the heels When the moon is full. Importunate wind, Howl on. Where are the dead? They’re gone. Translation from French by William Jay Smith
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THE COMING OF WINTER
Sentimental blockade! Cargoes due from the East! . . . Oh, rainfall! Oh, nightfall! Oh, wind! Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s, Oh, my smokestacks lost in the drizzle, all My factory smokestacks! Where can one sit? The park benches are dripping and wet; The season is over, I can tell you it’s true; The woods are so rusty, the benches so dripping and wet, And the horns so insistent with their constant halloo! . . .
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Ah, clouds pouring in from the Channel all day, You have come to spoil our last Sunday! The drizzle goes on; In the sodden forest spider webs Bend with the weight of raindrops and fall to ruin. O Sun, potentate of the golden air And the country fair, Where are you buried? Tonight a dying sun lies at the crest of the hill, In the broom reposes on his side, his coat, As white as the spit in some barroom, He lies on a litter of yellow broom, Yellow autumn broom. And the horns call to him To revive, To come to! Tallyho! Tallyho! Halloo! Halloo! Oh, tragic anthem, when will you have done?— And the horns sound cuckoo! . . . And the sun, unattended, lies trembling off there Like a gland ripped from the throat! . . . Let us cry Halloo; let us cry Tallyho! Good old winter is back, heigh-ho! And, oh, the wide and winding road With no trace of Little Red Riding Hood! . . . Oh, those cart tracks left from a happier time— In don-quixotic rails they climb
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Toward cloud patrols the wind has rolled Back to their transatlantic fold! . . . Let us hurry, hurry, hurry—here’s the season we know. And the wind last night did a fine job, too, Ripping up nests and lovely green gardens! In my heart, in my sleep, I hear the blows of the axe! . . . Green were the leaves on every bough, But the thicket is a muck of dead leaves now; O leaves and leaflets, may a good wind bear You off in swarms to some muddy pond Or may you find your way to some gamekeeper’s fire Or pad the mattress in an ambulance For soldiers who are far from France. Now is the time when rust invades the masses, When rust gnaws into the kilometric spleen Of telegraph wires on roads where no one passes.
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The horns, the horns,—the sad, Sad horns! . . . They go on and on now changing their tone, Changing their tone and changing their tune, Ton-ton, ton-ton, ton-tone! . . . Away on the north wind now is borne The sound of the horns, the sad, sad horns. But the echo remains; for I cannot change tone! . . . This is the season; now vintage is done! . . . Now come the rains so impossibly slow; Good-bye wicker panniers, Watteau panniers, too, That danced in the groves when harvest was through; This is the time of the dormitory cough, Herb tea drunk far from the family hearth, The time when consumption will cast its pall, And misery settle over all. O flannels, hotwater bottles, pharmaceuticals, dreams, Curtains parted on balconies along the strand Before an ocean of suburban roofs, O lamps and engravings, cakes and tea, Have you alone remained faithful to me? . . . (Oh, you and the sound of the lovely piano
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And the sober, hebdomadal mystery Of the vital statistics Evening newspapers carry!) This is the season, and the faltering planet! Let the wild south wind Unravel the slippers being knitted by Time. This is the season—oh, heartbreak!—the season! Every year without fail I will try, as in chorus, to sound its note. Translation from French by William Jay Smith
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from L A N D S C A P E S A N D I M P R E S S I O N S
Summer Landscape. The hot Sun at its zenith weeps ingots like the clappers of bells; and thirsty for the breezes of the meadow, and the smell of water cress, it invisibly absorbs water from the springs, the springs of the countryside, which have been writhing with discomfort as they work out their destinies through this horrid day; from afar, the sun watches flocks of motes rise through the air, and cooled and comforted at the sight, ceases drinking and the water hovers then in black sheets steaming from this spasmodic christening. In black sheets thick with storm clouds and fertilized by latent thunders, sheets that twist like invalids on their mattresses, that drift, stretch themselves, sniff one another amorously, lustingly, and thrust one another back for fear of final catastrophe. . . . Like eyes in death agony the leaves revolve on their stalks, branches pulsate like arteries choked by terrible temperatures, the meadow darkens like an angry peacock’s tail, like the comb of a blinded cock, or the face of some lost balloonist who has sailed beyond the earth’s orbit; inventing inexhaustibly lamentable pretexts, the winds seek one another out: man feels afflicted. Gone is the sacramental sun, gone with a wholly somnambulistic air. Love’s simoon makes its round. The pupils of one’s eyes are dilated, moist temples beat like drums, supplications are choked in burning throats, hands heavy with faith wander idly about, lips mad with thirst come down upon lips that are even madder with thirst, more withered and dry. . . . Is there no way to set you free, O cool corrosive dew? Is there no cork your liquid waves can strike against and thrust out? Poor desperate miners buried underground as they dug their tunnel, their lamps have gone out, and one can hear the picks of the pioneers from the other side, with only one wall remaining between. . . . Two lightning
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flashes have whistled through the air, interlacing like flashing snakes, thunder tears the temple veil and the fan of love’s cloudburst descends upon the breathless meadows like the speckled hawk upon an ocean wedged with ingots of faith, descends with a silver sound of rain on a boat lost in a lake. Water runs down leaves and eyes, dissolving the salt of sweat, drowning the eyes. Spring Evening on the Boulevards. Sitting on a bench one evening in spring on the great boulevards, near the Variétés. A café streaming with gas. A prostitute dressed all in red going from beer to beer. On the second floor, a room quite somber and quiet with a few lamps and tables over which heads were bent, a little study. On the third floor, adazzle with gas, all the windows open, flowers, perfumes, a dance in progress. One can’t hear the music for the din of the street swarming with cabs and people, with the corridors devouring and vomiting people incessantly, and the hawking of programs in front of the Variétés. . . . But one can see, gliding past in front of these ten windows, men in black tails with white shirt fronts, revolving to the music, holding ladies, blue, pink, lilac, white, holding them ever so lightly, so correctly, one can see them pass, repass, with serious, unsmiling faces (but one can’t hear the music they follow). Several pimps wander by; one says to the other: “She made ten francs, old boy . . .” From the Variétés, a crowd swarms out during intermission; and the hell of the boulevard continues, the cabs, the cafés, the gas, the shopwindows, more and more pedestrians—more prostitutes filing by under the harsh lights of the cafés. . . . Near me a newspaper stall and two women chatting; one says: “She certainly won’t last the night, that one, and my kid caught it from hers.” Buses filled with members of both sexes, each with his or her own feelings, troubles, vices. And above it all, the gentle, eternal stars. Parisian Landscape. Boulevard Bourdon—along the canal which empties through a black, choked-up subterranean hole into the swarming Seine—passing in a dark gully on beyond the Place de la Bastille—sixstory houses rising in isolation with their tiers of six windows—on the lower level a wineshop and restaurant with closed shutters, with no sign posted anywhere—can it be for sale? On the right side of the house, facing the empty horizon and the endless lumberyards with their stacks of logs, a huge billboard presents on a background of wash-water blue, an enormous fierce moronic musketeer holding in his right arm a flash of Vicat insecticide and in the other a powerful bellows that kills lice, cockroaches, and fleas, enlarged as if by a microscope.
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On the opposite side of the canal are other isolated abandoned houses encircled by balconies; on one side, displayed as in a cross section linked by two Venetian bridges, lie the bowels of the inner courtyard with the dish-rag gray windows of the kitchens. From the factories smoke billows forth in black clouds or in white streams. And beyond, the great rolling waves of the heavens made more tragic by the sight of a woman emerging to shake out a rug from her seventh-floor balcony. And life along the canal—vaults of the customs agents, heaps of casks and barrels on the towpath—lorries waiting—others arriving, others departing, while a whip cracks through the air. Then to the left like a series of circumflex accents a long row of open hangars, and below them in an etching entangled with wooden frames, the activity of the casks—dock workers hooded with gray sacks, people loading barges. There were only lorries on this street, lorries not heavily loaded but giving the impression of being so as they lumbered along, while the cobblestones sounded hollow beneath them, so hollow that it gave one a sinking feeling in the stomach. A Hot Stagnant Evening. One’s feet are baking, one can feel the arteries throbbing in one’s ankles, under one’s chin, in the heart, the wrists; one raises up hands that are already swollen and wet, the least little meal weighs one down, one must undo one’s necktie, one breathes so deeply that the cigarette stuck to the corner of one’s mouth is consumed in twelve puffs, one’s skin is wringing wet. . . . How unhappy I would be if I had breasts and were a nurse? Or if I were one of those military musicians laced tight in a uniform, and had to blow into a trombone in some bandstand. Ah, to be a fly on the wet tile floor of some provincial kitchen! Or rather a passive sponge, a branch of coral encrusted at the bottom of the sea, watching the parade of submarine nature, or a blue cornflower on a piece of Delft china perched above a pile of stoles, in the cool, dark back room of an antique shop on the banks of the Sequana! Or a flower in the chintz of the bare prim parlor of an old maid in Quimper . . . or a heron . . . A Workroom. Somewhat like an elevator shaft. Cabs on Autumn Nights. The cabs one takes in autumn in the middle of the night; . . . bakeries opening slyly like houses of ill fame; crossing Paris
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as it awakens. . . . The quais rousing to their wretched life, the stations already seething and throbbing with chaotic activity . . . Departure: in the bracing air—the black bridges; the suburbs like lacquer etched over with smudges of genius. The first shrubs, black clouds of smoke, gangs of workmen watching one pass, with folded arms, wind full on their cadaverous faces twinkling in space.
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Twilight. Twilight. . . . From the houses I pass come the smells of cooking and the rattle of plates. People are preparing to dine and then go to bed or to the theatre. . . . Ah, too long have I hardened myself against tears; I can be a terrific coward now in the face of the stars! And all this is without end, without end. Beaten-down horses drag their heavy carts along the streets—women wander by—gentlemen greet one another with polite smiles. . . . And the earth whirls on. Noon. One half the earth lit by the sun, the other half black and spotted with fire, gas, resin or candle flame. . . . In one place people are fighting, there are massacres; in another, there is an execution, in another, a robbery. . . . Below, men are sleeping, dying . . . the black ribbons of funeral processions winding toward the yew trees . . . endless. And with all this on its back, how can the enormous earth go on hurtling through eternal space with the terrible rapidity of a lightning flash? Sunday Morning. On a Sunday morning, after a week of intermittent rain, the sky, although decked out for the sabbath, retained its calm. Everyone had been to church; local couples in their Sunday best, before returning home, were taking a turn around the Kurtgarten: few foreigners had as yet appeared . . . the shops were still but half open. On the sidewalk cafés, tables were stacked up at one side with the central area left empty; to the rear there was some activity around the counter. English ladies were lunching under the awning—with phials of exotic pepper; exclamations would rise from the tables, followed by silence and the sound of working jaws. Here things were lively, what with the flowers in the ladies’ hats and on their tables—farther along, here and there, men sat by themselves having coffee, bored, their canes between their knees, their cigars dangling from their lips, twirling their scarlet or yellow gloves: the polyglot waiters moved with a bored manner among them: a family came in looking for a table, staring at everyone, while everyone stared back. All attention was nervously fixed on dress and appearance. There was a slight wind. Suddenly in the distance against a sunlit green background
Jules Laforgue 803 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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a woman opened a red umbrella and a man unfolded an immense copy of the Times. The whole horizon was a circle of green; in the distance rose the mountains, to the right and left, tall trees: in the foreground, the lawn with its palmettos, each white wrought-iron leaf of which held a gas globe. Suddenly, from the direction of the hotels, a cracked and hollow luncheon bell rang out. Then another; and another. To the right, a row of chairs around the bandleader’s box. A stiff handsome helmeted officer ambles past with a lady on his arm. A bitter Sunday it was: they were strolling along chatting. There was something in the air of that special Sunday sadness after the firing parties of the night before. She had about her that unreasoned sullen sadness of the typical beautiful woman whose constant preoccupation is her beauty, and who feels that she is passing through one of those days of non-beauty familiar to them all. The wind was rising, growing stronger, curling up the leaves on the heavy shrubbery, irritating the gentlemen who tried to unfold their newspapers. A churchbell rang out loud and clear in the distance, borne by the wind from the country. Far off a paper kite was flying, signalling the approach of autumn. A group of foreign ladies and gentlemen were conversing in a combination of Russian, English, and German, with volleys in French from a gay Parisian woman who looked up from a preparation of peach, sugar, and lemon that she stirred in a saucer—and when she had finished, instead of drinking this mixture, she washed her fingers in it, then drew on her gloves again, leaned back, and began to babble. The group was greeted by two Englishmen in tight-fitting jackets who, as they bowed, revealed distinct parts in their hair going from forehead to the nape of the neck. The fountain had died down, and when its rippling had ceased, the only noise came from the wind in the leaves. They were chatting: he chasing trifles with his cane, she dreaming of one thing and another, seeming to say from the depth of her empty existence: “Ah, what brutes these humans are!” Translation from French by William Jay Smith
COMMENTARY
I forget about rhyme, forget about the number of syllables, I forget about the break-up of stanzas, my lines begin at the margin like prose. The old regular stanza comes back in only when it can be in the form of a popular quatrain, etc. J. L.
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(1) Typical of him to announce his part in the most significant opening of poetic form in his time as a lapse of consciousness & will (actually a rejection of ego control over poetry & formal abstractions). In 1886, a year before launching a series of vers libre poems (the first by a major poet in French), he completed a translation, also in free verse, of Whitman’s poetry. His Last Poems, written throughout in vers libre, were capacious enough to acknowledge variety, multiplicity, & necessary conflict in the modern world, a visual image of contemporary life compounded of many verbal domains—popular culture & song, street slang, biology, medicine, philosophy, advertisement. Master of a collage poetry of his own making, he pushed his strange, disembodied juxtapositions even further by peppering his work with neologisms & assorted word-plays. (His early poetry, such as the Complaints & The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon, had worked much the same vision though in more traditional lines & strophes.) But all of his writing in fact was antibourgeois & iconoclastic, often evoking familiar nineteenth-century topoi in order to subvert them—his poetry alive as well to social issues, notably the degradation of women & the natural world. Like Baudelaire & Zola among his near contemporaries, he saw the intimate connections between the visual & verbal arts. The Impressionist painters, as major players in his world, became the subject of his acute commentary but also an influence on his poetics. The impressionist eye (rather than the mimetic one, which he opposed) saw the world “naturally,” as it really is, which meant, he wrote, “in multiple gradations of prismatic color.” And again: “The work will never be equivalent to fugitive reality,” to “incessantly undulatory life.” It was only a short leap from this to his characteristic irregularities in line length & rhymings. (2) Laforgue was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, grew up in France, lived mostly—as a reader for the empress Augusta—in Germany (where he wrote much of his best work), & married an English woman. Pitched toward the social periphery, nomadic, ill (dying of tuberculosis at twenty-six), he constructed voices without a center, surface figures, clowns (“Pierrots”), one of whom he once called a “lunar dandy”—a Baudelairian figure participating in the cold, reflective light of the moon. His poems obsess over the same topics—motley, quotidian references to urban life & culture: “Pierrot,” Sundays, the Moon, Horns, Hamlet. Often self-conscious to distraction, his clowns & clownlike speakers clearly anticipate & color the early poetry of Pound & T. S. Eliot, the latter of whom declared: “I owe [to Laforgue] more than to any one poet in any language.” And the former: “Laforgue is incontrovertible.” (3) “A lunar reveler am I, / Making ripples in a pool; / The only end I have in view / To be the subject of a myth” (Laforgue).
Jules Laforgue 805 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
S O M E
O R I E N TAL I SM S Prologue
One must not turn one’s back on the mysterious and the unknown. The rare moments when myth consents to grab you by the throat . . . to seek entry among the everyday facts of life . . . ; the hallucinated minutes that can nonetheless be measured with a watch, whose ticking then resounds over the years: none of this ought to be neglected.
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V. S E G A L E N
The subversive gap in the nineteenth-century colonialist drive for control over non-European peoples appeared in the domain of culture, & particularly of poetry. That is, “orientalism” had a double inflection: the colonization of peoples mostly from the Middle East, North Africa, & India but also including China & the Far East, & the objectivizing of the exotic Other. Yet the sheer acknowledgment of the Other instilled a vision of what Victor Segalen, writing from the 1870s onward, called “le divers” & produced in readers the capacity to revel in these multiple differences. At the end of the eighteenth century the plethora of new information about the East “put into doubt the basic legitimacy of the Christian state and cut to the heart of anxieties about European power and identity” (Nigel Leask). If governments thought of the outcome of colonialism as appropriation of other cultures & economies, poets, often inventing or emulating the Other’s voice, would typically seize the “orientalist” occasion as the horizon beyond the familiar, the locus, in Emily Dickinson’s phrase, of the “unreportable place,” unknown myths, unknown subjectivities. The East not only represented diversity, it also—in the hands of Sir William Jones (page 402), Gottfried Herder, Friedrich & August von Schlegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, & others—contained “the sources” of religion & language in the West: for example, Friedrich von Schlegel, Germany’s first competent Sanskritist, looked to India for the origin of European languages, & his brother August saw Indian religion as the likely source underlying all religions. Goethe’s interest in Islam & Emerson’s in Hinduism are further instances of the pervasive attraction of Western poets to Eastern spirituality. Nowhere, exclaimed the Indic encyclopedist Friedrich Majer, has the “eternal, infinite, self-sustaining Being” (here called Brahma) been described “in more beautiful truth and splendour than in those bewitching countries that in all probability
806 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
1757–1827
from T H E B O O K O F L O S : A S I A
The Kings of Asia heard The howl rise up from Europe, And each ran out from his Web, From his ancient woven Den; For the darkness of Asia was startled At the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc. And the Kings of Asia stood And crièd in bitterness of soul:— “Shall not the King call for Famine from the heath, Nor the Priest for Pestilence from the fen, To restrain, to dismay, to thin
William Blake 807 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
OR I E N TA L I S M S
William Blake
S OM E
were the cradle of humanity and the first workshop of God on earth.” This turn toward origins fed the Romantic drive for the recovery of basic human energies, the sources of life made inaccessible through centuries of kings & through modern bourgeois society. In this regard orientalism joined with the resurgence of interest in Greco-Roman & Hebraic myths & images (included here is Byron’s Hebrew Melodies—a culture & people then often viewed as oriental), with a notable stress on myths of passion & the erotic. Drawing on sources from Indian religion, Friedrich von Schlegel launched (at times in the spirit of Blake, for whose figure of Asia in The Book of Los, see below) a compelling account of visionary Romantic poetics. The Indian “doctrine of Emanation,” Schlegel wrote, includes “the eternal progressive development of the Divinity, and of universal spiritual animation.” And he continued: “True [modern] poetry [emerges] when art has annexed so much to the original germ, becomes so only when it breathes a kindred spirit with those old heathen fictions, or because it springs from them.” Such poetry “contemplate[s] the inner life of that mythology.” The section that follows focuses on original works of poetry, while examples of largely translative work, both from the “Orient” & elsewhere, appears in A Book of Origins, above. A small section of parallel works by nineteenth-century Asian poets begins on page 279.
OR I E N TA L I S M S S OM E
The inhabitants of mountain and plain, In the day of full-feeding prosperity And the night of delicious songs? Shall not the Counsellor throw his curb Of Poverty on the laborious, To fix the price of labour, To invent allegoric riches? And the privy admonishers of men Call for Fires in the City, For heaps of smoking ruins, In the night of prosperity and wantonness, To turn man from his path, To restrain the child from the womb, To cut off the bread from the city; That the remnant may learn to obey,
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That the pride of the heart may fail, That the lust of the eyes may be quench’d, That the delicate ear in its infancy May be dull’d, and the nostrils clos’d up, To teach Mortal Worms the path That leads from the gates of the Grave?” Urizen heard them cry, And his shudd’ring, waving wings Went enormous above the red flames, Drawing clouds of despair thro’ the Heavens Of Europe as he went. And his Books of brass, iron, and gold Melted over the land as he flew, Heavy-waving, howling, weeping. And he stood over Judaea, And stay’d in his ancient place, And stretch’d his clouds over Jerusalem; For Adam, a mouldering skeleton, Lay bleach’d on the garden of Eden; And Noah, as white as snow, On the mountains of Ararat.
808 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Then the thunders of Urizen bellow’d aloud From his woven darkness above.
OR I E N TA L I S M S
Orc, raging in European darkness, Arose like a pillar of fire above the Alps, Like a serpent of fiery flame! The sullen Earth Shrunk! Forth from the dead dust, rattling bones to bones Join. Shaking, convuls’d, the shiv’ring Clay breathes, And all Flesh naked stands: Fathers and Friends, Mothers and Infants, Kings and Warriors. The Grave shrieks with delight, and shakes Her hollow womb, and clasps the solid stem: Her bosom swells with wild desire; And milk and blood and glandous wine In rivers rush, and shout and dance, On mountain, dale, and plain. The Song of Los is ended Urizen Wept.
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Joha n n Wolf gan g von G o e t h e
1749–1832
ARABIAN BALLAD After William Jones’s translation from Arabic
Under the rock on the trail He lies slain Into whose blood No dew falls A great load laid he on me And died; God knows, this load Will I lift.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 809 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
OR I E N TA L I S M S S OM E
Heir of my revenge Is my sister’s son, The warlike, The irreconcileable. Mute sweats he poison, As the otter sweats; As the snake breathes venom Against which no enchantment avails The stern message came to us Of the heavy woe; The stoutest had they Overpowered. Me had Destiny plundered Striking down my friend, Whose dearest friend Was left unhurt.
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Sunshine was he On the cold day, And when the dogstar burned He was shade & coolness. Dry were his hips Not slow; Moist his hand, Bold & strong. With firm mind Followed he his aim Until he rested, Then rested also the firm mind. The rain cloud was he Imparting gifts; And, when he attacked, The terrible lion. Stately before men, Black haired, long-robed, When rushing on the foe A lean wolf—
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Two cups offered he, Honey and wormwood; Fare of such kind Tasted each.
OR I E N TA L I S M S
Terrible rode he alone; No man accompanied him; Like the sword of Yemen, With teeth adorned. At noon we young men set forth On the war trail Rode all night Like sweeping clouds without rest Every one was a sword Girt with a sword; Out of the sheath drawn A glancing lightning
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They sipped the spirit of sleep, But, when they nodded their heads, We smote them, And they were away Our vengeance was complete. There escaped of two tribes Quite little, The least. And when the Hudselite Had broken his lance to kill his man The man with his lance Slew the Hudselite. On a rough resting place They laid him,— On a sharp rock, where the very camels Broke their paws. When the morning greeted him there, The murdered, on the grim place, Was he robbed, The booty carried away.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 811 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
OR I E N TA L I S M S S OM E
But now are murdered by me The Hudseleites with deep wounds; Pity makes me not unhappy Itself is murdered. The spear’s thirst was assuaged With the first drink; To it was not denied Repeated drinks. Now is wine again permitted Which first was forbidden: With much toil I won this permission. To sword & spear, And to horse, gave I This favor, Which is now the good of all.
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Reach then the bowl, O Sawab Ben Amre! Since my body, at the command of my uncle Is now one great wound. And the cup of death Reached we to the Hudseleites Whose working is wo, Blindness, & ruin. Then laughed the hyenas At the death of the Hudseleites; And thou sawest the wolves Whose faces shone. The noblest vultures flew thither They stepped from corpse to corpse And from the richly prepared feast They could not rise into the air. Manuscript translation from German by Ralph Waldo Emerson
812 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
1788–1824
OR I E N TA L I S M S
from T H E G I A O U R : L E I L A A S G A Z E L L E
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S OM E
G eo rge G ord on , L ord By ro n
Her eye’s dark charm ’t were vain to tell, But gaze on that of the Gazelle, It will assist thy fancy well; As large, as languishingly dark, But Soul beam’d forth in every spark That darted from beneath the lid, Bright as the jewel of Giamschid. Yea, Soul, and should our prophet say That form was nought but breathing clay, By Alla! I would answer nay; Though on Al-Sirat’s arch I stood, Which totters o’er the fiery flood, With Paradise within my view, And all his Houris beckoning through. Oh! Who young Leila’s glance could read And keep that portion of his creed, Which saith that woman is but dust, A soulless toy for tyrant’s lust? On her might Muftis gaze, and own That through her eye the Immortal shone; On her fair cheek’s unfading hue The young pomegranate’s blossoms strew Their bloom in blushes ever new; Her hair in hyacinthine flow, When left to roll its folds below, As midst her handmaids in the hall She stood superior to them all, Hath swept the marble where her feet Gleam’d whiter than the mountain sleet Ere from the cloud that gave it birth It fell, and caught one stain of earth. The cygnet nobly walks the water; So moved on earth Circassia’s daughter, The loveliest bird of Franguestan! A soulless toy for tyrant’s lust: A vulgar error: the Koran allots at least a third of Paradise to well-behaved women; but by far the greater number of Mussulmans interpret the text their own way, and exclude their moi-
George Gordon, Lord Byron 813 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
OR I E N TA L I S M S S OM E
eties from heaven. Being enemies to Platonics, they cannot discern “any fitness of things” in the souls of the other sex, conceiving them to be superseded by the Houris. The young pomegrante’s blossoms strew: An oriental simile, which may, perhaps, though fairly stolen, be deemed “plus Arabe qu’en Arabie.” Hyacinthine, in Arabic “Sunbul”; as common a thought in the eastern poets as it was among the Greeks.
from H E B R E W M E L O D I E S A N C I E N T & M O D E R N
The Wild Gazelle
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The wild gazelle on Judah’s hills, Exulting yet may bound, And drink from all the living rills That gush on holy ground: Its airy step and glorious eye May glance in tameless transport by:— A step as fleet, an eye more bright, Hath Judah witness’d there; And o’er her scenes of lost delight Inhabitants more fair, The cedars wave on Lebanon, But Judah’s statelier maids are gone! More blest each palm that shades those plains Than Israel’s scatter’d race: For, taking root, it there remains In solitary grace: It cannot quit the place of birth, It will not live in other earth. But we must wander witheringly, In other lands to die; And where our fathers’ ashes be, Our own may never lie: Our temple hath not left a stone, And Mockery sits on Salem’s throne. Written in collaboration with the Jewish composer Isaac Nathan (1792 – 1864).
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Vict or Hu go
1802–1885
OR I E N TA L I S M S
from L E S O R I E N T A L E S : B O U N A B E R D I
Now, Bounaberdi, sultan of Europe’s Frankish folk, Shrouded in the simoon as in a great black cloak, Climbs as a giant up a giant mountain height At times, and gazes out across the sand and sea: Then both halves of the world lie simultaneously Spread out in the immense abyss beneath his sight. He stands there, all alone, on that majestic crest. Down at his right, the desert sand disturbs his gaze, And pays him tribute with a snow of powdery haze, While at his left the sea honors its former guest And lifts its voice to him in loud and solemn peals, As dogs bark joyfully about their masters’ heels.
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And the old emperor ponders as each scene appears, As clouds rise in his sight and sounds stir in his ears; And, as a lover dreams of his beloved, he Fancies that some unseen innumerable host Is offering up this dust and din to please his ghost— Marching beneath the gray horizon endlessly! Ah! when you rise again and ponder on that peak, Then, Bounaberdi, look across the distant land At my tent whitened by the howling desert sand, For I, an Arab, dwell in Cairo, free and meek; And when I cry out “Allah!” my good warhorse flies, And two bright blazing coals appear within his eyes. EDITORS ’ NOTE .
Bounaberdi: An Arabic pronunciation or distortion of the name Bonaparte.
Translation from French by E. H. Blackmore & A. M. Blackmore
Victor Hugo 815 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
OR I E N TA L I S M S S OM E
Ralp h Wa ld o E mers on
1809–1882
BRAHMA
If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near, Shadow and sunlight are the same, The vanished gods to me appear, And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
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Walt Whit ma n
1819–1892
from P A S S A G E T O I N D I A 1
Singing my days, Singing the great achievements of the present, Singing the strong light works of engineers, Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,) In the Old World the east the Suez canal, The New by its mighty railroad spann’d, The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires; Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee O soul, The Past! the Past! the Past!
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A Third Gallery
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Passage O soul to India! Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.
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Not you alone proud truths of the world, Nor you alone ye facts of modern science, But myths and fables of eld, Asia’s, Africa’s fables, The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams, The deep diving bibles and legends, The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions; O you temples fairer than lilies pour’d over by the rising sun! O you fables spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting to heaven! You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d with gold! Towers of fables immortal fashion’d from mortal dreams! You too I welcome and fully the same as the rest! You too with joy I sing. Passage to India! Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? The earth to be spann’d, connected by network, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, The lands to be welded together. A worship new I sing, You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours, You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours, You, not for trade or transportation only, But in God’s name, and for thy sake O soul. ...................................
Walt Whitman 817 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
OR I E N TA L I S M S
2
S OM E
The Past—the dark unfathom’d retrospect! The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows! The past—the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past? (As a projectile form’d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still keeps on, So the present, utterly form’d, impell’d by the past.)
OR I E N TA L I S M S S OM E
9
Passage to more than India! Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights? O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those? Disportest thou on waters such as those? Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas? Then have thy bent unleash’d. Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas! Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems! You, strew’d with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach’d you. Passage to more than India! O secret of the earth and sky! Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers! Of you O woods and fields! of you strong mountains of my land! Of you O prairies! of you gray rocks! O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows! O day and night, passage to you! O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter! Passage to you!
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Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins! Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor! Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail! Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough? Have we not grovel’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes? Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough? Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. O my brave soul! O farther farther sail! O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? O farther, farther, farther sail!
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1821–1867
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There is a wonderful country, a country of Cockaigne, they say, which I dreamed of visiting with an old friend. It is a strange country, lost in the mists of our North, and one might call it the East of the West, the China of Europe, so freely does a warm and capricious fancy flourish there, and so patiently and persistently has that fancy illustrated it with a learned and delicate vegetation. A real country of Cockaigne, where everything is beautiful, rich, quiet, honest; where order is the likeness and the mirror of luxury; where life is fat, and sweet to breathe; where disorder, tumult, and the unexpected are shut out; where happiness is wedded to silence; where even cooking is poetic, rich and highly flavoured at once; where all, dear love, is made in your image. You know that feverish sickness which comes over us in our cold miseries, that nostalgia of unknown lands, that anguish of curiosity? There is a country made in your image, where all is beautiful, rich, quiet and honest; where fancy has built and decorated a western China, where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wedded to silence. It is there that we should live, it is there that we should die! Yes, it is there that we should breathe, dream, and lengthen out the hours by the infinity of sensations. A musician has written an “Invitation à la Valse”: who will compose the “Invitation au Voyage” that we can offer to the beloved, to the chosen sister? Yes, it is in this atmosphere that it would be good to live; far off, where slower hours contain more thoughts, where clocks strike happiness with a deeper and more significant solemnity. On shining panels, or on gilded leather of a dark richness, slumbers the discreet life of pictures, deep, calm, and devout as the souls of the painters who created it. The sunsets which colour so richly the walls of dining-room and drawing-room are sifted through beautiful hangings or through tall wrought windows leaded into many panes. The pieces of furniture are large, curious, and fantastic, armed with locks and secrets like refined souls. Mirrors, metals, hangings, goldsmith’s work and pottery, play for the eyes a mute and mysterious symphony; and from all things, from every corner, from the cracks of drawers and from the folds of hangings, exhales a singular colour, a “forget-me-not” of Sumatra, which is, as it were, the soul of the abode.
Charles Baudelaire 819 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
OR I E N TA L I S M S
L’ I N V I T AT I O N A U V OYA G E
S OM E
C harles Ba u d ela ire
OR I E N TA L I S M S S OM E
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A real country of Cockaigne, I assure you, where all is beautiful, clean, and shining, like a clear conscience, like a bright array of kitchen crockery, like splendid jewellery of gold, like many coloured jewellery of silver. All the treasures of the world have found their way there, as to the house of a hard-working man who has put the whole world in his debt. Singular country, excelling others as Art excels Nature, where Nature is refashioned by dreams, where Nature is corrected, embellished, re-moulded. Let the alchemists of horticulture seek and seek again, let them set even further and further back the limits to their happiness! Let them offer prizes of sixty and of a hundred thousand florins to whoever will solve their ambitious problems! For me, I have found my “black tulip” and my “blue dahlia”! Incomparable flower, recaptured tulip, allegoric dahlia, it is there, is it not, in that beautiful country, so calm and so full of dreams, that you live and flourish? There, would you not be framed within your own analogy, and would you not see yourself again, reflected, as the mystics say, in your own “correspondence”? Dreams, dreams ever! and the more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things. Every man carries within himself his natural dose of opium, ceaselessly secreted and renewed, and, from birth to death, how many hours can we reckon of positive pleasure, of successful and decided action? Shall we ever live in, shall we ever pass into, that picture which my mind has painted, that picture made in your image? These treasures, this furniture, this luxury, this order, these odours, these miraculous flowers, are you. You too are the great rivers and the quiet canals. The vast ships that drift down them, laden with riches, from whose decks comes the sound of the monotonous songs of labouring sailors, are my thoughts which dumber or rise and fall on your breast. You lead them softly towards the sea, which is the infinite, mirroring the depths of the sky in the crystal clearness of your soul; and when, weary of the surge and heavy with the spoils of the East, they return to the port of their birth, it is still my thoughts that come back enriched out of the infinite to you. Translation from French by Arthur Symons
820 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
S OM E
Vict or S egalen
1878–1919
OR I E N TA L I S M S
from S T E L A E : R O A D S I D E S T E L A E
Solid Tempest
Carry me on your adamantine waves, petrified sea, sea without tides; solid tempest locking the flight of clouds and hopes like flies in amber. And let me find the right characters in which to seal the full eminence of your beauty. My gaze preceding my steps on the sidling path aches to tame you. Your hide is rugged, your mantle of air is vast and falls straight from the cold sky. Behind the visible skyline, other peaks lift your passes higher. I know you double the length of the way one must conquer. You pile effort on effort as pilgrims pile stones: in homage. In homage to your height, Mountain. Tire my way: let it go very high. And when I leave you for the plains below, how beautiful the plains are once more!
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the second of the roadside stelae
In Praise of Jade
If the Sage, ascribing little value to alabaster, venerates the pure, unctuous Jade, it is not because alabaster is common and the other rare. Know rather that Jade is good, For it is soft to the fingers—though inflexible. For it is prudent: its veins are fine, compact and solid.
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OR I E N TA L I S M S S OM E
For it is righteous since it has angles yet does not wound. For it is urbane when, hanging from one’s belt, it leans down, touching earth. For it is musical: its voice rises, prolongs itself to a quick fall. For it is sincere: its radiance not veiled by its faults and its faults not veiled by its radiance. As virtue, in the Sage, needs no ornament, so Jade alone can decently introduce itself by itself. Its praise being thus the praise of virtue itself. the third of the roadside stelae
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Bad Craftsmen
In the twenty-eight houses of the Sky: the starry Shuttle which has never woven silk; The Bull constellation, roped at the neck, which cannot draw its cart; The myriad-knotted Net so well laid to take hares by the ears and which never catches any; The Fan which fails to winnow; the Spoon which doesn’t even measure oil! And a congregation of politic craftsmen accuse the celestials of imposture and rate them nil. The poet says: They are radiant. the eighth of the roadside stelae
822 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
S OM E
An outlandish horizontal inscription: eight large characters, two by two, that must be read not from right to left, but the other way round—and what’s more, Eight great inverted characters. Passers-by proclaim: “Engraver’s ignorance! or else: impious idiosyncrasy!” and, blind to the truth, hurry on.
. You, oh you, will you not translate? These eight great retrograde characters signpost the return to the tomb and the soul’s way—they do not guide living steps. If they sink into stone, spurning the air dear to human lungs; if they burrow into the core of matter, away from light, It is clearly so that they should be read from the inner lining of space—the pathless country travelled by fixed dead eyes. the ninth of the roadside stelae
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Translations from French by Nathaniel Tarn
Victor Segalen 823 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
OR I E N TA L I S M S
Stela of the Soul’s Way
A rn o Holz
1863–1929
SIX FROM PHANTASUS
I want to know all the secrets! All the stars with roiling seas I scoop up into my palm. Waves revolve into my dreams, and I am delighted by the smallest nest a pair of swallows builds under my eaves. The quietest chirp from it touches my heart!
. I lie between dark mirror walls. Green glittering star fish, eyes that stare a huge skate opens wide its maw. A push, and they shine! Through a red coral forest sails a silver moon fish! Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
I recline and suck on my water pipe.
. Seven billion years before I was born I was an Iris. My roots drove themselves down into a star. On its dark waters floated my gigantic blue flower.
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Somewhere in the backwoods of India I must have lived, somehow, somewhen. A small percentage of myself contributed to the creation of Gautama Buddha, and even tonight, in a dream when I can’t quite control him, he drinks his palm wine from a rhino horn.
. Don’t try to listen for hidden meanings. Don’t strain to know. Don’t try to find yourself. You don’t exist! You are the evanescent blue smoke that curls out of your cigar the drop of water that struck the window pane the quietly crackling song your lamp sings through the silence.
. He can’t stand the twittering of birds.
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The so-called natural songs of nightingales and larks disgust him. His brain is lined wall to wall with cotton balls. In the center squats a tiny Rococo Venus and pees out of her silver bladder into a golden chamber pot. Translation from German by Anselm Hollo
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C H I L D H O O D PA R A D I S E Birth and Baptism
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1
I was . . . born on a first full, luminous streaming wonderful, wonderblue, wonderwarm spring day, in a royal Prussian pharmacy— “To the Black Eagle,”— with a narrow facade and a deep perspective; spacious, glassdoor klingeling, protected by shutters and quaint; built “anno domini,” in “days of yore,” already there under the Great Elector; dignified, cosy, with four stories and so many front steps, with sharp gables and a double roof, towering high above it all and beautiful; shelf on shelf, drawer on drawer, container near container, small box by small box, bottle by bottle, always most carefully neat, always most prudently exact, always most pitilessly orderly, most well sorted. A pharmacy frequently inspected, revised, so as not to say molested,
826 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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suddenly, completely unexpected, unawaited, unsuspected; inspected by topmast spyglass commissioners— austere, officious, majestically bespectacled, snooping, snuffling, sniffing, sniffling, rummaging through all boxes, all vessels, all provision rooms, with suspicion, curiosity, mistrust, for hours, hours and hours— useless, fruitless, ineffectual, fully unnecessary and superfluous. A pharmacy not yet new-fashioned, so atrociously moulded, so gruesomely schematicized, shrewdly like a factory, cleverly commercial, slyly cold and business-like; lacking the divine, the fairy-tale magic, the romance; americanized; as if predestined for me by “god,” as if by a special “destiny,” as if by a higher “power.” A pharmacy, just opposite the precinct station: honestly upright, peaceably lowly, comfortably one-storied, stretched out, yellow/pink piebald,
Arno Holz 827 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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patched up, gingerbreadbrown, bright red, tile-roofed, caring for citizens, rustling, rushing, rumbling, whooshing, scarily swooshing, cellar-deep teeming with rats; the precinct station with the big, heavy, monstrous, old-fashioned, old-frankish, outmoded fire alarm; a fire bell of black iron, dusty with cobwebs, a polished clapper, dangling, now and then swaying under a gray, leaking, under a decaying, splintered, under a slanted shingle roof penetrable by rain, hail, and blizzard; a fire bell begging and whining for rescue, help in need and resistance. There I was . . . born! 2
No one shouted “Rätin, he lives!” The aspects: Mars in opposition to Venus, Mercury in opposition to Saturn, Jupiter in opposition to Uranus, Neptune in dispute with all:
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Aries, Aquarius and Libra . . . you don’t see them that way . . . every day, Leo, Capricorn and Scorpio,—oh, it was pure mockery,— stood threateningly . . . fiercely armed, signalled in a terrible manner. I protested, I rebelled, I revolted, I opposed.
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But! The good, old, honest, diligent, industrious, eager Frau Pommerähnke, usually loaded and armed with an almost suitcase-sized, mysterious, black-leather purse containing a syringe; with a flesh-colored, self-knitted, crumpled, wrinkled, rumpled cardigan; Frau Pommerähnke, who had already helped into the world the whole city and half of the country who helped
Arno Holz 829 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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so many already to the light, to the air; Frau Pommerähnke assisted, and the refined, venerable, bachelor Doctor Piehdong, “clean as a whistle” always looking like the death from Warsaw, always moving like Magnificence itself, white gloved, with a gray top-hat, blue bespectacled; Doctor Piehdong congratulated, Father inspected, Mother triumphed, everything functioned. Chubby and round! Red-cheeked and sound! Fully nine pound! ...... And then as the christening procession slowly turned around the corner— most joyful of throngs, Mother in lace with three prongs, Father in festive tuxedo with tails, very tight pants and with ivory cane, behind him in a stately and pressing block, Godparents and guests total two score, the Liedtkes, the Tiedtkes, the Ziedtkes, the Zorns, the Hebestreits, and the Haberkorns, the Kluwes, the Struwes, the Druwes,
830 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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the Brodiens, the Scharfenbergs and the Lewertiens, the Kuhnkes, the Gruhnkes, the Ruhnkes, the Rieks, the Tuleweits, and the Papendieks, in short, in full array, dignified and elegant, each by rank and degree, most of the upper bourgeoisie, amidst the resounding joyous swells of pious, honest trusty bells, and most golden blue sunshine, mob and public right behind, pace by pace, trace on trace, down the pine-strewn church street, from the marketplace towards Saint George’s (there’s more at stake here than fun and games, “the manly heart pounds wildly in its cage,” a brimstone butterfly that flew and flutter-tumbled, beat its wings to hover overhead, and swung and tottered, shivered and quivered, picturesquely brightening up the scene); as the procession slowly turned the corner, suddenly:
Arno Holz 831 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
an idea occurred to . . . Mother! Stop it all! It must be so!
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Men and women freeze, stand, wonderingly staring, not to say as if they were “carved of stone”: The Liedtkes, the Tiedtkes, the Ziedtkes, the Zorns, the Hebestreits, and the Haberkorns, the Kluwes, the Struwes, the Druwes, the Brodiens, the Scharfenbergs and the Lewertiens, the Kuhnkes, the Gruhnkes, the Ruhnkes, the Rieks, the Tuleweits, and the Papendieks, in short, in full array, dignified and elegant, each by rank and degree, most of the upper bourgeoisie! Mother handed me over, in my resplendent display, eyes wide open, delighted, making goo-goo-ga-ga noises, gave me her little one, to the old Pommerähnke, the loyal soul, the kindly valiant one, the trusty doting mother, into the arms,
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at once rescuing, open, obligingly reaching out and, click, clack “Hold on to the kid for a moment, I’ll be right back,” through the crowd, through the people, through the ones who were surprised; courageous, energized, determined, vigorous, resolute, back into the pharmacy, it was something! Whereto?! Wherefore?! What for?! Idiot!
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Motherlove! Motherknowledge! Motherconcern! A boy who, at his baptism, had a pen, or a pencil, or a goose-quill stuck into his jacket, or into his swaddling clothes, or into his bunting, secretly, craftily, inconspicuously, will become something “famous”! ...... And barely five minutes later in the church, with the blessing of Pastor Dreschhoff, while I was crowned with names, all around me, the little
Arno Holz 833 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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wiseguy, in densely circling, snircling, closing orbit, yes so be it, the Liedtkes, the Tiedtkes, the Ziedtkes, the Zorns, the Hebestreits, and the Haberkorns, the Kluwes, the Struwes, the Druwes, the Brodiens, the Scharfenbergs and the Lewertiens, the Kuhnkes, the Gruhnkes, the Ruhnkes, the Rieks, the Tuleweits, and the Papendieks, in short, in full array, dignified and elegant, each by rank and degree, most of the upper bourgeoisie, I suddenly cried out and moaned, and consequently groaned, not because I was feeling my oats but rather being stuck by a very sharp Faber pencil with the . . . imprint Number One! Translation from German by David Dodd
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COMMENTARY
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You revolutionize an art only by revolutionizing its means. And again: To allow words their original values, without inflating or bronzing or wrapping them in cotton balls, that is the whole secret. (Both quotations from A. H. in his notes to Phantasus, 1898) Or his quasi-mathematical definition of “art”: Kunst = Natur – x. (1) He was, according to the great twentieth-century German experimentalist Helmut Heissenbüttel, an artist-of-the-word who drew first from Heine’s materialist aesthetic, then went beyond it into a new aesthetic of the word (Wortkunst). His objective, on the level of language, was “[a] poetry that abandons all musical use of words as an end in itself, that purely formally is carried only by a rhythm vivified by what strives for expression through it.” The shape of his poems on the page is immediately striking—a “middle-axis poetry” (Mittelachsenverse), in which all the lines of a poem are typographically centered & resemble on a first viewing the structures of a late twentieth-century poet like Michael McClure or, by a further stretch, the mesostics & centered writings of John Cage. What may be less obvious is that Holz’s invented form became for him, as with McClure & Cage, the vehicle for a new stance-toward-reality—a konsequenter Naturalismus (consistent naturalism) he called it—that underlay & determined his choice of language (demotic) & content (simultaneously quotidian & historically referential). Holz’s own early work, aside from the beginnings of his multivolume long poem Phantasus (a major breakthrough & the foreshadowing of a new genre), included a book of short prose sketches, Papa Hamlet (with Johannes Schlaf, 1889), the drama Die Familie Selicke (also with Schlaf, 1890), Die Kunst—ihr Wesen und ihre Gesetze (writings on art, 1891), & a theoretical work, Revolution der Lyrik (1899). Increasingly experimental in his later writings (Phantasus would expand to 60,000 lines by 1925 & show a Pound-like ambition to write a “Weltgedicht: a Nuova-Divinia after Dante or Über-Odysee after Homer”), he reemerges today as a still vital linking figure across the nineteenth- & twentieth-century divide. (2) “Holz not only replaced rhyme with a number of acoustic effects; he also asked ‘why the eye should not have its particular pleasures in the printed type of a poem.’ These pleasures are not miniature images of Man and World, but rather (as if they were calculated on the tachistoscope) ergonomically optimal uses of reading time. Beginning in 1897, Holz typographically centered the lines of his poetry for physiological reading ease. ‘If I left the axis at the beginning of the line, rather than in the middle, the eye would always be forced to travel twice as far.’ What the verses have in view, then, are not readers and their understanding, but eyes and their psychophysics, in other words: ‘movements of matter, which are not subject to the laws of intelligence and for that reason are much more significant.’ Holz’s Phantasus, rather than addressing fantasy as the surrogate of all senses in the finest romantic manner, reckons with unconscious optokinetics” (from Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, translated by Michael Metteer).
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Jos é A s u n ción S ilva
(1865–1896)
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NOCTURNE III
A night, A night thick with perfumes, with whispers and music, with wings, A night With gloworms fantastically bright in its bridal wet shadows, There by my side, pressed slowly and tightly against me, Mute and pale As if a presentiment of infinite sorrow should stir you Down to the secretest depths of your nature, A path with flowers crosses the plain Where you traveled, Under a full moon Up in the deep blue infinite skies Its white light scattered, And your shadow too Thin and limpid, And my shadow That the moon’s rays projected Across the sad sands, Where both were conjoined And were one And were one And were one immense shadow! And were one immense shadow! And were one only one immense shadow! That night All alone a soul Filled with infinite sorrow With your death and its torments Cut off from your self, by the shadow, by distance and time, An infinite blackness Where our voices don’t reach, Mute and alone On the path I was traveling . . . The sound of the dogs as they bayed at the moon, The pale moon, And the croaking out loud
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of the frogs . . . I felt cold, felt the coldness that came from your cheeks In the alcove in back, from your breasts and the hands that I loved Under sheets white as snow in the death house! A coldness of graves and a coldness of death And the coldness of nada . . . And my shadow That the moon’s rays projected Was drifting alone, Was drifting alone, Was drifting alone through an unpeopled wasteland! And your shadow, agile and smooth, Thin and limpid, As on that warm night in dead spring, That night filled with perfumes, with whispers and music, with wings, Came near and made off with her Came near and made off with her Came near and made off with her . . . Oh the shadows brought together! Oh the shadows of our bodies joining with the shadows of our souls! Oh the shadows sought and brought together in the nights of blackness and tears . . . ! Translation from Spanish by Jerome Rothenberg
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COMMENTARY
Leave your studies & pleasures, your / vapid lost causes, / &, as Shakyamuni once counseled, / hide your self in Nirvana. ( J. A. S., from Filosofías) And again: When you reach your last hour, / your final stop on earth, / you’ll feel an angst that can kill you— / at having done nothing. (1) “José Asunción Silva was a careful reader of Bécquer and Verlaine, Martí and Poe, Campoamor and Baudelaire. He was convinced he needed to combine traditions, though he had his mind on an obscure and introspective nothingness that, according to him, transcended all of them. Silva was a deep researcher of the dark aspect of the soul. “After a year abroad in 1886, he returned to his native Bogotá. In Europe his poetry had evidently taken a significant turn. He had met Mallarmé in Paris, an encounter that marked him deeply. In Silva, European romanticism was reinvented, though he didn’t intend to escape the archetype of the Romantic poet that he explicitly wanted to adapt. Silva’s life is full of sad anecdotes. An important part of his work was lost in a shipwreck and soon
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in his adult life he had to face all sorts of difficulties. He was a man of an intense emotional life. He believed poetry precisely was an investigation of ‘complex feelings.’ “About him the Mexican avant-garde poet José Juan Tablada would write: ‘Silva does not have a biography but a legend. He lived yesterday, is our brother today, but he goes back still further, caving in the past.’ His work constructs a space-time that can be best described using images such as Vallejo’s ‘alternative cavern.’ He knew his ‘night’ referred not only to the depth of his interior world but also to the artificiality of his visions.”
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(2) “Soon after the death of his sister Elvira, Silva wrote (in 1892) his most enduring poem ‘Noche,’ also known as ‘Nocturno III.’ The intensity of the piece provoked speculations around a supposed incestuous relationship with his sister. We could easily get lost in the biographical aspects of Silva’s figure. But we need to focus, at least for a moment, on this poem, so important in the development of later poetry in Spanish, not only as a forerunner of modernismo but as a structural inspiration for later avantgarde writing. “‘Nocturno III’ comes from an unusual extension of voice that even visually creates an unseen pattern of lines. One can sense in Silva’s ‘night’ the process of contacting his underworld and the intermittent flow and rupture derived from this contact. It is a chant to the night and to the obscure unity of a mysterious duality that does not lead to death, but is death itself. This poem in particular possesses a structure that would reappear (reinvented) in some of Neruda’s pieces, for example, but most importantly it deals with an alliance to obscurity and a dialect of rhythm and breakage, sound and visual play, that is still haunting. “Silva is also the author of a novel titled De sobremesa. In 1896 Silva committed suicide shooting a bullet directly into his heart.” EDITOR ’ S NOTE .
The commentary on José Asunción Silva was written by Heriberto Yépez.
Sig b jørn Ob s t f eld er
1866–1900
I LO O K
I look at the wide sky, I look at the gray-blue clouds, I look at the bloody sun. So this is the world. So this is the planets’ home. A rainbow!
838 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
I look at the tall buildings, I look at the thousands of windows, I look at the distant church steeples. So this is the earth. So this is the human beings’ home. The gray-blue clouds gather. The sun goes away. I look at the well-dressed gentlemen, I look at the smiling ladies, I look at the horses hanging their heads. How heavy the gray-blue clouds become. I look, I look . . . I must be on the wrong planet! It is so strange here . . . Translation from Norwegian by Anselm Hollo
THE DOG
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An Etching
I walked across the brown plain. I walked all day. The sea sighed in the west. Toward evening, the expanse rose and closed off the view. Soon I stood on top of the ridge. The sighing sea had become a mirror-smooth fjord below me. The sun was setting in it. This was the most beautiful thing I had seen in the days of my life. I forgot everything. I trembled in ecstasy. Finally I remembered that it was late, that I had to keep going. I started searching for the trail. I looked down and saw an abyss. I looked to the other side and saw a steep wall. A horrendous vertigo took hold of me. I had climbed hundreds of mountains in my life, and had never felt dizzy. I searched and searched. Dusk was coming on, and I saw nothing but steep walls before me. Disconcerted and frightened, I went down on hands and knees, crawling along to look for the trail. At the very moment when I think I have found it, I see a large dog come running down on the plain. What was it that stopped me? I did stop. I waited.
Sigbjørn Obstfelder Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
839
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My anxiety grew greater and greater. Is he thinking of coming up here? I lie down and press my body hard against the ground. I hear its bark. One second—and I see its head appear over the edge. Its eyes are right in front of me. It is no longer barking, and it isn’t panting either. I squeeze myself harder and harder against the ground. I know that it is going to reach out with its paw. In the next moment, this has happened. I feel its claws grabbing my wrist. We lie there, staring at one another. Its head rests on the edge. It does not move. I sense its claws and fiery eyes. I begin to understand its gaze. It is as if I can hear terrifying words emerging from its snout: “Human Being, your time has come! “Do you remember what you did? Do you remember how you whipped me with your plaited straps? Do you? “Do you remember how you beat my Brother Horse with narrow whips, when he sank to the ground in death’s exhaustion? Do you remember?” My eyes tried to answer: “Why do you accuse me? I have never owned a dog. And I have only been less than a hundred times in a horse-drawn carriage.” But its eyes glow ever more wildly: “Are you not Human Being? Do I not see you before me with your revolting hands that you kill with and have killed and kept killing with for thousands of years? “Did you not kill the sheep? Did you not serve the oxen’s blood at your table? What have you ever treated mercifully on this wonderful earth? Is there anything among all that lives that you have not murdered, defiled, tortured? “Are you not trampling all of the earth’s teeming life? Even the red rose—did you not rip it off its stalk when the blood surged high in its young petals? “Human Being, I know you! Now I hold your hand in my claws!” I knew well that I had journeyed on this earth with more care than most. But the animal did not understand this. For it, I was merely a human being, a human being with the white hands of a killer. And as its eyes stared at me, it seemed as if it had indeed been I who had whipped and mistreated all of the world’s dead tired horses. I heard the sea sigh and swell behind me; in front of me glowed those staring eyes in the dark. There came a moment when I wished that the animal would sink its fangs into me, quickly, quickly, to put an end to the whole thing. That was when I suddenly felt something strange flow through me. I
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raised my head in front of the unwavering eyes. I started speaking out loud. Such strange words or sound emerges from my mouth. I can neither remember or describe them exactly the way they were. “Wéyi ohahú! Dilodáma! Wági Wóha Wéyi ohahú!” I was aware that my eyes radiated a supernatural light. I remember seeing the dog’s eyes riveted on me in mounting surprise. But I was hardly aware of that. There was a kind of fearful voluptuousness in me, it was as if all of my cells swelled with a new, powerful, unearthly strength, I raised my hands and waved them and kept on shouting: “Weyimaláha oío, titá titá óli óli! Wéyi ohahú! Waniawai!” The surprise in the dog’s eyes changed into fear. I realized that later. I did not see it then. I no longer saw the dog, I did not see anything. I was standing now, and the strange words flowed out of me more and more strongly. The sea was sighing with increased wildness down there in the darkness, the wind howled, I shouted without seeing or sensing anything, I waved my arms in the air in time with my shouts and the wind’s howling. I don’t know how long I stood there like that. Finally I looked around me. The dog was no longer there. I fell to the ground in a dead faint. When I came to, I was calm. I saw where I was. I recognized myself. Had I been dreaming? I saw my hand. There was a deep blood bruise on it. I found my way. I went back to the hotel where I was the only guest. People gave me strange looks. I thought that this was probably because I had stayed out for so long. I ate. I got up from the table. I met the girl’s gaze. What was it? I went up to my room. I saw myself in the mirror. I understood. My hair had turned gray. Translation from Norwegian by Anselm Hollo
HURRICANE
Wind, storm, hurricane! Naked, I want to bathe in your roar! Hey! See my white arms! My flying hair, hey! Hurricane, play with my hair! Blow!
Sigbjørn Obstfelder 841 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Unfold the broad wings of my soul! My soul embraces the world! Uranos trembles within it! Hurricane! Hurricane! I am naked! Like you, I have thrown myself into Earth’s waving grass! My arms rejoice in Space! The Universe! Hey! Come! Let us play! Throw ourselves into the ocean! Come, whirling leaves! Come, ravens, sharks, waves! Come, raging skies! We are dancing, we are dancing! You and I! Translation from Norwegian by Anselm Hollo
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THE WOMAN IN BLACK
I walk down a deserted street. I stay close to the walls of buildings. Is someone following me? Is someone skulking along the walls behind me, hanging his head the way I hang mine? I dare not look behind me. It is pitch dark. My heart beats harder. I hear a whisper: “Man!” I feel the touch of female garments. I don’t look up yet I know that she is wearing black. And I know that she is a virgin and I know that her heart is racing. She grasps my hand. Her hand trembles. But she leans toward me, leans on me, and whispers: “Man!” We end up among stacks of construction materials and casks and junk, we ascend stairs, we enter, a skylight above us. She removes her veil. I see her large, strange eyes. She unbuttons her bodice, her hands tremble.
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“Look,” she says. “Is it beautiful?” And she embraces me, and she caresses my face, my neck, my chest, my whole body. With soft and gentle hands. And the hands whisper: “Blind.” Translation from Norwegian by Anselm Hollo
THE ARROW
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Out there, in the room, appears a radiant hand. Lightning flares from its fingertips. It reaches out, and entire worlds are covered in darkness, and millennial tribes dance Death’s dances. But above the dark shadows rise a few white backs, bright as meteors. They are the backs of those who torment themselves. He who has the whitest hand sees them. And he cuts his radiant hand to draw a drop of innocent blood. And he pulls an arrow out of its sixthousand-year-old quiver, dips its head in the innocent blood, takes aim at the naked backs. And the arrow flies through room after room, and it flies past the naked backs, and it flies toward them who dance the dance of life in darkness. And they fall. For the celestial blood is poison on earth. Solitary, the white backs wander on, in solitary greatness. Does heaven derive its powers from the realms of darkness? Translation from Norwegian by Anselm Hollo
COMMENTARY
I must be on the wrong planet! It is so strange here . . . S. O.
(1) “Those who knew Obstfelder are bound to sense how he visits them again when they sit down of an evening to read the book that contains his posthumous works. It may happen that a door opens and closes again, someone walks across the room, quiet and shy, sits in a corner and looks over at you, makes a slight gesture, utters a tranquil word, ‘as if a woman had entered into him.’ “His words do not contain, they conjure. That is why they can be so quiet. They are like charms—one just whispers them, and the mountains open.” Thus Rainer Maria Rilke, reviewing a posthumous volume of Obstfelder’s
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writings in the Viennese newspaper Die Zeit, 1904. In his letter “To a Young Girl,” written a few days later, Rilke compares himself to Obstfelder: “It is so natural for me to understand girls and women; a creative person’s most profound experiences are feminine. . . . Once, describing the face of a stranger, the poet Obstfelder wrote: ‘It was (when he began to speak) as if a woman had entered into him.’ It seems to me that this applies to every poet who begins to speak.” Particularly impressed by Obstfelder’s prose poems, Rilke is said to have modeled his Malte Laurids Brigge on the young hypersensitive poet from the North. In Scandinavia, the final decade of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a “New Romanticism.” Obstfelder’s first book of poems, Digte (Poems), was a seminal work of this movement. Reidar Ekner, a distinguished Swedish poet and editor/translator of a selection of Obstfelder’s work, considers his primary influences to have been the French Symbolists and “Walt Whitman and American song lyrics, Swedish folk songs, Danish and Norwegian poetry and Norwegian music (Grieg).” (2) Sigbjørn Obstfelder was born into a large and deeply devout family in Stavanger, Norway, in 1866. His father, a baker and grocery store owner, was the son of a German military surgeon who had served and settled in Denmark. His mother, a Norwegian farm girl, gave birth to sixteen children and died when Sigbjørn was fourteen years old. In the two decades after that traumatic event, Obstfelder studied first philology, then engineering, spent two years in the American Midwest as an engineering draftsman, returned to Europe, and led a peripatetic life in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and France, mostly unable to make ends meet and depending on the kindness of patrons. At the age of thirty-four he died of tuberculosis, on the same day that his only daughter was born. As his fellow countryman Knut Hamsun had told him: “Obstfelder, surely you are too good for this world.” EDITORS ’ NOTE .
The commentary on Sigbjørn Obstfelder was written by Anselm Hollo.
Ru b én D arío
1867–1916
IN THE LAND OF ALLEGORY
In the Land of Allegory Salome dances forever before King Herod on his throne. And the head of John the Baptist, who caused lions to tremble,
844 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
falls to the axe. Blood rains down. But the sexual rose, as it opens, affects all that exists with its carnal effluvium and its spiritual enigma. Translation from Spanish by Lysander Kemp
S ON AT I N A
The Princess is sad. What ails the Princess? Nothing but sighs escape from her lips, which have lost their smile and their strawberry red. The Princess is pale in her golden chair, the keys of her harpsichord gather dust, and a flower, forgotten, droops in its vase.
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The garden is bright with the peacocks’ triumph, the duenna prattles of commonplace things, the clown pirouettes in his crimson and gold; but the Princess is silent, her thoughts are far-off: the Princess traces the dragonfly course of a vague illusion in the eastern sky. Are her thoughts of a prince of Golconda or China? Of a prince who has halted his silver coach to see the soft light that glows in her eyes? Of the king of the fragrant isle of roses, or the lord who commands the clear-shining diamonds, or the arrogant lord of the pearls of Ormuz? Alas, the poor Princess, whose mouth is a rose, would be a swallow or a butterfly; would skim on light wings, or mount to the sun on the luminous stair of a golden sunbeam; would greet the lilies with the verses of May, or be lost in the wind on the thundering sea. She is tired of the palace, the silver distaff, the enchanted falcon, the scarlet buffoon, the swans reflected on the azure lake. And the flowers are sad for the flower of the court:
Rubén Darío 845 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
the jasmines of the east, the water lilies of the north, the dahlias of the west, and the roses of the south. The poor little Princess with the wide blue eyes is imprisoned in her gold, imprisoned in her tulle, in the marble cage of the royal palace, the lofty palace that is guarded by sentries, by a hundred Negroes with a hundred halberds, a sleepless greyhound, and a monstrous dragon. Oh to be a butterfly leaving its cocoon! (The Princess is sad. The Princess is pale.) Oh adorable vision of gold, marble, and rose! Oh to fly to the land where there is a prince— (The Princess is pale. The Princess is sad.)— more brilliant than daybreak, more handsome than April! “Hush, Princess, hush,” says her fairy godmother; “the joyous knight who adores you unseen is riding this way on his wingèd horse, a sword at his waist and a hawk on his wrist, and comes from far off, having conquered Death, to kindle your lips with a kiss of true love!” Translation from Spanish by Lysander Kemp
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AGENCY
The news?—The earth trembles. They are hatching war in The Hague. The crowned heads are all frightened. The whole world smells rotten. There is no balm in Gilead. The Marquis de Sade has landed, just in from Seboim. The Gulf Stream has changed course. Paris whips itself to delight. They say a comet is approaching. The predictions of that old monk Malachi are coming true. The Devil is hiding in the church. A nun gave birth—(but where?—) Barcelona is nothing now
846 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
except when a bomb explodes. China has cut off its pigtail. Henry de Rothschild is a poet. Madrid has turned against bullfighting. The Pope has got rid of his eunuchs. A bill was recently passed to legalize child prostitution. White faith is beginning to pall but everything black continues. The palace of the Antichrist is ready and waiting, somewhere. There are intercommunications between Lesbians and tramps. It is said that the Wandering Jew is coming—What else, oh Lord?— Translation from Spanish by Lysander Kemp
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T O R O O S E V E LT
It is with the voice of the Bible, or the verse of Walt Whitman that I advance upon you now, Hunter! Primitive and modern, sensible and complicated, with something of Washington and a dash of Nimrod. You are the United States, you are the future invader of all that’s innocent in America and its Indian blood, blood that still says Jesus Christ and speaks in Spanish. You are a superb and strapping specimen of your people; you are cultured and capable; you oppose Tolstoy. You are a horse-whisperer, an assassinator of tigers, you are Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar. (You are a Professor of Energy as the whackjobs among us now say.) You think that life is a fire, that progress is eruption and into whatever bones you shoot, you hit the future. No.
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The United States is powerful and huge. And when it shakes itself a deep temblor runs down the enormous vertebrae of the Andes. If it yells, its voice is like the ripping boom of the lion. It is just as Hugo said to Grant: “The stars are yours.” (Glinting wanly, it raises itself, the Argentine sun, and the star of Chile rises too . . . ) You are rich— you join the cult of Hercules with the cult of Mammon; and illuminating the way of easy conquest, “Freedom” has found its torch in New York. But our America, which has had poets from the ancient times of Netzahualcoyotl, which has kept walking in the footprints of the great Bacchus (who had learned the Panic alphabet at one glance); which has consulted the stars, which has known Atlantis, (whose name comes down drumming to us in Plato), which has lived since the old times on the very light of this world, on the life of its fire, its perfume, its love, the America of the great Moctezuma, of the Inca, our America smelling of Christopher Columbus, our Catholic America, our Spanish America, the America in which the noble Cuauhtemoc said: “I am in no bed of roses”: that same America which tumbles in the hurricanes and lives for Love, it lives, you men of Saxon eyes and Barbarian souls. And it dreams. And it loves, and it vibrates; and she is the daughter of the Sun, Be very careful. Long live this Spanish America! The Spanish Lion has loosed a thousand cubs today: they are at large, Roosevelt, and if you are to snag us, outlunged and awed, in your claws of iron, you must become God himself, the alarming Rifleman and the hardened Hunter. And though you count on everything, you lack the one thing needed: God. Translation from Spanish by Gabriel Gudding
848 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
METEMPSYCHOSIS
I was a soldier who slept in the bed of Cleopatra the queen. Her whiteness and her astral, omnipotent gaze. That is all over. O gaze! O whiteness! and O that bed where her whiteness seemed radiant! O the marmoreal, omnipotent rose! That is all over. And her backbone cracked in my arms; and I, emancipated, made her forget Antony. (O the bed and the gaze and the whiteness!) That is all over. I, Rufus Gallus, was a soldier, and bore the blood of Gaul, and the imperial heifer gave me one brazen minute of her fancy. That is all over.
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Why in that spasm did the pincers of my bronze fingers not squeeze the neck of the white queen in rut? That is all over. I was brought to Egypt. A chain hung around my neck. I was eaten one day by dogs. My name, Rufus Gallus. That is all over. Translation from Spanish by Alberto Acereda & Will Derusha
E X P LO I T I N T H E B U L L R I N G
Dramatis Personae The Bull, the Ox, the Crowd America. A bullring. Afternoon. The sun shines radiantly in a cloudless sky. In the amphitheater there is an immense number of spectators. In the arena, after the death of several bulls, the cuadrilla team prepares to depart triumphant. The first man, near a bloody track, is elegant, dressed
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in blue and gold, a muleta and sword under his arm. The banderilleros are dressed in yellow and silver. Sequins shimmer on the jackets of the picadors in the afternoon glare. In the bullpen are: a bull, handsome and brave, and a work ox. The sound of a bugle. The Crowd
Another bull! Another bull!
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The Ox
Did you hear? Prepare your thrust, your horns, and your hide: your turn has come. A savage wrath, banderillas and pikes will besiege you, applause for the executioner; finally, death. And above, the impassive and solitary contemplation of the vast firmament. I, ridiculous and despicable, am the patient slave. I am the humiliated eunuch. My neck knows how to endure, and I bear over rocky ground the cart with its squeaking wheels, where on the high load of fodder, at times the strong peasants sing verses. My pensive eyes, to the poet, arouse a suspicion of mysterious lives where the enigma reigns. Meditating suits me. I am a philosopher. If I suffer a blow and a prick, I reflect that God concedes to me this right: to drive away flies with my tail. And I know that the slaughterhouse exists . . . The Bull
Pampa! Liberty! Sunshine and fresh air! I was the robust master of the plains, where the air carried my bellowing like the sound of a horn blown by a Titan with full lungs. With the python skin-deep, I roamed for a time in the great sea of green blades; nearby ran the clear stream where I slaked my thirst with burning chops. Then, I was a beautiful king with sharp horns: the mountains responded to my voice, 850 A Third Gallery
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
and my image, magnificent and lordly, would make Pasiphaë burn with love. More than once, the indomitable hurricane, driving its fists and splitting the oak under the hot summer sky, blew its fire into my nostrils as it passed by. The contests came later. It was the cougar, sinking its claws in my flank, and I buried my horns in its belly. And after a sweltering day, the soft breath of the night, sweet sleep, sensing the dawn, greeting the sunrise that places roses and pearls on my neck: seeing Titan’s chariot advance as it grazes the clouds with golden hoofs, and around the lyrical carriage the pallid stars disappear. Today I await martyrdom, shame, and death . . .
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The Ox
Poor orator! At the entrance of life there is a smiling sphinx. Blue is instead black. The star hides, disappears, dies. Man is the treacherous one with power here. Because of him, fear. I have been on my prairie as lordly as you. Over the grass I bellowed proudly and breathed without a care. Today I live mutilated, I eat, I fatten up, I bow my head. The Bull
Well then, for you fresh fodder, a tranquil life, water in a bucket, an expected old age . . . For me, the red cape of a dexterous man, defiance and mockery, hoarse shouting, the sand where I drive my hoof, the agile and graceful toreador who tricks me and in my flesh buries the harpoon of his dauntless banderilla, a vicious horsefly of iron; the bestial tempest in my lung, the panting that raises dust,
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my thirst for death in a flood of instinct, my muscles of bronze, bloodswollen in a boiling plethora of life; in my eyes two furious flames, the wave of rage through my nerves, crazed, pouring its foam into my candescent gullet; the bugle of the dashing torilero that excites the packed crowd; the matador who will bury up to the pommel his sword in my flesh; the team of garlanded mules that will drag my body bloody and throbbing; and the cheers and applause for the thrust of steel driven straight into my heart. Oh, nothing more bitter! For me, the lips of the cold weapon that kills me; after the shame, the crude sacrifice, the horrible death rattle . . . while the sacred blue, immense, continues serene, and at its height the gold of the great sun rolls towards the west in radiant apotheosis . . . The Crowd
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The Ox
Be quiet! Die! It’s your time. The Bull
A gruesome sentence! Yesterday the air, the sun; today the executioner . . . What could be worse than this martyrdom? The Ox
Impotence! The Bull
And what could be blacker than death? The Ox
The yoke! Translation from Spanish by Alberto Acereda & Will Derusha
852 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
COMMENTARY
I seek a form that my style cannot discover . . . / And I only find the word that runs away . . . / The neck of the great white swan, that questions me.
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R. D., Prosas profanas y otros poemas,1896
(1) From the publication of his early book of poems and stories Azul (Blue) in 1888, Darío (born Felix Rubén García Sarmiento in Metapa, Nicaragua) was the first great poet of Spanish-American modernismo: a reinvigoration of Spanish poesis and language with its roots deeply planted in America. But the Modernistas, as Octavio Paz would write of them later, “accomplished more than a job of restoration; they added something new. The world, the universe, is a system of correspondencies under the rule of rhythm. Everything connects, everything rhymes. Every form in nature has something to say to every other. The poet is not a maker of rhythm but its transmitter. Analogy is the highest expression of the imagination.” A wanderer (he lived in Europe from 1898 to 1914, two years before his death), Darío by the early twentieth century was able to bypass symbolism—to engage, like the Romantics before him, in a poetics & in a politics from a less (or more) than political perspective. If Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was “a Declaration of Independence from the ‘bondage’ of European and British conventions,” as one of us once wrote, then Darío in his way would declare the independence of his America from ours. Paz again: “Rubén Darío was the bridge between the precursors and the second generation of Modernism. . . . At times, he reminds us of Poe; at other times, of Whitman. Of the first, in that portion of his work in which he scorns the world of the Americas to seek an otherworldly music; of the second, in that portion in which he expresses his vitalist affirmations, his pantheism, and his belief that he was, in his own right, the bard of Latin America as Whitman was of Anglo-America” (Octavio Paz, Prologue to Selected Poems of Rubén Darío, 1988). (2) “If there is poetry in our America, it is in the old things, in Palenque and Utatlán, in the legendary Indian, and in the courtly and sensual Inca, and in the great Moctezuma on the golden seat. The rest is yours, democratic Walt Whitman” (R. D., from “Liminary Words,” in Prosas profanas y otros poemas). And again: “If in these things there is politics, it is because politics appears universally. And if you find verses to a president, it is because they are a continental clamor. Tomorrow we may well become Yankees (and this is most likely); my protest stands anyhow, written on the wings of immaculate swans, as illustrious as Jupiter.”
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A lf red J ar ry
1873–1907
from E X P L O I T S A N D O P I N I O N S O F
D O C TO R FAU S T R O L L , PATA P H YS I C I A N Elements of Pataphysics
Definition An epiphenomenon is that which is superinduced upon a phenomenon. Pataphysics, whose etymological spelling should be ¶ʌȚ (ȝİIJå IJå ijȣıȚțȐ) and actual orthography ’pataphysics, preceded by an apostrophe so as to avoid a simple pun, is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. Ex: an epiphenomenon being often accidental, pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be—and perhaps should be—envisaged in the place of the traditional one, since the laws that are supposed to have been discovered in the traditional universe are also correlations of exceptions, albeit more frequent ones, but in any case accidental data which, reduced to the status of unexceptional exceptions, possess no longer even the virtue of originality.
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A Visit to Lucullus
Concerning the Termes Now, Faustroll was sleeping next to Visited. The great bed, carved out by knife, squatted upon the nakedness of the earth, that ancient part of the world’s nebula, and poured upon the ground the worm-eaten hours of its sand. Amid this rhythmical silence, Visited desired to discover whether, underneath the spiral-painted tapestry, Faustroll, who had loved her like the infinite series of numbers, possessed a heart capable of pumping out with its open and closed fist the projection of circling blood. The watch’s tick-tock, like the scratching on a table of a fingernail, a pen nib or a nail, beat near her ear. She counted nine strokes; the pulsation stopped, then continued up to eleven. . . . The bishop’s daughter heard her own sleep before any further beats,
854 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
and these did not disturb her, for she did not survive the frequency of Priapus. On the oak of the decrepit bed, the termes, comparable to the invisibility of a red louse with yellow eyes, lent the isochronism of the throbbing of its head to the simulation of Faustroll’s heart. Clinamen . . . Meanwhile, after there was no one left in the world, the Painting Machine, animated inside by a system of weightless springs, revolved in azimuth in the iron hall of the Palace of Machines, the only monument standing in a deserted and razed Paris; like a spinning top, it dashed itself against the pillars, swayed and veered in infinitely varied directions, and followed its own whim in blowing onto the walls’ canvas the succession of primary colors ranged according to the tubes of its stomach, like a pousse-l’amour in a bar, the lighter colors nearest to the surface. In the sealed palace which alone ruffled this dead smoothness, this modern deluge of the universal Seine, the unforeseen beast Clinamen ejaculated onto the walls of its universe:
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Nebuchadnezzar Changed into Beast What a beautiful sunset! or rather it is the moon, like a porthole in a hogshead of wine greater than a ship, or like the oily stopper of an Italian flask. The sky is a sulphurous gold so red that there is really nothing missing but a bird five hundred meters high capable of wafting us a breeze from the clouds. The architecture, the very type of all these flames, is most lively and even rather moving, but too romantic! There are towers with eyes and beaks and turrets capped like little policemen. Two watching women sway at the wind-swept windows like drying straitjackets. Thus the bird: The great Angel, who is not angel but Principality, swoops down, after a flight exactly as black as a martin’s, the color of the metal of a roofer’s anvil. With one point on the roof, the compasses close and open up again, describing a circle around Nebuchadnezzar. One arm chants the metamorphosis. The king’s hair does not stand on end, but droops like a walrus’s wet whiskers; the pointed ends of his hair make no effort to squeeze shut the sensitive pimples which people this limp seaweed with zoophytes reflecting all the stars: tiny wings flutter to the rhythm of a toad’s webbed feet. Pitiful pleas swim up against the stream of tears. The eyes’ sorrowful pupils, in their ascent, crawl toward the knees of the wine-lees colored sky, but the angel has enchained the newborn monster in the blood of the vitreous palace and thrown him into the bottom of a bottle.
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The River and the Meadow The river has a fat, soft face for the smack of oars, a neck with many wrinkles, a blue skin with green downy hair. Between its arms, pressed to its heart, it holds the little Island shaped like a chrysalis. The Meadow in its green gown is asleep, its head in the hollow of its shoulder and neck. Toward the Cross At one end of the Infinite, in the form of a rectangle, is the white cross where the demons have been executed together with the unrepentant Thief. There is a barrier around the rectangle, white, with five-pointed stars studding the bars. Down the rectangle’s diagonal comes the angel, praying calm and white like the wave’s foam. And the horned fish, a monkey trick of the divine Ichthys, surge back toward the cross driven through the Dragon, who is green except for the pink of his bifid tongue. A blood-covered creature with hair standing on end and lenticular eyes is coiled around the tree. A green Pierrot rushes up, weaving from side to side and turning cartwheels. And all the devils, in the shape of mandrills or clowns, spread their caudal fins out wide like acrobats’ legs, and, imploring the inexorable angel (Woan’t yew p’-lay with me, mistuh Loyal?), plod toward the Passion, shaking their clowns’ straw wigs encrusted with sea-salt.
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God Forbids Adam and Eve to Touch the Tree of Good and Evil. The Angel Lucifer Runs Away God is young and gentle, with a rosy halo. His robe is blue and his gestures sweeping. The tree’s base is twisted and its leaves aslant. The other trees are doing nothing apart from being green. Adam adores and looks to see if Eve also adores. They are on their knees. The angel Lucifer, old and looking like time and like the old man of the sea lapidated by Sinbad, plunges with his gilded horns toward the lateral ether. Love The soul is wheedled by Love who looks exactly like an iridescent veil and assumes the masked face of a chrysalis. It walks upon inverted skulls. Behind the wall where it hides, claws brandish weapons. It is baptized with poison. Ancient monsters, the wall’s substance, laugh into their green beards. The heart remains red and blue, violet in the artificial absence of the iridescent veil that it is weaving. The Clown His round hump hides the world’s roundness, as his red cheek rends the lions on the tapestry. Clubs and diamonds are embroidered on the crim856 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
son silk of his garments, and toward the sun and the grass he makes a benedictory aspersion with his tinkling aspergillum. “Farther! Farther!” Cries God to the Meek The mountain is red, the sun and the sky are red. A finger points toward its peak. The rocks surge upward, the absolute summit lost to view. The bodies of those who have not reached it come tumbling down again head first. One falls backward on to his hands, dropping his guitar. Another waits with his back to the mountain, near his bottles. One lies down on the road, his eyes still climbing. The finger still points, and the sun waits for obedience before it will set. Fear Creates Silence Nothing is terrifying, if it be not a widowed gallows, a bridge with dry piers, and a shadow which is content to be black. Fear, turning away its head, keeps its eyelids lowered and the lips of the stone mask closed. In the Nether Regions
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The fire of the nether regions is of liquid blood, and one can see down to the very depths. The heads of suffering have sunk down, and an arm is raised from each body like a tree from the sea bed, stretched to where the fire is abated. There, a serpent darts his venom. All this blood is aflame and held within the rock whence people are hurled. And there is a red angel for whom one single gesture suffices, which signifies: FROM TOP TO BOTTOM. From Bethlehem to the Garden of Olives It is a little red star, above the crib of the Mother and Child, and above the ass’s cross. The sky is blue. The little star becomes a halo. God has lifted the weight of the cross from the animal and carries it on his brand new man’s shoulder. The black cross becomes rose, the blue sky turns violet. The road is as straight and white as the arm of one crucified. Alas! the cross has become bright red. It is a blade steeped in blood from the wound. Above the body, at the end of the road’s arm, are eyes and a beard which bleed also, and above his image in the wooden mirror, Christ spells out: J-N-R-I. Just a Witch Her hump to the rear, belly to the fore, neck twisted, hair whistling in the flight of the broomstick with which she has transfixed herself, she goes under the claws, vegetation of the bright red sky, and the index of the road to the Devil. Alfred Jarry 857 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Emerging from His Bliss, God Creates the Worlds God arises haloed by a blue pentagram, blesses and sows and makes the sky bluer. Fire glows red from the idea of ascension, and the gold of the stars mirrors the halo. The suns are great four-leaved clovers, in bloom, like the cross. And the only thing not created is the white robe of Form itself. The Doctors and the Lover
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In the bed, calm as a green sea, there is a floating of outstretched arms, or rather these are not the arms but the two divisions of the head of hair, vegetating upon the dead man. And the center of this head of hair curves like a dome and undulates like the movement of a leech. Faces, mushrooms bloated with rottenness, spring up evenly and red in the windowpanes of agony. The first doctor, a larger orb behind this dome, trapezoidal in character, becomes slit-eyed and decks his cheeks with bunting. The second rejoices in the external equilibrium of spectacles, twin spheres, and weighs his diagnostic in the libration of dumbbells. The third old man veils himself with the white wing of his hair and announces desperately that beauty returns to the skull by polishing his own. The fourth, without understanding, watches . . . the lover who, against the current of the stream of tears, sails in pursuit of the soul, his eyebrows joined upward by their inner points in the shape of cranes in flight, or the communion of the two palms of one praying or swimming, in the attitude of daily devotion called by the Brahmins KHURMOOKUM.
Concerning the Surface of God
God is, by definition, without dimension; it is permissible, however, for the clarity of our exposition, and though he possesses no dimensions, to endow him with any number of them greater than zero, if these dimensions vanish on both sides of our identities. We shall content ourselves with two dimensions, so that these flat geometrical signs may easily be written down on a sheet of paper. Symbolically God is signified by a triangle, but the three Persons should not be regarded as being either its angles or its sides. They are the three apexes of another equilateral triangle circumscribed around the traditional one. This hypothesis conforms to the revelations of Anna Katherina Emmerick, who saw the cross (which we may consider to be the symbol of the Verb of God) in the form of a Y, a fact which she explains only by
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the physical reason that no arm of human length could be outstretched far enough to reach the nails of the branches of a Tau. Therefore, POSTULATE: Until we are furnished with more ample information and for greater ease in our provisional estimates, let us suppose God to have the shape and symbolic appearance of three equal straight lines of length a, emanating from the same point and having between them angles of 120 degrees. From the space enclosed between these lines, or from the triangle obtained by joining the three farthest points of these straight lines, we propose to calculate the surface. Let x be the median extension of one of the Persons a, 2y the side of the triangle to which it is perpendicular, N and P the extensions of the straight line (a + x) in both directions ad infinitum. Thus we have: x = f N a P. But N=f0 and P = 0. Therefore
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x = f (f 0) a 0 = f f + 0 a 0 x = a. In another respect, the right triangle whose sides are a, x, and y give us a2 = x2 + y2. By substituting for x its value of (a) one arrives at a2 = (a)2 + y2 = a2 + y2. Whence y2
a2 a2 = 0
and y = 0. Therefore the surface of the equilateral triangle having for bisectors of its angles the three straight lines a will be S = y (x + a) = 0 (a + a) S = 0 0. COROLLARY: At first consideration of the radical 0, we can affirm that the surface calculated is one line at the most; in the second place, if
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we construct the figure according to the values obtained for x and y, we can determine: That the straight line 2y, which we now know to be 2 0, has its point of intersection on one of the straight lines a in the opposite direction to that of our first hypothesis, since x = a; also, that the base of our triangle coincides with its apex; That the two straight lines a make, together with the first one, angles at least smaller than 60°, and what is more can only attain 2 0 by coinciding with the first straight line a. Which conforms to the dogma of the equivalence of the three Persons between themselves and in their totality. We can say that a is a straight line connecting 0 and f, and can define God thus: DEFINITION: God is the shortest distance between zero and infinity. In which direction? one may ask. We shall reply that His first name is not Jack, but Plus-and-Minus. And one should say: ± God is the shortest distance between 0 and f, in either direction. Which conforms to the belief in the two principles; but it is more correct to attribute the sign + to that of the subject’s faith. But God being without dimension is not a line. —Let us note, in fact, that, according to the formula f0a+a+0=f the length a is nil, so that a is not a line but a point. Therefore, definitively: GOD IS THE TANGENTIAL POINT BETWEEN ZERO AND INFINITY. Pataphysics is the science . . . Translation from French by Simon Watson Taylor
COMMENTARY
Screw good taste! A. J., quoted by Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years
(1) It was not as a poet in the narrow sense that he left his mark but as the enacter of new & old poetic mysteries—“the principles of innocence and blasphemy, ambiguity and the absurd, and universal convertibility” (thus Roger Shattuck, in summation). From Dada & Surrealism to the workings of absurdist poetics & theatrics after World War II, he remained a presence through the legend of his work & life. “We maintain,” wrote the Surrealist master André Breton, “that beginning with Jarry, much more
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than with Wilde, the differentiation long considered necessary between art and life has been challenged, to wind up annihilated as a principle.” Jarry’s masterwork was Ubu Roi (1896—& the Ubu works that followed it), with its monstrous, pear-shaped King of Poland (= Nowhere), riding on a hobbyhorse, a toilet brush as scepter, the repeated exclamation “merdre” (= “shit[e]” or “shitrr”) peppering his talk. Identifying himself with Ubu & with the concept of the monstrous as such (“I call ‘monster’ every original inexhaustible beauty”), he led the mind (both his & ours) into those disruptive, absurdly comic ways of thought he renamed ’Pataphysics (above). Of his own writing in its relation to the world outside itself, he wrote: “It doesn’t resemble anything.” Or Shattuck, again, of where it brought him: “The world [was] his hallucination.”
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(2) Intimations of the absurd existed in Romanticism and were carried forward through the nineteenth century—not only in the great non-sense works of Lear & Carroll, but in Blake’s Island in the Moon (above), Ludwig Tieck’s The Land of Upside Down, Jean Paul’s “humoristic poetry,” Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant, & in numerous carnivalesque & folk examples or popular entertainments such as the British Punch & Judy works, mummers’ plays, and so on. (See page 417, above.) Wrote Friedrich von Schlegel in raising but not resolving questions of irony & “incomprehensibility” (Unverständlichkeit): “Of all things that have to do with communicating ideas, what could be more fascinating than the question of whether such communication is actually possible?” Or the voice of the “satirical poet” in Goethe’s Faust (Part Two), the title echoed in Jarry’s Faustroll: “Do you know what would really delight me as a poet? To write and recite what no one wants to hear.”
G ert ru d e St ein
1874–1946
from T H E M A K I N G O F A M E R I C A N S
Family living is being existing. There are very many knowing this thing, there are some completely knowing this thing. Everywhere something is done. Everywhere where that thing is done it is done by some one. Everywhere where the thing that is done by some one comes to be done it is done and done by some one. Certainly every where where something is done it is done and done by some one. Certainly some are doing something and it is done and done by each one of them. Certainly in a family living where something is done by some one it is done and done by that one. Certainly where it is done and done by some one, the thing that is done and done by that one is done by that one in some family living. Every one doing that thing and there are many doing
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that thing, there are almost quite enough doing that thing, every one doing that thing, any one doing that thing is doing that thing in the way that one, the one doing that thing is naturally doing that thing. It is not always being completely done by that one, the thing that is done and done by that one, it is not completely done by that one in the way it is natural for that one to do that thing. Some doing the thing that is done and done by them in a family living are completely doing that thing in the way it is natural for them to do that thing. Some doing the thing that is done and done by them are not completely doing the thing in the way it is natural for them to do that thing. Some of such of them are completely doing the thing that is done and done by them in a family living, they are not completely doing the thing in the way it is natural for them to do that thing. Some are doing the thing they are doing in a family living. It is done and done by them. There are enough of them doing some such thing, certainly not too many, certainly very many, certainly some and each one of them is some one by whom something is done and done. There are enough kinds of them. There are very many kinds of them doing something in a family living that is done and done and done by them. Every one in any family living who does not come to be a dead one before coming to be almost an old one, comes to be almost an old one and any one coming to be almost an old one has it then to be as something existing that they are ones going on being living. Any one in any family living who does not come to be a dead one before coming to be an old one comes to be an old one and is then being one having it being as something being existing that they are ones going on being living. Certainly any one coming to be almost an old one is then having it being as something being existing that that one is then going on being living. Certainly any one coming to be an old one is one being one then having it as being something existing that that one is being then one going on being living. Almost any one coming to be almost an old one coming to be an old one is one having it then as being something existing being one going on being living. Almost every one coming to be almost an old one, coming to be an old one is one having it then as being something existing being one going on being living. Almost every one being one coming to be almost an old one is one having been being in some family living. Almost every one coming to be an old one is one having been being in some family living. Almost every one coming to being an old one is one having been being in some family living. Almost every one coming to be almost an old one is being in some family living. Almost every one coming to be an old one is being in some family living. Some when they are being quite young ones are being ones doing something that is being done again and again by some one in a family living.
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Some when they are older ones are being ones doing something that is done and done and done again by some one in a family living. Some when they are almost old ones are being ones doing something that is something that is done and done in a family living. Some when they are being old ones are doing then something that is being something that is being done and done in a family living. Some all their living are doing what is being done and done in a family living. When one has come to be one not going on being a living one, mostly every one has been one being in a family living. When any one has come to be one not going on being living, mostly any one is then being one being in a family living. When any one has come to be one not going on being living, any family living can be then being existing. Any one can come to be one coming not to be going on being living. Any family living can be then being existing. Any one can come to be one coming not to be going on being living, in a family living, any family living can then have been something being existing. Any one can come to be one not going to be one going on being living. Any family can be one being existing. Any family living can be one having been existing. Any family can be one having been existing. Any family living can be one being existing. Any one can come to be one not going on being living. Any family living can have been being existing. Any family living can be existing. There are very many family livings being existing. There have been very many family livings being existing. Some in any family living are older ones than any other one. Some in any family living are younger ones than any other one. Some in any family living are not so old and not so young as any other one in the family living. Any one in a family living is younger than some other one in the family living, has been younger than some other one in the family living. Any one in a family living is older than some other one in the family living. Some in the family living have been older than any other one in the family living. Some in the family living have come to be doing something again and again, something that is done and done in that family living. Some of such of them are older than very many then in the family living. Some of such of them are younger than some in the family living. Some in the family living who have come to be doing what is being done again and again in the family living are older than most of them in the family living. Some who have come to be doing what is being done and done in the family living are younger than most of them in that family living. Some who have come to be doing what is being done and done in the family
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living are older than some and younger than some of them living in that family living. The way of doing what is done and done in a family living is a way that a family living is needing being one in a way existing. Sometimes then that family is going on in that way of existing. Sometimes that family living is going on into another way of being existing. Sometimes some one who has done and done what is done by some one in the family living of that one is coming to be an older one and is then going on doing what that one is doing and then it is a very different thing the thing that one is doing in the family living of that one. Some in family living are doing what is done and done in family living in family living being existing. Any one in a family living is one knowing any other one in the family living. Any one in a family living is one any other one in the family living is knowing. Any one in a family living is not knowing that another one in the family living is doing something and doing it again and again. Any one in a family living is doing something and doing it again and not any other one in the family living is knowing that thing is knowing that that one is doing something and is doing it again and again and again. Any one in a family living is knowing that any one in the family living is doing something and doing it again and again and again and again. Any one in a family living is certain that some in the family living are not doing something. Any one in a family living is certain that any one in the family living has been doing something. Any one in a family living is certain that any one in the family living has been doing something. Some one in a family living is needing that every one in the family living is certain that that one will go on being one being in the family living. Some in a family living are needing that any one is certain that they will go on being in the family living. Some one in a family living is one needing that every one in the family living is not doing something. Some one in a family living is needing that any one in the family living is certain that that one is one needing that every one in the family living are not doing something. Some one in a family living is needing that every one in the family living is doing something. Some one in a family living is needing that any one in the family living is certain that that one is needing that every one in the family living is doing something. Any one in the family living is doing something. Any one in the family living is not doing something. Every one in the family living is knowing that any one in the family living is not doing something. Every one in the family living is knowing that any one in the family living is doing something. 864 A Third Gallery
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Some one in a family living is needing to be certain that every one in the family living is not going to be doing something. Some one in a family living is needing to be certain that every one in the family living is going to be doing something. Old ones come to be dead. Any one coming to be an old enough one comes to be a dead one. Old ones come to be dead ones. Any one not coming to be a dead one before coming to be an old one comes to be an old one and comes then to be a dead one as any old one comes to be a dead one. Any one coming to be an old enough one comes then to be a dead one. Every one coming to be an old enough one comes then to be a dead one. Certainly old ones come to be dead ones. Certainly any one not coming to be a dead one before coming to be an old enough one comes to be an old enough one to come to be a dead one. Old ones come to be dead. Any old one can come then to be a dead one. Old ones and how they come to be dead, they come to be old enough ones to come to be dead. Any one coming to be an old one is coming then to be a dead one. Every one not coming to be a dead one before coming to be an old one, is coming to be an old one and is then coming to be a dead one. Old ones come to be dead. There are old ones in family living in some family livings and these when they come to be old enough ones come to be dead. Any one coming to be an old enough one comes then to be a dead one. Doing something is done by some in family living. Some family living is existing. Some are doing something in family living. Some one in a family living is doing something and family living is existing and family living is going on being existing and that one is doing something in family living. That one has been doing something in family living, that one is doing something in family living, that one is going to be doing something in family living. That one has been doing something in family living and that one is doing that thing and any one in the family living is being one being in the family living and that one the one doing something in the family living is completely remembering that every one being in the family living is in the family living. That one is remembering something of this thing about every one being in the family living, is remembering something about each one being in the family living, is compeletely remembering something about each one being in the family living and any one in the family living can come to be remembering that that one the one completely remembering something about each one being in the family living is remembering something about each one in the family living being in the family living. The one remembering completely remembering something about each Gertrude Stein 865
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one being in the family living has been completely remembering everything about any one being in the family living, is remembering completely remembering everything about some being in the family living, is completely remembering something about every one being in the family living, will be completely remembering everything about some being in the family living will completely remember something about every one being in the family living. Family living can be existing. Very many are remembering that family living can be existing. Very many can go on living remembering that family living is existing. Very many are living and are remembering that family living can go on existing. Very many can go on living remembering that family living can go on existing. Family living can go on existing. Very many are remembering this thing are remembering that family living living can go on existing. Very many are quite certain that family living can go on existing. Very many are remembering that they are quite certain that family living can go on existing. Any family living going on existing is going on and every one can come to be a dead one and there are then not any more living in that family living and that family is not then existing if there are not then any more having come to be living. Any family living is existing if there are some more being living when very many have come to be dead ones. Family living can be existing if not every one in the family living has come to be a dead one. Family living can be existing if there have come to be some existing who have not come to be dead ones. Family living can be existing and there can be some who are not completely remembering any such thing. Family living can be existing and there can be some who have been completely remembering such a thing. Family living can be existing and there can be some remembering something of such a thing. Family living can be existing and some can come to be old ones and then dead ones and some can have been then quite expecting some such thing. Family living can be existing and some can come to be old ones and not yet dead ones and some can be remembering something of some such thing. Family living can be existing and some one can come to be an old one and some can come to be a pretty old one and some can come to be completely expecting such a thing and completely remembering expecting such a thing. Family living can be existing and every one can come to be a dead one and not any one then is remembering any such thing. Family living can be existing and every one can come to be a dead one and some are remembering some such thing. Family living can be existing and any one can come to be a dead one and every one is then a dead one and there are then not any more being living. Any old one can come to be a dead
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one. Every old one can come to be a dead one. Any family being existing is one having some being then not having come to be a dead one. Any family living can be existing when not every one has come to be a dead one. Every one in a family living having come to be dead ones some are remembering something of some such thing. Some being living not having come to be dead ones can be ones being in a family living. Some being living and having come to be old ones can come then to be dead ones. Some being living and being in a family living and coming then to be old ones can come then to be dead ones. Any one can be certain that some can remember such a thing. Any family living can be one being existing and some can remember something of some such thing.
COMMENTARY
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When I said, A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE. And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun. (G. S., Lectures in America) And again: I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years. (G. S., from Four in America) (1) With roots in the century before (the quotation, above, looking back to Burns & Blake, among others), she came, by the first decade of the twentieth century, to an investigation of language & form, “going systematically to work smashing every connotation that words ever had, in order to get them back clean” (W. C. Williams). Her materials were simple enough to be easily misunderstood, & her declared intention was to “work in the excitedness of pure being . . . to get back that intensity into the language.” Wrote Stein further about her sense of origins: “Poetry did then in the beginning include everything and it was natural that it should because then everything including what was happening could be made real to anyone by just naming what was happening in other words by doing what poetry always must do by living in nouns. // Nouns are the name of anything. Think of all that early poetry, think of Homer, think of Chaucer, think of the Bible and you will see what I mean you will realize that they were drunk with nouns, to name to know how to name earth sea and sky and all that was in them was enough to make them live and love in names, and that is what poetry is it is a state of knowing and feeling a name” (Poetry and Grammar). Or Emerson, as her great predecessor (& ours): “The poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary” (The Poet—see Manifestos & Poetics, below).
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(2) The selection presented here is from The Making of Americans, a novel on the face of it, that she began in 1902 & brought to a first conclusion by 1908. As elsewhere in her work, the element of repetition looms large—an obvious reprise of one of the enduring characteristics of poetry, revised & developed in the generations immediately before her own. Wrote Stein later in describing “the gradual making of The Making of Americans”: “I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations . . . until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts, endlessly the same and endlessly different.” Wrote Stein, again, of her demotic flattening & democratizing of language: “The important thing is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality.” To place her here, then, toward the end of a book of romanticisms, is to recognize the shared work that links her time to theirs—& both to ours. (3) “There are . . . various . . . reasons why repetition and apparent tautology are frequently beauties of the highest kind. Among the chief of these reasons is the interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passions, but as things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion. . . . The truth of these remarks might be shewn by innumerable passages from the Bible, and from the impassioned poetry of every nation” (W. Wordsworth, note to “The Thorn,” 1800).
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A n t on io M acha d o
1875–1939
SIX POEMS Poem
Green little gardens, Bright little squares, Verdigris fountains, Where water dreams, Where mute water Slips over stone. Leaves of faded Green, almost black, Of the acacias—the wind
868 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Of September has Stripped their flowers And carried a few, Yellow and dry, To play there in the white Dust of the earth. Pretty girl, Filling your pitcher With transparent water, When you catch sight of me you don’t Lift your brown hand And arrange the black curls Of your hair And admire yourself In the limpid crystal. You gaze into the air Of the beautiful evening While the clear water Fills your pitcher.
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Poem
It is not true, sorrow, that I have known you. You are the nostalgia of a good life, The solitude of a sombre heart, A boat without shipwreck and without star. Like a lost dog, wandering, Sniffing and hunting aimlessly For his road, without a road, like A child on a holiday night Lost among the crowds, The dusty air, the flickering Candles, stunned, his heart drunk With music and hurt,
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So I go, drunk and melancholy, Lunatic guitarist, poet, A poor man in a dream, Hunting for God in the mists. Notes I
Out of my window— The fields of Baeza Under the full moon, The mountains of Cazorla, Aznaitin and Magina, Moonlight and stone, And the lion cubs Of the Sierra Morena. II
In the olive grove I can see an owl Flying and flying.
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Fields. Fields. Fields. Amongst the olives, The white farm houses. And the black oak In the middle of the road Between Ubeda and Baeza. III
Through the stained glass The owl got into The cathedral. Saint Christopher Wanted to chase her away Because she tried to drink The oil from the lamp Of Saint Mary.
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But the Virgin said— “Let her drink, Saint Christopher.” IV
In the olive grove I can see the owl Flying and flying. She flies heavily Carrying a green branch To Saint Mary. Fields of Baeza I will dream of you When I can see you no more. Songs I
Against the flowering mountain The full seas dash. The wax of my bees Holds little grains of salt.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
II
Spring has come. Nobody knows how it did it. III
Full moon, full moon, So full, so round, On this serene night Of March; wax of light Made by white bees.
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Poem
O solitude, my only companion, O muse of portents, who has given My voice words I could never ask for, Answer my question—Who do I speak to? Absent from the noisy masquerade, Diverting my sorrow without a friend, Always close to you, lady with veiled face, Always veiled during our dialogues. Today I think—What does it matter who I am? This is not the gravest enigma—this face Which recreates itself in my intimate mirror, But the mystery of your loving voice. Uncover your features so I can see, Fixed on me, your diamond eyes.
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Meditation for This Day
Facing the palm of fire Which spreads from the departing sun Throughout the silent evening— In this garden of peace— While flowery Valencia Drinks the Guadalquivir— Valencia of slender towers In the young skies of Ausias March, Your river changes to roses At the touch of the sea. I think of the war. War Has swept like a tornado Through the steppes of high Douro, Through the plains of growing bread, From fertile Estremadura To the gardens of lemon trees,
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From the grey skies of Asturias To the marshes of light and salt. I think that Spain has been sold out, River by river, mountain by mountain, sea by sea. Translations from Spanish by Kenneth Rexroth
COMMENTARY
I thought that the poetic element was not the word in its phonic value, nor color, nor line, nor a complex of sensations, but a deep pulsing of the spirit: what the soul supplies, if it does supply anything; or what it says, if it says anything, when aroused to response by contact with the world. A. M.
He always held within himself as much of death as of life, halves fused together by ingenuous artistry. . . . He smelled from far away of metamorphosis.
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Juan Ramón Jiménez
(1) “Alone, like a ghost,” he walked through Spain’s towns & provincial countryside, noting a land & a people previously unacknowledged during the centuries of Spanish Empire. Now, with its demise & final defeat by the United States in 1898, Spain’s silenced worlds began to reemerge in the often balladic, short-line poems of Machado. A member of the “Generation of ’98,” the group of astonishing talents in poetry, fiction, theater, & philosophy who responded to the loss of Spain’s last colonies in its two-century-long decline by searching for its causes & attempting to find remedies for Spain’s regeneration, Machado wrote out of a tradition of the popular, his father before him an important collector of Spanish folkloric materials. Hardly a Baudelairian flaneur registering through startled encounters the humanity & inhumanity of a large modern cosmopolitan city, Machado’s walker follows the momentousness of small changes in the human & natural landscape, recalling the otherwise very different poet Wordsworth. His speakers observe & dream at once; as translator Willis Barnstone says: “He saw [the objects and places he knew] through a metaphysical lens of open-eyed dream,” producing poems in which the speaker vanishes into an intensely visual/scenic realization, reminiscent of the classical Chinese but also anticipating what in North America would be imagist & objectivist techniques, while engaging at times in a homegrown imagism of sharp, surrealist-like juxtapositions. (2) An admired & admiring acquaintance of Rubén Darío (above), Machado nonetheless turned away from the hints of artifice, the exotic, highly colored, & finely wrought poetry of the latter’s modernismo, to recover, in his own idiom, the more democratic poetic vision of a favorite North Ameri-
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can poet, Whitman. His highly visual lyric intensifies cross the threshold of the quotidian into a spiritual domain where the dream element—always questioned but never abandoned by him—links him deeper into the past century & the dream work of the earlier Romantics. At the same time it anticipates the poetry of Lorca, say, in particular the “deep song” of the Andalusian region. Less well known than Lorca outside of Spain & the Spanish-speaking world, Machado was acclaimed by Latin American poets such as César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, & Octavio Paz. In his later years, past the scope of this volume, he strongly supported the Republican government of Spain against the fascist insurgency of Francisco Franco and died in exile, shortly after having crossed the border into France.
Rain er M aria R ilke
1875–1926
ORPHEUS, EURYDICE, AND HERMES
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That’s the strange regalia of souls. Vibrant as platinum filaments they went, like arteries through their darkness. From the holes of powder beetles, from the otter’s bed, from the oak king judging by the royal oak— blood like our own life-blood, sprang. Otherwise nothing was red. The dark was heavier than Caesar’s foot. There were canyons there, distracted forests, and bridges over air-pockets; a great gray, blind lake mooned over the background canals, like a bag of winds over the Caucasus. Through terraced highlands, stocked with cattle and patience, streaked the single road. It was unwinding like a bandage. They went on this road. First the willowy man in the blue cloak; he didn’t say a thing. He counted his toes. His step ate up the road, a yard at a time, without bruising a thistle. His hands fell, clammy and clenched, 874 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
as if they feared the folds of his tunic, as if they didn’t know a thing about the frail lyre, hooked on his left shoulder, like roses wrestling an olive tree.
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It was as though his intelligence were cut in two. His outlook worried like a dog behind him, now diving ahead, now romping back, now yawning on its haunches at an elbow of the road. What he heard breathed myrrh behind him, and often it seemed to reach back to them, those two others on oath to follow behind to the finish. Then again there was nothing behind him, only the backring of his heel, and the currents of air in his blue cloak. He said to himself, “For all that, they are there.” He spoke aloud and heard his own voice die. “They are coming, but if they are two, how fearfully light their step is!” Couldn’t he turn round? (Yet a single back-look would be the ruin of this work so near perfection.) And as a matter of fact, he knew he must now turn to them, those two light ones, who followed and kept their counsel. First the road-god, the messenger man . . . His caduceus shadow-bowing behind him, his eye arched, archaic, his ankles feathered like arrows— in his left hand he held her, the one so loved that out of a single lyre more sorrow came than from all women in labor, so that out of this sorrow came the fountain-head of the world: valleys, fields, towns, roads . . . acropolis, marble quarries, goats, vineyards. And this sorrow-world circled about her, just as the sun and stern stars circle the earth— a heaven of anxiety ringed by the determined stars . . . that’s how she was.
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She leant, however, on the god’s arm; her step was delicate from her wound— uncertain, drugged and patient. She was drowned in herself, as in a higher hope, and she didn’t give the man in front of her a thought, nor the road climbing to life. She was in herself. Being dead fulfilled her beyond fulfillment. Like an apple full of sugar and darkness, she was full of her decisive death, so green she couldn’t bite into it. She was still in her marble maidenhood, untouchable. Her sex had closed house, like a young flower rebuking the night air. Her hands were still ringing and tingling— even the light touch of the god was almost a violation. A woman? She was no longer that blond transcendence so often ornamenting the singer’s meters, nor a hanging garden in his double bed. She had wearied of being the hero’s one possession.
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She was as bountiful as uncoiled hair, poured out like rain, shared in a hundred pieces like her wedding cake. She was a root, self-rooted. And when the god suddenly gripped her, and said with pain in his voice, “He is looking back at us,” she didn’t get through to the words, and answered vaguely, “Who?” Far there, dark against the clear entrance, stood some one, or rather no one you’d ever know. He stood and stared at the one level, inevitable road, as the reproachful god of messengers looking round, pushed off again. His caduceus was like a shotgun on his shoulder. Translation from German by Robert Lowell
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COMMENTARY
The thing is definite, the art-thing must be still more definite; removed from all accident, reft away from all obscurity, withdrawn from time and given over to space, it has become enduring, capable of eternity. The model seems, the art-thing is. (R. M. R., letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, August 8, 1903) And again: Works of art are indeed always products of having been in danger, of having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no further.
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(1) The push in his work was toward “the task of transformation”—of the poet as “transformer of the earth”—or, as in the poem “Wendung [Turning-Point],” of a “heart-work,” liberating “all the images imprisoned within you,” that he also called “in-seeing.” If that made him—as the story goes—the last & greatest symbolist, his work, like that of the Romantics before & the Moderns after, existed at the extremes (of terror, exaltation) & became “that unexampled act of violence . . . [that] sought among visible things equivalents for the vision within.” As he went on with it, it brought him to a struggle with & within language as such—like Hopkins’s “inscape,” Rossetti’s “inner standing-point,” even Norwid’s “sancta obscuritas” (above)—or, as he described it further, “One often finds oneself at variance with the external behavior of a language and intent on its innermost life, or on an innermost language, without terminations, if possible—a language of word-kernels, a language that’s not gathered, up above, on stalks, but grasped in the speech-seed.” (2) His early book Das Buch der Bilder (Book of Images) comes on the cusp between centuries, begun in 1899, first version published in 1902, second in 1906. The start of a breakthrough into what he called Ding-Gedichte (thingpoems; object-poems), the poem that opens Buch der Bilder (“Eingang” = Introduction) reads: “Whoever you are, go out into the evening, / leaving your room, of which you know each bit; / your house is the last before the infinite, / whoever you are. / Then with your eyes that wearily / scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone / slowly you raise a shadowy black tree / and fix it on the sky: slender, alone. / And you have made the world (and it shall grow / and ripen as a word, unspoken, still). / When you have grasped its meaning with your will, / then tenderly your eyes will let it go . . .” (translation by C. F. MacIntyre, Selected Poems). The simultaneity of subjective & objective thought is both the link to his “new poems” (1907), from which the selection here is drawn, & to what came before—“To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour” (W. Blake)—or later: “We awaken at the same moment to ourselves and to things” (G. Oppen). (3) “Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes” as an allegory of the vital Wendung from a nineteenth-century to a twentieth-century romanticism: Orpheus, here a poet of somewhat outmoded longing & anxiety, fails to facilitate the translation of his silent & dependent beloved from the shades to the upper
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world of the living; she, however, becomes in spite of & through his failure the embryo of her own self (“a root self-rooted”), opening the way in one possible reading to the new, independent voice of Eurydice in the brilliant feminist poems of modernists H. D. & Marina Tsvetaeva. Hermes, the god of thresholds, “carries across” the old century into the new one.
Yos a n o A kiko
1878–1942
THE WOMAN
“Don’t forget a whip,” spake Zarathustra, “a woman is a cow, is a sheep.” I’ll add to it and say, “Let her loose in the field.” Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
from M I D A R E G A M I ( H A I R I N D I S O R D E R ) :
COCHINEAL PURPLE
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Hair five feet untangled soft in the water the maiden’s heart I’ll keep secret won’t let it out The girl twenty flowing through the comb the black hair’s haughty the spring how beautiful Dark red whom shall I tell about it the blood wavers thoughts of spring life in its prime Toward Kiyomizu passing Gion cherry moonlight night everyone I see tonight is beautiful Clouds blue Summer Princess who’s come her morning hair beautiful it flows in the water Night’s Deity come morning rides a sheep home I’ll capture and hide it under my pillow Not even touching the blood-tide in my soft flesh aren’t you lonely you who teach the Way? He not allowed to go the darkening spring evening laid on a small koto my tangled tangled hair
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Arm for pillow a strand of hair snapped I heard it as a small koto in spring night’s dream Hot-bathing at a spring’s bottom a small lily flower its twentieth summer I see as beautiful Disturbed heart hesitant heart persists, for the god stepping on lilies I can’t cover my breasts The scarlet rose her layered lips, don’t allow a song without a soulful scent to ride on them Now here when I turn to reflect my love was like a blind man unafraid of the dark My tangled hair made back into Kyo Shimada the morning he’s still in bed I shake him awake My painted parasol thrown onto the other shore grass I cross the brook spring water warm Cuckoo it’s one li to Saga three li to Kyoto in Kiyotaki of water the day breaks so fast Pressing my breasts I softly kick the mystery curtain here the flower’s vermilion is intense
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Somehow I felt you waited for me have come out into a flower field this evening moon Hot-bathed and out of the spring what touches my skin is the silk of the harsh human world My light dress its two-foot sleeve sliding down it a firefly flows away into night wind blue Leaning on an evening door you sing a song: “I left my melancholy home I’ll never return” I see it as my spring figure twenty years old a light-colored peony vermilion at its base Just to see I touched it with my young lips how cold was the dew on the lotus white Spring rain dripping on a swallow’s wings I’ll receive it to smooth my morning-slept hair Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
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M AY I T N OT CO M E TO PA S S T H AT YO U D I E Aggrieved over my younger brother So-shichi, who is in the army laying siege to Luxu.
Ah, my younger brother, I weep for you, May it not come to pass that you die, Because you are the one born last Parents’ love is greater that much, But did they make you hold a blade, Tell you to kill human beings, So you might kill humans and die, Have they brought you up till twenty-four?
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Being the master of a proud old house Of merchants in the town of Sakai Destined to inherit your parent’s name, May it not come to pass that you die, The Castle of Luxu may be destroyed, Or may not, how can that matter, It’s no concern of yours, no such Requirement exists in a merchant’s house. May it not come to pass that you die, His Majesty the Emperor would not Himself go out to fight, would He, To make each shed the other’s blood, To order you to die in a beastly way, To tell you that a man’s honor is to die, His Majesty’s heart being deep, How would he think of all this? Ah, my younger brother, in battle May it not come to pass that you die, In the autumn that passed Father died, Our dear Mother, surviving him, In the midst of her grief and pain, Her son summoned, is left to keep house, In His Majesty’s reign, in peace, they say, Mother’s gray hair can only increase.
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Prostrate by the blinds she weeps, Your wife, so new, innocently young, Have you forgotten her, think of her, After less than ten months separated, Try to think of a young woman’s heart, If not you, the only one in the world for her, Ah, whom else could she count on, May it not come to pass that you die. Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
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IN PRAISE OF MAY
May is a fancy month, a flower month, The month of buds, the month of scents, the month of colors, The month of poplars, marrons, plantanes, Azaleas, tree peonies, wisteria, redbud, Lilacs, tulips, poppies, The month women’s clothes turn Light and thin, the month of love, The festival month Kyoto residents In twirled crowns, arrows on their backs, Compete in horse races, The month girls in the City of Paris Choose for the Flower Festival A beautiful, noble queen; If I may speak of myself, It’s the month I crossed Siberia, crossed Germany, Longing for my love, And arrived in that distant Paris, The month to celebrate our fourth son, Auguste, born last year, With irises, swords, and streamers, The breezy month, the month of The blue moon, of platinum-colored clouds, When the bright sky and the hemp palm Outside the window of my small study Remind me of a Malay island,
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The month of honeybees, the month of butterflies, The month of birth when ants turn into moths And canaries hatch their eggs, The sensual month, the month of flesh That somehow incites you, The month of Vous voulez wine, of perfumes, Of dances, of music, and of songs, The month of the sun when Myriad things inside me Hold one another tight, become entangled, Moan, kiss, and sweat, the month Of the blue sea, of the forest, of the park, of the fountains, Of the garden, of the terrace, of the gazebo, So here comes May To toss at us a giddiness Sweet as the lemonade you suck with a straw From a thin, skinny glass. Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
AUGUSTE’S SINGLE STRIKE
My lovely two-year-old Auguste, I write this down for you: Today, for the first time, you struck your mother on the cheek. It was the power of your life that wanted to win— the genuine power for conquest took on the form of anger and a spastic fit and flashed like lightning. You must have been conscious of nothing, must have forgotten it at once. But your mother was shocked, was also deeply happy. You can, some day, as a man, be on your own defiantly, you can be on your own purely, resolutely, also can love man and nature decisively
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Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
(the core of conquest is love), also you can conquer suspicion, pain, death, jealousy, cowardice, derision, oppression, crooked learning, conventions, filthy wealth, and social ranks. Yes, that genuine strike, that’s the totality of your life. Such were the premonitions I felt that made me happy under the pain of the sharp blow you struck with your palm as a lion cub might. At the same time I felt the same power lurking in myself and even the cheek you didn’t strike became hot like the cheek you did. You must have been conscious of nothing, must have forgotten it at once. But when you’ve become an adult, take this out and read it, when you think, when you work, when you love someone, when you fight. My lovely two-year-old Auguste, I write this down for you: Today, for the first time, you struck your mother on the cheek. My still more lovely Auguste, You, in my womb, walked through Europe, sightseeing. As you grow up, your wisdom will remember the memories of those travels with your mother. What Michelangelo and Rodin did, what Napoleon and Pasteur did, yes, it was that genuine strike, that ferocious, blissful strike. Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
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SONG OF THE LETTER A Written for a boys’ magazine.
The letter A that tops ai (love), starts the Japanese syllabary and English alphabet; let’s look at my favorite letter A from various angles to sing a song. The letter A that doesn’t like to dress up can be the entrance to a shabby shack; through it you see a wooden floor, a straw mat, a fire pit, or a table perhaps. The tiny delicate letter A may be a lighthouse, slender, lone, built on a cape far away; encircling it are white-caps. The always gentle letter A can be an ivory bridge, beside which, though invisible, a phantom hand is plucking a melodious tune.
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The always bright letter A, a prism made of white crystal, patiently holds a bird of light, its seven feathers beautiful. The energetic letter A is someone who’s hurrying away, stepping on the sand of a vast desert, making a sandy, sandy sound. The supercilious letter A is atop Mount Olympus, erected in place of a spear, a goose quill with its silver-white tip. The sometimes lonesome letter A assumes the figure of a nun with her triangular hat, looking at the sky, elbows on the windowsill. And yet the dignified letter A is a pyramid shining faraway,
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sun-bathed morning and evening on the Egyptian plain. From time to time the letter A becomes a red, pointed cap of Pierrot in his clown’s role and dances out in front of me. Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
COMMENTARY
The day when mountains move has come. / Though I say this, nobody believes me. / Mountains sleep only for a little while / that once have been active in flames. / But even if you forgot it, / just believe, people, / that all the women who slept / now awake and move.
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Y. A., a “new-style” poem, translated by Kenneth Rexroth
(1) The appearance of her first book, Hair in Disorder (Midaregami), in 1901, created a scandal, not only for its explicit female sexuality but also for its complexity & presumed unintelligibility within the framework of the traditional tanka form. (The translation here, following Japanese custom, presents each five-line tanka as a single long line.) As a by now acknowledged masterwork of “Japanese romanticism,” already influenced by symbolist & other fin-de-siècle European writing but drawing as well from older Japanese & Chinese sources, Hair in Disorder provided a vehicle for female empowerment—a “battleground poetry,” in Janine Beichman’s phrase, not as a form of rant, but as Yosano described it, writing of her own “first poems,” “I realized that if women didn’t really exert themselves they would never mix with men on an equal footing. That was the first time I made a poem.” The resulting innovations—both in tanka & in “new-style” poetry—went beyond most poets of her time: a use of multiple voices (male as well as female); an unprecedented focus on the naked body derived, it was said, from European painting & from the erotic side of the ukiyo-e (floating world) tradition of print-making; & a sense of mystery & ambiguity, created by formal means (“asymmetry, ellipses, and numerous allusions”), that she called shinpi & that Beichman delivers further as “the palimpsestic effect.” Her work, as it moved into the new century, was voluminous; by Kenneth Rexroth’s count, “she wrote more than 17,000 tanka, nearly five hundred shintaishi (free verse [poems]), published seventy-five books, including translations of classical literature, and had eleven children.” She was also an outspoken pacifist & a socialist sympathizer, who openly opposed Japan’s military adventures in the twentieth century, as in the antiwar poem addressed to her brother (1904), which brought denunciation as “a traitor, a rebel, a criminal who ought to be subjected to national punishment.” (In the light of her radical independence, her relation with her poet
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husband, Yosano Hiroshi [a.k.a. Tekkan], assumes far less significance for her work than it’s usually given.) Writes Rexroth further: “She is one of the world’s greatest women poets, comparable to Christina Rossetti, Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labé, and Li Ch’ing Chao. She is certainly one of the very greatest poets of her time—the most perfect expression of the ‘Art Nouveau’ sensibility—like Debussy, who should have set her poems to music.” (2) “Two salient aesthetic characteristics of [Hair in Disorder are] the sense of mystery (shinpi) . . . and what I call the palimpsestic effect, created by a mingling of traditions and associations. Thus, the semidivine female figures who appear in several of the most striking poems bear traces of Greek myth, Chinese legend and poetry, earlier Japanese literature, and Western art of the Renaissance and the nineteenth century. Through their polysemous, palimpsestic character, these elusive figures evoke millennia, span East and West, and look forward to the future. They are capacious enough to include even the realistic young women, the prostitutes, and the geisha for whom they are sometimes (mis)taken” (J. Beichman, in Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry, 2002).
G ui lla u me A pollin aire
1880–1918
ZONE
In the end you are weary of this ancient world Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
This morning the bridges are bleating Eiffel Tower oh herd Weary of living in Roman antiquity and Greek Here even the motor-cars look antique Religion alone has stayed young religion Has stayed simple like the hangars at Port Aviation You alone in Europe Christianity are not ancient The most modern European is you Pope Pius X And you whom the windows watch shame restrains From entering a church this morning and confessing your sins You read the handbills the catalogues the singing posters So much for poetry this morning and the prose is in the papers Special editions full of crimes Celebrities and other attractions for 25 centimes This morning I saw a pretty street whose name is gone Clean and shining clarion of the sun 886 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Where from Monday morning to Saturday evening four times a day Directors workers and beautiful shorthand typists go their way And thrice in the morning the siren makes its moan And a bell bays savagely coming up to noon The inscriptions on walls and signs The notices and plates squawk parrot-wise I love the grace of this industrial street In Paris between the Avenue des Ternes and the Rue Aumont-Thiéville
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There it is the young street and you still but a small child Your mother always dresses you in blue and white You are very pious and with René Dalize your oldest crony Nothing delights you more than church ceremony It is nine at night the lowered gas burns blue you steal away From the dormitory and all night in the college chapel pray Whilst everlastingly the flaming glory of Christ Wheels in adorable depths of amethyst It is the fair lily that we all revere It is the torch burning in the wind its auburn hair It is the rosepale son of the mother of grief It is the tree with the world’s prayers ever in leaf It is of honour and eternity the double beam It is the six-branched star it is God Who Friday dies and Sunday rises from the dead It is Christ who better than airmen wings his flight Holding the record of the world for height Pupil Christ of the eye Twentieth pupil of the centuries it is no novice And changed into a bird this century soars like Jesus The devils in the deeps look up and say they see a Nimitation of Simon Magus in Judea Craft by name by nature craft they cry About the pretty flyer the angels fly Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana hover With Icarus round the first airworthy ever For those whom the Eucharist transports they now and then make way Host-elevating priests ascending endlessly The aeroplane alights at last with outstretched pinions Then the sky is filled with swallows in their millions The rooks come flocking the owls the hawks Flamingoes from Africa and ibises and storks The roc bird famed in song and story soars Guillaume Apollinaire 887 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
With Adam’s skull the first head in its claws The eagle stoops screaming from heaven’s verge From America comes the little humming-bird From China the long and supple One-winged peehees that fly in couples Behold the dove spirit without alloy That ocellate peacock and lyre-bird convoy The phoenix flame-devoured flame-revived All with its ardent ash an instant hides Leaving the perilous straits the sirens three Divinely singing join the company And eagle phoenix peehees fraternize One and all with the machine that flies Now you walk in Paris alone among the crowd Herds of bellowing buses hemming you about Anguish of love parching you within As though you were never to be loved again If you lived in olden times you would get you to a cloister You are ashamed when you catch yourself at a paternoster You are your own mocker and like hellfire your laughter crackles Golden on your life’s hearth fall the sparks of your laughter It is a picture in a dark museum hung And you sometimes go and contemplate it long
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To-day you walk in Paris the women are blood-red It was and would I could forget it was at beauty’s ebb From the midst of fervent flames Our Lady beheld me at Chartres The blood of your Sacred Heart flooded me in Montmartre I am sick with hearing the words of bliss The love I endure is like a syphilis And the image that possesses you and never leaves your side In anguish and insomnia keeps you alive Now you are on the Riviera among The lemon-trees that flower all year long With your friends you go for a sail on the sea One is from Nice one from Menton and two from La Turbie The polypuses in the depths fill us with horror And in the seaweed fishes swim emblems of the Saviour You are in an inn-garden near Prague You feel perfectly happy a rose is on the table
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And you observe instead of writing your story in prose The chafer asleep in the heart of the rose Appalled you see your image in the agates of Saint Vitus That day you were fit to die with sadness You look like Lazarus frantic in the daylight The hands of the clock in the Jewish quarter go to left from right And you too live slowly backwards Climbing up to the Hradchin or listening as night falls To Czech songs being sung in taverns Here you are in Marseilles among the water-melons Here you are in Coblentz at the Giant’s Hostelry Here you are in Rome under a Japanese medlar-tree Here you are in Amsterdam with an ill-favoured maiden You find her beautiful she is engaged to a student in Leyden There they let their rooms in Latin cubicula locanda I remember I spent three days there and as many in Gouda
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You are in Paris with the examining magistrate They clap you in gaol like a common reprobate Grievous and joyous voyages you made Before you knew what falsehood was and age At twenty you suffered from love and at thirty again My life was folly and my days in vain You dare not look at your hands tears haunt my eyes For you for her I love and all the old miseries Weeping you watch the wretched emigrants They believe in God they pray the women suckle their infants They fill with their smell the station of Saint-Lazare Like the wise men from the east they have faith in their star They hope to prosper in the Argentine And to come home having made their fortune A family transports a red eiderdown as you your heart An eiderdown as unreal as our dreams Some go no further doss in the stews Of the Rue des Rosiers or the Rue des Écouffes Often in the streets I have seen them in the gloaming Taking the air and like chessmen seldom moving They are mostly Jews the wives wear wigs and in The depths of shadowy dens bloodless sit on and on
Guillaume Apollinaire 889 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
You stand at the bar of a crapulous café Drinking coffee at two sous a time in the midst of the unhappy It is night you are in a restaurant it is superior These women are decent enough they have their troubles however All even the ugliest one have made their lovers suffer She is a Jersey police-constable’s daughter Her hands I had not seen are chapped and hard The seams of her belly go to my heart To a poor harlot horribly laughing I humble my mouth You are alone morning is at hand In the streets the milkmen rattle their cans Like a dark beauty night withdraws Watchful Leah or Ferdine the false And you drink this alcohol burning like your life Your life that you drink like spirit of wine You walk towards Auteuil you want to walk home and sleep Among your fetishes from Guinea and the South Seas Christs of another creed another guise The lowly Christs of dim expectancies Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Adieu Adieu Sun corseless head Translation from French by Samuel Beckett
COMMENTARY
There is no longer any Wagnerianism in us, and the young authors have cast away all the enchanted clothing of the mighty romanticism of Germany and Wagner, just as they have rejected the rustic tinsel of our early evaluations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. G. A., from “The New Spirit and the Poets”
(1) And yet the twist with Apollinaire—as with others into & including our own time—was the acknowledgment of the New Poetry’s / New Spirit’s sources in the century before: “to inherit from the romantics,” he wrote, “a curiosity which will incite it to explore all the domains suitable for
890 A Third Gallery Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
furnishing literary subject matter which will permit life to be exalted in whatever form it occurs.” That push would lead him & others in his wake toward a new “synthetic poetry”—a synthesis of all arts & all forms into a single work—& “a liberty of unimaginable opulence . . . an encyclopedic liberty . . . in which [the poets] will have at their disposition the entire world, its noises and appearances, the thought and language of man, song, dance, all the arts and artifices, still more mirages than Morgane [Morgan le Fay] could summon up on the hill of Gibel, with which to compose the visible and unfolded book of the future” (italics ours). If the global ambition as stated here matches that of some earlier poets—say Whitman, say Hugo—its modernism was precisely in his recognition of previously unknown means (of production, of dissemination) & the free ability to invent new forms of word & image, where & whenever needed. In all of this the key element, he tells us, is “surprise” (“the greatest source of what is new”)—a state-of-the-poem beyond definition & closure that links him (circa 1910) to the experimental Romantics before & the Dadas & Surrealists immediately after, among many others. With all of which, the tie-in he also made to “the poets[’] wish to master prophecy, that spirited mare that has never been tamed,” established even deeper links to past & future. His early death, following head wounds in World War I & Spanish flu shortly thereafter, left a gap that others rushed to fill. For more on/of Apollinaire, see Poems for the Millennium, volume one.
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(2) Victory will be above all To see truly into the distance To see everything Up close So that everything can have a new name from “Victoire,” trans. David Antin
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
&
P O E T I C S
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M A N I F E S T O S
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
Joha n n Wolf gan g von G o e t h e
1749–1832
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[ TOWA R D A WO R L D L I T E R AT U R E ]
If . . . a world literature develops in the near future—as appears inevitable with the ever-increasing ease of communication—we must expect no more and no less than what it can and in fact will accomplish. The world at large, no matter how vast it may be, is only an expanded homeland and will actually yield in interest no more than our native land. What appeals to the multitude will spread endlessly and, as we can already see now, will be well received in all parts of the world, while what is serious and truly substantial will be less successful. However, those who have devoted themselves to higher and more fruitful endeavors will become more easily and more intimately acquainted. Everywhere in the world there are men who are concerned with what has already been achieved and, using that as a basis, with working toward the true progress of mankind. But the course they take and the pace they maintain is not to everyone’s liking. The more forceful members of society want to move faster and therefore reject and prevent the furtherance of the very things which could aid their own advancement. The seriousminded must therefore form a silent, almost secret congregation, since it would be futile to oppose the powerful currents of the day. But they must maintain their position tenaciously until the storm has subsided. Such men will find their main consolation, even their ultimate encouragement in the fact that what is true is at the same time useful. Once they themselves have discovered this connection and can demonstrate it convincingly, they will not fail to have a strong impact, and what is more, for years to come. Translation from German by John Geary
William Blake
1757–1827
from T H E M A R R I A G E O F H E A V E N A N D H E L L :
REASON AND ENERGY
As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion
895 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah xxxiv & XXXV Chap: Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. The voice of the Devil
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All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors. 1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul. 2. That Energy. calld Evil. is alone from the Body. & that Reason. calld Good. is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True 1 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age 2 Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3 Energy is Eternal Delight ______________________________ Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah. And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan and his children are call’d Sin & Death But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan. For this history has been adopted by both parties It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he, who dwells in flaming fire. Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.
896 Manifestos & Poetics Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum! Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it
F ried rich Höld erlin
1770–1843
from O N T H E D I F F E R E N C E O F P O E T I C M O D E S
In the poem, feeling is expressed in an idealistic—passion in a naïve—and fantasy in an energetic manner.
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Thus once again the idealistic in the poem affects sentiment (by means of passion), the naïve affects passion (by means of fantasy), the energetic affects fantasy (by means of sentiment). _ naive poem. basic tone. passion. pp. by means of fantasy. language. Sentiment Passion Fantasy Sentiment Passion Fantasy Sentiment. by means of Fantasy. effect. Passion Fantasy Sentiment Passion Fantasy Sentiment Passion. energetic poem. basic tone. Fantasy. pp. by means of sentiment. language. Passion Fantasy Sentiment Passion Fantasy Sentiment Passion. pref. by means of Sentiment. effect. Fantasy Sentiment Passion Fantasy Sentiment Passion Fantasy. idealistic poem. basic tone.
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Sentiment, pp. language. Fantasy
by means of passion Sentiment Passion Fantasy Sentiment Passion Fantasy. pref. by means of Passion.
effect. Sentiment Passion Passion ?
Fantasy Passion _ Passion Sentiment
Fantasy Fantasy
Sentiment Sentiment.
Sentiment Fantasy Sentiment Fantasy. by means of Sentiment
Fantasy Passion Sentiment Fantasy Passion Sentiment. Style of the song Diotima.
Translation from German by Thomas Pfau
William Word swort h
1770–1850
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from A D V E R T I S E M E N T F O R LY R I C A L B A L L A D S
It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves. The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. It is desirable that such readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification; but that, while they are perusing this book, they should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents; and if the answer be favorable to the
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author’s wishes, that they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision. Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed. It must be expected that many lines and phrases will not exactly suit their taste. It will perhaps appear to them, that wishing to avoid the prevalent fault of the day, the author has sometimes descended too low, and that many of his expressions are too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity. It is apprehended, that the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers, and with those in modern times who have been the most successful in painting manners and passions, the fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make. An accurate taste in poetry, and in all the other arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed, is an acquired talent, which can only be produced by severe thought, and a long continued intercourse with the best models of composition. This is mentioned not so much with so ridiculous a purpose as to prevent the most inexperienced reader from judging for himself; but merely to temper the rashness of decision, and to suggest that if poetry be a subject on which much time has not been bestowed, the judgment may be erroneous, and that in many cases it necessarily will be so.
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Samu el Taylor C olerid ge
1772–1834
from S H A K S P E A R E , W I T H I N T R O D U C T O R Y M A T T E R
O N P O E T R Y, T H E D R A M A , A N D T H E S T A G E
No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes its genius—the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination. How then comes it that not only single “Zoili” [disparaging critics] but whole nations have combined in unhesitating condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters,—as a wild heath where islands of fertility look the greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without snapping the flower?—In this statement, I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire, save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakspeare’s own commentators and (so they would tell
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 899 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
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you) almost idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material;—as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it developes, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms;—each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within,—its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror;—and even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakspeare,—himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness. [And again, from Biographia Literaria: “The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. Precipitandus est liber spiritus,* says Petronius Arbiter most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words.”] *The “free” spirit must be hurried on.
F ried rich von S chlegel
1772–1829
AT H E N A E U M F R AG M E N T 116
Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. Its mission is not merely to reunite all separate genres of poetry and to put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetorics. It will, and should, now mingle and now amalgamate poetry and prose, genius and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature, render poetry living and social, and life and society poetic, poetize wit, fill and saturate the forms of art with solid cultural
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material of every kind, and inspire them with vibrations of humor. It embraces everything poetic, from the greatest system of art which, in turn, includes many systems, down to the sigh, the kiss, which the musing child breathes forth in artless song. It can lose itself in what it represents to such a degree that one might think its one and only goal were the characterization of poetic individuals of every type; and yet no form has thus far arisen appropriate to expressing the author’s mind so perfectly, so that artists who just wanted to write a novel have by coincidence described themselves. Romantic poetry alone can, like the epic, become a mirror of the entire surrounding world, a picture of its age. And yet, it too can soar, free from all real and ideal interests, on the wings of poetic reflection, midway between the work and the artist. It can even exponentiate this reflection and multiply it as in an endless series of mirrors. It is capable of the highest and the most universal education; not only by creating from within, but also from without, since it organizes in similar fashion all parts of what is destined to become a whole; thus, a view is opened to an endlessly developing classicism. Among the arts Romantic poetry is what wit is to philosophy, and what society, association, friendship, and love are in life. Other types of poetry are completed and can now be entirely analyzed. The Romantic type of poetry is still becoming; indeed, its peculiar essence is that it is always becoming and that it can never be completed. It cannot be exhausted by any theory, and only a divinatory criticism might dare to characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, as it alone is free; and as its first law it recognizes that the arbitrariness of the poet endures no law above him. The Romantic genre of poetry is the only one which is more than a genre, and which is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be Romantic. Translation from German by Ernst Behler & Roman Struc
from O N I N C O M P R E H E N S I B I L I T Y
What gods will rescue us from all these ironies? The only solution is to find an irony that might be able to swallow up all these big and little ironies and leave no trace of them at all. I must confess that at precisely this moment I feel that mine has a real urge to do just that. But even this would only be a short-term solution. I fear that if I understand correctly what destiny seems to be hinting at, then soon there will arise a new generation of little ironies: for truly the stars augur the fantastic. And even if it should happen that everything were to be peaceful for a long period of time, one still would not be able to put any faith in this seeming calm. Irony is something one simply cannot play games with. It can have
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incredibly long-lasting effects. I have a suspicion that some of the most conscious artists of earlier times are still carrying on ironically, hundreds of years after their deaths, with their most faithful followers and admirers. Shakespeare has so infinitely many depths, subterfuges, and intentions. Shouldn’t he also, then, have had the intention of concealing insidious traps in his works to catch the cleverest artists of posterity, to deceive them and make them believe before they realize what they’re doing that that they are somewhat like Shakespeare themselves. Surely, he must be in this respect as in so many others much more full of intentions than people usually think. I’ve already been forced to admit indirectly that the Athenaeum is incomprehensible, and because it happened in the heat of irony, I can hardly take it back without in the process doing violence to that irony. But is incomprehensibility really something so unmitigatedly contemptible and evil? Methinks the salvation of families and nations rests upon it. If I am not wholly deceived, then states and systems, the most artificial productions of man, are often so artificial that one simply can’t admire the wisdom of their creator enough. Only an incredibly minute quantity of it suffices: as long as its truth and purity remain inviolate and no blasphemous rationality dares approach its sacred confines. Yes, even man’s most precious possession, his own inner happiness, depends in the last analysis, as anybody can easily verify, on some such point of strength that must be left in the dark, but that nonetheless shores up and supports the whole burden and would crumble the moment one subjected it to rational analysis. Verily, it would fare badly with you if, as you demand, the whole world were ever to become wholly comprehensible in earnest. And isn’t this entire, unending world constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos? Translation from German by Peter Firchow
Percy Bys s he S helley
1792–1822
from A D E F E N C E O F P O E T R Y
Three Excerpts
Even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time
902 Manifestos & Poetics Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
from the selectest of the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.
. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love: or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
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. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of whatever beautiful, or generous, or true can have place in an evil time. It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus were less cold, cruel and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before Poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth which at once connects, animates and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation. And let us not circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of these immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all poets like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind have built up since the beginning of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 903 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
John Keat s
1795–1821
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
TO RICHARD WOODHOUSE, 27 OCTOBER 1818
My dear Woodhouse, Your Letter gave me a great satisfaction; more on account of its friendliness, than any relish of that matter in it which is accounted so acceptable in the “genus irritabile.” The best answer I can give you is in a clerklike manner to make some observations on two princple points, which seem to point like indices into the midst of the whole pro and con, about genius, and views and achievements and ambition and cetera. 1st As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature—how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children: I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough so to let you see that no dependence is to be placed on what I said that day. In the second place I will speak of my views, and of the life I purpose to myself. I am ambitious of doing the world some good: if I should be spared that may be the work of maturer years—in the interval I will assay
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to reach to as high a summit in Poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer. The faint conceptions I have of Poems to come brings the blood frequently into my forehead—All I hope is that I may not lose all interest in human affairs—that the solitary indifference I feel for applause even from the finest Spirits, will not blunt any acuteness of vision I may have. I do not think it will—I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the Beautiful even if my night’s labours should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine upon them. But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself; but from some character in whose soul I now live. I am sure however that this next sentence is from myself. I feel your anxiety, good opinion and friendliness in the highest degree, and am Your’s most sincerely John Keats
Hein rich Hein e
1797–1856
from J O U R N E Y F R O M M U N I C H T O G E N O A
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Heine’s Epitaph
As if under a triumphal arch of colossal masses of clouds, the sun drew upwards, victorious, cheerful, secure, auguring a lovely day. But for me it was like the poor moon, that still stood fading in the sky. It had wandered along its solitary path in the barren nighttime, when happiness slumbered and only ghosts, owls and sinners walked abroad; and now, as the young day climbed forth, with jubilant beams and shimmering dawn, now must it depart—just one wistful glance toward the great light of the world, and it disappeared like fragrant mist. “It will be a lovely day,” called my traveling companion to me from the wagon. Yes, it will be a lovely day, repeated softly my praying heart, and trembled with melancholy and joy. Yes, it will be a lovely day, the sun of freedom will warm the earth more happily than all the combined stars of the aristocracy; a new generation will blossom up, engendered in the embrace of free choice, not in the bed of compulsion and under control of spiritual customs officers; with the free birth for men will come also free thoughts and feelings into the world, of which we who are born as servants have no notion—Oh! they will apprehend just as little how horrible was the night, in whose darkness we have had to live, and how
Heinrich Heine 905 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
atrociously we have had to fight, with ugly ghosts, thumping owls and sanctimonious sinners! O we poor fighters! that we have had to misspend our lifetimes in such battles and are now tired and pale, as the day of victory beams forth! The glow of the sunrise will no longer be able to redden our cheeks and warm our hearts, we’ll die off like the perishing moon—the wander-path of Man is measured all too short, and at its end is the implacable grave. I really know not, if I deserve to have the laurel wreath one day adorn my coffin. Poesy, as much as I may have loved it, was always but a holy plaything to me, or the consecrated means to a divine end. I have never placed great value on poet’s fame, and if one praises my songs or censures them, it concerns me little. But ye should lay a sword upon my coffin; for I was a good soldier in the liberation wars of mankind.
Vict or Hu go
1802–1885
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from P R E F A C E T O C R O M W E L L
Behold, then, a new religion, a new society; upon this twofold foundation there must inevitably spring up a new poetry. Previously—we beg pardon for setting forth a result which the reader has probably already foreseen from what has been said above—previously, following therein the course pursued by the ancient polytheism and philosophy, the purely epic muse of the ancients had studied nature in only a single aspect, casting aside without pity almost everything in art which, in the world subjected to its imitation, had not relation to a certain type of beauty. A type which was magnificent at first, but, as always happens with everything systematic, became in later times false, trivial and conventional. Christianity leads poetry to the truth. Like it, the modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct God; if a mutilated nature will be the more beautiful for the mutilation; if art has the right to duplicate, so to speak, man, life, creation; if things will progress better when their muscles and their vigour have been taken from them; if, in short, to be incomplete is the best way to be harmonious. Then it is that, with its eyes fixed upon events that are both laughable and redoubtable, and under the influence of that spirit of 906 Manifestos & Poetics
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Christian melancholy and philosophical criticism which we described a moment ago, poetry will take a great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations—but without confounding them—darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the startingpoint of poetry. All things are connected. Thus, then, we see a principle unknown to the ancients, a new type, introduced in poetry; and as an additional element in anything modifies the whole of the thing, a new form of the art is developed. This type is the grotesque; its new form is comedy. And we beg leave to dwell upon this point; for we have now indicated the significant feature, the fundamental difference which, in our opinion, separates modern from ancient art, the present form from the defunct form; or, to use less definite but more popular terms, romantic literature from classical literature. Translation from French by Charles W. Norton
Ralp h Wald o E mers o n
1809–1882
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from T H E P O E T
By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call
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nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptize her but baptizes herself; and this through the metamorphosis again.
Walt Whit ma n
1819–1892
from P R E F A C E T O L E A V E S O F G R A S S
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This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready plow’d and manured . . . others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches . . . and shall master all attachment.
Charles Ba u d ela ire
1821–1867
from T H E P A I N T E R O F M O D E R N L I F E
Do you remember a picture (it really is a picture!), painted—or rather written—by the most powerful pen of our age [viz. Edgar Allan Poe], and entitled The Man of the Crowd? In the window of a coffee-house there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing in all the odours and essences of life: as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remembers, and fervently
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desires to remember, everything. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion!
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. Now convalescence is like a return towards childhood. The convalescent, like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial. Let us go back, if we can, by a retrospective effort of the imagination, towards our most youthful, our earliest, impressions, and we will recognize that they had a strange kinship with those brightly coloured impressions which we were later to receive in the aftermath of a physical illness, always provided that that Illness had left our spiritual capacities pure and unharmed. The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour. I am prepared to go even further and assert that inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its repercussion in the very core of the brain. The man of genius has sound nerves, while those of the child are weak. With the one, Reason has taken up a considerable position; with the other, Sensibility is almost the whole being. But genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will—a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated.
. The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The
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lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are—or are not—to be found: or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd Itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an “I” with an insatiable appetite for the “non-I,” at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive. Translation from French by Jonathan Mayne
Fyod or D os t oevs ky
1821–1881
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from N O T E S F R O M U N D E R G R O U N D
The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view of the public more distinctly than is commonly done, one of the characters of the recent past. He is one of the representatives of a generation still living. Author’s Note.
Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind. Anyway, I have only lately determined to remember some of my early adventures. Till now I have always avoided them, even with a certain uneasiness. Now, when I am not only recalling them, but have actually decided to write an account of them, I want to try the experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth. I will observe, in parenthesis, that Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that man is bound to lie about himself. He considers that Rousseau certainly told lies about
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himself in his confessions, and even intentionally lied, out of vanity. I am convinced that Heine is right; I quite understand how sometimes one may, out of sheer vanity, attribute regular crimes to oneself, and indeed I can very well conceive that kind of vanity. But Heine judged of people who made their confessions to the public. I write only for myself, and I wish to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that form. It is a form, an empty form—I shall never have readers. I have made this plain already . . . I don’t wish to be hampered by any restrictions in the compilation of my notes. I shall not attempt any system or method. I will jot things down as I remember them. But here, perhaps, someone will catch at the word and ask me: if you really don’t reckon on readers, why do you make such compacts with yourself—and on paper too—that is, that you won’t attempt any system or method, that you jot things down as you remember them, and so on, and so on? Why are you explaining? Why do you apologise? Well, there it is, I answer. There is a whole psychology in all this, though. Perhaps it is simply that I am a coward. And perhaps that I purposely imagine an audience before me in order that I may be more dignified while I write. There are perhaps thousands of reasons. Again, what is my object precisely in writing? If it is not for the benefit of the public why should I not simply recall these incidents in my own mind without putting them on paper? Quite so; but yet it is more imposing on paper. There is something more impressive in it; I shall be better able to criticise myself and improve my style. Besides, I shall perhaps obtain actual relief from writing. Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed by one memory of a distant past. It came back vividly to my mind a few days ago, and has remained haunting me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow. I have hundreds of such reminiscences; but at times some one stands out from the hundred and oppresses me. For some reason I believe that if I write it down I should get rid of it. Why not try? Besides, I am bored, and I never have anything to do. Writing will be a sort of work. They say work makes man kind-hearted and honest. Well, here is a chance for me, anyway. Snow is falling today, yellow and dingy. It fell yesterday, too, and a few days ago. I fancy it is the wet snow that has reminded me of that incident which I cannot shake off now. And so let it be a story A PROPOS of the falling snow. Translation from Russian by Constance Garnett
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E mily D ickin s on
1830–1886
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LET TER TO THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
July 1862 Could you believe me – without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves – Would this do just as well? It often alarms Father – He says Death might occur, and he has Molds of all the rest – but has no Mold of me, but I noticed the Quick wore off those things, in a few days, and forestall the dishonor – You will think no caprice of me – You said “Dark.” I know the Butterfly – and the Lizard – and the Orchis – Are not those your Countrymen? I am happy to be your scholar, and will deserve the kindness, I cannot repay. If you truly consent, I recite, now – Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon, to commend – the Bone, but to set it, Sir, and fracture within, is more critical. And for this, Preceptor, I shall bring you – Obedience – the Blossom from my Garden, and every gratitude I know. Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that – My Business is Circumference – An ignorance, not of Customs, but if caught with the Dawn – or the Sunset see me – Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty, Sir, if you please, it afflicts me, and I thought that instruction would take it away. Because you have much business, beside the growth of me – you will appoint, yourself, how often I shall come – without your inconvenience. And if at any time – you regret you received me, or I prove a different fabric to that you supposed – you must banish me – When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person. You are true, about the “perfection.” Today, makes Yesterday mean. You spoke of Pippa Passes – I never heard anybody speak of Pippa Passes – before. You see my posture is benighted. To thank you, baffles me. Are you perfectly powerful? Had I a pleasure you had not, I could delight to bring it. Your Scholar
912 Manifestos & Poetics Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Wa lt er Pat er
1839–1894
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from T H E R E N A I S S A N C E : S T U D I E S I N A R T A N D P O E T R Y
Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us,—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. “Philosophy is the microscope of thought.” The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of
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the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
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St ép ha n e M allarmé
1842–1898
from C R I S I S I N V E R S E
Languages are imperfect because multiple; the supreme language is missing. Inasmuch as thought consists of writing without pen and paper, without whispering even, without the sound of the immortal Word, the diversity of languages on earth means that no one can utter words which would bear the miraculous stamp of Truth Herself Incarnate. This is clearly nature’s law—we stumble on it with a smile of resignation—to the effect that we have no sufficient reason for equating ourselves with God. But esthetically, I am disappointed when I consider how impossible it is for language to express things by means of certain keys which would reproduce their brilliance and aura—keys which do exist as a part of the instrument of the human voice, or among languages, or sometimes even in one language. When compared to the opacity of the word ombre, the word tenebres does not seem very dark; and how frustrating the per-
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verseness and contradiction which lend dark tones to jour, bright tones to nuit! We dream of words brilliant at once in meaning and sound, or darkening in meaning and so in sound, luminously and elementally selfsucceeding. But, let us remember that if our dream were fulfilled, verse would not exist—verse which, in all its wisdom, atones for the sins of languages, comes nobly to their aid. Strange mystery—and so, equally mysterious and meaningful, prosody sprang forth in primitive times. The ideal would be a reasonable number of words stretched beneath our mastering glance, arranged in enduring figures, and followed by silence. Translation from French by Bradford Cook
G erard M a n ley Hop ki n s
1844–1889
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from P O E T R Y A N D V E R S E
Is all verse poetry or all poetry verse?—Depends on definitions of both. Poetry is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning. Some matter and meaning is essential to it but only as an element necessary to support and employ the shape which is contemplated for its own sake. (Poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake—and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on. Now if this can be done without repeating it once of the inscape will be enough for art and beauty and poetry but then at least the inscape must be understood as so standing by itself that it could be copied and repeated. If not/ repetition, oftening, over-and-overing, aftering of the inscape must take place in order to detach it to the mind and in this light poetry is speech which afters and oftens its inscape, speech couched in a repeating figure and verse is spoken sound having a repeating figure.) Verse is (inscape of spoken sound, not spoken words, or speech employed to carry the inscape of
Is all poetry verse?
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spoken sound—or in the usual words) speech wholly or partially repeating the same figure of sound. Now there is speech which wholly or partially repeats the same figure of grammar and this may be framed to be heard for its own sake and interest over and above its interest of meaning. Poetry then may be couched in this, and therefore all poetry is not verse but all poetry is either verse or falls under this or some still further development of what verse is, speech wholly or partially repeating some kind of figure which is over and above meaning, at least the grammatical, historical, and logical meaning. But is all verse poetry?—Verse may be applied for use, e.g. to help the memory, and then is useful art, not ȝȠȣıȚțȒ (“Thirty days hath September” and “Propria quae maribus” or Livy’s horrendum carmen) and so is not poetry. Or it might be composed without meaning (as nonsense verse and choruses—“Hey nonny nonny” or “Wille wau wau wau” etc) and then alone it would not be poetry but might be part of a poem. But if it has a meaning and is meant to be heard for its own sake it will be poetry if you take poetry to be a kind of composition and not the virtue or success or excellence of that kind, as eloquence is the virtue of oratory and not oratory only and beauty the virtue of inscape and not inscape only. In this way poetry may be high or low, good or bad, and doggrel will be poor or low poetry but not merely verse, for it aims at interest or amusement. But if poetry is the virtue of its own kind of composition then all verse even composed for its own interest’s sake is not poetry.
A rt hu r R imb a u d
Is all verse poetry?
1854–1891
from L E T T E R T O P A U L D E M E N Y, M A Y 1 5 , 1 8 7 1
I have decided to give you an hour of new literature. I begin at once with a psalm of current interest. Poem enclosed: Paris War Song (Chant de Guerre Parisien). 916 Manifestos & Poetics
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And now follows a discourse on the future of poetry:— All ancient poetry culminated in Greek poetry, harmonious Life. From Greece to the Romantic movement—Middle Ages—there are men of letters, versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, nothing but rhymed prose, a game, fatty degeneration and glory of countless idiotic generations: Racine is the pure, the strong, the great man. Had his rhymes been effaced, his hemistitches got mixed up, today the Divine Imbecile would be as unknown as any old author of Origins. After Racine the game gets moldy. It lasted for two thousand years! Neither a joke, nor a paradox. My reason inspires me with a certainty on this subject even greater than the rage of any Young-France ever was. Besides, newcomers have a right to condemn their ancestors: one is at home and there’s plenty of time. Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!! The Romantics? who prove so clearly that the song is very seldom the work, that is, the idea sung and understood by the singer. For, I is an other. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it isn’t to blame. To me this is evident: I give a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths or comes bursting onto the stage. If the old fools had not hit upon the false significance of the Ego only, we should not now have to sweep away these millions of skeletons who, since time immemorial, have been accumulating the products of those one-eyed intellects claiming themselves to be the authors. In Greece, I have said, verses and lyres, rhythms: Action. After that, music and rhymes are games, pasttimes. The study of this past charms the curious: many delight in reviving these antiquities:—the pleasure is theirs. Universal Mind has always thrown out its ideas naturally; man would pick up part of these fruits of the brain; they acted through, wrote books with them: and so things went along, since man did not work on himself, not being yet awake, or not yet in the fullness of his dream. Writers, functionaries. Author, creator, poet, that man has never existed! The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He looks for his soul, inspects it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it: it seems simple: in every brain a natural development is accomplished: so many egoists proclaim themselves authors; others attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! But the soul has to be made monstrous, that’s the point:—like comprachicos, if you like! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face. One must, I say, be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer through a long, a prodigious and ratioArthur Rimbaud 917
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nal disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. Ineffable torture in which he will need all his faith and superhuman strength, the great criminal, the great sickman, the utterly damned, and the supreme Savant! For he arrives at the unknown! Since he has cultivated his soul—richer to begin with than any other! He arrives at the unknown: and even if, half crazed, in the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them! Let him croak in his leap into those unutterable and innumerable things: there will come other horrible workers: they will begin at the horizons where he has succumbed. Translation from French by Louise Varèse
Rain er M aria R ilke
1875–1926
A N A R C H A I C TO R S O O F A P O L LO
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Never will we know his fabulous head where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet his torso glows: a candelabrum set before his gaze which is pushed back and hid, restrained and shining. Else the curving breast could not thus blind you, nor through the soft turn of the loins could this smile easily have passed into the bright groin where the genitals burned. Else stood this stone a fragment and defaced, with lucent body from the shoulders falling, too short, not gleaming like a lion’s fell; nor would this star have shaken the shackles off, bursting with light, until there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. Translation from German by C. F. MacIntyre
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CREDITS
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Permission for the inclusion in this gathering of the following material has been graciously granted by the publishers and individuals indicated below. Yosano Akiko: “The Woman,” “Cochineal Purple” from Midaregami (Hair in Disorder), “May It Not Come to Pass That You Die,” “In Praise of May,” and “Auguste’s Single Strike” first appeared in Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology, translated by Hiroaki Sato (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2007). Reprinted by permission of the translator. “Song of the Letter A” reprinted by permission of Hiroaki Sato. Guillaume Apollinaire: “Zone,” translated by Samuel Beckett, from Collected Poems in French and English by Samuel Beckett; copyright © 1977 by Samuel Beckett. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc., and Faber and Faber. Extract from “Victoire” reprinted by permission of the translator, David Antin. Charles Baudelaire: “Correspondences,” translated by Richard Wilbur, and “A Carrion,” translated by Allen Tate, from The Flowers of Evil, copyright © 1965 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Get Drunk” and “One O’Clock in the Morning,” translated by Louise Varèse, from Paris Spleen, copyright © 1947 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Litanies of Satan” reprinted by permission of the translator, Jack Foley. “The Voyage,” translated by Robert Lowell, from Imitations, by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 1959 by Robert Lowell. Copyright renewed 1987 by Harriet, Sheridan, and Caroline Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. “To the Reader” from The Flowers of Evil, translated by Keith Waldrop (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2006). Copyright © 2006 by Keith Waldrop and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Extract from The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Jonathan Mayne, published by Phaidon Press Limited. © 1964, 1995 Phaidon Press Limited. Giuseppe Belli: “Eleven Roman Sonnets: For the Pope” reprinted by permission of the translator, Harold Norse. Charles Bernstein: “Artifice of Absorption” from A Poetics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992). Reprinted by permission of the author. Aloysius Bertrand: Extract from Gaspard de la Nuit from The Prose Poem, edited
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and with translations by Michael Benedikt. Copyright © 1976 by Michael Benedikt. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the Estate of Michael Benedikt. Maurice Blanchot: Extract from “The Gaze of Orpheus,” translated by Lydia Davis, from The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays. Reprinted by permission of Station Hill Press. Georg Büchner: Extract from Lenz reprinted by permission of the translator, Richard Sieburth. John Clare: “[I Am: A Sonnet & a Variation],” “The Badger: A Sequence,” “[Mouse’s Nest],” “Emmonsails Heath in Winter,” extract from The Progress of Rhyme, and “Sonnet: To John Clare” are transcriptions of original manuscripts, made by Jeffrey C. Robinson at the Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, England, June 2008. In transcribing the poems included here from the manuscripts, we are nonetheless grateful to Eric Robinson and his associates for their massive achievement in bringing Clare’s often difficult manuscripts for the first time into view for modern readers and scholars. Extract from letter to Messrs Taylor and Hessey from The Prose of John Clare, edited by J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, reprinted 1970 by Barnes and Noble, Inc.). “Jack Randalls Challenge to All the World” from John Clare: The Living Year 1841, edited by Tim Chilcott (Trent Editions, 1999). Letter to Mr. Jas. Hipkins from The Letters of John Clare, edited by J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, reprinted 1970 by Barnes and Noble, Inc.). Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Extracts (“Fragment from the Gutch Notebook” and “From The Notebooks”) from The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Kathleen Coburn. Copyright © 1957 by Princeton University Press, renewed 1985. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Rubén Darío: “In the Land of Allegory,” “Sonatina,” and “Agency” from Selected Poems of Rubén Darío, translated by Lysander Kemp. Copyright © 1965, renewed 1993. Reprinted by permission of the University of Texas Press. “To Roosevelt” first appeared in Mandorla: Nueva Escritura de Las Américas. Reprinted by permission of the translator, Gabriel Gudding. “Metempsychosis” and “Exploit in the Bullring” from Selected Poems of Rubén Darío: A Bilingual Anthology, translated by Alberto Acereda and Will Derusha (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2002). Reprinted by permission of Associated University Presses. Emily Dickinson: #1249 “Had I not seen the Sun,” #627 “I think I was enchanted,” #764 “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun,” #706 “I Cannot live with You,” and #778 “Four Trees – opon a solitary Acre” reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. “To Recipient Unknown” and “To Thomas Wentworth Higginson, July 1862” reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1958, 1986 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College; 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson; 1960 by Mary L. Hampson.
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Denis Diderot: Extract from Rameau’s Nephew: An Improvisation, translated by Jacques Barzun. Copyright © 1966. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Extract from Denis Diderot: The Poet of Conversation, by David Antin. Reprinted by permission of David Antin. Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont: Extracts from Poésies and Maldoror and the Complete Works, translated by Alexis Lykiard. Reprinted by permission of Exact Change. Robert Duncan: “Shelley’s Arethusa Set to New Measures” © 2008 by the Jess Collins Trust and used by permission. “The Opening of the Field” copyright © 2008 by the Estate of Robert Duncan and reprinted by permission. Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Turtle in swamp” reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Volume XIV, 1854–1861, edited by Susan Sutton Smith and Harrison Hayford, p. 151, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Charles Fourier: Extract from The Theory of the Four Movements and “The Phalanx at Dawn” from The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier by Jonathan Beecher. Copyright © 1971 by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. Sigmund Freud: Extract from The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965). Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books Group. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “The Marienbad Elegy,” from Selected Verse: With Plain Prose Translations of Each Poem by Goethe, translated, introduced, and edited by David Luke (Penguin Classics, 1964). Copyright © 1964 by David Luke. “Arabian Ballad” from the Ralph Waldo Emerson collection, call number MS Am 1280H (126). Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and The Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association. Bibi Hayati: “Before There Was a Hint of Civilization,” “How Can I See the Splendor of the Moon,” and “Is It the Night of Power,” translated by Aliki Barnstone, first appeared in The Shambhala Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Poetry, edited by Aliki Barnstone. Heinrich Heine: “Und Drang,” translated by Ezra Pound, from Collected Early Poems, copyright © 1926, 1935, 1954, 1965, 1967, 1976 by The Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Faber and Faber. Extract from “Ludwig Borne: A Memorial,” translated by Frederic Ewen and Robert C. Holub, from The Romantic School and Other Essays, edited by Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub. Copyright © 1985. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, The Continuum International Publishing Group. Extract from “Germany: A Winter’s Tale,” translated by Aaron Kramer, in Poetry and Prose, edited by Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub. Copyright © 1982. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, The Continuum International Publishing Group. Friedrich Hölderlin: “I Once Asked the Muse” and “Palimpsest: Columbus” reprinted by permission of the translator, Richard Sieburth. “In the Forest” will appear in Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publisher, Fall 2008). “Poetic Modes” and “On the Difference of Poetic Modes” reprinted by permission from Friedrich
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Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, edited and translated by Thomas Pfau, the State University of New York Press. Copyright © 1988 by State University of New York. All rights reserved. Arno Holz: Extracts from Phantasus reprinted by permission of the translator, Anselm Hollo. “Childhood Paradise” reprinted by permission of the translator, David Dodd. Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Star Images: September to December 1864” and “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” from The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Norman H. Mackenzie (Clarendon, 1990). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Victor Hugo: “The Slope of Reverie,” “What the Public Says” from The Art of Being a Grandfather, “The Immaculate Conception,” “The Threshold of the Abyss” from God, extract from “Reply to a Bill of Indictment,” and “Bounaberdi” from The Selected Poems of Victor Hugo, translated by E. H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore. Copyright © 2001 by The University of Chicago. “Russia 1812,” translated by Robert Lowell, from Imitations by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 1959 by Robert Lowell. Copyright renewed 1987 by Harriet, Sheridan, and Caroline Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. “A Hieroglyphic Alphabet” reprinted by permission of the translator, Steve McCaffery. Hô Xuân Huong: “Autumn Landscape,” “On Sharing a Husband,” “Jackfruit,” and “Weaving at Night” from Spring Essence, translated by John Balaban. Translation copyright © 2000 by John Balaban. Reprinted with the permission of the translator and Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. Kobayashi Issa: “Fifteen Haiku” first appeared in Modern Haiku 35.3 (Autumn 2004). Reprinted by permission of the translator, Hiroaki Sato. Extract from The Spring of My Life: And Selected Haiku by Kobayashi Issa, translated by Sam Hamill, © 1997 by Sam Hamill. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boston, MA. www.shambhala.com Alfred Jarry: Extracts from “Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician” from Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. Copyright © 1965 by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Joseph Joubert: Extracts from The Notebooks reprinted by permission of the translator, Paul Auster. Vuk Karadz˘ic´: “A Poem for the Goddess Her City & the Marriage of Her Son & Daughter,” translated by Jerome Rothenberg and Miodrag Pavovic, from Antologija Liarske Narodne Poesije (Vuk Karadz˘ic´ Publishing House, Belgrade, 1982). Reprinted by permission of the translators and The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Søren Kierkegaard: “The Illegible Letter” and “Nebuchadnezzar” from Parables of Kierkegaard. © 1978 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. “Diapsalmata” from Kierkegaard’s Writings: Vol. III. © 1987 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Jules Laforgue: “Pierrots” translated by Ezra Pound, from The Translations of Ezra Pound, copyright © 1963 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Faber and Faber. “Complaint on the Oblivion of the Dead,” “The Coming of Winter,” and extract from Landscapes and Impressions from Selected Writings of Jules LaForgue, translated and edited by William Jay
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Smith, New York: Grove Press, 1956. Copyright © 1956 by William Jay Smith. Reprinted by permission of the translator. Giacomo Leopardi: “L’Infinito” translated by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Kenneth Rexroth. “Saturday Night in the Village,” translated by Robert Lowell, from Imitations, by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 1959 by Robert Lowell. Copyright renewed 1987 by Harriet, Sheridan, and Caroline Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Extract from Operette Morali: Essays and Dialogues, translated by Giovanni Cecchetti, © 1982 The Regents of the University of California. Published by University of California Press. “Broom, or the Flower of the Desert,” translated by Eamon Grennan, from Leopardi: Selected Poems. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Mikhail Lermontov: “My Demon,” “Untitled Poem,” “A Dream,” and “New Years Poem” translated by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak. Reprinted by permission of Jerome Rothenberg. Elias Lönnrot: “In the Beginning,” from The Kalevala: An Epic Poem after Oral Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1999), translated by Keith Bosley. Reprinted by permission of the translator. Antonio Machado: “Poem” (“Green little gardens”), “Poem” (“It is not true, sorrow, that I have known you”), “Notes,” “Songs,” “Poem” (“O solitude, my only companion”), and “Meditation for This Day” translated by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Kenneth Rexroth. Stéphane Mallarmé: “The Tomb of Edgar Poe” and “Igitur,” translated by Mary Ann Caws, from Selected Poetry and Prose, copyright © 1982 by Mary Ann Caws. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Extract from A Tomb for Anatol reprinted by permission of the translator, Paul Auster. Extract from “Crisis in Verse,” translated by Bradford Cook, from Mallarmé: Selected Prose, Poems, Essays, and Letters. © 1956 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. José Martí: “Undated Fragment” from José Martí: Selected Writings (Penguin, 2002). Reprinted by permission of the translator, Esther Allen. “Not Rhetoric or Ornament,” “Two Homelands Have I,” extract from “Powder from the Wings of a Moth,” “I Am an Honest Man” from Simple Verses, and “The Swiss Father” reprinted by permission of the translator, Mark Weiss. Commentary on José Martí by Mark Weiss reprinted by permission of the author. Adam Mickiewicz: “The Ruins of the Castle of Balaklava” from Crimean Sonnets, translated by Louise Bogan, “The Romantic,” translated by W. H. Auden, and “The Great Improvisation” from Forefathers’ Eve, translated by Louise Varèse, from Adam Mickiewicz, Selected Poems (Noonday Press, 1955), edited by Clark Mills. Reprinted by permission of the Polish Institute. Extract from Pan Tadeusz, translated by Donald Davie, from Slavic Excursions: Essays on Russian and Polish Literature by Donald Davie (Carcanet Press, 1990). Gerard de Nerval: Extracts from Aurelia, or Dream and Life and “Panorama” reprinted by permission of the translator, Richard Sieburth. Extracts from Les Chimères translated by Robin Blaser, from The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser. Copyright © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California. Published by University of California Press. Friedrich Nietzsche: Extract from “Oedipus: Soliloquies of the Last Philosopher”
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from Unpublished Writings, translated by Richard Gray. Copyright © 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. “The Desert Grows: Woe to Him Who Harbours Deserts . . . ,” “Only a Fool! Only a Poet!” and extract from Dithyrambs of Dionysus translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Anvil Press Poetry, 1984). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Letter to Jacob Burckhardt from The Portable Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann, translated by Walter Kaufmann, copyright 1954 by The Viking Press, renewed © 1982 by Viking Penguin, Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Cyprian Norwid: “The Sphinx” is taken from Cyprian Kamil Norwid: Selected Poems, translated by Adam Czerniawski. Published by Anvil Press Poetry in 2004. “What Did You Do to Athens, Socrates?” reprinted by permission of the translator, Walter Whipple. “Chopin’s Piano” reprinted by permission of the translator, Jerome Rothenberg. Novalis: Extract from Faith and Love or The King and the Queen reprinted by permission of the translator, Arthur Versluis. Extract from Hymns to the Night translated by Dick Higgins. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Dick Higgins. Sigbjørn Obstfelder: “I Look,” “The Dog,” “Hurricane,” “The Woman in Black,” and “The Arrow” reprinted by permission of the translator, Anselm Hollo. Commentary on Sigbjørn Obstfelder by Anselm Hollo reprinted by permission of the author. Charles Olson: “A Lustrum for You, E. P.,” from The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, reprinted by permission of University of California Press. Sándor Petöfi: “The Madman” and “Homer and Ossian” from Collected Translations by Edwin Morgan (Carcanet Press Ltd., 1990). Commentary on Sándor Petöfi by Enikö Bollobás reprinted by permission of the author. Aleksander Pushkin: “The Emperor Nicholas I,” translated by Dannie Abse, from After Pushkin (Carcanet Press, 1999). Reprinted by permission of the translator. “The Prophet,” translated by Ted Hughes, from Selected Translations. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber UK and the Estate of Ted Hughes. Extract from The Bronze Horseman, translated by Charles Tomlinson, from After Pushkin (Carcanet Press, 1999). Reprinted by permission of the translator. “Tsar Nikita and His Daughters,” translated by Ranjit Bolt, from After Pushkin (Carcanet Press, 1999). Reprinted by permission of the translator. Extract from Eugene Onegin translated by Tom Beck. Reprinted by permission of Dedalus Books, UK. Antoine Ó Reachtabhra (Blind Raftery): “I Am Rafteirí” reprinted by permission of the translator, Thomas Kinsella. Rainer Maria Rilke: “Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes,” translated by Robert Lowell, from Imitations by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 1959 by Robert Lowell. Copyright renewed 1987 by Harriet, Sheridan, and Caroline Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. “An Archaic Torso of Apollo,” from Rilke: Selected Poems. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press. Arthur Rimbaud: “Morning of Drunkenness” and letter to Paul Demeny, translated by Louise Varèse, from Illuminations, copyright ©1957 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “The Drunken Boat” from Conductors of the Pit (Soft Skull Press, 2005), reprinted by permission of the translator, Clayton Eshleman. “Bad Blood,” “Delirium,” and “Farewell,” translated by Louise Varèse, from A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat, copyright © 1961 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Extract from “Reveries of the Solitary Walker,” translated by Charles E. Butterworth. Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade: Extract from Juliette from Anthology of Black Humor, edited by André Breton. Translation copyright © 1997 by Mark Polizzotti. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. Friedrich Schlegel: “Athenaeum Fragment 116,” from Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, translated, introduced, and annotated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), pp. 140–41. Copyright © 1968 by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. “On Incomprehensibility,” from pp. 267–68 of Lucinde and the Fragments, translated by Peter Firchow (University of Minnesota Press, 1971). Reprinted by permission of Peter Firchow and the University of Minnesota Press. Victor Segalen: “Roadside Stelae” reprinted by permission of the translator, Nathaniel Tarn. Dionysios Solomos: “The Destruction of Psara” reprinted by permission of the translators, Eleni Sikelianos and Karen Van Dyck. “The Shark” and “The Woman of Zante” reprinted by permission of the translators, George Economou and Stavros Deligiorgis. Sousândrade (Joaquim de Sousa Andrade): Extract from The Wall Street Inferno translated by Robert E. Brown. Reprinted by permission of the translator and Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Germaine de Staël: “Corinne’s Improvisation in the Naples Countryside” and “Corinne’s Last Song,” translated by Sylvia Raphael, from Corinne, or Italy (Oxford University Press, 1998). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. August Strindberg: “The Nightingale’s Song,” from Selected Poems of August Strindberg, edited and translated by Lotta M. Löfgren. © 2002 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. Emanuel Swedenborg: Extract from The Spiritual Diary reprinted by permission of the Swedenborg Society. Paul Verlaine: “Chanson d’Automne / Autumn Song,” extract from Songs without Words, and “The Art of Poetry,” translated by Martin Sorrell, from Six Nineteenth Century French Poets, edited by A. M. Blackmore and E. H. Blackmore (Oxford University Press, 2000). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. “Overture” and “Sonnet to the Asshole” translated by Alan Stone. From The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, edited by Byrne R. S. Fone. Copyright © 1984. Wu Tsao: “For the Courtesan Ch’ing Lin,” “Bitter Rain in My Courtyard,” and “I Have Closed the Double Doors” translated by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Kenneth Rexroth.
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FIGURE CREDITS
William Blake: America a Prophecy from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2008 the William Blake Archive. Used with permission. Laocoön from the Collection of Robert N. Essick. Copyright © 2008 the William Blake Archive. Used with permission. Thomas Chatterton: “Seven Ancient Monuments: Map of Rudhall and Redcliff Wall” © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. British Library Shelfmark Add.5766A. Emily Dickinson: Visual poem “A – poor torn heart – a tattered heart,” The Houghton Library, Harvard University MS Am 1118.5 (B175). © The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Victor Hugo: Ma Destinée reprinted by permission of The Image Works, Inc. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Blessed Damozel, Harvard University Art Museums, Fogg Art Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.202. Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Shaker vision drawings: Sacred Roll reprinted by permission of The Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. Spirit Message reprinted from Heavenly Visions (New York: The Drawing Center, 2001).
926 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Anonymous (“The Boasting Drunk in Dodge”), 552 Anonymous (Christmas Gysarts [Mummers] Play), 417 Anonymous (The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times), 548 Anonymous (“The Honest Farmer’s Declaration”), 562 Anonymous (“Song of the Bald Mountain Witches & Magic Nymphs”), 425 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 714, 886 Baudelaire, Charles, 596, 819, 908 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 460 Belli, Giuseppe, 243 Bertrand, Aloysius, 476 Blake, William, 76, 95, 397, 709, 807, 895 Blood, Benjamin, 730 Brinton, Daniel G., 406 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 466 Browning, Robert, 520 Büchner, Georg, 429 Budge, E. A. Wallis, 397 Burns, Robert, 121 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 230, 813 Carpenter, Jacob, 551 Carroll, Lewis, 713, 715, 720 Chatterton, Thomas, 65 Child, Francis J., 411
Clare, John, 293 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 202, 426, 899 Cooper, Thomas, 556 Darío, Rubén, 844 Darwin, Charles, 431 Darwin, Erasmus, 42 De Quincey, Thomas, 221 Dickinson, Emily, 634, 912 Diderot, Denis, 30 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 910 Ducasse, Isidore, Comte de Lautréamont, 760 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 494, 816, 907 FitzGerald, Edward, 403 Fourier, Charles, 217 Freud, Sigmund, 430 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 63, 81, 720, 809, 895 Goya, Francisco, 58 Guest, Lady Charlotte, 414 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 731 Hayati, Bibi, 288 Hearn, Lafcadio, 717 Heine, Heinrich, 314, 905 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 421 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 145, 897 Holz, Arno, 824
927 Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 737, 915 Hugo, Victor, 435, 729, 815, 906 Hunt, Leigh, 719 Huong Hô Xuân, 285 Issa, Kobayashi, 281 Jarry, Alfred, 854 Jones, Ernest, 553 Jones, Sir William, 402 Joubert, Joseph, 109 Karadz˘ic´, Vuk, 413 Keats, John, 301, 904 Kierkegaard, Søren, 540
Copyright © 2009. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Laforgue, Jules, 795 Lear, Edward, 531, 712 Leopardi, Giacomo, 343 Lermontov, Mikhail, 563 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 407, 416 Lönnrot, Elias, 451 Machado, Antonio, 868 Macpherson, James, 46 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 686, 724, 914 Mangan, James Clarence, 718 Martí, José, 768 Matthews, Washington, 408 Mead, G. R. S., 398 Melville, Herman, 584 Menken, Adah Isaacs, 663 Mickiewicz, Adam 335 Nerval, Gerard de, 428, 482 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 743 Norwid, Cyprian, 590 Novalis, 190 Obstfelder, Sigbjørn, 838 Pater, Walter, 913 Petöfi, Sándor, 608 Poe, Edgar Allan, 504 Pushkin, Alexander, 375
Reachtabhra, Antoine Ó (Blind Raftery), 547 Reuben, James, 549 [Richter], Jean Paul, 133 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 874, 918 Rimbaud, Arthur, 719, 779, 916 Robinson, Mary, 72, 114 Rossetti, Christina, 644 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 619 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 23 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de, 53 Schlegel, Friedrich, 900 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 407 Segalen, Victor, 821 Shakers, 710, 716 Shelley, Mary, 427, 722 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 250, 412, 902 Silva, José Asunción, 836 Smart, Christopher, 34, 727 Solomos, Dionysios, 358 Sousândrade (Joaquim de Sousa Andrade), 655 Southcott, Joanna, 560 Staël, Germaine de, 138 Stein, Gertrude, 861 Sterne, Laurence, 726 Strindberg, August, 716 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 26 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 674 Tagore, Rabindranath, 291 Tegnér, Esaias, 416 Tennyson, Alfred, 510 Thoreau, Henry David, 723 Verlaine, Paul, 752 Whitman, Walt, 569, 721, 816, 908 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 183 Wordsworth, William, 160, 898 Wu Tsao, 286 Yosano, Akiko, 878
928 Index of Authors Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three : The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic