The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century 9783110897623, 9783110184075

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Peter Hühn/Jens Kiefer The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry

Narratologia Contributions to Narrative Theory/ Beiträge zur Erzähltheorie

Edited by/Herausgegeben von Fotis Jannidis, John Pier, Wolf Schmid Editorial Board/Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik Jose Angel Garcia Landa, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Matias Martinez Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar Nünning Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert

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G Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Peter Hühn/Jens Kiefer

The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry Studies in English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century

Translated by Alastair Matthews

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G_ Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

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Hühn, Peter, 1939The narratological analysis of lyric poetry : studies in English poetry from the 16th to the 20th century / by Peter Hühn, Jens Kiefer ; translated by Alastair Matthews, p. cm. - (Narratologia ; 7) ISBN 3-11-018407-9 (alk. paper) 1. English poetry - History and criticism - Theory, etc. 2. Lyric poetry - History and criticism - Theory, etc. 3. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Kiefer, Jens, 1971II. Title. III. Series. PR502.H74 2005 821'.0409-dc22 2005007069

ISBN 3-11-018407-9 ISSN 1612-8427 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche

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Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at .

© Copyright 2005 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin Printed in Germany

Preface This book describes a framework for the cross-generic application of narratological concepts and methods to lyric poetry. A series of analyses of individual English poems demonstrates how the theory can be put into practice. The book is the result of work carried out under the leadership of Jörg Schönert and me in Sub-Project P6 (The Theory and Methodology of the Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Approaches from the Perspective of English and German Studies) of the Narratology Research Group established at the University of Hamburg by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) on 1 April 2001 (see www.nanport.uni-hamburg.de). Jens Kiefer and Malte Stein participated as research assistants, Stefan Schenk-Haupt, Jette Katharina Wulf, and Tonio Kempf as student assistants. I should like to thank them all for their help. Jens Kiefer also prepared several of the studies presented in this book. A companion volume by Jörg Schönert and Malte Stein on the narratological analysis of German lyric poetry will soon be published in this series. I would like to thank Alastair Matthews for the translation of the entire volume and John Pier for offering valuable advice for improving the clarity of the analyses. Hamburg

Peter Hühn

Table of Contents Preface 1 Introduction: The Theory and Methodology of the Narcological Analysis of Lyric Poetry (Peter Hühn and Jörg Schönert)

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2 Sir Thomas Wyatt: "They flee from me" (Jens Kiefer)

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3 William Shakespeare: Sonnet 107 (Peter Hühn)

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4 John Donne: "The Canonization" (Jens Kiefer)

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5 Andrew Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress" (Peter Hühn)

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6 Jonathan Swift: "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (Jens Kiefer)

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7 Thomas Gray: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (Peter Hühn)

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8 Samuel Τ. Coleridge: "Kubla Khan" (Peter Hühn)

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9 John Keats: "Ode on Melancholy" (Peter Hühn)

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10 Robert Browning: "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church" (Peter Hühn)

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11 Christina Rossetti: "Promises like Pie-Crust" (Jens Kiefer)

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12 Thomas Hardy: "The Voice" (Peter Hühn)

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13 Τ. S.Eliot: "Portrait of a Lady" (Peter Hühn)

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14 W. B. Yeats: "The Second Coming" (Peter Hühn)

177

15 D. Η. Lawrence: "Man and Bat" (Peter Hühn)

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16 Philip Larkin and Thomas Hood: "I Remember, I Remember" (Peter Hühn)

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17 Eavan Boland: "Ode to Suburbia" (Peter Hühn)

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18 Peter Reading: "Fiction" (Jens Kiefer)

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19 Conclusion: The Results of the Analyses and Their Implications for Narratology and the Theory and Analysis of Poetry (Peter Hühn)

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1 Introduction: The Theory and Methodology of the Narcological Analysis of Lyric Poetry The essays on English lyric poetry presented in this volume are a practical demonstration of how the analytical methods and concepts of narratology can be used to provide detailed descriptions and interpretations of poems.1 The legitimacy of this approach depends on the premise that narration is an anthropologically universal semiotic practice, independent of culture and period, used to structure experience and produce and communicate meaning, and is as such one of the basic operations at work even in lyric poetry. If this is so, it is reasonable to assume that the well-developed precision and explanatory potential of modem narrative analysis—narratology—can help us conceptually refine and enhance the study of lyric poetry. In order to provide a theoretical foundation for and methodological introduction to the essays on the individual poems, this introduction provides a brief explanation of the structure and terminology of the approach used in the book. We consider (1) the justification for the crossgeneric application of narratology to lyric poetry, (2) the status of lyric poetry in genre theory, and, most importantly, (3) the nature and components of the narratological framework behind the analyses. Modelling the role of the dimensions of sequentiality (3.1) and mediacy (3.2) in the narrative process is of particular importance here. This theoretical treatment of how narratology can be applied to lyric poetry is followed (4) by some remarks on the selection of the poems treated in the subsequent essays. 1 Narrativity and Lyric Poetry: The Cross-Generic Application of Narratology to the Study of Poems The following discussion assumes that narrativity consists of a combination of two dimensions: sequentiality, or the temporal organization and linking of individual incidents to form a coherent succession, and mediacy, mediation being the selection, presentation, and meaningful interSee the theoretical description and justification of this approach in Hühn and Schönert (2002). Cf. also Hühn (2002, 2005).

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pretation of such a succession from a particular perspective. These two dimensions underlie the important conceptual opposition between histoire and recit, story and discourse, story and text, and fabula and syuzhet in most narcological models.2 However, our two dimensions are not completely identical with this group of terms. The latter make it possible to perform what we might call pragmatic chronological analysis: they distinguish the initial, unmediated happenings from their presentation, which is mediated through narrative, but they do not provide a systematic distinction between any of the constitutive elements of narrativity. In this respect, sequentiality (and within it, eventfulness) has clear priority in the definition of narrativity: different text-types such as description, argument, and explanation necessarily contain the dimension of mediacy, but temporal structure alone is a constitutive element of narrative texts. Lyric texts in the narrower sense of the term (i.e. not just obviously narrative poems such as ballads, romances, and verse stories) have the same three fundamental narratological aspects (sequentiality, mediacy, and articulation) as prose narratives such as novels and novellas. They involve a temporal sequence of happenings (which are usually mental or psychological, but can be external, for example social in nature), and they also create coherence and relevance by relating these happenings from a particular perspective (the act of mediation). Finally, they require an act of expression with which the mediation finds form in a linguistic text. The objective of applying the constructs of narratology to poetry is primarily a practical one: narrative theory is a sophisticated framework with which we may be able to refine, extend, and elucidate the methodology of the analysis of lyric poetry, which is notoriously lacking in theoretical foundations—perhaps to the extent of opening the way to the development of a theory of the lyric.3 We have no desire to conflate lyric poetry with the narrative genres as if it were no different from them. In fact, the cross-generic approach is designed to capture the ways of combining processes, experiences, perceptions, and so on that are characteristic of lyric poetry and distinguish it from other genres.

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On these oppositions, cf. Genette (1980), Chatman (1978), Rimmon-Kenan (2002), and Tomashevsky (1965). Cf. Pier (2003) on the background and issues behind this opposition. Cf. the fundamental criticism of the state of lyric theory in Warning (1997), MüllerZettelmann (2000), and Schönert (2004).

Introduction

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2 The Distinctiveness of Lyric Poetry: The Status of the Lyric in Genre Theory Experience to date has shown that it is futile to attempt to proceed as with the epic and the drama and define the lyric systematically in the context of the three traditional literary genres.4 Instead, it will be proposed that the place of the lyric relative to the epic and dramatic genres should be defined in terms of text theory.5 If we define narration as a communicative act in which chains of happenings are provided with a meaningful structure by a complex of mediating entities (particularly the narrating entity), lyric and dramatic texts can be reconstructed as reduced forms in which the range of particular possible levels of mediation varies in each case.6 Seen in this way, lyric texts in the nairower sense (i.e. not just narrative poetry) are distinguished by a characteristic variability in the extent to which they use the theoretically available levels and sources of mediation. They can instantiate the two fundamental constituents of the narrative process equally well (the arrangement of happenings into a temporal sequence on the one hand and the assembly of mediating entities and the manipulation of modes of mediation on the other). However, in a manner analogous to the speech of characters in dramatic texts, they are able to make it seem as if mediacy is replaced by the performative immediacy of speech. The result is that the voice of the speaker alone is heard as it emanates from experience and speech that are apparently simultaneous, analogous to the performative flow of the speech of characters in dramatic texts. 3 Modelling the Narrative Process: The Narratological Framework A slightly modified form of Genette's approach provides the basis for the treatment of mediacy in the descriptive approach to the analysis of lyric poetry suggested here. In the case of the study of mediation, on the other hand, no such widely recognized analytical framework has yet been elaborated. The approach in this book draws on cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics (from which it borrows the concepts of schema, script, and frame) and combines them with models of schema-deviation and the 4 5 6

Cf. Warning (1997:17f.). Cf. Titzmann (2003) and Schönert (2004). See Schönert (2004:313f.) on the following.

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violation of expectations that can be developed on the basis of Lotman's theory of the syuzhet (which provides the concepts of the boundary crossing and the event) and Burner's concept of canonicity and breach (1991). The modelling of sequentiality is of particular importance for the refinement and further development of the analysis of lyric poetry, for the methods of traditional interpretation do not provide a satisfactory framework for use in this area. To avoid misunderstandings, it should be explicitly stated that potentially familiar terms may need to be redefined. With this in mind, we now propose a number of definitions, which are complicated as little as possible by terms with multiple meanings. When applying narratological constructs to lyric poetry, we begin by making the fundamental distinction between the level of happenings and the level of presentation—between incidents, which we take as the primary, basic material, and the way in which they are mediated in the text.7 We assume that plots (or stories, as we shall call them) are not objectively present in (factual or fictional) reality and do not exist before a (human) agent constructs them on the basis of the incidents. Thus, the level of happenings is defined as the chronologically (and only chronologically) ordered set of existents and incidents relevant to the text. The meaningful connections between them are established on the level of presentation and are thus the work of the mediating and sending entities (the abstract author, the speaker/narrator, and speaking characters) and are also affected by focalization (as we shall see in detail below). The relationship between happenings and presentation is one of mutual dependency. The text (of a poem) requires the presence of happenings, but these happenings only come into being through the words of the text. This relationship can be described in two ways, analytically or genetically. We should also mention the level of the fictional narrative act (or the poetic utterance) which converts the happenings into the form of their textual presentation.8 The

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This distinction corresponds approximately to the difference between histoire and recit in Genette (1980) and story and discourse in Chatman (1978). In the terminology we propose, however, happenings are the chronologically ordered set of incidents, as in Martinez and Scheffel (1999), whereas it is clear that Genette and Chatman—and many other narcologists, including Bal (1985), Rimmon-Kenan (2002), and Tomashevsky (1965)—assume the presence of meaningful connections (usually referred to as logical or causal connections) on this level. The term 'happenings' in our framework, then, is not identical to Chatman's 'happenings' (1978), which are one of his subtypes of event, the other being actions.

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This level is equivalent to Genette's concept of narration.

Introduction

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textual presentation is the only level directly accessible to the analyst: from it, both the happenings and the narrative act are to be reconstructed. 3.1 Sequentiality We introduce the concepts of existent and incident to make possible a detailed description of the level of happenings.9 An existent is a static element or something/someone related to an action (e.g. a character and its traits, location, and so on), while an incident involves something dynamic (e.g. a change in properties or conditions, an occurrence, an action, and so on). Arranged in chronological order, the set of all existents and incidents constitutes the happenings that occur within the narrative world. In lyric poetry, happenings are frequently composed of mental or psychological processes. The level of presentation is produced by drawing a complex combination of syntagmatic and paradigmatic connections between the incidents. These connections are made (or presented as being made) from particular perspectives by particular mediating entities (see below). Incidents and existents are bound into meaningfully coherent sequences by means of selection, linking, and interpretation. We can turn to the methods of cognitive psychology and linguistics for help in elucidating these operations in more detail. On this basis, we make the fundamental assumption that meaningful sequences come into being only with the help of reference to contexts and world knowledge. Authors and readers, that is to say, can grasp or understand texts only by referring to pre-existent meaningful structures, to familiar cognitive schemata that already have a meaning.10 The concept of world knowledge covers culture-specific paradigms drawn both from general experience (extratextual references to, for example, phenomena such as sea travel, growing old, or sexual love) and from literature and the other arts (intertextual references to literary models such as, for example, the medieval knight's quest or Petrarchan love). The narratological analysis of sequences in poems, then, attempts to reconstruct the schemata, acquired through reading or experience, that can be as9

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Cf. the distinction between existents and events in Chatman (1978). Chatman's term 'event' is replaced by 'incident' in our framework because our use of 'event' is associated with Lotman's concept of the boundary crossing and Bruner's idea of canonicity and breach (1991). Culler (1975:139-60), Schank and Abelson (1977), Bruner (1990, 1991), and Turner (1996).

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sumed to be (or have been) known to the author and contemporary readers and are relevant to the texts and thus help provide their meaning.11 Cognitive schemata can also have a predominantly intratextual basis, for particular patterns can be created for a particular text and then (again with reference to pre-existent extra- or intertextual models) be developed in a text-specific manner. An example of this is provided by the development of life as a chain of illusory triumphs over illusion in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We can distinguish between two types of cognitive schema: frames and scripts. Frames provide thematic or situational contexts or frames of reference for the reading of a poem. Examples are death in Tennyson's 'Crossing the Bar' and sexual love in Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'. Scripts, on the other hand, embody model sequences—they refer to natural processes or developments, to conventional courses of action or stereotypical procedures, usually in close connection with the relevant frame. Death as the crossing of a boundary between one world and another and the formal ritual of unfulfilled courtly love might be identified as the scripts of the Tennyson and Marvell poems respectively. Identifying the frame allows a reader to draw together, coherently and in a primarily static sense, the situationally and/or thematically significant elements and parts of a poem. Referring to one or more scripts, on the other hand, allows the dynamic (i.e. specifically narrative) dimension of the text to be modelled. The conventions of brevity and situational abstraction in the mediation of the happenings in lyric poetry means that most frames and scripts are indicated only in passing, requiring a greater effort of reconstruction on the part of the reader than is the case in novels or short stories. Isotopies are an additional way in which meaningful connections can be made. They are equivalences that exist between words or phrases on the level of the signified and create semantic coherence by placing a certain recurring seme in a dominant position (e.g. unpreparedness or immaturity in the first stanza of Donne's 'The Good Morrow'). •J Λ

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Cf. in particular Herman (2002:85-113) and Semino (1995), and in general Barthes (1994), Culler (1975), and Eco (1979). Cf. Greimas (1966). Greimas's original definition of seme and isotopy was originally a narrow one. He himself, together with Courtes (1979), Rastier (1972), and Eco (1979) extended it beyond simple features (e.g. human or sexual) to cover more complex semiotic phenomena, including categories of theme, situation, and figurative language, that create coherence through repetition.

Introduction

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We introduce the concept of the event to refer to the decisive turning point in the sequence structure of a poem. It is the central component of a poem's narrative organization and determines its tellability.13 Eventfulness in our sense is defined as deviation from the expected continuation of the sequence pattern activated by the text.14 An event also occurs if an expected continuation or change does not occur. Sequences can deviate more or less strongly from the expectations raised by the standard pattern; thus, they can be more or less eventful, and eventfulness is measured along a sliding scale rather than being either present or absent.15 The level of deviation in any particular case is a product of the interpretation of the sequence structure in the context of cultural and historical parameters. Events are generally linked to entities, participants in the action who cause or bring with them an occurrence of decisive importance. Two basic types of event can be distinguished depending on whether the entity is associated with happenings or the presentation. If the event is linked with a character in the narrated story (i.e. on the level of the happenings), such as the protagonist, we are dealing with an event in the happenings. If the decisive change in attitude or behaviour involves the speaker or narrator behind the performatively presented narrative act or act of articulation (in the sense of the story of the narrator), we are dealing with a presentation event.16 We also note two special kinds of event. A mediation event is an exceptional, borderline variant of the presentation event. It is found when the decisive change is brought about, not by a change in individual attitude, but by what is primarily a textual and rhetorical restructuring of the form of presentation—a change in the manner of mediation. The modification or replacement of schemata (frames and/or scripts) are two examples of such a change. As a result, the context of mediation events moves from the figure of the speaker to the level of the abstract author/composing subject (see below). The (ideal) reader is the context for reception events. Here, the decisive change in attitude does not take place in the narrator or in a character, but is meant to occur in the reader as a result of the reading experience: this might involve gaining insight or adopting a new ideological position, for example. 13 14

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Cf. Pratt (1977) and Prince (1987). Cf. Lotman's (1977) strong concept of the event as a boundary crossing, Bruner's canonicity and breach approach (1991:11-13), and Wolfs idea of the narreme (2002:44-51). Cf. Schmid (2003). Cf. Schmid (1982:93) on the concept of the story of the narrator (Erzählgeschichte).

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The story (known as the plot in some alternative frameworks) is the most complex and wide-ranging (macro)structure on the level of presentation.17 A story is the result of the selection, weighting, and correlation of meaningful sequences. It is typically linked to a participant in the action and structured accordingly. Events provide the central points around which the course of a story is orientated, and the meaningful relationships between them are established by that story. In lyric poetry, stories tend to differ from those of novels in that they are concerned primarily with internal phenomena such as perceptions, thoughts, ideas, feelings, memories, desires, attitudes, and products of the imagination that the speaker or protagonist ascribes to him- or herself as a story in a monological process of mental reflection, defining his or her individual identity by means of that story.18 3.2 Mediacy There is one further prerequisite for the complete description of the structure of narrative sequentiality: we must specify the forms and entities that mediate the happenings on the level of presentation. Here, two basic aspects of mediacy must be distinguished: modes of mediation and mediating entities. With respect to the mode of mediation, we can differentiate between two kinds or facets of perspective. First, voice involves direct linguistic expression whose deictic (pronominal, temporal, spatial, and modal) orientation is provided by the speaking subject. Second, focalization is the perceptual, psychological, cognitive, and/or ideological perspective from which incidents and existents are presented and through which they are filtered, by which they are formed, and, in some cases, from which they are interpreted or evaluated.19 Care must be taken to keep voice and focalization separate from one another, but this does not exclude the possibility that the same figure can be the source of both. When dealing with mediating entities, four levels (of communication) embedded in one another can be distinguished.20 They are the levels of (1) 17 18

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Cf. the concept of the plot in Brooks (1984). On the narrative constitution of individual identity, cf. for example Cavarero (2000), Eakin (1999), Kerby (1991), Ricceur (1990), and Worthington (1996). Cf. Genette (1980), Kablitz (1988), Lanser (1981), Nünning (1990), and Uspensky (1973). Initial approaches to making distinctions of this kind in lyric poetry can be found in Bernhart (1993), Burdorf (1997), Hühn (1995,1998), and Schönert (1999).

Introduction

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the empirical author/producer of a text, (2) the abstract author/composing subject, (3) the speaker/narrator, and (4) a protagonist/character. Like the speaker, a protagonist or character can have a voice. The empirical author is considered in the analytical process only in so far as it is necessary to ensure that the frames and scripts we identify and the meanings we associate with words would also have been historically plausible when the author wrote the poem in question. The abstract author/composing subject is responsible for the system of values, norms, and meaning implied by the formal, stylistic, rhetorical, and tropical structure of the text. This structure is an attitude or stance that should be treated as a construct, not as belonging to an individualized person.21 This is the level where we can see what is (necessarily) excluded from the words of the speaker/narrator by his or her particular personal perspective, the level where we may find out about underlying motivations or problems, for example.22 This level can therefore be described more precisely as one of second-order observation, a source of perspective superordinate to speaker and focalizer and established, so to speak, behind their backs.23 It can also be described as a special form of perspective. (For example, the metaphorical language in Wordsworth's 'The Daffodils' shows—behind the speaker's back—how he longs for company in his isolated situation and has a spontaneous experience in which he suddenly projects this desire onto nature as a feeling of found company, then claiming to have received the feeling from nature without knowing it before drawing his poetic inspiration from the experience.) Making a precise distinction between the abstract author and the speaker is always dependent on interpretation, and more precisely on what we attribute to whom. We must decide what mental features and level of self-awareness we attribute to the narrator (in some cases also to the narrated I) and the abstract author respectively. We must also be able to recognize cases in which making this distinction is deliberately impeded (e.g. in Shakespeare's Sonnets 71 and 138). The question of the reliability of the speaker/narrator can be formulated in terms of the relationship between him or her and the abstract author: contradictions between the words of the speaker and the composition of the text (i.e. the abstract author) point to the unreliability of the former. Just as in the narrators of 21

22 23

On the justification for conceiving of the entity of the abstract author in this way, which has met with considerable criticism, cf. for example Chatman (1990). Cf. Easthope (1983) and Hühn (1998). Luhmann (1990, 1995).

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narrative literature, the phenomenon of unreliability and non-omniscience can be found in the speaker of lyric poetry, although this has been the subject of little or no previous work. 4 The Choice of Texts and Arrangement of the Analyses The potential of this narratological approach to the analysis of lyric poetry is explored in a total of eighteen English lyric poems stretching from the sixteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. In order to make the analyses comparable despite the fact that they cover different authors and periods, all the texts were required to have a particular thematic feature in common: the speaker must be clearly self-reflexive or clearly make himor herself a theme of the poem. This decision does not reflect a subjectivist understanding of the lyric genre: instead, it was motivated by the observation that a distinctly self-reflexive speaker is found in a large proportion of the English lyric poems from all periods in representative anthologies.24 The poems selected can be considered part of the established canon of the English lyric, for the majority of them (or at least of those prior to modernism) are found in the main anthologies in common use. The individual selections were made with a view to covering the most well-known authors and as many periods and styles as possible. The primary aim of the essays that follow is to demonstrate the methods and benefits of the narratological approach when it is put into practice. The concepts and terms they use are employed in the context of the system described here. They are intended as models of how the approach described in this introduction should be put into practice, and not to provide comprehensive interpretations on the basis of a detailed discussion of previous assessments; references to secondary literature have therefore been restricted to selected representative works. A second purpose of the analyses and of the concluding chapter is to use our narratological approach to illustrate the distinctive features of the narrative structures found in lyric poetry.

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25

To demonstrate the prominence of poems with a first-person perspective or a selfreflexive speaker in three common anthologies, we point out that they comprise 88% of John Hayward's Penguin Book of English Verse (1956), 76% of Christopher Ricks's Oxford Book of English Verse (1999), and 74% of Paul Keegan's New Penguin Book of English Verse (2000). See for example the three anthologies listed in n. 24.

Introduction

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Bibliography Bai, Mieke (1985). Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto). Barthes (1994). The Semiotic Challenge, tr. Richard Howard (Berkeley). Bernhart, Wolfgang (1993). "Überlegungen zur Lyriktheorie aus erzähltheoretischer Sicht", in: Herbert Foltinek, Wolfgang Riehle, and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz (eds), Tales and 'their telling difference': Festschrift fiir Franz K. Stanzel (Heidelberg), 359-75. Brooks, Peter (1984). Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA). Bruner, Jerome (1990). Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA). Bruner, Jerome (1991). "The Narrative Construction of Reality", in: Critical Inquiry 18,1-21. Burdorf, Dieter (1997). Einfiihrung in die Gedichtanalyse (Stuttgart and Weimar). Cavarero, Adriana (2000). Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, tr. P. Kottman (London). Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY). Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca). Culler, Jonathan (1975). Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (London). Eakin, Paul John (1999). How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY). Easthope, Antony (1983). Poetry as Discourse (London). Eco, Umberto (1979). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington). Genette, G6rard (1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, tr. J. E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY). Greimas, Algiras Julien (1966). Semantique structurale, Langue et langage (Paris). Greimas, Algirdas Julien, and Joseph Courtes (1979). Semiotique: Dictionnaire Raisonne de la Theorie du Langage, Langue Linguistique Communication (Paris). Hayward, John (ed.) (1956). The Penguin Book of English Verse (Harmondsworth). Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln). Hühn, Peter (1995). Geschichte der englischen Lyrik, 2 vols (Tübingen).

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Hühn, Peter (1998). "Watching the Speaker Speak: Self-Observation and SelfIntransparency in Lyric Poetry", in: Mark Jeffreys (ed.), New Definitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology, and Culture (New York), 215-44. Hühn, Peter (2002). "Reading Poetry as Narrative: Towards a Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poems", in: Christian Todenhagen and Wolfgang Thiele (eds), Investigations into Narrative Structures (Frankfurt/Main), 13-27. Hühn, Peter (2005). "Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry", in: Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (eds), Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric (Amsterdam and Atlanta) (forthcoming). Hühn, Peter, and Jörg Schönert (2002). "Zur narratologischen Analyse von Lyrik", in: Poetica, 34, 287-305. Kablitz, Andreas (1988). "Erzählperspektive - Point of View - Focalisation: Überlegungen zu einem Konzept der Erzähltheorie", in: Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 98,237-55. Keegan, Paul (ed.) (2000). The New Penguin Book of English Verse (London). Kerby, Anthony Paul (1991). Narrative and the Self (Bloomington, IN). Lanser, Susan S. (1981). The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton, NJ). Lotman, Jury M. (1977). The Structure of the Artistic Text, tr. R. Vivon (Ann Arbor). Luhmann, Niklas (1990). "Weltkunst", in: N. Luhmann, F. D. Bunsen, and D. Baecker (eds), Unbeobachtbare Welt: Über Kunst und Architektur (Bielefeld), 7—45. Luhmann, Niklas (1995). Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/Main). Martinez, Matias, and Michael Scheffel (1999). Einfiihrung in die Erzähltheorie (München). Müller-Zettelmann, Eva (2000). Lyrik und Metalyrik: Theorie einer Gattung und ihrer Selbstbespiegelung anhand von Beispielen aus der englisch- und deutschsprachigen Dichtkunst (Heidelberg). Nünning, Ansgar (1990). '"Point of view' oder 'Focalisation'? Über einige Grundlagen und Kategorien konkurrierender Modelle der erzählerischen Vermittlung", in: Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 23, 249-68. Pier, John (2003). "On the Semiotic Parameters of Narrative: A Critique of Story and Discourse", in: Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (eds), What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory (Berlin and New York), 73-97. Pratt, Mary Louise (1977). Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington). Prince, Gerald (1987). A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln). Rastier, Francis (1972). "Systematique des Isotopies", in: A. J. Greimas (ed.), Essais de semiotiquepoetique, Langue et langage (Paris), 80-106. Ricks, Christopher (ed.) (1999). The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford).

Introduction

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Ricoeur, Paul (1990). Soi-meme comme un autre (Paris). Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London and New York). Schank, Roger, and Robert Abelson (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge (Hillsdale). Schmid, Wolf (1982). "Die narrativen Ebenen 'Geschehen', 'Geschichte', 'Erzählung' und Präsentation der Erzählung", in: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 9, 83-110. Schmid, Wolf (2003). "Narrativity and Eventfulness", in: Tom Kindt and HansHarald Müller (eds), What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory (Berlin and New York), 17-33. Schönert, Jörg (1999). "Empirischer Autor, Impliziter Autor und Lyrisches Ich", in: Fotis Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, Matias Martinez, und Simone Winko (eds), Rückkehr des Autors. Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs (Tübingen), 289-94. Schönert, Jörg (2004). "Normative Vorgaben als 'Theorie der Lyrik'? Vorschläge zu einer texttheoretischen Revision", in: Gustav Frank and Wolfgang Lukas (eds), Norm - Grenze - Abweichung: Kultursemiotische Studien zu Literatur, Medien und Wirtschaft. Michael Titzmann zum 60. Geburtstag (Passau), 303-18. Semino, Elena (1995). "Schema Theory and the Analysis of Text Worlds in Poetry", in: Language and Literature 4, 79-108. Titzmann, Michael (2003). "The Systematic Place of Narratology in Literary Theory and Textual Theory", in: Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (eds), What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory (Berlin and New York), 175-204. Tomashevsky, Boris (1965). "Thematics", in: Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, tr. with an introduction by L. T. Lennox and M. J. Reis, (Lincoln), 61-95. Turner, Mark (1996). The Literary Mind (New York). Uspensky, Boris A. (1973). A Poetics of Composition (Berkeley). Warning, Rainer (1997). "Interpretation, Analyse, Lektüre: Methodologische Erwägungen zum Umgang mit lyrischen Texten", in: Rainer Warning, Lektüren romanischer Lyrik: Von den Trobadors zum Surrealismus (Freiburg i. Br.), 9 43. Wolf, Werner (2002). "Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzählliteratur", in: Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (eds), Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär (Trier), 23-104. Worthington, Kim L. (1996). Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction (Oxford).

Jens Kiefer

2 Sir Thomas Wyatt: "They flee from me that sometime did me seek" flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek That now are wild and do not remember That sometime they put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range Busily seeking with a continual change.

THEY

5

be fortune it hath been otherwise Twenty times better, but once in special, In thin array after a pleasant guise, When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall And she me caught in her arms long and small, Therewithall sweetly did me kiss And softly said, 'Dear heart, how like you this?'

THANKED

10

15

20

IT was no dream: I lay broad waking. But all is turned thorough my gentleness Into a strange fashion of forsaking. And I have leave to go of her goodness And she also to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindly am served I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1978). The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (Harmondsworth), 116-17. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542). The poem was first printed in Tottel's Miscellany in 1557.

1 Lyric Poetry and the Petrarchan Legacy Thomas Wyatt is not only recognized as one of the most important poets in the revival of the sixteenth-century English lyric, but is also remembered for establishing, along with Surrey, the conventions of Petrarchan love in the English lyric with his translations from the Italian and poems of his own. The Petrarchan love schema originated in the Canzoniere,

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Petrarch's sonnets to Laura, and for roughly three hundred years it constituted the most important point of reference for European love poetry. It also represents the central way of transmitting emotions in lyric poetry. The basic situation with which the Petrarchan conventions operate is that of a man wooing a socially superior lady in a courtly context where, for social and moral reasons, his desire cannot be fulfilled. This may be due, for example, to the demand for female chastity, the lady's higher social standing, or the fact that she is already married. The disappointment and lamenting with which the lover responds to his rejection are of special significance because their primary consequence is that they prompt him to turn to self-reflection and self-discipline. Being confronted with rejection and frustration forces the lover to respond to his experience cognitively and reflect on his identity as it relates to his role in the love situation. Wyatt's poem clearly engages with this schema, but it does so in an unconventional manner, deviating from the conventions of Petrarchan love in both its form and, above all, its content.1 Rather than turning to the sonnet form chosen by Petrarch, Wyatt employs seven-line stanzas that associate his poem with the rhyme-royal form used by Chaucer in the love epic Troilus and Criseyde. It is in his development of the basic material (the lover and the idolized lady), however, that Wyatt breaks most decisively from tradition, leaving the lover's experience of frustration and expression of it as the only features that conform to the schema. He departs from it by having the disappointed lover discredit the lady instead of praising her, and by making several women at once rather than a single woman the cause of the lover's disappointment. Above all—and this represents a particularly striking departure from convention—the lover has found sexual fulfilment. The violation of the implicit rule of renunciation by the full expression of sexuality is found in even more radical form in Donne's lyric poetry.2

2

Some of Wyatt's deviations from Petrarchism have been described both as developments of Petrarchism and criticism of it. Cf. Gus (1974:218f.), who interprets the elements in Wyatt's lyric poetry that deviate from traditional Petrarchism, not as provocative criticism, but as the product of a creative combination of Petrarchism, early English love lyrics, and elements of Stoic thought. For example, the sexual fulfilment of love is also eventful in Donne's 'The Canonization' (see pp. 35-45).

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2 Characters, Communication Situation, and Perspective The internally focalized happenings are presented to us by an autodiegetic speaker who alternates between narrating things as they happen and in retrospect. In addition to the speaker, the characters include a number of his former lovers and an anonymous woman. Summarized and condensed, the happenings consist of the following elements: the speaker has been forsaken, reacts to this rejection, and remembers the happy time when he was sexually united with a woman, as well as sexual relations with other women. The speaker is moved to speak by his present love situation, which is characterized by the fact that the women who initially sought to spend time with him are now avoiding him. Despite his disappointment, he does not try to persuade his former lover to resume their relationship. The purpose of his speech act is rather to articulate his displeasure and help him come to terms with the frustration caused by his separation from his former lovers. 3 Juxtaposing the Past and Present Situations As early as the opening line, it is clear that the speech act of the poem is preceded by an event whose significance for the speaker lies in the fact that it creates a decisive break between his present situation and the past. This event concerns the end of the sexual relationships between the speaker and the women. In the past, they sought his love and readily gave themselves to him, but they now shun him. The speaker does not attempt to find something in his own behaviour that might explain why his former lovers no longer find him attractive; instead, he suggests that they are habitually unfaithful and fickle: '[...] and now they range / Busily seeking with continual change' (11. 6-7). A change in the characters' roles has clearly taken place before the speech act begins. From his point of view, he previously had control ('danger') of the various women, who have now however distanced themselves from him and no longer seek his presence. At the time of narration, the former lovers enjoy an independence which prevents the speaker from exercising power over and having sexual access to them: Ί have seen them gentle, tame, and meek / That now are wild and do not remember / That sometime they put themselves in danger'

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(11. 3-5).3 This transformation also contributes to the ironic distortion of the conventional Petrarchan concept of the lover's role, according to which the lover is understood as the servant of the lady he courts. In the third stanza of this poem, however, in which the speaker once more attempts to explain the change in his situation, he portrays himself as the person who has been performed a service: 'But since that I so kindly am served [...]'(1. 20). The sexual union of the past is narrated two times. In the first stanza, it is narrated as an occurrence that took place repeatedly and with different women; in the second, it is narrated as a singular occurrence involving a specific woman. The former lovers are all remembered as sharing the same features ('gentle, tame and meek' 1. 3), but the memory of this particular lover has additional qualities: the situation was clearly felt to be unique ('once in special', 1. 9), and the woman's words are repeated literally. The speaker's present misfortune is accentuated by the memory of this central erotic experience: 'Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise / Twenty times better' (11. 8-9). 4 Discrediting the Lovers of the Past The situation with which the speaker finds himself confronted is one in which his erotic desires are unfulfilled. There does not seem to be any chance of his consoling himself with another woman, for all women have, from his point of view, abandoned him. He does not try to win back his woman with a seductive poem,4 but rather discredits her in order to deny her the status of an admirable lady. He undermines her reputation in the context of a one-sided explanation of why their relationship ended. The speaker describes his own behaviour towards the woman with the word 'gentleness' (1. 16) and characterizes her as the guilty party by implicitly accusing her of abandoning her gentleness (cf. 1. 3f.) and alleging that she was led to end their relationship by her desire for something new ('newfangleness', 1. 19) in the form of other men. In his one-sided analysis of why their relationship ended, the speaker fails to reflect on the fact that he 3

4

As in Middle English, the primary meaning of 'danger' here is power and influence, the sense of modern English 'danger' being an additional implication. Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' (see pp. 45-55) is an example of a poem in which the speaker attempts to seduce a woman.

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is accusing the woman of behaving like himself, for, as the first stanza demonstrates, the speaker also had a variety of love relationships. The fact that the speaker complains about losing not only a single woman but several women at once shows that the ironic tone of the final stanza is a response, not to a single case of disappointed love, but to a more fundamental disappointment at the loss of the power that the women previously allowed him to exert over them. The speaker's desire for power is revealed particularly clearly in the animal-related metaphors of the first stanza, which express not only the women's consent to engage in sexual activity, but also stress their dependence and subjection by describing them with the features tame, meek, and needing to be fed. The speaker's loss of power and the change in the women's state from tame to wild are two sides of the same coin, for by returning to their untamed condition, his former lovers leave his sphere of influence: Ί have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, / That now are wild and do not remember / That sometime they put themselves in danger / To take bread at my hand' (11. 3-6). We cannot say for sure whether the speaker really exercised power over the women or whether they actually sought his presence of their own free will and his position of power was no more than wishful thinking on his part. When he accuses the women of doing something that he himself has also done, it becomes clear that he is too closely involved in the happenings to be able to see his own position in them clearly. This undermines the credibility of the speaker and clearly suggests that his evaluation of the happenings is marked by his subjective interests and is to a certain extent unreliable. 5 Sequence Structure The macrostructure of the happenings presented in the poem can be divided into three components: a past state, characterized by the iterative sequence of women coming close; a present state, in which the women no longer seek the presence of the speaker; and his reaction to this change of state. The failure of the women to return and the speaker's reaction follow the script of revenge as a reaction to disappointment, for the discrediting of the lady takes place as a reaction to the withdrawal of her love. The choice of animal-related metaphors to describe the behaviour of the women means that their absence can be understood as suggesting the sequence of returning to the wild. If they were initially tame, the speaker now perceives them as wild. Thus, the script of returning to the wild func-

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Jens Kiefer

tions as a secondary script with which the women's self-empowerment is interpreted and morally evaluated and their denigration legitimized. 6 Story and Event Three events, with different degrees of prominence, can be identified. Two occurrences are portrayed as events (specifically, events in happenings) experienced by the speaker: the absence of the women, which contrasts with his expectations or his desires, and the erotic memory presented by the speaker in the second stanza. The erotic encounter is distinctly set apart from the other meetings ('once in special', 1. 9) and is so clear and makes such an intense impression that it needs to be explicitly distinguished from a dream: 'It was no dream: I lay broad waking' (1. 15). The reader, however, sees eventfulness in something else: the speaker's denigration of the woman, which makes the speaker lose credibility, or at least seem partially blind to his own promiscuity, and the way in which he behaved towards his former lovers. The reader's expectation of receiving reliable and properly evaluated information from the speaker is let down in this poem. The story of the poem can be seen as one of loss, on the one hand, and as that of an apparently successful but not completely transparent distancing process on the other. When unable to continue his sexual relationship and retain his power, the speaker manages to convince himself that he does not need to mourn the loss of his former lover by in his speech act declaring her as no longer worthy of admiration. Wyatt's poem thus provides an example illustrating Gary Waller's thesis that the discourse of courtly love is not only meant to portray the suffering of the lover and the admiration of a lady, but is also an attempt to obtain control over her: 'It seems to focus on the depicting and idealizing of the beloved and to offer her patient, unrewarded service, but in fact it provides a discourse of control and domination. While the lover idealizes his beloved, he is intent on controlling her and what she stands for' (Waller 1986:81). Because of this shift from the discourse of love to that of power, we are dealing with a mediation event: the reader is able to see the speaker's hidden motives for making this shift (injured vanity and the loss of love). This insight into the true nature of the speaker's response to his loss is eventful.

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7 Gavin Ewart's Parodistic Exposure of the Speaker Gavin Ewart's parody of Wyatt's 'They flee from me that sometime did me seek' can be seen as a metacommentary on the speaker of Wyatt's poem.5 Comparing the speaker of Wyatt's poem with that in Ewart's reveals the blind spot of the former. The speaker in Ewart's poem has recognized his own powerlessness and inability to exert influence on the women. Unlike the speaker in the earlier poem, however, he does not hide his disappointment behind an ironic exchange of roles and retain his supposed gentleness, but is able to express his frustration and powerlessness openly. Describing the woman as a 'bitch' (1. 21) makes clear that the speaker shares the disappointment of the speaker in Wyatt's poem; in fact, he has changed it into rage. At the same time, the admission Ί feel emotionally underprivileged' (1. 20) makes clear that this speaker, unlike that in Wyatt's poem, is aware of his position relative to his former lover.

Gavin Ewart: "They flee from me that sometime did me seek"

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A t this moment in time the chicks that went for me in a big way are opting out; as of now, it's an all-change situation. The scenario was once, for me, 100% better. Kissing her was viable in a nude or semi-nude situation. It was How's about it, baby? her embraces were relevant and life-enhancing. I was not hallucinating. But with regard to that one my permissiveness has landed me in a forsaking situation. The affair is no longer on-going. She can, as of now, explore new parameters How's about it? indeed!

5

Gavin Ewart, Collected Poems 1980-1990 (London, 1991), 90.

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Jens Kiefer 20

I feel emotionally underprivileged. What a bitch! (and that's meaningful!)

The happenings of the story in Wyatt's poem reflect an asymmetric relationship between the male and female sexes that has been tellable up to the twentieth century, as Ewart's poem shows. What has changed, however, is the speaker's ability to step back and consider his own position. The contemporary speaker is able to do something that the speaker in Wyatt's poem cannot, namely, articulate an admission of his own powerlessness—'(and that's meaningful)' (1. 22). Bibliography Estrin, Barbara L. (1994). "Taking Bread: Wyatt's Revenge in the Lyrics and Sustenance in the Palms", in: Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell (Durham and London), 93-122. Fox, Alistair (1997). The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England (Oxford). Greenblatt, Stephen (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London), 115-56. Gus, Donald L. (1974). "Wyatt's Petrarchism: An Instance of Creative Imitation in the Renaissance", in: Lucius Keller (ed.), Übersetzung und Nachahmung im europäischen Petrarkismus: Studien und Texte (Stuttgart), 218-32. Hoffmeister, Gerhart (1973). Petrarkistische Lyrik (Stuttgart). Hühn, Peter (1995). "Der Beginn der neuenglischen Lyrik im 16. Jahrhundert: Sir Thomas Wyatt und Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey", in: Geschichte der englischen Lyrik Band I: Vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Romantik (Tübingen), 2352. Waller, Gary (1986). English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London). Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1978). The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz. (Harmondsworth), 116-17.

Peter Hühn

3 William Shakespeare: Sonnet 107

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10

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

William Shakespeare (1986). The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth), 130. William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The sonnet was first published in 1609.

1 Context and Structure William Shakespeare's cycle of sonnets, which includes Sonnet 107 ('Not mine own fears'), clearly stands in the literaiy tradition of the love sonnet initiated by Petrarch's Canzoniere. At the same time, however, it radically restructures the conventional Petrarchan situation, in which the combination of beauty and virtue in the prototypical lady demands at once both intense love and selfless homage from the lover. There is no escape from this dilemma, which the lover experiences as a conflict between desire and renunciation. Shakespeare's sonnet cycle attempts to resolve the dilemma that results from having incompatible attitudes to and feelings for one and the same person by separating love from friendship and directing each at a different individual. This makes it theoretically possible for both needs to be fulfilled. Selfless admiring homage is directed at the friend, an unusually handsome young man who is clearly of high social standing (Sonnets 1-126), and sexual desire at the dark lady, a fascinatingly erotic woman who is ready to be loved (Sonnets 127-52). In the course of the cycle,

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however, we encounter numerous signs that this attempt to resolve the dilemma is ultimately unsuccessful in both respects (cf. Hühn 1997). An analysis of Sonnet 107 must consider the poem's context in the cycle in general and the first part (i.e. the section addressed to the young man) in particular. Its context should be considered primarily in terms of the frame of close friendship between men together with the relationship between artists and the patrons on whose favour and support they depend. In general, the first part of the cycle, including Sonnet 107 in particular, is characterized by the fact that the definition of the frame alternates constantly between the two aspects of friendship and patronage. The process of paying artistic, poetic homage to a friend and patron can be identified as the script with which the frame is combined.1 The happenings of Shakespeare's Sonnet 107 have three components: the speaker's private friendship, which, it is feared, is under threat (for unknown reasons) but ultimately survives; a public political occurrence (also unexplained) from which peace and stability result; and the speaker's self-assured assertion of his literary ability (as will be shown in detail below). The absence of explanations for the allusions in the poem has led most research to date to concentrate on dating the sonnet and decoding the historical references in it. However, the poem's political references affect its meaning only in so far as they allow the speaker to represent developments in the public political situation as a story with a decisive turning-point, to define and influence his relationship with his friend and patron, and to stabilize his identity in this context (see below). The homage script implicitly activated by the sonnet is manifested in a succession of statements. The speaker asserts the constancy and sincerity of his allegiance to and love for his friend and patron, which are threatened by a third party or by the public situation ('Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul / [ . . . ] / Can yet the lease of my true love control', 11. 1 3). Eventually, he promises that this poem will provide a fitting monument to his friend and ensure the survival of his memory ('thou in this shalt find thy monument', 1. 13). It is true that concrete reference to the script is not made until some way into the poem, but this does not change the fact that the norm it implies makes us expect from the beginning that the text will end in an expression of homage. However, there are also three signs of a tendency to deviate from the script. The first deviation lies Λ

1 2

On the theme of patronage, cf. for example Saunders (1964) and Marotti (1982). See Calvert (1987), Kerrigan (1986:313-20), and Duncan-Jones (1997:324).

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in the fact that the speaker's assertion of friendship is made in a moment of crisis, in the face of an approaching threat to his relationship ('Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom', 1. 4). Both private fears and public portents (11. 1-2) anticipate this threat, meaning that the evolution of his private friendship is closely connected with public political changes (the precise nature of the link is not made clear). Second, it is striking that, instead of emphasizing their shared partnership, the speaker characterizes the relationship of friendship between him and his friend solely from his individual perspective, using only the first-person singular form of the possessive pronoun rather than the plural 'our' ('my true love', 1. 3; my emphasis; see also line 10). The third and crucial way in which Sonnet 107 deviates from the frame of friendship and patronage and the homage script that were activated earlier lies in the unexpected fact that the speaker's statements about his poetic ability do not describe the homage he performs in service of his friend and patron, but glorify himself instead ('I'll live in this poor rhyme', 1. 11). As a result, the poem's eventfulness lies in the sudden redefinition of the frame and the consequent abrupt change in the script to one of poetic self-immortalization. In this way, narration itself constitutes a story in so far as something that begins as the story of a friendship continues its existence as a story of a poet making himself the theme of a poem. 2 Sequence Structure: Threat and Stabilization The detailed presentation of the happenings in Sonnet 107 is organized in such a way that the various incidents are arranged in a structure that remains constant but whose reference (and thus also meaning) shifts several times in the course of the poem (between the private and public spheres). The abstract sequence schema consists of a movement from being threatened to the contrasting condition of stability. This pattern takes effect from the opening of the poem, where it structures the first quatrain, which presents a subsequence within a larger sequence of friendship and patronage: 'my true love' (1. 3).3 The general context of the cycle and the development of the thought process in this particular poem (the use of 'my love' in line 10 and the apostrophe in line 13) both imply that these words refer to friendship (in the context of the speaker's relationship with his 3

On the meaning of the word Move' in the context of the discourse of patronage, cf. for example Barrell (1988:24-26).

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friend as a patron). The friendship thus established between the speaker and the young man is threatened ('forfeit to a confined doom', 1. 4). This manifests itself in the private fears of the speaker ('mine own fears', 1. 1) and, parallel to them, vague public concern about the future ('the prophetic soul / Of the wide world', 11. 1-2).4 The speaker reacts to these fears with a narrative of negation, which Prince (1988) calls the disnarrated. He narrates what can be summarized as the failure of the anticipated threat to materialize and with this negation points forward to the future stabilization of the relationship: 'Not [...] nor [...]/ Can yet the lease of my true love control' (11. 1-3; my emphasis). The poem does not state the reasons behind the presence of the threat or how it is neutralized, but two explanations for the potential danger do present themselves: the fundamental transitoriness and impermanence of all things (as suggested by 'lease'), and the increasing withdrawal of the friend (the theme of a group of neighbouring sonnets in the cycle, particularly clearly in Sonnets 87-96). By not accepting these stories that anticipate the future ('dreaming on things to come', 1. 2) and thus negating the prophecies in them, the speaker asserts the ability to govern and control the stability of his relationship. This insistence that it is possible to control how long love lasts can be seen as a first sign of the narrating I's strength and high level of self-consciousness. The first quatrain begins with the private sphere and public political affairs being linked by means of a parallel between them. This connection is subsequently developed further in a second sequence with two parts, which are found in the second and third quatrains respectively. The second quatrain reports the beginning of the stabilization of the political situation; this public development then serves as the cause of the parallel stabilization of the speaker's personal situation in the third quatrain.5 This second sequence (i.e. the second and third quatrains) is narrated in an essentially simultaneous manner: the speaker presents the series of happenings as taking place in the present. At the same time, however, he looks back on the past and forward to the future from the present. His narrative introduces the present situation with a reference to the past ('The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured', 1. 5) and then makes a prediction concerning the future ('peace proclaims olives of endless age', 1. 8). We 4

5

'Prophetic soul' can be understood here as meaning a publicly (as opposed to individually) held opinion. Again, the speaker does not explain why his friendship is affected by a changed political situation.

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can now see that the two sequences (i.e. the first and second quatrains) are separated by a temporal gap (temporal ellipsis). In the interval between them, the situation is stabilized, so that by the time of the second sequence ('now', 11. 7, 9), it is characterized by security. The augurs unreservedly admit that their prophecies have not been fulfilled, thereby confirming post hoc the speaker's anticipatory negation of the predictions of danger ('the prophetic soul') in the first quatrain. The reason why the situation has been stabilized lies in the harmless passing of the lunar eclipse, which is clearly a metaphor for a concrete political development and whose end is an image of the restoration of a threatened order.6 This situation of newly attained stability provides the foundation for the future continuation of the present public situation. Peace itself can become a speaker and an agent and proclaim its own unending survival. Thus, the schema in which a threat is juxtaposed with and followed by stabilization is found again in the first part (second quatrain) of the second sequence. It is notable that, in a way similar to that found in the first quatrain, the danger is not externally caused but justified internally—intrinsically, so to speak. As in the first quatrain, personification is used to provide the abstract existents and incidents with a dynamic of their own and thus give them the status of agents, 'incertainties' and 'peace' being used as grammatical subjects. The structure's frame of reference, however, has changed. Rather than the speaker's relationship with his friend, it is first and foremost the political happenings that are affected by threat and stability.7

6

7

Attempts to date the sonnet typically reconstruct its contemporary context on the basis of an interpretation of the expression 'mortal moon'. It is usually understood as a reference to Elizabeth I, the 'Virgin Queen', who died in 1603. Contrary to all that had been feared, the accession of James I to the throne took place peacefully without upheaval. Cf. for example Kerrigan (1986:313-20), who evidently reads 'endured' as meaning 'suffered'. Despite the death of the ('mortal') Queen, the continuity of the Crown's authority is not interrupted, and peace and order are preserved. The theory that 'mortal moon' should be interpreted as a reference to Elizabeth I and the problem of the dynastic shift to James I after her death is supported above all by the isotopy in 'crown' (1. 7) and 'balmy' (1. 9; a reference to the anointing of the king in the coronation ceremony) (cf. Kerrigan 1986:313-20).

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3 From Homage to a Friend to Self-Immortalization as a Poet In the first quatrain, the threat was thematized (and thereby negated) by means of the analogy between private and public factors. Likewise, the transition from the second to the third quatrain suggests a similar parallel with respect to the process of stabilization, now with the additional implication of causal assistance. This parallel exists between the general political situation and the status of the speaker's personal friendship (as the second part of the second sequence): 'Now with the drops of this most balmy time / My love looks fresh [...]' (11. 9-10). The choice of balm as a metaphor for the restoration of the political situation not only emphasizes its stabilization with (medical and thus individual-related) connotations of recovery and physical revitalization after sickness and crisis, but also, with the contrast between death and life that this implies, introduces a shift in the role and identity of the speaker from that of a friend to that of a poet. This change in role triggers a corresponding recoding of the thematic frame of reference, a change of frame from the relationship of friendship/patronage to the condition of being a poet, and also a redefinition of the implied script from one of homage to one of self-immortalization through writing. The narrative sequence schema of stability following threat is suddenly made concrete and redefined as the progression from speechless transitoriness to the poet's commemoration of himself in his poem (Til live in this poor rhyme', 1. 11), as victory over death, the opponent who subjects himself to the speaker in the form of a written contract, so to speak ('and death to me subscribes', 1. 10; my emphasis). The process of literary writing now gives permanence no longer (as implied up to this point) to the shared friendship between the speaker and the young man, but instead and emphatically to a single person: the speaker as an individual. This thematization of the speaker's role as a poet, then, represents a significant change of frame leading to the continuation of the narrative sequence initiated earlier: the abstract structural schema of threat and continuity is retained but filled with different semantic content.8 The poet has 8

Minsky (1979) introduces the term 'replacement frame' to refer to changes of frame in an interpretive process. A replacement frame is a new frame of reference that the recipient is forced to introduce when the previous frame is no longer adequate for the interpretation of the data provided. In order to understand the continuation of the sequence in the third quatrain of Sonnet 107, it is necessary to shift to the frame of poetry. This new frame, however, does not replace the previous one of friendship; the latter

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the power to guarantee that something will live on because of his special linguistic faculty: he is able to preserve fleeting, transitory life by transforming it into the lasting materiality of a literary work, thereby confronting transitoriness with permanence. This ability distinguishes the poet from all those (the 'speechless tribes' of line 12) who are destined to be forgotten and thus overcome by death because of their lack of words. As in the preceding (sub)sequences, the contrast between threat and survival serves to place emphasis on endurance and provide it with eventfulness in the form of a break with expectations. The power of poetry to foster memories allows the speaker to live on in the poem, which contradicts the expectation that biological death entails the end of human existence.9 However, the metaphorical identification of life with the poem is less eventful than the change of frame with which the speaker suddenly shifts the thematic focus of the poem from his role as a friend to his role as a poet who assures himself of his own attainment of immortality. In the closing couplet, in which the poetic sequence is continued and concluded, the speaker then takes his ability to guarantee immortality and applies it to his friend. Alluding to the art of rhetorical commemoration with an architectural metaphor (making a commemorative monument the medium of remembrance), he promises him a poetic memorial. With that, the promise of preservation ('And thou in this shalt find thy monument', 1. 13) completes what is still a schema of homage. The completion, however, is little more than a formal one, for the significance of the promise as one made as an act of homage is covertly but clearly limited by the fact that it actually implies that the position of the speaker is superior to that of his friend. Not only do the closing words emphasize the friend's existential dependency on the speaker, but the use of the commemorative monument as a metaphor associates the idea of permanence with physical death in the case of the friend, while the speaker draws attention to the continuation of his own life ('live', 1. 11).

9

must be kept active and retained as a foil so that the significance of the sudden change can be felt. The topos of immortalization is a convention, part of a tradition that extends back to the Epilogue of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Book III of Horace's Carmina. Cf. the similar use of the topos in Keats's O d e on Melancholy' (pp. 111-23).

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4 Eventfiilness It can now be seen that the narrative structure of Sonnet 107 displays eventfiilness on two levels and with two different degrees of intensity. On the level of the poem's sequences, an event—an event in the happenings—occurs in the form of danger being overcome, for the feared series of negative incidents never materializes. In addition, the reinterpretation of the sequences, which takes place in the form of a change of script and frame, is also an event—a presentation event, more precisely one in the form of a mediation event—in so far as the change should be seen as taking place on the level of presentation and thus attributed to the intention of the speaker. The eventfiilness of the latter event is greater than that of the former—the sequence of threat and survival is repeated several times, thus eventually becoming predictable, but the change of frame occurs unexpectedly and radically disrupts the interpretive schema that has taken shape. The eventfiilness of this latter change can be defined even more precisely by analysing the place of the sequence of friendship and poetry with respect to the (power) relations between the two characters. The function of the narrative statements changes from furthering the speaker's efforts to ensure the survival of his friendship to helping him assure himself of his own survival as a poet.10 The alteration of the power relations between the two men suggests that the stability of the friendship between them, which the first quatrain asserted, is being called into question. By thematizing his role as a poet rather than the homage contained in his praise of friendship, the speaker portrays the inversion of the asymmetric relationship of friendship and patronage as a seizure of power by the poet. The change in power relations at the end of the second sequence manifests itself in several ways. Instead of proposing that he and his friend live on together as two friends in his poem, the speaker attaches two separate plans for the future to his poetic medium.11 Whereas the speaker is already sure that he will live on ('I'll live', 1. 11), the friend is yet to be provided

10

11

Fineman (1986) also notes that Shakespeare's sonnets break with the conventional homage script in this way, but does not give further consideration to Sonnet 107. Fineman locates Shakespeare's discovery of poetic subjectivity in the paradoxical form of homage he presents, one in which there is no longer a clear difference between homage and the subversive pretence of it. Vickers (1989) points out that, unlike the constantly repeated first- and second-person singular pronouns, the use of 'we* and 'our' is extremely rare in the Sonnets and usually denotes precarious unity.

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with permanence ('thou in this shalt find thy monument', 1. 14). The poem is already there, but the friend will only be able to make use of it after his death. The poet self-consciously presents his own survival, underlining it with the modesty topos ('poor rhyme', 1. 11), and uses his artistic supremacy over death to invert the dependency relationship of the conventional patronage system. Even if the friend is financially and socially superior, he has no way of ensuring that he will be immortalized after his death without drawing on outside help. He belongs to the 'speechless tribes' and must therefore turn to his poet-friend in order to be immortalized in a poem. Shakespeare's cycle places Sonnet 107 in the context of a process of alienation caused by the friend's hurtful behaviour and increasing withdrawal (cf. Sonnets 87-96 in particular). If we consider this context in our analysis, both the eventfiilness of the poem and the communicative function of its narration acquire an additional aspect of meaning. The change of frame can now be read as a sign of the still-existent crisis, and the emphasis placed on the poet's power to grant immortality can correspondingly be understood as a strategic move with which the speaker intends, if not to persuade his friend to change his mind and show his old affection once more, then at least to demonstrate his independence and strength to his friend. The narrative act thereby acquires a pragmatic function, for it is intended to have a direct effect on the relationship between the speaker and his friend (rather than simply presenting it). Seen from the point of view of communication, the poem's eventfiilness can thus be defined in two contexts of different extension. Inside the poem's narrative, it can be described as an act of self-assertion and claim to power; outside, in the context of the probable wider communication situation, it can be described as an attempt to direct the development of the friendship - an attempt, that is, to make a reality of the permanency that the friendship was emphatically asserted to have at the beginning of the sonnet. The sequence of the poem is disrupted by the change of frame. We can generalize from this to identify the event of the story presented in Sonnet 107 as an assertion of autonomy by a strong poet who is not subject to external interests and sees his creative power as the primary source of his identity. Going further, we might cautiously see in this assertion of independence by a poet the precursor of a functional change in literary history

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and a cultural paradigm shift: departure from the patronage system and 12

discovery of the artist as an autonomous subject. One of the specifically lyric elements in the form of the narrative process in Sonnet 107 lies in its performative function. The act of narration takes place in the middle of an incomplete progress that narration serves to extend and complete. This performativity is further intensified by the speaker's self-referential reference to the composition of the sonnet ('this poor rhyme', 1. 11; 'this', 1. 13), which draws the poetic speech act itself into the heart of the narrative process. The speaker prospectively narrates something ('thou in this shalt find thy monument', 1. 13) that is then realized in the course of narration. Sarcastically, we might add that all the friend has to do now for his poetic future to become a reality is die.13 Bibliography Barrell, John (1988). Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester), 18—43. Booth, Stephen (ed.) (2000). Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven and London). Calvert, Hugh (1987). Shakespeare's Sonnets and Problems of Autobiography (Braunton). Fineman, Joel (1986). Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley). Hühn, Peter (1997). "Erfolg durch Scheitern: Zur Individualitätssemantik in Shakespeares Sonetten", in: Henk de Berg and Matthias Prangel (eds), Systemtheorie und Hermeneutik (Tübingen), 173-98. Maroth, Arthur F. (1982). "'Love is not love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order", in: English Literary History 19, 396-428. Minsky, Marvin (1979). "A Framework for Representing Knowledge", in: Dieter Metzing (ed.), Frame Conception and Text Understanding (New York), 1-25. Prince, Gerald (1988). "The Disnarrated", in: Style 22,1-8. Saunders, J. W. (1964). The Profession of English Letters (London). Shakespeare, William (1986). The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth), 130, 313-20. Shakespeare, William (1997). Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Katherine DuncanJones (London: The Arden Shakespeare), 324-25. Vendler, Helen (1998). The Art of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' (Cambridge, MA). 12

13

Cf. Fineman's thesis (1986) that Shakespeare discovered poetic subjectivity in the Sonnets. The poet too, of course, will only live on in poetry after he dies. What is important for the strategy behind his speech, however, is the fact that he makes a clear distinction between himself and the friend by referring to life when talking about himself and associating his friend's situation with death and a commemorative monument.

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Vickers, Brian (1989). "'Mutual Render': I and Thou in the Sonnets", in: Returning to Shakespeare (London and New York), 41-88. Walch, Günter (1993). "Shakespeares Sonettdichtung als Gedächtniskunst", in: Dieter Mehl and Wolfgang Weiß (eds), Shakespeares Sonette in europäischen Perspektiven: Ein Symposium (Münster and Hamburg), 95-113.

Jens Kiefer

4 John Donne: "The Canonization"

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FOR God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love, Or chide my palsy, or my gout, My five gray hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout, With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve, Take you a course, get you a place, Observe his Honour, or his Grace, Or the King's real, or his stamped face Cont6mplate; what you will, approve, So you will let me love. ALAS, alas, who'S injured by my love? What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd? Who says my tears have overflow'd his ground? When did my colds a forward spring remove? When did those heats which my veins fill Add one man to the plaguy bill? Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still Litigious men, which quarrels move, Though she and I do love.

what you will, we are made such by love; Call her one, me another fly, We're tapers too, and at our own cost die, And we in us find the Eagle and the Dove. The Phoenix riddle hath more wit By us; we two being one, are it. So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit, We die, and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love. CALL US

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WE can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tomb or hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no piece of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought um becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs, And by these hymns, all shall approve Us canoniz'd for Love: AND thus invoke us: 'You, whom reverend love Made one another's hermitage; You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage; Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove

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45

Into the glasses of your eyes (So made such mirrors, and such spies, That they did all to you epitomize) Countries, towns, courts: beg from above A pattern of your love!'

John Donne (1983). The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, ed. Theodore Redpath (London), 237-238. John Donne (1572-1631). The poem is thought to have been composed after 1603 and was first printed in 1633.

The treatment of the theme of love in John Donne's poem 'The Canonization' is of great interest to students of cultural history and of narratology alike. The cultural historian is struck by the fact that a poem of this date can contain such a clear statement of a modern concept of love as something autonomous and unaffected by other aspects of society.1 The narratologist notes the originality of the way in which this form of love is developed on the level of the story: the combination of love with a religious script and the relocation of certain sequence elements in the future make it possible to live the ideal despite the obstacles facing it. 1 Communication Situation and Perspective The imperative 'For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love' (1. 1) activates the situational frame of a conversation in which the conversation partner who is being spoken to has refused to sanction the autodiegetic speaker's love relationship. Love can thus be identified at this point as the general thematic context governing the communication situation. The speaker goes on to address his interlocutor, initially in an almost aggressive manner, with the intention of defending himself against the criticism of his love. As he does so, the relationship between speech act and story alternates between simultaneity, retrospection, and prospection. Retrospective speech (i.e. reference to a past happening that has come to an end before the speech act takes place) can be found only in a future utterance imagined by the speaker (11. 37^45). In this imagined speech act that the speaker expects or calls for ('And thus invoke us', 1. 37), his love story is depicted retrospectively in a way that corresponds to the narrator's wishes. The text does not provide an unambiguous indication of who the 1

Cf. Low (1990) and Halpern (1999).

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speaker is addressing when he expresses the expectation that the story of his love will be told in future. However, the imperative projection of the narrative speech into the future strongly suggests that a change of addressee is involved and that the task of expressing what is contained in lines 37-45 is assigned to the future lovers imagined by the speaker ('And by these hymns, all shall approve / Us canoniz'd for love', 11. 35-36), for it is they who call on the saints of love to grant fulfilment of an ideal love ('beg from above / A Pattern of your love!', 11. 44-45) Thus, the lovers who are addressed here function as intradiegetic speakers. This change of addressee is accompanied by a deliberate change in focalization: the autodiegetic speaker is now looking at how future figures perceive him, • whereby what they see is constructed by him. 2

2 The Speaker's Argument in Defence of His Love The speaker's attempt to make his addressee consent to his love is confined to the first two stanzas alone. His strategy changes in the third stanza: instead of advancing new arguments, he represents his love as a fact that will not be changed by the opinion of his conversation partner: 'Call us what you will, we are made such by love' (1. 19). This self-assured statement of his love contrasts with the beginning of the poem, where the speaker twice asks for acceptance of his love in the first stanza (11. 1, 9). However, although the speaker attempts to convince his addressee of his view in the first two stanzas, the almost aggressive tone of his words shows that even here he is so convinced of the righteousness of his love that he could do without his conversation partner's consent if need be. The strategy with which the speaker attempts to influence his addressee in the first stanza has two aspects. On the one hand, he exaggerates the potential arguments of his interlocutor in order to devalue them; on the other, he tries to turn his interlocutor's attention to his own situation by suggesting he develop his financial affairs and pursue his interests at court (11. 4-8). In this way, the speaker defends himself against the objections he attributes to his addressee, according to which he is too ill, too old, and too poor to have a love relationship. 2

Swift's 'Verses' on his own death and Gray's 'Elegy' also have a speaker who makes statements about his survival in public memory after his death by giving words to speakers imagined by him (see pp. 57-78, 79-94).

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In the rhetorical questions of the second stanza, the speaker uses Petrarchan cliches to exaggerate to extremes the negative effects that his love relationship might be accused of having on the world. Such objections are thereby made ridiculous or taken to the point of absurdity. By doing this, the speaker shows that he understands his love to be completely independent of its surroundings. For him, love and the world form two different social contexts shaped by radically different experiences. The world around his love is governed by different principles from it and neither influences nor is influenced by it ('Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still / Litigious men, which quarrels move, / Though she and I do love', 11. 16-18). The rhetorical questions indicate that feelings and emotions are only to be found in love ('my sighs', 1. 11; 'my tears', 1. 12; 'my colds', 1. 13; 'those heats', 1. 14), whereas economic affairs ('merchant's ships', 1. 11), illness ('plaguy bill', 1. 15), legal discourse ('lawyers', 1.16), and war ('soldiers', 1. 16) are part of the world around love, the world of the addressee. By giving an exaggerated representation of the effects his love could have on worldly affairs, the speaker is trying to suggest that his love can do no harm to anyone because it is a self-contained entity without access to the world. At the same time, it becomes clear that the lovers have said farewell to worldly concerns so that financial questions, for example, are of no importance to them. 3 Love and Its Metaphors The third, fourth, and fifth stanzas describe the lovers' present state and the future awaiting them. The third and fourth stanzas are spoken by and focalized through the autodiegetic speaker. In the fifth stanza, on the other hand, the speaker provides a retrospective description of himself and his beloved that is focalized through other, future lovers. 3

Cf. Halpern (1999:105ff.), who relates the presentation of love as separated from other parts of life to autopoiesis in the sense of systems theory: the semantics of love in Donne's poem corresponds to the requirement of closed systems. The relationship between love and the world is described analogously to that between system and environment: love does occur in an environment, but the two are unable to exercise causal influence on one another. The comparison with autopoiesis (i.e. self-creation), however, is only partly appropriate in the case of this form of love. Although the speaker postulates eternal resurrection and thus unending recreation through sexuality in the image of the phoenix, he also denies the ability of love to support itself by admitting that the two lovers cannot live on their love: 'We can die by it, if not live by love' (1. 28).

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Although the second stanza contains elements taken from the tradition of Petrarchan love poetry ('my sighs', 'my tears', 11. 11, 12), it is clear that the relationship between the speaker and his beloved is not subject to Petrarchan conventions. For instance, the speaker is not rejected by his beloved. Also—and this is eventful (see below)—their love has a distinctly sexual quality. Sometimes the images used by the speaker to describe his love relationship depict the two lovers as separate entities sharing a particular characteristic, and sometimes they depict them as a single unit made up of opposites. The lovers first appear as two flies (or moths), whose minute size underlines once more how insignificant their love is to the world around them. Then they are two candles, this image implicitly reminding us that moths attracted by the light of candles are consumed in their flames. Each sees the other as candle or fly, and so they bring about each other's death. Just as the words 'We die, and rise the same' (1. 26), it is important to recognize the sexual connotations of their death ('to die' had the additional meaning of sexual fulfilment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). The references to death also indicate that, unlike love, the life of the lovers cannot last forever. By concentrating solely on love and sexuality, they neglect the worldly matters that would have to be considered if they were to survive in the world. Thus, according to the speaker, the two lovers must bear responsibility for their own death: 'We're tapers too, and at our own cost die' (1. 21). Flies only live for a short time, and candles go out. The phoenix, in contrast, is forever reborn, and so its life can be considered eternal.4 Before the unification of the lovers, represented by the image of the phoenix, the difference between them is highlighted once more in the contrast between eagle and dove. The eagle and dove can be understood as embodying qualities that can be assigned to the lovers (the eagle represents strength; the dove kindness, tranquillity, and love) or as standing for the difference between the sexes, which, like mortality, is transcended by the phoenix: 'The Phoenix riddle hath more wit / By us; we two being one, are it, / So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit' (11. 23-25). The lovers be4

In the notes to his edition of Donne's poetry (1983:239-241), Theodore Redpath remarks that the Petrarchan images of the phoenix and the moth had already been combined by the Sicilian poet Jacopo da Lentini, and that the image of the phoenix is widespread in Sicilian literature in general. In Petrarch, the phoenix appears as an image for the speaker's desire for the Laura he adores. As well as being symbols in the Petrarchan tradition, the phoenix, eagle, and dove are symbols of spiritual renewal and resurrection in the Christian faith. Cf. Koppenfels (1967:71).

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come one, and the opposites bound to them are transcended in the phoenix and its endless cycle of death and rebirth (which, for the lovers, signifies their repeated performance of the act of love). The riddle of the phoenix (its recurrent death and rebirth) is no longer a mystery to the speaker: selfcreation and the return of things past are explained as the result of the union of different sexes. To those outside his love, however, it remains a riddle ('Mysterious by this love', 1. 27). The fourth stanza returns to the problem outlined earlier: love can give the two partners sexual fulfilment, but it cannot provide for them or make them immortal in the world: 'We can die by it, if not live by love' (1. 28). Love, or at least the kind of love to which the speaker subscribes, has a self-destructive element, or at least an aspect that endangers the lovers because of the social isolation caused by the extreme nature of their love. Thus, from the perspective of the wider world, the speaker's love for his beloved does not seem worthy of commemoration in the sense of being recorded in official history. In defiance, the speaker chooses to be commemorated in poetic immortality instead: 'And if unfit for tomb or hearse / Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; / And if no piece of chronicle we prove, / We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms' (11. 29-32). Chronicles record only the deeds that the world deems worth remembering, but poetry makes it possible to keep the public memory of the speaker's love relationship alive as well. As in the mnemotechnical tradition, the lines of a poem are understood as spaces in which the lovers reside after their death.5 Unlike the addressee of the first stanza, who seems to have objected to the speaker's love, future lovers and readers are intended to tell the story of the two lovers in a way approved by the speaker. The behaviour of the two lovers serves as a script in this future narrative in which they serve as examples on whom readers can model their own behaviour as lovers ('[...] beg from above / A pattern of your love!', 11. 44—45). Two changes of state can be found in the fifth stanza. The first change to be specified involves the conditions to which love is subject in society ('You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage', 1. 39). The two lovers of the poem experienced love as peace because they made a world in which they existed only for each other. Future lovers, however, find themselves under even greater pressure to justify themselves in an environment where they meet with even less acceptance, for love for them means 5

Recall that the Italian word 'stanza' can mean 'stanza' or 'room'.

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'rage'. The second change has taken place in the lovers and concerns the way in which they represent the world for each other or make a world of their own. So, two worlds are contrasted: a macro-world, which we can take as being represented by the addressee, and a micro-world of love, centred on emotional needs rather than on economic and legal practicalities. The speaker composes a summary of his love story and places it in the mouths of the future lovers. In it, the lovers have absorbed the soul (i.e. essence) of the world. The lovers' ability to see the whole world (not just part of it) in each other means that, in the eyes of the speaker, their world is no longer the incomplete one that it was initially suggested to be ('(So made such mirrors, and such spies, / That they did all to you epitomize) / Countries, towns, courts', 11. 42-44). In the eyes of the reader, however, the autonomous love proposed by the speaker appears questionable or turns out to be a construct with which he asserts his love. Even if the lovers are a self-contained world for one another, they remain dependent on the external world. Only by positioning themselves in relation to the macroworld, and more specifically by absorbing its soul, can the lovers be a world of their own for one another. Love, therefore, is no different from art. It operates according to rules of its own, but it always occurs in the world, in an environment that does not necessarily determine it, but on which it nonetheless depends. 4 Scripts and Sequences The main underlying script can be identified as that of canonization. It allows us to understand the happenings as a process developing towards a particular goal. The instantiation of the script, however, deviates significantly from this schema, for the elements of the religious script are replaced by profane ones. The canonization of the lovers is justified by extraordinary occurrences: the miracle of love ('riddle', 'mysterious') that takes place in their lives, and their death for love, which makes them martyrs comparable to Christian martyrs who perform miracles and die for their faith. The burial of the lovers is the next element in the script to be mentioned. As they are unworthy of an elaborate funeral ('unfit for tomb or hearse', 1. 29), their last resting place is not a grave, but rather meta-

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phorically found in the lines of the poem.6 As poet, the speaker uses the poem to make a major contribution to his canonization and future commemoration. In fact, given that the act of canonization itself is not narrated, it is possible to see the poet's speech act as an act of selfcanonization. The sequence ends with a call to the saints from whom future lovers request mercy and support. 5 Eventfulness and Story 'The Canonization' displays a high level of eventfulness in several respects. For a start, the highly sexual concept of love and the active enjoyment of such sexuality break with traditional ideas of love. The overall eventfulness of the poem, however, lies less in the deviation of one of its central elements from the Petrarchan schema and more in the application of the canonization script to profane happenings (i.e. we are dealing with a presentation event, specifically, a mediation event). This leads to the playful generation of a new script in which love is interpreted as a religious activity and to which future generations can refer.7 The story presented in the poem can be understood as embodying failure and at the same time as a successful process of problem solving. The conflict confronting the speaker has arisen because his love is not accepted, stemming from a difference between the speaker's wish-world and the norms governing the represented world. Although the speaker is able to act out his sexuality with his beloved, he is unable to win public recognition for and acceptance of his love during his lifetime. He is faced with a problem in the fact that his love meets with disapproval, and responds to it in the present in which he speaks by attempting to convince his detractors that his love is acceptable. The actual solution to the problem, however, he locates in an imagined future. In the future envisaged by the speaker, his love is canonized and accepted and has become a model for other lovers. The generation of a new schema that treats love as a religion and thereby liberates the lovers from the demands of the world can be understood as the speaker's 6

7

On immortalization in a poem, see also the interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 107 (pp. 23-33). In Shakespeare's poem, the survival of the poet alone stands in the foreground, but the function of Donne's poem for the speaker lies in ensuring that the two lovers are remembered together as such. This linguistically playful facet, which involves the use of particularly unusual comparisons, is also known as a conceit and is one of the main features of the metaphysical poets, of whom Donne is one. Cf. Smith (1991) on the conceit and metaphysical wit.

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personal success story. He also succeeds in allowing his memory to live on in his verses instead of resorting to the chronicle or the tombstone, the usual ways of preserving someone's memory. In the eyes of an observer, the autonomous love postulated by the speaker is no more than a convenient construct. The speaker, too, is aware of this, as his artful use of wit and conceits shows. Nonetheless, the obviously playful way in which he turns to the future canonization and recording of his love allows him to succeed for the present in empowering himself in his role as a lover who can show his love and act accordingly. Bibliography Baumlin, James S. (1991). John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (Columbia, MO). Brooks, Cleanth (1962). "The Language of Paradox: 'The Canonization'", in: Helen Gardner (ed.), John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays (PrenticeHall), 100-108. Donne, John (1983). The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, ed. Theodore Redpath (London). Ferry, Anne (1975). All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell (Cambridge, MA). Freitag, Hans-Heinrich (1975). Zentrale Motive und Themen in der Liebeslyrik von John Donne (Bonn). Halpern, Richard (1999). "The Lyric in the Field of Information: Autopoiesis and History in Donne's Songs and Sonnets", in: Andrew Mousley (ed.), John Donne: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basingstoke), 104-21. Koppenfels, Werner von (1967). Das Petrarkistische Element in der Dichtung von John Donne (München). Low, Anthony (1990). 'Donne and the Reinvention of Love', in: English Literary Renaissance, 20, 465-86. Miner, Earl (1969). The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley (Princeton, NJ). Smith, A. J. (1991). Metaphysical Wit (Cambridge).

Peter Hühn

5 Andrew Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress"

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HAD we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love's day. Thou by the Indian Ganges' side Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood: And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow. An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze. Two hundred to adore each breast: But thirty thousand to the rest. An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart: For, Lady, you deserve this state; Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us He Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song: then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity: And your quaint honour turn to dust; And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now, therefore, while the youthful glue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may; And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

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Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball: And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Thorough the iron grates of life. Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Andrew Marvell (1972). The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Dormo (Harmondsworth), 50-51. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). The poem is thought to have been written between 1650 and 1652 and was first published in 1681.

1 Overall Structure: Three Versions of a Love-Story In this poem, the speaker presents his understanding of the type and structure of his own love-story.1 He narrates three different versions of the love-story in succession. In the first two, he thematizes and rejects a traditional concept of how to behave when in love, illustrating two equally unsatisfactory enactments of it. He then argues in favour of a new, third kind of love. He addresses the narratives to his beloved in order to persuade her to put the version he prefers into practice. The deliberations in the poem are thus an elaborate attempt at seduction with the aid of narration. The three narrative variants of how the love between the speaker and his beloved might unfold stand in three successive sequences, have different temporal features, and imply different possibilities of being realized: the first is hypothetical and unreal (11. 1-20), the second real and set in the future (11. 21-32), and the third imperative and located in the present (11. 33-46). The happenings contain two existents—the male speaker and the woman he loves—in a world in which everything is subject to time and transitoriness. The incidents in the happenings consist of the speaker's yearning love for the woman, his insistent pleas to let him fulfil his love for her, and her rejection of those pleas for what are clearly moral reasons, even though she shares his love (or rather, the speaker assumes she does or expects her to do so). The order of presentation is divided into three narrative sequences, each of which places the existents in a similar initial situation consisting of the wooing I and the resistant ('coy') beloved 1

Cf. the comprehensive interpretations in Ferry (1975:185-99) and Hühn (1995:162— 70).

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whom he woos. The sequences differ distinctly, however, in the role played by fulfilment in the incidents that take place in them. On the level of the overall structure of the poem, these three different narrative sequences are combined to form a macrosequence whose function is to present an argument. In 'To His Coy Mistress', the speaker employs narration for pragmatic purposes: he uses it as a way of convincing his beloved to join him in love. Love, more specifically a man's sexual desire for a particular woman, is activated as the frame for all three blocks of happenings. The implicit communication situation in which this occurs is one in which an attempt is made to persuade or seduce someone to consent to the fulfilment of love. In each of the three variants of the love-story, the frame places love beyond the pragmatic context of life and society (where we might find, for example, arrangements for the possible or necessary goal of married life being considered). Love is isolated: it is nothing more and nothing less than a self-sufficient relationship between two people that is nonetheless fundamentally subject to moral norms. The composition of this frame is determined by period and culture, and the frame must be reconstructed as part of the general cultural knowledge of contemporary readers. This means that we are concerned with the love schema found in the Petrarchan tradition of courtly love, which was handed down in primarily literary form. In this schema, the possibility of the lovers being united in reality is excluded on social or moral grounds (the woman is already married, has a social position far superior to that of the man, and so on). Instead, the schema is concerned with making the man's behaviour more refined and Λ

sensitive and making him control his desires. All three sequences draw on a dominant contemporary intertextual (literary) schema with different degrees of conformity or deviation. That schema is the script of courtship as it should take place in a Petrarchan context. The highly ritualized process unfolds as follows: the man tries to win the favour of a woman whom he admires, praises (typically with the help of his poetry), and desires, and who is socially superior, physically perfect, and morally exemplary, resists his attempts at seduction for moral reasons and never articulates her own feelings of love in the process. This schema prevents fulfilment of love as a matter of principle and thus makes it impossible for such an event (which the lover desires) to occur. On the other hand, this means 2

See the description of the conventions of Petrarchan love in the analysis of Wyatt's 'They flee me that sometime did me seek' (pp. 15-22).

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that the potential eventfulness of any fulfilment that might somehow yet occur increases considerably. The tradition of Petrarchan lyric poetry also saw the development of other genre-specific ways of creating events. For example, the speaker could reflect on his own suffering and thereby arrive at self-discipline and renunciation (this breaks with love's natural instincts), or the schema could be varied unexpectedly on the level of its poetic presentation, that is, in the way that the artist shaped a poetic text (this produces discourse events).3 Strikingly, however, the speaker of our poem does not follow these conventional routes. Instead, he totally rejects the Petrarchan concept of love by insisting on fulfilment. The characters are assigned asymmetric positions in the Petrarchan script (active and passive, forward and resistant, desirous and denying, warm and cold). 2 The First Two Love Narratives: Impossible Fulfilment The speaker in this poem is identical with the protagonist and is therefore autodiegetic. He narrates the happenings with the intention of driving them forward in the extratextual world by means of the linguistic act of narration. By placing several possible versions of their love-story before his beloved, the speaker hopes to persuade her to take up the role attributed to her in the version he prefers and thereby steer the story in the direction he wants. The starting point for the three narratives in the successive narrative sequences of 'To His Coy Mistress' consists of the speaker's fundamental dissatisfaction with the conventional script of Petrarchan love and his desire to formulate and realize a love whose course follows a different path. The first of the three sequences (11. 1-20) corresponds most to the Petrarchan script and the sequence of desire, praise of beauty, rejection, and lament it prescribes: Ί would / Love you ten years before the flood: / And you should, if you please, refuse / Till the conversion of the Jews' (11. 710). However, it does so under unreal conditions ('Had we but world enough, and time', 1. 1), and this means that even here the reproduction of the conventional story has a critical accent. The speaker accepts the course

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A good example of the latter case can be found in Marvell's 'The Definition of Love', in which the lack (and impossibility) of love's fulfilment, and thus the failure of an event to occur in the action, are repeatedly underlined, but the choice of images, becoming more and more intense until the elegant and pithy closing formula, takes on the character of an event because of the way it ingeniously varies the schema.

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taken by developments and explicitly evaluates it positively (11. 19-20), but by stretching the realistic (familiar) concept of space and time into infinity, he implicitly exposes the script and the procedure it prescribes to ridicule. The spatial separation of the lovers is taken to extremes ('Thou by the Indian Ganges' side / Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide / Of Humber would complain', 11. 5-7),4 and the end of the sequence is moved far into the distant future ('Till the conversion of the Jews', 1. 10). The opposition between human love and the excessive extension of time and space has a grotesque effect and is presented to us in a tone of good-natured mockery, but with a hint that there will be stronger criticism if the specified conditions are not met: 'This coyness [...] were no crime' (1. 2; my emphasis). The semantic discrepancy between finite human love and infinite time and space is linguistically stressed using the isotopy impossible for humans or unrealistic (e.g. 'An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze', 11. 13-14). The relationship between the characters is asymmetric ('I' vs 'thou'). As the sequence is stretched out so far into the future, the possible event, i.e. the fulfilment of love, in a departure from the script, is postponed indefinitely and made unattainable ('you should if you please refuse / Till the conversion of the Jews', 11. 9-10). At the end of the sequence, it is not even mentioned any more, and the end point specified in its place ('the last age should show your heart', 1. 18) returns to conformity with the conventional script (renunciation of physical fulfilment and praise of moral perfection). The sequence thus is not provided with a definite end and lacks both event and turning-point. The narrator recounts a hypothetical love-story that would be possible and acceptable only under certain patently unrealistic conditions. The second sequence (11. 21-32) follows the same script (note the allusions to praise, wooing, and rejection in 'beauty', 'song', and 'long-preserved virginity' in 11. 25-27), but now under radically different and expressly realistic conditions of time and transitoriness ('But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near', 11. 21-22). In this respect, the second sequence shows both similarities to and differences from the first. At its centre lies a crudely and bluntly drawn opposition between death and sexuality. With aggressive sarcasm, this contrast underlines the impossibility of fulfilling love's desire in the context of the script of Petrarchan love, given the transitoriness of the world (11. 25-32). This line of 4

An allusion to Hull, where Marvell lived.

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meaning suggested throughout the second sequence finds linguistic expression in the semantic contrasts (in the sense of contradictions or impossibilities) of a number of collocations: 'beauty' / 'vault' / 'song' (11. 2527), 'worms' / 'virginity' (11. 27-28), 'quaint' / 'dust' (1. 29),5 'ashes' / 'lust' (1. 30), 'grave' / 'private place' / 'embrace' (11. 31-32). The crass nature of these semantic implications is intensified by the drastic sexual allusions that many words share because of the isotopy sexual: 'worms' 'try' - 'virginity', 'quaint', 'lust', 'private', 'embrace'. As in the first sequence, internal focalization communicates an evaluative attitude, but now with greater clarity and in a more aggressive tone in the form of horror and bitter irony. The aggressiveness can be understood as a sign of frustrated passion. In this sequence, too, the consummation of love is essentially postponed. As in the first sequence, the event of fulfilment (understood as a deviation from the script) does not take place. Here, however, it is impossible because time is limited by the inevitability of death: 'The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace' (11. 31-32). This narrative refers to mortality and finite existence in order to highlight the lack of fulfilment, unlike the previous one, in which fulfilment is postponed indefinitely in an infinity of time and space. Again, the sequence is extended into the future, but here its coming end is sure and final. And once more, the relationship between the characters is an asymmetric one. This version of the love-story is narrated prospectively (as occurring in the future). The presentation concentrates on the end of the process, on the future non-occurrence of the event of fulfilment, as for example in the ironic, sarcastic phrase 'then worms shall try / That long preserv'd virginity' (11. 27-28). The implementation of the script is different from that in the first love sequence in that the speaker finds himself in the reality that he knows from experience ('at my back I always hear', 1. 21). This makes the real structure of the first sequence more apparent: its assumption of infinity means that it is based on an illusory assumption. 3 The Third Love Narrative: Possible Fulfilment To conclude the poem, the third and final sequence (11. 33-46) turns to the consequences of the prospectively narrated second version and radically In addition to having its main meanings of'pretty, 'well-crafted' and 'curious', 'quaint' is also an allusion to the slang expression for the female genitals.

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reformulates them. The result is the definitive version, the positive lovestory, for which the other two prepare the way and which the speaker now narrates in the present tense ('now', 'sits', 'transpires', 11. 33-35) and with imperatives ('let us', 11. 37, 41). He shows how they could put the woman's readiness to return the speaker's love (11. 33-36) into practice together (1. 37). He metaphorically describes the progression to physical union as an action using three images: birds of prey devouring their victims (11. 38-40), rolling into a ball (11. 41-44), and accelerating the movement of the sun (11.45-46). In this way, he outlines the love-story as one that has yet to be realized. The narration of this is intended to serve as a stimulus for making it a reality, which is why the narrative is formulated in the present tense and in the imperative mood, as a consequence of the preceding negative variants of the love-story ('therefore', 1. 33). The failure of love to find fulfilment in the first two variants serves to justify the radical restructuring of the course of love in the third version. The demand that fulfilment take place in the present is accompanied by other changes to the concept of love. The relationship between the characters is now defined as a symmetric one ('we', 'us', 'our'; 'amorous birds of prey', 11. 37-46). The speaker uses their shared desire to stress that he and his lover are of equal value and importance (11. 33-36). Above all, he cites the woman's lust ('thy willing soul transpires / At every pore with instant fires', 11. 35-36), which now corresponds to his own feelings that have been unmistakable from the beginning. Their shared intense desire and their shared idea of where it should lead now make a new and different version of the story possible. Only one aspect of the original asymmetry remains: the woman does not have a voice and has still to be convinced that she should consummate her love. Indeed, we cannot say whether the speaker really perceives passion in the woman or whether he ascribes it to her suggestively in an effort to seduce her. What is crucial is that sharing the same idea of where their desire should lead is an essential requirement for the realization of the new kind of love-story proposed here. The force of mutual desire lies behind the call that passiveness should be abandoned and give way to action, in explicit contrast to the previous postponement: 'Rather [...] than languish' (11. 39-40). The fulfilment of love is clearly what is intended here. This is linguistically reflected in the use of transitive and resultative verbs ('devour', 'roll', 'tear', 'make', 11. 39-46). Isotopies underline the energy and intensity of desire with words and collocations containing the closely related semes strong, intense, violent, and compressed (e.g. 'birds of prey', 'devour', 'roll all our

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strength', 'ball', 'tear', 'rough strife', 'make him run', 11. 38-46). Furthermore, the semantic implications of intensity are combined with obvious sexual connotations, particularly in 'Let us roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball: / And tear our pleasures with rough strife, / Thorough the iron grates of life' (11. 41-44).6 4 Eventfulness and Overall Structure The event in this poem lies in the sexual fulfilment of love, which is directly sought for and narrated as being possible because of the woman's readiness to return the speaker's affections. This fulfilment represents a deviation from the conventional script of renunciation, which is replaced with the opposite concept. Thus, we are initially dealing with a mediation event, one, however, that is clearly employed in pursuit of an event in the happenings, a change in the real world outside the text. Disruption of the expectations raised by intertextual patterns implies a relatively high level of eventfulness. After Wyatt and Surrey introduced Petrarchism into English lyric poetry, it met with a variety of criticism in England, even to the point of being rejected (the first signs of this appear in Wyatt himself, before it becomes most apparent in Donne).7 In theory, this reduces the eventfulness of a deviation from the schema of Petrarchan love. However, considered in context, cases of such criticism were the exception rather than the norm, and in any case, Marvell goes further than such critics in breaking with expectations (and thus increasing the eventfulness of his poem) by drawing specific attention to the physical, animal, and sexual nature of love's fulfilment.8 In addition, the eventfulness of the poem is stressed by the use of the spatial-semantic metaphor of the boundary crossing in its imagery. Any obstacles that are faced ('the iron grates of life', 1. 43)9 must be overcome by force. This is also a sign of the increased power of passion, which provides the driving force behind the 6

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The reading 'iron grates', which replaces the version 'iron gates' found in the 1681 Folio edition and followed in most modern printings of the poem, is found in an early manuscript version. Donno (1972:235) treats it as authentic and adopts it in her edition. Cf. also Randall (1992). Cf. the interpretations of 'They flee from me that sometime did me seek' (pp. 15-22) and 'The Canonization' (pp. 35-43). Cf. Low and Pival (1969) and Brody (1989). 'Iron grates' expresses the force needed to make the boundary crossing more potently than the less intense 'iron gates' of the folio version.

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third sequence. The end of the poem intensifies the degree to which it breaks with expectations (the criterion for measuring eventfulness) still further in that the speaker now expressly accepts the passage of time.10 This contrasts with the first part, in which the hypothetical suspension of time is identified as an unreal fiction, and especially with the second part, in which to the horror of the speaker, time slips ineluctably away. In the third part, surprisingly, the passage of time is actually accelerated, so that the experience of love can be made as intense as possible, relished all the more because it is known to be transitory, as expressed succinctly by the seemingly paradoxical manifesto at the end of the poem: 'Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run' (11.4546). The three versions of the love-story are arranged with a specific objective in mind. The first two versions, negative in different ways and to different degrees, are narrated at the beginning in order to make the positive version with which the poem concludes more forceful and more convincing.11 The conventional interpretation of this arrangement in the critical literature to date is that it reflects a form of logical argument (the syllogism),12 and the order of the elements does indeed follow the structure of an argument. Narratology allows us to add to this line of criticism and make it more precise in the following way. The speaker uses narration to assist his argument by arranging the three narrative sequences in such a way that the transition from the two unsatisfactory versions of the lovestory to the version promising fulfilment has a twofold function. It rhetorically supports the pragmatic boundary crossing striven for in the final sequence and psychologically justifies its eventfulness. That eventfulness lies in the event of fulfilment, which is implicitly longed for in love but forbidden by the script in the previous two sequences. The act of narration forms an integral part of the love-story in so far as it is aimed at fulfilling love in the real world. As he narrates, the speaker addresses the story to his beloved and calls on her to respond to his role as lover by adopting the role of lover herself. Adoption of this new role and the resultant implementation of the story in reality are endowed with par10 11

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Cf. Berthoff (1970:110-14). From a rhetorical point of view, the strategy of persuasion employed in the poem makes use of the classical carpe diem topos. Cf. Leishman (1968:76-78), Donno (1972:233), and Hühn (1995). Cf. for example Leishman (1968:70-72), Low and Pival (1969), Hodge (1978:22-26), Donno (1972:233), and Hühn (1995).

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ticular intensity by the fact that narration takes place at the same time as what is narrated. The pragmatic function of narration in 'To His Coy Mistress' can be formulated even more succinctly as follows: the urgency with which the speaker speaks in a situation directly preceding the event heralds (it is hoped) a move from telling to doing. Taking a further interpretive step, we can link the special function of narration in this poem to the role of the speaker as a subject. He is faced with the inescapable transitoriness of existence in this world, and he responds to it with the poem, ultimately an attempt to define his subjectivity through the physical consummation of love (see Belsey 1987), that is, by assigning himself a role in a successful love-story. This way of constructing identity is set apart from several traditional alternatives available at the time. Most prominent among them were defining the self by referring to transcendence (resorting to religious certainties), stabilizing identity by means of biological self-reproduction in the form of descendants (making recourse to cyclical concepts),13 and stabilizing identity by means of literary (self-)immortalization (exploiting art's promise of permanence).14 In its uncompromisingly radical engagement with the temporality of existence in this world, 'To His Coy Mistress' presents us with a strikingly modern kind of story that categorically departs from traditional concepts.15 Bibliography Belsey, Catherine (1987). "Love and Death in 'To His Coy Mistress'", in: Richard Machin and Christopher Norris (eds), Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry (Cambridge), 105-21. Berthoff, Ann E. (1970). The Resolved Soul: A Study ofMarvell's Major Poems (Princeton, NJ). Brody, Jules (1989). "The Resurrection of the Body. A New Reading of Marveil's 'To His Coy Mistress'", in: English Literary History 56, 53-79.

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The procreation sonnets at the beginning of Shakespeare's sonnet cycle are concerned with this strategy. The speaker in Shakespeare's Sonnets makes recourse to this strategy; an example is Sonnet 107 (see pp. 23-33). The story is modern in the sense that it turns away from ideas of eternity and replaces cyclical concepts of time with linear ones (cf. for example Wendorff 1980). Unlike Marvell, Donne ultimately remains faithful to traditional concepts of time (see the interpretation of 'The Canonization', pp. 35-43).

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Donno, Elizabeth Story (ed.) (1972). Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth). Ferry, Anne (1975). All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell (Cambridge, MA). Hodge, R. I. V. (1978). Forshortened Time: Andrew Marvell and Seventeenth Century Revolutions (Cambridge). Hühn, Peter (1995). Geschichte der englischen Lyrik, Bd. 1 (Tübingen). Leishman, J. B. (1968). The Art of Marvell's Poetry (London). Low, Anthony, and Paul J. Pival (1969). "Rhetorical Pattern in Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'", in: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 68,414-21. Randall, Dale B. J. (1992). "Once More to the G(r)ates: An Old Crux and a New Reading of 'To His Coy Mistress'", in: Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell (Columbia, MO), 47-69. Wendorff, Rudolf (1980). Zeit und Kultur: Geschichte des Zeitbewußtseins in Europa (Opladen).

Jens Kiefer

6 Jonathan Swift: "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D. Occasioned by Reading a Maxim in Rochefoucauld AS Rochefoucault his Maxims drew From Nature, I believe 'em true: They argue no corrupted Mind In him; the Fault is in Mankind. 5

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Maxim more than all the rest Is thought too base for human Breast; "In all Distresses of our Friends "We first consult our private Ends, "While Nature kindly bent to ease us, "Points out some Circumstance to please us." THIS

IF this perhaps your Patience move Let Reason and Experience prove.

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WE all behold with envious Eyes, Our Equal rais'd above our Size; Who wou'd not at a crowded Show, Stand high himself, keep others low? I love my Friend as well as you, But would not have him stop my View; Then let him have the higher Post; I ask but for an Inch at most. IF in a Battle you should find, One, whom you love of all Mankind, Had some heroick Action done, A Champion kill'd, or Trophy won; Rather than thus be over-topt, Would you not wish his Lawrels cropt? DEAR honest Ned is in the Gout, Lies rackt with Pain, and you without: How patiently you hear him groan! How glad the Case is not your own! Poet would not grieve to see, His Brethren write as well as he? But rather than they should excel, He'd wish his Rivals all in Hell. WHAT

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HER End when Emulation misses, She turns to Envy, Stings and Hisses: The strongest Friendship yields to Pride, Unless the Odds be on our Side. VAIN human Kind! Fantastick Race! Thy various Follies, who can trace? Self-love, Ambition, Envy, Pride, Their Empire in our Hearts divide: Give others Riches, Power, and Station, 'Tis all on me an Usurpation. I have no Title to aspire; Yet, when you sink, I seem the higher. In POPE, I cannot read a Line, But with a Sigh, I wish it mine: When he can in one Couplet fix More Sense than I can do in Six: It gives me such a jealous Fit, I cry, Pox take him, and his Wit.

WHY must I be outdone by GAY, In my own hum'rous biting Way? 55

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is no more my Friend, Who dares to Irony pretend; Which I was born to introduce, Refin'd it first, and shew'd its Use.

ARBUTHNOT

ST. JOHN, as well as PULTNEY knows, That I had some repute for Prose; And till they drove me out of Date, Could maul a Minister of State: If they have mortify'd my Pride, And made me throw my Pen aside; If with such Talents Heav'n hath blest 'em Have I not Reason to detest 'em?

To all my Foes, dear Fortune, send Thy Gifts, but never to my Friend: I tamely can endure the first, But, this with Envy makes me burst. much may serve by way of Proem, Proceed we therefore to our Poem. THUS

THE Time is not remote, when I Must by the Course of Nature dye: When I foresee my special Friends, Will try to find their private Ends: Tho' it is hardly understood, Which way my Death can do them good;

Swift: Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift

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Yet, thus methinks, I bear 'em speak; See, how the Dean begins to break: Poor Gentleman, he droops apace, You plainly find it in his Face: That old Vertigo in his Head, Will never leave him, till he's dead: Besides, his Memory decays, He recollects not what he says; He cannot call his Friends to Mind; Forgets the Place where last he din'd: Plyes you with Stories o'er and o'er, He told them fifty Times before. How does he fancy we can sit, To hear his out-of-fashion'd Wit? But he takes up with younger Fokes, Who for his Wine will bear his Jokes: Faith, he must make his Stories shorter, Or change his Comrades once a Quarter: In half the Time, he talks them round; There must another Sett be found.

FOR Poetry, he's past his Prime, 100 He takes an Hour to find a Rhime: His Fire is out, his Wit decay'd, His Fancy sunk, his Muse a Jade. I'd have him throw away his Pen; But there's no talking to some Men. 105 AND, then their Tenderness appears, By adding largely to my Years: "He's older than he would be reckon'd, "And well remembers Charles the Second. "HE hardly drinks a Pint of Wine; 110 "And that, I doubt, is no good Sign. "His Stomach too begins to fail: "Last Year we thought him strong and hale; "But now, he's quite another Thing; "I wish he may hold out till Spring." 115

hug themselves, and reason thus; "It is not yet so bad with us."

THEN

IN such a Case they talk in Tropes, And, by their Fears express their Hopes: Some great Misfortune to portend, 120 No Enemy can match a Friend; With all the Kindness they profess, The Merit of a lucky Guess, (When daily Howd'y's come of Course, And Servants answer; Worse and Worse)

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Jens Kiefer 125 Wou'd please 'em better than to tell, That, GOD be prais'd, the Dean is well. Then he who prophecy'd the best, Approves his Foresight to the rest: "You know, I always fear'd the worst, 130 "And often told you so at first:" He'd rather chuse that I should dye, Than his Prediction prove a Lye. Not one foretels I shall recover; But, all agree, to give me over. 135 YET shou'd some Neighbour feel a Pain, Just in the Parts, where I complain; How many a Message would he send? What hearty Prayers that I should mend? Enquire what Regimen I kept; 140 What gave me Ease, and how I slept? And more lament, when I was dead, Than all the Sniv'llers round my Bed. MY good Companions, never fear, For though you may mistake a Year; 145 Though your Prognosticks run too fast, They must be verify'd at last. the fatal Day arrive! "How is the Dean? He's just alive. "Now the departing Prayer is read: 150 "He hardly breathes. The Dean is dead. "Before the Passing-Bell begun, "The News thro' half the Town has run. "O, may we all for Death prepare! "What has he left? And who's his Heir? 155 "I know no more than what the News is, "'Tis all bequeath'd to publick Uses. 'To publick Use! A perfect Whim! "What had the Publick done for him! "Meer Envy, Avarice, and Pride! 160 "He gave it all:—But first he dy'd. "And had the Dean, in all the Nation, "No worthy Friend, no poor Relation? "So ready to do Strangers good, "Forgetting his own Flesh and Blood?" "BEHOLD

165 Now Grub-Street Wits are all employ'd; With Elegies, the Town is cloy'd: Some Paragraph in ev'ry Paper, To curse the Dean, or bless the Drapier.

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THE Doctors tender of their Fame, Wisely on me lay all the Blame: "We must confess his Case was nice; "But he would never take Advice: "Had he been rul'd, for ought appears, "He might have liv'd these Twenty Years: "For when we open'd him we found, "That all his vital Parts were sound." Dublin soon to London spread, 'Tis told at Court, the Dean is dead.

FROM

Lady Suffolk in the Spleen, Runs laughing up to tell the Queen. The Queen, so Gracious, Mild, and Good, Cries, "Is he gone? 'Tis time he shou'd. "He's dead you say; why let him rot; "I'm glad the Medals were forgot. "I promis'd them, I own; but when? "I only was the Princess then; "But now as Consort of the King, "You know 'tis quite a different Thing." KIND

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Now, Chartres at Sir Robert's Levee, Tells, with a Sneer, the Tidings heavy: "Why, is he dead without his Shoes? (Cries Bob) "I'm Sorry for the News; "Oh, were the Wretch but living still, "And in his Place my good Friend Will·, "Or, had a Mitre on his Head "Provided Bolingbroke were dead." Now Curl his Shop from Rubbish drains; Three genuine Tomes of Swift's Remains. And then to make them pass the glibber, Revis'd by Tibbalds, Moore, and Cibber. He'll treat me as he does my Betters. Publish my Will, my Life, my Letters. Revive the Libels born to dye; Which POPE must bear, as well as I. shift the Scene, to represent How those I love, my Death lament. Poor POPE will grieve a Month; and GAY A Week; and ARBUTHNOTT a Day.

HERE

ST. JOHN himself will scarce forbear, To bite his Pen, and drop a Tear. The rest will give a Shrug and cry, I'm sorry; but we all must dye. Indifference clad in Wisdom's Guise,

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All Fortitude of Mind supplies: For how can stony Bowels melt, In those who never Pity felt; When We are lash'd, They kiss the Rod; Resigning to the Will of God. THE Fools, my Juniors by a Year, Are tortur'd with Suspence and Fear. Who wisely thought my Age a Screen, When Death approach'd, to stand between: The Screen remov'd, their Hearts are trembling, They mourn for me without dissembling. MY female Friends, whose tender Hearts Have better learn'd to act their Parts. Receive the News in doleful Dumps, "The Dean is dead, {and what is Trumps?) "Then Lord have Mercy on his Soul. "(Ladies I'll venture for the Vole) "Six Deans they say must bear the Pall. "(I wish I knew what King to call.) "Madam, your Husband will attend "The Funeral of so good a Friend. "No Madam, 'tis a shocking Sight, "And he's engag'd To-morrow Night! "My Lady Club wou'd take it ill, "If he shou'd fail her at Quadrill. "He lov'd the Dean. (I lead a Heart.) "But dearest Friends, they say, must part. "His Time was come, he ran his Race; "We hope he's in a better Place." WHY do we grieve that Friends should dye? No Loss more easy to supply. One Year is past; a different Scene; No further mention of the Dean; Who now, alas, no more is mist, Than if he never did exist. Where's now this Fav'rite of Apollo"? Departed; and his Works must follow. Must undergo the common Fate; His Kind of Wit is out of Date. Some Country Squire to Lintot goes, Enquires for SWIFT in Verse and Prose: Says Lintot, "I have heard the Name: "He dy'd a Year ago." The same. He searcheth all his Shop in vain; "Sir you may find them in Duck-lane: "I sent them with a Load of Books, "Last Monday to the Pastry-cooks. "To fancy they cou'd live a Year!

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"I find you're but a Stranger here. "The Dean was famous in his Time; "And had a Kind of Knack at Rhyme: "His way of Writing now is past; "The Town hath got a better Taste: "I keep no antiquated Stuff; "But, spick and span I have enough. "Pray, do but give me leave to shew 'em; "Here's Colley Cibber's Birth-day Poem. "This Ode you never yet have seen, "By Stephen Duck, upon the Queen. "Then, here's a Letter finely penn'd Against the Craftsman and his Friend; "It clearly shews that all Reflection "On Ministers, is disaffection. "Next, here's Sir Robert's Vindication. "And Mr. Henly's last Oration: "The Hawkers have not got 'em yet, "Your Honour please to buy a Set?

Wolston'S Tracts, the twelfth Edition; "'Tis read by ev'ry Politician: "The Country Members, when in Town, "To all their Boroughs send them down: 285 "You never met a Thing so smart; "The Courtiers have them all by Heart: "Those Maids of Honour (who can read) "Are taught to use them for their Creed. "The Rev'rend Author's good Intention, 290 "Hath been rewarded with a Pension: "He doth an Honour to his Gown, "By bravely running Priest-craft down: "He shews, as sure as G O D ' S in Gloc 'ster, "That Jesus was a Grand Impostor: 295 "That all his Miracles were Cheats, "Perform'd as Juglers do their Feats: "The Church had never such a Writer: "A Shame, he hath not got a Mitre!" "HERE'S

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SUPPOSE me dead; and then suppose A Club assembled at the Rose, Where from Discourse of this and that, I grow the Subject of their Chat: And, while they toss my Name about, With Favour some, and some without; One quite indiffrent in the Cause, My Character impartial draws:

"THE Dean, if we believe Report, "Was never ill receiv'd at Court: "As for his Works in Verse and Prose,

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"I own my self no Judge of those: "Nor, can I tell what Criticks thought 'em; "But, this I know, all People bought 'em; "As with a moral View design'd "To cure the Vices of Mankind: "His Vein, ironically grave, "Expos'd the Fool, and lash'd the Knave: "To steal a Hint was never known, "But what he writ was all his own.

"HE never thought an Honour done him, "Because a Duke was proud to own him: "Would rather slip aside, and chuse "To talk with Wits in dirty Shoes: "Despis'd the Fools with Stars and Garters, "So often seen caressing Chartres: 325 "He never courted Men in Station, "Nor Persons had in Admiration·, "Of no Man's Greatness was afraid, "Because he sought for no Man's Aid. "Though trusted long in great Affairs, 330 "He gave himself no haughty Airs: "Without regarding private Ends, "Spent all his Credit for his Friends: "And only chose the Wise and Good; "No Flatt'rers; no Allies in Blood; 335 "But succour'd Virtue in Distress, "And seldom fail'd of good Success; "As Numbers in their Hearts must own, "Who, but for him, had been unknown. 320

"WITH Princes kept a due Decorum, "But never stood in Awe before 'em: "And to her Majesty, God bless her, "Would speak as free as to her Dresser, "She thought it his peculiar Whim, "Nor took it ill as come from him. 345 "He follow'd David"s Lesson just, "In Princes never put thy Trust. "And, would you make him truly sower; "Provoke him with a slave in Power. "The Irish Senate, if you nam'd, 350 "With what Impatience he declaim'd! "Fair LIBERTY was all his Cry; "For her he stood prepar'd to die; "For her he boldly stood alone; "For her he oft expos'd his own. 355 "Two Kingdoms just as Faction led, "Had set a Price upon his Head; "But, not a Traytor cou'd be found, "To sell him for Six Hundred Pound.

340

Swift: Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift "HAD he but spar'd his Tongue and Pen, "He might have rose like other Men: "But, Power was never in his Thought; "And, Wealth he valu'd not a Groat: "Ingratitude he often found, "And pity'd those who meant the Wound: 365 "But, kept the Tenor of his Mind, "To merit well of human Kind: "Nor made a Sacrifice of those "Who still were true, to please his Foes. "He labour'd many a fruitless Hour 370 "To reconcile his Friends in Power; "Saw Mischief by a Faction brewing, "While they pursu'd each others Ruin. "But, finding vain was all his Care, "He left the Court in meer Despair.

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"AND, oh! how short are human Schemes! "Here ended all our golden Dreams. "What ST. JOHN'S Skill in State Affairs, "What ORMOND'S Valour, OXFORD'S Cares, "To save their sinking Country lent, 380 "Was all destroy'd by one Event. "Too soon that precious Life was ended, "On which alone, our Weal depended. "When up a dangerous Faction starts, "With Wrath and Vengeance in their Hearts: 385 "By solemn League and Co ν 'nant bound, 'To ruin, slaughter, and confound; 'To tum Religion to a Fable, "And make the Government a Babel: "Pervert the Law, disgrace the Gown, 390 "Corrupt the Senate, rob the Crown; 'To sacrifice old England's Glory, "And make her infamous in Story. "When such a Tempest shook the Land, "How could unguarded Virtue stand? 395

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Horror, Grief, Despair the Dean "Beheld the dire destructive Scene: "His Friends in Exile, or the Tower, "Himself within the Frown of Power; "Pursu'd by base envenom'd Pens, "Far to the Land of Slaves and Fens; "A servile Race in Folly nurs'd, "Who truckle most, when treated worst.

"WITH

"BY Innocence and Resolution, "He bore continual Persecution; "While Numbers to Preferment rose; "Whose Merits were, to be his Foes.

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"When, ev 'η his own familiar Friends "Intent upon their private Ends; "Like Renegadoes now he feels, "Against him lifting up their Heels. "THE Dean did by his Pen defeat "An infamous destructive Cheat. "Taught Fools their Int'rest how to know; "And gave them Arms to ward the Blow. "Envy hath own'd it was his doing, "To save that helpless Land from Ruin, "While they who at the Steerage stood, "And reapt the Profit, sought his Blood. "To save them from their evil Fate, "In him was held a Crime of State. "A wicked Monster on the Bench, "Whose Fury Blood could never quench; "As vile and profligate a Villain, "As modern Scroggs, or old Tressilian-, "Who long all Justice had discarded, "Nor fear'd he GOD, nor Man regarded; "Vow'd on the Dean his Rage to vent, "And make him of his Zeal repent; "But Heav'n his Innocence defends, "The grateful People stand his Friends: "Not Strains of Law, nor Judges Frown, "Nor Topicks brought to please the Crown, "Nor Witness hir'd, nor Jury pick'd, "Prevail to bring him in convict. "IN Exile with a steady Heart, "He spent his Life's declining Part; "Where, Folly, Pride, and Faction sway, Remote from ST. JOHN, POPE, and GAY. "HIS Friendship there to few confin'd, "Were always of the midling Kind: "No Fools of Rank, a mungril Breed, "Who fain would pass for Lords indeed: "Where Titles give no Right or Power, "And Peerage is a wither'd Flower, "He would have held it a Disgrace, "If such a Wretch had known his Face. "On Rural Squires, that Kingdom's Bane, "He vented oft his Wrath in vain: "Biennial Squires, to Market brought; "Who sell their Souls and Votes for Naught; "The Nation stript go joyful back, "To rob the Church, their Tenants rack, "Go Snacks with Thieves and Rapparees,

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"And, keep the Peace, to pick up Fees: "In every Jobb to have a Share, "A Jayl or Barrack to repair; "And turn the Tax for publick Roads "Commodious to their own Abodes.

may allow, the Dean "Had too much Satyr in his Vein; "And seem'd determin'd not to starve it, "Because no Age could more deserve it. "Yet, Malice never was his Aim; "He lash'd the Vice but spar'd the Name. 465 "No Individual could resent, "Where Thousands equally were meant. "His Satyr points at no Defect, "But what all Mortals may correct; "For he abhorr'd that senseless Tribe, 470 "Who call it Humour when they jibe: "He spar'd a Hump or crooked Nose, "Whose Owners set not up for Beaux. "True genuine Dulness mov'd his Pity, "Unless it offer'd to be witty. 475 "Those, who their Ignorance confess'd, "He ne'er offended with a Jest; "But laugh'd to hear an Idiot quote, "A Verse from Horace, learn'd by Rote. "PERHAPS I

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"HE knew an hundred pleasant Stories, "With all the Turns of Whigs and Tories: "Was chearful to his dying Day, "And Friends would let him have his Way. "HE gave the little Wealth he had, "To build a House for Fools and Mad: "And shew'd by one satyric Touch, "No Nation wanted it so much: "That Kingdom he hath left his Debtor, "I wish it soon may have a Better."

Jonathan Swift, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London, 1967), 496-513. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). The poem was first published in 1739.'

Swift wrote two complete poems, each with various versions, in which reference is made to La Rochefoucault's maxim. One is 'The Life and Genuine Character of Dr. Swift' (1733), the other is 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift', which Swift probably completed in 1731. In 1739, Faulkner published his text of the latter, which, treated as

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1 Communication Situation and Focalization The narrator in this poem is an autodiegetic speaker who describes himself as 'the Dean' and refers to himself in both the first and third persons. His fictional speech thus also displays clear features of factual speech: the speaker presents himself as the empirical author, and a large part of the happenings in fact coincides with the author's biography rather than being fictive. The thin boundary between represented world and contemporary existents is a major factor in giving the poem its ironic and comic effect. Because biographical details are present and the speaker refers to himself as the Dean, previous research has failed to distinguish between the speaker and Swift, the empirical author.2 In the following interpretation, however, we shall assume that, despite the low level of authorial fictionalization, there is a difference between the author and the speaker.3 The assumption that we are dealing with a speaker who is presented to us by the author is reinforced formally by the way in which language is used in the poem. In particular, impure rhymes and groups of short lines, which do not correspond to the poetic diction of the Augustan age, as well as alliteration and exaggeration, all enable the speaker to ironize his speech act and thus also his role as a poet.

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the standard and complete edition, continues to be used today, albeit in a variety of ways. Pat Rogers treats Faulkner's footnotes as a paratext in her edition (Penguin, 1983), whereas Herbert Davis integrates them into his text in Jonathan Swift: Poetical Works (London, 1967) by treating them as part of the poem and attributing them to Swift himself. As the status of the footnotes cannot be determined conclusively, they are not considered in this interpretation. And in any case, our attention is directed primarily at issues of sequentiality, which are not affected by the question of some additional voice whose presence might need to be assumed. Cf. Karian (2001) on the history of the poem's publication. Vieth (1978) is an exception. He distinguishes among four identities of Swift: Swift as empirical author; Swift as speaker; the image of Swift created by his admirer; and Swift as the voice in the footnotes who refers to the other Swifts in the third person. From the point of view of narratology, the distinction between the image of Swift and Swift the speaker is better described using the distinction between narration and focalization and the further distinction between the object and subject of focalization. The autodiegetic speaker, who presents himself as the Dean, can be the subject of focalization (in which case he focalizes other characters) or the object of focalization (in which case he is an imaginary object focalized by other characters). Cf. Ryan (1980) and Cohn (1999) on the separation of author and narrator as a feature of fictional speech. Cf. Nickel-Bacon, Groeben, and Schreier (2002) for a theory of fictionality that combines aspects of representation, content, and pragmatics.

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The speaker imagines how the wider world and his friends will react to his death and prospectively narrates what will take place when he is no longer alive. To do this, he reproduces the speech of characters whose words are presented as a part of a dialogue or, as in the case of the admirer, in the form of a self-contained narrative. The 'Dean' is joined by a number of other intradiegetic speakers: 'my special Friends' (11. 81-116); 'my good Companions' (11. 147-64); 'the Doctors' (11. 171-76); 'Lady Suffolk and the Queen' (11. 182-88); 'Chartres' (1.191); 'Walpole' or 'Bob' (11. 193-96); 'my female friends' (11. 228^2); 'Lintot' (11. 255-98); and finally, 'one quite indiff rent in the Cause' (1. 305), the admirer (11. 307-488). By introducing the intradiegetic speakers, the form of perspective in the poem becomes one in which the speaker is both the subject and the object of focalization. He sees other people perceiving him, but the content of their observations is his own creation, an externalization of how he sees himself. The Dean is appraised in his role as a public figure, so we can identify the writer and the politically active person as the character schemata that are activated. As a result of their concentration on public reputation, the words of the Dean do not contain any representation of consciousness in the form of focalization from within whatsoever: his own attitude towards death and old age are not thematized. This is contrary to what we would probably expect in a poem whose theme is the approach of death. Rather than a theme, death serves to prompt the speaker to reflect on his place in society. In some sections of the poem, the extradiegetic speaker seems to disappear behind the dramatic speech of the other speakers (the words of the characters are quoted, sometimes without verba dicendi). When he does speak for himself, however, he does so in the guise of an 'overt narrator' (Chatman 1978) who addresses the reader (1. 299) and makes narration itself a theme of what he says (11. 71-72). 2 Temporal Relationships and Sequentiality The 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift' displays a double temporal perspective that results from the problem of making statements about the time after one's death. As it is not possible for him to describe his death and the world of the thereafter, the speaker delegates the task of narrating how he lives on in memory (or, as the case may be, how he is forgotten) to other speakers who can talk about the Dean in the past. From their point

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of view, their narratives are retrospective; from the point of view of the speaker, they are prospective. The speaker provides his narrative with the structure of a series of well-delineated episode-like sections by separating the first seventy lines, the proem, from the poem that follows (11. 71 ff.), and by marking ellipses (e.g. 1. 245) and changes of scene (e.g. 1. 205). This episodic surface structure should be distinguished from the action of the sequence structure, which is based on four patterns, while the same incidents can sometimes be assigned to several scripts. The first schema is provided by La Rochefoucault's maxim, which precedes the poem as a motto in some editions: 'In the Adversity of our best friends, we find something that doth not displease us'. The Dean expresses his agreement and attributes this kind of behaviour to human nature: 'As Rochefoucault his Maxims drew / From Nature, I believe'em true / They argue no corrupted Mind / In him; the Fault is in Mankind' (11. 1-^4). In his paraphrase of the maxim, the speaker stresses human self-interest and the fact that it is possible to profit from the misfortune of others: 'In all Distresses of our Friends / We first consult our private Ends, / While Nature kindly bent to ease us, / Points out some Circumstance to please us' (11. 7-10). According to the schema that the Dean derives from the maxim and illustrates with examples, we always react, not with sympathetic compassion, but with pleasure and an increased sense of our own value when somebody close to us meets with misfortune. The speaker presents this schema as a quasi-universal explanatory model of human behaviour. It is illustrated first with abstract examples in the proem and then with the imagined reactions of friends and society to the death of the Dean. The schema is interrupted only when the admirer begins his speech (11. 299-468), an admirer, however, who is introduced, not as a friend of the Dean, but as an unbiased observer. He bears the Dean no envy and honours him with a sequence that serves to represent his life and dignify his achievements. The admirer's biographical treatment of the Dean's life and political career is accompanied by a subsequence whose theme is the political and moral-religious decline of the kingdom of England. The sequence of biographical praise, which includes an embedded section concerning the political situation, is itself part of a larger sequence that narrates the period (of two years) between the decline of the Dean's physical and mental powers and the speech delivered by his admirer.

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2.1 The Misfortune of Our Friends Increases Our Sense of Self-Value 'Self-Love, Ambition, Envy, Pride' (1. 41), portrayed as basic anthropological features of the human race ('Vain human Kind! Fantastic Race!', 1. 39) are responsible for the resentment we feel towards our friends and the increase in self-esteem with which we respond to their misfortunes. The speaker begins by enumerating general examples of envy among his fellow human beings before relating the schema to his own behaviour and showing that he also envies his friends because of their literary success: 'In Pope, I cannot read a line / But with a Sigh, I wish it mine' (11. 47—48). As he does so, he emphasizes that resentment is not merely a result of the successes of others in general, for the successes of our friends are particularly intolerable: 'To all my Foes, dear Fortune, send / Thy Gifts, but never to my Friend: / 1 tamely can endure the first, / But, this with envy makes me burst' (11. 67-70). Following the schema of human nature according to which another's misfortune increases one's own sense of selfvalue, this behavioural pattern is not related in the form of a one-off event, but presented as a commonplace fact. It is also played out by different characters in different situations at different times in order to make clear the universal validity of the schema. In the proem, this behavioural pattern is not associated with a temporal framework: the narrative structure is mediated using individual examples that have no chronological or sequential relationship with one another. The main part of the poem, on the other hand, which is just as much designed to illustrate the schema, is provided with the structure of a chronological progression by the speaker. The episodes in it are located in time and even follow a sequential framework, the progression from disease to death, and from death to remembrance and the fading of memory. Following the proem, resentment towards the Dean is thematized against the background of his coming death (11. 73-146). The approaching death of the Dean does not produce sadness in his friends; instead, it reveals their resentment towards him and their true opinion of him (which is attributed to them by the extradiegetic speaker, who imagines the words of the intradiegetic speakers). For the speaker, this reaction to coming death confirms La Rochefoucault's maxim, for he has acknowledged that it applies to himself as much as to anyone else, even though he still cannot explain what his friends might have to gain from his death. This is the more surprising given that he is trying to prove the validity of the schema pre-

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cisely on the basis of his friends' behaviour: 'When I foresee my special Friends, / Will try to find their private Ends: / Tho' it is hardly understood, / Which way my Death can do them good' (11. 75—80). In what follows, the Dean's friends humiliate him on the basis of his literary ability. From their perspective, he seems old-fashioned, his stories are too long and repetitive: 'He takes an hour to find a rhyme: / His Fire is out, his Wit decay'd, / His Fancy sunk, his Muse a Jade' (11. 100-103). Even their knowledge of the Dean's old age and frailty does not make his friends sad, but rather assures them of their own well-being: 'Then hug themselves, and reason thus; / "it is not yet so bad with us'" (11. 115-16). The behaviour of the friends, who, instead of hoping the Dean will recover, take his impending death for granted, is interpreted by the speaker as a reflection of their desires and self-interest: 'In such a Case they talk in Tropes, / And, by their Fears express their Hopes' (11. 117-18). This sequence structures the entire poem. The next episode (11. 147204) begins with the death of the Dean and narrates the imagined reactions of public figures to it. Here, the speaker performs the paradoxical act of narrating his own death. In Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard', the speaker does not narrate the moment of his death, but uses other speakers to narrate the time after it. In Swift's poem, however, the speaker himself represents the moment of his death speaking of himself in the third person, after which he passes the task of speaking to others:4 the Dean's doctors, the Queen, Robert Walpole, and Curl the bookseller are among them. In each case, their reactions reveal little or no signs that the Dean's death has affected them. The doctors make him responsible for his death because, they say, he never followed their advice, and the Queen is relieved that she will not have to give him the decorations promised him. Curl the bookseller is also able to benefit from the Dean's death by publishing his letters. Following the reaction of society to his death, the Dean presents the reaction of the fellow-authors who were close to him: Pope, Gay, and 4

The narration of the speaker's own death also plays a central role in Gray's 'Elegy' (cf. pp. 79-94). The speaker in Gray's poem attempts to make a particular image of himself remain in memory after his death, but this is only a minor function of Swift's poem: the objective of influencing public memory recedes behind that of satirically illustrating human selfishness. Thus, the death of the Dean provides an opportunity to document a universally valid aspect of the behaviour of the speaker's fellow human beings, whereas the primary effect of the representation of the speaker's death in Gray is to underline his individuality.

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Arbuthnot (11. 205-42). They vie with each other in the brevity of their grief, so that they, too, confirm the truth of La Rochefoucault's aphorism. However, this pattern of behaviour is finally broken by the admirer, whom the speaker introduces as a neutral observer, One quite indiff rent in the Cause' (I. 305) and who extols the achievements of the Dean. 2.2 Growing Old, Dying, Remembering the Deceased, and the Fading of Memory The chronological position of the incidents in this sequence can be determined in absolute (rather than merely relational) terms. The sequence contains several subsequences and refers to a variety of scripts. The stages narrated are those of illness in old age, death, and the reactions of friends and society to the death of the Dean. This last element of the sequence contains a particularly significant subsequence, in which the admirer evaluates the Dean's life and accomplishments. The imagined period of time between the beginning of the speech act and the Dean's death covers about a year: 'My good Companions, never fear, / For though you may mistake a Year; / Though your Prognosticks run too fast, / They must be verify'd at last' (11. 143-46). The time prior to the death of the Dean sees the effects of the aging process taking hold on him (in the form of failing memory, decreasing creativity, and stomach trouble). This makes those around him expect that he will die soon. However, he actually dies a year later than his friends had predicted. His death is followed by commemoration in the form of society discussing his achievements. This discussion, however, ceases after another year has passed, once the Dean has completely disappeared from public memory and is no longer appreciated by society at all: One Year is past; a different Scene; / No further mention of the Dean / Who now, alas, no more is mist, / Than if he never did exist' (11. 245^48). The only person who seems to remember him and be positively disposed towards him is the admirer, who, significantly, does not belong to a literary circle or hold political office. He is simply an ordinary pub-goer.

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2.2.1 The Admirer's Praise of the Dean The speech of the admirer is functionally opposed to the sequence according to which another's misfortune increases one's own sense of self-value. The first sequence states that notable achievements are generally not appreciated and that the Dean is therefore forgotten after his death. The function of this subsequence, on the other hand, lies in providing a new evaluation of the Dean's acts and allowing his memory to live on. The admirer begins by re-evaluating Swift's literary output, defending the use of irony in it by arguing that the technique was employed with the moral intention of curing human vices. The admirer goes on to consider the relationship between the Dean and the world around him, referring in the process to the same social groups as those in relation to which the Dean positioned himself: the literary world, friends, the court. The admirer's characterization of the Dean differs significantly from the Dean's description of himself. The Dean portrayed himself as being more interested in himself than his friends and as being envious of them, but the admirer stresses nothing other than the Dean's decency and selflessness: 'Without regarding private Ends, / Spent all his Credit for his Friends' (11. 331-32). In addition, the admirer introduces new accents in his characterization of the Dean and biographical reconstruction of his life. Above all, he emphasizes the Dean's irrepressible desire for freedom, which the Dean himself did not treat as a theme: 'Fair LIBERTY was all his cry; / For her he stood prepar'd to die' (11. 351-52).5 The admirer's narrative reveals the Dean's modesty and moral integrity by contrasting his life with potential alternative biographical scripts, portraying the Dean's life as one that would have taken a different course if he had respected the politics of power and refrained from speaking out in public: 'Had he but spar'd his Tongue and Pen, / He might have rose like other Men: / But, Power was never in his thought; / And, Wealth he valu'd not a Groat' (11. 359-52). The outline of an alternative life free of political persecution serves to highlight the Dean's altruism and sense of justice and contrast them with the image of him suggested by his friends.

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The emphasis on the drive to liberty refers to Swift's political engagement with the Irish question and the anti-colonialist pamphlets written by him. Cf. Oakleaf (2003) and Higgiqs (1994) on Swift's political role; cf. Fabricant (2003) on his relationship with Ireland.

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2.2.2 Deterioration of the Political and Moral Situation As well as relating episodes from the life of the Dean and praising his achievements, the admirer's speech contains a political historical passage. Furthermore, there is another embedded subsequence, whose theme is the decline of the kingdom of England. The sequence concerning the Dean's biography is linked to this sequence of decline because the political situation in England provides the context in which the course of the Dean's political biography can be traced. The admirer identifies the death of the Queen as the cause of the kingdom's decline: 'Too soon that precious Life was ended / On which alone our Weal depended' (11. 382-83).6 Political and religious decline in the kingdom follows as a consequence of her early death: 'To tum Religion to a Fable, / And make the Government a Babel·. / Pervert the Law, disgrace the Gown, / Corrupt the Senate, rob the Crown' (11. 387-90). The presentation of this political and moral decline also serves, like the speculation about alternative courses of life, to highlight the Dean's positive characteristics. While Church and state busy themselves with internal conflicts, the Dean takes compassionate action on behalf of his fellow human beings. 3 The Function of the Narrative and the Status of the Admirer's Praise Tension exists between the two functions that can be identified in the Dean's narrative. Initially, the title thematizes Swift's death and thus suggests that the function of the narrative lies in securing the Dean a place in memory. The poem itself then contrasts two images of Swift that could be remembered. By portraying the possible reaction of society and the Dean's friends to his death, the speaker paints an image of himself in which the envy of others is dominant and his achievements are not recognized. In the admirer's narrative, on the other hand, he outlines a schema by which the future can remember him and in which his successes are applauded. The function of securing a place in memory has given rise to debate in the critical literature about the extent to which the admirer's speech should be taken as ironic or whether the image of Swift proposed

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The speaker does not make clear in the poem whose life ended too early. The footnotes, however, suggest that the death of the Queen is what is meant.

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here can be treated as one that the speaker (or Swift) wants to be preserved in future.7 It can be shown that the words of the admirer themselves contain signals of irony. Slepian (1984), for example, notes that the admirer's speech praises the Dean for not naming any names in his satires; yet Swift did precisely that in practice, mentioning the names of various politicians and fellow writers in his satires. Thus, the extradiegetic speaker ironizes his own speech act using a character he has invented. Furthermore, the aim of securing a place in memory is clearly subordinate to the desire to provide a satirical lesson. Thus, the poem is dominated by its second function, that of demonstrating the veracity of La Rochefoucault's aphorism by illustrating and criticizing human self-love in a verse satire.8 The admirer's speech reveals a paradox here. In the admirer's assessment, the Dean is not afflicted by the qualities of self-love and envy that La Rochefoucault's aphorism identifies as basic human characteristics. If, however, we view the speaker as creating the admirer's speech in order to satisfy his own self-love, we find confirmation of the speaker's earlier statement that he, too, is subject to the instinct of self-love. The admirer's role, therefore, has two simultaneous functions: it creates a positive image of the Dean for the future and at the same ironizes it by exposing the power of human vanity. 4 Eventfulness Events can be distinguished according to whether they represent a break with the expectations of a character, the speaker, or the abstract reader— whether they relate to happenings, presentation, or reception. The most striking break with expectations concerns the portrayal of the Dean as an altruistic person who was valued by those around him. By presenting the Dean in this way, the admirer contradicts La Rochefoucault's aphorism itself as well as the speaker's illustration of it. This contradiction creates eventfulness in different ways depending on the context in which it is seen. Seen in terms of the behaviour of the characters who are presented, it provides us with an event in the happenings: it is possible for someone 7

0

Cf. Booth (1974) and Fish (1989) on the discussion of the question of irony in literary theory. Cf. Weiß (1992) on Swift's verse satires; cf. Schmidt (1977) on satire in Swift in general.

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(even if he is not a friend of the Dean) to respect another person's achievements without experiencing envy. Seen in terms of the speaker, it provides us with a presentation event: the speaker invents his own admirer, who then constructs the expectation that there are people who do not cling to self-love. By creating this speech (albeit in the words of a character), the speaker actually demonstrates his own self-love and thereby betrays his blind spot. However, this self-deception can be seen as part of a strategy in which the speaker presents himself ironically with the intention of providing apparent confirmation of the naive myth of selflessness, but only in order to debunk it and bring the reader to a position of critical insight into the fact that selfishness is an essential human characteristic. Seen in this way, the text aims to bring about a reception event: a change in attitude as a result of the reading process. Bibliography Booth, Wayne C. (1974). A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago and London). Cohn, Dorrit (1999). The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore). Fabricant, Carole (2003). "Swift the Irishman", in: Christopher Fox (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (Cambridge), 48-72. Fish, Stanley (1989). "Short People got no Reason to live: Reading Irony", in: Doing what comes naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford), 180-96. Higgins, Ian (1994). Swift's Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge). Karian, Stephen (2001). "Reading out the material Text of Swift's Verses on the Death", in: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 41:3, 515-44. Oakleaf, David (2003). "Politics and History", in: Christopher Fox (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (Cambridge), 31-47. Schmidt, Johann Ν. (1977). Satire: Swift und Pope (Stuttgart). Slepian, Barry (1984). "The Ironic Intention of Swift's Verses on His own death", in: David M. Vieth (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Jonathan Swift's Poetry (Hamden, CT), 295-306. Swift, Jonathan (1967). Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London), 496-513. Swift, Jonathan (1983). The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (New Haven and London), 485-98. Vieth, David M. (1978). "The Mystery of Personal Identity: Swift's Verses on his own Death", in: Louis Martz and Aubrey Williams (eds), The Author in his Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism (New Haven and London), 245-62. Weiß, Wolfgang (1992). Swift und die Satire des 18. Jahrhunderts: Epoche Werke - Wirkung (München).

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Waingrow, Marshall (1984). "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift", in: David M. Vieth (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Jonathan Swift's Poetry (Hamden, CT), 307-14.

Peter Hühn

7 Thomas Gray: "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard" THE curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. 5

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; that from yonder ivy-mantled tower The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. SAVE

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those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. BENEATH

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THE breezy call of incense-breathing mom, The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed. FOR them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

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OFT did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

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LET not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals of the poor. THE boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike the inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave. NOR you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault, If Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise, Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. CAN storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

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in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstacy the living lyre. PERHAPS

BUT Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repressed their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul. FULL many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

village-Hampden that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. SOME

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THE applause of listening senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land, And read their history in a nation's eyes,

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THEIR lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined; Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

THE struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride With incense kindled at the Muse's flame. FAR from the madding crowd's ignoble strife Their sober wishes never learned to stray; Along the cool sequestered vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. YET even these bones from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh. name, their years, spelt by the unlettered muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die.

THEIR

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FOR who to dumb Forgetfiilness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing lingering look behind? ON some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev'n from the tomb the voice of nature cries, Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires. FOR thee who, mindful of the unhonoured dead, Dost in these lines their artless tale relate; If chance, by lonely Contemplation led, Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, some hoary-headed swain may say, 'Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn 'Brushing with hasty steps the dews away 'To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.

HAPLY

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Peter Hühn at the foot of yonder nodding beech 'That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, 'His listless length at noontide would he stretch, 'And pore upon the brook that babbles by. 'THERE

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by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, 'Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove, 'Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, 'Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love.

'HARD

ΌΝΕ morn I missed him on the customed hill, 'Along the heath and near his favourite tree; 'Another came; nor yet beside the rill, 'Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he; 'THE next with dirges due in sad array 'Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne. 'Approach and read (for thou can'st read) the lay, 'Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.' THE EPITAPH

HERE rests his head upon the lap of earth A youth to fortune and to fame unknown. Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, 120 And Melancholy marked him for her own. LARGE was his bounty and his soul sincere, Heaven did a recompence as largely send: He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend. 125 No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God. The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London, 1976 [1969]), 117-40. Thomas Gray (1716-1771). The poem was published in 1751 and is thought to have been begun between 1742 and 1746.

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1 Composition and Sequence Structure The overall narrative configuration of this poem consists of the speaker's attempt, in two successive sequences (A and B), to make life live on. That is to say, he seeks to secure a place for past lives in memory by using narration to effect an act of commemoration. Two different protagonists are commemorated: the dead villagers, who are buried in a graveyard (sequence A: 11. 13-92), and then the speaker himself (sequence B: 11. 93128). In the case of the villagers, the poem is concerned with retrospectively reclaiming and preserving their memory. In the case of the speaker, on the other hand, the poem's objective lies beyond the present and consists of preserving for (and in) the future the memory of someone alive in the present. The two sequences also differ in their forms of perspective and modes of narration. In sequence A, the speaker speculatively observes and records the life of the villagers in the past; in sequence B, he makes himself the object of representation and observation, initially in the form of brief self-description, and then (from line 98 onwards) in a more detailed picture of himself as seen from a villager's point of view. The speaker anticipates (rightly or wrongly) how the villager will see him and supplies the words of the villager's account in direct speech. The speaker's speculative reconstruction of the life of the villagers refers to the past; that of his own life refers to the future.1 The narratives of the speaker's life and the lives of others are structured analogously: both express a desire that those about whom they narrate be remembered, and both narrate about people who are marginalized and live a confined existence. Ultimately, then, the speaker can be identified as the protagonist of both stories, seeking as he does to define himself, to give himself an identity, by narrating them, and to survive for posterity by expressing himself from within his current crisis situation. The speaker's narratives are, at first covertly and then somewhat openly, about himself. Their function is to reassure him of who he is and preserve that identity in a tone of melancholy resignation. The partial concealment of the fact that the speaker is referring to himself in these narratives is achieved by a change in focalization: it shifts from the speaker as an internal focalizer who focalizes himself from within to the imagined villager as a focalizer who focalizes the speaker from the outside. 1

Cf. Williams (1984:100ff., 160ff.) for an alternative segmentation of the poem into sequences (what he calls 'poems')·

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The two sequences are preceded by a description of an evening in a village churchyard (a form of nature introduction, 11. 1-12). Simultaneously with the occurrences he perceives, the speaker narrates the fall of evening, which isolates him in the churchyard, cuts him off from his surroundings, and leads him to engage in lonely speculation. The adoption of his own self as the point of reference for his subsequent musings is clearly reflected by the verse-final position (in this introductory description) of the only pronominal reference to the speaker within the entire poem (1. 4). Frame and script can be identified, in relatively general terms up to this point, as the contemplation of nature and the fall of darkness and end of the day in the countryside respectively. Isotopies provide the occurrences with a specific semantic content in two ways. First, the idea of (life, activity, and so on) coming to an end is stressed by the metaphorically generated connotations of dying and parting ('tolls the knell', 'parting', 1. 1) and returning to rest ('homeward', 'weary way', 1. 3; 'fades', 1. 5; 'stillness', 1. 6; 'drowsy', 1. 8). Second, the semantic features lonely and isolated are activated ('leaves [...] to me', 1. 4; 'distant', 1. 8; 'complain / of such', 11. 10-11). Thus, the concrete occurrence in the rural surroundings of the natural world is accompanied by semantic implications of ending, isolation, and exclusion. They subsequently reappear with a crucial role in the two narrative sequences.

2 Sequence A : The Life of the Villagers Sequence A (11. 13-92), the life of the villagers, is divided into two subsequences (i.e. subordinate sequences), sequence A/ (11. 13-44) and sequence A2 (11. 45-92), which are themselves divided into two parts. Commemoration can be identified as the general frame (as the title of the elegy itself suggests), the overall script can be identified as that of preserving the memory of the dead by preparing a memorial, particularly in the form of a narrative or an inscription. Accordingly, a reconstruction of the lives of the villagers lying buried in the churchyard is narrated in these subsequences, their lives being declared worthy of preservation and given a place in memory by means of the narrative. These narratively reconstructed life stories have several negative aspects that explain and emotionally intensify the desire to preserve them in memory. The villagers' lives are finished for ever and will never be continued; the villagers are marginalized; little value is attached to them and their lives, which are thus not deemed worthy of attention; and they were never able to develop

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their gifts and realize their true potential. This negativity is further strengthened by the fact that it is the common feature of three isotopies (or better, isotopy complexes) that are shared by all the sequences and ensure their equivalence: transitory, passing, past; not developed, not realized, not lived·, and excluded, marginalized, hated. The negativity of the villagers' lives, then, is ultimately the product of two factors. It is naturally conditioned by the general finiteness of life on earth and socially conditioned by the deep divisions between the levels of society and the resultant upper-class contempt for the lower class. In short, it is conditioned by transitoriness and exclusion—the same two semantic features that were a theme of the nature introduction. This negative side of the villagers' lives is countered by the natural human need to preserve them in sentimental (in the eighteenth-century sense) and sympathetic memory. The function of memory as a contrast and therapeutic response to loss is communicated here by the isotopy preserving, referential, symbolized. That is to say, memory can provide a metonymic link with a past life and a dead person. The power of the poem's narrative of the villagers' simple life stories stems from the combination of the insignificance of their lives, on the one hand, and the universal desire for permanence and the emotional sensitivity of remembrance, on the other. As noted above, sequence A contains two instances of the script's succession of life and remembrance: the subsequences At (11. 11—44) and A2 (11. 45-92). The narrative reconstructions of the daily life of the dead villagers (11. 13-28) and the general circumstances of their life (11. 45-76) are both followed by reflection on the process of remembering such an existence (11. 29-44, 77-92). The symmetry of the two subsequences is formally emphasized by the fact that they are subdivided into groups of four (or in one case, eight) stanzas. Subsequence A / (11. 13-44) concentrates on dignifying the life of people in the countryside and giving them the place in memory that is denied them because they are generally despised by society. In lines 13-28, the speaker narrates the (idealized) daily life of the villagers' ancestors buried in the graveyard. He begins with a prospective (negative) narrative describing morning and evening life in the family home of the past as something that will not be found again in the future (11. 13-24). He then reconstructs (retrospectively) a direct reproduction of daily work in the past (again idealized) (11. 25-28). There is a departure from linear chronology (the day is described after the evening) and a change in the mode of presentation (from a negative description of the future to a positive narrative

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of the past), highlighting the daily work of earlier villagers as a special achievement. Their life is further dignified by means of the isotopy nobleheroic. In metaphoric words and phrases ('clarion [...] horn'—'rouse', 11. 19-20; 'yield', 1. 25; 'stubborn [...] broke', 1. 26; 'bow'd [...] beneath their sturdy stroke', 1. 28), it provides the toil of the day's routine and labour with connotations of heroism in wartime, on which the nobility's sense of its own value was also based. This positive treatment of the life of the villagers is continued in the second part of subsequence A / (11. 29-44), now taking the form of an emphatic rejection of the idea that they should be despised because of their class.2 The speaker does not want the simple reminders of their life to be debased, and proposes that they should no longer be dismissed as insignificant (11. 29-32, 37-40). He justifies this call by pointing out that even those more privileged in life are lost and can never be brought back despite their pompous memorials (11. 33-36, 41-44). The statements of the speaker's cause and the arguments behind it are presented in narrative form and interlock with one another here. Whereas subsequence A / is devoted to life as it actually was (or rather, is imagined to have been) in the past, subsequence A2 (11. 45-92) presents (in what is ultimately another case of speculation) the life the dead villagers could have had but were unable to realize because of the constraints imposed on their existence. Again, this is followed by a reference to the desire for permanence (manifested in memorials). In eight stanzas (11. 4576), the speaker narrates, in conditional or negative form, the hypothetical lives that the dead ancestors might have lived had they not been prevented from doing so by the restrictions of society. He presents their unrealized potential ambivalently in the form of major crimes as well as of great cultural achievements. This involves a variety of possible biographies— those of poet, statesman, scholar, and rebel, but also those of tyrant, liar, and profligate—all of which are presented in succinct narrative form. In the second part of this subsequence A2 (11. 77-92), the speaker reports (narrates), again casting an eye on the graveyard around him, the (active) efforts taken by the dead to ensure their place in memory—efforts, that is, to find permanence and to overcome, in symbolic form, at least, the transitoriness of life. This desire stems from the natural needs of the living human soul ('the parting soul', 1. 89; 'the voice of nature', 1. 91). The commemorative function itself, however, is borne by the material memorial 2

Cf. Sha (1990) on Gray's markedly contradictory attitude to the lower classes.

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when it is erected ('memorial', 1. 78; 'the [...] muse', 1. 81), so that the provision of permanence is disconnected from the human individual and takes on independent existence as a monument. 3 Sequence B: The Life and Commemoration of the Speaker Sequence Β (11. 93-128), the life and commemoration of the speaker, is also divided into two subsequences: sequence Bj (11. 93-116), on his life and death, and sequence B2 (11. 117-28), on his memory. Its structure is also analogous to that of sequence A in its semantic implications (isotopies of negativity and preservation). In lines 93-116 (sequence B}), the speaker, addressing himself ('thee', 1. 93), narrates his (hypothetical) life and death in the village community. To do so, he employs a hypodiegetic narrative (11. 98-116), using an (invented) villager ('swain', 1. 97) as intradiegetic narrator. This hypodiegetic narrative is addressed to another invented character, a 'kindred spirit' (1. 96) of the speaker. As a member of a different social class, the speaker comes across as marginalized and unfamiliar in this environment, just as the country people are in the wider world. The situation and the way it unfolds are marked by isotopies that are essentially similar to those found in the life and death of the villagers 0transitory; excluded, isolated; not understood).

The gravestone is a memorial with a special feature: it bears an 'Epitaph' (11. 117-28: sequence B2) with which it narrates—and thereby preserves—the entire life story of the speaker. His life is thematically similar to that of the villagers with respect to the presence of socially determined limits on the development of his potential ('to Fortune and to Fame unknown', 1. 118). His early death ('Here rests [...]/ A youth', 11. 117-18; my emphasis) further increases the impact of what has not been realized. The relationship between the inscription on the gravestone and the swain's narrative is either ambiguous or paradoxical. As the swain cannot read, and thus does not read the inscription out loud, it is not directly embedded in his narrative (instead, it is parallel to this narrative, and can thus be described as hypodiegetic). On the other hand, for the listener (who can read and goes on to read it at the swain's request), it is directly tied to the narrative that has just been heard; in this respect, it can be described as hypohypodiegetic from the recipient's perspective. Unlike the first sequence (A), the second part of the second sequence (B2) not only names the desire to be preserved in memory, but also pro-

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vides it with extensive realization in the form of the life story described in the poem.3 In this respect, sequence Β represents an intensification of sequence A. As far as the temporal position of the narrator is concerned, the hypodiegetic story of the speaker's life is narrated retrospectively by both the swain and the gravestone, but the narrative of their sequences is hypothetical and prospective. Consequently, sequences A and Β differ in their temporal reference. If the villagers are concerned with reconstructing and preserving the past, the speaker is concerned with anticipating the future and his future preservation. The speaker attempts to perpetuate his existence after his death, the very same task that he has just undertaken on behalf of the people of the countryside. 4 Perspective Structure The first difference between sequences A and Β is that between their protagonists, the people of the countryside and the speaker respectively. This difference is reflected both in the narrating voice, which belongs first to the speaker and then to the swain, and in the kind of focalization employed. Overall, the poem employs an extreme form of internal focalization through the speaker. With very few exceptions (the perception of details of the poem's setting in lines 1-12 and 77-84), it presents no more than reflection, speculation, and imagination. This is true of sequence Β as well as of sequence A. The emotional and ideological facets of focalization are consistent throughout: every perception and thought is coloured by the universal atmosphere of melancholy, nostalgia, and regret, while the upper class is discredited and simple, modest life dignified, first in the treatment of the village community, and then in that of the youth in the epitaph. This also establishes an analogy between the two sequences. However, within the essentially internal perspective maintained throughout the poem, focalization does change in sequence Β in so far as the speaker observes himself from the outside, from the imagined position of another. In his self-apostrophe (11. 93-97), the speaker makes himself the object of perception, preparing the way for a change in narrating voice and focalization in line 98: an intradiegetic narrator is introduced, and a Sharp (2002) places the relevance of written memory in the historical context of the rise of printing, which results in a depersonalization of the relationship between author and reader.

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collective point of view ('we', 11. 98ff.) represented by the swain is adopted. While the speaker is the subject of focalization in the first 92 lines, he is its object from line 93, and particularly line 98, onwards.4 Interestingly, the speaker is not focalized from within in either case. This is obvious in the case of the swain's narrative, but also applies to the reflections of the first 92 lines. They relate the thoughts of the speaker regarding the village community, but lack explicit mention of his own feelings and attitudes, although this does not prevent us deducing the inner state of the speaker from these imagined projections. In the epitaph, the speaker is then focalized from within in a distanced summary. Here, the mental state that was previously no more than implied (loneliness, sadness at transitoriness and injustice, and so on) is explicitly confirmed. 5 Self-Definition and Eventfulness The structural equivalence of the lives treated, the consistency of the isotopies, and the consistency of the emotional and ideological focalization all indicate that the speaker narrates changing but equivalent projections of his own life in this poem. The narrative of his life is projected first onto the lives of the villagers (sequence A), then onto the imagined picture of himself as seen from the outside by the village community (subsequence Bi), and finally onto the inscription on his grave, which is presented from the perspective of an impersonal but knowing entity (subsequence Β2). In all three cases, the story is one of marginalization and exclusion, of transitoriness and unrealized potential. The speaker defines his individuality and identity with a story that is narrated by himself about himself. Predictably, he draws on his social exclusion and undeveloped potential, but he also gives expression to a strong need for close relationships with other people.5 This desire is shown in the reference to a particular friend in the epitaph ('a friend', 1. 124) as well as in the idea of a 'kindred spirit' (1. 96) who asks about him and, analogously, in the emphasis placed on the (imagined) close and personal family ties among the dead villagers. This emphasis on close social relationships establishes a link between the

4 5

Cf. Brady (1965) on the central role of perspective in Gray's 'Elegy'. McCarthy's view (1997:140f., 150f.) that the speaker's position changes from that of an observer to that of a participant during the poem is incorrect, for he is no more integrated into the village community at the end than at the beginning (although there may well be a desire for a close personal relationship) (cf. for example Brady 1965).

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speaker and the (dead) villagers and implicitly contrasts them both with the impersonal public life of ruling high society. The importance of the close social relationships he longs for is also expressed in the sentimental, emotional tone of the narratives, which suggests authenticity and is aimed at making the reader adopt a corresponding attitude towards the speaker. The order of the sequences in the poem allows us to describe the overall nature of the narrative process and identify the poem's eventfulness with increased accuracy. The sequence structure can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it suggests that the narrator attains insight into his own life stoiy (sequence B) by means of reconstructing the story of the villagers in his imagination (sequence A). In this case, his narrative of the life stories of others becomes a way of pre-structuring his own life story. On the other hand, the order of the sequences can also be interpreted as a strategic technique designed to build up to the ending. In this case, reflection on the life of the villagers and interest in remembering them are primarily a pretext allowing the speaker to respond to his own precarious situation. The two views differ merely in the degree of self-awareness attributed to the speaker. Irrespective of the extent to which the macrostructure of the poem, the integration of its parts, can be related to a conscious plan on the part of the speaker, however, it is clear that a story of narration itself is represented: the arrangement of the two narrative sequences allows the narrator's definition of himself to be narrated as it takes shape. The poem's eventfulness, understood as (the degree of) deviation from the expected course of the narrative, does not lie in the speaker's efforts to secure the survival of his own memory as such, for this aim is presented as something universally human and thus as something to be expected.6 What is eventful (in the sense of a mediation event) is rather the unusual way in which the survival of memory is brought about. The speaker explicitly states his future epitaph in and as a poem that captures the essence of his life (as the speaker wants to see it) and paradoxically preserves his existence while he is still alive by anticipating in thought the time after his death. The different interpretations of the arrangement of the sequences described above affect the poem's eventfulness only in so far as it could arguably be decreased by greater self-consciousness on the part of the speaker (in the sense of having an intended strategy). It should also be noted that the self-elegy, as a poetic statement of a memorial to oneself, 6

Cf. the discussion of the relationship between Gray's 'Elegy' and the traditions of the elegy as a genre in Smith (1977:40-54).

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differs from the two socially differentiated ways of life and the two ways of commemorating the dead presented in the poem. The speaker establishes the capacity to feel sympathy and to be sensitive (11. 121ff.) as something of inherent value and no less important than the fruitful agricultural work of the villagers and the political, military, and economic achievements of the great (11. 29ff.). The epitaph differs from the typebased inscriptions on the villagers' graves (defining the speaker's individuality) and from the graves of the privileged, stressing the simplicity of the memorial and thereby the exclusion of the speaker from high society. Thus, by means of the narrative process spanning the poem (and attributing to himself the narrative of life presented in the poem as a whole), the speaker creates his individual identity both by referring to the models of identity provided by the two social classes he contrasts with one another and by differentiating himself from them.7 Concern about being remembered in future is a central factor in this narrative project of identity creation. The imaginary visiting stranger (the 'kindred spirit', 1. 96) is a second version of the speaker's own self, and the description of his life by another in the epitaph is ultimately a description of his own life by himself. The underlying situation of the poem is thus revealed as one of carefully disguised self-reflexivity,9 a precursor of the lonely self-definition of the Romantic self.10 Nonetheless, we cannot fail to notice that the poem makes stabilization of the self and preservation of its existence dependent on others: the swain and the 'kindred spirit', perceiving and, however slightly, recognizing it. In this respect, it stresses the social components of identity in the eighteenth-century sense (cf. Smith 1982).11 Thus, the kind of identity constructed here stands between two epochs of cultural history.12 7

Cf. Newey (1995:1-8), who touches on the speaker's poetic definition of himself in terms of the tension between loneliness and social recognition. 8 Its central thematic relevance is illustrated in, for example, Wright (1977). 9 The literature on Gray has attached varying significance to self-reflexivity. See for example Mertner (1978); Londsale (1975), who considers it in relation to self-distancing techniques; and Branson (1965), who treats it from the point of view of decorum. 10 Williams (1984:1044ff.) classifies the 'Elegy' as a 'Greater (Romantic) Lyric', thereby linking it to Romanticism. 1 ' Cf. Mead's (1967) concept of identity. 12 Weinfield (1991) sees Gray's 'Elegy' as a key turning-point in the development of the English lyric. With little theoretical clarity, he argues that it reflects a changed attitude to history and a new concept of the speaker.

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However, the speaker's attempt to obtain identity in narrative by formulating his own elegy and epitaph in order to secure his place in future memory is fundamentally ambivalent and contradictory. Stabilizing his identity by anticipating his own death in this way is possible only if the speaker adopts an extremely precarious, marginal position, pointing to his deep existential insecurity.13 This contradiction, however, must not be allowed to become too obvious, for the effectiveness of the self-reassurance formulated in the poem would then be threatened (see Hühn 1991). The narratives of the speaker and of others are sentimentalized and the impression of spontaneity is given in order to conceal the contradiction. However, the use of these techniques is reflected—behind the speaker's back, so to speak—in the structure and text of the poem, making the perspective of the composing entity, the abstract author, apparent. 6 Lyric-Specific Features One feature of the narrative composition of Gray's 'Elegy' that is specific to lyric poetry (and particularly that of the Romantic period, as anticipated here by Gray's pre-Romanticism) is the paradoxical combination of narrative self-reflexivity and self-definition. The self defines and identifies itself by narrating its own emotional behaviour and psychological development, but does so while simultaneously concealing this self-referentiality. A second lyric-specific feature, which completes and confirms the first, lies in the fact that narration takes place from within a story that has not reached closure. Death, the future end of the narrative of a life, is narrated prospectively, yet it is also the only temporal position from which the definitive meaning of a life story can be narrated without the potential for later revision. It is also the only point from which the type of story represented by the life in question can be reliably and conclusively determined (cf. Benjamin 1977; Brooks 1984:22-34). By narrating from a position within the course of his own life, then, the speaker is prospectively anticipating retrospection and trying to determine the form that his life will ultimately be seen to have taken. In this way, he hopes to stabilize his identity in the present by narrating the future.

13

Cf. the general emphasis placed by McCarthy (1997:15), albeit with a less specific explanation, on uncertainty as a product of the poem's end. Cf. also Newey (1993), who reveals the generally precarious status of the composition of identity in Gray's poem.

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In so far as the speaker's narrative of his life is self-referentially tied to the poem, the narrative stabilization of identity in Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard' resembles the strategy employed in Shakespeare's Sonnet 107, Swift's 'Verse on the Death of Dr. Swift', and Keats's 'Ode on Melancholy', as well as, in a different form, in Donne's 'The Canonization'.14 All these texts have in common the fact that they use the permanence of the (literary) work of art to preserve the self from the endangered and transitory existence of an individual life. They differ, however, in the reference they make to other people. Reference back to a concrete individual in the process of self-definition has a central role only in Donne and Shakespeare (where that individual is a beloved woman and a friend, respectively). In Swift and Keats, on the other hand, the self is essentially presented in isolation, reference to others becoming a theme only as something hypothetical: a desire (in Swift's neutral advocate), or a non-occurrence (in Keats). Gray occupies an intermediate position here with his (admittedly brief) reference to a friend (in the epitaph) and his idealized 'kindred spirit'. This increasing isolation with which the I conceives of itself would appear to be a product of the age in which the poem was written. Bibliography Benjamin, Walter (1977). "Der Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows", in: Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt/Main), 385410. Brady, Frank (1965). "Structure and Meaning in Gray's Elegy", in: F. W. Hilles and H. Bloom (eds), From Sensibility to Romanticism (New York), 177-89. Bronson, Bertrand Η. (1965). "On a Special Decorum in Gray's Elegy", in: F. Hilles and H. Bloom (eds), From Sensibility to Romanticism (New York), 171-76. Brooks, Peter (1984). Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York). Hühn, Peter (1991). "Outwitting Self-Consciousness: Self-Reference and Paradox in Three Romantic Poems", in: English Studies 72, 230-45. Lonsdale, Roger (1975). "The Poetry of Thomas Gray: Versions of the Self', in: Proceedings of the British Academy 59, 105-23. McCarthy, B. Eugene (1997). Thomas Gray: The Progress of a Poet (Madison).

14

Cf. the interpretations of these poems in the present volume (23-33, 57-78, 111-123, and 35-43 respectively).

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Mead, George Herbert (1967). Mind, Self and Society from the Stand-point of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Ch. W. Morris (Chicago and London). Mertner, Edgar (1978). "Thomas Gray und die Gattung der Elegie", in: Poetica 2, 326-47. Newey, Vincent (1995). Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (Aldershott). Newey, Vincent (1993). "The Selving of Thomas Gray", in: W. B. Hutchings and William Ruddick (eds), Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays (Liverpool), 1338. Sha, Richard C. (1990). "Gray's Political 'Elegy': Poetry as the Burial of History", in: Philological Quarterly 69, 337-57. Sharp, Michele Turner (2002). "Elegy into Epitaph: Print Culture and Commemorative Practice in 'Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'", in: Papers on Language and Literature 38:1,3-28. Smith, Adam (1982 [1759]). The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis). Smith, Eric (1977). By Mourning Tongues (Ipswich). Weinfield, Henry (1991). The Poet Without a Name: Gray's 'Elegy' and the Problem of History (Carbondale and Edwardsville). Williams, Anne (1984). Prophetic Strain: The Greater Speakern the Eighteenth Century (Chicago). Wright, George T. (1977). "Stillness and the Argument in Gray's Elegy", in: Modern Philology 74, 381-89.

Peter Hühn 8 Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "Kubla Khan: Or, Α Vision in a Dream. Α Fragment" THE following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse 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 effects 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':1 '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, 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 has 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['s] 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

1

1613.

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Peter Hühn Come trembling back, unite, and now once more The pool becomes a mirror.2

Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently pur-posed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. Αύριον άδιον άσω3: but the to-morrow is yet to come. 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.4

KUBLA KHAN

5

10

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3

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5

IN Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree:5 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.

These lines are taken from Coleridge's poem 'The Picture; or, the Lover's Resolution' (11. 91-100). The quotation is taken from Theocritus's Idylls (i. 145): 'a sweeter song hereafter I will sing you'. This is the quotation as corrected in the 1834 edition; when the text was first published in 1816, it had an erroneous temporal reference, 'today' instead of 'tomorrow'. This is a reference to Coleridge's poem 'The Pains of Sleep', which was printed immediately after 'Kubla Khan' in Christabel; Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep in 1816 (see Keach 1997:566). 'The Pains of Sleep' stands in direct contrast to 'Kubla Khan' in that it deals with tormented hellish visions rather than inspirational heavenly ones and does not refer to the theme of creativity. It is therefore not considered in the following analysis of 'Kubla Khan'. The reference to it at the end of the preface uses the first-person pronoun for the first time ( Ί have annexed'); its main function, it might therefore be argued, is to highlight the fact that the author referred to himself in the third person in all his remarks on 'Kubla Khan'. The author is able to make his authorship explicit when mentioning 'The Pains of Sleep' because, unlike 'Kubla Khan' (see below), the poem is not concerned with issues of artistic creativity. The references are to the historical Mongol Emperor Kubilai Chan, the founder of the Yüan Dynasty in China in the thirteenth century, and his palace in Shang-Tu.

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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, 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! 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.6 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!

A possible allusion to Milton's Paradise Lost, IV.280fif. (in which the paradise is located on Mount Amara in Ethiopia).

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Peter Hühn 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.7

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1967[1912]), 295-98.

Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge

(London,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The poem is thought to have been written in 1798 and was published in 1816.

1 Overall Structure Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment' is a poetic text with an unusually complex overall structure. Even when it was first published in Christabel; Kubla Khan, A Vision;

The Pains of Sleep, Coleridge provided a prose preface to accompany the poem. As the following analysis shows, it is emphatically not to be read in the sense of a source of plain factual autobiographical information on the genesis of the poem. Rather, it must be understood as an integral part of the poetic text as a whole, with which it is linked thematically. 'Kubla Khan' thus displays a twofold bipartite structure. The text consists of the prose preface and the lyric poem proper, which is itself divided into two parts with different protagonists (Kubla and the speaker). All three parts are concerned with the production of works of art and the conditions under which they are produced: they deal with artistic creativity and the issues surrounding it. This constitutes the overarching (thematic) frame of the text, allowing the individual parts to be related to one another and controling the ways in which they are related. The following processes of artistic production are presented in narrative form: (1) the preface contains the origins of the poem 'Kubla Khan' (followed by a brief reference to another poem, 'The Pains of Sleep'); (2) the first two thirds of 'Kubla Khan' itself (11. 1-36) describe the historical construction of a piece of country architecture (a 'pleasure dome' and its gardens); and (3) the final third of 'Kubla Khan' (11. 37-54) relates the desire for the (future) composition of a poetic work of art, the linguistic reproduction of the architectural work. 7

This division of the poem into four parts follows the first published version of 1816, from which the edition of Ε. H. Coleridge departs. Cf. Keach (1997:250-52, 526).

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2 The Preface The prose preface begins with a short note on how the poem came to be published before narrating how it originated. The treatment of publication and origin implies, as suggested above, that the situational and thematic frame consists of issues of artistic creativity. These issues involve the fragility of the process by which a (linguistic) work of art is created, particularly the risk of failure inherent in the fact that it is always possible for the work to go awry or be left incomplete. The script for the creative process can be found in the classical idea that supernatural inspiration (by a god or a muse) is a necessary precondition for literary activity. Here, however, the script is stripped of its numinous components, appearing instead in an emphatically secularized (i.e. modernized) form: the speaker can only compose by dreaming the poem, by being given the lines of the poem in a dream. In addition, inspiration is provided with a rational and empirical basis, so to speak, by being explained in pharmacological and psychological terms as the result of taking opium, reading a book about the subject of the poem (Kubla Khan), and sleeping and dreaming. In this sense, the sequence of the creative process is given its character by the isotopy naturally caused, psychologically conditioned. Nonetheless, the central features of the traditional script—the provision of art by a source outside individual consciousness, and the resultant passive, receptive, and intermediary status of the author who receives it— remain active on the level of isotopies {passive, receptive) in the sequence described here. The narrator may be an author, but he hardly ever functions as the (grammatical) subject of the corresponding actions. Byron asks him to publish the 'fragment', the medicine is prescribed to him by someone else, the poetic images appear in his dream without his volition ('images rose up [...] without [...] conscious effort'), and he is disturbed from outside (a visitor interrupts him) when writing down what he found in the dream. The narrator's status as a recipient is further highlighted metaphorically in the expression 'vision' and the elaborate mirror metaphor in the quotation from 'The Picture', and is even formulated explicitly at the end of the preface: 'what had been originally, as it were, given to him'. The narrator's dependence on inspiration is also revealed by the fact that he is, despite his efforts, unable to complete on his own the fragment he finds. This all complements the consistent reference to himself in the third person ('the Author'), which plays down his active role still further. Only in the very last paragraph, when he talks about a different text ('The

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Pains of Sleep'), does he use the first-person pronoun to refer to himself. The fragile and vulnerable nature of the creative process is clearly exposed when the author is interrupted by the visitor from Porlock. On the other hand, the use of the terms 'Author' and 'composed' clearly point to the narrator's role as an author. Furthermore, despite the emphasis on receptivity, the covert sustained thematic importance of the authorial role is manifested in the use of internal focalization in which the narrator constantly focalizes himself from within. This is particularly apparent in the report of his dream and his memory of it. This perspective is based on the factual identity of speaker (or narrator) and protagonist as the mediating entity behind the preface. Despite the narrator's manipulation of pronouns to create distance from himself, there is ultimately no doubt that he is an autodiegetic narrator. Reference is made to the inspiration script throughout the preface, and this brings with it a variety of efforts to underplay or deny the role of conscious and active control in guiding the process of artistic creation. The overall purpose of this strategy is to protect literary creativity, fragile, unpredictable, and easily disturbed as it is, from the disruptive effects of self-awareness and self-consciousness. The anecdotal narrative of the poem's genesis is a deliberate attempt at mystification, as shown not least by the careful attention to structure throughout the poem (the clear break exactly two thirds of the way through, the elaborate pattern of its rhymes, the function of repetition of motifs, and so on).8 Texts this obviously crafted are not found in dreams. The anecdotal narrative of the preface is confined solely to the (interrupted) creative process. The work of art itself, which has been created but not (for the time being at least) completed, is mentioned but not described in any detail. The act of narration takes place retrospectively (in the preterite): it occurs after what it narrates, after the composition of the poem is interrupted, its position in the sequence of the creative process thus preceding the decisive event of completion, which has not yet occurred and does not show signs of being about to do so. The narrative of the poem's unfinished composition has three functions. First, it provides an introduction to the unfinished work of art about which it narrates. Second, it justifies the publication ofthat work and guards against potential criticism of it by playing down any claim to artistic perfection it might be thought to 8

Note also that there are several different versions of the preface, not all of which describe the genesis of the poem in the same way. Cf. the overview in Hughes (1996:160— 64).

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make ('a psychological curiosity'). Third, it establishes artistic production and the issues surrounding the production of works of art as the general (thematic) frame for 'Kubla Khan', the text printed after it. 3 'Kubla Khan': The Poem Itself The poem, which is described as a 'fragment', consists of two sequences that engage with the creative process in different ways, first with Kubla Khan's construction of a palace and gardens in Xanadu (11. 1-36), then with the wish to recreate this process in an imagined poem (11. 37-54, esp. Ί would build that dome in air', 1. 46). The first part uses a historical example to narrate the successful production of a work of art created by another at a distant point in time: the preterite is employed for the purpose of 'historicizing' this production. The second part, on the other hand, articulates the speaker's wish (as yet unfulfilled) that he succeed similarly in writing a poem in the immediate present. 3a Kubla Khan's Successful Construction of His Palace The first part of the poem (11. 1-36) presents Kubla's palace and gardens as products of the artificial and artistic modification of nature. Accordingly, the development and completion of the work are shaped by tension and then balance between the dynamic elemental force of nature and the imposition of regulating human order. The script can be defined as the artistic building work commissioned by a powerful autocratic ruler and carried out by artists and craftsmen. The process of planning and construction that stretches from the initial motivating command ('decree', 1. 2) to final completion of the work (11. 31-36) constitutes the first sequence: crafting and modification of the landscape to achieve a particular aim. The artistic process takes place, however, without explicit reference to artists or workers and with only one mention of Kubla as the work's originator (1. 1), for it is references to nature itself—the material, so to speak, with which the work is made—that predominate. Nature appears partly as something passive, partly as something active, as reflected in the use of the passive and active voice in the text. Thus, production consists of a combination of planned human and spontaneous natural activity: the command to start building and closing in the grounds assumes the presence of human agents; while the fountain and river with their changing power and

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the chasm with its threatening might are implicitly personified as agents of nature. This dynamic mutual relationship (in the sense of two simultaneously combined and contrasted opposing forces and spheres) is underlined by the many isotopies based on the fundamental human/natural (or human/non-human) opposition, thus providing the semantic details of the sequence. The human isotopy is represented by planning and ordering ('decree', 1. 2), building ('with walls and towers [...] girdled round', 1. 7), and measuring ('five miles', 11. 6, 25). By comparison, the contrasting non-human (or natural) isotopy is far more pronounced and dominant in the form of the holy, supernatural, and numinous ('sacred river', 11. 3, 24, 26; 'holy and enchanted', 1. 14; 'haunted', 1. 15; 'demon-lover', 1. 16), the wild and mighty and the threatening (e.g. 'savage', 1. 14; 'with ceaseless turmoil seething', 1. 17; 'mighty fountain [...] forced', 1. 19; 'vaulted', 1. 21; 'lifeless ocean', 1. 28; 'war', 1. 30), and the vast and immeasurable ('measureless', 11. 4, 27). The human/natural opposition is paralleled by oppositions of space, light, and temperature: up/down ('caverns', 11. 4, 27; 'down to', 1. 5; 'chasm', 11. 12, 17; 'flung up', 11. 24; 'sank in', 1. 28) and light/dark and warm/cold ('sunless', 1. 5; 'bright', 1. 8; 'sunny', 1. 11). Taken together, the oppositions among the isotopies point to the precarious position of human activity and control in the creative process.9 This is similar to the situation in the preface, although here the emphasis on human activity is stronger (albeit less obvious). And, unlike the situation described in the preface, the process of composition manages to reach completion. The artistic product, i.e. the palace in the middle of the gardens described in lines 31-36, results from the special balance achieved between the isotopies that were previously parts of an opposition: human/natural, up/down, and warm—bright/cold—dark. The isotopy human has a particular implication of artistry attached to it here, especially in 'dome', 'measure', and 'rare device' (11. 31, 33, 35). The balance is either summarized in abstract terms ('mingled measure', 1. 33; 'a miracle of rare device', 1. 35) or portrayed in visual images in which opposites are combined ('The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves', 11. 31-32; 'waves [...] the fountain and the caves', 11. 32-34; Ά sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice', 1. 36). The harmony thus created 9

Cf. England's interpretation (1973) of the contrasting images as an expression of the constant conflict between creative impulses and the obstruction of creativity by the intellect.

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between the opposing powers of nature and human design marks the completion of the perfect work of art. The perfection with which design and spontaneity are integrated is captured succinctly by the phrase 'a miracle of rare device' (1. 35). It presents the work of art as a product of human artistic design ('device') and simultaneously as a marvel produced by forces beyond human control ('miracle'). Significantly, however, it is not possible to trace precisely how this work of art came into being. The creative act remains just as obscure as Kubla Khan himself, who, although he is the originator of the project and his name the title of the poem, withdraws into the background. In shrouding the creative process in mystery, the first part of the poem is clearly analogous to the preface. The event here lies in the unexpected perfection of the work in reality (as the final product of planning and decree), despite the fact that it was initially faced with the elemental power of nature and processes beyond human control. Eventfiilness is further accentuated by the contrast with the failure to complete the work described in the preface. As a result, a story comes into being, a story of artistic production. The act of narration takes place retrospectively throughout, after the story has been provided with closure by the event of completion. Overall, the representation of the process is externally focalized (only at one point, lines 29-30, is Kubla focalized from within). The narrator remains heterodiegetic and does not make his role as narrator a theme of his narrative, even though he does betray his emotional involvement by making exclamations at certain points (11. 12, 14). The distance between narrator and content is further reflected in the historical and geographical remoteness of the happenings. 3b The Speaker's Longing for Inspiration The second part of the poem (11. 37-54) is composed of two sections. Lines 37-41 retrospectively narrate a vision (seen in the past) of a lady making music, followed by a section narrated prospectively and conditionally ('if [...] then [...]') in lines 42-54, which specifies reliving the vision of lines 37-41 as a precondition for the artistic (reproduction of Kubla's 'pleasure-dome' in a literary work of art ('with music loud and long, / 1 would build that dome in air', 11. 45-46). The effect of that work on an audience—making them recognize its author as an inspired artist— is also described here. As before, the frame is that of artistic creativity, while the script that is activated corresponds to that of the preface: the process of artistic production requires inspiration to set it in motion, after

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which the completion of the work can then take place. As in the preface, too, successful completion of the creative process is desired, but here the final phase of the script is made more specific: completion is defined with reference to the audience. The finished work of art would bring the artist the admiration and respect of the audience and thus give him his special identity. In other words, respectful reception and recognition are the true signs of perfection. The artistic (and in particular poetic) significance of the sequence in the second part of the poem is even more distinct than it is in the first part. It is highlighted by the presence of the isotopy artistic, musical, poetic throughout this second part, and is apparent in 'dulcimer' (11. 37, 40), 'singing' (1. 41), 'symphony and song' (1. 43), and 'music' (1. 45), and even more strongly in the allusion to Plato's dialogue Ion and its description of the furor poeticus,10 the divine inspiration of poets (11. 49-53).11 In this respect, isotopies provide the sequence with a meaning analogous to that of the preface and of the first sequence. The receptive status of the artist and the dominance of the power of nature (over human activity) are highlighted with particular clarity. The 'damsel with a dulcimer' (1. 37) has the role of a muse.12 The speaker could be inspired to creativity only if her music were revived in his mind (11. 44—46). Muse and inspiration are associated with several attributes: sacred and superhuman ('Mount Abora', 1. 41), and also dangerous and imposing (esp. 11. 49-52), the latter concerning the place of the artist in relation to the audience. As in the other two parts of the text, important aspects of the process of artistic creativity are thus shown to be beyond human control.

10

Cf. for example the following passage: 'so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed [...] And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and reason is no longer in him: no man, while he retains that faculty, has the oracular gift of poetry.' (Plato 1953:107-108 (534 a-b)).

11

Cf. Patterson (1974), who (rather unconvincingly) develops the idea of demonic, amoral poetry from this. See Fulford (1999), who discusses the relationship between gender and the concept of creativity.

12

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The structure of the sequence is such that the artistic process of producing a work of art that results in the recognition of the artist can only be narrated prospectively, as a wish in conditional form. This is similar to the preface, but different from the first sequence. The event has not yet occurred, and its potential eventfulness if it does occur is increased considerably by the difficulties and hindrances to which the creative process is subject. The precariously contingent nature of the event is accentuated above all by the radical change in the narrator's position compared with the first sequence. In the first part of the poem, the narrator is heterodiegetic and clearly dissociated from the artist of Kubla Khan's palace in historical, geographical, and ethnic terms. In the second part of the poem, however, he is the stricken artist, an autodiegetic narrator who is identical with the protagonist. It is up to him to perform the creative event, but his chances of doing so are threatened by the narrator's intentionality and high level of self-consciousness, which stem from the fact that he is narrating about himself. At the end of the poem (11. 49ff.), he takes a distance from himself by describing himself from the perspective of others (the audience), thereby focalizing himself from outside. This constitutes another attempt to prevent intense introspection and self-consciousness from obstructing the inspiration that is so deeply desired. As noted above, a similar distancing strategy is employed in the preface, where the narrator uses third-person forms to refer to himself. Located between the past (the vision) and the future poetic re-creation of the pleasure-dome, the act of narration precedes that of creation, thus providing the narrative with a twofold function: it is intended both to articulate the desire to create a work of art and to enable and aid the creative process by anticipating its course in narrative form while simultaneously concealing the role of its creator as an agent. The narrative does not explicitly aim to initiate the creative process, but it may encourage it indirectly. 4 The Connection of the Parts and the Question of Coherence The relationship of the two narrative sequences to one another and to the introduction is an important issue with respect to the complex story presented in the poem 'Kubla Khan'. The connections between the three elements are not set out explicitly by the text, however, so that readers are left to supply them.13 A starting point for relating the parts to one another 13

Cf. Breuer's description (1980) of the connection involved as a paradox.

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is provided by the reference back to line 36 (and thus to the first sequence) in lines 46—47 (esp. 'That sunny dome! those caves of ice!'). Accordingly, the link between the two sequences can be most plausibly constructed as a chronological progression from the description of a paradigmatic achievement to the search to replicate it. The first sequence narrates a historical example of the successful production of a perfect work of art in an objective and distanced manner (characterized by the fact that it takes place in the distant past, involves architecture as the artistic medium, names the patron instead of the artist, and, more generally, is located in a pre-modern context). The second sequence, on the other hand, relates the development of an as yet unfulfilled desire to replicate the earlier creation in a different medium (literature), and it does so in a subjectivized form in which the speaker, rather than distancing himself from the artist, is identical with him. The differences between the first and second sequences reveal the Romantic poet's concern with his artistic productivity, which is not subject to his direct intention and is actually obstructed by intentionality.14 The two sequences are arranged to narrate the historical origins of the problem facing Romantic poets (the shift from a pre-modern to a modern situation), and they point to its solution at the same time. On the level of the happenings, the first part contains a narrative about an artistic creation, but not the creation itself. The linguistic portrayal of the origins of Kubla's pleasure-dome on the level of presentation, however, should be seen as a genuine poetic work of art, as the construction of the 'dome in air' (1. 46), i.e. in poetic language. Thus, the first sequence sees the realization of what the artist longs for and strives for in the second, and it does so unexpectedly, without the artist considering himself in the process, without self-consciousness on his part. Seen in this way, the poem's fragmentary structure is simply a technique for concealing coherence. If we interpret the narrative order of the two sequences in this way, the eventfulness of the poem lies in the fact that the event narrated prospectively and conditionally in the second sequence has already been realized in the text of the description. Moreover, the event is located, not on the same level, the level of the happenings, but on a higher level, the level of 14

Wheeler (1981) provides a highly detailed reconstruction of the interplay between activeness and passiveness as a strategy for solving the crisis of creativity. Hewitt (1988), on the other hand, rather implausibly interprets the two artist figures, Kubla and the speaker in the last part, as false poets.

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their presentation as a poetic text, and is thus a mediation event. The difference between the two sequences allows the second one to stress the fundamental unpredictability of the artistic enterprise and thus supply the horizon of expectations against which eventfulness can be measured. The second sequence anticipates an additional event (or another aspect of the first): the recognition of the speaker as an artist privileged with quasidivine inspiration. The text leaves open the question of whether this event actually occurs, depending on whether its readers perceive and appreciate the fact that the apparently fragmentary structure of the poem itself is actually a carefully-wrought work of art, and whether consequently they then admire the artist's achievement as that of a genius.15 Seen from this perspective, eventfulness has moved to the level of reception, such that we might call it a reception event. The relationship between the preface and the poem reflects the same issues concerning the composition and completion of works of art as the second sequence (the necessity of inspiration and so on). In a sense, however, the order is inverted. From the beginning, the anecdotal narrative of the unfinished creation of a work of art (the poem) locates its eventfulness in the as yet unrealized completion of the poem. It thereby anticipates and intensifies the function of the second sequence, but it does so on a higher —metapoetic—level. As suggested above, on this metapoetic level, the poem should be understood as the eventful fulfilment of the desire that it expresses.16 Finally, the function of narration lies in combining, in a contrastive manner and on two levels, the composition of a work of art with reflection on the problems of composition. In semiotic terms, this could be described as combining the work of art as an object of reference (in the form of a narrative) with the work of art as a reference to that object (also in the form of a narrative). The order of the narrative in the poem itself (first sequence—second sequence) presents object before reference, thereby inverting the order of the narrative in the text as a whole (preface—poem), 15

Cf. Chayes's emphasis (1966) on the role of the audience in the question of creativity. Stevenson (1983) also sees the references to paradise as signs of a positive treatment of the theme of creativity, with particular stress on the position of the reader at the end.

16

See Mackenzie (1969). Pearce (1981), on the other hand, reads the poem as a statement of the loss of creativity, not just in Coleridge, but in western civilization in general, thereby failing to appreciate the complexity of the strategies employed in the poem. Hogsette (1997) takes a similar view.

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in which reference appears before object. The order of the narrative in the poem allows readers to see through the assertion of the preface and interpret the order of the narrative in the overall text as a progression from desire to eventful fulfilment. So, in 'Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream', Coleridge is ultimately presenting us with a sophisticated treatment of authorship. He does so in the form of a typically Romantic project, paradoxically mediating between the precarious status of spontaneous artistic creativity and the unavoidable nature of modern subjectivity with its high level of consciousness, self-reflexivity, and self-awareness. The text presents this project by combining two passages. One is a performative passage in the present tense (i.e. narrated simultaneously with what it describes) (11. 37-54), in which artistic completion is something the future may bring, while the other passage is in the preterite (11. 1-36), where completion has already occurred in two different and differently distant pasts: the impersonal past of Kubla Khan on the level of the happenings, and the personal past of the narrator/speaker on the level of the presentation. The context provided for the poem by the preface means that the combination of the passages is presented as a failure, but it can ultimately be read as a success because the relationship between its parts is inverted in the poem itself. This presentation of authorship in the Romantic tradition illustrates the phenomenon of mimetic narration—metanarration in Nünning's sense (2001; 2005). Here, the problems, conditions, and forms of poetic speech—artistic creation—as a form of narrative presentation become themes of the text in their own right in the preface and in the second sequence of the poem. An important consequence of the metanarrative aspect of the text lies in the fact that mimetic narration itself—the representation of artistic crises and reflection on creativity as such—becomes the subject of the poem, a typical phenomenon of Romantic poetry. This metanarrative change of focus can be seen symptomatically in the unity, highly significant and often overlooked, underlying the complex construction of 'Kubla Khan: Or, a Vision in a Dream'. The desire for creative inspiration forms part of the perfect poem which, according to the narrative of the preface, the speaker dreamed in its entirety and was unable to write down completely because of the intrusion of the visitor from Porlock. In other words, the artistic crisis is presented as part of the genuine work of art.

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Bibliography Breuer, Rolf (1980). "Coleridge's Concept of Imagination - with a Consideration of 'Kubla Khan'", in: Roland Hagenbüchle and Jospeh T. Swann (eds), Poetic Knowledge: Circumference and Centre (Bonn), 42-50. Chayes, Irene H. (1966). '"Kubla Khan' and the Creative Process", in: Studies in Romanticism 6:1, 1-21. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1967[1912]). Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London), 295-98. England, A. B. (1973). "'Kubla Khan' Again: The Ocean, the Caverns, and the Ancestral Voices", in: Ariel 4:4, 63-72. Fulford, Tim (1999). "Mary Robinson and the Abyssinian Maid: Coleridge's Muses and Feminist Criticism", in: Romanticism On the Net 13. (seen 6/12/2004) Hewitt, Regina (1988). "The False Poets in 'Kubla Khan'", in: English Language Notes 26:2, 48-55. Hogsette, David S. (1997). "Eclipsed by the Pleasure Dome: Poetic Failure in Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'", in: Romanticism On the Net 5. (seen 6/12/2004) Hughes, Jula (1996). Eigenzeitlichkeit: Zur Poetik in der englischen Romantik. Blake, Schiller, Coleridge, Fr. Schlegel, v. Hardenberg (Erlangen-Nürnberg) (Dissertation). Mackenzie, Norman (1969). '"Kubla Khan': A Poem of Creative Agony and Loss", in: English Miscellany 20, 229-40. Nünning, Ansgar (2001). "Mimesis des Erzählens: Prolegomena zu einer Wirkungsästhetik, Typologie und Funktionsgeschichte des Akts des Erzählens und der Metanarration", in: Jörg Heibig (ed.), Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift fiir Wilhelm Füger (Heidelberg), 13-47. Nünning, Ansgar (2005). "On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology and an Outline of the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary", in: John Pier (ed.), The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology (Berlin et al.), 11-57. Patterson Jr., Charles I. (1974). "The Daemonic in 'Kubla Khan': Toward Interpretation", in: PMLA 89, 1033^42. Pearce, Donald (1981). '"Kubla Khan' in Context", in: Studies in English Literature, 7500-7900 21,565-83. Plato (1953). The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1, tr. B. Jowett (Oxford), 107-108 (534 a-b). Stevenson, Warren (1983). "The Symbolic City of Kubla Khan", in: Nimbus of Glory: A Study of Coleridge's Three Great Poems (Salzburg), 25-59. Wheeler, Κ. M. (1981). '"Kubla Khan' and the Art of Thingifying", in: The Creative Mind in Coleridge's Poetry (London), 17-41.

Peter Hühn

9 John Keats: "Ode on Melancholy"

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No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine: Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed 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. 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 moming 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, Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. SHE dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips. Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

John Keats, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London, 1970), 538-41. John Keats (1795-1821). The poem was written in 1819.

The title of Keats's 'Ode on Melancholy' specifies the frame of the text: the psychological phenomenon of melancholy or depression. Accordingly, the poem portrays specific kinds of melancholic psychological experiences and the effects they can have on a person. It also focuses themati-

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cally on various ways of quasi-therapeutically dealing with the onset of meancholy, which is generally considered to be painful and requiring treatment. These strategies for reacting to (or treating) melancholy are based on particular scripts (as will be shown in detail below). The distinctive way in which the story is produced stems from the complex presentation of the various components of the happenings that are connected with one another. We therefore begin by examining the communication situation in the poem. 1 Communication Situation Two figures and with them two narrative levels can be distinguished in the presentation of the happenings (the process of melancholy experience): the speaker (or narrator) and the addressee, who is the subject of the narrated sequence and thus has the role of protagonist in the series of narrated happenings. The speaker, then, presents a narrative that is explicitly addressed to its protagonist. The narrative act takes place prior to the story such that the speaker narrates prospectively and with an imperative force: he calls on the addressee to adopt the role of protagonist in the narrative presented in the poem and thereby make it a reality. The narrative is explicitly characterized as being about a particular figure, thus becoming the story ofthat figure. Neither the narrator nor the addressee is characterized as an individual, but the perspective in the voice of the speaker (specifically, the focalization of the depressed addressee from within) implies a psychological affinity between them (the mental experience of melancholy is individual, essentially inaccessible to the consciousness of others, so that the speaker can know how to describe its presence in his addressee only if he has also experienced it himself). This implicit affinity can be interpreted in two ways. First, we can assume that the speaker is transferring to the addressee his own melancholy disposition and the experiences it brings (in order to suggest how the addressee might behave if caught in a bout of depression). Or, second, we can read the apostrophe as part of a dialogue between the speaker and himself, in which case we interpret the addressee as an externalized part of his own consciousness projected outside himself. The structure of the text supports this latter possibility, above all by highlighting the speaker's close acquaintance with melancholy and by using an elaborate distancing technique. Read in this way, the poem should be seen as showing the speaker calling on himself to engage more intensively with

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his melancholic experiences. By projecting part of himself outside himself (in his covert self-apostrophe), he hopes to externalize his intense problematic experience and adopt a distanced attitude towards it. This distancing strategy is extended and intensified by the rhetorical and stylistic linguistic changes between the second and third stanzas. The pronouns are third-person ('him', 1. 27; 'his soul', 1. 29), instead of second-person ('thy sorrow', 1. 15), and concrete individual perceptions ('the melancholy fit', 1. 11; 'thy mistress', 1. 18) are succeeded by more abstract allegorical personifications marked by initial capitals ('Beauty', 1. 21; 'Joy', 1. 22; 'Melancholy', 1. 26). The speaker should therefore be recognized as the true protagonist of the story of psychological experience that he anticipates by narrating prospectively. The techniques of perspective and rhetoric that he uses to conceal his identity provide the strategy that makes it possible to implement this story in reality (mainly, by circumventing too strong selfawareness—as will be shown in detail below).

2 Two Contrasting Sequences: Desensitization and Stimulation In the text of the poem, the speaker contrasts two alternative sequences, both of which have a melancholy fit as their starting point. These narrative sequences are based on different scripts that offer contrasting ways of reacting to (or alternative therapeutic treatments for) the onset of depression. In both cases, they are narrated in the imperative mood and the future tense, but they have different aims. The script implied by the first stanza is one in which the onset of depression is soothed. This script, however, is evaluated negatively and thus rejected from the beginning. The form of treatment it suggests is introduced simply to serve as a contrast against which the positive counter-script of stimulation can be seen when the second and third stanzas develop it and propose that it be put into practice. The schema of soothing that underlies the negative development of the melancholy fit in the first stanza is designed to show how depression can be overcome rapidly if its painful intensity is reduced by desensitization and forgetfulness ('Lethe', 1. 1) induced by various homeopathic (or in fact, narcotic / pharmacological) means, or even by suicide as a last desperate measure (see 1. 10). The aim of this script is to relieve the intense agony of the soul ('drown the wakeful anguish of the soul', 1. 10) by means that can be likened to the loss of consciousness (sleep) and of life (death). Unlike the positive implications of 'your sorrow's mysteries' (1. 8), the negative connotations of these responses to

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depression and the imperative advising against them ('No, no, go not', 1.1) establish a negative view of this script and the series of happenings it could potentially produce and is thus rejected decisively. Characteristic of the behaviour described as a demonstration of the script is the fact that it is directed, not by a concrete positive aim, but only by the desire to avoid what is painful and unpleasant. The negative imperatives narrate a virtual story about escaping from and ending a fit of melancholy in particular and individual consciousness and existence in general. The second and third stanzas counter this rejected series of happenings and its underlying script with a positive sequence whose cumulative enumeration of measures of intensification (rather than desensitization) ('or ... or ...') is based on the script of stimulation.1 In this case, the course of depression is directed, not by the desire to reduce it, but rather by the wish to intensify it and revel in unconstrained exploration of the experience (cf. Smith 1966). This tendency is highlighted throughout by means of an isotopy, more specifically by means of the dominant position given to the semantic features pleasurable and enjoyable in numerous phrases and collocations. This is most prominent in eating-related metaphors ('glut', 1. 15; 'feed', 1. 20) as well as in the paradoxical yet potent association of pain and suffering ('droop-headed', 1. 13; 'shroud', 1. 14; 'sorrow', 1. 15) with wealth ('wealth', 1. 17; 'rich', 1. 18). This expresses a desire to exploit the cutting sensitivity of depression in order to take perception and feeling, including pain, and thus the power of the senses in general, to new extremes. This objective is pursued further in the final stanza, where the close connection between beauty and transitoriness is savoured in a multitude of allegorical images: 'Beauty that must die' (1. 21); 'Joy [...] bidding adieu' (11. 22-23); 'aching pleasure' (1. 23); 'Poison [...] bee-mouth' (1. 24); 'Delight [...] Melancholy' (11. 25-26); 'Joy's grape [...] sadness' (11. 28-29). The isotopy of the second stanza (with emphasis on the aspect of enjoyment) is present here, but the pleasurable enjoyment of passing beauty is increasingly combined with a note of pain. Pleasure here is concerned less with the positive or negative tone of the feelings involved than it is with the level of their sensual intensity, which the combination of opposites is intended to increase (Sperry 1973:282-86). In this sense, the 1

Vendler (1983:158-61) stresses how the two stanzas are analogous in tending towards extremes. She plays down the clear differences of evaluative focal ization behind the contrast between recommendation and dissuasion in order to highlight the difference of the third stanza. She ignores explicit textual signals in order to reconstruct a different— essentially hidden—story of movement towards truth and the absolute.

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alternative treatment of melancholy is intended expressly to intensify 'the wakeful anguish of the soul' (1. 10) (rather than reducing it, as does the negative sequence of the first stanza) and to enable the soul to taste the sadness of melancholy ('taste the sadness of her might', 1. 29)—to let go and embrace this life, one in which pain is never far from pleasure, with all the senses. The result is higher insight ('seen', 1. 27) into what it means to be melancholy. As they progress from beginning to end, the two sequences contrast in other ways, the difference and superiority of the second sequence being stressed in each case. It activates a further (intertextual) script, the goalorientated structure of a mythical quest (Waldoff 1980:150-51; Vendler 1983:162-63). The protagonist describes managing to surrender himself to the experience of melancholy as gaining access to a sacred region inhabited by a numinous power, the female figure of 'Veil'd Melancholy' in 'her sovran shrine' (1. 26) (Alwes 1993:137—43). The two sequences differ in the status of the female figures that appear at each stage in them. The allegorical figure of Melancholy at the end of the poem has the status of an independent force, but the female characters in the first story (Proserpine and Psyche) and at the beginning of the second ('thy mistress', 1. 18) are there simply to satisfy the needs of the action, not as active characters in their own right. The two sequences also contrast in the degree to which the protagonist is an active participant in what happens. Both begin with a fit of melancholy occurring as an unforeseen happening imposed from outside, implicitly in the first sequence and explicitly in the second ('the melancholy fit shall fall / Sudden from heaven', 11. 11-12). The first sequence reduces the role of the protagonist as an active participant by presenting his reaction as a primarily submissive one ('suffer', 1. 3; 'let', 1. 6) before the fit ends of its own accord ('shade to shade will come [...] And drown', 11. 9-10). In the second sequence, on the other hand, the eagerness with which the protagonist is urged to accept the onset of the fit and intensify its experience creates a higher level of dynamic participation ('glut', 1. 15; 'imprison', 1. 19; 'feed', 1. 20; 'Whose strenuous tongue / Can burst', 11. 27-28). Just as its beginning, the end of the second sequence is marked by an external occurrence. The protagonist's efforts to accept his depression lead to the power of Melancholy accepting him as her willing victim and trophy, to be transformed, raised up, and protected in honour and tribute to her. The course of events thus acquires a religious dimension: a superhuman power is witnessed and honoured, and she raises the status of the person honouring her. Finally, the opposition between the

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two sequences is underlined by spatial images. The movement of the second sequence, initially downwards ('fall', 1. 11) and then upwards again at the end ('be [...] hung', 1. 30), inverts that of the first, where implications of falling are attached to the desire to drown sorrow. 3 Eventfulness The differences between the two sequences and potential stories described above mean that the second sequence has a considerably higher level of eventfulness (in the sense of deviating from expectations, breaking with the structure of the apparent script). Its eventfulness is higher because of the way in which the protagonist reacts to the onset of depression and because of the outcome of his experience. The desensitization script of the first sequence has the objective of reducing suffering. The expectation that pain will be reduced as a result of the behaviour suggested is disrupted in so far as the ultimate outcome is the elimination of pain altogether in a last desperate measure: suicide.2 In the second sequence, however, the decisive change, the transformation of the protagonist into a trophy, is completely unexpected, has no basis in what comes before it, and is not even something that the protagonist himself intends. Furthermore, it defies immediate comprehension and categorization so that the end of the second sequence is far more eventful than that of the first. Despite the contrast in how the two sequences handle experience of melancholy, there is one respect in which they can be seen as analogous and as having similar outcomes. Influencing the speaker's consciousness is a central aim of both sequences, and both end with consciousness being overcome. However, even here there is a difference: the negative version ends relatively simply, directly seeking the total elimination of consciousness in death, whereas the positive alternative sees the speaker experiencing unconsciousness as an unexpected and unintended result of his attempt to intensify his melancholy experiences and his committed affirmation of the contradiction on which they depend (Dickstein 1971:228-31). Paradoxically, transitoriness is overcome ('trophies', 1. 30) by being observed and perceived consciously as a painful experience ('seen', 1. 27; 'taste',

2

If we assume that the main script behind the first sequence is the intertextual script according to which melancholy tends to lead to suicide, as described by Robert Burton in his 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy (1.4. i) (Allott 1970:539), then there is no break with expectations and no eventfulness at all.

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1. 29). By incongruously linking success and failure, victory and defeat in this way (O'Neill 1997:207-9), the end of the second sequence defines itself in terms of its internal difference (in contrast to the unity and homogeneity that the first sequence aims to achieve).3 Seen in this way, the story's dynamic motif consists of a response to the subjection of human existence to the forces of time. The pain of experiencing transitoriness and recognizing that is combined with the speaker's paradoxical escape from its effects when he is transformed into a 'cloudy trophy'. In this state, the ineffable and all-embracing quality of melancholy is transformed, given concrete form in a lasting symbol of memory, and thereby both dissolved and preserved, as expressed by the collocation of 'cloudy' (also found in line 12) and 'trophies' in line 30. This final image transforms the transitory into something permanent, keeping it paradoxically present at the same time.4

3 4

Cf. the detailed survey of the differences in Empson (1961:214—17). Vendler (1983:160, 164—66) sees the melancholy of love whose object has been lost as the dynamic element of the poem. She treats the story as a search for the lost beloved in a series of substitutes (from Proserpine and Psyche to the human mistress of line 18 and finally Melancholy). The construction of such a sequence lacks a sound textual basis for two reasons. First, treating the loss of the beloved as the cause of melancholy is pure hypostatization (Vendler uses the deleted first stanza of the ode to establish a link with the conventions of Petrarchan love). Second, such a view does not reflect the fact that the female figures (whose appearance in each stanza is indeed striking) differ widely in status. Proserpine stands metonymically for the kingdom of the dead (which is also introduced in a further metonymic expression, 'ruby grape'), while the real mistress is merely one of several equally important examples of the link between beauty and transitoriness; Melancholy, in contrast, is an allegorical representation of the psychological phenomenon treated in the poem, whose explicit theme is to consider how it can be dealt with in real life. Instead of ignoring the textual status of these named figures, we must take it into account when investigating the internal structure of the sequence (in the sense of the distinction between the context and direction of the action). In any case, Vendler subsequently (1983:170f.) abandons the complex of love in favour of the themes of experience in the poem: the lonely heroic confrontation with the fragile world of the senses; a potential source of sorrow and death (178ff.); and the quasireligious all-embracing (186f.) search for truth; 'the true essence of the experience' (183).

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4 Transformation into a Work of Art as a Mediation Event The poem's ending, which we have just considered, is also where the meaning of its narrative is to be found. The story that the addressee is asked to enact, or, more precisely, that the speaker calls on himself to enact as its protagonist, represents a creative act of narrative self-definition (Lockridge 1990; cf. Eakin 1999). This act can be linked to the text of the poem and to the speaker's identification of himself as a poet by creating it. This reference back to the text itself, supported by the positive value implied by 'trophy', and the reference to another, intertextual (genre-specific) script reveal a new aspect of meaning in the O d e on Melancholy': the motif of the poet's (self-) immortalization in a literary work of art, as found, for example, in Horace, Ovid, Shakespeare, Shelley, Coleridge, and Yeats,5 and in other poems by Keats himself ('Ode to a Nightingale' and, in modified form, in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'). Following this motif, the speaker defines himself and his basic attitude to life by means of the story that he narrates in the form of the poem. The initially unrealized story of himself that he projects onto another person, the addressee, while really hoping to become its protagonist himself, has become a reality in the completion of 'Ode on Melancholy' as a poem.6 Signs that the speaker finds fulfilment in the work of art in this way can be seen in several analogous shifts on a number of levels in the transition from the second to the third stanza. The chronological progression implied by the initial instructions ('when [...] / Then glut', 11. 11-15; my emphasis) gives way to the final statement of an established state ('She dwells1. 21; my emphasis). Also, the second-person pronouns are replaced by third-person pronouns accompanied by a change from individual, personal reference (e.g. 'thy sorrow', 1. 15; my emphasis) to general and collective descriptions. A marked effect of self-distancing and objectification is produced (note the personifications in 'seen of none save him\ 1. 27, and the plural in 'among her cloudy trophies', 1. 30; my emphasis). In this context, the title of the poem should also be treated as stemming 5

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Ovid's Metamorphoses (epilogue); Horace's Carmina (III.30); Shakespeare's immortalization sonnets, for example Sonnets 18 and 107 (see the interpretation of the latter, pp. 23-33); Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind'; Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' (see pp. 9 5 110); and Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium'. Vendler (1983:168f., 185) notes the presence of the theme of literature in the image of the trophy, but she remains inside the poem, without going on to link the theme with the text of the ode itself.

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from the speaker, who summarizes the content of the poem and captures it in a generalization after completing it. The eventfulness of the narrated story is to be found in the speaker's imagined self-transformation into a poem that is raised above the ravages of time, but nonetheless relates and preserves the intensity with which the transitory is experienced. This eventfulness has the status of a boundary crossing in Lotman's sense, which is reflected linguistically and formally by a semantic ellipsis (the shift in the referent of 'she' in line 21 from the mistress to the character of Melancholy) and the changes in (grammatical) mood and posture between the second and third stanzas described above. The main source of eventfulness here is not the motif of poetic self-immortalization per se (it is to some degree conventional), but the surprising way in which it is connected associatively with the script of suffering that is itself eventfully disrupted beforehand. In so far as the speaker's changed state following the boundary crossing can, as presented in the poem, be directly associated with the poem itself and its status as a work of art, the Ode on Melancholy' contains an example of a mediation event. 5 The Position of the Speaker The attitude expressed by the speaker is extensively supported by the rhetorical and linguistic composition of the poem in which and through which he speaks. This indicates a high level of self-consciousness on his part and means that the linguistic and rhetorical techniques he uses are related to the poem's concern with the problems of consciousness as its frame of reference. An example of how the speaker lends credence to his words by means of compositional techniques can be found in the underlying vitality that runs through the whole poem, for example in the first stanza's emphatic rejection of desensitization and oblivion as responses to melancholy ('No, no, go not', 1.1) and in the equally emphatic alternative call of the second and third stanzas in favour of intensifying experience. Similarly, the speaker's choice of words and images supports his decision against the pursuit of inner unity in the first story and his decision to accept inner tensions in the second story. The language of the first stanza highlights the (rejected) desire for unity, congruence, and similarity (as in 'go [...] to Lethe', 1. 1; 'kissed', 1. 3; 'partner', 1. 8; 'shade to shade', 1. 9). The second and third stanzas, on the other hand, employ collocations based predominantly on contrast and discrepancy (such as 'glut [...] sorrow', 1. 15; 'rich anger', 1. 18; 'Imprison [...] soft hand [...] rave' 1. 19;

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'aching Pleasure', 1. 23). Such use of language to support evaluative judgements suggests that the speaker is reliable. As a result, several levels of mediation that are usually kept separate in novels fall together in Keats's 'Ode on Melancholy'. Not only are the protagonist and addressee identical with one another, they are also identical with the speaker, or narrator, whose consciousness is the main factor controlling the textual composition of the poem. The poem gives the impression (primarily by means of the use of distancing pronouns) that it preserves the distinction between these levels, but it is now clear that this is ultimately part of an attempt to conceal the fact that the speaker is addressing himself and prompting himself to adopt the role of protagonist in the story—to make a certain way of life a reality and define himself by living it. This attempt at self-stimulation would fall flat if the speaker were too self-conscious and directly aware of himself when making it. So far the story that he tries to make himself follow is nothing more than an ideal, an object of desire. Yet, paradoxically, as it advances in the poem, the prospective narrative creates the illusion that this same story is being enacted in the imagination as it is spoken. The last stage of analysis consists of examining the textual level (the composition of what the speaker says) in order to discover the extent to which it contains signs of a critical view of the speaker's position, attitude, and blind spots, thereby revealing, behind his back, so to speak, the fact that his is a particular subjective position. Whether these signs in the linguistic and textual structure of the poem are felt to originate in the consciousness of the speaker, the speaking subject, or transcend it and stem instead from the abstract author, the composing entity, is inevitably a question of attribution and interpretation. It has been shown above that the textual composition of what the speaker says substantially supports his narrative project, lends credence to him, and thus reflects his own mental state. In addition, however, the text also contains elements that contradict the conscious perspective of the speaker and is therefore attributable to the abstract author, who can be understood as the source of a corrective perspective behind the speaker's back, and whose presence, in this case, is particularly well concealed or suppressed (which is perhaps a sign of how much the author identified himself with the position of the speaker). Above all, the final line is formulated in such a way that it can be taken as an ironically critical commentary on the speaker's project of poetic selfdefinition. The transformation of the speaker into one of several 'cloudy trophies' arrayed in the temple of Melancholy can also be read as an

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ironic anticlimax of the heroic quest for the goddess. Understood in this way, the allegorical transformation does not mark a victorious triumph over time, but signals the reification and death of a living being in literature and a literary work of art, even though the implication of lifeless reification is relativized by the adjective 'cloudy' and its associations with natural processes.7 The story projected by the speaker is relativized by the way in which the poem is composed so that the quality of the event and the evaluation attached to it are problematized, although its eventfulness as such is not called into question. In fact, analogously to the growing deviation described above, eventfulness is increased still further. 6 Lyric-Specific Elements of Narration The narrativity of O d e on Melancholy' is characterized by two features that can be identified as narrative phenomena typical of poetry. The first concerns the status and specificity of the protagonist and the narrated story, which are both affected by a pronounced ambivalence between individual and general relevance: the text suggests the presence of references to the speaker and his particular existential problems, but it also makes a point of playing down its individual implications and the speaker's self-referentiality in favour of making statements of general relevance. This is undoubtedly related to the conventional generic tendency of lyric poetry to concentrate on internal perspective and mental processes, which allows a more direct relationship with a wide range of recipients than is possible in novels and short stories, whose relevance is initially 7

Haverkamp (1996:109-15) suggests two psychoanalytically orientated interpretations of the end of the poem. They are based on Walter Benjamin's association of reading with melancholy (the transformation of what is read into objects and dead texture) and exploit intertextual links (to, among other works, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Shakespeare's Sonnet 31) (Haverkamp 1996:104f.). The split in the lyric voice (selfapostrophe in the third person) establishes ironic distance from the act of selftransformation into a poem (the trophy), and the first, thematic interpretation sees this as a technique with which the subject protects itself. According to the second, structural, interpretation, Keats, primarily in response to Shakespeare's Sonnet 31, exposes this strategy as an unsuccessful attempt by the subject to rescue itself, destroying it so that nothing is left except the repetitive compulsion of writing (in the subsequent poems). The second of these interpretations (described here in considerably abbreviated form) in particular is dangerously dependent on the (historical) plausibility of the frames referred to, on the post-structuralist linkage of certain hypotheses concerning writing and melancholy.

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restricted by the attachment of their scenes, settings, individuated characters, and so on to a specific social context. The second lyric-specific element of narration involves the position of the narrative act and the function of narration. As is frequently the case in poems, the narrator does not narrate the story retrospectively after it has ended, but rather from within the unfolding process at a point before the decisive event occurs. In Keats's Ode on Melancholy', this point is prior even to the real beginning of the sequence. It follows that narration can be fimctionalized as a means of opening and guiding the story—the narration of the story serves to make it possible and to allow it to reach its desired end. Narration and the propulsion of development merge extensively. In Keats, this is so to a particularly high degree, for the beginning is presented in imperative and prospective form and the end, although something imagined, is nonetheless narrated in an anticipatory and conditional manner. Here we see how closely these two elements of lyric narration are connected: the story is relevant to the speaker's consciousness and he consequently tells it self-reflexively, which means that, as suggested above, he must employ self-distancing strategies in order not to be constrained by self-consciousness.

Bibliography Alwes, Karla (1993). Imagination Transformed: The Evolution of the Female Character in Keats's Poetry (Carbondale and Edwardsville). Eakin, Paul John (1999). How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY). Empson, William (1961 ['1930]). Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth). Haverkamp, Anselm (1996). "Mourning Becomes Melancholia: The Leaves of Books", in: Leaves of Mourning: Hölderlin's Late Work - With an Essay on Keats and Melancholy, tr. V. Chadwick (Albany), 101-115. Keats, John (1970). The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London), 538541. Lockridge, Laurence S. (1990). "Keats: The Ethics of Imagination", in: Robert Barth and John L. Maloney (eds), Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam's Dream: Essays in Honor of Walter Jackson Bate (Columbia), 143-73. Minahan, John A. (1992). Word Like a Bell: John, Keats, Music, and the Romantic Poet (Kennt, OH). O'Neill, Michael (1997). Romanticism and the Self Conscious Poem (Oxford).

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Smith, Barbara Herrnstein (1966). "'Sorrow's Mysteries': Keats's Ode on Melancholy'", in: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 6:4, 670-91. Sperry, Stuart M. (1973). Keats the Poet (Princeton). Vendler, Helen (1983). The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA). Waldoff, Leon (1980). Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination (Urbana). Watts, Cedric (1985). A Preface to John Keats (Harlow).

Peter Hühn

10 Robert Browning: "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church"

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Rome, 15VANITY, saith the preacher, vanity! Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back? Nephews - sons mine ... ah God, I know not! Well She, men would have to be your mother once, Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was! What's done is done, and she is dead beside, Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since, And as she died so must we die ourselves, And thence ye may perceive the world's a dream. Life, how and what is it? As here I lie In this state-chamber, dying by degrees, Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask 'Do I live, am I dead?' Peace, peace seems all. Saint Praxed's ever was the church for peace; And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know: - Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care; Shrewd was that snatch from out the comer South He graced his carrion with, God curse the same! Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence One sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side, And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats, And up into the airy dome where live The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk: And I shall fill my slab of basalt there, And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, With those nine columns round me, two and two, The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands: Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe As fresh poured red wine of a mighty pulse. - Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, Put me where I may look at him! True peach, Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize! Draw close: that conflagration of my church - What then? So much was saved if aught were missed! My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,

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Drop water gently till the surface sink, And if ye find ... Ah God, I know not, I! ... Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, And corded up in a tight olive-frail, Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli, Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape, Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast... Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all, That brave Frascati villa with its bath, So, let the blue lump poise between my knees, Like God the Father's globe on both his hands Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay, For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years: Man goeth to the grave, and where is he? Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black 'Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath? The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me, Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so, The Saviour at his sermon on the mount, Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off, And Moses with the tables ... but 1 know Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee, Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope To revel down my villas while I gasp Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at! Nay, boys, ye love me - all of jasper, then! 'Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve My bath must needs be left behind, alas! One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut, There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts, And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs? - That's if ye carve my epitaph aright, Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word, No gaudy ware like Gandolf s second line Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need! And then how I shall lie through centuries, And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, And see God made and eaten all day long, And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste

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Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! 85 For as I lie here, hours of the dead night, Dying in state and by such slow degrees, I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point, And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop 90 Into great laps and folds of sculptor's-work: And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts Grow, with a certain humming in my ears, About the life before I lived this life, And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests, 95 Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount, Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes, And new-found agate ums as fresh as day, And marble's language, Latin pure, discreet, - Aha, ELUSCEBAT quoth our friend? 100 No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best! Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage. All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart? Ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick, 105 They glitter like your mother's for my soul, Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze, Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase With grapes, and add a visor and a Term, And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx 110 That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, To comfort me on my entablature Whereon I am to lie till I must ask 'Do I live, am I dead?' There, leave me, there! For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude 115 To death - ye wish it - God, ye wish it! Stone Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat As if the corpse they keep were oozing through And no more lapis to delight the world! Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there, 120 But in a row: and, going, tum your backs - Ay, like departing altar-ministrants, And leave me in my church, the church for peace, That I may watch at leisure if he leers Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone, 125 As still he envied me, so fair she was! Robert Browning, The Poems, vol. 1, ed. John Pettigrew (Harmondsworth, 1981), 413-16. Robert Browning (1812-1889). The poem was written in 1844 and published in 1845.

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1 The Form of the Dramatic Monologue and the Communication Situation of the Poem 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church' is a dramatic monologue, a poetic form used by Browning with particular frequency. He created this subgenre of English lyric poetry simultaneously with Alfred Tennyson. The speaker, who is clearly distinguished from the author, appears in a quasi-dramatic situation, often one of crisis, in which he confronts one or more other individuals who are also present. His words, which are addressed to them, are an attempt to come to terms with his problematic situation by linguistic means. Unlike the soliloquy, an expression of silent thoughts by a character alone on stage in a drama, a monologue consists of the individual speech of one among several participants in a communication situation. Thus, the text of a dramatic monologue reproduces the speech of the speaker, but not the answers, commentaries, questions, and so on of the other participants in the communication situation. The dramatization of speech is designed to draw attention to the speaker's representation of himself and his attempts to come to terms with the situation and crisis by purely linguistic means. These attempts often take the form of miniature narrative sequences. The dramatic monologue, then, establishes a second-order perspective on the speaker's situation and point of view, and typically makes considerable use of the difference between the speaking subject and the composing entity. The brief indication of time and place following the title, 'Rome, 15-', establishes the context in which the words of the Bishop, the speaker of this monologue, are spoken. Like his rival Gandolf, he is a Active but historically plausible character from the Italian Renaissance, a time when, particularly in Rome, the Catholic clergy was expressing its secular splendour with unparalleled vigour. Sancta Praxedis (Santa Prassede in Italian), the Roman church mentioned in the title and the poem itself, was built in 822 and consecrated to the eponymous saint and martyr of the second century. The historical status of the characters and happenings creates a clear distinction between the author and the speaker (unlike Erlebnisgedichte, which tend to create the illusion that the two are close to one another). Turning to the communication situation and overarching narrative structure of the poem, we find that we are dealing with a death-bed scene in which a dying man attempts to exercise control over the future after his death. The dying bishop is lying in his residence ('in this state-chamber', 1. 11) and has gathered around him his illegitimate sons, whose true status

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he normally conceals by calling them his nephews. He has called them to him in order to make them erect, exactly in the manner he describes, a splendid memorial to him in Saint Praxed's Church after his death. He presses his plans on his sons, among them Anselm, who stands out because he is named and is clearly his favourite. Their behaviour—in the form, it can be gathered, of facial expressions, body language, and verbal replies—is very reserved, if not to say hostile. Faced with this response, the Bishop offers promised benefits in return for the enactment of his plans. In this, it appears, he is unsuccessful, so he proceeds to scale down his demands progressively and make them more appropriate to the situation. The Bishop's position is indeed an extremely unappealing one. As he is on his death-bed, he inevitably has no real means of exerting control over the shape of the future, in which he will no longer be physically present. Furthermore, he no longer seems to have complete control over his own thoughts and words (cf. Phipps 1976:150ff.). This is indicated by the biblical quotations which he scatters throughout his speech in a mechanical, automatic manner (as we shall see in detail below) and by his misperception of the facts in at least two places: in his reference to 'Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount' (1. 95), he places St Praxedis in the context of the Sermon on the Mount or even confuses her with Christ, and at the end of the poem he thinks he is in the church (1. 122), when it is clear that he is really lying in his residence (1. 11). 2 Contrasting Ways of Life: Spiritual and Secular Scripts The Bishop employs narration as his primary way of characterizing his present and future situations and stabilizing his threatened self. His narratives extend in three temporal directions. They refer to the present (his performative presentation of the simultaneous processes of communication and of reflection when meeting his sons), to the past (his rivalry with Gandolf and affair with the woman), and above all to the future (his attempt to design his own memorial in advance and thus control the continuation of his existence into the future in the form of a monument). With one exception, the telling of these narratives proves to be unsuccessful with respect to what they were intended to do—he makes little, if any, progress towards achieving the stability he desires and overcoming the resistance he faces. The frame of the poem is the situation of death in which an individual awaits the end of his existence. This is combined with the themes of look-

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ing back on one's life and the attitude one adopts towards a fundamental existential crisis in the present. The general situation of death acquires a more specific meaning here because, as a bishop, the protagonist is a leading representative of the Christian faith. Its central teaching is that death is redemption, a positive transition from an imperfect existence marked by suffering and transitoriness to a permanent state of perfect happiness. Christianity suggests the presence of a script specifying the following schema for future developments: turning away from transitory life and vain worldly goals in order to make the boundary crossing of entering a transcendent realm characterized by essence and eternity, by nearness to God and by redemption of the soul. And indeed, the Bishop returns to this script with his quotations from the Bible at several points (e.g. 1. 1: Ecclesiastes 1, 2; 1. 33: Philippians 3, 14; 1. 51: Job 7, 6; 1. 52: Job 21, 13; 1. 101: Genesis 49, 9). In these terms, he describes life in the world (including his own life until now) as vain (1. 1), illusory (1. 9), transitory (11. 51, 101), or anticipates the inevitability of death (1. 8) and the preordained movement towards a transcendent end ('pilgrimage', 1. 101). However, the references to the Christian script are discredited in two ways. First, they are cited as a matter of routine, like cliches, and clearly without conviction. Second, they are used only to establish the vanity of life in this world, without any consideration of our future existence in the next world, the heart of the Christian message, and so display a glaring lack of faith in the coming of transcendence.1 The Bishop chooses a different script as the basis for his narrative of the future. It is the script of preserving and prolonging worldly existence in art and as a work of art—the aestheticization of individuality in the magnificence of a grander form, here in the Church, and more precisely in the interior of a church. The choice of a script other than the Christian one is in and of itself sufficient to merit classification as eventful, the more so because the choice is made by someone whose position should oblige him to use the Christian script, someone, in fact, who should see spreading that script as his proper and foremost duty. Instead, he structures his narrative 1

Cf. in general Phipps (1976), who provides a highly detailed description of the discrepancy between spiritual office and secular concerns, which he sees as an internal contradiction in the figure of the Bishop throughout the poem, backing up his argument by referring to the concept of the grotesque. He interprets the Bishop as a critical representation of the degeneration of Christian religiosity. Cf. Greenberg (1969) on the relationship between this degeneration and the theological controversies of Browning's England.

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sequence with the script of preserving and prolonging worldly existence. The product is the Bishop's prospective narrative about how he will live on in Saint Praxed's Church after his death. The elements of this sequence appear in two (successive) phases. The first phase prepares the way for and temporally precedes the second. It contains the Bishop's imagined picture of how his memorial ('this tomb of mine', 1. 15) will be splendidly decorated with precious material and exquisite art. The second phase is temporally indeterminate. It covers the Bishop's impression of how he will perceive what happens in the church when dead. A second script is also present, the Bishop's rivalry with Gandolf, which takes the form of a continuing dispute over superiority, a struggle for victory or defeat in the competition between them. Like the script of preserving and prolonging worldly existence, this script of rivalry and competition is completely secular and un-Christian (it violates the Christian commandments that we should be humble and love our neighbours). Both scripts also share the fact that they involve individual identity. Both are distinctively concerned with preserving and stabilizing the self, enabling it to identify itself as that of a powerful, exceptional individual. Finally, using different but in fact only slightly changed means, both scripts treat existence after death as a direct continuation of the life in this world that precedes it. In all these respects (individuality, worldliness, aestheticization, and culturedness), the story in this dramatic monologue is characterized as a historically specific one, as an expression of cultural concepts of the Renaissance, as a picture of the idealized life of a typical person in the Renaissance. 3 The Shape of the Narrative Sequence The dynamic structure of the narrative sequence about the Bishop's rivalry with Old Gandolf is introduced as a theme at the beginning of the text in the context of a reference to the beauty of the woman the Bishop once loved, the mother of his sons. The Bishop was proud of winning her, not because of his love for her, but above all because by doing so he was able to outdo Gandolf and make him jealous (1. 5). This, so he thinks, was a lasting triumph, and he closes his monologue by mentioning it again (1. 125). Even his choice of location for his memorial in the church is described in the context of the competition between them: Gandolf once beat the speaker by obtaining a better place for himself in the church by means of cunning (11. 17-19). The speaker seeks revenge by trying to outdo him

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with his future memorial by having it built with valuable material (1. 31), having an extra, rare and precious stone added to his sculpture (1. 47), and having his inscription written in better (i.e. classical) Latin (11. 78, 99). With respect to the preservation of his self and the continuation of his existence and identity in and by means of art, the Bishop's prospective narrative of his plans concentrates (apart from the position, which has already been decided) on the material and visual embellishments to be used for and in his memorial. He imagines a magnificent construction made of basalt and marble the colour of peach-blossom and surrounded by columns (11. 25-30, 53-62). However, the unfavourable attitude of his sons forces him to downsize, first to jasper and then to ordinary gritstone (11. 68-69, 115-118). The secular orientation of the future existence that the Bishop imagines for himself is even more apparent in the visual embellishment of the memorial. He compares himself to God when relating the decorative effect of the lapis lazuli (11. 48-49), while, in the narrative sequences outlined above, he combines biblical motifs with pagan figures such as Pan, nymphs, and Bacchus (11. 57-62, 107-110). He does so without regard for the contempt of the flesh in Christian morality by juxtaposing St Praxedis with a nymph about to be stripped of her clothing by Pan (11. 60-61), for example. Aesthetic form, not religious doctrine, is what matters. In his plan for the future continuation of his existence, the Bishop even hopes to display his artistic taste and refinement in the authentic Ciceronian style of the Latin inscription, which contrasts with the postclassical form of Gandolf s epitaph (11. 76-79, 99). The Bishop's portrayal of his future existence reflects the same tendency towards embracing sensuality and this world that marks the imagined continuation of his life in and as a memorial. He describes the view of the pulpit, choir, and dome from the place he has chosen for his memorial (11. 21-24), and he depicts his continued acoustic, visual, and olfactory perception of masses, the Eucharist, candles, und incense through the centuries (11. 80-84), again with a distinct emphasis on aesthetic qualities at the expense of spiritual content (e.g. in the purely physical representation of the Eucharist: 'see God made and eaten all day long', 1. 82). The Bishop imagines the transition to life after death as a gradual change in form from that of a body lying on its death-bed to that of a sculpture on a sarcophagus (11. 85-96). He thinks the process is already underway, that he is already in the church, even though he is clearly in his residence at present ('in my state-chamber', 1. 11). The closing scene, too, is an imagined anticipation of his later existence in the church ('leave me in my

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church', 1. 122). He releases his sons 'like departing altar-ministrants' (11. 120-22) and mentally pictures Gandolf looking at him jealously again because of the woman he won (11. 123-25). Here, at the end of the Bishop's speech, it is particularly clear what has characterized his narrative of the future from the beginning. His fundamental view of his existence after death is that it will be a continuation of his past and present life. Even though he makes explicit reference to the earlier death of Gandolf and of the mother of his sons as well as to his own approaching death, he believes that the worldly status that matters to him will survive unchanged in the future: his splendour will still be displayed, art and cultivation will still dignify him, and his position will still be upheld against that of his rivals. 4 Eventfulness The Bishop's narrative of the future in which he pictures his life after death is motivated solely by concern for this world, sensuality, enjoyment of life, aestheticization, and self-assertion. As outlined above, the simple fact that this narrative is associated with a high-ranking Church official is enough to allow it to be treated as eventful. This eventfulness underlies the entire narrative rather than lying in a single unforeseen change at a certain point. It is, however, modified and made more complex by an additional narrative factor: the communication process that unfolds as the Bishop speaks. This communication process is presented performatively with an unusual amount of detail and comprehensiveness, dramatically presented as it takes place, and 'narrated' as a scenic progression. During it, the Bishop's prospectively formulated narrative of the future, constructed by nothing more than his mind and imagination, is confronted with empirical reality. If the future realization of his narrative is to seem likely—and in this way become a plausible reality in the mind of the Bishop—his sons should at least indicate that they assent to his instructions and are committed to following them. It is clear, however, that they do not. This unpromising response means that Gandolf, who has already beaten the Bishop to the best burial site in the church (11. 17-19), retains the upper hand in the struggle between them, even allowing him to mock the Bishop triumphantly (1. 67). So, even at the time of the Bishop's speech, there are signs that his expectations for the future will not be met, and this calls into serious question the concept of self-identity that the

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Bishop is trying to secure with his prospective narrative. It would also make his approaching death a rather more serious disruption, but the Bishop does not consider this possibility (or rather, he does not dare to consider it), for only partially does he admit the defeat that becomes apparent in his conversation with his sons. He recognizes their unwillingness to follow his instructions (11. 62-67, esp. Ί know / Ye mark me not!'; 11. 69-70; 11. 103-105; 11. 113-15, esp. 'ye have stabbed me with ingratitude'; 11. 119-20), but, to no avail, attempts to make them change their position by means of emotional coercion ('lest I grieve', 1. 69), promising to intercede for them with St Praxedis ('have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray / Horses for ye [...]', 11. 73-75), threatening them ('Else I give the Pope / My villas', 11. 102-103), and appealing to their moral dignity ('Well, go! I bless ye', 1. 119). The Bishop is thus to be treated as unreliable, not for moral reasons (such as lying to others), but because his personal involvement is central to his narrative, also because of the periodical decline in his sense of reality, apparently caused by the approach of death.2 The extent to which his concept of life and of himself is, as before, oriented around this world rather than the next would seem to explain why he conceives of his future existence in aesthetic terms (in the form of an artistically crafted memorial) and masks with an illusion the actual (biological) implications of the situation facing him. The structure of the dramatic monologue leads to the strong individuation and subjectivization of the speaker, who is clearly dissociated from the author, and produces a conspicuous difference between the speaking subject and the composing entity. This typically enables readers to consider the speaker from a distance, see more than he or she can, and above all identify his or her blind spots. The cognitive distance from which readers consider the speaker is reinforced here by the distancing effect of the title ('The Bishop Order His Tomb [...]', followed by the specification of the year in which the poem is set). The external perspective allows us to see just how much the speaker overestimates his ability to influence his sons, how much he clings to illusions, particularly in his ideas about the continuation of his individual life after death, and how obsessively he is fixated on his rivalry with Gandolf (and perhaps also how abstruse, childish, or senile the meandering speech of the Bishop must seem to his listeners). This discrepancy, set up by the author, is un2

The personal involvement of the narrator in his or her narrative is always a primary source of unreliability. Cf. Rimmon-Kenan (2002:101 f.).

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derlined by incongruities of which the Bishop himself is unaware, as noted above (his confusion of St Praxedis with Christ in lines 93 ff. and his inability to remember that he is in his residence rather than in the church in lines 122ff.). In this respect, eventfiilness is to be found in the Bishop's failure (of which he is not entirely aware) in his attempts to stabilize his identity by means of prospective narration at the moment of his death: there is an implicit break with the schema of expectations regarding self-preservation in art established by the text. In more precise terms, the Bishop responds to the imminent destruction of his existence and identity in this world by producing a narrative of the future naively based on this world. However, it fails, and, in his present state of physical and psychological infirmity, he attempts to control the future behaviour of people after his death, even though he has no chance of success. Significantly, then, eventfiilness in this poem is arranged on two levels. First, by focusing solely on this world, the Bishop breaks with the expectations of the clerical norm, which constitutes a mediation event, but only slightly, for secularity was widespread among the clergy during the Renaissance. This new worldly attitude provides the context for the second event—it creates the hope of total fulfilment of life in this world, the disappointment of which is eventful (it is an unachieved event in the happenings). The failure of the Bishop's attempts to preserve his identity after his death can be read as symptomatic of a wider problem: the inadequacy of the new, secular concept of existence that emerged during the Renaissance. The protagonist's failure is all the more striking (and all the more eventful) because its causes are rooted in his own faculty of reason. His tendency to engage in self-delusion and resort to illusory solutions to his problems presents a disturbing challenge to the faith in human rationality and belief in this life as a source of fulfilment on which the modem humanist project depends.3

3

The fact that, despite his caricature-like portrayal, the Bishop can quite reasonably be interpreted as an idealized representative of humanism and the fulfilment of life in this world, is shown by the view expressed by the art critic and historian John Ruskin in 1856 (frequently quoted in the critical literature on Browning): Ί know of no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit, - its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin' (Ruskin 1904:449).

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5 Lyric-Specific Features Despite its quasi-dramatic presentation, it is clear that 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church' should be classified as a lyric poem. It belongs to the subgenre of the dramatic monologue, a lyric form created by Browning and Tennyson, and distinguished by monologue-like selfexpression while carefully avoiding Romantic subjectivism and the concomitant risk of solipsism. It does this by adopting a distanced view of the subjective consciousness that articulates itself, thus making second-order observation of consciousness possible. The dramatic monologue deliberately plays down the traditional formal artistry of lyric poetry by the choice of (non-rhyming) blank verse and the use of a colloquial manner of speech. Nonetheless, it highlights its poetic character by the distinctly melodic, regular rhythm of the lines, whose uniform length is perceptible to the ear. The function of this form, inconspicuously but firmly poetic, is to provide prosodic support for the double perspective typical of the dramatic monologue. It combines the suggestive ease with which it is possible to share the speaker's internal point of view empathetically with subtle hints that a critically distanced external perspective towards this point of view should be adopted. This distinctive double perspective means that, in most cases, the event is not located primarily on the level of the happenings, since it does not function as a structural element of the self-narrative within the poem (typically where a speaker defines his or her individuality, as the Bishop does here by identifying his character with a work of art as his memorial). Instead, eventfulness is only created by the critically penetrating second-order perspective of readers (a reception event), who recognize significant contradictions in the speaker's self-definition, which he or she suppresses or conceals and thus cannot see. Readers are thus aware of a significant break in the narrative (here, the failure of the Bishop's narrative of the future without his being aware of it). In this respect, then, the subgenre of the dramatic monologue is characterized by the reception event, a kind of event whose composition and location differ from those of the kind of event found in other forms of lyric poetry.

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Bibliography Browning, Robert (1981). The Poems, vol. 1, ed. John Pettigrew (Harmondsworth), 413-16. Greenberg, Robert A. (1969). "Ruskin, Pugin, and the Contemporary Context of 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb"', in: PMLA 84, 1588-94. Phipps, Charles Thomas, S.J. (1976). Browning's Clerical Characters, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 138-66. Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft (2003), vol. 3, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller et al., Berlin. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (2002[' 1983]). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London). Ruskin, John (1904). Modern Painters, Vol. IV, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 6, ed. Ε. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London).

Jens Kiefer

11 Christina Rossetti: "Promises like Pie-Crust" me no promises, So will 1 not promise you: Keep we both our liberties, Never false and never true: 5 Let us hold the dice uncast, Free to come as free to go: For I cannot know your past, And of mine what can you know? PROMISE

YOU, so warm, may once have been 10 Warmer towards another one: I, so cold, may once have seen Sunlight, once have felt the sun: Who shall show us if it was Thus indeed in time of old? 15 Fades the image from the glass, And the fortune is not told. IF you promised, you might grieve For lost liberty again: If I promised, I believe 20 I should fret to break the chain. Let us be the friends we were, Nothing more but nothing less: Many thrive on frugal fare Who would perish of excess. Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum edition: Vol. III, ed. R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge and London, 1990), 281. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). The poem was written in 1861 and published in 1896.

The title of Christina Rossetti's poem is a modified quotation from a statement that acquired the status of a proverb after being coined by Jonathan

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Swift: 'Promises and Pie-Crust are made to be broken'.1 The proverb provides a script for our expectations to follow (promises tend to be broken), and it can also be understood as encouraging us not to put our faith in promises because the people who make them are not required to keep them. The autodiegetic speaker, however, never explains whether or how a promise has been broken, for her speech act is an attempt to dissuade both herself and her addressee from making promises and entering into a future partnership.2 In this way, she hopes to avoid the subsequent disappointment that the script would lead her to expect. The situational frame for the unrealized act of promising can thus be identified as that of a relationship. Two variants of this schema are presented in the poem: that of friendship and, in contrast, that of love. The speaker's strategy for avoiding promises between herself and the interlocutor is distinctly anti-narrative. She does not narrate a story of what their future together will be like, nor does she make their past explicit in the form of a narrative. Instead of things that have happened being related, we find a predominance of questions, conditional statements, generalizations, and imperatives, all of which suggest that the poem is structured primarily in order to put an argument across, rather than provide a typically lyric picture of consciousness or a narrative mediation of things that happen or have happened: in place of happenings, it is the appellative function of speech that predominates. Nonetheless, it is still possible to sketch out a rudimentary series of potential happenings with a meaningful story in 'Promises like Pie-Crust'. 1 The Communication Situation and the Strategy of the Speaker Only once, and then not until the third stanza, does the speaker relate a change of state in retrospect: 'Let us be the friends we were' (1. 21). The use of the preterite shows that the friendship to which she refers has ended. This change of state also indicates the temporal position of the speech act relative to the story. A friendship existed between her and her addressee in the past, and she wants to restore it in the same form now.

2

These words, which are usually attributed to Swift, appear in his Political Conversations of 1738. It should be noted, however, that similar formulations can be found in Ward and Trollope and even in Shakespeare. As the poem contains no indications of its narrator's gender, we shall assume that the speaker is, like the author, female. In doing so, we follow Lanser's rule, according to which the gender of the narrator can be identified with that of the author unless there are indications to the contrary. Cf. Lanser (1981).

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Bringing this about is the purpose of the poem: it speaks of a point in time prior to the end of the story in order to bring the latter to an end by restoring the friendship that once was. This means that the present point in time, the time of speech, represents a transitional phase in which the relationship between speaker and addressee is not developing according to the schema of friendship. The text does not explicitly say what caused the original friendship between the two individuals to change, but we can work out what happened on the basis of isotopies in the text and of identifying schemata of everyday knowledge. In all probability, the most likely forms of interaction that could be involved as alternatives to friendship are enmity (or simply the cessation of contact) or love. There is no textual evidence to suggest openly declared hostility or a plan to terminate the relationship. There are, however, several signs that a romantic relationship is the alternative to friendship in question: The isotopy temperature ('warm', 'Warmer', 'cold', 'Sunlight', 'sun', 11. 9-12) is projected onto interpersonal emotional states (in the sense of feelings of warmth or coldness), a promise in return is expected, while freedom ('liberties', 1. 3; 'Free to come as free to go', 1. 6) and its loss ('lost liberty', 1. 18; 'chain', 1. 20) are thematized. The speaker and her addressee are opposed to one another in the sense that they are associated with opposite temperatures, coldness and warmth respectively. In her attempt to convince both herself and, more obviously at first, her addressee not to enter into a romantic relationship, the speaker employs the strategy of describing hypothetical past and future states in order to show why such a relationship would not work. The future states are linked by the isotopy loss offreedom, and the past is characterized as opaque, a time during which it is impossible to tell exactly what happened. The strategy of portraying the past as one that cannot be reconstructed is technically reinforced in the presentation by the fact that the speaker does not focalize herself from within. She must surely be capable of making definitive personal statements about her memories and inner life, but the possible memories she relates here are hypothetical and focalized from outside (Ί, so cold, may once have seen / Sunlight, once have felt the Sun', 11. 11-12).

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2 Sequentially and Stanza Order The happenings presented allow us to reconstruct a conflict resulting from the incompatibility of the scripts of friendship and love and leading to a story based on the more complex script of friendship being threatened by love. According to it, friendship developed between the speaker and her addressee, both of whom had presumably had romantic relationships with others in the past. This state of friendship has been endangered by the addressee's desire to take it further in the form of a romantic relationship. The speaker's response to the resultant dispute consists of an attempt to persuade herself and the addressee to restore the original state of friendship between them. The speaker's defensive psychological reaction can be included as an element of the sequence in addition to the purpose of her speech. The question of whether the friendship is successfully continued is excluded from the sequence in which it constitutes a gap. The first stanza is motivated by dissatisfaction with a hypothetical future. The speaker turns to her addressee with a request not to promise her anything. Promises are negatively encoded in two respects. They are subject to the danger of not being kept, of people being unfaithful ('Never false and never true', 1. 4). Promises also create expectations regarding the future, and those who make promises may subsequently feel that the need to fulfil such expectations has stripped them of their freedom. The speaker's imperatives produce a negatively coloured image of her idea of a shared partnership. The speaker sees sharing her future in a relationship founded on promises between herself and her addressee as an encroachment on her individual freedom, rather than as a source of security. This concept of partnership is the source of her need to maintain her independence and not be tied down in the future. The need to keep the future open is also expressed by the image of leaving the dice uncast and the desire for freedom of movement ('Let us hold the dice uncast / Free to come and free to go', 11. 5-6). However, fear of losing freedom is not the reason given by the speaker for declining to enter into a shared future based on commitment; instead, she cites the opacity of the experiences she and her addressee have (or might have) had in the past: 'For I cannot know your past, / And of mine what can you know?' (11. 7-8). The second stanza contains instances of hypothetical analepses that point back to the experiences both parties have had in previous relationships. This retrospective view is already apparent in the first stanza when the speaker rationalizes her wish not to enter into a partnership on the ba-

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sis of lacking knowledge about the addressee's past. Why it is possible for the future to be affected by lack of knowledge about the past remains an open question. It is striking that the speaker narrates the retrospective view of her past using 'may' (1. 11) even though she should be capable of making more definite statements about it. The result is that the speaker presents the past as not being narratable. Neither she nor her addressee can access the other's past; she cannot describe her own past reliably, and not even another person can show them what the past was like: 'Who shall show us if it was / Thus indeed in time of old?' (11. 13-14). The uncertainty of the future (resulting from the fading story of the past) is expressed again in an image at the end of the stanza, the past now accessible neither to the speaker nor to a third party: 'Fades the image from the glass / And the fortune is not told' (11. 15-16). Together with the hypothetical increasing coldness of relations between the speaker and the addressee, the disappearance of the image from the glass (probably a crystal ball) constitutes the isotopy decline, to grow weaker. It is not only the two parties' knowledge of their own histories that decreases, but also, hypothetical^, their ability, expressed in the metaphors of warmth and coldness, to open themselves emotionally to another. The self sees itself and the other as developing in parallel. Both were probably capable of intense feelings earlier, but this ability is becoming weaker and weaker: 'You, so warm, may once have been / Warmer towards another one: /1, so cold, may once have seen / Sunlight, once have felt the Sun' (11. 9-12). Despite this parallel in how they have changed, there is a mismatch between the speaker and her addressee in that she characterizes herself as emotionally cold, but her addressee as still having the property of warmth because of his supposedly greater emotional intensity in the past (1. 9). In the logic of the pictura/subscriptio relationship between temperature and capacity of feeling, the states warm and cold suggest that, because of his warmth, the addressee is still able to melt and become one with another, whereas, because of her coldness, the speaker is unable to do so and must therefore continue to exist as separate entity. The loss of freedom associated with promises is again a theme of the third stanza. The speaker assumes that both she and her addressee would end up unhappy if they were to make commitments to each other. The addressee would regret the loss of his freedom, and the speaker would try to sever the link between them, which she perceives of as a fetter: Ί should fret to break the chain' (1. 20). The conclusion that she draws and formulates hortatively is that she and her addressee should base their fu-

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ture relationship on the script of friendship: 'Let us be the friends we were' (1. 21). As a further argument in support of friendship, the speaker transfers the metaphor of flourishing growth from the context of love to that of friendship ('Many thrive on frugal fare / Who would perish of excess', 11. 23-24). Traditionally, love can be experienced as shared growth, but the speaker associates this potential with friendship. The individual can, she believes, flourish in friendship. As well as the metaphor of thriving, the metaphor of nourishment is employed in order to explain the difference between love and friendship: friendship, according to the speaker, provides adequate nourishment, but it is possible for lovers to eat themselves to death. The traditional concept of hunger for love is inverted here. The impersonal 'many' in the penultimate line stresses that this comment on the nature of love from the perspective of the speaker is meant to be generalizable, not just specific to her particular situation. 3 A Blind Spot? The strategy of the speaker's speech displays subtle inconsistencies. They suggest that she may be unreliable or they may explain her position with an argument she has conveniently invented in order to play down her real reasons for rejecting the script of love.3 The inconsistency involves the motivation given by the speaker for her refusal to enter into a romantic relationship with her addressee. She herself is mentioned in only one of the reasons given for her stance, the inability of either party to know the other's past: 'For I cannot know your past, / And of mine what can you know?' (11. 7-8). Even here, however, the nature of the speaker's explanation proves to be questionable, for when individuals, particularly friends, lack knowledge about each other, narration could be used to provide such knowledge. But narrating, creating a shared story, is precisely what the speaker does not do. Her strategy of representing the past as something that can be reconstructed only in the form of allusions, if at all, therefore looks suspiciously like an attempt to divert attention from her real reason for declining to enter into a romantic relationship: fear—fear of having her future prescribed in the form of partnership as well as fear of having an identifiable past. The speaker partially acknowledges this situation herself when she admits her own fear of breaking promises: 'If I promised, I believe / 1 should fret to break the 3

On unreliability, cf. Martinez and Scheffel (2000:95-107).

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chain' (11. 19-20). Her insecurity about keeping her own promises is reflected here, but her fear of being let down by the addressee's promises— possibly her real reason for turning him down—is not mentioned. If we also consider the title of the poem, a further inconsistency becomes apparent. If promises are made to be broken, they cannot limit individual freedom, for the inherent expectation that they will be broken means that they are not binding in the first place. Seen in this light, the fear of losing freedom can be viewed as an invented argument intended to divert attention away from the speaker's fear of broken promises in a relationship. Alternatively, the title can be linked to the speaker instead of the problem of promises and of the loss of freedom, in which case it becomes a precise statement of her unspoken fear. Considered against the background of the suspicion that the speaker is trying to evade showing her fear of being disappointed, the function of her speech changes: the attempt at persuasion is no longer directed primarily at the addressee, but mainly at the speaker herself. She is trying to convince herself not to make any promises because of her fear of being hurt if her addressee breaks his. 4 Eventfulness The speaker clearly refuses to conceive of the possible beginning of a romantic relationship as an event with positive connotations. This refusal can be treated as eventful from the point of view of an external observer. The rejection of the option of love and the reasons for this choice break with expectations in two ways. First, the speaker's unwillingness to relate past or future in narrative form contradicts the basic psychological assumption that humans use narration to construct a stable identity in conflict situations and are thus able to make sense of and deal with them. The speaker does not make use of this possibility of defining her identity by means of narrative: she refuses to narrate herself. Second, an unusual change in roles can be seen in the assignment of gender to the speaker and the addressee. This is even more apparent if considered in the context of the conventions of Petrarchan love. The situation in which the speaker and her addressee find themselves is the same as the basic Petrarchan situation: the lover is rejected by the lady he worships. In Petrarchism, the fulfilment of love is frustrated by class differences and moral standards, neither of which, however, affect the relationship between self and other in this case. Here the speaker's fear, concealed behind deceptive arguments, is the obstacle to love. And, whereas in Petrarchism the man is the

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speaker and source of perspective, these roles are here adopted by the woman. In view of the above findings concerning the speaker's blind spot, it is clear that the rejection of eventfulness on the level of the happenings is tied to an eventful change on the level of presentation. The discrepancy between the level of the happenings and the title means that the reader can see the function of the speaker's speech changing from that of persuading the addressee to that of convincing herself. It becomes apparent that her hidden motivation lies in her unadmitted fear of a relationship founded on love. In many poems, narration and the self-attribution of a story are central to the speaker's construction of self-identity and are themselves part of that identity. In 'Promise like Pie-Crust', however, the speaker functionalizes the absence of narration. The non-narration of the past is employed as an argument against a future that could be narrated as a love-story. Even so, it is still possible to derive a narrative structure from this attempted anti-narrative speech act, and it is this that gives the poem its special interest. Bibliography Harrison, Antony H. (1988). Christina Rossetti in Context (Chapel Hill, NC). Mayberry, Katherine J. (1989). Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of Discovery (Baton Rouge, LA). Rosenblum, Dolores (1986). Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance (Carbondale, IL). Rossetti, Christina (1990). The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum edition: Vol. III, ed. R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge and London), 281.

Peter Hühn

12 Thomas Hardy: "The Voice" much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair. WOMAN

5

10

CAN it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown! OR is it only the breeze, in its listlessness Travelling across the wet mead to me here, You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,' Heard no more again far or near? I; faltering forward, Leaves around me falling, Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward2 And the woman calling. THUS

15

December 1912. The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, vol. 2, ed. Samuel Hynes (Oxford, 1987 ['1984]), 56-57. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). 'The Voice' was written in 1912 and published in 1914.

1 The Communication Situation: Trying to Make the Past Present Again The speaker, the extradiegetic narrator, in this poem is an aging man, and because he is the protagonist, he is also an autodiegetic narrator. He calls up memories of various stages in his life involving a relationship with a woman he loved—first harmony, later estrangement, and then the loss due to her death3—before finally reflecting on his current desolate situation.4 1 2 3

Lack of feeling. The north. Lines 11-12 of the poem imply very clearly that we can assume the woman is dead (and not simply absent).

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The succession of internal psychological pictures of these four points in his life, which range from the past to the immediate present, supplies the incidents that, with the help of a frame and a script (as will be described below), make up a psychological process (sequence A) on the extradiegetic level (i.e. as the spoken reflection takes place). This narrative sequence, which covers all four of the poem's stanzas, is presented simultaneously and continuously in the present tense and is to this extent performative. At the same time, a second narrative sequence (sequence B) is formed on the diegetic level. It is created out of the content of the memories as they unfold in the present and recall the three previous stages in the man's relationship with the woman. This sequence is narrated retrospectively and in the preterite in the first two stanzas: (1) harmony ('at first, when our day was fair', 1. 4; 'then [...] / [...] when I drew near to the town / Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, / Even to the original air-blue gown', 11. 5-8); (2) estrangement ('as you were / When you had changed from the one who was all to me', 11. 2-3); and (3) death ('much missed', 1. 1). The narrative of this series of past happenings (Β) and the performative presentation of the series of present memories (A) are linked to one another. In sequence A, the speaker attempts to make sequence Β present again, for he tries to go back in time and return step by step from the woman's current state of death, via their earlier estrangement, to the harmonious beginning of their love. However, the actual chronology of sequence Β (the fact that it ended with the factual death of the woman) means that this attempt ultimately fails: 'You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness' (1. II). 5 As in many love poems, the relevance of the speaker's changing relationship with the woman lies in the fact that he defines and stabilizes his individual existence and identity in terms of the harmony and fulfilment

4

5

The death, in 1912, of Hardy's first wife, Emma Gifford, with whom he had become estranged and his emotional reactions to this experience provide the biographical context that can be reconstructed for the origins of this and the other poems in the 'Poems of 1912-13' section of the 1914 anthology Satires of Circumstance (cf. for example Hynes 1987:490—91; Gewanter 1991). Even if the speaker's memories of the woman addressed in the poem correspond to the attitudes of the author in the real world, knowledge of them is not a necessary requirement for analysing the poem. Cf. the general remarks on interpretation in Bailey (1970:298) and Johnson (1991:22527).

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of love, which is why its later loss is so painful and the present attempt to regain it brings such intense affects with it.6 2 The Content of the Memories: The Past Made Present Sequence Β provides the reference level for the psychological process of remembering and functions as an embedded narrative in the narrative structure of the poem. The frame for this sequence, in the sense of its thematic and situational context, can be identified as love between man and woman as a central frame of orientation in life. The script can be identified as the development of love into happiness, harmony, and fulfilment in a long-term partnership (such as marriage, for example), which serves as a source of hope and expectations for the future to guide men and women in relationships from the moment they begin (cf. lines 6-7). As mentioned above, the chronology of these past incidents is inverted significantly when they are presented in the poem. The memories begin at the end with the death of the woman and the man's feeling of loss ('much missed', 1. 1). They then move back to the period in his life when the two were estranged ('as you were / When you had changed [...]', 11. 2-3), an estrangement which is negated and undone ('now you are not', 1. 2). Finally, they return to the original harmony between them ('as at first, when our day was fair', 1. 4; 'then, / Standing [...]', 11. 5-8).7 In reality, however, sequence Β has already come to an end with the death of the woman (1. 11); the poem returns to this, the true chronological situation, when it makes her death a theme again after the memories have been related. The special way in which this narrative is embedded as a series of memories means that, not only its chronology, but also its eventfulness is inverted. The outcome of the love between the speaker and the woman in the past contrasted with the hopeful expectations attached to it and was thus (in the negative sense of disappointment) eventful. The order of the presentation, however, cancels out this negative event, or rather is meant to cancel it out, in order to make it possible to experience the original love again. Seen against the foil of the actual course of the man's life, the overriding 6

7

Cf. the analyses of Donne's 'The Canonization' (pp. 35-43) and MarvelPs 'To His Coy Mistress' (pp. 45-55). Gewanter (1991:201f.) highlights the poem's biographical references (to Hardy's wife Emma) and sees the failed attempt to win back the young Emma (due to the psychological dominance of the old Emma) as a striking feature of the poem. Cf. the essentially similar approaches in Sexton (1991:216f.) and Ramazani (1991:966f.).

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of the negative event is itself an event, but it is ultimately shown to be an illusion by the new, even more obvious indication of the women's death in lines 11-12. In sequence B, the actual chronology is overridden and restored, and eventfulness is correspondingly created in the sense of fulfilment and disappointment respectively. This double inversion makes sequence Β an integral functional element of sequence A. 3 The Course of the Memories: The Process o f Making Them Present The frame for sequence A can be identified as the situation of suffering that results from old age and declining life and here affects an aging man conscious of having had a happier past. The script, directly related to it, can be defined accordingly as a compensatory process of remembering whose aim is to make the past, felt to be a happy one, present again in the imagination, to relive, at least in the fleeting mental pictures of the mind, what is lost. This process of making the past present and its failure involve sequence B. They are concerned with the speaker's initial, requited love for the dead woman before the later estrangement from her that followed a change in her behaviour. The process of remembering that produces the speaker's imaginary perceptions is initiated and guided by an imaginary call from the woman ('the voice', 'how you call to me', 1. 1; 'saying', 1. 2). This acoustic signal that the speaker thinks he hears should clearly be seen as an external projection of his subjective feeling of loss and his longing to bring what is a

lost back to life. The imaginary acoustic perception of the woman's voice shows just how much the speaker's intense process of remembering is affected by his existential insecurity and emotional needs. The process of imagination and perception, which takes place in the speaker's present, unfolds in two counter-current subsequences (i.e. subordinate sequences). First, the harmony of the past is retrieved in the present with increasing intensity; second, the desolation of the present returns when the experience of fulfilment in the relived past dissolves. Sequence A is related to sequence Β in that a counter-chronological regression can be seen taking place in the first and second stanzas. It moves through the stages of the speaker's relationship with the woman, starting with her loss when she Later in the poem, the speaker himself becomes aware that the woman's call is a projection (11. 9-10).

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died ('much missed', 1. 1), passing through the estrangement that followed her change ('when you had changed [...]', 1. 3), to arrive at the harmony of the speaker's love for her in her original form ('as at first [...]', 1. 4; and all of the second stanza). The third and fourth stanzas, on the other hand, represent a chronological progression, leading not only to the disillusioned recognition that the woman is dead forever (11. 11-12) and the speaker's experience of his own infirmity with new intensity (11. 13-16), but also to the changes perceived in nature around the speaker in the context of advancing autumn: the wind blows (1. 9), the leaves fall (1. 14), and the thorn-bushes are barren (1. 15). The forward movement of the speaker should be understood in a mainly spatial sense, but the clear metaphorical implications of decline and the approach of his own death should not be missed either ('faltering forward', 1. 13). The powerful shift from the first to the second subsequence is effected by semiotic reinterpretation of the initial acoustic perception. The speaker interprets the imaginary call of the woman as the suggestive effect of a natural phenomenon, the noise of the wind, thereby exposing it as a projection: 'Or is it [the voice] only the breeze [...]?' (11. 9-12).9 The sudden recognition that the call heard earlier was a figment of the imagination and the speaker's new awareness that the process of remembering consists of illusions mean that, after the second stanza, sequence A breaks with the pattern initially prescribed by the script. The counterchronological and imaginary process of making the past present (the first subsequence) is displaced by an illusion-free process of perception (the second subsequence). The closing line, with its sudden reference back to the woman's voice, does not fit into this progression (see below). Semantic equivalences (isotopies) underline the fact that the two narrative subsequences run in opposing directions. The isotopies activate the features close vs. distanced in the relationship (in its imagined form) between the speaker and the woman, taking the form of together, in harmony vs. parted, in discord. In the first and second stanzas, we find a shift from parted, in discord (implied by 'missed', 1. 1: togetherness is desired but not found; and 'changed', 1. 3: the speaker and the woman are estranged) to together, in harmony (implied by 'you', for example the direct apostrophe of another individual in line 1, and the connection of 'you' and Τ or 'me' by a series of verbs: 'call to', 1. 1; 'hear', 1. 5; 'view', 1. 5; 9

The question-mark indicates the speaker's emotional reluctance to accept the projection for what it is.

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'drew near', 1. 6; 'wait for', 1. 7; 'knew', 1. 7). The third and fourth stanzas shift back to parted, in discord ('listlessness', 1. 9; 'you [...] dissolved', 'wistlessness', 1.11; 'heard no more', 1. 12; the woman is referred to in the third person and the pronoun Τ is syntactically isolated). The final line is ambivalent. The fact that the speaker hears the woman calling points to a new (partial) reduction in the absolute separation between them (contrasting with 'Heard no more again far or near', 1. 12). There is, however, clearly a greater distance between them than was previously the case: the woman is no longer addressed directly, the use of the definite article ('the woman') makes the reference to her more distanced, and there is no mention of the speaker as the addressee of the voice here (which he was explicitly stated to be in line 1). 4 Eventfulness and the Function of Narration On this basis, we are now in a position to describe the eventfulness and overall narrative structure of the poem. At the end of his life, an old man tries to suspend the passage of time and turn back the clock in his imagination in order to experience again in the present the past he experienced as happy before the time when his life took a turn for the worse. The function of narration consists of this attempt to win back the past by remembering. In terms of social psychology, the context for the attempt is provided by the existential relevance of the speaker's relationship with the woman: it affects how he defines himself. This provides the narrative sequences with their particular significance. The occurrences presented contain an event in two respects, both of which involve deterioration, disappointment, and frustration as deviations from the relevant script (in sequence B, the progression of love to further harmony and fulfilment; in sequence A, the present retrieval of a happy past experience from memory). In the past (sequence B), the event—an event in happenings—lies in the change in the woman and the break-up of the relationship; in the present (sequence A), the event—a presentation event—lies in the speaker's increased awareness of her death, his own decline, and the fact that the happy beginning is gone forever.10 True, it is hardly uncommon for expec10

This shift to disillusionment and the awareness, explicitly articulated, that the togetherness of the past cannot be relived challenges a possible mythical interpretation of the poem. According to it, the woman is in the other world and calling the man to join her in the kingdom of the dead, where she promises him a return to their previous union.

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tations to be disappointed in these respects—decline and transitoriness are typically modern pessimistic experiences. However, as is characteristic of lyric poetry, the existential impact of disappointment is particularly intense here. This is because of the high emotional charge attached to the expectations raised by the script and the fact that they affect the speaker's definition of himself. For a number of reasons, the second event, the one that affects the speaker in the present, has a higher level of eventfulness. The pain with which the protagonist experiences the disappointment of his expectations is increased in two ways. First, he (as it seems to him in his mind) was drawn back to the happy beginning by the woman herself, by her call, her voice (with the prospect of being able to annul the earlier, unhappy ending). Second, his disappointment in the present brings his earlier loss back to him, and reliving it makes it even more cutting. Also, the change in the present penetrates deeper because, whereas the woman changed in the past, she is now dead for ever, and that will not change. Combined with the protagonist's awareness of his own approaching death, this means that his experience of decline is now considerably more intense. Furthermore, we should note the abruptness with which the speaker moves from mentally recalling his happy past to perceiving his current desolate situation (this contrasts with the gradual change in the woman in the past).11 In this context, the final line ('And the woman calling', 1. 16) can be interpreted as a further intensification of eventfulness. Despite his disillusionment and decline, the speaker's desire to relive his happy past remains unbroken and resistant to rational insight, thereby making the pain of disappointment even more cutting. It would be less so if the speaker reacted apathetically and unfeelingly. In this respect, the closing line increases the eventfulness of the speaker's present disappointment.

11

The same objection can be made to interpretations, such as Lerner's (1996:31-33), in which the woman is treated as a ghost. The structure of the events in the poem acquires a different emphasis if, rather than reading the remembering speaker's reconstruction of the beginning of his relationship with the woman in the sense he suggests (that it was one of perfect harmony), we interpret the visualized scene (of waiting and approach) as a metaphorical sign of absent union. This would imply that the speaker is unreliable and would affect the eventfulness of the poem—not only the act of making the past present, but the past itself would be an illusion. However, this interpretation is not supported by further textual evidence and runs counter to the general nature of the desire to remember as a central motif in the happenings of the text.

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5 The Function of Formal Features The semantic structure of the poem is reinforced and the eventful change that takes place is accentuated in a directly perceptible manner by the formal poetic level of the text, the level of signifiers in the presentation, by which we mean the poem's prosodic, aural, and grammatical or syntactic structures. For example, the initial (emotional) proximity between the speaker and the woman and the subsequent increase in the distance between them is reflected in the spatial arrangement of the words (primarily pronouns) that refer to them in the text. In the lines of the first and second stanzas, the words for the speaker and his addressee closely follow one another ('woman [...] you [...] to me [...] to me', 1. 1; 'you [...] all to me', 1. 3; 'you [...] I [...] me [...] you', 1. 5; 'you [...] forme [...] I [...] you', 1. 7). The first stanza is also home to the only pronoun in the entire poem that refers to both the speaker and the woman together ('our', 1. 4). It marks the high point of the progression towards union and harmony. In the third and fourth stanzas, the corresponding words are much rarer, and they appear either in different lines ('to me', 1. 10; 'you', 1. 11) or at opposite ends of the stanza ( T [...]/ [...] me', 11. 13-14; 'woman', 1. 16). Sentence type and structure change consistently and continually as the stanzas progress. The first stanza consists of a single long constative sentence, the second of two sentences—a doubting question followed by an emphatic affirmation, the third of an interrogative sentence with subordinate clauses, while the syntax of the final stanza is completely fragmentary and lacks even a single finite verb. Thus, developments on the syntactic level parallel both the semantic disintegration of harmony and the reliability with which it is created and recreated. Significant changes in rhythm and stanza form reflect the change in the course of the poem. The first three stanzas all have dactylic lines with four stresses (the final line of the third stanza being an exception) and follow the rhyme scheme abab {a = trisyllabic, near-identical rhyme, b = monosyllabic masculine rhyme). The fourth stanza, on the other hand, contains trochaic lines with three stresses (apart from line 15) and disyllabic (feminine) rhymes. There is a corresponding change in the emotional implications of the rhythm. At first it is lively and light, but, beginning with the final line of the third stanza, it becomes heavy and sluggish. Thus, rhythm and stanza form mark the change from the first to the second subsequence. Also, from this perspective, the third stanza has a transitional status in that it extends elements of the force behind the first sequence, thereby demon-

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strating its emotional power, while also heralding the approaching change. The final stanza, too, demonstrates that the rhythmical structure of the poem, rather than reflecting the eventful change immediately, lags behind it somewhat. In three of its lines, the third stanza retains the rhythm of the first two stanzas, from which it departs in only one of its lines. The opposite is the case in the fourth stanza: it has three short (three-stress) lines and one line (1. 15) in which the typical four-stress line of the first two stanzas (with two dactyls) appears for the last time. This hesitancy, compared with the relatively sudden change on the cognitive level, might be interpreted as reflecting the mismatch between rational insight, which is rapidly gained, and emotional attitude, which takes a noticeably longer time to change. In the main, the formal elements of the poem underline its narrative development and decisive event (that of disillusionment) by providing them with equivalents on the level of the signifiers. Here, as ever, the signifiers have no meaning in themselves: meaning is acquired only by their being correlated with the semantic structures of the poem. Bibliography Bailey, J. O. (1970). The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (Chapel Hill). Gewanter, David (1991). '"Undervoicings of Loss' in Hardy's Elegies to His Wife", in: Victorian Poetry 29, 193-207. Hynes, Samuel (ed.) (1987). The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, vol. 2 (Oxford). Johnson, Trevor (1991). A Critical Introduction to the Poems of Thomas Hardy (London). Lerner, Laurence (1996). "Moments of Vision - and After", in: Charles P. C. Pettit (ed.), Celebrating Thomas Hardy - Insights and Appreciations (London), 39-53. Ramazani, Jahan (1991). "Hardy and the Poetics of Melancholia: Poems of 191213 and Other Elegies for Emma", in: ELH 58,957-77. Sexton, Melanie (1991). "Phantoms of His Own Figuring: The Movement Toward Recovery in Hardy's 'Poems of 1912-13'", in: Victorian Poetry 29, 209-26.

Peter Hühn 13 Τ. S. Eliot: "Portrait of a Lady" Thou hast committed Fornication: but that was in another country, And besides, the wench is dead. THE JEW OF MAL ΤΑ.

I the smoke and fog of a December afternoon You have the scene arrange itself—as it will seem to do— With "I have saved this afternoon for you"; And four wax candles in the darkened room, 5 Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead, An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid. We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips. 10 "So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul Should be resurrected only among friends Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room." —And so the conversation slips 15 Among velleities and carefully caught regrets Through attenuated tones of violins Mingled with remote cornets And begins. AMONG

20

25

30

"You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, And how, how rare and strange it is, to find In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends, (For indeed I do not love it... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!) To find a friend who has these qualities, Who has, and gives Those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you— Without these friendships—life, what cauchemarV AMONG the windings of the violins And the ariettes Of cracked comets Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own, Capricious monotone

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40

That is at least one definite "false note." — Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance, Admire the monuments, Discuss the late events, Correct our watches by the public clocks. Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks. II

55

Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in his fingers while she talks. "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (Slowly twisting the lilac stalks) "You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see." I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea. "Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the Spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful, after all."

60

THE voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune Of a broken violin on an August afternoon: "I am always sure that you understand My feelings, always sure that you feel, Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

45

50

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel. You will go on, and when you have prevailed You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

65

BUT what have I, but what have I, my friend, To give you, what can you receive from me? Only the friendship and the sympathy Of one about to reach her journey's end. I shall sit here, serving tea to friends...."

70

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends For what she has said to me? You will see me any morning in the park Reading the comics and the sporting page.

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80

Particularly I remark An English countess goes upon the stage. A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance, Another bank defaulter has confessed. I keep my countenance, I remain self-possessed Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired Reiterates some worn-out common song With the smell of hyacinths across the garden Recalling things that other people have desired. Are these ideas right or wrong? Ill

85

90

THE October night comes down; returning as before Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease I mount the stairs and tum the handle of the door And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees. "And so you are going abroad; and when do you return? But that's a useless question. You hardly know when you are coming back, You will find so much to learn." My smile falls heavily among the bric-ä-brac.

you can write to me." My self-possession flares up for a second; 95 This is as I had reckoned. "I have been wondering frequently of late (But our beginnings never know our ends!) Why we have not developed into friends." I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark 100 Suddenly, his expression in a glass. My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark. "PERHAPS

"FOR everybody said so, all our friends, They all were sure our feelings would relate So closely! I myself can hardly understand. 105 We must leave it now to fate. You will write, at any rate. Perhaps it is not too late. I shall sit here, serving tea to friends." AND I must borrow every changing shape 110 To find expression ... dance, dance Like a dancing bear, Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

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120

WELL! and what if she should die some afternoon, Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose; Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand With the smoke coming down above the housetops; Doubtful, for a while Not knowing what to feel or if I understand Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon... Would she not have the advantage, after all? This music is successful with a "dying fall" Now that we talk of dying— And should I have the right to smile?

T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London, 1974), 18-22. T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888-1965). published in 1917.

The poem was written between 1910 and 1911 and

The happenings that can be reconstructed on the basis of this poem involve two characters, a relatively young man and a relatively old lady. They take place in a cultured, socially refined city atmosphere in which the lady meets the man and other guests for afternoon tea. The incidents in the happenings consist of individual conversations between the man and the lady on such afternoons during a period of just under a year (lasting from December to October). The man's last visit is also one of farewell: he is to go abroad in the near future. 1 Overall Narrative Structure We can begin by providing a brief preliminary summary of the complex form in which the above happenings are presented in 'Portrait of a Lady'.1 In the text of the poem, the elements of the series of happenings are selected, perspectivized, sequentialized, and semanticized from the point of view of the young man, on the one hand, and that of the lady, on the other. Thus, two different stories of their relationship are presented (i.e. nar-

Cf. the treatment of individual motifs, themes, and structural elements in, for example, Palmer (1996:52-75), Jain (1991:54-63), and Scofield (1988:63-66).

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rated).2 The two stories and their narrators are not contrasted with one another on the same level; instead, the difference between them is one of hierarchy—that between the diegetic and the hypodiegetic level. Being the speaker in the poem, the young man functions as an extradiegetic narrator so that he himself and the lady are characters in his diegetic narrative. In that diegetic narrative, the lady is also a speaker and (intradiegetic) narrator, for her presentation of a hypodiegetic narrative about her relationship with the man is quoted. Both stories are autodiegetic (i.e. the narrator relates his or her own story in each case). This asymmetric arrangement means that in terms of perspective, the story of the young man seems primary, that of the lady secondary. In thematic terms, however, the situation is exactly the opposite in that the man develops his story in response to the lady's definition of her relationship with him in her narrative. It is notable that both characters combine practical and narrative actions. As protagonists, their actions make their stories progress, and they simultaneously relate those stories as narrators. They write and narrate simultaneously, but for different addressees: the lady addresses her narrative to the young man directly, but he communicates his narrative to himself alone. In both cases, narration itself influences the development of the story, but does so in significantly different ways because of the different kinds of addressee involved and the corresponding differences in focalization. The situation is such that the lady directly shows the young man the special emotional interest she has in him, whereas he, who does not share her feelings and so decides against her, is unable to tell her openly of his attitude. From a narratological point of view, the two stories unfold in a dissimilar manner with tension between them in the following sense: when the lady tries to impose her version of the story (which we can describe for the present as a story of intimacy) on the young man, she encounters the psychological resistance that prompts him to respond by 'writing' a story of his own (which we can describe for the present as a defensive story of self-assertion). Although the man communicates his story to himself alone and takes refuge behind formal courtesy in his external behaviour, the lady is nonetheless gradually able to tell from his reserve that her hopes have not been met and that her story has failed to produce the desired effect. The discrepancy between the stories is not equally apparent to both characters,

2

Cf. the brief references to the poem's narrative elements (without full discussion of their implications) in, for example, Bergonzi (1972:13), Palmer (1996:54), Jain (1991:55), and Calder (1987:32f.).

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and this difference in awareness can be described using the concept of focalization. The man has access to internal focalization in the case of his own perceptions and also, because she relates them, to those of the lady. She, on the other hand, is denied insight into his consciousness. Both stories contain the same two characters, although they differ in the actions and experiences they ascribe to each other as performing and undergoing. The presentations of both stories are structured in parallel with respect to sequentialization and to the incidents selected, making the contrasting ways in which the stories unfold even more apparent: they share the same chronological succession of four meetings in December, April, August, and October in the course of a year. This arrangement shapes and defines the beginning and the end of the relationship, both of which constitute a section in the poem (I and ΠΙ respectively), with two points in time from the intervening period being combined in section Π. The sequence of meetings over afternoon tea is treated as a story by both characters as the protagonists of their own autodiegetic narratives. Because the lady's story is embedded in the man's, it seems sensible to analyse the story she narrates about the course of the relationship first. 2 The Lady's Narrative The refined social life of afternoon tea, generally characterized by the public atmosphere and ease of its clearly defined social world, can be identified as the situational frame of the happenings. In the context of this general frame, the lady's words (in I) model her meetings with the young man by means of the isotopies intimacy ('intimate', 'soul', 1. 10) and exclusiveness ('saved [...] for you', 1. 3; 'that I say this to you', 1. 27) and the frame of friendship, which involves a close emotional but non-erotic partnership ('friends', 11. 11, 19; 'to find a friend', 1. 24) and direct understanding between kindred spirits ('you knew? you are not blind! / How keen you are!', 11. 22-23). With the help of these isotopies and this frame, the lady attempts, partly indirectly, partly very directly, to define the state and quality of her relationship with the man both now and in the future and to impose this relationship on him by addressing him. She also specifies the motivation behind her desire for such a relationship between friends: the search for meaning, coherence, and fulfilment in life in the face of the fragmentary and senseless nature of modern existence ('life composed [...] of odds and ends', 1. 21; 'Without these friendships - life, what cauchemar\ \ 1. 28).

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The script underlying the lady's narrative can be described as the development of a platonic friendship, an exclusive intimate relationship along the lines of a de-eroticized conventional love-story whose function is to provide a central source of meaning on which to base one's life.3 The lady expectantly outlines (narrates) the development of the relationship she desires in the form of a rudimentary narrative succession: desiring and searching, finding a friend, and establishing mutual friendship ('to find / In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends, / [ . . . ] / To find a friend who has these qualities, / Who has and gives / Those qualities upon which friendship lives', 11. 20-26). As shown by the accompanying expectation of finding a meaningful point around which to orient her life, the lady is narrating this story of friendship in an attempt to define her existence and identity using the young man as her specific point of reference. By modelling and presenting the incidents in this way, the narrator not only establishes the beginning of a meaningful and coherent sequence, but also identifies her own individual existence as meaningful and coherent, too. If the first scene in section I marks a beginning, the two scenes in section II present slightly different phases of a developing and changing relationship. Coherence with section I is established by the return of the isotopies intimacy and exclusiveness ('you have prevailed / You can say [...]', 11. 62-63) and the frame of friendship ('my friend', 1. 44) together with its directness of understanding (11. 58-63) and existential relevance ('[...] What life is, you who hold it in your hands', 1. 45; 'My buried life [...]', 11. 53-55). Similarly, the lady repeats her narrative of how she desires her platonic friendship to develop. She does so pleadingly in a process of intimate communication: Ί am always sure that you understand / My feelings, always sure that you feel, / Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand' (11. 58-60). At the same time, however, she points to the presence of factors that threaten continuation of the relationship because they call into question its suggested ability to function as a source of meaning. Most prominent here is her reproachful doubt of the man's ability or even readiness to show understanding for her in the very area that is of existential relevance to her, the question of life itself ('you do not know [...] you who hold it in your hands', 11. 44—45; 'you let it flow from you [...] youth is cruel [...] smiles at situations which it cannot see', 11. 47—49). These doubts and reproaches are emphasized (with different levels of directness) 3

Palmer (1996:55) refers correctly to a 'quest for friendship (or love)' here.

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by means of repetition (11. 44, 47, 64); sarcastic, bitterly ironic double meanings ('You are invulnerable [...] You can say: at this point many a one has failed', 11. 61-63); and reproachful humility and self-depreciation ('what have I [...] to give you', 11. 64-65). By stressing 'friendship' and 'sympathy' as the only gifts she has for him (1. 66), she insinuates that she finds them lacking in him and reproaches him for it. The pity-seeking reference to her approaching death (1. 67) in her closing remarks, which is also a reference to her failure to find stability and purpose in her story of friendship, has a distinctly accusatory tone and is a particularly painful reflection of the problems of the relationship. The farewell scene in section ΙΠ signals the end of the relationship in reality. It can no longer continue because the story of the man's progress now diverges spatially from that of the lady ('And so you are going abroad; [...]/ You hardly know when you are coming back. / You will find so much to learn', 11. 88-91).4 The farewell scene in section III also shows the lady's recognition that the shared story of friendship was never a reality ('[...] wondering [...] Why we have not developed into friends', 11. 9698). The fact of failure is accentuated by the references, again in a reproachful tone ( Ί myself can hardly understand', 1. 104), to the likely success that the initial state of the characters seemed to promise ('For everybody said so [...]', 11. 102-104). In her final sentence, Ί shall sit here, serving tea to friends' (1. 107; see also 1. 68), the lady potently presents herself in her passive state as someone needing salvation and waiting for it without finding it. This is a further illustration of the motivation behind the story she desired. This story of a platonic friendship is begun in eager hopefulness, but it ultimately proves unsuccessful because of the man. It is presented as a hypodiegetic narrative by the lady and from her point of view, so that from a narratological perspective, this story is related in a way characterized by the increasingly tense juxtaposition of two narrative levels. Tension arises between the ideal model and actual developments, between the desire for mutual friendship to develop successfully and the failure of such a development to take place in reality. The lady repeatedly narrates the development of friendship prospectively in her words to the young man, trying to make him behave accordingly; the failure of friendship to

4

The lady turns to written correspondence as a way of keeping her hopes of friendship alive despite spatial separation (11. 93, 106f.), but this is evidently a desperate illusion and simply underlines her failure even more.

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develop is shaped in actu—performatively—as a narrative sequence by the series of statements she makes in her four meetings with the man and by the increasingly obvious disintegration of their relationship. The eventfulness of the story is determined by the initial likelihood of intimacy and understanding developing, on the one hand, and the young man's behaviour in breaking this expectation, on the other. Paradoxically, the story's eventfulness is reduced by the lady's attempt to increase it. She asserts that the failure of friendship to develop could not have been anticipated: 'our beginnings never know our ends' (1. 97). These words reduce the level of eventfulness in two ways. First, they treat the unpredictability of the case in point as something that should really be expected in accordance with a general principle ('never'). More significantly, however, they lower the level of eventfulness because of the fact that they are a modified quotation from John Denham (1615-1669). The original source reads: 'Youth, what man's age is like to be doth show; / We may our ends by our beginnings know' ('Of Prudence', 11. 224—25).5 It postulates that the course of an individual's life is coherent and predictable (and thus low in eventfulness). And, contrary to what the lady claims, this is exactly the case here. The initial situation in section I is marked by ironic distance between the man and the lady (11. 8ff.) and a sarcastic comparison with the scene of Juliet's death in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1. 6). This clearly points forward to the end of the story, although the lady, of course, cannot know it: it is apparent only from the external perspective of the man. So, only retrospectively and from an external perspective does the characteristic logic with which this story unfolds become apparent. The pattern of this logic can be interpreted as follows: the young man's response to the lady is influenced by the way she behaves, and this means that she condemns her own story to failure from the beginning. It thus cannot be expected to have a particularly high level of eventfulness. The significance of the story's beginning for its ending is also apparent from the way it is co-ordinated (again beyond the lady's awareness) with the passage of the year from December through April and August to October, which suggests that it begins at the end of one year and concludes as the end of another approaches.

5

John Denham, The Poetical Works of Edmund G. Gilfillan (Edinburgh, 1857), 286.

Waller and Sir John Denham,

ed.

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3 The Speaker's Narrative When the intradiegetic narrator (the lady) relates her hypodiegetic and autodiegetic story to the extradiegtic narrator (the speaker), he is provided a structure with reference to which he can construct his own autodiegetic story. That is to say, he reacts to the narrative of their relationship that the lady addresses to and tries to impose on him by producing a counter-narrative that he covertly formulates in his mind and communicates only to himself.6 The motivation behind his story lies in turning away the emotions the lady tries to encourage in and impose on him; this story helps him to distance himself from the intimacy and platonic friendship she offers him and needs for herself.7 The purely oppositional character of his story is apparent from the way the narrator links the incidents he mentions into a sequence by means of frames and isotopies that are directly opposed to those suggested by the lady. A first example of this lies in the implied frame of self-conscious role-playing in a context deliberately created for this purpose ('You have the scene arrange itself [...] Four wax candles in a darkened room [...] Prepared for all the things to be said [...]', 11. 2-7; 'carefully caught regrets', 1. 15). This devalues the emotions and moral claims expressed by the lady. The man's narrative also runs counter to the lady's because of the dominant semantic factors (isotopies) that underlie it: dying and death ('an atmosphere of Juliet's tomb', 1. 6) and lack of vitality ('velleities [...]', 'attenuated tones of violins', 11. 15-16), both of which contrast with the lady's references to 'life'. These negative reactions to the lady are indirectly implied by the way in which her behaviour is described. To them we can add the reactions of the man, which are subsequently related by way of conclusion, for he rejects the intimacy and cultured exclusiveness that she desires—a rejection expressed both psychologically ('inside my brain', 1. 32) in the form of dissonant musical 6

7

The fact that the speaker imagines his internal monologue as addressed to various other individuals (the lady and others present at afternoon tea) should be seen as part of the strategy with which he counters the claims that the lady tries to impose on him with her story of friendship. This confrontational situation has been treated in a variety of ways in previous interpretations of the poem. For example, Schusterman (1989) sees it as a conflict between opposing (form-driven vs content-driven) concepts of art, Doreski (1993) as a struggle for mastery of the discourse in which the young man draws on the reader's sympathy for support, Bardotti (1989) as a failure of communication resulting from different kinds of behaviour, Moody (1979) as a conflict between 'hypotrophied vs atrophyied sensibility', and Mays (1994) as a juxtaposition of two voices and psychological positions.

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images ('a dull tom-tom', 1. 32; 'one definite "false note'", 1. 35) and physically in the form of taking refuge in the open air ('take the air, in a tobacco trance', 1. 36), the public sphere ('Correct our watches by the public clocks', 1. 39), and unrefined behaviour ('drink our bocks', 1. 40). In more general terms, refuge is sought in alternative company. The precise nature of this company is not specified, but it is formulated by the speaker in his mind, with the lady remaining conspicuously excluded from his thoughts ('Let us take the air [...]', 1. 36; see 'our', 11. 39-^0). The relationship between this sequence (the beginning of the man's narrative of the relationship as it unfolds) and the lady's story is characterized by dependence and reaction (it is the story of how another story is fended off) and, as a defensive strategy, by secrecy (the narrative is concealed from the protagonist of the story to which the man reacts after being affected by it precisely because it is openly addressed to him). This indicates that the man does not begin with a particular script of his own with which he intends to give the sequence meaning; instead, he begins his story simply as an attempt to counter the script of the lady's story. This may be a sign of his own vacuity and weakness, both of which are reflected in his inability to tell her that he does not want to accept the opportunity with which she presents him. Section II sees the continuation of psychological defensiveness and distancing ('The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune / Of a broken violin', 11. 57-58) and physical withdrawal ('You will see me any morning in the park [...]', 11. 71-78). This amounts to warding off the story of cultured intimacy that the lady wants to impose on the man. Being a reaction marked by secrecy ( Ί smile, of course, / And go on drinking tea', 11. 4950; Ί keep my countenance, / I remain self-possessed', 11. 77-78), these details are essentially a continuation of the sequence initiated in section I. At the same time, however, the sequence is semantically redefined. While the story begun in section I had a negative structure, being no more than an attempt to counter another story, there are now two indications that it has a specific role in relation to the subject that narrates it. We find signs of reference to two schemata of individual conduct, by which we mean conventionalized behavioural models and patterns of action with an identity-creating function—cultural schemata (see Lotman 1977). The two behavioural schemata contradict one another. On the one hand, the young man's pursuit of independence, control of his own destiny, and a stable self-identity ('keep my countenance', 'remain self-possessed', 11. 77-78) is based on the schema of individual self-assertion and the search for indi-

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vidual autonomy. On the other hand, there are signs that he is emotionally engaging with the lady's story. They imply a behavioural schema that shows signs of resembling hers with respect to empathy and the desire for nearness. It can be interpreted as a longing to open up to another. The desire is not strong enough for him to be ready to accept what she offers him, but he nonetheless morally undermines his right to refuse her blankly when he asks himself how he might give something back in kind or show his appreciation of her perspective: 'how can I make a cowardly amends / For what she has said to me?' (11. 69-70; note the characteristic qualification imposed by the man's reference to his own weakness - 'cowardly' - , which contrasts with the strength of invulnerability that he attributes to her in lines 61-63). The man's longing, clearly for love and human nearness (Drexler 1980:145f.), awakened by sensual impressions (music and the smell of flowers, 11. 79-82), also points to a certain psychological affinity with the lady, for she experiences the same desire beforehand with similar association (Chopin and lilacs). However, the affinity is not developed in depth, but is manifested in compensatory, retrospective empathy ('Recalling things that other people have desired', 1. 82) as a symptom of weakness in life (as in the admission of cowardice) and in the form of extreme withdrawal. In conclusion, the two meaningful action-guiding patterns or schemata conflict with one another in that the desire for autonomy expressly insists on fending off the lady's story, while at the same time the signs of emotional affinity decisively undermine this defensive attitude. The result is a general uncertainty in the man regarding his position ('Are these ideas right or wrong?', 1. 83). The lady's story continues to be held at a distance in section III, as she is now aware. This intensifies the two new, conflicting tendencies introduced in section II: on the one hand, the man desires autonomy and control over his own destiny ('My self-possession flares up for a second; / This is as I had reckoned', 11. 94-95); on the other hand, this is subverted by his lack of inner stability, his inadequate sense of direction and strength of personality, and his growing moral and emotional qualms. The speaker cannot base his search for independence on inner strength, but only on the mechanical routines of external form he turns to in despair ( Ί must borrow every changing shape / To find expression [...] bear [...] parrot [...] ape', 11. 108-11). He loses faith in routine and in the social credibility of the role he plays ('My smile falls heavily among the bric-abrac', 1. 92). This crisis is intensified by his increased self-consciousness ( Ί feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark / Suddenly, his ex-

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pression in a glass', 11. 99-100), which leads to self-paralysis ('My selfpossession gutters', 1. 101) and is further aggravated by the breakdown of his personality, robbing him of his sense of direction ('we are really in the dark', 1. 101; the plural refers to the speaker). The protagonist's lack of inner resolution (cf. Smithson 1982:45—47) is tied to an increase in emotional involvement and moral self-doubt ('what if she should die some afternoon [...]', 1. 113; 'Doubtful [...] / Not knowing what to feel or if I understand [...]', 11. 117-8; 'and should I have the right to smile?', 1. 123).8 In all these musings, the speaker returns self-critically to things the lady said earlier (her thoughts of death in line 67, her need for understanding in lines 58-60, and her criticism of his polite smile in line 49). Finally, the increasing insecurity of the speaker produces a clear change in the relationship between his story and hers: it tends to redefine his story as one of rivalry, of the conflict between self-determination and dependence: 'Would she not have the advantage, after all?' (1. 120). It is the course of the lady's story that changes, rather than its nature, for by failing to achieve the expected fulfilment, it deviates from the script. The speaker's story, on the other hand, undergoes a conceptual change. He begins (in section I) with what is no more than a counter-story, produced to fend off what the lady tries to impose on him. He then transforms it (in section II) into an ambivalent search for the two alternative behavioural schemata of independence and empathy. Finally (in section III), there develops a rivalry between himself and the lady and between their stories. That is to say, he ends by interpreting the conflict between his story's two competing positions or schemata in terms of the dichotomy between self-assertion and self-surrender: he views this conflict in terms of his fragile search for autonomy, which is under threat, not only because it is regarded as morally wrong, but also because the woman's death would force him into a position of permanent emotional dependence and subjection ('[...] what if she [...] / Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand [...]', 11. 114-16; 'Would she not have the advantage, after all?', 1. 120). Generally speaking, the definitive meaning of a story can be determined only once the story has actually ended (Brooks 1984:22), and the end of this poem shows that the speaker interprets the relationship between his story and the embedded story of the lady retrospectively as a conflict between two stories aimed at imposing themselves on him—a

8

Somewhat one-sidedly, Shusterman (1989:109ff.), interprets the end of the poem as a moral criticism of the young man's aestheticism.

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conflict between shutting himself in and opening himself up. Eventfulness is thus produced through the changing of scripts or schemata, and particularly in the following paradox: when the speaker parts from the woman, he finds himself in a position of lasting moral and emotional inferiority, yet this is the very time when he would seem to have the ideal opportunity of increasing his independence. We can speak of a reception event here in that the reader can see what the protagonist apparently cannot: the paradoxical failure of his search for autonomy at the very moment when he finally frees himself from the lady. 4 The Structure of the Text as a Perspective on the Speaker The story told by the lady is presented (focalized) from her internal perspective; at the same time, however, the fact that it is bound to a particular standpoint is made clear from the outside. The same goes for the speaker, the man. The next higher level, that of the composing entity responsible for the structure of the text, serves to foreground, behind the speaker's back, the fact that the narrative is presented throughout from his specific internal perspective (his consciousness). The foregrounding of the speaker's standpoint is apparent in two ways, one more explicit than the other. First, title and motto form a framing device that establishes an ironically distanced perspective. Because it is not part of the speaker's first-person statements, the source of this perspective is unambiguously located outside his (current) consciousness and should be attributed to the implied author, i.e. the composing entity (or perhaps the speaker at a later point in time). Second, the structure of the text (the arrangement and choice of the speaker's words) creates a separate indirect perspective on his stance and the cognitive, psy-chological, and social factors behind it. This, it should be stressed, is a matter of interpretation (i.e. how we construe the speaker's character) whether we attribute a given implication of textual form to the consciousness of the speaker or to the superior perspective of the implied author in which the speaker's blind spots then become apparent.9 The motto quoted from Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1592) was originally part of an exchange of accusation and evasion between an accuser, Friar Barnadine, and the devious Barabas, the Jew of

9

Cf. the references to the narrator's unreliability in, for example, Bergonzi (1972:13) and Palmer (1996:54).

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Malta.10 As Friar Barnadine is formulating his accusation ('thou hast committed -'), Barabas interrupts him by throwing in a freely invented crime ('Fornication?') and advancing a trumped-up reason not to be punished ('But that was in another country, / And besides the wench is dead'). This is an attempt by someone who is in fact guilty of poisoning nuns in revenge for injustice to extricate himself deviously from the affair by changing the crime of which he is accused and finding fictitious reasons to be exonerated of it. Drawn together in a single sentence, the quotation has the formal appearance of being an accusation directed at the speaker, and there is an ironic, if not to say grotesque discrepancy between it and the speaker's behaviour (cf. Palmer 1996:55f.). In its literal sense, the reproach is obviously unjustified, for the speaker denies himself an intimate relationship with the lady. Metaphorically speaking, though, perhaps he mistreats her, so that the succession suggested by the poem (her anticipated death, be it literal or psychological, following his departure for another country) can be seen as corresponding with the motto after all. The allusion to the novel The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881) in the title also implies criticism of the man's behaviour, for it links the relationship between the lady and the speaker with that between Isabel Archer, deceived in her loyalty and strength of feeling, and the cultured but superficial, cold, and calculating Gilbert Osmond. There is also an ironic note in the stylistic and social contrast between 'wench' in the motto and 'Lady' in the title, between the common and the prestigious, which throws a mildly critical light on the lady's claim to cultivation. The frame (title and motto), then, produces an ironically critical view directed primarily at the speaker, but also at the lady and serves to intensify the problems arising from their respective stories: his insufficient capacity for emotional engagement, her tendency towards spiritual self-stylization. Attribution is more controversial when it comes to determining who is behind the critical implications contained in the textual structure of what is said, with its many aural and structural equivalences (especially in rhyme and repetition). A number of formal tendencies directly support the attitude that the speaker displays towards the lady and himself to the extent that in their intended effect, if not in their poetic form, they are to be seen as creations of his consciousness. One example of such a formal feature is the use of rhyme to frame the lady's remarks in sections I and II 10

Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, vol. 1, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1973), 309 (IV.i.40-42).

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(lines 10-13 are bounded by the rhyme '-ips' in lines 9 and 14; lines 1928 by the rhymes '-ins' and '-ets' in lines 15-18 and 29-32; and lines 44—45 by the rhyme '-alks' in lines 43 and 46). Another example is found in sections II and III when rhymes from the lady's words recur in those of the speaker (lines 50 and 51; 69 and 70; 92; and 116 and 119 reproduce the rhymes in her words in lines 48 and 49; 65 and 68; 90; and 104 respectively). In itself, of course, the rhyme pattern of the poem is not part of what the speaker says consciously; although it is true that the linguistic structures and their semantic tendencies can plausibly be taken as signs of the speaker's conscious strategy of fending off the lady's advances by means of ironic framing or contrast, as for example when 'You hardly know when you are coming back' (1. 90; lady) is followed by 'My smile falls heavily among the bric-ä-brac' (1. 92; man). These discontinuous links between the speech of the two characters also reveal the speaker's moral or emotional problems with the defensive position he commits himself to. An example of this occurs when he reacts to the lady's Ί shall sit here, serving tea to friends' (1. 68) with Ί take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends [...]' (11.69—70). This self-questioning should also be seen as originating in his consciousness, as is made clear by the reflection on his struggle for composure (11. 77-78) and by the sight of himself in the mirror (1. 100), his reaction to the possibility of the lady's death and the effect it would have on him (11. 114-23) and the fact that sections II and III (and thus the poem as a whole) end with unanswered questions—all of which are signs of the speaker's high level of conscious selfperception. A further sign of the speaker's high degree of self-consciousness can be found in the allusion in line 122 ('This music is successful with a "dying fall'") to Orsino's opening speech in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: 'If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken and so die. / That strain again, it had a dying fall [...]'. 11 The analogy with Orsino lies in the latter's comparable psychological imprisonment in himself. Orsino the unhappy lover repeatedly savours his own unhappiness in music and stabilizes his identity by relating himself to it. Similarly, the speaker tries to come to terms with the crisis caused by feelings of personal guilt and existential emptiness by taking self-indulgent aesthetic pleasure in the dark idea of the lady's death. In the 11

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, The Arden Edition (London, 1975), 5 (I.i.1-4).

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relevant passage (11. 114—23), he uses melancholy musical language to depict how he sees himself reacting to the news of her death. This pointer to the psychological function of aestheticization can be generalized and extended to the whole of the speaker's narrative, for his presentation of the story of the relationship is characterized by the striking presence of recurring and equivalent images together with aural and lexical elements from the beginning. All of this serves as means of distancing himself from the problems of life and emotional qualms, helping him, ironically, to fend off the story that the lady tries to impose on him. However, it must be emphasized again that the poem's form in the narrower sense (such as rhyme) should not be treated as his creation. A strategy of aestheticization is employed throughout, as can be seen generally in the literal or, more frequently, metaphorical references to music throughout the poem (11. 1418, 29—35, 56-57, 79-80) and specifically in the speaker's use of'music' (1. 122) as a metaphor for his style at the end. Aestheticization is also evident in the location given to the allusion to Twelfth Night and in the selfattested success of the speaker's strategy, the psychological effectiveness of which is, however, relativized by the question in the final sentence. The quotation marks around 'dying fall' and the self-referential metaphor of 'music' point to conscious quotation and thus suggest that the speaker should be credited with responsibility for the tendencies of the strategy of aestheticization and their function. Taken together, then, these different signs show that here, as is the tendency of the text as a functional whole, the speaker employs art and aestheticization to stabilize his identity. He does so in response to his general weakness, his fundamental incapability to engage existentially with another person, and his fundamentally insecure identity.12 Of course, he does not appear explicitly as a practising poet of himself, but the place of music in his words is more than a neutral, inherently meaningless formal feature: it can be seen as a symptom of the aestheticization of his life. In this, his position is ultimately equivalent to that of the lady, who has used aestheticization to shape and control her encounters and relationships from the

12

Cf. Scofield (1988:63-66) and in general Shusterman (1989). Shusterman and Spender (1972:46) take the view that the words 'leave me sitting pen in hand' (1. 116) show the speaker to be the retrospectively writing author of the poem. This is not convincing, for the poem as a whole is narrated concurrently with what happens, although the passage in question is narrated prospectively as a conditional. It seems more likely that these words refer to an attempt to take up written contact, as the lady wishes (11. 93, 106).

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beginning. So, looking back from the end of the poem, the fundamental affinity between the lady and the young man becomes particularly clear. The form of the text as a lyric is functionalized in support of a strategy of aestheticization in the presentation of the characters and their stories. This is a defining feature of the specifically poetic aspect of the narrative structures in Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady'. A second such feature can be found in the close functional connection or interaction between narration and the acts that propel the story forward. Narration, particularly in the case of the lady, supports the prospectively narrated story. A third feature, closely related to this, is the fact that narration takes place simultaneously with what is narrated at different points in the course of the story, what Genette (1980:217) calls interpolated and Rimmon-Kenan (2002:91) intercalated narration. Consequently, these individual discontinuous narrative situations are linked together into a narrative sequence, the course of the story in actu. Not only do the lady and the young man narrate the stories of their relationship, but in their narrative acts, each also embodies, performatively, a special kind of story that is different from the one narrated in each case. In the case of the lady, we have the story of a story (one of intimacy and platonic friendship) being frustrated by her act of narration; in the case of the young man, this story of intimacy is held at a distance, this defensiveness ultimately being undermined by its own success, failing at the moment of farewell, when it finally succeeds. She obstructs her story by narrating, he obstructs his by not narrating. Finally, a fourth feature specific to the lyric lies in the tendency to use compressed and fragmented narrative progressions and provide only indirect and allusive presentations of the characters and society that surround them. Bibliography Bardotti, Marta (1989). "Portrait of a Lady di T. S. Eliot: La persuasione mancata", in: Textus: English Studies in Italy 2, 237-58. Bergonzi, Bernard (1972). T. S. Eliot (London). Brooks, Peter (1984). Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA). Calder, Angus (1987). T. S. Eliot: New Readings (Brighton). Doreski, William (1993). "Politics of Discourse in Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady"', in: Yeats Eliot Review 12, 9-15. Drexler, Peter (1980). Escape from Personality: Eine Studie zum Problem der Identität bei Τ. S. Eliot (Frankfurt am Main). Eliot, T. S. (1974). Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London).

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Genette, Gerald (1980). Narrative Disscourse: An Essay in Method, tr. J.E. Lewin (Ithaca). Jain, Manju (1991). A Critical Reading of 'The Selected Poems' by T. S. Eliot (Delhi). Lotman, Jurij M. (1977). The Structure of the Artistic Text, tr. G. Len-hoff & R. Vroon (Ann Arbor). Mays, J. C. C. (1994). 'Early Poems: from "'Prufrock' to 'Gerontion'", in: David Moody (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge), 108-20. Moody, A. D. (1979). Thomas Steams Eliot: Poet (Cambridge). Palmer, Maija (1996). Men and Women in T. S. Eliot's Early Poetry (Lund). Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London). Schneider, Elizabeth (1975). T. S. Eliot: The Pattern in the Carpet (Berkeley). Scofield, Martin (1988). T. S. Eliot: The Poems (Cambridge). Shusterman, Richard (1989). "Aesthetic Education as Aesthetic Ideology: T. S. Eliot on Art's Moral Critique", in: Philosophy and Literature 13,98-114. Smithson, Isaiah (1982). "Time and Irony in T. S. Eliot's Early Poetry", in: Massachusetts Studies in English: Graduate English Program 2,39-52. Spender, Stephen (1972). Eliot (London).

Peter Hühn

14 W. B. Yeats: "The Second Coming" and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. TURNING

5

some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? SURELY

10

15

20

W. B. Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition, ed. R. J. Finneran (New York, 1983), 187. W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats (1865-1939). The poem was first published in 1920.

1 Overall Narrative Structure The overall narrative structure of the poem comprises two syntagmatic phases corresponding to its two parts. In the first, the speaker, an extradiegetic narrator, enumerates changes taking place in the contemporary world; in the second, he interprets them as reflecting a historical process covering the course of millennia. The order of the two phases constitutes a progression on two levels. First, they turn from the current political situation at a particular point in time to the structure of long-term historical

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processes.1 Second, the essentially distanced and descriptive statement of observable facts is followed by an interpretation of those facts from a particular individual perspective. Their meaning is provided by association, a vision, prophetic foresight, and explanation. The poem, therefore, represents two narrative sequences on different levels and with different protagonists: (1) on the diegetic level, we have a historiographical narrative, a narrative about the course of world history, whose collective protagonists are culture and society (primarily those of Europe); and (2) on the extradiegetic level, we find a presentation of the narrative act, i.e. a performative presentation of the narration of the historiographical narrative with the speaker as protagonist. By its nature, of course, the narrative act as such is only implicitly, rather than directly, presented in the poem. Nonetheless, it is manifested clearly in the form and development of the text and can be reconstructed from its style, character, and chain of thought so that in this way, it forms the story of the narrator (as we will see in detail below). These two narrative chains are closely linked to one another. The historiographical narrative does not exist until it is produced interpretively by the story of the narrator, and the mental process of the story of the narrator cannot be manifested except in the historiographical narrative. Before discussing this connection, we begin by analysing the two narrative sequences independently of one another. 2 The Historiographical Narrative on the Diegetic Level The happenings presented by the speaker can be reconstructed as the collapse of the old Europe immediately following the First World War (as can be gleaned from the date of publication) and the development of culture and history since the origins of Christianity. On the level of presentation, the first section (11. 1-8) follows a structurally analogous schema and symbolically relates the collapse of order. It uses motifs from falconry (11. 1-2) as well as more abstract formulations that imply physical and spatial ('things', 'centre', 1. 3), political ('anarchy', 1. 4), cultural ('blooddimmed', 'ceremony of innocence', 11. 5-6), and moral ('the best', 'the An overview of the various approaches to interpreting this poem can be found in Timm (1987:111-14). Particularly in earlier criticism, a central point of debate concerns the extent to which an interpretation of 'The Second Coming' can be informed by Yeats's macro-cyclical model of history, the theory of which is formulated in a remark on the poem (Yeats 1983:646-48) and in the Vision of 1925. Cf. for example Allen (1985). With good reason, Kleinstück (1963) and Davie (1965) argue against such an approach.

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worst', 1. 7) references. Even the more abstract expressions here contain metaphorical verbs ('cannot hold', 'is loosed', 'is drowned'). The general frame activated at the beginning consists of a state of anarchy and disorder which can be related to the contemporary political situation in Europe when the poem was written, a time when traditional structures were collapsing in numerous countries in the wake of revolution, war, and the foundation of new nation states. This brings us no further than being able to state the obvious and identify the script as a process of general decline. The speaker does not as yet have a more precise script that might help him understand the changes better. Instead of providing a clearly defined sequence pattern and identifying its eventfulness, he initially confines himself to presenting thematically different but structurally analogous descriptive situations and endowing them with semantic content by means of particular isotopies. Foremost among these isotopies are loss of control and order ('cannot hear', 'fall apart', 'cannot hold', 'is loosed', 'is drowned', 'lack') and negative, bad ('centre cannot hold', 'mere anarchy', 'blood-dimmed tide', 'innocence is drowned', 'best' vs 'worst'). The sustained use of passive constructions without an agent is also distinctive ('is loosed', 'is drowned', 11. 4—6) due to the fact that an active cause cannot be identified. The weakness of good or the strength of evil (explicitly stated in lines 7 8) is one possible moral explanation for the collapse of order that can be derived from these features.3 The second part of the poem (11. 9-22) then suddenly begins by explicitly identifying a script that allows the changes recorded in the first part to be slotted into a large-scale meaningful narrative sequence, a master plot. This script is activated by the spontaneous association of the concepts of 'revelation' (1. 9) and that of the 'Second Coming' (1. 10). This involves a conventional programme that is familiar to the reader acquainted with Christianity and thus does not need to be stated in detail in the poem. The Λ

2

3

Thaut (2001) does not provide sufficient justification for his view that the frame consists of the process of decolonization and, in particular, of the relationship between England and Ireland, from which he arrives at implausible interpretations (Thaut 2001:17-18). Without any plausible grounding in the text, Wheeler (1974) interprets the text in the context of individual psychology; he crassly sees it as an experience of helplessness in early childhood that is overcome in a fantasy of almighty power. Cf. Deane's precise description (1995) of the structure of the isotopies in the poem using the LakofT-Johnson-Tumer theory and the concept of metaphor (Deane concentrates on the metaphors of centre and periphery).

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expression 'revelation' (from the Greek apokalypse) points to the Bible as a pre-text in which the entire history of the world is narrated as a grand recit. In particular, it refers to Revelation 13 and Matthew 24, two prospective narratives prophesying the end of the world in which the total collapse of order and the triumph of evil (known as the Antichrist in the Epistles of John) act as precursors of the return of Christ (the Second Coming). Immediately after this set of associations is activated, however, the term 'Second Coming' unexpectedly makes the speaker think of a completely different, indeed diametrically opposed script in the form of a terrifying vision. Its source is not the Bible and biblical tradition, but the collective unconscious ('Spiritus Mundi\ 1. 12).4 The exact structure of the new script is encoded in the image of a beast with the body of a lion and the head of a human moving slowly through the desert surrounded by indignant desert birds. It can only be identified by means of interpretation. Several important aspects of the interpretive process are pre-structured by the context and in particular the implicit relationship of opposition between the vision and the orthodox biblical idea of the Second Coming. This relationship of opposition is indicated, not only by the reference to Bethlehem as birthplace (a metonymical reference to the First Coming), but also by the dichotomy between the figures of a gentle child (suggested by birth in Bethlehem, if nothing else) and the 'rough beast' (1. 21). This is also the dichotomy between the union of God and man in Christ and the fusion of man and animal in the 'beast', between love and sympathy and unfeeling hard-heartedness ('blank', 'pitiless', 1. 15). The speaker himself does not explicitly provide such an interpretation of the future, but it can nonetheless be derived from the implicit disfiguration of the script suggested by the initial associations. Moreover, its nature is made clear by corresponding isotopies: non-human (the 'lion body', whose human features are merely superficial, 1. 14; 'rough beast', 1. 21), and unloving, unsympathetic ('gaze blank and pitiless', 1. 15; the indignation of the 'desert birds', 1. 17).5

5

In a note, Yeats explains this term as 'a general storehouse of images which have ceased to be a property of any personality or spirit' (1983:644, 648), stressing the shared nature of this memory present in the unconscious. There is more than sufficient evidence to show that 'rough beast' should not be taken as (or rather is not understood by the speaker as) the Antichrist of the biblical Apocalypse. The reference to Bethlehem shows that, unlike the situation in the Bible, the beast is not a precursor of Christ's lasting return, but actually a replacement for him. This is also

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In this way, the happenings are transformed into a sequence: a rudimentary narrative about the unstoppable approach of something terrifying. The idea of Christ's return triggers the vision, and it is against the background of this idea that the narrative should be seen. It is about the arrival of the principle opposed to what Christ stands for ('beast', 1. 21), recounting the replacement of Christ, rather than his triumph. This implicit transformation of the biblical script is elucidated and its essence captured in a densely and somewhat cryptically formulated narrative about the processes of history near the end of the poem (11. 19-20). The pattern underlying these processes consists of the relationship between cause and effect in the progress of history and the movement from one historical epoch to the next. One epoch predetermines and prefigures the next with what it suppresses or excludes because these things return again later due precisely to the fact they have been sidelined previously. The expression 'rocking cradle', considered in light of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, points to Christ as the human incarnation of the divine, to the establishment of love and pity as cardinal values. This implies that the people of Christendom have banished violence and brutality from their behaviour, or at least that they have laid violence and brutality to rest for a long time ('stony sleep', 1. 19), only for them to emerge again as a nightmare after two thousand years: the return of the repressed.6 The unpitying predatory and violent element in human nature was suppressed by the guiding Christian values during the era they dominated, and it now returns in a more potent form as the principle of the new age. The narrator's abstract explanatory statement about the nature of history (11. 19-20) establishes a causal link between the metaphorical vision and the past. Then, in the two closing lines, he returns to the concrete treatment of the former, and in doing so, presents a coherent narrative sequence in which the changes of the present are connected to the past and at the same time open the way for the future.7

6

7

highlighted by the fact that a very different source displaces the Bible from its role as an authority on which to base script and explanation. Furthermore, the speaker is familiar with the scenario in which the dreadful triumph of evil marks the coming return of Christ—an expectation that underlies the first part of the poem (11. 1-10). However, he is then shocked to find that, contrary to this expectation, destruction and collapse are followed by something unknown and even more awful than them. The mechanism described here is not intended to be an exact equivalent to Freud's return of the repressed. Cf. Kleinstück (1963:179-91) and Ellmann (1954:257-60) in particular on the reconstruction of this sequence.

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The motivation behind these historical developments, their driving force, finds itself the subject of ambivalent or even of contradictory statements. On the one hand, the concrete visual content of the vision suggests that the changes are caused from the outside, that they are an intrusion from somewhere beyond the domain of humans: the desert. On the other hand, the structure of the process that the speaker derives from the vision is formulated abstractly (11. 19-20), and this suggests an internal, selfgoverning mechanism. It may be that this ambivalence is to be understood as indicating that the exclusion of certain kinds of human behaviour (such as aggression) from a culture means that, once expelled, they break in (and return) from outside it. In contrast to the Christian narrative of the end of the world, as initially suggested by the script of the Apocalypse, the future, in so far as it is the continuation of the sequence, is left markedly open in the final version of the narrative. The poem ends, not with an answer, but with a question ('what rough beast [...]?'), so that the new things the future will bring can be described only very broadly in terms of inversion and negation of the old (i.e. the traditional script). The exact course of development is not yet apparent and cannot be narrated prospectively either. While the first script suggested by the poem can be characterized as a story or as history in the traditional sense, with a quasi-teleological focus on an ideal conclusive ending, the open and unclosed narrative structure of the sequence implied here can be regarded as modern. The special character of this narrative structure is underlined by the position of the narrator relative to the happenings and to the temporal position of the narrative act. We are dealing with a homodiegetic narrator, one who is part of the narrated world and thus subject to its constraints. Bound by these limitations, he narrates the story, not from its end, but from within the course of its unfolding. The narrative act is thus located at the very point at which one historical phase gives way to the text, a point from which the continuation of the story can be seen and narrated, both as conditioned by the past and as radically different from it. The eventfiilness of the poem lies in its deviation from the conventional script, in its abrupt disruption of what the implications of the title lead us to expect. The break with expectations takes three forms. First, it is not Christ, the bringer (or restorer) of an order of justice, love, and goodness to the world who comes, but his absolute opposite, an anti-

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Christ (but not in the Bible's sense).8 Second, the inversion of the principle of Christianity follows from the prior supremacy of that very principle, which we would therefore not expect to be replaced. Finally, in no way is the end of the world approaching, for what is coming is in fact a new phase in the endless chain of epochs. This break with expectations, particularly for people with a traditional outlook, comes as a shock and is thus endowed with a high level of eventfulness. Although the poem's eventfulness does involve the level of the happenings (the history of the world), it presents us primarily with a presentation event, for it is the interpretive process that stands in the foreground. 3 The Story of the Narrator on the Extradiegetic Level We have seen that the poem focuses primarily on the narrated story and its eventfulness. At the same time, however, although it is not foregrounded but implied by the character and style of the text, the narrative act unfolds with a particular purpose. It produces a historiographical narrative in which the story told by the narrator is presented as a succession of mental acts with which the speaker reacts to the current chaotic situation—an attempt to interpret, order, and master the situation through narration. The speaker reports his perceptions, mental processes, and interpretations in the present tense, and the poem thus develops in the performative mode. As for the reader, he acts as a witness or observer (somewhat like spectators in the theatre) who experiences these impressions as they are produced. For this reason, it is possible for the reader to examine and analyse the influences on and the motivation for the narrative process. The story of the narrator takes places in four phases. In the first part (11. 1-8), the speaker gives a descriptive summary of the political events of the present. At the beginning of the second part (11. 9-11), the recurrent instances of destruction in his report are associated with the biblical Apocalypse. This association then stimulates a contrasting vision drawn from the collective unconscious (11. 11-17). Finally, the speaker formulates a discursive interpretation of the vision and translates it into an image of the future (11. 18-22).

8

Whereas the biblical anti-Christ precedes the Second Coming of Christ and is ultimately and definitively superseded by him, the figure here replaces a Christ who is merely seen as the representation of one specific historical epoch now coming to an end.

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The development of this progression is characterized by several features. First, it is striking that the thematic importance of the speaker's mental activity becomes increasingly explicit. The opening of the poem (11. 1-8), lacking in direct pronominal or deictic references to the speaker, appears to be related neutrally and impersonally, although the choice of words does imply a negative evaluation of what is described ('mere anarchy', 'blood-dimmed', 'innocence is drowned') and thus betrays the speaker's underlying sense of unease. The presence and emotional involvement of the speaker become more apparent in the second phase (11. 9-11) as a result of the use of an emphatic particle, repetition, interjections, and the deictic reference 'at hand'. In the third phase (11. 11-17), the signs of the speaker's psychological involvement increase still further when the vision is experienced and direct reference made to its emotional effect: '[...] troubles my sight' (1. 13). Here we also find the speaker's first explicit reference to himself ('my sight'), a process that continues in the fourth phase (11. 18-22) with the appearance of 'now I know' and the closing question. Furthermore, the increased prominence and mental involvement of the speaker is combined with a qualitative change in his activities. Thus, in the first two phases, he makes judgements in terms of traditional categories (good vs bad) and draws on a traditional interpretive schema (the biblical Apocalypse), while in the last two phases, he spontaneously produces (in the vision) and equally spontaneously explains (11. 19-20) an opposing schema of development and meaning. The frame of this extradiegetic sequence is to be described as a historical crisis situation; and the response is a script for coming to terms with such an experience of cultural crisis. In the course of the poem, a shift occurs from drawing on the authority of tradition (the Bible and the Christian concept of history and the world) to making spontaneous reference to visionary insight, to the collective unconscious as an alternative source. With this spontaneous visionary reference, the speaker establishes himself as a visionary and asserts his innate possession of a supra-individual authority in this role ('The darkness drops again; but now I know\ 1. 18; my emphasis). This change in the script constitutes an event (in the form of a presentation event) on the extradiegetic level. The speaker's desire for knowledge, and thus for mental order and a way of making sense of things, however, is not affected by the change, since in the first part, he lacks this ordering knowledge and in the second, a traditional schema of order is replaced by a new and hitherto unknown model whose function remains the same ('now I know'). The speaker does come to recognize,

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however, that his knowledge is not yet complete, for he is unable to answer the question about the particular nature of the 'rough beast'. In this respect, a gradual development takes place in the desire for mental order. In the end, the speaker is in a position to face the unknown, but asks his question nonetheless, for he still wants to know, still strives for cognitive certainty.9 The presentation of the speaker's narrative and interpretive activity in the story of the narrator is the work of the author. It provokes a critical attitude in the reader towards the insights the speaker claims to have and leads naturally to the question of the speaker's reliability. The derivation of an abstract concept of history (11. 19-20) from the vision is neither backed up with argument nor explained, but is apodictically asserted and authenticated with nothing more than the self-assurance of a visionary.10 As the concept cannot be verified logically and is simply posited as a way of making sense of things, the speaker's conclusion can be doubted. It is hard to say whether the abstract author provides indications of the speaker's unreliability or, in more general terms, his limitations caused by personal involvement). It is probably best that this question be left open.11 The historiographical narrative and the story of the narrator share a significant feature with respect to the transition from old to new ideas. The story of the narrator shows how the new breaks into the orderly human mind from another world that lies beyond the individual and the grasp of reason, the world of the Spiritus Mundi. Similarly, in the narrated story, something historically new enters human culture from a place beyond human habitation: the desert.12 In the context of a detailed study of the role of history and culture in defining eventfulness, this element can be plausibly interpreted as characteristic of certain archaic and mythical tendencies in modernism.

9

10 11

12

Cf. Whitaker (1964:73-75), who gives special prominence to the speaker's ability to ask about the shape of the new. Johnson (1991:86—87) notes the implicit assertiveness of the metaphors that are used. Yeats personally supported such a view elsewhere (e.g. in A Vision of 1925), although this does not mean that we can (let alone must) draw on this fact in our analysis of the poem. It is read mainly as an unreserved affirmation of such theories and views (cf. for example Harrison 1995). Cf. Davie (1965:79), and Holdridge, who uses the category of the sublime to describe this arrival (2000:122-24).

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Bibliography Allen, James Lovic (1985). "What Rough Beast?: 'The Second Coming' and Ά Vision'", in: REAL - The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 3, 223-63. Davie, Donald (1965). "Michael Roberts and the Dancer", in: Denis Donoghue and J. R. Mulryne (eds), An Honoured Guest: New Essays on W. B. Yeats (London), 73-87. Deane, Paul D. (1995). "Metaphors of center and periphery in Yeats' 'The Second Coming'", in: Journal of Pragmatics 24, 627-42. Ellmann, Richard (1954). The Identity of Yeats (London: Faber). Harrison, John R. (1995). "What Rough Beast? Yeats, Nietzsche and Historical Rhetoric in 'The Second Coming'", in: Papers on Language and Literature 31:4, 362-88. Henn, T. R. (1965). The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry ofW. B. Yeats (London). Holdridge, Jefferson (2000). Those Mingled Seas: The Poetry ofW. B. Yeats, The Beautiful and the Sublime (Dublin). Johnson, William (1991). "Textual/Sexual Politics in Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan'", in: Leonard Orr (ed.), Yeats and Postmodernism (Syracuse, NY), 8089. Kleinstück, Johannes (1963). W. B. Yeats oder Der Dichter in der modernen Welt (Hamburg). Thaut, Cristina J. (2001). "The 'Rough Beast': A Postcolonial and Postmodern Yeats", in: Deborah Fleming (ed.), W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism (West Cornwall, CT), 3-25. Timm, Eitel (1987). W. Β. Yeats (Darmstadt). Wheeler, Richard P. (1974). "Yeats' 'Second Coming': What Rough Beast?", in: American Imago 31, 233-51. Whitaker, Thomas R. (1964). Swan and Shadow: Yeats's Dialogue with History (Chapel Hill). Yeats, W. B. (1983). The Poems: A New Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York).

Peter Hühn

15 D. H. Lawrence: "Man and Bat" WHEN I went into my room, at mid-morning, Say ten o'clock ... My room, a crash-box over that great stone rattle The Via de' Bardi. ... 5

WHEN I went into my room at mid-morning, Why? ... a bird! A bird Flying round the room in insane circles.

10

IN insane circles! ...A bat! A disgusting bat At mid-morning! ... OUT! GO out!

15

ROUND and round and round With a twitchy, nervous, intolerable flight, And a neurasthenic lunge, And an impure frenzy; A bat, big as a swallow. OUT, out of my room!

20

THE Venetian shutters I push wide To the free, calm upper air; Loop back the curtains. ... Now out, out from my room!

25

So to drive him out, flicking with my white handkerchief: Go! But he will not. ROUND and round and round In an impure haste, Fumbling, a beast in air,

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30

Peter Hühn Arid stumbling, lunging and touching the walls, the bell-wires About my room! ALWAYS refusing to go out into the air Above that crash-gulf of the Via de' Bardi, Yet blind with frenzy, with cluttered fear.

35

40

45

50

55

AT last he swerved into the window bay, But blew back, as if an incoming wind blew him in again. A strong inrushing wind. AND round and round and round! Blundering more insane, and leaping, in throbs, to clutch at a corner, At a wire, at a bell-rope: On and on, watched relentless by me, round and round in my room, Round and round and dithering with tiredness and haste and increasing delirium Flicker-splashing round my room. I would not let him rest; Not one instant cleave, cling like a blot with his breast to the wall In an obscure corner. Not an instant! I flicked him on, Trying to drive him through the window. Again he swerved into the window bay And I ran forward, to frighten him forth. But he rose, and from a terror worse than me he flew past me Back into my room, and round, round, round in my room Clutch, cleave, stagger, Dropping about the air Getting tired. seemed to blow him back from the window Every time he swerved at it; Back on a strange parabola, then round, round, dizzy in my room. SOMETHING

60

HE could not go out, I also realised.... It was the light of day which he could not enter, Any more than I could enter the white-hot door of a blast-furnace. HE could not plunge into the daylight that streamed at the window. It was asking too much of his nature.

Lawrence: Man and Bat 65

WORSE even than the hideous terror of me with my handkerchief Saying: Out, go out!... Was the horror of white daylight in the window!

So I switched on the electric light, thinking: Now The outside will seem brown. ... 70

BUT no. The outside did not seem brown. And he did not mind the yellow electric light. SILENT!

75

80

85

He was having a silent rest. But never! Not in my room. ROUND and round and round Near the ceiling as if in a web, Staggering; Plunging, falling out of the web, Broken in heaviness, Lunging blindly, Heavier; And clutching, clutching for one second's pause, Always, as if for one drop of rest, One little drop. AND I!

Never, I say. ... Go out! 90

slower, Seeming to stumble, to fall in air. Β lind-weary.

FLYING

YET never able to pass the whiteness of light into freedom ... A bird would have dashed through, come what might. 95

sink, lurch, and round and round Flicker, flicker-heavy; Even wings heavy: And cleave in a high corner for a second, like a clot, also a prayer.

FALL,

no. Out, you beast.

BUT

100

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he fell in a corner, palpitating, spent. And there, a clot, he squatted and looked at me. With sticking-out, bead-berry eyes, black, And improper derisive ears, And shut wings, And brown, furry body.

TILL

105

nut-brown, fine fur! But it might as well have been hair on a spider; thing With long, black-paper ears. BROWN,

110

So, a dilemma! He squatted there like something unclean. No, he must not squat, nor hang, obscene, in my room! YET nothing on earth will give him courage to pass the sweet fire of day. then? Hit him and kill him and throw him away?

WHAT

115

NAY,

I didn't create him. Let the God that created him be responsible for his death ... Only, in the bright day, I will not have this clot in my room. 120

125

LET the God who is maker of bats watch with them in their unclean corners. I admit a God in every crevice, But not bats in my room; Nor the God of bats, while the sun shines. So out, out you brute!... And he lunged, flight-heavy, away from me, sideways, a sghembo!1 And round and round and round my room, a clot with wings, Impure even in weariness. dark skinny and flapping the air, Lost their flicker. Spent.

WLNGS

130

HE fell again with a little thud Near the curtain on the floor. And there lay.

Diagonally, sidewards.

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191

AH death, death You are no solution! Bats must be bats. life has a way out. And the human soul is fated to wide-eyed responsibility In life.

ONLY

140

So I picked him up in a flannel jacket, Well covered, lest he should bite me. For I would have had to kill him if he'd bitten me, the impure one. ... And he hardly stirred in my hand, muffled up. HASTILY,

145

I shook him out of the window.

AND away he went! Fear craven in his tail. Great haste, and straight, almost bird straight above the Via de' Bardi. Above that crash-gulf of exploding whips, Towards the Borgo San Jacopo.

150 AND now, at evening, as he flickers over the river Dipping with petty triumphant flight, and tittering over the sun's departure, I believe he chirps, pipistrello, seeing me here on this terrace writing: There he sits, the long loud one! But I am greater than he ... 155 I escaped him. ... Florence. The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (Harmondsworth, 1977[l1964]), 342-47. D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence (1885-1930). 'Man and Bat'was published in 1923.

1 The Story of the Encounter between Man and Bat The speaker of 'Man and Bat' narrates an anecdotal experience that took place when he was staying in Italy: a surprising encounter with a bat in his room during the daytime. The speaker is an autodiegetic narrator, relating his experience retrospectively (mainly in the preterite) in chronological

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order2 with literal quotations (printed in italics) of what he spontaneously said and thought during the period of time narrated, the experience thus turned into an ordered narrative. Both protagonists, man and animal, undergo a narrative development. In the case of the man, in particular, it takes the form of a decisive psychological and mental change. Because of the central position these changes in attitude have in the poem, the following analysis will concentrate on the techniques of semanticization and perspective through the use of isotopies and focalization respectively and by means of which the incidents are converted into sequences that can be meaningfully interpreted and whose eventfiilness they constitute.3 The general interpretive frame for the poem can be treated as the situation in which a visitor to a southern city finds himself when he enters his room and unexpectedly discovers a bat there. The existents contained in the happenings are a man and a bat in a room above a busy street in Florence in the morning. The incidents consist of the speaker's ultimately successful efforts to expel the animal from his room, which arouses him to hysterical revulsion,4 the creature's frenzied attempts to escape, and the man's growing understanding for the way it behaves. Following a temporal ellipsis, the happenings conclude with an outdoor scene in the evening on the terrace outside the room. The speaker observes the bat in the distance and writes as he does so, clearly about his experience and possibly in the form of the present poem. The thematic frame that is initially activated here concerns the hygienic conditions in which modern civilized city life is set, particularly the associated ideas of cleanliness and the absence of vermin (representatives of a repulsively alien, lower form of life).5 The process of removing vermin, intruders whose presence is considered dangerous, from places of human habitation can be identified as the script. As for the activation of these schemata, we can begin by identifying the following, initially domi-

2 3

4

5

The historic present is also used occasionally (11. 20, 88). For general overviews of Lawrence's lyric poetry, cf. for example Gilbert (1972), Laird (1988), and Lockwood (1987). In the book Bird, Beast and Flowers (1923), in which 'Man and Bat' was first published, Lawrence expresses a generally unfavourable attitude towards bats in the poem 'Bat', immediately preceding 'Man and Bat', and ends with the lines 'In China the bat is symbol of happiness. / Not for me!' (Lawrence 1923:340-42). Rather unconvincingly, Chauduri (2003:205-6) makes reference to John Ruskin in order to identify the thematic frame of reference for the confrontation of man and bat as the opposition between the Enlightenment Self and the impurity of the Gothic.

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nant sequence in the poem: the successful removal of the bat (understood as a repulsive intruder) from the speaker's place of residence. The sequence begins with the discovery of the bat by the speaker and continues with the latter's initially unsuccessful attempts to drive it away; the bat then becomes exhausted, which finally allows the speaker to throw it out of the window wrapped in his jacket, thereby returning it to its natural habitat in the open air, as shown by the closing evening scene.

2 The Semanticization of the First Sequence: Removing the Strange and the Different The meaning of the first sequence, the removal of the bat from the room, is enriched and defined in accordance with the script through the use of several isotopies or seme complexes. The isotopy complex wild, uncontrollable, irrational, aimless, eruptive (and others) is used to highlight the particular way in which and the particular implications with which the speaker perceives the movements of the bat: he sees them as mechanical reflexes, the antithesis of human reason, civilization, and discipline. Semantic components of this kind are contained in both adjectives and nouns that express more or less abstract qualities of the bat's character (e.g. 'insane', 11. 8, 9; 'twitchy', 'nervous', 'intolerable', 1. 15; 'frenzy', 11. 17, 33; 'haste', 1. 27; 'delirium', 1. 41) and in concrete descriptions of its movements (e.g. 'round and round and round', 11. 14, 26, 37, etc.; 'fumbling', 1. 28; 'blundering', 1. 38; 'flickersplashing', 1. 42; 'staggering', 1. 79; 'plunging', 1. 80; 'lunging', 1. 82; 'flapping', 1. 128). A further isotopy complex is employed in order to provide a distinctive characterization of the way in which the animal comes to rest in the room: clinging, reluctant to leave. Such features, again either concrete descriptions or abstract summaries, are found in words such as 'rest' (1. 43), 'cleave', 'cling' (1. 44), 'clutch', 'cleave' (1. 53), 'clutching [...]' (1. 84), 'cleave' (1. 98), 'squatted' (1. I l l ) , 'squat', 'hang' (1. 112). These implications betray an instinctive fear that the strange, non-human intruder might settle in and make its home in a human place, the room. The speaker's quasi-instinctive aversion towards the bat is emphasized by the seme unclean, repulsive in numerous words (e.g. 'disgusting', 1. 11; 'impure', 11. 17, 27, 127; 'blot', 1. 44; 'clot', 11. 97, 119; 'unclean', 11. I l l , 120; 'obscene', 1. 112).

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The presence of the general semantic components strange, the other in a series of expressions underlines the fact that the bat belongs to a domain other than that of humans, more precisely the lower, animal domain ('sticking-out, bead-berry eyes, black', 'improper derisive ears', 'shut wings', 'brown, furry body', 11. 103-6; 'hair on a spider', 1. 108; 'long, black-paper ears', 1. 109; 'wings dark skinny and flapping', 1. 128). This implication is supported by the fact that the intruder is associated with night and darkness, worlds that humans find unnerving, strange, and threatening (e.g. 'obscure', 1. 45 vs 'white', 1. 24, 'whiteness', 1. 93; 'blind', 11. 33, 82, 92, etc. vs 'sweet fire of the day', 1. 113). Unlike the bat, the speaker and the objects connected with him in the room, as well as the room itself, are characterized by the isotopies human, made by humans, technical, noisy (e.g. 'white handkerchief, 11. 24, 65; 'window', 'window bay', 11. 34, 48, 56, 63, 144; 'electric light', 11. 68, 72; 'jacket', 1. 140; 'my room, a crash-box over that great stone rattle / The Via de' Bardi', 11. 3-4; 'above that crash-gulf, 1. 32 vs 'silent', 1. 73). Finally, in combination with 'my room', the seme complex isolated, cut off makes clear the contrast between the bat (which has intruded from outside) and the controlled world of the speaker (surrounded by walls, curtains, and shutters). The narrative of the removal of an utterly different intruder from the world of urban civilization formed, sealed, and mastered by humans is brought into being as the first, dominant sequence in the text by means of the semanticization described above. The sequence interpreted in this way represents the basic, originally intended content of what the speaker says: he reworks his encounter with the bat as a particular kind of story and presents it in narrative form. In the resultant product, retrospective report (in the preterite) alternates with literally quoted statements (in italics) and, in places, the reproduction of thoughts in free indirect speech or as an inner monologue (e.g. 11. 114-15,11. 116-23). 3 A Shift in Perspective and the Development of a Counter-Current Tendency In addition to the sequence described above, a second, counter-current sequence is formed in the poem. It consists of growing understanding for the bat's point of view and behaviour, and it interlocks with the first in the text. The mediation of this second sequence depends primarily on a particular focalization technique, and more specifically, on the gradual shift in

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focalization (i.e. the perspective of perception and evaluation) to the bat in the course of the poem. In Rimmon-Kenan's terminology, this shift involves both the psychological (cognitive and emotive) and ideological (normative and evaluative) facets of focalization,6 the textual manifestations of which extend throughout the poem (as we shall see in detail below). In a way that is somewhat less apparent than in the first sequence, we can identify as the thematic frame of this sequence the equal status of all living things and the equality of humans and animals.7 We can take the script to be the process of a change in attitude that leads to increased acceptance of the needs of another living creature and an understanding of how it sees things. At the beginning, the narrated I merely considers the animal from an external, emphatically human perspective, and views it with an aggressive attitude of hostile aversion. Subsequently, however, he begins to look at the appearance and behaviour of the bat more closely, and then he even starts to develop an interest in and understanding for the reasons why it behaves as it does. Correspondingly, as the poem progresses, the perspective centres on the animal, both in the sense of adopting its point of view and providing insight into its situation, and it reflects an increasing readiness to accept that of the animal, even creating a certain equality between it and the man. The speaker not only focalizes the bat from within repeatedly, but also shows signs of imagining and adopting its point of view, resulting in his seeing the surroundings, and himself, from the bat's position (internal focalization). At the end of the poem (11. 153-55), he goes even further and gives it a voice of its own (as will be shown below). The complete structure of this shift in focalization, and thus the creation of the second sequence, passes through a number of stages. In the first, the speaker recognizes the reasons for the bat's behaviour and explicitly compares it with himself: 'He could not go out, / I also realized [...]/ It was the light of day, which he could not enter, / Any more than I could enter the white-hot door of a blast furnace' (11. 59-62). He even cites the bat's nature as justification for its reluctance to be forced out of the room: 'It was asking too much of his nature' (1. 64). The beginnings of internal focalization from the bat's point of view then appear in the speaker's ability to see himself from an ironically distanced external position: 'Worse even than the hideous terror of me with my white handker6 7

Cf. Rimmon-Kenan (2002:80-84). Cf. Gilbert (1972:168-69).

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chief / Saying: Out, go out! [...]/ Was the terror of white daylight in the window!' (11. 65-67). In the closing evening scene, which represents the climax and conclusion of the second sequence, the bat is free again, and the speaker pictures it as observing him ( Ί believe he chirps, pipistrello, seeing me here on this terrace writing', 1. 152) and completes the shift in perspective by giving it a voice of its own, thereby relativizing his characteristically human sense of his own importance: ' There he sits, the long loud one! / But I am greater than he [...] /1 escaped him [...]' (11. 15355). The poem ends with the speaker adopting the bat's position and perspective in his imagination. Parallel with this shift, and conditioned by it, the speaker's conscious attitude towards the bat undergoes a change. He begins to engage in selfcritical moral reflection on the relationship between humans and animals, putting himself in the bat's position and is able to reconstruct and understand its motivations (11. 59-69). He does not exploit his power to kill it and stops seeing himself as a god (11. 116-18) and aiming to solve the problem by killing the creature (11. 134-39). His instinctive feeling of dislike for bats resurfaces again and again (11. 119-24), but this does not change the speaker's fundamental acceptance of the fact that the bat is a living being whose life has its own inherent value that is not subject to human evaluative criteria. This acceptance is latently apparent from the beginning of the poem in the speaker's consistent use of the pronoun 'he' to refer to the bat, which, it can be argued, means that he treats it as a quasi-human individual. This re-evaluation of the animal and the adoption of its perspective take place to such an extent that the speaker selfcritically allows himself to be evaluated by the bat at the end. The equality of the two is also reflected in a marked (though not immediately obvious) unintentionally humorous analogy between the behaviour of man and that of bat. Both display an excessively hectic, hysterical level of activity, the animal more in its physical movements of circling and fluttering, the man in his psychological arousal and his physical attempts to drive the bat away. Just as the first sequence, this second sequence and its meaning are largely objects of the speaker's conscious perception and reflection. It is clearly the values of the first sequence, including dislike for the bat, however, that dominate the behaviour of the speaker. They strongly resist the development of a counter-current tendency towards acceptance and understanding. In other words, the second sequence unfolds in a state of tension with the first, which is also shown by the fact that elements of both sequences interlock throughout the poem. This ambivalence is symbolically

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manifested in the concrete gesture with which the speaker finally removes the bat from his room: he throws it out, but does so by wrapping it in his jacket—clothing it, so to speak—beforehand. 4 The Function of Narration and Eventfulness The interlocking combination of the two sequences means that we are now in a position to define the overall story that is narrated in 'Man and Bat'. The removal of the bat as something strange and different is only one side of the narrative progression in the poem. On the other, contrasting side, the speaker overcomes his natural internal resistance and attains an increasing appreciation of the value both of the bat as an individual living thing and of life in general as well as an increasingly critical view of civilized human values and modes of behaviour. In this respect, a stance of self-critical analysis develops in the story such that at the end, the narrator is able to consider himself from a distance. The function of the story lies in allowing this kind of self-recognition to be achieved, thereby relativizing the modes of civilized human behaviour by making it possible to adopt another's position. A central purpose of this narrative with two conflicting aspects is that it enables the speaker to clarify his self-definition. At the beginning, he is not yet able to engage in critical reflection: he presents himself as a product of civilization and automatically behaves accordingly. He then problematizes his initial defensive reaction and suddenly discovers that he has a previously unknown affinity with and readiness to sympathize with life from beyond the confines of civilization. He updates his understanding of himself to include these new features and redefines his identity in the narrative of the complex experience he has undergone. At the end of the poem, the speaker's narrative includes subtle references to the fact that he is narrating a story about himself in order to help himself define his own identity. In a self-referential foray in lines 150-55, he thematizes the written formulation of the narrative and thereby brings the second sequence to an effective conclusion. The reference to 'seeing me here on this terrace writing' (1. 152; my emphasis) can be understood in this sense. We can identify the fundamental change and extension of perspective (focalization) in the second sequence as the event in the poem. This change is not only unexpected, but also takes place in a way that runs counter to the script that underlies the first sequence. Thus, a high level of eventfulness is present. The ground is prepared for the event (retrospec-

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tively with regard to the level of the happenings) by the gradual establishment of the second sequence. In practice, the event itself occurs—in the sense of a presentation event—at the end of the poem, where, by mentally adopting the bat's voice and point of view, the speaker actually crosses a boundary and leaves the narrow conventionality of human civilization behind, becoming free in the knowledge of the life and spirit shared by people and animals.8 We know that this boundary crossing and the associated break with expectations have taken place when the speaker imagines what the bat is saying, thereby demonstrating that he is able to make fun of both his own limitations and those of the (apparently) self-satisfied bat. Ultimately, then, we are dealing with more than just the shift in perspective that results from the increasing adoption of the bat's point of view. More generally, the speaker develops a more powerful ability to look critically on his own position and that of others. This critical faculty finds expression in the form of irony through the treatment of the bat and the speaker himself. The speaker should be treated as the source of this self-irony, which opens the way to comprehensive relativization and indicates the degree to which his eyes have been opened at the end of the poem. When the poem ends, he is capable of ironically perceiving the parallel mental limitations of man and bat. This marks his eventful attainment of new insight compared with the first phase of their encounter, during which he clearly fails to notice that the hysterically frantic ways in which they react to each other are perfectly comparable.9 The exposure of this comparability is thus the work of the abstract author, rather than of the speaker. The temporal position of the narrative act lies exactly at the end of the story ('now', 1. 150)—at the veiy moment when the boundary crossing and event take place. The narrative act occurs when the poem is written, and, as mentioned above, it may well be included in the narrative itself (cf. 1. 151). There is a change in the narrator's position relative to what he narrates: the retrospective narrative that runs through most of the poem gives way to a simultaneous one at its end, and the preterite of the narrated struggle is replaced by the present of the conclusive breakthrough to recognition and change. This shift is presented performatively, as it is made. 8

9

D. H. Lawrence treats this theme repeatedly in his lyric poems, including other pieces in the Birds, Beasts and Flowers anthology of 1923. The few commentaries on 'Man and Bat' in the critical literature (e.g. Lockwood 1987:124-35) typically mention the element of human self-criticism, but not the (human) similarities between the behaviour of man and bat.

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Bibliography Chaudhuri, Amit (2003). D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference' (Oxford). Gilbert, Sandra M. (1972). Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Ithaca). Laird, Holly Α. (1988). Seifand Sequence: The Poetry ofD. H. Lawrence (Charlottesville). Lawrence, D. H. (1977[1964]). The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (Harmondsworth). Lockwood, Μ. J. (1987). A Study of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Thinking in Poetry (Basingstoke). Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (2002[* 1983]). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London). Sword, Helen (2001). "Lawrence's Poetry", in: Anne Fernihough (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge), 119-35.

Peter Hühn

16 Philip Larkin: "I Remember, I Remember" and Thomas Hood: "I Remember, I Remember" The title of Philip Larkin's Ί Remember, I Remember' is an explicit reference to the popular Romantic childhood poem with the same title by Thomas Hood. Larkin does not make use of any specific elements of Hood's poem, and he strikingly avoids using the word 'remember', which Hood repeats like a refrain. Nonetheless, Hood's Ί Remember, I Remember' is an intertext that cannot be ignored if Larkin's poem is to be understood in depth and should therefore be taken into account in the analysis of the latter. A detailed comparison will show the extent to which the two poems imply opposing concepts of childhood (and becoming an adult) and, correspondingly, present radically different narratives of childhood and growing up. One version of the beginning and subsequent development of the individual human being is prototypically Romantic and sentimental, the other modern in its disillusionment. 1 Thomas Hood's "I Remember, I Remember" I

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I remember, I remember The house where I was bom, The little window where the sun Came peeping in at morn; He never came a wink too soon Nor brought too long a day; But now, I often wish the night Had borne my breath away! II 1 remember, I remember The roses, red and white, The vi'lets and the lily-cups, Those flowers made of light! The lilacs where the robin built,

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15

And where my brother set The labumam on his birth-day, The tree is living yet!

III

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30

I remember, I remember Where I was used to swing, And thought the air must rush as fresh To swallows on the wing; My spirit flew in feathers then, That is so heavy now, The summer pools could hardly cool The fever on my brow! IV I remember, I remember The fir trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops Were close against the sky; It was a childish ignorance, But now'tis little joy To know I'm farther off from heav'n Than when I was a boy.

Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, ed. John Clubbe (Cambridge, MA, 1970), 35-36. Thomas Hood (1799-1845).

The poem 7 Remember, I Remember' was published in 1827.

1.1 A Romantic Narrative of Childhood The speaker of Hood's poem, who is also its protagonist, looks back on his life and contrasts two periods with one another. He reconstructs his childhood in a series of individual memory-narratives, each of which he briefly confronts with his present adulthood. The narrative representation of childhood takes the form of two sequences on two different levels. First, each of the child's four past experiences at successive points in time is related in a smaller sequence inside the individual stanzas and contrasted with the experiences of the adult. Second, the poem as a whole forms an overarching sequence that subsumes the process of remembering ( Ί remember, I remember') and uses the four individual snapshots to trace the gradual movement of the child through the process of growing up. To-

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gether, the two sequences constitute the story of childhood narrated in the poem, and, in accordance with the ideas of Romanticism, the retrospective narrative treats the process of growing up after childhood as the source of a decisive change. The frame activated for the sequences and their semanticization on the level of the presentation is that of a person looking back on his or her life in retrospect from the perspective of an adult with a particular interest in his or her childhood and remembering the process of growing up. The relevance of these themes and thus the status of this frame are perioddependent in so far as it was specifically during Romanticism that a new, intense interest in children and childhood developed. The script to which Hood's poem should be related is similarly period-specific: the schema for the process of growing up and becoming an adult is a characteristically Romantic one of regression, decline, and loss.

1.2 Relating Experiences of Childhood in the Two Sequences The various sequences within the four stanzas consist of memories of typical individual childhood experiences that occurred at different points in time during the lost past and contrast with the present. In the first stanza, the speaker describes the child's happy contentment with the passing of time from early in the morning to the end of the day, a constant spontaneous pleasure that has given way to weariness and desire for death in the present. The contrast between then and now suggests that decline and degeneration are general forces at work in the process of growing up and in the course of life. In the second stanza, the speaker mentions two objects of special significance for the child: the flowers ('made of light', 1. 12) and the laburnum planted by his brother, which, he makes clear, has resisted the ravages of time ('is living yet', 1. 16). This implies that continuity between past and present is to be found only in his non-human surroundings, and not in him himself (it is also implied that his brother has since died). The following stanza contrasts the youthful physical feeling of vitality, energy, and ease ('My spirit flew in feathers then', 1. 21) with the heaviness of the present ('so heavy now', 1. 22), thereby providing a further picture of physical decline. The final stanza contrasts the child's intuitively close relationship with heaven (implied by his belief that the treetops were close to the sky) with the rational knowledge of the adult who sees the child's experience for the illusion and ignorance it was ('It was a childish ignorance', 1. 29). In this respect, growing up takes the

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form of disillusionment (resulting from knowledge) and spiritual loss ('To know I'm farther off from heav'n [...]', 1. 31). Each stanza, it can now be seen, consists of a brief but vivid sequence that refers as a pictura to the abstract formulas of the subscriptio, to loss and downfall as general features of how the speaker experiences the changing course of life. This is also true of the third stanza, for it implies human degeneration ex negativo, so to speak, in its emphasis on the continuity of non-human life. Ultimately, all four sequences share an analogous schema of regression, degeneration, and decline. In terms of the overall construction of the poem, these four sequences represent an overarching sequence whose arrangement suggests changes that are structurally analogous to the individual stanzas. With respect to the childhood experiences remembered from the past, the order of the stanzas embodies a spatial movement from inside to outside, from the house of home (stanza 1) to the garden (stanzas 2 and 3) and on into the forest (stanza 4). This progression implies metaphorically (in the form of the pictura/subscriptio relationship) that setting forth into the world is a product of growing up. If we turn now to the present in which the act of remembering takes place, this potentially positive movement forward is contrasted with an increasingly serious psychological and spiritual collapse. It leads from the loss of the will to live (stanza 1) and implicit discontinuity (stanza 2) to a feeling of heaviness and oppression (stanza 3) and on to a sense of disappointment and disillusionment (stanza 4). This story, in which the growth of knowledge and with it disillusionment is accompanied by increasing spiritual decline, is made even more cutting by the fact that, as the poem progresses, the difficult present in which the adult exists is pushed ever further into the background by the lost childhood of the remembered past. This is reflected in the way in which the stanzas end: the first two close with references to the present, the last two with memories of the past. 1.3 The Course of Life as a Process of Decline and Loss The establishment of the loss of original meaning and energy as a source of analogy between the individual sequences within the four stanzas is further supported by shared semantic features in linguistic expression of the experiences of childhood. We are concerned here above all with the seme complex lively and light (not heavy), which is used to associate childhood with full and untrammelled life, as is the case, for example,

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with 'peeping in' (1. 4: the sun as a living thing), 'Nor brought too long a day' (1. 6: the day as a gift), 'made of light' (1. 12: the special significance of the plants), 'swallows' and 'in feathers' (11. 20, 21: emphasis on lightness), 'close against the sky' (1. 28: nearness to heaven). In contrast, formulations such as 'borne my breath away' (1. 8), 'so heavy now' (1. 22), and 'farther off from heav'n' (1. 31) imply the absence of these qualities. This additional semanticization shows that the various sequences share a common underlying abstract structure of development: continual decline in the spontaneous abundance of meaning that children find in their experiences until this ability is extinguished, above all by later knowledge. The speaker is identical with the protagonist and is thus an autodiegetic narrator who reproduces the story of his own life and uses it to define himself as an individual. The narrative process is retrospective, not only in the neutral chronological sense (of looking back), but also with respect to its mood (one of nostalgia). The essential characteristic of the narrative act is the fact that the attitude of the remembering person is absolute and dominant and is combined with a purely past-orientated focus, as can be seen not least in the frequent repetition of Ί remember'. Accordingly, narration is motivated by regret and a nostalgic longing for the past. The poem narrates the prototypical Romantic story in which becoming an adult is a process of degeneration accompanied by an increasing desire to regain the lost paradise of childhood. By constructing his own story as one of loss and decline, the speaker correspondingly defines his identity in terms of incompleteness and absence. Finally, we note that the level of eventfulness is dependent on the historical context in which the poem is seen. Against the background of the inherited (pre-Romantic) concept of growing up as a process in which human existence attains perfection, a high level of eventfulness should be recorded, for the sequence deviates radically from such expectations. In the context of the Romantic glorification of childhood (as given paradigmatic poetic form in Wordsworth's 'My heart leaps up' and 'Intimations of Immortality', for example), the poem's eventfulness is much lower, for the negative course of the speaker's life and his evaluation of it are no more than what we would expect. Even in this case, however, the level of eventfulness is increased, as is typical of lyric poetry, by the emotional intensity: the nostalgic longing for lost roots is intensified by repeated references to the act of remembering in the title and the refrain-like opening line of each of the four stanzas.

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2 Philip Larkin's "I Remember, I Remember" up England by a different line For once, early in the cold new year, We stopped, and, watching men with number-plates Sprint down the platform to familiar gates, 'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. Ί was born here.' COMING

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I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign That this was still the town that had been 'mine' So long, but found I wasn't even clear Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates Were standing, had we annually departed

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FOR all those family hols? ... A whistle went: Things moved. 1 sat back, staring at my boots. 'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?' No, only where my childhood was unspent, I wanted to retort, just where I started:

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BY now I've got the whole place clearly charted. Our garden, first: where I did not invent Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits, And wasn't spoken to by an old hat. And here we have that splendid family

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I never ran to when I got depressed, The boys all biceps and the girls all chest, Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be 'Really myself. I'll show you, come to that, The bracken where I never trembling sat,

30

to go through with it; where she Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'. And, in those offices, my doggerel Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

35

WHO didn't call and tell my father There Before us, had we the gift to see ahead 'You look as though you wished the place in Hell,' My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well, I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.

DETERMINED

'NOTHING,

like something, happens anywhere.'

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Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London, 1988), 81-82. Philip Larkin (1922-1985).

The poem Ί Remember, 1 Remember' was published in 1955.

2.1 The Frame for Remembering Childhood: A Train Journey The speaker of Larkin's Ί Remember, I Remember'—who, as in Hood's poem, is also its protagonist—links two narrative sequences with one another. One is the account of a train journey through England with an unexpected stop in Coventry, the city of the speaker's birth, leading him to exchange words with his friend on the subject of growing up (11. 1-13, 3336), and the other an internalized mental narrative of his childhood and youth (11. 14-32). Both sequences are narrated retrospectively in the preterite, although they are located on different narrative levels, the narrative of the journey providing the frame for the story of the speaker's childhood and youth. The title is an explicit reference to the poem of the same name by Thomas Hood and thus indicates the foil against which Larkin's Ί Remember, I Remember' should be seen and from which it deviates significantly, as we shall see below. The first sequence of the train journey consists of a short stop made by the train in Coventry, the speaker's sudden recognition of the changed and near-forgotten city of his birth, and his subsequent departure (11. 11-12). Here, the speaker's cry of astonishment and his friend's enquiry stimulate his mental recapitulation of the story of his childhood and roots (the presentation of the second sequence). The frame for this first sequence is the situation of a train journey with its contemporary culture-specific implications: the idle traveller looks out of the window, gazes at what there is to see on the way, passively and with little interest; and then meets with transient, chance, incoherent, and superficial impressions. Travelling by train involves movement from starting point to a destination (as a script), with destination and arrival being more important than the route or possible breaks in the journey. These features are stressed above all at the beginning of the poem, in, for example, 'by a different line / for once' (11. 1-2), 'we stopped', and 'watching men with number-plates' (1. 3). No event takes place in this sequence. True, the unforeseen stop at the place of the speaker's birth constitutes a break with expectations, but it does not imply a decisive change. It is even possible to interpret the final remark that 'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere' (1. 36) as a succinct statement of the irrelevance and triviality of places and a further pointer to the

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fact that this sequence of spatial movement, the train journey, does not contain an event. 2.2 The Speaker's Memories of His Childhood In the second sequence (11. 14—32), the speaker relates his life story (childhood and adolescence) as an autodiegetic narrator in the form of a hypodiegetic narrative. He uses language to do so, but his words are not addressed out loud to his friend; they are meant for himself alone and are purely mental, present only in his consciousness. In chronological terms, this is a retrospective narrative: the speaker uses the preterite to look back on his childhood and youth from the position of an adult. The narrative act itself, however, is presented immediately, simultaneously: 'By now I've got the whole place clearly charted' (1. 16; my emphasis). Thus, the presentation of the second sequence frees itself from its temporally embedded position in the retrospective first sequence and, with the additional implication of special intimacy, presents the reader with a process unfolding in the present. The speaker's decision to direct this narrative only to himself (and the reader), but not to his friend, may be motivated by shame, the fact that it runs against general opinion, or by the reticence of a withdrawn individual. The conversation initiated by the speaker's recognition of his birthplace, particularly the question 'Was that [...] where you "have your roots'" (1. 13), begins activating the frame and script for the second sequence before we have left the first. Marked as a quotation, 'have your roots' strikes a note of irony. The frame activated is that of looking back on one's own life, taking interest in childhood and roots, for which the stop in the speaker's birthplace provides a stimulus. The question asked by the speaker's companion also makes reference to a particular script in this context. The metaphor of plants ('roots') implies organic growth and consistent development and rests on the fundamental significance of place for the beginning of a life story. The particular direction in which these implications point becomes clear from the reference to later literary activity ('my doggerel', 1. 28) combined with the title's allusion to Hood's poem, and in particular to the Romantic concept of childhood as a time of thriving imaginativeness. We are looking, it seems, at the schema of a traditional, ultimately Romantic story of an artist's life developing towards recognition and fame after noteworthy literary beginnings characterized by the Romantic idea of the child's natural imaginative creativity.

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But the memories of childhood that the speaker actually narrates deviate radically from this script. We find a purely negative narrative that, by recounting what did not happen to the speaker, negates the expectations raised.1 He was not struck by inspiration in a garden with flowers and fruits (11. 17-18), did not create a private world of the imagination by seeing life in things (1. 19), did not find the chance to be himself with a sympathetic neighbouring family when his parents failed to appreciate him (11. 20-24), did not experience the sexuality of love for the first time (11. 24-27), did not write poetry while working in the office (11. 28-29), and finally did not have his literary talent discovered by an important personality and mentioned to his father (11. 29-32). Nothing is said about what the speaker actually experienced, but it is implied that it was not significant in the way what is negated would have been. The places named (garden, neighbours' house, office) are clearly real, but nothing relevant or positive took place in them. Not only is the typical story of a poet's growth presented as something that did not happen (see the recurrent negatives), but it is also ironized through and through and made to seem ridiculous by means of massive exaggeration, cliches, and inappropriate collocations (e.g. 'blinding theologies of flowers and fruits', 1. 18; 'spoken to by an old hat', 1. 19; '"really myself", 1. 24; etc.). Thus, the Romantic story is rejected in two ways. 2.3 Hood and Larkin: Romantic and Modern Mentalities The particular characteristics of this sequence of childhood memories can be further revealed by means of an intertextual comparison with Hood's Ί Remember, I Remember', the foil directly alluded to in the title (cf. Rossen 1989:39-40). The two poems are similar in the formal significance they attribute to the experiences of childhood, but the essential differences are highlighted by the negation and ironization of Larkin's narrative with its superficially analogous focus on the period of childhood. The first point to strike our attention is the fact that Larkin refers to his literary activity and thereby (in his negated narrative) places his later development towards this end in the foreground, whereas Hood's interest is directed solely at his childhood in and of itself prior to any such development. The central difference lies in the fact that Larkin is a long way from Hood's Cf. Prince (1988) on the technique of narrating what did not happen, which he calls 'the disnarrated'.

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position of seeing growing up as a process of decline from an ideal, perfect state. Instead, he counters Hood's longing for the paradise-like state of childhood by displaying a pronounced revulsion towards that period of life, even associating it with Hell ('You look as if you wished the place in Hell', 1. 33). Correspondingly, he sets a generally ironic rejection of traditional models and the transfiguration of the past against Hood's nostalgic backward view. While the narrative stance of Hood's poem is shaped by the act of remembering, in Larkin, it is shaped by that of forgetting, or rather wanting to forget, and repression. However, we can also see this intention and the intense irony employed in pursuing it as signs of a feeling of regret or even of bitter disappointment about an insignificant, possibly unhappy childhood (cf. the paradoxical formulation 'where my childhood was unspent\ 1. 14; my emphasis).2 Intertextual relations highlight the difference between the concepts of childhood in Hood and Larkin. The difference can ultimately be reduced to that between Romanticism and modernism. It is the difference between looking back nostalgically on past imaginativeness and being fundamentally and bitterly disillusioned, between having a story of decline as a schema for the course of life and not having any consistent story for life at all. 2.4 Negation and Absence as an Event The elements of negation and irony now allow us to identify the event in the narrative process of the poem. A high level of eventfulness is produced by the radical rejection of the quoted script, that of an artist's teleologically determined career, and in particular also by the dismissal of the idea of being rooted and developing organically. The rejection of this concept is accentuated by ironic signals. Rather than presenting us with a specific story, the speaker insists on the absence of a story. As he puts it tersely at the end, 'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere'. From this perspective, the distinctive absence of a story is eventful. We are dealing here with a particularly radical kind of mediation event, for the negated and ironized sequence is ultimately made of rhetorical operations on the level of presentation. The disruption of expectations and the movement towards abstraction in the sententia-like formulation of the closing sentence point to what may be another aspect of the poem's event. It involves an act of recognition, of 2

Cf. Swarbrick (1995:61-62) and Rossen (1989:40).

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insight into the nature of the direction taken by the speaker's life (formulated in negations); in this respect, it constitutes a presentation event with respect to the speaker. In other words, the speaker defines himself by means of a story he narrates about himself and concludes by bringing to a pithy conclusion. Yet this is, paradoxically, a negated story—the 'nothappening' of a story. The speaker's ironic self-definition, performed here by presenting his own story as one that is absent or deficient, can be considered typical of the speaker in Larkin's lyric poetry. The role of irony in his admission and acceptance of his deficient existence is also typical. As the purely mental nature of the childhood narrative in Ί Remember, I Remember' shows, the speaker performs his act of self-definition, not for others, and not even for his friend, but only for himself (and also, of course, for the reader). It takes the form of a lonely act of achieving insight into and acceptance of himself. Furthermore, the eventfulness of this second sequence returns to and intensifies a characteristic element of the first sequence (the train journey): the questioning of the significance of place. In this respect, the poem thematizes the lack of roots and place met in modern experience and typical of modern existence. The function of narration in Larkin's poem is to be found in this complex form of selfdefinition. The temporal position of the narrative act supports the retrospective cognitive aspect of the event. All in all, then, narration in both sequences takes place by looking back in the preterite, but the narrative process itself (that of narrating the childhood experiences that did not happen) and the element of (eventful) insight at the end are made immediate by means of literal quotation and are portrayed in the present: 'By now I've got the whole place clearly charted [...]' (1. 16; my emphasis) and Ί suppose it's not the place's fault' (1. 35; my emphasis). 2.5 The Functionalization of Formal Poetic Techniques in Larkin and Hood To conclude, we note the links between the themes of the two poems and the formal elements of their prosodic structure. In Larkin's Ί Remember, I Remember', such a correlation is to be found mainly in the elaborate rhyme scheme. Each of the seven five-line stanzas has a different rhyme scheme: abccb, aabcd, effed, defgh, iihgg, hiklm, mlkkl, m. However, if, instead of following the stanza divisions, we segment the 36 lines of the poem into four groups of nine lines (marking the borders between them with //), the underlying system becomes apparent: abccb, aabc//d, effed,

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deff/gh, iihgg, hi//klm, mlkkl, m. It turns out that the rhymes, seemingly without structure, are based on a simple schema of permutations involving inversion and repetition: abc, cba, abc, def, fed, def, and so on. This principle of variation can be interpreted as pointing to the presence of monotonous repetitiveness and uneventfulness below the apparently varied surface of modern life. The (eventful) deviation from traditional models is a central theme of Larkin's poem. Clearly, this is also reflected in the form of text. In his Ί Remember, I Remember', Hood turns to a traditional stanza pattern, that of the ballad. Each of the four stanzas consists of two ballad stanzas with a series of four- and three-stress lines in which only the even lines rhyme: 4x 3a 4x 3a 4x 3b 4x 3b. The ballad stanza (known as the Chevy Chase stanza) is not only a traditional pattern, but also has distinctly archaic connotations because of its links with an earlier era (the late Middle Ages) and with pre-modern societies and stories (including heroic battles, magic powers, and fateful developments). For this reason, it was rediscovered and widely used by the Romantics (e.g. by Keats in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and Coleridge in the 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner') with their interest in basic, traditional forms of life as a contrast to the modernizing society they knew. Hood's use of this stanza form thus underlines the archaic pre-modern quality of unbroken unity and wholeness that he attributes to the life of children in whom these values have yet to be corrupted by the disillusionment of contemporary rationalism. Bibliography Hood, Thomas (1970). Selected Poems, ed. John Clubbe (Cambridge, MA). Larkin, Philip (1988). Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London). Prince, Gerald (1988). "The Disnarrated", in: Style 22, 1-8. Rossen, Janice (1989). Philip Larkin: His Life's Work (New York and London). Swarbrick, Andrew (1995). Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin. (London).

Peter Hühn

17 Eavan Bo land: "Ode to Suburbia"

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Six o'clock: the kitchen bulbs which blister Your dark, your housewives starting to nose Out each other's day, the claustrophobia Of your back gardens varicose With shrubs make an ugly sister Of you suburbia. How long ago did the glass in your windows subtly Silver into mirrors which again And again show the same woman Shriek at a child? Which multiply A dish, a brush, ash, The gape of a fish IN the kitchen, the gape of a child in the cot? You swelled so that when you tried The silver slipper on your foot It pinched your instep and the common Hurt which touched you made You human. No creatures of the streets will feel the touch Of a wand turning the wet sinews Of fruit suddenly to a coach, While this rat without leather reins Or a whip or britches continues Sliming your drains. No magic here. Yet you encroach until The shy countryside, fooled By your plainness falls, then rises From your bed changed, schooled Forever by your skill, Your compromises. and your metamorphosis Is now complete, although the mind Which spinstered you might still miss Your mystery now, might still fail To see your powers defined By this detail. MIDNIGHT

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BY this creature drowsing now in every house The same lion who tore stripes Once off zebras. Who now sleeps Small beside the coals. And may On a red letter day, Catch a mouse.

Eavan Boland, Collected Poems (Manchester, 1995), 44-45. Eavan Boland (1944-). The poem was first published in the anthology The War Horse (1975).

1 Ode Form, Context, and Narrative Structure The title of 'Ode to Suburbia' by the Irish poet Eavan Boland explicitly invites the reader to relate the poem to the conventions of the ode.1 In formal terms, the transposition of this classical lyric genre into English poetry is marked primarily by the apostrophe of a superhuman power or of a personified abstraction, and in functional terms (particularly since Romanticism) by the speaker's use of poetry as a medium of reflection and a source of reassurance. Accordingly, Boland's 'Ode' is directly addressed to the super-individual figure of 'suburbia', introduced in the title of the poem and again cited as addressee in line 6. The nature of this entity is— albeit with clearly ironic intent—evoked and presented in narrative form in the course of the poem. The figure of suburbia is thus the protagonist of the poem. As is generally the case in the ode, it has no voice of its own and is instead characterized by a narrative about it. 'Suburbia' refers topographically to the regions on the outskirts of big cities and socially to the mass of people who live there and their characteristic way of life. This world and way of life are first linked metonymically to the housewives who live there (1. 2) and then personified in one of them, a typical housewife (11. 6, 9), who maintains her representative status throughout the poem ('in every house', 1. 37). Housewives are ideally suited to represent this suburban environment because they are there throughout the day, as a result of which their personalities are shaped by it. In her narrative, the speaker traces a day in the life of the typical housewife from 6 a.m. to midnight, the changes she undergoes constituting the narrative sequence of the poem. The meaning of these changes is formed and generalized by correlation with other, secondary equivalences, particularly by intertextual 1

On Boland's themes and way of writing, cf. for example Matthews (1997:39-44).

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allusions (as we shall see in more detail below). By narrating this sequence in the second person, in the form of apostrophe, the speaker imposes a narrative of individual life on her addressee, thereby defining the super-individual identity of the latter. This situation can be interpreted in two ways: as a characterization of someone else (as in odes) or as a case of covert self-apostrophe, of self-characterization. On the level of the happenings, a change in the qualitative (or ontological) status of what happens can be noted as the stanzas progress. Using concrete statements, the first three stanzas refer mostly to realistic social incidents (ones involving mutual curiosity, a child, the kitchen) in the suburban home of the housewife. Subsequently, however, the poem moves into the domain of fantastic and fairytale transformations, for changes can now be caused by the influence of magical powers. Initially, we have instances of potential fantastic transformations failing to occur: magic is missing when fruit and rat do not become coach and coachman in lines 19-25. We then encounter cases in which such changes do take place: the borders of the countryside are seduced by the suburban atmosphere and what was once a lion-like strength is reduced to a minimum, to catching mice instead of tearing through zebras, in lines 25-42. These latter changes can be related to 'real' social and physical processes (the expansion of cities and the loss of vitality respectively), but the imagery used has an alienating effect and makes them fantastic. In fact, this shift to fantasy is anticipated by isolated allusions to a fairytale (11. 5, 8, 15) in the first three stanzas. 2 Realistic and Fantastic Schemata The everyday existence of women in suburban homes can be taken as the frame (the situational context or scene) of the poem's narrative. More specifically, the consequences of this suburban existence for women can be identified as thematic elements of the frame—the forlornness of their life, their social marginalization, and their loss of vitality, all of which provide the context for what happens. Two scripts can be distinguished against the background of this frame. One is concerned predominantly with the realistic level of what takes place, the other predominantly with the fantastic level. First, the chronological course of the daily life of a woman in a suburban environment is activated as the realistic schema for what takes place, but only in the form of isolated elements. Even from the beginning, it is alienated considerably and generalized to have representative status in

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showing the woman's increasing entanglement in this existence: neighbours spy on each other from early in the morning (11. 1-5), they discipline their noisy children and prepare meals (11. 9-13), and they long for a different life, especially after the working day is over (11. 31-36). The second schema for what happens is referred to both at the beginning ('ugly sister', 1. 5; 'mirrors', 1. 8; 'silver slippers', 1. 15) and, more intensively, from the fourth stanza onwards. In this schema, dreary everyday existence undergoes a magical transformation ('the touch / Of a wand', 11. 19-20) following the model provided by the fairytale of Cinderella (in Charles Perrault's version).2 Here, however, the allusions to this script serve only to break the expectation that the state of repression and disownment will undergo a fairytale transformation into one of recognition and female self-fulfilment. This expectation is broken in a number of ways. Rather than being Cinderella herself, the protagonist's role is that of her ugly sister (1. 5), who, as in the fairytale, repeatedly looks at herself in the mirror (11. 8-9). The slipper does not fit her properly (11. 14-16), a carriage is not magically provided to take her to the ball (11. 19-24), and there is no magic fairy (1. 20) to liberate her from her unfortunate condition. Instead of winning herself a prince with her beauty, the protagonist, suburbia, possesses a 'plainness' with which she seduces the gullible countryside into losing its innocence and sharing in her own corrupt existence (11. 26-27). And yet, despite this striking failure to follow the Cinderella schema, the protagonist remains covertly faithful to it. She continues to see herself as a potential Cinderella (11. 39-40) whose special status is, though hidden (a 'mystery', 1. 34), nonetheless present, lying dormant with the potential to become a reality as a result of a miraculous change at some point in the future. The metaphor with which this potential is described is not drawn from the fairytale of Cinderella but consists instead of the untamable savageness of a lion. This defiant insistence on the protagonist's identity is underlined both by the parallel between 'the same woman' (1. 9) and 'the same lion' (1. 38) and by the association of the lion with Cinderella (both sleep on the hearth, by the coal and in the ashes respectively).3 Bitter sarcasm in the closing lines of the poem shows that this expectation and self-image, the protagonist's hope that she will be transformed and her hidden potential identity revealed (1. 31), are nothing more than an 2 3

Cf. 'Cinderella', in Perrault (1972). Cf. Perrault (1972) (hence her name, which is derived from Latin cinis, ashes).

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illusion. In the folk-tale, midnight marks the beginning of the hour during which magical powers and spells can take effect. In the fairytale of Cinderella, on the other hand, midnight brings magic to an end. Boland's poem draws on the two concepts in different ways: by virtue of the image of the lion and its ironization, midnight is both the time at which the hope of transformation is experienced and the time at which that hope is shown to be an illusion. On the one hand, the choice of the lion as a metaphor expresses the woman's desperate conviction that her vitality and wildness, the loss of which is—she hopes—only superficial, will be miraculously restored ('your mystery', 'your powers', 11. 34, 35). On the other hand, this hope turns sour when the metaphor is developed and makes a mockery of it: the lion will not be able to catch anything more than a mouse (instead of zebras, its usual prey), and that only on a certain special day ('on a red letter day', 1. 41). These occurrences and ideas are not presented neutrally by the speaker; instead, the use of focalization means that, throughout the poem but most clearly at its end, they are evaluated critically (see more on this below). The irony and glaring sarcasm of the last two stanzas are a particularly clear manifestation of the sustained distancing and negative focalization of the triumph of suburban existence and the changes that do not occur. This critical perspective is apparent in direct evaluations ('make an ugly sister / of you suburbia', 11. 5-6) and judgements ('you encroach [...]', 11. 25-30), as well as in indirect characterization (the parallel between 'gape of a fish' and 'gape of a child' in lines 12 and 13) and implicit contrasts (between the rat in the fairytale and 'this rat [...] sliming your drains', 11. 22-24). 3 The Structure of the Course of Suburban Existence The combination of the two scripts and the characteristic deviations from the norm expressed in presentation and critical focalization as described above constitute the narrative sequence of the poem: the story of personified suburbia in the allegorical form of a day in the life of a housewife in the world on the outskirts of a modem city. That life is determined by her social and spatial marginalization within the family (her place is with the child in the kitchen) and, above all, by the loss of vitality that she suffers at least in part as a result of this, even though she retains an (illusory) awareness of her true nature as something very different. It is stressed throughout that the changes, or rather the lack thereof, relate specifically

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to the femininity of the protagonist, to her role as woman and mother, and that, as well as suffering as a victim of the conditions of suburban existence, she intensifies them and helps them spread because of her mentality (as will be shown in more detail below) and her role as a temptress. Initially, her position as a victim is foregrounded. There are references to her paralysing confinement ('claustrophobia', 1. 3), her unappealing appearance ('varicose', 'ugly', 11. 4, 5), her place in a world where privacy is not respected (1. 2), and her subjection to the duties of cooking and caring for her child (11. 10-13). In addition, her status as a victim is highlighted by the reigning suburban mentality in which she becomes an aging spinster ('the mind / which spinstered you', 11. 32-33) and is thereby deprived of her feminine attractiveness. If we take the reference to the swelling of her body ('You swelled so [...]', 1. 14) as indicating a new pregnancy (a first child has already been mentioned), we have in her future motherhood an explanation for why she is unable to put the silver slipper on properly and so, unable to fulfil the prerequisite for being magically liberated from her Cinderella-existence ('You swelled so that when you tried [...]', 11. 14— 15), is subject to the general constraints of the human condition ('the common / Hurt [...] made / You human', 11. 16-18). Yet we can also observe that the attitude and behaviour of the protagonist mean that she herself strengthens the hold that suburban life has on her and is partly responsible for the stultified and paralysed existence that results. She is prepared to adapt and compromise, and this readiness then fools others ('schooled / [...] by your skill, / Your compromises', 11. 28-30). The reference to 'the mind / Which spinstered you' (11. 32-33), too, can be interpreted as referring to an attitude in the protagonist herself that is responsible for the decline in vitality (and sexuality) that leaves her an old spinster (11. 32-36). More generally, the discrepancy between the passive and active aspects of the protagonist's role, captured by the ambivalence of 'the mind / Which spinstered you' in particular, also determines the mode of speech in the poem. This apostrophe, which is superficially directed at the figure of suburbia, should be read primarily, not as a distanced allegorization of the conditions of suburban life, but can actually be interpreted as an utterance in which the speaker addresses herself and associates the story of an unsuccessful change with herself. This is suggested by the fact that suburbia is presented in personified form using experiences from the everyday life of a woman. Accordingly, the speaker is to be treated as autodiegetic rather than heterodiegetic and identified as a suburban housewife who seeks to capture the conditions of her life and understand herself by means

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of the poem's narrative. More specifically, she employs critical selfobservation and self-distancing, manifested in focalization, to do so. A paradoxical ambiguity marks the distinctive connection of the two scripts and the bitter irony (above all at the end) to which her counterfactual insistence on the survival of her vitality is subject. On the one hand, the belief that she is different is shown to be an illusion; on the other, this self-ironizing discovery is, because it demonstrates the faculty of selfcriticism, itself evidence that she is indeed different, that she has not really been completely corrupted by the suburban world after all. 4 The Problem of Eventfiilness Together with the critical and ironic focalization, the linking of the realistic and fairytale scripts leads to the problem of eventfiilness in the Ode to Suburbia'. It has a complex variety of aspects. First, suburban existence is, following the realistic script, marked by a basic uneventfulness because of its routine and repetition. The uneventfulness of the ordinary is characterized as a deficiency by the evocation of the fairytale script; leading to the desire for an eventful magical transformation, a possible way of escaping from suburban existence. And this potential eventfulness is then itself explicitly negated in stanzas 4 and 5 as something that is factually impossible (due to the overarching power of the conditions of suburban existence). The desire for an eventful change ('metamorphosis', 1. 31) and its disappointment are repeated in the counterfactual retention of the idea of hidden vitality and the ironic exposure of this as an illusion in stanzas 6 and 7. This dual evocation of a desired change and its negation causes the level of (potential) eventfulness to increase considerably, as well as to make the lack thereof, a correspondingly frustrating experience, particularly apparent. The function of the ironic and distanced focalization is not just to underline sarcastically the disillusionment that follows the protagonist's desire to undergo a magical fairytale transformation. It is also plausible to see it as suggesting that a realistic change is necessary. Seen in this way, the poem's narrative sequence does indeed lack an event (with respect to the level of the happenings), but the elaborate ironic mediation of the sequence on the level of the presentation provides this uneventfulness with an additional facet. It points towards an event that is yet to be realized, a realistic, specifically non-fantastic change: overcoming the stultifying conditions of suburban life, escaping from this world.

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The resultant thematic complex of change and lack of change is also reflected on a formal level in the elaborate rhyme system of the poem. Each of the seven stanzas contains three rhymes, differing from stanza to stanza and making superficial change apparent. The internal substance of this change, however, is based on the principles of repetition and variation, rather than on a true development in the rhyme patterns. The rhyme schemes for each of the stanzas are as follow: (1) abc bac; (2) abb acc; (3) aba cbc; (4) aba cbc; (5) abc bac; (6) aba cbc; and (7) abb cca. Stanza 5 repeats the scheme of stanza 1, and the schemes of stanzas 3, 4, and 6 are identical. Stanza 7 displays a unique scheme that has not occurred before, although closer examination shows that it is actually a repetition of that of stanza 2 with the second half of the pattern inverted {cca instead of acc). On a semantic level, then, the permutations in the rhyme schemes of the poem can be understood as formally analogous to the circularity and constant, unchanging repetition that characterize the world of suburban existence. 5 The Function of Narration We can now summarize our findings by describing how the poem portrays the function of narration for the speaker. The ironic and distancing narrative of a routine day in her life and the changes that fail to occur in it allows the speaker to engage critically with (her own) suburban existence. She seeks to understand the mechanisms that govern the structure of her daily existence and her life in general, the mechanisms behind the existential conditions and constraints imposed on her natural vitality by her environment and its mentality. She seeks to expose her secret dreams of transformation (her desire for metamorphosis) as the illusions they are. And finally, she seeks to use this critical attitude to go beyond illusions and assure herself of the identity and vitality she would like to have and the necessity of the change she would have to undergo. The narrative recapitulation of the course of her day takes place simultaneously: as shown by the use of the present tense and the deictic references to the here and now of the speaker in the first and fourth to seventh stanzas ('here', 1. 25; 'now', 11. 32, 37), the narrative act is temporally concurrent with the chain of experiences. These experiences frame references to memories of the past (stanzas 2 and 3) and expectations of a future in which changes do not occur (beginning of stanza 4). The simultaneity of narration, together with the sarcastically and ironically distanced focalization and the fact that

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the speaker addresses herself, implies that the adoption of a critical attitude and critical self-observation are being used as part of a search for self-assurance in life. As is often the case in lyric poetry, the position of the narrative act in the structure of the narrative sequence is prior to the event. In the O d e to Suburbia', this act occurs at the critical point, the point at which the eventful change could, or rather should, occur. The necessity of that change is made clear by the thematic prominence given to the uneventfulness of prior experience by the narrative act. The change, however, does not occur (or has not yet occurred) in the poem itself. Bibliography Boland, Eavan (1995). Collected Poems (Manchester). Dorgan, Theo (ed.) (1996). Irish Poetry since Kavanagh (Dublin). Haberstroh, Patricia Boyle (1996). Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets (Syracuse, NY). Matthews, Steven (1997). Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation: The Evolving Debate 1969-Present (Basingstoke). Perrault, Charles (1972). Cinderella or, The Little Glass Slipper, ill. Errol LeCain (London).

Jens Kiefer

18 Peter Reading: "Fiction" is a fictitious character arrived at an age and bodily state rendering suicide superfluous, would rather sip Grands Crus than throw his leg. He is a writer of fiction. He says 'Even one's self is wholly fictitious.' Hatred once drew him to satiric verse but he could think of nothing to rhyme with 'Manageress of the Angel Hotel', or Ί call my doctor "Killer" Coldwill" (a fictitious name, 'Coldwill', by the way), or 'Headmaster of the Secondary Mod.' DONALD

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DONALD has created a character called 'Donald' or 'Don' who keeps a notebook dubbed Donald's Spleneticisms, e.g.: 'Complacent as a Country Town G P \ 'Contemptible as County Council Clerks', Ά hateful little Welshman shared my train with no lobes to his ears and yellow socks', 'Seedy as Salesmen of Secondhand Cars'.

IN Donald's novel, 'Don' writes poetry titles such as 'It's a Small World', 'Fiction', Ύ - X', 'Remaindered', which he sends to literary periodicals under the nom de plume 'Peter Reading' (the present writer is seeking advice from his attorney, Donald & Donald). This fictitious bard has a doctor called 'Coldwill' who sleeps with the manageress of the Angel (and sues 'Don' for libel). IN Donald's novel, 'Don' (whose nom de plume is 'Peter Reading') sues a man whose real name is 'Peter Reading' for having once written a fiction about a poet who wrote verse concerning a novelist called 'Donald' whose book Fiction deals with 'Don' (a poet who writes satirical verse

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and is sued by an incompetent quack, the manageress of a pub, a Celt with lobeless ears and yellow socks, acned Council clerks and a Range Rover salesman). IN 'Reading's' fiction, the poet who writes verse concerning the novelist 'Donald' is sued by the latter who takes offence at the lines '... an age and bodily state rendering suicide superfluous, would rather sip Grands Crus than throw his leg'. For the Defence, 'Donald, QC' says that 'Even one's self is wholly fictitious.'

Peter Reading, Collected Poems I: Poems 1970-1984 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1995), 13738. Peter Reading (1946-). 'Fiction' was first published in 1979 in the collection of the same name.

Peter Reading's poem 'Fiction' displays a clear difference in complexity between the presentation and the happenings. The happenings contain no more than a minimal sequence of actions, but their presentation is sufficiently complex to problematize and retard processes of reception such as associating traits with characters and following the course of the action. The reason for this lies in the fact that the same name is given to several characters in the replication of the same set of actions on different narrative levels {mise en abyme), which becomes a structural principle of the text, and in the collapse of the boundaries between those levels (metalepsis).1 1 Sequence Structure and Eventfulness It is striking that, although several narrative levels are constructed in 'Fiction', there is never a change of speaker and the different levels all share the same series of happenings. The same sequence of actions is presented on each of the different levels: it is only the actors that change, and they too can hardly be distinguished because of their shared names. As a result, 1

For definitions of mise en abyme and metalepsis, cf. Rimmon-Kenan (2002:94f.) and Genette (1980:234ff.).

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the diegetic level loses its privileged place in the evocation of the happenings, for it cannot be grasped as a main action elucidated by subordinate levels. The sequence of actions is based on the script of libel action, according to which a person takes legal measures against another person who has written something about him or her that he or she believes to be a misrepresentation. The script takes on the particular form it has in this poem because of its position against the background of the situational frame of literary writing. The elements of the sequence thus include the act with which a fictional work is produced by an author and the accusation of the latter by someone who feels injured by that work. This sequence structure is partially varied to the extent that plaintiff and defendant can exchange places: the defendants can become plaintiffs who feel libelled and themselves take action against an author. Libellous writing is motivated by hate: 'Hatred once drew him to satiric verse' (1. 7). However, this motivation for the act of writing is not detailed to the same degree on all levels. The succession of writing and accusation is endowed with the property of eventfulness in so far as the writer is accused by a fictive figure invented by him in each case. Here, inside the fiction, metalepsis pierces the boundary between the fictional and factual worlds, for it allows invented characters to leave the pages containing them and interact with those who invented them. 2 Narrator and Narrative Levels In order to illustrate the complex replication and transgression of boundaries, we must first distinguish between the different levels. Separating and naming the various levels is possible, however, only to a limited degree, for the form of metalepsis involved in the poem amalgamates two narrative levels each time it occurs and thus subverts the logical distinction between them. Strictly speaking, a question such as 'to what level does the accusation of the extradiegetic narrator by a hypodiegetic character belong?' cannot be answered because the action of accusing is part of an act of level-transgression. The division into levels that follows, then, is pragmatic in function: it allows us to reduce the complexity of the poem and make its structure easier to grasp. Again, we should note that all the narrative levels embedded in one another are ultimately the creation of the extradiegetic narrator. He quotes the speech of characters and refers to the content of the books written by them, but he is the only speaker. We are

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dealing, then, with various narrative levels, but a single narrator. Furthermore, the presence of the extradiegetic narrator can be treated as that of an overt narrator because his commentary on the characters and identification of himself as 'the present writer' (1. 26) make it apparent that he is the source of what is said and show that it is his speech act that is being presented. Λ

1. The extradiegetic level is where the act of production takes place. The extradiegetic speaker implicitly directs thematic attention towards this act by referring to the Active nature of the characters (11. 1,11). 2. Donald is the protagonist at the diegetic level (11. 1-14). He is introduced as a Active character right at the beginning, but without the text from which he comes being specified. Donald is an aging, sick writer who began writing satiric verses because of his hatred, but was unable to complete them because of a lack of suitable rhymes. The characters of his poems, on whom he clearly hopes to take revenge, are the manageress of a hotel and Dr 'Coldwill'. Donald has also written a novel whose protagonist is called 'Donald' or 'Don'. 3. This 'Don' is the protagonist of the hypodiegetic level (11. 14-34). He is also a writer and keeps a notebook of aphorisms whose alliteration and sarcastic title make them seem absurd. 'Don' also writes poems. Their titles correspond to those of poems by the empirical Peter Reading, and they, like the poem 'Fiction', belong to Reading's Fiction collection. 'Don' publishes these poems under the pseudonym of'Peter Readingand the extradiegetic narrator, who claims to be the real Peter Reading, is considering legal action against him. The lawyers of the apparently real Peter Reading have the name Donald & Donald. Although the doubling of the name shows that they are lawyers running a legal practice, single quotations marks and italicized text are the only ways of distinguishing accuser from accused, both of whom share the same name (Donald, Peter Reading). 'Don' is sued by someone else, too. 'Coldwill', his doctor, sleeps with the manageress of a pub and sues him for libel. Here we see the diegetic level being replicated: 'Coldwill' and the manageress of the 'Angel' pub are also characters in an unfinished poem by the diegetic Donald.3 Further-

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Cf. Rimmon-Kenan (2002:97-101) on the concept of the overt narrator. The two Coldwills are distinguished by the use of italics, but the pub manageress is not set apart typographically.

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more, the motivation for 'Coldwill"s action is unclear on the hypodiegetic level, but it is possible to explain it by turning to the injurious epithet of Killer"' (1. 10) that is associated with the doctor on the diegetic level. In this case, however, an additional case of metalepsis is present. Not only do we meet 'Don' as the accused, but he also acts as the accuser. He takes action against an author—whose name, 'Peter Reading', is treated as authentic—for writing a book about a certain poet, which suggests that the latter should be identified as 'Don'. 4. The content of the book by 'Peter Reading' about this poet constitutes a hypo-hypodiegetic level (11. 34-35; 11. 42-49). It seems reasonable to link this poet with the Peter Reading who is presented as a real person ('the present writer', 1. 26), for he, too, is a poet sued by a character he has invented. We then find ourselves dealing with both the replication and the crossing of levels. On the one hand, the hypohypodiegetic level replicates elements of the action of the hypodiegetic level; on the other, the creator of a character becomes a character invented by a character he has created. As on the diegetically higher level, this poet is sued by a character he has invented, the novelist 'Donald'. The latter feels affronted by statements made about him ("'.. .an age and bodily state rendering suicide superfluous, would rather sip Grands Crus than throw his leg'", 11. 45-47). At the same time, this characterization of 'Donald' corresponds to what the extradiegetic narrator says about the diegetic Donald. And, as there, so here the defence takes the form of the words '"Even one's self is wholly fictitious'" (1. 49). The protagonist of the hypo-hypodiegetic level, 'Donald', has also written a book with the title Fiction and a protagonist called 'Don'. The technique of distinguishing between characters of the same name using italics and single quotation marks may well start to fall apart here, for the diegetic and the hypo-hypohypodiegetic 'Don' are both set in the same style. Either the diegetic 'Don' has made himself (in the third person) into a theme of his own book, or we are dealing with another case of metalepsis. 5. Like the diegetic Donald, the 'Don' who is active on the hypo-hypohypodiegetic level (11. 36-41) writes satiric verses and is accused by a series of people who are either characters in a poem by the diegetic Donald or characters from the notebook of the hypodiegetic 'Donald'. The extradiegetic narrator presents these characters as absurd figures by means of alliteration and value judgements such as 'incompetent quack' (1. 38). This can be seen as a reason for their hatred and accu-

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sation of one another such that the motivation for the actions of the characters crosses the boundaries of the diegetic level, for it is the extradiegetic narrator who maligns them in this way. 3 Self-Reflexivity It is clear that it is not possible to separate the levels unambiguously in all cases: the use of the same name for several characters and the narrative techniques of metalepsis and mise en abyme deliberately erode the distinctions between levels. As a result, the way in which the poem is mediated becomes a theme: it can be described as atypical of lyric poetry and draws on techniques that we would normally expect to find in the post-modern novel. These techniques include the use of the real author's name and the highlighting of the text's fictional status. By presenting himself as the real author in the outside world, the extradiegetic narrator activates the genre schema of autobiographical writing, which is based on the identity of narrator and author. The identity of narrator and author implies that we are dealing with a non-fictional (i.e. factual) text.4 However, even the title of the poem, with its indication of the fictionality of what is presented, contradicts this assumption. The word 'fiction' not only refers to the fictionality of a statement, but also serves as a generic term for narrative texts. By beginning his poem with the generic term for narrative literature, the extradiegetic speaker provides a meta-textual commentary on his behaviour in the text. The problematic relationship between novel and poem is not only suggested by the form of the presentation, but is also introduced thematically by the embedding of genres in one another. In 'Fiction', novels feature in the content of poems, and poems appear in novels. For example, 'Donald', a character in Donald's novel, writes poems, and the novelist 'Donald', who has written a book about the poet 'Don', is a character in a poem. The title 'Fiction' points to a further opposition, one that makes up the self-referential component of the poem but is nonetheless systematically blurred by it: the distinction between poetic invention and authenticity in the real world, between the reality and fictionality of things that take place. Almost all of the characters introduced in 'Fiction' are marked as fictive by the extradiegetic narrator. In some cases, the characters even comment on this status themselves, as with the diegetic Donald and the 4

Cf. Ryan (1980).

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hypo-hypodiegetic 'Donald': '"Even one's self is wholly fictitious'" (11. 6, 49). The extradiegetic narrator is an exception, for he presents himself as a person (assumed to be) factually existent in the real world. However, he violates the rule that prevents real people and Active characters from interacting in the real world: the extradiegetic narrator takes action against a Active character invented by him for using his name as a pseudonym and thereby casting doubt on his authenticity. This pattern (a real person takes action against a Active character) is then repeated and replicated, the Peter Reading marked as real being accused by a character he has invented. The use of the same name for several characters also contributes to the erosion of the distinction that the extradiegetic narrator draws between real and invented characters. For example, as well as the extradiegetic narrator, another character has the name ''Peter Reading1; coming from Donald's novel, he is nonetheless also characterized as real. The relationship between the two versions of Peter Reading thus takes the form of inversion: one takes action against a character invented by him, the other is accused by a character invented by him. The difference between the Peter Reading who is identified as real and 'Peter Reading', a character in a novel, is therefore a small one.5 By considering the opposition between the fictitious and the real, we are able to see how the text simultaneously stresses and blurs differences. The marking and levelling of the difference between real and fictive characters serves, as mentioned above, to thematize poetic self-referentiality (in the sense of metafictionality). It is also, however, part of a larger legal situation, which structures and semanticizes the text in its totality. The action of accusing and the action of defence ('"Donald, QC"\ 1. 48) are both part of the legal setting.6 Accordingly, an accusation is found on all levels apart from the extradiegetic and diegetic ones, the plaintiff being motivated by libellous statements in a literary work by the defendant.7 The

5

6

7

With the removal of a narrative level, the difference would be levelled completely. We could also assume the identity of the 'present writer' in line 26 and 'Peter Reading' in lines 32 and 33. This would mean that the same happenings are narrated twice and lead to the paradoxical conclusion that the extradiegetic narrator is himself an invented character. The letters QC stand for 'Queen's Counsel', a title for distinguished barristers in the English legal system. The action of defamation is present on both these levels. The extradiegetic narrator portrays the character Donald as ridiculous, and the latter does the same to his doctor and the hotel manageress.

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legal act of bringing a case implies that plaintiff and defendant are individuals in the real world. Furthermore, the ability to take action against an author on the basis of his work depends on a concept of individual authorship. An individual can be prosecuted for what has been said only if it can be demonstrated that he or she is the source of the statement. This is precisely the logic that 'Donald' makes use of when he, as the accused, refers to his own Active status, thereby implying that he cannot be held responsible for what he is accused of. The legitimacy of attributing statements to an author is systematically problematized in 'Fiction', for all the authors and possibly the extradiegetic narrator as well are presented as Active characters. So, although discrediting the idea that the author lies behind what is said and negating the status of the author as a legal subject forms part of the strategy of the text, the poem also demonstrates the power of the author to create and unfold worlds in the act of writing: the extradiegetic narrator, who presents himself as the real author, holds all the strands of the happenings in his hands. He is the only speaker in the poem and denies his characters the opportunity of becoming narrators in their own right. The power of fiction allows him to create a world in which the distinction between fictionality and factuality has been suspended. His abiity, within fiction, to neutralize criteria of factuality thus underlines still farther the fictionality of the poem. The fictional pact with the reader is preserved. 'Fiction', then, demonstrates the primacy of fictionality over factuality: the narrator's creative gift is so great that he is able to entangle himself in paradoxes (being taken to court by his own creations) without losing control of the narrative. The problematization of the concepts of authorship and fictionality can be interpreted in two ways: either as an affirmation of post-modern theories in which such strategies of problematization originate, or as an illustration and criticism of them.8 The final line of the poem, '"Even one's self is wholly fictitious'", can then be understood, not just as the words of a character in the fictional world, but also as a statement by the author about reality, which, drawing on post-modern tendencies to extend the concept of textuality, is itself treated as textually constructed. This self-referential aspect of the text, in which the text comments on the methods used in it, thus becomes an essential part of the 8

The text itself does not provide sufficient evidence to decide with certainty whether the textual methods should indeed be treated as signals of irony and/or as criticism of postmodern theories. To answer this question, we would have to leave the level of the text and consider information about the real author's position and/or his other works.

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story, brought into being through the use of paradoxical narrative methods. This means that the story on the level of the happenings (the story of an author who is accused of libel) recedes into the background behind the level of presentation. A story can also be reconstructed there, a story in which the rules of the logic of communication are repeatedly broken. Put another way, the metaleptic form of the presentation narrates about narrative conventions and the nature of the fictional. Reading's poem could quite easily have had a different title: 'Metafiction' or 'Metanarration'.9 Bibliography Genette, Gerard (1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, tr. J. E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY). Hühn, Peter (1995). "Postmoderne Tendenzen in der britischen Gegenwartslyrik: Formen, Funktionen, Kontexte", Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 28, 295-331. Martin, Isabel (1996). Das Werk Peter Readings (1970-1994). Interpretation und Dokumente (Heidelberg). Nünning, Ansgar (2001). "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie: Definition, Typologie und Grundriß einer Funktionsgeschichte metanarrativer Erzähleräußerungen", AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 26, 125-164. Nünning, Ansgar (2005). "On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology and an Outline of the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary", in: John Pier (ed.), The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology (Berlin etc), 11-57. Reading, Peter (1979). Fiction (London). Reading, Peter (1995). Collected Poems I: Poems 1970-1984 (Newcastle upon Tyne), 137-38. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London). Ryan, Marie-Laure (1980). "Fiction, Non-Factuals, and the Principle of Minimal Departure", Poetics Today 9,403-422. Waugh, Patricia (1984). Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London).

9

Cf. the theoretical approaches in Nünning (2001; 2005) and Waugh (1984). Nünning assumes that metanarrativity and metafictionality can be distinguished in the majority of cases—metanarration then means that the narrative act is thematized in such a way that the act itself and the role of the speaker are foregrounded, rather than the fictive status of the happenings.

Peter Hülm

19 Conclusion: The Results of the Analyses and Their Implications for Narratology and the Theory and Analysis of Poetry The preceding studies in textual analysis are evaluated from two main points of view in this conclusion.1 First (1), from a narratological perspective, we consider the extent to which narration in poems displays features and functions unique to or distinctive of the lyric—in other words, do the analyses allow us to expand our catalogue of narrative forms or improve our understanding of narratology? We then (2) turn our attention to the theory of the lyric and consider whether and what lessons the narratological studies in this volume have for the theory and analysis of lyric poetry. Finally (3), after these theoretical issues have been covered, we look briefly at the possibility of identifying period-specific characteristics and trends in the poems. The extent to which the significance of our findings can be generalized is inevitably somewhat limited by the choice of texts. Even so, although only a relatively small number of poems have been examined, the majority of them are found in respected anthologies, meaning that their canonical status allows us to consider them representative of the periods in which they were written. As pointed out above (see p. 10), the selection of poems in which the speaker's reference to him- or herself is markedly prominent is not the result of a subjectivist definition of the lyric genre. Instead, it is justified by the observation that the majority of English poems from all periods in standard anthologies have a speaker who refers to him- or herself.2 Bearing in mind that the textual data was selected on this basis, the tendencies identified below should be understood as heuristic hypotheses about the theory and history of lyric poetry—they are intended to stimulate further research in this field. The place of lyric poetry in text theory as outlined in the introduction (see p. 3) is used to help structure the following survey of the aspects of narrativity in the lyric and the discussion of the lessons to be drawn in the

2

The introduction outlines the analytical approach involved and describes the concepts employed. For reasons of clarity, the explanations of some terms are repeated here. See p. 10, n. 24 in the introduction.

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analysis and theory of lyric poetry. To recap, it was proposed that narration is an anthropologically universal act of communication, can be described narratologically in terms of the distinction between two basic aspects, sequentiality and mediacy, and could be used as the basis for the definition of the lyric genre. Mediacy can be analysed in terms of mediating entities (real author, abstract author / composing subject, speaker / narrator, and characters) and modes of mediation (voice and focalization). Accordingly, it was suggested, lyric poetry in the narrow sense (i.e. not just narrative poetry) can be defined as a special variant of narration in which the possible levels of mediation and mediating entities are employed to varying degrees (see p. 3). Lyric texts can instantiate the two fundamental narrative constituents of the narrative process equally well (the arrangement of the happenings into a temporal sequence on the one hand and the organization of mediating entities and the manipulation of modes of mediation on the other). However, in a manner analogous to the speech of characters in dramatic texts, they are able to make it seem as if mediacy is replaced by the performative immediacy of speech. It should be stressed here that sequentiality (and with it eventfulness) is the most important factor in the definition of narrativity in narrative literature and the lyric (and also the drama): different text-types such as descriptions, arguments, and explanations necessarily contain the dimension of mediacy, but temporal structure alone is a constitutive element of all kinds of narrative text. Sequentiality in the lyrical poem is characteristically marked by a tendency to use summarizing narration and compressed references to temporal processes, as opposed to the greater detail provided in narrative texts and, to a lesser degree, in dramas. 1 The Forms and Functions of the Narrative Elements in Lyric Poetry To show how the lyric-specific characteristics of poems tend to make narrativity in them different from that in narrative texts, we need a general frame of reference that specifies the typical features of how stories are narrated in a literary context and thus provides a foil against which comparison can take place. One such frame of reference is provided by prototype theory; drawing on it, we shall take the (folk- or) fairytale as the pro-

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totype of literary narration.3 Its main features are as follows. With respect to mediacy, it has a heterodiegetic narrator who does not appear as an individual, the narrative act is not thematized, the abstract author / composing subject is (ideologically) congruent with the narrator, external focalization is used, and narration is retrospective throughout. With respect to sequentiality, the course of the happenings is markedly eventful, the happenings and the event have a physical, social status (i.e. they are not located in a human mind), and a central conventional frame and script are activated (e.g. the course of life or the act of proving oneself in a series of tests followed by a reward). Turning to this prototype as a heuristic (but not normative) point of reference makes it possible to give a clear outline of forms of narrativity in the lyric. This is not to say, however, that numerous deviations from this prototypical model are not found in narrative literature, too, particularly that of the twentieth century.4 A general result of the preceding analyses is that it is possible to identify a variety of narrative elements in all the poems examined: all the basic components of narrativity were found to be present: sequentiality—the temporal structuring of elements on the level of the happenings (and differently on the level of the narrative act) and mediacy—the transformation of the chain of happenings into its textual presentation as well as the thematization of a mediating entity, a narrator or speaker. Using these components, the manifestations of the narrative element in lyric poetry will now be summarized, classified, and described in terms of their function. We turn first to the level of mediation. 1.1 Mediacy: Mediating Entities and Modes of Mediation The thematic principle behind the choice of poems analysed in this volume (the speaker thematizing him- or herself) restricts the range of forms of mediation that are encountered. The first feature affected by this is the position of the speaker, who is homodiegetic in all the texts, and autodiegetic in most of them. Protagonist and speaker, that is to say, fall together as one and the same individual entity. The resultant self-reference is typi3

4

Werner Wolf (2002:35-37) has employed the fairytale as a prototype of literary narration for analogous purposes. Clear signs of the problematization of traditional eventfulness and its retrospective presentation can be seen as early as the nineteenth century, for example in Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Dickens's Great Expectations, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Hardy's Jude the Obscure.

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cally made explicit by the use of the first-person pronoun. In some cases (Keats and Boland), it is concealed behind apostrophe in the second person, but can still be recognized as an external projection of the speaker's psyche onto another entity. In each case, this concealment of self-reference, which is also partially obscured in some other poems (Gray and Coleridge), has a function relating to the problem of the poem's theme (a crisis of creativity or insecure identity): it prevents the self-imposed paralysis that would result from excessive self-awareness. Thus, despite the merger of speaker and protagonist in one and the same person, the theoretical distinction between the two positions must be retained, now in the sense of the difference between the Ί ' as subject and the Ί ' as object. The same basic distinction applies to the apparent immediacy of the speaker's self-expression. From a narratological perspective, this selfreflexivity of the narrator (particularly in his or her role as narrator) involves dramatizing him- or herself or the narrative act. In this dramatization, the speaker stages his or her self like an object, a character, and suggests immediacy and authenticity. A special function of the choice of an autodiegetic speaker with a tendency to self-dramatization can be seen in the fact that in many cases the speaker defines his or her individual identity using the narrated story—in other words, he or she identifies him- or herself by attributing a (usually mental) story to him- or herself (as will be discussed in detail below). In this respect, we have arrived at a nonnormative, non-substantialist narratological reformulation of and replacement for the conventional thesis of lyric subjectivity. Despite the limited range of possible relationships between narrator / speaker and protagonist, the poems selected do display real differences in the degree of mediacy to which the underlying happenings are subjected. The poems in one group of texts (Wyatt, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Lawrence, Hood, Larkin, and Reading) clearly highlight the fact that their central happenings are mediated through the speaker. In each case, the happenings are located in the past. In addition, however, some poems (Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, and Lawrence) present a process taking place in the present, either simultaneously or subsequently - a process of reflecting on or recalling past happenings. As it turns out, such performativity is the dominant feature in the way the other poems progress (Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Swift, Gray, Keats, Browning, Rossetti, Eliot, and Boland). In them, almost dramatically, the mental process itself supplies the happenings, which are staged in an ongoing process (as suggested above) and which readers feel they are witnessing directly. This prefer-

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ence for the performative would seem, at least in the examples considered in this book, to be typical of lyric poetry. The identity of speaker and protagonist means that focalization in the selected poems does not occur in the sense of a (character's) point of view that differs from the position of the narrator but is found above all as a (mostly covert) evaluative perspective.5 It can reveal tensions and contradictions in the speaker's mind that the latter does not (or does not want to) see, as in Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard', Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady' and Lawrence's 'Man and Bat', or it can express an evaluative attitude indirectly, as in Donne's 'The Canonization', Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress', and Keats's 'Ode on Melancholy'. By definition, the abstract author/composing entity (see pp. 9-10) is noticeable only through discrepancies in the speaker's utterance, and its function is to mark a speaker as unreliable or non-omniscient. This is the case above all in the poems by Wyatt, Browning, Rossetti, and Eliot, in which we find various levels of self-deception or repression in the speaker. The abstract author can be reconstructed as a set of elements contained in the structure of the text that contrast with the explicit content of the speaker's statements. It should be stressed that this act of reconstruction is heavily dependent on where the reader believes the relevant attitudes and evaluations originate. The same question of attribution arises in a different manner in Swift's 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift' in particular. Do we treat the contradiction between the closing praise and the introductory maxim as revealing a blind spot in the speaker, as confirming his theory of the motivating power of narcissism, or as an ironic strategy for souring the idealized image the reader has of him? In the poems selected here, the narrating entity generally thematizes him- or herself, and there is a preference for performative processes of perception and reflection. This reveals a series of additional tendencies that deviate from the prototype and can tentatively be identified as typical of lyric poetry. The mind becomes the place of the narrated happenings (there is a preference for psychological and mental processes as the subject matter of narration). Also, what happens is abstracted away from specific situations (there is a lack of external details in the form of names and the description of locations and circumstances). Finally, there is a widespread tendency to represent happenings in a highly compressed form. 5

What Rimmon-Kenan (2002:81-83) calls the emotive or ideological facet of focalization.

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1.2 Sequentially: Ways of Connecting Frames and Scripts The forms of narrativity in lyric poetry are more plentiful on the level of sequentiality than on that of mediacy. The most general finding here concerns the creation of meaningfulness and eventfulness in successions of narrated happenings by activating and attributing frames and scripts (cf. pp. 5-8). The thematic (rather than situational) aspect of frames is of primary importance here, for it concerns the overall way in which happenings are interpreted and semantically processed. If prototypical narration is characterized (mainly) by the activation of a central (thematic) frame and a corresponding script, the combination of two (or more) such schemata stands out as a structural principle in a large number of the poems.6 The nature of this combination varies from text to text, allowing us to distinguish a number of different types. One widespread form of combination occurs when two (thematic) frames and/or scripts are connected, frequently with a primary schema being modified by a secondary one. The two can be connected either by existing alongside one another or by following one another. Eventfulness, as a break with expectations, is then produced by the unusual connection of a particular structural and developmental pattern with the dissimilar principles of another pattern. This is what Wyatt's 'They flee from me' does when it links the frame of love with the frame of power by having the speaker change the frame of reference when recapitulating his past experiences of love. A similar shift in frame is found in Shakespeare's Sonnet 107, where the poem moves from the theme of friendship to the theme of writing poetry, again involving the aspect of power. In both cases, the connection or changing of frames produces the eventfulness of the poem (see below). The function of the connection here is to solve (or attempt to solve) the problems of a crisis situation. However, the level of awareness on the part of the speaker is different in each case: the unrecognized response to male humiliation in Wyatt contrasts with the clearly conscious resistance to the patron's superiority in Shakespeare. In both examples, the change in frame and script takes place in the form of a succession. In Donne's 'The Canonization', on the other hand, the script of love is connected simultaneously with the script of canoniza6

This phenomenon also occurs in narrative prose. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, for example, combine religious and economic frames and corresponding scripts, and Richardson's Pamela combines a script of emotional love with one of social advancement.

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tion. The function of this connection is to raise the value of love and imaginatively and poetically rescue a love relationship from its precarious position in the world. Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' directly contrasts and explicitly exchanges diametrically opposed love scripts with one another in order to fulfil the urge of love in the world. In both instances, then, we are concerned with self-definition through love and the justification of love's fulfilment. In both cases, too, albeit in different specific ways, wit—deliberately sophisticated rhetoric—is employed to make the connection of the scripts possible and plausible. Rather than connecting frames/scripts that differ in nature, the poems by Swift, Gray, and Coleridge basically use one and the same schema recursively (repeatedly in changed form). They transform a script and confront it with itself. Swift's 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift' first illustrates the script of action motivated by self-love before refuting it, and by doing so reaffirms its applicability with respect to the speaker. In Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard', the speaker begins by applying to others the script of preserving the memory of individual life in narrative form. He then applies it to himself and ultimately presents the entire elegy as its poetic realization. The recursive use of the script of artistic creation in Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' is more complex in that complete and incomplete implementations are confronted with one another in such a way that the overall product can be read as a particularly sophisticated complete implementation. In all three cases, the script is used on various levels, both as part of the structure and as the overall structure itself. Keats's 'Ode on Melancholy' is structurally similar to Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' in that both poems confront alternative scripts for the same frame (melancholy and love respectively) in succession and justify the version favoured in each case. In Keats, an additional script is linked in: that of immortalization in a work of art. Browning's dramatic monologue 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb' presents such eternity in this world by combining it with two scripts: that of secular rivalry (love and power) and that of preparation for the next world. The latter script is distinctly superficial. Unlike Keats, the reader can see signs in Browning's poem that the development suggested by the script will not materialize. In the poems by Keats and Browning, the speaker strives to achieve a specific event: that of self-preservation and self-elevation. Rossetti's 'Promises Like Pie-Crusts', on the other hand, essentially denies that eventfulness is possible. It resists the change in frame and script from friendship to love and does not take up the opportunity of using such a change as a

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route to self-definition, clearly because of fear of being hurt by failure. Hardy's 'The Voice', meanwhile, draws on the thematic macro-frame of love in order to achieve self-definition, combining two scripts in the process by embedding them one into the other: one is the course of life in the past, which is returned to the present in memory, the other being the common aim of fulfilling love. The concrete implementation of each script has a negative event: failure. In Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady', the complexity of the way in which the scripts are connected is increased by the creation of a confrontation (by means of embedding) between two characters and their narratives about themselves, each of which uses different (and in part changing) frames and scripts. The lady's longing for intimacy is repelled by defensiveness and a subsequent desire for personal autonomy in the male speaker. Ultimately, eventfiilness lies in the unacknowledged convergence of the speaker's script with that of the lady (when an affinity between them is exposed) and in the fact that the male desire for autonomy cannot be satisfied. In a way that is structurally similar to Hardy's poem, Yeats's 'The Second Coming' combines a script involving the mind (the desire to understand) with an extratextual process as its object (the course of history). This embedding is used to create the event which takes the form of an unexpected cognitive insight into a radical deviation from the conventional script of history. Lawrence's 'Man and Bat' operates with the replacement (not without a conflict) of a conventional script by a new one (which, however, has Romantic origins). The attempts to remove vermin are replaced by recognition of the equality of bat and man. This allows the speaker to distance himself from himself and is ultimately defined as eventful by both scripts. The configuration of the scripts in Larkin's Ί Remember, I Remember' is complicated by the reference to the intertextual script provided by Hood's poem of the same name, the Romantic schema in which the process of children growing up is treated as one of degeneration and banishment from a perfect state of paradise. Larkin combines this intertextual Romantic script (redefined as the schema of an artistic career that develops out of a happy childhood) in negated form (as a schema that is emphatically not realized) with the modern script of train travel and its implications of chance, mobility, and not being tied to a particular place. Eventfulness here lies in the extreme deviation from the intertextual script (childhood becomes Hell), the complete absence of a tellable story, and

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the stress on the lack of roots. Here, more radically than in Lawrence, a conventional script is rejected by means of emphatic non-narration. In a comparable way, Boland's 'Ode to Suburbia' confronts and intertwines a traditional intertextual script (transformation of the heroine in fairytales) with a modern schema characterized by uniformity and lack of change (the daily routine of a suburban woman). Eventfulness is found firstly in the disillusionment caused by the absence of the expected transformation and, secondly, in the transformation made possible by this critical self-distance. In both cases, the negation of the traditional script is subtly shaped by regret at the loss of eventfulness as a source of meaning. Reading's 'Fiction' makes recursive use of one and the same script (potentially endowed with eventfulness) recursively on a confusing number of embedded narrative levels. The script is that of a libel case brought because of the disputed presentation of an individual in a literary work. The (metaleptic) crossing of the boundaries between the levels is combined with the blurring of the difference between fictionality and factuality. The purpose of the recursion is to undermine the conventional category of eventfulness and ultimately take it to the point of absurdity. These varied ways of connecting frames and scripts to provide the foundations of eventfulness can be classified formally and thematically. A total of five structural types of script-combination can be identified:7 • • • • •

successive replacement or change (Wyatt, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Eliot, and Lawrence); contrasting alternatives (Marvell, Keats, and Eliot); direct overlay (Donne, Keats, Browning, Hood, Larkin, and Boland); recursion (repeated use) of a single schema in like or changed form (Swift, Gray, Coleridge, and Reading); and and embedding (Hardy, Eliot, Yeats, and Larkin).

In some cases (relatively few in number), two or more of these types are combined in a single poem (this is the case with Keats, Eliot, and Larkin). A revealing general finding of this discussion is that, in our examples, eventfulness in the sense of deviation and breaking with expectations is always created by connecting different scripts in a variety of ways. From this, we can conclude that poems do not present experiences and percep7

Each type also covers the negation of scripts (e.g. the absence of a change in script in Rossetti's poem is also a case of successive replacement or change).

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tions directly in linear order, but typically work through them by making further multiple references to cognitive schemata. Narrativity in the lyric, then, is tied to a special semantic complexity and a notable variety of layers of meaning that is quantitatively different from narrative prose, particularly the prototype of the fairytale. From a narratological point of view, this is where heterogeneous or complex isotopies appear in lyric poetry (see pp. 6-7). 1.3 Function: Themes and Identity In our corpus, thematic analysis, resulting from the classification of thematic (or situational) frames and the assignment of scripts accordingly, permits further conclusions to be drawn concerning the form, function, and development of narrativity in poems. Within the general context established by the use of self-reflexivity and self-thematization as guiding criteria for the inclusion of a poem in the analysis, frames can be classified according to two broad categories. (1) Thematic reference to the other: • love and intimate friendship (Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Rossetti, Hardy, and Eliot); • art and artistic creativity (Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, and Browning); • recognition and insight (triggered from outside) (Yeats and Lawrence). (2) Thematic reference to the self: • autonomy and self-affirmation (Shakespeare, Swift, Gray, Browning, Eliot, Hood, Larkin, Boland, and Reading). All these poems have in common the fact that they refer to the underlying sequential schema of instability—stability (crisis—resolution) as a form of abstract base-script. They begin with a situation of crisis or tension (manifested in a different thematic form in each case) and test particular strategies for resolving it. These strategies involve the speaker attempting (if not permanently, then at least in the act of speaking) to define his or her individual personal identity or reassure him- or herself by making reference to the narrated developments. The objective is to achieve stability in a situation of implicit crisis. The speaker pursues this aim by using the narrated story to orientate him- or herself existentially in terms of a

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stable point or frame of reference. The latter is dependent on the thematic complex of each poem and can have a wide range of very different forms from poem to poem, as the above overview and the following breakdown demonstrate. In other words, the speaker creates an individual story (there are many ways of doing this) that binds him or her, as protagonist, to a point of reference and that he or she identifies as his or her own. He or she does this in order to identify him- or herself, or, if not that, at least gain increased stability. Even if the resultant narratives contain reference to phenomena external to consciousness, we are ultimately dealing with mental, cognitive stories with which the speaker reaches, or tries to reach, a momentary or lasting state of security. The stories differ with respect to their degree of closure (considered in more detail below). From a thematic perspective, two main forms of reference can be distinguished: texts with concrete references to the other (to another person or to art and creativity) and texts with more abstract references to the self (to the speaker's own person and self). 1.3.1 Thematic Reference to the Other Love and intimate friendship make up the first subcategory of references to the other and involve identity being formed by means of a central reference to another person. Wyatt's speaker finds himself in the crisis situation of the abandoned lover and seeks to gain stability with his story of the victim who suffers due to (alleged) female inconstancy and the female exploitation of male generosity. Shakespeare's speaker responds to the danger of such an injury by changing from a story of intimate friendship to one of a self-assured poet. In both cases, it is hoped that turning to the self can provide a way out of being dependent on the decisions of a partner. In contrast, the protagonists in Donne, Marvell, and Hardy define themselves using stories in which they have fulfilled love relationships with their partners. In the case of Donne, the relationship is threatened by the world, while in that of Marvell, it is prevented or put off by the woman's scruples, dictated by convention. Hardy's speaker, by contrast, seeks solace by retrospectively returning to the promising beginning in his mind long after the breakdown and end of the relationship. It is precisely this form of self-identification by means of love that is rejected in Rossetti (because of the danger that it will not last and the resultant fear of being hurt) and in Eliot (due to fear of emotional engagement and loss of self resulting from lack of individual strength).

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In the second subcategory (art and artistic creativity), the role of the poet or the permanence of the work of art serves to provide a secure identity. In his crisis of friendship, Shakespeare's speaker is able to turn with self-assurance to the role of the poet and to the certainty of living on in his poem. In the Romantic texts, on the other hand, the creation of a work of art is presented as a serious problem because it is not compliant with the demands of the conscious will. Coleridge and Keats solve this problem with a paradoxical strategy. In each case, the speaker ascribes to himself a story that has yet to be successfully completed or has initially not even been begun ('Kubla Khan' and 'Ode on Melancholy' respectively). Then, in his artistically successful presentation of this desire for completion that characterizes his precarious situation, he suddenly illustrates his poetic skill. The particularly complex structure of 'Kubla Khan' contains an additional element: the narrative of success with which another author is initially explicitly credited covertly becomes a demonstration of the speaker's own artistic productivity. In this somewhat complicated way, the Romantic poems tend to withdraw the process of successful self-definition as an artist from the observation of both the self and others. Browning, on the other hand, makes apparent the failure of the Bishop's attempt to attain stability through art (which, however, he commissions rather than produce himself) by setting this attempt within the framework of the dramatic monologue. In a comparable way, the two texts belonging to the third category (that of recognition and insight) show the achievement of new selfunderstanding when the other intrudes into the speaker's conventional concept of order and when this intrusion from outside is dealt with (the intrusion can be a visionary message from the collective unconscious or the arrival of animals from regions beyond those of humans). In this respect, this thematic structure provides a transition to the second group of reference types, which contains a variety of kinds of self-reference (see below). In Yeats's 'The Second Coming', the vision leads to a new understanding of history, with the speaker defining himself as a privileged visionary by means of the performative achievement of insight. The speaker in Lawrence's 'Man and Bat' narrates the acquisition of new insights into the place of humans relative to animal life, and this story of recognition allows him to better conceive of the common life and limits of himself and other beings. The various strategies for seeking resolution by referring to others may differ in detail, but they are all responses to the same initial problem: the

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self is threatened by its own transitoriness or by the destabilization of its existential or social status.

1.3.2 Thematic Self-Reference The second group of ways in which identity can be shaped by identifying a story as one's own is characterized by the lack of external reference, sometimes even by the emphatic rejection of it. Instead, we find that selfassurance is created by reference to the self and by the establishment of self-autonomy. In Shakespeare's Sonnet 107, the speaker creates autonomy of this kind by means of self-assertion and self-empowerment as a poet (a form of the modern self): he builds on his literary ability and makes himself independent of friend and of patron. By comparison, the situation in Swift's 'Verses upon the Death of Dr. Swift' is paradoxical and more complex. Here, the speaker implicitly undermines his narrative of praise by ironizing himself, thereby ultimately showing himself to be a free independent spirit without emotional or ideological ties to external positions. The speaker of Gray's 'Elegy' defines himself as an outsider of two social classes with his refined sensitivity, high self-reflexivity, and pronounced individuality. He is an early form of the isolated and selfsufficient Romantic self, but with the remnants of a close relationship with a special friend (not recalled in any detail here) such as we find in the poems that make thematic reference to the other. Browning's Bishop grotesquely fails in his search for autonomy in this world because of the selfdeception of which he is unaware and of the internal contradictions in his project. The male speaker in Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady' fails in his attempt at self-assertion in the face of the lady's claims because of his unacknowledged affinity with her and his moral and emotional dependency on her. Hood's speaker in Ί Remember, I Remember' defines himself retrospectively and nostalgically (reminiscent of Romanticism) by means of his early wholeness and vitality (as a child), thereby leaving himself unable to do more than register his failure in the present. On the other hand, the self in Larkin's poem, in a way comparable with that in Swift's, sees itself isolated, stripped self-ironically of all illusory links with others and left with itself alone—a modern self lacking place and stories, clearly distinct from Hood's Romantic self. Larkin and Swift (and in another respect Rossetti) use rejecting or discrediting personal stories as a means of self-definition. This is also the case in Boland's Ode to Suburbia', in which we find that ironic self-criticism of a model story (which fails to

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materialize but is actually secretly longed for) is a prerequisite for the creation of non-illusory independence and difference. The blurring of the distinction between fictionality and factuality and the problematization of narration in Reading's 'Fiction' ultimately serve to demonstrate the sovereign power of the narrator and ensure his ability to define himself with this power. Most of these ways of constructing the self are formulated by deposing or replacing references to the other. In their place, we find clarification following withdrawal to a position of one's own and self-reassurance following affirmation of one's concept of oneself. 1.4 Eventfiilness On the basis of the systematic and thematic operations with which meaning and coherence are formed on the level of sequentially in particular, we will now classify the different kinds of eventfiilness (see p. 7), understood as deviation from a pre-existent, expected schema of development. Eventfiilness in this sense concerns the central element of a narrative text, the reason why it is narrated in the first place. The first principle for classifying event types can be found in the relationship between the eventful turning-point or change and the two narrative levels, happenings and their presentation. Even though happenings are always mediated on the level of presentation and only acquire their meaning and structure through this level, eventfulness can be ascribed to or involve either level. Events in happenings are primarily ascribed to the succession of happenings, presentation events involve the story of the narrator, i.e. the process of presentation produced by the mediation of the narrating entity. These two kinds of event can be described as sequence events because of their involvement with sequentiality. They can always be attributed to an entity, a participant in the action, who brings about or causes a decisive change. In the case of events in happenings, that entity is a character, as a rule the protagonist; in the case of presentation events, that entity is the narrator or speaker, showing that presentation events concern the attitude or behaviour of the narrator in the performatively presented narrative act. We can thus describe events in happenings and presentation events as diegetic and extradiegetic sequence events respectively. Mediation events can be distinguished from those extradiegetic sequence events that directly involve the narrating figure and his or her attitude. In a mediation event, the decisive change occurs not primarily as a modification of individual attitude, but as a pro-

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nounced shift from happenings to the level of presentation or as a mainly textual or rhetorical change in the form of the presentation, e.g. a shift in schemata (frame and/or script). The entity involved thus changes from the speaker or narrator to the level of the abstract author/composing subject, while the complementary involvement of the (abstract) reader is also to be assumed (e.g. Coleridge and Keats; see below). A key feature of this type of event is the change in the mode of mediation, which can take place with or without the narrating entity being aware of it, or it can be an intentional action or emerge inconspicuously (examples in Shakespeare and Wyatt respectively; see below). Reception events make up the final group of events.8 They are intended to involve the reader, who is meant to undergo a decisive change as a result of the reading process. Ultimately, of course, the meaning of a text—its eventfulness—always comes into being in the mind of the reader, but this does not prevent us from distinguishing a special group of cases in which the reader not only registers the event, but is also the person (intended to be) affected by it. Here, the poem seeks to bring about a change in the attitude of, reveal a new insight into, or stimulate cognitive or ideological reorientation in the reader. In undergoing such a transformation, the reader contrasts markedly with characters or narrator. Reception events are to be expected above all in poems with an unreliable or non-omniscient speaker and also, as suggested above, to complement mediation events (e.g. Browning and Wyatt; see below). The way that events are formed means that their status depends on the level of narrative or communication they involve. Events in happenings are presented, while presentation and mediation events are enacted directly, and reception events are yet to be realized in the mind and behaviour of the reader. The following overview of eventfulness in the poems is based on two forms of classification. The main criterion is the extent to which events are realized: to what extent does a text actually bring the eventful change to completion? In addition, we will identify the different event types. Eventfulness in the fairytale, the prototype relative to which we are seeking to identify the special narrative phenomena of lyric poetry, exemplifies the classic case of an event in happenings: the part of the life of the 8

It should be stressed that reception events are not empirical in the sense of referring to kinds of reception that can be shown to take place in real readers; instead, they involve forms of reception that the text is intended to stimulate (whether or not it does so in a particular real reader being another matter).

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hero or heroine that is presented contains a retrospectively narrated complete and positive change or conversion in him or her. This is the first general type, various forms of which we distinguish below. A general overview of the variants found in the selected poems shows that the completed event is not implemented in its prototypical guise in any of our texts. The nearest approximations are Lawrence's 'Man and Bat', in which a radical change in attitude is presented first retrospectively, then simultaneously, and Yeats's 'The Second Coming', in which the attainment of insight takes place simultaneously and performatively. Both cases differ from the prototype, however, in that they involve a presentation event (with Lawrence's poem containing a peculiar transition from an event in happenings to a presentation event). In both cases, too, eventfulness—as is typical of lyric poetry—involves mind and perspective rather than physical and social changes. Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' differs from these two texts primarily in structural terms. The (mediation) event lies in the break, formulated with metaphysical wit, with the conventional script (renunciation) and replacement of the latter with the opposite concept (the fulfilment of love). This event, however, does not occur; it lies in the future, where it would affect physical behaviour beyond the mental domain—the type of event sought is an event in happenings. The structure of the sujet in Boland's 'Ode to Suburbia' is more complex and has a considerably different surface structure and set of themes. However, it is comparable in that the event (liberation and existential change), again created by the form of mediation, can be expected to occur only in the future, not before. Its necessity is highlighted to an unusual degree by the emphatic lack of eventfulness, above all by the ironic and self-critical quotation of the prototype (the fairytale). Although these examples modify the prototype, they remain close to it. From these we can distinguish a second type of eventfulness in which various forms of non-realization, of failure, of negative event occur. Here, the points of reference for eventfulness should be considered more carefully than in the previous case. As with the first type of eventfulness, the speaker in Browning's 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb' anticipates a positive and completed event in the future (lasting survival in the memory of the community after his death), thereby seeking to stabilize his mental identity in the present. Circumstances suggest that his anticipated self-preservation will not be successful, something that the Bishop is not willing to accept. The form of the dramatic monologue, however, means that the reader can see the Bishop's expectations for the self-deceptiveness they

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are. This means that a reception event may take place: the reader is intended to gain an insight that the speaker does not achieve. Hardy's 'The Voice' displays a comparable structure in its imagined nullification of the beloved woman's death. Here, however, negative eventfulness is grounded in the level of presentation: as the poem unfolds, the speaker himself comes to see his self-deceptiveness for what it is and to recognize the failure of his attempts at establishing a link with the past and resuming the past experience. The situation in Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady', by comparison, is more complex, for here, the speaker's emancipation on the way to individual autonomy progresses in clear contrast with the claims of the lady, paradoxically meeting with failure (due to feelings of guilt and perception of psychological affinity) at the very moment when he seems to have succeeded (by departing and forcing separation). Not only are readers able to see the eventual occurrence of this negative event more clearly than the speaker, they can also see his constant semiconscious attempts at suppressing his real feelings. Ultimately, this constitutes a reception event. A third type of eventfulness is found in cases in which what would be a decisive change is rejected against the expectation that an event will be realized (i.e. there is implicit or explicit reference to the class of realized events). A particularly clear example is Rossetti's 'Promises like PieCrust', in which the speaker expressly declines the offer of an eventful change on the level of the happenings (the move from friendship to love). The speaker in Larkin's Ί Remember, Ί Remember', on the other hand, thematizes the lack of conventional eventfulness by parodically referring to the expectation of it in the sense of a mediation event, defining his identity in the process. Interestingly, Larkin's intertext (Hood's poem of the same name) provides an example of a negative event (growing up as a decline from the perfection of childhood), meaning that Larkin's text represents the next step after Hood's: it moves from a negative event to the complete absence of any event. Reading's 'Fiction' intensifies the dissolution of eventfulness in the fundamental sense still further with its radical undermining of central premises of narrative that make eventfulness possible in the first place. The main ways it does this is to blur the distinctions between the level of happenings and the level of presentation and between reality and fiction, questioning the concept of authorship and problematizing the narrative process itself. In addition, on a higher level, we can identify a feature common to most of the texts which undermine the category of the event: they can be seen to transform the very break with expectations into a new type of event (on the level of mediation).

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Completed mediation events constitute a fourth type, in which the change is tied to a major shift from the level of the happenings to the level of presentation or a distinctive shift in the mode of textual and rhetorical presentation. Borderline and intermediate cases of and between presentation and mediation events are found in the poems by Shakespeare, Wyatt, and Donne. In Shakespeare's Sonnet 107, the event consists of a change of frame and script (from the relationship of friendship and patronage to the role of the poet) and a resultant provocative shift in power relations. A similar shift (from the discourse of love to that of morality and power) is found in Wyatt's 'They flee from me'. In Shakespeare's poem, the change modifies the concrete situation of the speaker and the addressee (as a result of explicit apostrophe in a performative speech act). In Wyatt's text, on the other hand, the change affects the speaker alone in the form of psychological moral success. Readers, however, may see this change for the compensatory action, the self-righteous strategy of evasion, the act of selfdeception it is, which means they become aware that it points to failure, to a negative event. Donne's 'The Canonization' assembles its (combined) presentation and mediation event, not by means of succession (as in Shakespeare), but by audaciously connecting two scripts (love and canonization) in order to redefine the imminent negative event, the subjection of love to a threat, as a positive event. The effect is heightened by the element of metaphysical wit, which lays stress on the presentation and, together with the playfully conscious employment of this strategy, indicates that, unlike Wyatt's, Donne's speaker is not guilty of self-deceptiveness. Two more extreme forms of mediation event can be found in the two Romantic poems about imagination and creativity. The complex artistic text of Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' constitutes the eventful fulfilment of an attempt to bring to completion a process of poetic creation that fails on the level of the happenings. In a similar manner, the poetic form of Keats's 'Ode on Melancholy' satisfies the desire for self-immortalization expressed most notably in the closing section of the poem, becoming an icon of the power of creative melancholy. In both cases, relocation of the event in the form of the text means that it involves the (abstract) author on the one hand, and the reader on the other, not the speaker, whose awareness is confined to the domain of happenings. Gray's proto-Romantic 'Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard' can also be described, at least in part, as containing a mediation event. The speaker suffers because of his status as an outsider, since his reflection and especially his longing for preservation and permanence after death expressed in the second part are stilled by

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distanced self-description and, even more so, by the epitaph he formulates for himself. The change in levels is less radical here than in the first two cases, however, in that the decisive change (solving an existential problem by transposing it into a poetic text) is an object of the deliberations and therefore of the consciousness of the speaker. The reader can see further than this—can see, as the (abstract) author intended, that the speaker, unconsciously, establishes in his reflections a poetic memorial to his marginalization, his special sensitivity, and his individuality. The classification of the individual poems using this typology is, as will have become apparent on several occasions in this study, frequently a cautious undertaking in which definitive answers are not always to be had. It is based on dominant textual features and does not always include consideration of all aspects of a text. Among the examples selected here, it is particularly difficult to identify the place of Swift's 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift' in our typology of events. Above all, this is due to the repeated ironic undermining of the status of the poem's narrative sequences, and thus also of its eventfulness. If the initial script (human self-love as the driving force for actions) is eventfully disrupted by the admirer on the level of happenings, the level of presentation provides confirmation of the maxim that self-love produces a positive self-image (the speaker invents the admirer for particular reasons). This can be read as a case of ironic self-dramatization whose aim is to lure readers into a trap and place them in a condition in which they no longer think for themselves (it misleads them into having uncritical faith in human selflessness). From this point of view, the poem's event would consist of the reader gaining insight into the use of this strategy, ultimately meaning recognition of the general human and individual tendency to be selfish. Depending on how we view it, then, Swift's poem shows features belonging to an event in happenings, a presentation event, or a reception event. Reception events, developed to differrent degrees, are particularly likely to be present when we are dealing with an unreliable or non-omniscient speaker or narrator. In our examples, this is above all the case in the poems by Wyatt and Browning. 1.5 The Temporal Position and Functions of the Act of Expression We conclude this overview of the application of narcological categories to our poems by considering the relationship between the act of articulation or narrative act and the narrative sequence, particularly the event, and the function of speech or of narration for that event, notably, with regard

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to the realization of the event. The prototypical place of the narrative act in the fairytale and its function are determined by retrospective presentation (use of the preterite tense) and the fact that narration does not influence the narrated story:9 the narrator, it would appear, narrates the story without influencing or wanting to influence its course. This situation can occur, not only when there is a heterodiegetic narrator (as in the fairytale), but in principle also when there is a homo- or autodiegetic speaker, as in all of the poems considered in this book. Strikingly, however, it is relatively rare that they make use of this possibility. The only clear examples are the childhood narratives of Hood and Larkin, in which the retrospective consideration of a completed process from a standpoint in the present provides a nostalgic or sarcastic route to self-knowledge. Much of Lawrence's 'Man and Bat' corresponds to this model, although the poem ends by placing the simultaneous presentation of the decisive, eventful change after a retrospective anecdotal report, thereby connecting the prototypical presentation with a different type (see above). Wyatt's poem also contains central features of the prototype, but remains distinctive because the retrospective presentation of the happenings that took place manipulates and redefines them in response to perceived injustice. This indicates that there is an attempt to exert ideological, if not practical, influence on the story.10 A second kind of temporal position for the act of narrative presentation can be observed when the happenings are presented simultaneously, that is, when the course of the story (normally a process of reflection or perception) and its eventful change are presented in a direct and performative way, almost dramatically. This type is represented with particular clarity in the poems by Hardy and Yeats, in which the event (a disturbing insight) takes place as an integral part of a continual process of reflection stretching from the beginning to the end of the text. Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady' is a more complex variant of this type in that the performative mental process is not presented continuously, but is interrupted twice by ellipsis,

9

10

Retrospective narration is typically combined with a restriction of focalization (above all, that of knowledge) to the moment narrated at any given point: the narrator does not refer to future developments. In all narrative acts, the happenings are interpreted on the level of presentation, by virtue of which it becomes a story. Here, it becomes apparent (behind the speaker's back) that this process is a deliberately manipulative modification of an originally different understanding.

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meaning that it covers a longer period of time.11 Here, too, the decisive change (gaining insight into the failure to achieve the desired autonomy) occurs as the process takes place. Shakespeare's Sonnet 107 also belongs to this class because the abrupt change of frame and script is carried out during the process of presentation alone and mediated to the addressee in it.12 The largest group of poems is made up of those exhibiting a third kind of temporal relationship between presentation and story. It places the act of narration before the event, which is prospectively narrated. This usually implies that narration has a special function for the continuation of the story. A particularly clear example is provided by Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress', in which the presentation of the love story addressed to the beloved is intended to bring about its eventful completion which, the prospective presentation suggests, is about to take place in the immediate future. Browning's 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb' displays a very similar temporal situation, with the exception that it is the failure of the event to occur in the future that becomes increasingly apparent. The situation is more complex in Boland's 'Ode to Suburbia' in that the implicitly critical narrative of an eventless sequence underpins the necessity of a future event (emancipation from the routine of suburban life) and thus also its psychological possibility. The speaker in Rossetti's 'Promises Like PieCrust', on the other hand, emphatically turns away from the event that could come. She narrates in order to prevent the event from taking place. In accordance with their structure as poems with mediation events, the texts by Keats, Coleridge, and Gray create a temporal relationship between the act of presentation and the presented happenings in a particular way involving the transgression of levels. Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' thematizes the absent event (the completion of the process of artistic creation) at two points on the level of presentation (in the prose preface and in the last part of the poem), yet at the same time realizes it unexpectedly in the artistic form of the presentation (as a mediation event). An analogous situation is found in Keats's O d e on Melancholy', where the speaker seeks immortality by sacrificing himself to the divine Melancholy and pictures this to himself at the end of the poem. It becomes a reality in the 11

12

This is a special kind of relationship between narrative act and happenings that Rimmon-Kenan (2002:91) calls intercalated. In Eliot's poem, however, narration is simultaneous rather than retrospective at various points. Here, too, the process of presentation is intercalated (due to the ellipsis between lines 4 and 5).

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form of the poem's text. Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard' employs a similar strategy: the speaker longs for his individual personality to be preserved in future, a desire fulfilled eventfully, unexpectedly once again, by the presence of the poem itself. By expressing his desires, he is essentially writing his own elegy, but he also tries to anticipate the occurrence of the future event by prospectively formulating his own epitaph as he reflects. This example also shows clearly that the prospective presentation of a desired eventful change has or can have a stabilizing effect on the present, just as the narration of the story generally has the function of affecting its course in some way. This is the case above all in Donne's 'The Canonization', where the depiction of the future eventful transformation (in the form of canonization) is also, in the mind at least, a solution to the current crisis (in which love is threatened). This solution is strengthened by the fact that the prospective narrative looks back on the present retrospectively, ennobling and stabilizing it. In this context, Swift's 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift' again proves to elude simple classification. It initially seems as if we are dealing with another prospective narrative of a future event, but the eventfulness that involves the level of happenings in this way is ultimately undermined ironically and must be relocated on the level of presentation or even that of reception. Finally, the proliferation of levels of happenings and presentation, the difficulty of distinguishing between them, and the questioning of the notion of authorship mean that Reading's 'Fiction' problematizes the category of the event so radically that it is largely impossible to establish a clear relationship between the narrative act and the narrated story. From this perspective, then, we can conclude that the prototypical form of narration does occur in poems, but that considerably deviant forms occur far more frequently, at least among our examples of texts in which the speaker makes him- or herself a theme. Deviation can take two forms. On the one hand, we observe a strong tendency to employ simultaneous, performative presentation. On the other, there is also a strong tendency to provide prospective narratives of decisive eventful changes and to functionalize narration in order to shape the course of the narrated story. This means that the narrator figure or speaker is far more heavily involved in the narrative act and that narration is far more directly involved in shaping the narrator's life in poems than generally seems to be the case in narrative texts.

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1.6 The Functionalization of Formal Poetic Features The possibility of functionalizing formal features in the narrative structures of a poem is a truly typical characteristic of lyric poetry. By formal features, we mean the traditional genre-specific ways of structuring a poem's linguistic material: examples include stanzas, lines, rhyme, rhythm and metre, repetition, as well as tropes such as metaphor, syntactic techniques (e.g. the use of passive constructions), and the use of pronouns. In general, it can be stated that these techniques do not contain any inherent meaning for they typically acquire their effect only when they are linked to the semantic dimension (in the sense of a complex set of positions between analogy and difference, intensification or support and contrast or counterpoint). From a narratological point of view, these structural techniques concern the level of presentation and thus the dimension of mediacy in the narrative developments that are presented. This leads to the general question of who is responsible for these techniques and the intention behind their use. Two main possibilities suggest themselves: the speaker or narrator (when he or she explicitly or implicitly thematizes him- or herself as the originator of the text, perhaps in the role of the poet, as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 107), and the abstract author (who is able to indirectly evaluate, support, or undermine the presentation of the speaker by shaping the linguistic material). The former case is rare, while the latter occurs in the vast majority of the poems in our corpus. The poems we have examined contain numerous examples of an extremely diverse range of ways in which formal features can complement the content of narrative developments. Hardy's 'The Voice' uses rhythm, metre, and syntactic structure to make clear how the emotional side of the process of recalling a memory to the present and the collapse of that process lags behind the cognitive side. Similarly, Larkin's Ί Remember, I Remember' and Boland's Ode to Suburbia' employ rhyme patterns to indicate the repetitiveness of the segments of life they present. The language of Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady' reflects aestheticization as a way of overcoming problems in life. Poems with presentation events frequently employ elaborate formal techniques to support the shift of eventfulness to the level of the text. This is the case in Donne's 'The Canonization' and is so to an even greater degree in the poems of Coleridge, Keats, and Gray, in which the poetic form of the text functions as a medium for solving the problems thematized on the level of happenings. Donne's poem employs the period-specific tech-

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nique of wit in addition to traditional poetic techniques. Wit is used with the same function, albeit in a different form, in Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' and Swifts 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift'. 2 Possible Implications for the Theory and Analysis of Lyric Poetry We shall now attempt to identify some possible implications of the above observations for the theory of lyric poetry. First, we can see that the fundamental distinction between the narcological dimensions of mediacy and sequentiality, as well as the narrative act, together with the subclassifications they contain, prove to be appropriate when put into practice in the analysis of concrete texts for their use in the study of the poems yields informative results. In this sense, it is clear that, even given the somewhat restrictive thematic criterion behind the selection of our texts, poems do contain a temporal (and therefore narrative) sequence structure and can thus employ the whole range of possible mediating entities and modes of mediation to varying degrees, apparently to the point of doing without mediation entirely. If we turn now to considering mediacy in detail, we note that distinguishing between the entities involved, particularly the positions of the abstract author/composing subject, the narrator/speaker, and the protagonist, allows us to improve the precision with which we analyse the conditions of mediation. One phenomenon that can be analysed more clearly by doing so is the apparent immediacy of self-presentation that is typical of the lyric. It can be described as a strategic presentation of the self as protagonist by the self as speaker/narrator, with the convergence of the two positions in the same individual obscuring the fact that it is indeed a presentation. A further problem concerns the status of first-person perspective (the voice of a homo- or autodiegetic speaker). The categories of the abstract author/composing subject and the reader's attribution (targeted either at the speaker or at the abstract author) allow us to study the possible relativization of such a perspective more clearly. In lyric poetry, as in narrative prose, the concept of focalization (and its various facets), which we distinguish from the voice of the speak-er, allows for describing more precisely how perceptual and evaluative perspectives, such as those of the speaking I and the experiencing I, are intertwined. Finally, the notoriously problematic subjectivity of the lyric genre can be defined neutrally as an operation in which the speaker provides him- or herself with a story mediated in a poem in order to constitute his or her identity.

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The narratological approach makes an even greater contribution to the accurate modelling and analysis of sequentiality, particularly given that there have to date been practically no analytical categories for examining this crucial aspect of poetry. Borrowing the concepts of frame and script from cognitivism makes this possible in two ways. They provide a controlled means of linking a poem to its sociocultural context via the reader's relevant world knowledge, and these schemata provide a new, specific, and precise way of describing the distinctive kinds of progression in poems (and thus their meanings). As the analyses show, the characteristic feature of lyric poetry in general and of the individual lyric poems considered here in particular can be reconstructed and identified precisely in terms of the various ways in which different frames and scripts can be connected. In addition, this approach provides a way of identifying the decisive turning- or focal point in a poem: its event, that which constitutes its pointe, its tellability. Events can be classified according to the levels they involve: happenings, presentation, the abstract author, or the reader's reception. The widespread use of simultaneous performative speech and narration and, connected with this, the striking frequency of presentation events (as opposed to the rarer events on the level of happenings), and the phenomenon of the mediation event can be considered typical of lyric poetry. The varying use of mediating entities also brings us to the fundamental distinction between sequences located on the level of the happenings and those located on the level of a performatively unfolding mental process. Poems can place one or the other in a dominant position, thereby determining their essential sequentiality. Alternatively, they can employ both levels at once, thereby producing particularly complex developments.13 A third aspect to be considered in the analytical process is that of the temporal relationship between the act of articulation or the narrative act and the sequentiality, and particularly the event, of a poem. Further characteristic features of lyric poems can be identified in this area on the basis of such facts as the widespread preference for the homodiegetic speaker in lyric poetry. This, too, is an aspect that has been neglected in traditional approaches to the theory of lyric poetry. The analyses in this book demonstrate that narratological concepts and methods can be applied to lyric poetry. This does not mean, however, that 13

The most prominent instances of this in our examples are found in the poems by Hardy and Yeats.

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all poems will be compatible with this approach and suited to meaningful analysis using it. As our project is concerned primarily with testing the practical potential of the approach, its limits have not been considered in the individual essays. Accordingly, we can do no more here than suggest some possible conditions that poems must meet if the use of narratology is to contribute meaningfully to their analysis. We can be sure of two necessary conditions. One is that there be a temporally ordered series of elements on the level of happenings or on that of presentation, for it must be possible to construe some kind of action in the happenings or presentation. The other is the unbroken presence of some kind of (individual) entity, also on the level of the happenings or that of presentation. Accordingly, poems from the schools of concrete poetry, pure sound poetry, and 'language poetry' resist analysis using narcological concepts because they replace temporal with predominantly spatial structures and semantic with purely aural structures, or they cease to provide a single coherent entity in terms of which they can be seen.

3 Some Possible Period-Specific Tendencies Because our selection contains relatively few poems and is also thematically restricted, we are confined to making extremely cautious preliminary suggestions regarding the historical and period-specific tendencies in English lyric poetry that our narratological perspective might reveal. With respect to mediacy, we can begin by noting that the convergence of speaker and protagonist and the direct performative presentation of unfolding mental processes are found in poems from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. They are clearly not period-specific. The phenomenon of the non-omniscient or unreliable speaker, and thus marked discrepancies between the speaker and the abstract author, are also to be found in examples from various centuries. With respect to sequentiality, developmental tendencies present themselves primarily in the area of eventfulness. The problematization of events occurs primarily in texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The replacement of changes in external situations by changes in attitude and perception as sources of eventfulness, in those cases where eventfulness is still to be found, would seem to increase in poems from more recent centuries. Presentation events of a particular type (involving artistic creativity) were clearly of particular interest to Romanticism.

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Eventful stabilization by means of artistic creativity ceases to occur in the examples of the twentieth century. Despite such developments, and pending the more detailed understanding of historical developments that is a matter for specialized future studies, the overall picture presented by the analyses in this volume is one in which many of the structural features we have identified are, perhaps surprisingly, less period-specific than lyric-specific. Bibliography Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London). Wolf, Werner (2002). "Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie", in: Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (eds), Erzähltheorie, transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär (Trier), 23-104.