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    Gerard Manley Hopkins
    1844–1889
    Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. He is regarded by different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I.

    Hopkins's idiosyncratic creativity was the result of interactions with others, beginning with the members of his family. Hopkins's extended family constituted a social environment that made the commitment of an eldest son to religion, language, and art not only possible but also highly probable. His mother, Kate Smith Hopkins (1821-1900), was a devout High Church Anglican who brought up her children to be religious. Hopkins read from the New Testament daily at school to fulfill a promise he made to her. The daughter of a London physician, she was better educated than most Victorian women and particularly fond of music and of reading, especially German philosophy and literature, the novels of Dickens, and eventually her eldest son's poetry.

    Her sister Maria Smith Giberne taught Hopkins to sketch. The drawings originally executed as headings on letters from her home, Blunt House, Croydon, to Hopkins's mother and father reveal the kind of precise, detailed drawing that Hopkins was taught. The influence of Maria Smith Giberne on her nephew can be seen by comparing these letter headings with Hopkins's sketch, Dandelion, Hemlock, and Ivy, which he made at Blunt House. Hopkins's interest in the visual arts was also sustained by his maternal uncle, Edward Smith, who began as a lawyer but soon made painting his profession; by Richard James Lane, his maternal great-uncle, an engraver and lithographer who frequently exhibited at the Royal Academy; and by Lane's daughters, Clara and Eliza (or Emily), who exhibited at the Society of Female Artists and elsewhere. Another maternal uncle, John Simm Smith, Jr., reinforced the religious tradition which Hopkins's mother passed on to him; Smith was churchwarden at St. Peter's, Croydon.

    These artistic and religious traditions were also supported by Hopkins's paternal relations. His aunt Anne Eleanor Hopkins tutored her nephew in sketching, painting, and music. His uncle Thomas Marsland Hopkins was perpetual curate at St. Saviour's Paddington, and coauthor with Hopkins's father of the 1849 volume, Pietas Metrica Or, Nature Suggestive of God and Godliness, "by the Brothers Theophilus and Theophylact." He was married to Katherine Beechey, who, with her cousin Catherine Lloyd, maintained close contacts with the High Church Tractarian movement which deeply affected Hopkins at Oxford. Her sister, Frances Ann Beechey, was a good painter, famous in North America for her documentary paintings of the Canadian voyageurs. In 1865 she was in London, where Hopkins met her, and after 1870 she exhibited at the Royal Academy. Charles Gordon Hopkins, Hopkins's uncle, developed the family interest in languages as well as religion. He moved to Hawaii, where he learned Hawaiian and helped establish an Anglican bishopric in Honolulu. In 1856 he helped Manley Hopkins, the poet's father, become consul-general for Hawaii in London.

    Manley Hopkins was the founder of a marine insurance firm. It is no accident that shipwreck, one of the firm's primary concerns, was the subject of Hopkins's most ambitious poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875). Nor can the emphasis on religion in that poem be attributed solely to the mother's influence. Manley Hopkins was a devout High Church Anglican who taught Sunday School at St. John's in Hampstead, where he was churchwarden. He loved music and literature, passing on his fondness for puns and wordplay to his sons Gerard and Lionel and his love for poetry to Gerard especially. His publications include A Philosopher's Stone and Other Poems (1843), Pietas Metrica (1849), and Spicelegium Poeticum, A Gathering of Verses by Manley Hopkins (1892). He also reviewed poetry for the London Times and wrote one novel and an essay on Longfellow, which were never published.

    This concern for art, language, and religion in Hopkins's extended family had a direct effect on the Hopkins children. Hopkins's sister Milicent (1849-1946) was originally interested in music but eventually became an "out-sister" of All Saints' Home, an Anglican sisterhood founded in London in 1851. She took the sister's habit in 1878. Hopkins's sister Kate (1856-1933) shared her brother's love of languages, humor, and sketching. She helped Robert Bridges publish the first edition of Hopkins's poems. Hopkins's youngest sister, Grace (1857-1945), set some of his poems to music and composed accompaniments for Hopkins's melodies for poems by Richard Watson Dixon and Robert Bridges.

    Hopkins's brother Lionel (1854-1952) sustained the family interest in languages. He was top of the senior division of Modern School at Winchester, with a reputation for thoughtful and thorough work in French and German. He became a world-famous expert on archaic and colloquial Chinese. He loved puns, jokes, parodies, and all kinds of wordplay as much as his father and his brother Gerard. Hopkins's brother Arthur (1847-1930) continued the family interest in the visual arts. He was an excellent sketcher and became a professional illustrator and artist. He illustrated Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native in 1878, was a member of the Royal Watercolour Society, and exhibited at the Royal Academy. The youngest brother, Everard (1860-1928), followed in Arthur's footsteps. He too became a professional illustrator and cartoonist for newspapers and periodicals, and he exhibited his watercolors and pastels in London. Both Everard and Arthur were regular contributors to Punch and shared Hopkins's admiration for the paintings of John Everett Millais.

    The relationship between Hopkins and his father reveals important early instances of creative collaboration and competition within the family. Hopkins copied eleven of the poems from his father's volume A Philosopher's Stone into his Oxford notebooks. In those poems his father expressed a Keatsian dismay over science's threat to a magical or imaginative response to nature. Manley Hopkins's desire to preserve a Wordsworthian love of nature in his children is evident in his "To a Beautiful Child":




    ... thy book

    Is cliff, and wood, and foaming waterfall;

    Thy playmates--the wild sheep and birds that call

    Hoarse to the storm;--thy sport is with the storm

    To wrestle;--and thy piety to stand

    Musing on things create, and their Creator's hand!

    This was a remarkably prophetic poem for Manley Hopkins's first "beautiful child," Gerard, born only a year after this poem was published. The phrase "And birds that call/Hoarse to the storm," invites comparison with the son's images of the windhover rebuffing the big wind in "The Windhover" (1877) and with the image of the great stormfowl at the conclusion of "Henry Purcell" (1879). The father's prophecy, "thy sport is with the storm/To wrestle" is fulfilled in Gerard's The Wreck of the Deutschland and "The Loss of the Eurydice" (1878). These two shipwreck poems, replete with spiritual instruction for those in doubt and danger, were the son's poetic and religious counterparts to his father's 1873 volume, The Port of Refuge, or advice and instructions to the Master-Mariner in situations of doubt, difficulty, and danger.

    Gerard's response to nature was also influenced by a poem such as "A Bird Singing in a Narrow Street," one of the eleven poems from The Philosopher's Stone he copied into his notebook. This theme of the bird confined recurs most obviously in Gerard's "The Caged Skylark" (1877) but may be detected even in comments on the imprisoning narrowness of urban civilization in his letters. In addition, the son answered the father's representation of a bird filling the "throbbing air" with sound and "making our bosoms to thy cadence thrill" in "The Nightingale" (1866):




    For he began at once and shook

    My head to hear. He might have strung

    A row of ripples in the brook,

    So forcibly he sung,

    The mist upon the leaves have strewed,

    And danced the balls of dew that stood

    In acres all above the wood.

    This particular motif of the singing bird appears again in Gerard's "Spring" (1877): "and thrush/Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring/The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing." The father's attempt to represent what it is like to live in a bird's environment, moreover, to experience daily the "fields, the open sky, /The rising sun, the moon's pale majesty; /The leafy bower, where the airy nest is hung" was also one of the inspirations of the son's lengthy account of a lark's gliding beneath clouds, its aerial view of the fields below, and its proximity to a rainbow in "Il Mystico" (1862), as well as the son's attempt to enter into a lark's existence and express its essence mimically in "The Woodlark" (1876). A related motif, Manley's feeling for clouds, evident in his poem "Clouds," encouraged his son's representation of them in "Hurrahing in Harvest" (1877) and "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire" (1888).

    Competition and collaboration between father and son continued even long after Hopkins left home to take his place in the world. In 1879, for instance, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to Bridges, "I enclose some lines by my father called forth by the proposal to fell the trees in Well Walk (where Keats and other interesting people lived) and printed in some local paper." Two months later Hopkins composed "Binsey Poplars" to commemorate the felling of a grove of trees near Oxford. Clearly, competition with his father was an important creative stimulus.

    In addition to specific inspirations such as these, the father communicated to his son a sense of nature as a book written by God which leads its readers to a thoughtful contemplation of Him, a theme particularly evident in Manley and Thomas Marsland Hopkins's book of poems, Pietas Metrica. Consequently, Gerard went on to write poems which were some of the best expressions not only of the Romantic approach to nature but also the older tradition of explicitly religious nature poetry.

    Pietas Metrica was devoted explicitly to that marriage of nature and religion which became characteristic of Gerard's poetry. This book is also valuable as a model of the norm of contemporary religious nature poetry which Hopkins was trying both to sustain and surpass. The aims of the authors of Pietas Metrica became Hopkins's own. As noted in the preface, "It was the design of the writers of this volume to blend together two of Man's best things, Religion and Poetry. They aimed at binding with another tie the feeling of piety with external nature and our daily thoughts. The books of Nature and Revelation have been laid side by side and read together.

    The most joyous synchronic reading of the Bible and the Book of Nature was the hymn of creation, a traditional genre inspired by Psalm 148 to which such poems of Gerard's as "God's Grandeur" (1877), "Pied Beauty" (1877), "Hurrahing in Harvest," and "Easter" (1866) belong. A line such as "Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes" in Hopkins's "Easter," for instance, would normally be ascribed to the influence of George Herbert, but the representation of a flower "breathing up to heaven/The incense of her prayer" like a "natural altar" in "The Fraxinella" in Pietas Metrica reveals that it is just as appropriate to look to contemporary poetry for a context for Hopkins's poems as it is to look back to Metaphysical poets such as Herbert. Indeed, in some cases it may be more appropriate to seek contemporary models. Though Herbert's "The Flower" is a famous example of a flower straining toward heaven, he employs no satellite imagery of opening eyes; indeed he only twice uses the word ope in all of his poems, neither time referring to flowers, and he never uses the adjective heavenward.

    The personification of Earth in Hopkins's "Easter"--"Earth throws Winter's robes away, /Decks herself for Easter Day"--also recalls the personification of Nature in "Catholic Truth" from Pietas Metrica. A reader of Hopkins's poetry familiar with contemporary creation hymns such as "Catholic Truth" would also expect the song rhythm which Hopkins employs in the third stanza of "Easter," because in this genre nature, rather than mankind, is usually represented as more faithfully singing God's praise:




    Gather gladness from the skies;

    Take a lesson from the ground;

    Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes

    And a Spring-time joy have found;

    Earth throws Winter's robes away,

    Decks herself for Easter Day.

    Ultimately, mankind joins in the song in related hymns in this genre, including Christina Rossetti's "And there was no more Sea," in which all possible voices are united "In oneness of contentment offering praise." Hence Hopkins extends the rhythm to include man in the fourth stanza of "Easter":




    Beauty now for ashes wear,

    Perfumes for the garb of woe.

    Chaplets for dishevelled hair,

    Dances for sad footsteps slow;

    Open wide your hearts that they

    Let in joy this Easter Day.



    Although man and nature are ultimately bound by love in one hymn of creation, contemporary readers of poems such as "Easter" know that nature is traditionally represented not only as more consistently heeding the commandment to song which concludes Hopkins's "Easter" but also as best fulfilling the demand of his first stanza for a plenitude of offerings:




    Break the box and shed the nard;

    Stop not now to count the cost;

    Hither bring pearl, opal, sard;

    Reck not what the poor have lost;

    Upon Christ throw all away:

    Know ye, this is Easter Day.

    "Where are the Nine?" in Pietas Metrica develops this concept of nature's unstinted offering and points the traditional contrast between man and nature implicit in the first stanza of "Easter": "And is it so that Nature stints her praise, /With niggard thanks makes offering to her God?" The answer of Hopkins's father and uncle is clear:




    No, Nature is not backward, she declares

    Each blessing as it comes, and owns her Lord,

    She is no miser of her thanks, she spares

    No praise, due to Heaven, beloved adored.

    Hopkins agreed with his father and uncle that man seemed "backward" in comparison with nature, especially in "God's Grandeur," "Spring," "In the Valley of the Elwy" (1877), "The Sea and the Skylark" (1877), "Binsey Poplars," "Duns Scotus's Oxford" (1879), and "Ribblesdale" (1882). Hopkins also discovered to his despair the truth of the final complaint of "Where are the Nine?":




    Alas for man! day after day may rise,

    Night may shade his thankless head,

    He sees no God in the bright, morning skies

    He sings no praises from his guarded bed.



    This apparent disappearance of God from nature in the nineteenth century inspired some of the didacticism which pervades Hopkins's later nature poetry. Unlike the Romantics, many Victorians thought of nature as another Book of Revelation to be used for the same practical ends as the Bible: to inculcate lessons in the religious life. As the statement in the Hopkins brothers' preface about placing the books of Nature and Revelation side by side suggests, Pietas Metrica is an excellent illustration of this tradition. While the Wordsworthian influence in the volume is occasionally implicit in poems such as "Love," the sermonical aim is almost always explicit, as in the title "Autumnal Lessons."

    Flowers were especially popular for purposes of instruction, their function in Hopkins's "Easter." The flowers in "Catholic Truth," for example, are "All telling the same truth; their simple creed," and the author of "The Fraxinella" sighs, with the exclamation mark so characteristic of Hopkins, "Ah! could our hearts/Read thoughtful lessons from thy modest leaves." When we place Hopkins's nature poetry in this tradition we not only perceive the contemporary precedents for the homilies which conclude so many of his nature poems, we also begin to discern some of the distinguishing features of his didacticism. Hopkins's commands strike us as more direct and imperative, and we discover that his religious poetry was unusually proselytical before he became a Catholic and long before he became a Jesuit.

    Nature poetry was not the only area in which father and son were rivals. Romantic love of childhood as well as nature is evident in Manley Hopkins's "To a Beautiful Child" and "The Nursery Window," and this theme of childhood innocence is also stressed by his son in "Spring," "The Handsome Heart" (1879), and "The Bugler's First Communion" (1879). The father also composed straightforward religious poems such as his long poem on John the Baptist in A Philosopher's Stone, and the son soon surpassed his father in this category as well. Gerard's many poems about martyrs recall his father's preoccupation with physical suffering in poems such as "The Grave-Digger" and "The Child's Dream" from A Philosopher's Stone.

    The son's melancholy, evident in poems such as the undated "Spring and Death," "Spring and Fall" (1880), and "The Leaden Echo" (1882), can also be traced to poems such as his father's sonnet "All things grow old--grow old, decay and change" and "A Philosopher's Stone," which warns that "The withered crown will soon slide down/ A skull all bleached and blent" and concludes in that didactic mode typical of several of his son's religious poems:




    "The Alchymists rare, are they who prepare

    For death ere life be done;

    And by study hard WITHIN THE CHURCHYARD

    IS FOUND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE."

    Gerard also wrote a poem about an alchemist, "The Alchemist in the City," but the poem of his which captures this didactic tone best is perhaps The Wreck of the Deutschland, especially the eleventh stanza:




    `Some find me a sword; some

    The flange and the rail; flame,

    Fang, or flood' goes Death on drum,

    And storms bugle his fame.

    But we dream we are rooted in earth--Dust!

    Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,

    Wave with the meadow, forget that there must

    The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.



    The son clearly surpassed the father in many ways. For instance, the son resisted the temptation to become morbid better than the father's example might lead one to expect. Compare Gerard Manley Hopkins's version of an attempted rescue with the account in the London Times, one of the sources he used for The Wreck of the Deutschland. According to the Times , "One brave sailor, who was safe in the rigging went down to try to save a child or woman who was drowning on deck. He was secured by a rope to the rigging, but a wave dashed him against the bulwark, and when daylight dawned his headless body, detained by the rope, was swinging to and fro with the waves." Hopkins wrote:




    One stirred from the rigging to save

    The wild woman-kind below,

    With a rope's end round the man, handy and brave--

    He was pitched to his death at a blow,

    For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew:

    They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro

    Through the cobbled foam-fleece.

    Hopkins transformed the prose into song, but he deleted the morbid details of the decapitation.

    It was no doubt partly to escape contemplation of such details connected with his marine-insurance business that Manley Hopkins cultivated a Wordsworthian love of nature. The example of Wordsworth's youth in nature and the contrasting example of Coleridge's youth in the city, "Debarr'd from Nature's living images, /Compelled to be a life unto itself" (The Prelude VI: 313-314), encouraged Manley Hopkins to live in Hampstead rather than in London proper where he worked. He moved his family to Hampstead in 1852, and Gerard and his brother Cyril (1846-1932), who later rejoined his father's firm, were sent to live with relatives in the Hainault Forest, where they spent the summer exploring and studying nature. When he returned to his family, Gerard found himself living near groves of lime and elm, many fine views, the garden where Keats composed his "Ode to a Nightingale" under a mulberry tree and the Heath celebrated in painting after painting by Constable. Hopkins obviously enjoyed living there: Cyril recalls that he was a fearless climber of trees, especially the lofty elm which stood in their garden.

    At the age of ten, Hopkins left the garden and his family home for Robert Cholmondley's boarding school at Highgate, a northern height of London less populous and more forested than Hampstead. Like Hampstead, it commanded a good view of the surrounding area and was associated with the memories of such artists as Marvell, Lamb, Keats, and De Quincey; the tomb, even the coffin, of Coleridge could be seen in Highgate when Hopkins was there. One of Hopkins's friends at Highgate was Coleridge's grandson E. H. Coleridge, who became a biographer of Byron and named one of his sons after his friend Hopkins. While at Highgate Hopkins composed "The Escorial" (1860), his earliest poem extant. The description of the destruction of the Escorial by the sweeping rain and sobbing wind recalls Byron, but the allusions to Raphael, Titian, Velásquez, Rubens, and Claude, as well as to various styles of architecture, reveal Hopkins's desire to unite in some way his love of the visual arts and his love of poetry.

    The sketches of Bavarian peasants Hopkins produced when his father took him to southern Germany in 1860 reveal his growing interest in being a painter as well as a poet. The only drawing manual in the Hopkins family library, as far as is known, was John Eagles's The Sketcher (1856). Rev. Eagles, who was Manley Hopkins's maternal uncle, recommends the classical idealism of Gaspard Poussin and an elegant, expressive mode of pastoral. However, the fourth volume of John Ruskin's Modern Painters was published the same year as The Sketcher, and it promulgated important modifications of Eagles's ideal of amateur drawing. Ruskin's emphasis on objective, detailed representation of nature soon became evident in the sketches of Hopkins and other members of his family.

    Hopkins's Ruskinese sketches are significant because although Hopkins is remembered as a poet, he wanted to be a painter, deciding against it finally because he thought it was too "passionate" an exercise for one with a religious vocation. Nevertheless, even after he became a Jesuit he continued to cultivate an acquaintance with the visual arts through drawing and attendance at exhibitions, and this lifelong attraction to the visual arts affected the verbal art for which he is remembered. In his early poetry and in his journals wordpainting is pervasive, and there is a recurrent Keatsian straining after the stasis of the plastic arts.

    Hopkins's finely detailed black-and-white sketches were primarily important to him as special exercises of the mind, the eye, and the hand which could alter the sketcher's consciousness of the outside world. The typical Hopkins drawing is what Ruskin called the "outline drawing"; as Ruskin put it, "without any wash of colour, such an outline is the most valuable of all means for obtaining such memoranda of any scene as may explain to another person, or record for yourself, what is most important in its features." Many such practical purposes for drawing were advanced by Ruskin, but his ultimate purpose was to unite science, art, and religion. As Humphry House put it, "Because the Romantic tradition said that Nature was somehow the source of important spiritual experience, and because the habit of mind of the following generation (with an empiric scientific philosophy) was to dwell lovingly on factual detail, a suspicion came about that perhaps the cause of the spiritual experience lay in detail."

    This is part of the motivation for the obsession with minute detail seen in Hopkins's Manor Farm, Shanklin Sept. 21, 1863 and in his May 12 n. r. Oxford. According to Ruskin, those who sketched in this way possessed the further advantage of cultivating certain special powers of the eye and the mind: "By drawing they actually obtained a power of the eye and a power of the mind wholly different from that known to any other discipline, and which could only be known by the experienced student--he only could known how the eye gained physical power by the attention to details, and that was one reason why delicate drawings had, above all others, been most prized; and that nicety of study made the eye see things and causes which it could not otherwise trace." Manor Farm uses fairly heavy shading but combines it with fine detail for a more delicate effect. An effect of lighter delicacy is achieved in May 12 n. r. Oxford, a sketch of a convolvulus, by restricting the heavy shading to the shadows and by using fairly delicate gradations.

    The powers of the mind which such study granted included the cultivation of patience, discipline, earnestness, and a love of work for its own sake, but perhaps the most important power developed was the ability to concentrate. Ruskin stressed the importance of concentration to perceptions of the unity of things: "No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing; but we may see more and more of it the longer we look." By concentrating on the whole of a thing Hopkins was able to discover the "inscape," the distinctively unifying pattern of, say, "a white shire of cloud. I looked long up at it till the tall height and the beauty of the scaping--regularly curled knots springing up if I remember from fine stems, like foliage on wood or stone--had strongly grown on me.... Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.... if you look well at big pack-clouds overhead you will soon find a strong large quaining and squaring in them which makes each pack imprerssive and whole." By concentrating in this way also on the formal aspects of running water he was able to discover some of the deeper, recurrent formations of "scaping" even in a tumultuous river: "by watching hard the banks began to sail upstream, the scaping unfolded." This kind of concentration was clearly aided by drawing exercises such as July 18. At the Baths of Rosenlaui.

    A search for recurring regularity and distinctively unifying forms was one of the primary motivations of an outline drawing of a tree such as June 26, '68. Many of Hopkins's sketches of trees seem to be attempts to discover what Ruskin called the "fountain-like impulse" of trees in which "each terminates all its minor branches at its outer extremity, so as to form a great outer curve, whose character and proportion are peculiar for each species"; ultimately both Ruskin and Hopkins were seeking "organic unity; the law, whether of radiation or parallelism, or concurrent action, which rules the masses of herbs and trees."

    One of Hopkins's journal entries makes this motivation clear and serves as an effective summary of his typically Victorian union of science and aesthetics: "Oaks: the organization of this tree is difficult. Speaking generally no doubt the determining planes are concentric, a system of brief contiguous and continuous tangents, whereas those of the cedar would roughly be called horizontals and those of the beech radiating but modified by droop and by a screw-set towards jutting points. But beyond this since the normal growth of the boughs is radiating and the leaves grow some way in there is of course a system of spoke-wise clubs of greensleeve-pieces.... I have seen also the pieces in profile with chiselled outlines, the blocks thus made detached and lessening towards the end.... Oaks differ much, and much turns on the broadness of the leaves, the narrower giving the crisped and starring and Catherine-wheel forms, the broader the flat-pieced or shard-covered ones, in which it is possible to see composition in dips etc on wider bases than the single knot or cluster." Hopkins discovered that his genius lay in such translations of visual perceptions into words.

    His drawings were often remarkably similar to the early sketches of his brother Arthur, although Arthur's drawings are often more fully detailed and unified. Hence it is difficult to accept the belief of critics that Gerard had more talent than his brother. On the contrary, the differences between Gerard's sketches and Arthur's suggest a need to revise the accepted opinion that Gerard could have been a professional painter if he had wanted to. Rather, it would appear that just as Lope de Vega's success in Spanish drama induced Cervantes to develop an alternative genre, Arthur Hopkins's superior sketching abilities encouraged his older brother to concentrate his energies on literary and religious creativity instead.

    This sibling rivalry between Hopkins and his brother Arthur reveals how crucial adaptive compromise can be in the development of a genius's creative potential. Although some of Hopkins's drawings suggest that he could have achieved more detail if he had tried, it is apparent that, while he shared the motivations of his family for drawing, he soon developed specific aims and interests which often differed significantly from theirs. His letter of 10 July 1863 to his friend A. W. M. Baillie confirms that he had developed special interests and did not find any member of his own family a congenial thinker in these matters: "I venture to hope you will approve of some of the sketches in a Ruskinese point of view:--if you do not, who will, my sole congenial thinker on art?"

    Some of the differences between Hopkins's aims and those of his brother Arthur are most obvious in the results of their sketching from the cliff in Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in 1863. Arthur, focusing on an unusual bridgelike rock formation in the sea, produced a memorable subject for a picturesque travel record: Arched Rock. Freshwater Bay. (from the cliff) July 23. 1863. Gerard, on the other hand, tried to reproduce the pattern made by the waves below and wrote: "Note: The curves of the returning wave overlap, the angular space between is smooth but covered with a network of foam. The advancing wave, already broken, and now only a mass of foam, upon the point of encountering the reflux of the former. Study from the cliff above. Freshwater Gate. July 23." Gerard's aims clearly diverged from Arthur's in at least two important ways: he became more interested in drawing as a means of visual research and more willing to supplement this visual art with verbal art.

    In addition, these two sketches illustrate the meaning of "inscape," that conundrum of Hopkins's readers. A common misconception of the word is that it signifies simply a love of the unique particular, the unusual feature, the singular appearance, but that meaning fits Arched Rock better than it does Gerard's note on waves. Gerard lost interest in what was merely unique; as in the wave study he usually sought the distinctively unifying design, the "returning" or recurrent pattern, the internal "network" of structural relationships which clearly and unmistakably integrates or scapes an object or set of objects and thus reveals the presence of integrating laws throughout nature and a divine unifying force or "stress" in this world. The suggestion of metaphysical significance is obvious in an 1874 note by Hopkins on waves: "The laps of running foam striking the sea-wall double on themselves and return in nearly the same order and shape in which they came. This is mechanical reflection and is the same as optical: indeed all nature is mechanical, but then it is not seen that mechanics contain that which is beyond mechanics."

    Arthur was also fascinated by waves and produced some excellent sketches of them, especially 1st September, '75, Breaking Waves, Whitby, and Study of the back of a breaking wave seen from above and behind. Whitby. 30 Aug. '75. These sketches are clearly superior to any of Gerard's drawings of waves in detail, finish, delicacy of shading, and illusion of motion. Likewise, Arthur's Study of 'The Armed Knight', a reef at the Land's End. 4 Sept. '79 easily surpasses Gerard's 1863 sketches of rock formations, both in truth of detail and aesthetic development, and his At Whitnash. Warwickshire 8 Sept. '77 reproduces more subtle and delicate effects of light and shade than Gerard achieved in his studies of groups of trees.

    Gerard did not even try to sketch the majesty and sublimity of an ocean wave as Arthur did, however. Characteristically, in his Study from the cliff above Gerard conveyed the motion of the waves with words. Phrases such as "the advancing wave already broken, and now only a mass of foam" supply a scenario, a succession of events in time to complement the spatial representation. Eagles recommended not only sea-pieces such as this but also shipwrecks, and eventually this advice, along with similar recommendations from Ruskin, and the family preoccupation with danger at sea due to the father's insurance business inspired Gerard's attempt to represent a shipwreck. Besides his father's publication of Port of Refuge another factor that motivated Gerard may well have been Arthur's wave studies of 30 August and 1 September 1875.

    Only a few months after Arthur executed these studies, Gerard began his own response to the sea in the genre which was to make him famous: not painting, but poetry. If he had insisted on competing directly with his brother, he might well have gone on to become a draughtsman less well known than Arthur. However, his response to the sea, The Wreck of the Deutschland, was in some ways an even better fulfillment of the suggestion of his great-uncle, John Eagles, that those who appreciate the sublime acquire "greater notions of the power and majesty of Him who maketh the clouds his chariot, and walketh upon the wings of the wind."

    It has been argued that the visual image, the painter's vision, is predominant in Hopkins's journal, but the essence of his creativity was verbal rather than visual, as this description of a glacier reveals: "There are round one of the heights of the Jungfrau two ends or falls of a glacier. If you took the skin of a white tiger or the deep fell of some other animal and swung it tossing high in the air and then cast it out before you it would fall and so clasp and lap round anything in this way just as this glacier does and the fleece would part in the same rifts: you must suppose a lazuli under-flix to appear. The spraying out of one end I tried to catch but it would have taken hours: it is this which first made me think of a tiger-skin, and it ends in tongues and points like the tail and claws: indeed the ends of the glaciers are knotted or knuckled like talons." Hopkins had tried to "catch" the spraying out of one end of the glacier in three sketches inscribed July 15, '68; July 15; and July 15, Little Scheidegg, but he realized that he had relatively little talent for sketching. He could have "taken hours" and persisted, but instead he let his visual impression stimulate his linguistic creativity, specifically his extraordinary capacity for metaphor. His frustration in one genre only stimulated him to be creative in another.

    A similar shift from the visual to the verbal is suggested by his "A Vision of the Mermaids" (1862), a pen-and-ink drawing followed by a poem, both apparently inspired by the poetic vision of the mermaids in The Sketcher. Eagles's comment, "How difficult it would be, by any sketch, to convey the subject!," explains why Hopkins followed his drawing with words such as the following:




    Plum-purple was the west; but spikes of light

    Spear'd open lustrous gashes, crimson-white;

    (Where the eye fix'd, fled the encrimsoning spot,

    And gathering, floated where the gaze was not

    And thro' their parting lids there came and went

    Keen glimpses of the inner firmament:

    Fair beds they seem'd of water-lily flakes

    Clustering entrancingly in beryl lakes.

    This kind of poetic diction reflects the influence of one of Hopkins's teachers at Highgate, Richard Watson Dixon. Dixon had been involved in the vanguard of much that seemed exciting in the art of the time. Dante Gabriel Rossetti had taught him painting and had praised his poems. Dixon's Christ's Company and Other Poems (1861) featured Rossetti's decorative, sensuous beauty and remote dream worlds and a typically Victorian love of wordpainting.

    Yet Dixon's title emphasizes the fact that his longer poems are High Church hagiographical verses and the Incarnation is a pervasive theme in the poems in this volume. Dixon had been attracted to the Oxford Pre-Raphaelites who followed Rossetti because of their Ruskinese stress on Christian art and because of the original pietism of the group itself. Almost every member of the group had initially intended to take Holy Orders, but most of them were deflected from their purpose by their desire to be artists. Dixon also at one point had given up his religious commitment to become a Pre-Raphaelite painter, but, unlike other members of the group, Dixon finally did take Holy Orders. He thus became an important model for Hopkins of the possibility of combining poetic and religious vocations.

    Hopkins praised and respected Dixon's poetry and even copied out favorite stanzas when he entered the Jesuit novitiate. The affinities between Dixon's poems and Hopkins's early poetry are evident when we compare the descriptions of the sunsets in "The Sicilian Vespers," Dixon's boyhood prize poem, and in "A Vision of the Mermaids," thought by some to be one of Hopkins's best poems at Highgate. Both teacher and student focus on an isle breaking the sunset's tide of light; and both reveal a preference for iambic pentameter couplets and the adjectival compounds, long sentences, and colorful pictorial images characteristic of Victorian wordpainting.

    In short, Dixon introduced Hopkins to "the school of Keats" in Victorian poetry. As Hopkins recalled, Dixon would "praise Keats by the hour." The result is obvious in "A Vision of the Mermaids," which reproduces the archaic diction, literary and mythological allusiveness, precious neologisms, luxurious sensuality, subjective dreaminess, and amoral, otherworldly aestheticism of Keats's early poems. Hopkins's comments about Keats's choice of subjects apply to his own poem as well: "His contemporaries ... still concerned themselves with great causes [such] as liberty and religion, but he lived in mythology and fairyland the life of a dreamer." The mermaids' song of "piteous siren sweetness" in Hopkins's poem, the Keatsian temptation for him and the other Victorian poets, was to live alone in a world of private visions where the reality of the impersonal world might be freely altered to fit personal desire.

    Yet Hopkins could resist the temptation even in his early poetry. Again what he said about Keats applies as well to his own early poems: "even when he is misconstructing one can remark certain instinctive turns of construction in his style, shewing his latent power." The most significant "instinctive turn" in Hopkins's early poetry occurs in "Il Mystico" (1862), in which older, more traditional religious ideals replace his Keatsian dream visions. "Il Mystico" anticipates that general move that Hopkins, like Tennyson, made from the imitation of Keats to a more explicitly Christian Romanticism, a conversion which enabled him to fulfill his own prophecy for Keats: "what he did not want to live by would have asserted itself presently and perhaps have been as much more powerful than that of his contemporaries as his sensibility or impressionableness, by which he did not want to live, was keener and richer than theirs."

    "Il Mystico" contains another "instinctive turn." The poem begins as an imitation of Milton's "Il Penseroso," but its development embodies in embryo the general movement in Hopkins's early art from representations of ideal worlds to representations of this world which culminated in his famous 1877 poems on nature. His initial attempt to attain a spiritual vision in "Il Mystico" is fragmented until the speaker finds that his best expression of his aspiration for some other, more perfect realm is an objective correlative in nature, the ascent of the lark, which translates that desire into action.

    Hopkins cultivated this "instinctive turn" and the result was his first published poem, "Winter with the Gulf Stream," which appeared in the popular periodical Once a Week on 14 February 1863, when Hopkins was only eighteen years old. This poem reveals the beginning of Hopkins's movement away from a pseudo-Keatsian dreamy subjectivity toward imitation of those traits of Keats's most valuable to Hopkins at this stage of his development: mastery of objective correlatives and evocative natural detail. Rather than being introduced to the speaker, as we are in "A Vision of the Mermaids," we are introduced to the object. The poem begins not with "Rowing, I reached a rock," but with "The boughs, the boughs"; the "I" is not introduced until six stanzas later. The objects to which we are initially introduced are, moreover, more closely observed than those of his earlier poems. We are not shown general features of a landscape from a distance but an immediate foreground of branches and vines--"Frost furred our ivies are and rough/With bills of rime the brambles shew." Instead of masses of trees we are shown their leaves hissing and scuttling along the ground and the clammy coats of foliage they become when the rain-blasts are unbound.

    Hopkins eventually began to be critical of mere love of detail, however--"that kind of thought which runs upon the concrete and the particular, which disintegrates and drops toward atomism in some shape or other," he wrote in his journal--and he became increasingly aware of the importance of religion as the ultimate source of unity.

    His religious consciousness increased dramatically when he entered Oxford, the city of spires. From April of 1863, when he first arrived with some of his journals, drawings, and early Keatsian poems in hand, until June of 1867 when he graduated, Hopkins felt the charm of Oxford, "steeped in sentiment as she lies," as Matthew Arnold had said, "spreading her gardens to the moonlight and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages." Here he became more fully aware of the religious implications of the medievalism of Ruskin, Dixon, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Inspired also by Christina Rossetti, the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of God in the Eucharist, and by the Victorian preoccupation with the fifteenth-century Italian religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola, he soon embraced Ruskin's definition of "Medievalism" as a "confession of Christ" opposed to both "Classicalism" ("Pagan Faith") and "Modernism" (the "denial of Christ").

    At Oxford Hopkins's consciousness of competition with contemporaries increased, apparently partly as a result of the tradition of oral contests which persisted at Oxford and also because of Hopkins's decision to focus on classical studies which tended to be highly agonistic and rhetorically oriented. At Highgate Hopkins was encouraged to begin his literary career as a student of Keats by his teacher Dixon, who also showed Hopkins how to resist Keats's dominance, partly by sublimating it in devotional poetry. While the initiation and direction of Hopkins's creativity in the relationship with Dixon was positive, Hopkins's relationship with a more famous teacher at Oxford, Walter Pater, was fiercely dialectical, with Hopkins defining his position in opposition to Pater's. Yet there was also a curious symbiotic quality in their relationship; they remained friends and shared related interests in Dante, Savonarola, medievalism, and the Pre-Raphaelites.

    Among the Pre-Raphaelites the most important figure for Hopkins was Christina Rossetti. She benefited from the emphasis on the feminine in the Pre-Raphaelite focus on Marian figures such as Dante's Beatrice. When Hopkins met her in 1864 he met an icon, the model for the Virgin in the paintings of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She influenced Hopkins more than any other contemporary at this point in his career and was particularly important in Hopkins's replacement of Keats with Dante as the dominant paradigm in his poetic imagination.

    Christina Rossetti became for Hopkins the embodiment of the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, the Oxford Movement, and Victorian religious poetry generally. In the 1860s Hopkins was profoundly influenced by her example and succeeded, unbeknownst to her and to the critics of his time, in becoming a rival far greater than any of her contemporaries.

    Their rivalry began with Hopkins's response to her poem "The Convent Threshold." Geoffrey Hartman was clearly on the right track when he suggested in the introduction to Hopkins: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966) that "Hopkins seems to develop his lyric structures out of the Pre-Raphaelite dream vision. In his early `A Vision of the Mermaids' and `St. Dorothea' he may be struggling with such poems as Christina Rossetti's `Convent Threshold' and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's `The Blessed Damozel,' poems in which the poet stands at a lower level than the vision, or is irrevocably, pathetically distanced." Such poems were the essence of medievalism in poetry according to William Morris, who felt that Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" was the germ from which all Pre-Raphaelite poetry sprang. Standing beyond Keats, however, the primary source was Dante. Christina Rossetti clearly alludes to Beatrice's appeal to Dante in "The Convent Threshold":




    I choose the stairs that mount above,

    Stair after golden skyward stair,

    .............................

    Lo, stairs are meant to lift us higher:

    Mount with me, mount the kindled stair.

    Your eyes look earthward, mine look up.

    .........................................

    How should I rest in Paradise,

    Or sit on steps of heaven alone?

    .............................

    Oh save me from a pang in heaven,

    By all the gifts we took and gave,

    Repent, repent, and be forgiven.



    Hopkins read this appeal at a crucial moment in his career, when he was actually considering renouncing his own powerful attraction to this world for a life beyond the cloister threshold. He translated portions of Rossetti's poem into Latin elegiacs and devoted much of his poetic creativity in 1864 to his own response to it, which he called at first "A Voice from the World" (later "Beyond the Cloister") and subtitled "An Answer to Miss Rossetti's Convent Threshold ." The surviving fragments express the speaker's sense of spiritual inferiority and his admiration for the decision of Christina Rossetti's heroine to join the convent. Hopkins's first title identifies his persona as the one whose eyes "look earthward," but he is willing to lift up his gaze:




    At last I hear the voice well known;

    ................................

    You see but with a holier mind--

    You hear and, alter'd, do not hear

    Being a stoled apparel'd star.

    ...........................

    Teach me the paces that you went

    I can send up an Esau's cry;

    Tune it to words of good intent.

    This ice, this lead, this steel, this stone,

    This heart is warm to you alone;

    Make it to God. I am not spent

    .............................

    Steel may be melted and rock rent.

    Penance shall clothe me to the bone.

    Teach me the way: I will repent.



    Hopkins was clearly oriented to the Pre-Raphaelite dream vision in which the poet is represented on a lower plane than the vision. By taking the part of Rossetti's heroine's earthly lover in his poem, moreover, Hopkins invites a comparison between his persona and Christina's erstwhile lover, James Collinson, who also became a follower of the Pre-Raphaelites and convert to Catholicism and, for a while, a Jesuit. Eventually, by converting to Catholicism himself and joining the Society of Jesus, Hopkins exchanged the inferior position articulated in "A Voice from the World" for a superior one, superior at least in the sense that Christina Rossetti apparently felt that her sister Maria, who actually did cross the convent threshold and become a religious, had achieved a higher stage of religious development than she herself did.

    Both Hopkins and Christina Rossetti believed that religion was more important than art. The outline of Hopkins's career follows that of Christina Rossetti's: an outwardly drab, plodding life of submission quietly bursting into splendor in holiness and poetry. Both felt that religious inspiration was more important than artistic inspiration. Whenever religious renunciation and self-expression were felt to be at odds, as they often were, self-expression had to be sacrificed. Poetry had to be subordinated to religion.

    No doubt partly as a result of this attitude, both Hopkins and Rossetti were subject to intermittent creativity. Both thought of poetry as a gift which could not be summoned at will, and each turned to prose between bursts of poetic inspiration. In fact each went through a stage of about seven years in which writing prose almost entirely replaced composing poetry. Hopkins's prose period stretched from 1868 to 1875, when his literary energies were devoted primarily to his journal. In addition to passing through periods of writing prose, both poets concluded their literary careers with devotional commentaries: in Hopkins's case, his unfinished "Commentary on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius."

    The attitudes of Christina Rossetti and Hopkins toward art and religion have destined them to share much the same fate at the hands of twentieth-century readers: criticism for deliberately narrowing their subjects to a range too limited for modern palates, for expressing religious convictions with which it is now difficult to sympathize, for allowing religion to take precedence over poetry, or for actually impairing the creative gift itself. On the other hand, both are often praised by twentieth-century readers for the same feature: the expression of counterpoised forces generating dramatic tensions.

    One of the most dramatic tensions was that between their attraction to this world and their determination to transcend it. Like Hopkins, Christina Rossetti often reveals a Keatsian attraction to the life of sensations, especially to nature. Hopkins's wide variety of responses to nature, especially in the 1860s and 1880s, ranging from strong attraction to its beauty to belief that this beauty must be denied on religious grounds, is congruent with the range of Christina Rossetti's responses. Ultimately, however, she believed that God was not in nature but above and therefore that one must ascend the heavenly stair invoked in "The Convent Threshold," "A Shadow of Dorothea," and other poems. Hopkins's version of the legend of Saint Dorothea, "For a Picture of St. Dorothea" (1864), and his "Heaven-Haven" reveal a similar transition from the natural to the supernatural in his early poetry.

    Hopkins's "For a Picture of St. Dorothea" originated in that section of his journal devoted primarily to the representation of nature. However, the flowers in his poem are not rooted in the earth but in legend. Hopkins's aim was not truth to nature primarily in this poem but the revival of medieval legend by defamiliarizing it, putting it in a new context and thereby restoring its original impact in the service of religion.

    In "Heaven-Haven" Hopkins again responded to the transcendental, otherworldly aspiration so evident in the Dorothea legend and in Christina Rossetti's "A Shadow of Dorothea." As "Heaven-Haven" suggests, Hopkins's sense of the unreliability and instability of this world led him to a desire to transcend this world in order to discover some other, better world less subject to the triumph of time. Of the two paths to holiness, the outward or the inward--contemplation of God's presence in this world or contemplation of His presence within the self--by far the most common is the one Christina Rossetti usually followed: withdrawal from the external world in order to plumb the secret depths of one's own soul. Hopkins is perhaps more famous for his 1877 nature sonnets which focus on God in nature, but his sonnets of desolation of the 1880s turn inward, returning to the impulse already apparent in "Heaven-Haven," subtitled "A Nun Takes the Veil":




    I have desired to go

    Where springs not fail,

    To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

    And a few lilies blow.



    And I have asked to be

    Where no storms come,

    Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

    And out of the swing of the sea.

    Hopkins's "A Soliloquy of One of the Spies Left in the Wilderness" (1864) is also a response to the recurrent call of desert Christianity. It appears to be based directly on one of the biblical interpretations of the great reformer Savonarola, the famous burner of profane art in Renaissance Italy. As Hopkins commented in a letter, Savonarola was "the only person in history (except perhaps Origen) about whom" he had "real feeling," because for Hopkins Savonarola was "the prophet of Christian art." Savonarola's example reinforced Christina Rossetti's and at first encouraged Hopkins to move beyond not only his Greek studies but also the imitation of nature that had characterized his early art. Ultimately, Savonarola's example inspired Hopkins to give up nature, beauty, and art altogether.

    The sequence of events is clear. On 18 January 1866 Hopkins composed his most ascetic poem, "The Habit of Perfection." On 23 January he included poetry in the list of things to be given up for Lent. In July he decided to become a Catholic, and he traveled to Birmingham in September to consult the leader of the Oxford converts, John Henry Newman. Newman received him into the Church in October. On 5 May 1868 Hopkins firmly "resolved to be a religious." Less than a week later, apparently still inspired by Savonarola, he made a bonfire of his poems and gave up poetry almost entirely for seven years. Finally, in the fall of 1868 Hopkins joined a "serged fellowship" like Savonarola's and like the one he admired in "Eastern Communion" (1865), a commitment foreshadowed by the emphasis on vows of silence and poverty in "The Habit of Perfection."

    Hopkins had been attracted to asceticism since childhood. At Highgate, for instance, he argued that nearly everyone consumed more liquids than the body needed, and, to prove it, he wagered that he could go without liquids for at least a week. He persisted until his tongue was black and he collapsed at drill. He won not only his wager but also the undying enmity of the headmaster Dr. John Bradley Dyne. On another occasion, he abstained from salt for a week. His continuing insistence on extremes of self-denial later in life struck some of his fellow Jesuits as more appropriate to a Victorian Puritan than to a Catholic.

    Thus it is important to realize that he converted to Catholicism not to be more ascetic, for asceticism was as Protestant as it was Catholic, but to be able to embrace the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. This explanation was not enough to satisfy his family, however. Hopkins's letter informing them of his conversion came as a great shock. He wrote to Newman: "I have been up at Oxford just long enough to have heard fr. my father and mother in return for my letter announcing my conversion. Their answers are terrible: I cannot read them twice." Meanwhile, Manley Hopkins was writing to Gerard's Anglican confessor, H.P. Liddon: "The blow is so deadly and great that we have not yet recovered from the first shock of it. We had observed a growing love for asceticism and high ritual, and/ ... we believed he had lately resolved on taking orders in the English Church .... save him from throwing a pure life and a somewhat unusual intellect away in the cold limbo which Rome assigns to her English converts. The deepness of our distress, the shattering of our hopes and the foreseen estrangement which must happen, are my excuse for writing to you so freely." After receiving Liddon's reply, Manley Hopkins wrote to Liddon again, accusing Gerard of speaking "with perfect coldness of any possible estrangement from us, who have loved him with an unchanging love. His mother's heart is almost broken by this, and by his desertion from our Church, her belief in, and devotion to, which are woven in with her very being." Manley used similar terms in his letter to Gerard: "The manner in which you seem to repel and throw us off cuts us to the heart .... O Gerard my darling boy are you indeed gone from me?"

    As these words suggest, when Hopkins converted to Catholicism he felt he had actually forfeited his rightful place in the family home; he did not even know if his father would let him in the house again. A letter from Hopkins reveals that his father consented to his presence there on one condition: "You are so kind as not to forbid me your house, to which I have no claim, on condition, if I understand, that I promise not to try to convert my brothers and sisters." This was not an easy condition for him to accept, however; "Before I can promise this I must get permission, wh. I have no doubt will be given. Of course this promise will not apply after they come of age. Whether after my reception you will still speak as you do now I cannot tell." Despite these differences Hopkins did spend his Christmas holidays with his family in 1866 and 1867, but what his father called "the foreseen estrangement which must happen" necessarily increased when Hopkins began his novitiate in the Society of Jesus at Manresa House, Roehampton, in September 1868 and later moved to St. Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst, for his philosophical studies in 1870. He spent Christmas away from his family from 1868 to 1871. He returned to the family hearth for the holiday in subsequent years, but in 1885 his Dublin poems still testify to the lonely isolation and anticipation of death characteristic of many Victorian orphans:




    To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life

    Among strangers. Father and mother dear,

    Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near

    .......................................

    I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third

    Remove. Not but in all removes I can

    Kind love both give and get.

    When, aged only forty-four, he was finally close to the farthest remove, death, another reconciliation was attempted, but it was too late. His was a painful and poignant tragedy all too typical of Victorian families.

    His father had written "by study hard WITHIN THE CHURCHYARD/IS FOUND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE." Ironically, it was by following this advice that father and son became estranged. The son did study hard within the churchyard, and he found that the Catholic concept of the Real Presence was his philosopher's stone. The Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation became for him the mystical catalyst which could transmute into gold, redeem, and regenerate all that is base--what Hopkins called "the triviality of this life," "the sordidness of things." Contrary to his father's assertions, this was not a last-minute discovery. As early as June of 1864 Hopkins wrote to E. H. Coleridge: "The great aid to belief and object of belief is the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. Religion without that is sombre, dangerous, illogical, with that it is--not to speak of its grand consistency and certainty--loveable. Hold that and you will gain all Catholic truth." Ironically, as we have seen, "Catholic Truth" was the title of one of the poems in Pietas Metrica.

    The next month Hopkins wrote to Baillie, "I have written three religious poems which however you would not at all enter into, they being of a very Catholic character." The first of these poems was apparently "Barnfloor and Winepress," published the next year in the Union Review. This poem adumbrates the poetic as well as religious importance of Hopkins's belief in the Real Presence of God in the Eucharist, the "Half-Way House" of God in this world as Hopkins called the sacrament in a poem of that name in 1864. "Barnfloor and Winepress" in some respects foreshadows the poetry of nature Hopkins was to compose in the late 1870s.

    Though primarily a celebration of the Real Presence, this poem reveals how Hopkins could in his imagination extend the idea of the mystical Body of Christ in the communion bread and wine to the rest of nature. In this poem the wheat and grapes are not mere raw materials for Transubstantiation but are represented metaphorically as if they were already participating in the Being of God. One of the attractions of the doctrine of the Real Presence for Hopkins was that it was, as depicted in "Barnfloor and Winepress," the central instance of a metaphor participating in the reality it represents, an archetype for a sacramental poetry of nature.

    This potential for a new sacramental poetry was first realized by Hopkins in The Wreck of the Deutschland. Hopkins recalled that when he read about the wreck of the German ship Deutschland off the coast of England it "made a deep impression on me, more than any other wreck or accident I ever read of," a statement made all the more impressive when we consider the number of shipwrecks he must have discussed with his father. Hopkins wrote about this particular disaster at the suggestion of Fr. James Jones, Rector of St. Beuno's College, where Hopkins studied theology from 1874 to 1877. Hopkins recalled that "What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for [presumably `Rosa Mystica' and `Ad Mariam']. But when in the winter of '75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper."

    The result is an ode of thirty-five eight-line stanzas, divided into two parts. The first part, consisting of ten stanzas, is autobiographical, recalling how God touched the speaker in his own life. The second begins with seven stanzas dramatizing newspaper accounts of the wreck. Then fourteen stanzas narrow the focus to a single passenger, the tallest of the five nuns who drowned. She was heard to call on Christ before her death. The last four stanzas address God directly and culminate in a call for the conversion of England.

    The Wreck of the Deutschland became the occasion for Hopkins's incarnation as a poet in his own right. He broke with the Keatsian wordpainting style with which he began, replacing his initial prolixity, stasis, and lack of construction with a concise, dramatic unity. He rejected his original attraction to Keats’s sensual aestheticism for a clearly moral, indeed a didactic, rhetoric. He saw nature not only as a pleasant spectacle as Keats had; he also confronted its seemingly infinite destructiveness as few before or after him have done. In this shipwreck he perceived the possibility of a theodicy, a vindication of God’s justice which would counter the growing sense of the disappearance of God among the Victorians. For Hopkins, therefore, seeing more clearly than ever before the proselytic possibilities of art, his rector’s suggestion that someone write a poem about the wreck became the theological sanction he needed to begin reconciling his religious and poetic vocations.

    Nevertheless, although The Wreck of the Deutschland was a great breakthrough to the vision of God immanent in nature and thus to the sacramentalism that was to be the basis of the great nature poems of the following years, when Hopkins sent the poem to his friendRobert Bridges, Bridges refused to reread it despite Hopkins’s pleas. The poem was also rejected by the Jesuit magazine the Month, primarily because of its new “sprung” rhythm, and many subsequent readers have had difficulty with it as well.

    Hopkins’s readers have more easily understood the sonnets he wrote about the landscape he actually saw around him near St. Beuno’s College, Wales. It was in an earlier poem, “Half-Way House,” that Hopkins most clearly recorded his need to approach God in this world: “I must o’ertake Thee at once and under heaven/If I shall overtake Thee at last above.” As “The Windhover,” “God’s Grandeur,” and Hopkins’s other sonnets of 1877 reveal, Hopkins found such a halfway house not only in the communion bread and wine but also in the Vale of Clwyd and the rest of the countryside around St. Beuno’s. Wales clearly provided the occasion for his greatest experience of nature, as it had for Wordsworth (on Mt. Snowdon and near Tintern Abbey),John Dyer (on Grongar Hill), and Henry Vaughan.

    Some of the most luminous symbols of the presence of God in Hopkins’s Welsh poems are the sunrises and the “sea-sunsets which give such splendour to the vale of Clwyd,” as Wordsworth put it in the preface to his own Descriptive Sketches. Such sights were prized and distilled in Hopkins’s nature poetry in his imagery of sunlight which “sidled like dewdrops, like dandled diamonds” (“The furl of fresh-leaved dogrose down,” 1879). Everything from ploughed furrows to clouds to their reflections in pools is shining and gleaming. Even night reveals a world of strangely translucent moonshine or of stars that gleam like “bright boroughs” or “diamond delves” or “quickgold” in gray lawns; all of nature was perceived as a “piece-bright paling” that was Christ’s “home” (“The Starlight Night,” 1877).

    Hopkins’s most famous Welsh sonnet, “The Windhover,” reveals that for him this Book of Nature, like the Bible, demanded a moral application to the self. Hopkins wrote in his notes on St. Ignatius: “This world is word, exprerssion, news of God”; “it is a book he has written.... a poem of beauty: what is it about? His praise, the reverence due to him, the way to serve him.... Do I then do it? Never mind others now nor the race of man: DO I DO IT?” One of Hopkins’s attempts to answer that question is “The Windhover.”

    The initial “I” focuses attention on the speaker, but the explicit application of the lesson of the Book of Nature to him does not begin until the line “My heart in hiding/stirred for a bird” at the conclusion of the octet. One biographical interpretation of this line is that he was hiding from fulfilling his ambitions to be a great painter and poet. Instead of ostentatiously pursuing fame in that way, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he had chosen to be the “hidden man of the heart” (1 Peter 3:4), quietly pursuing the imitation of Christ. As Hopkins put it, Christ’s “hidden life at Nazareth is the great help to faith for us who must live more or less an obscure, constrained, and unsuccessful life.”

    Hopkins did live such a life, but the windhover reminded him of Jesus’ great achievements after Nazareth. The windhover “stirred” his desire to become a great knight of faith, one of those who imitate not only the constraint but also the “achieve of, the mastery of” this great chevalier. The “ecstasy” of the windhover recalls Hopkins’s initial desire in “Il Mystico” to be lifted up on “Spirit’s wings” so “that I may drink that ecstasy/Which to pure souls alone may be.” Ultimately, Hopkins became aware that he had been hiding from the emotional risks of total commitment to becoming a “pure” soul. The phrase “hiding” thus suggests not only hiding from the world or from worldly ambition but also hiding from God.

    The words “here/Buckle” which open the sestet mean “here in my heart,” therefore, as well as here in the bird and here in Jesus. Hopkins’s heart-in-hiding, Christ’s prey, sensed Him diving down to seize it for his own. Just as the bird buckled its wings together and thereby buckled its “brute beauty” and “valour”and capacity to “act,” so the speaker responds by buckling together all his considerable talents and renewing his commitment to the imitation of Christ in order to buckle down, buckle to, in serious preparation for the combat, the grappling, the buckling with the enemy. As Paul said, “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil.”

    Hopkins wrote “The Windhover” only a few months before his ordination as a Jesuit priest, the ultimate commitment to sacrifice his worldly ambitions. Just as Jesus’ paradoxical triumph was his buckling under, his apparent collapse, so Hopkins felt that the knight of faith must be prepared for the same buckling under or collapse of his pride, for a life of “sheer plod” and “blue-bleak” self-sacrifice, if need be. Nevertheless, the imagery of “The Windhover” promises that the knight of faith will have a fire break from his heart then—galled, gashed, and crucified in imitation of Christ. The fire will be “a billion times told lovelier” than that of his “heart in hiding,” and far more “dangerous,” both to his old self (for the fire is all-consuming) and to his enemy, Evil.

    In Hopkins’s case, the fire also became far more “dangerous” to his worldly poetic ambitions. Among other things, “The Windhover” represents Hopkins’s Pegasus, the flying steed of classical myth. The collapse of his old poetic self is implied in the imagery, for Bellerophon was thrown off Pegasus because of his pride. Fearing his pride in his own poetry, Hopkins burned his poems upon entering the Society of Jesus: he believed that poetry always had to give way, buckle under, to the “greater cause” of religion. As a result there was a very real danger that his poems would never reach the public they deserved, that he would have to sacrifice all the worldly fame promised him as “the star of Balliol” for a life of “sheer plod.”

    Yet the “plod” makes the plough “shine” in “The Windhover.” The plough scratching the field was in fact a common medieval metaphor for the writer’s pen scratching across the paper, the furrows corresponding to the rows of letters. Hopkins’s paradoxical triumph as a poet is that although his poems were created out of that life of sheer plod and remained as obscure as “blue-bleak embers” to most of his contemporaries, now that they have found an audience to appreciate them, they have burst into fire.

    They remained unknown to most of his contemporaries, however, for whom nature existed only to be exploited. As Hopkins put it in “God’s Grandeur,” the shod feet of modern men “have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; /And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.” It was both the immediate loss of the landscape and the fact that the “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been” (“Binsey Poplars”) that led Hopkins to plead, “What would the world be, once bereft/Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, wildness and wet; /Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet” (“Inversnaid,” 1881).

    Industrialization continued to consume the wilderness as it still does, however; whole landscapes like those around Oxford were destroyed by what Hopkins called “base and brickish” suburbs (“Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” 1879). Finally, in 1882 Hopkins concluded the octet of “Ribblesdale” by replacing the image of God brooding protectively over nature (“God’s Grandeur”) with a new image of God giving all of nature over to “rack or wrong.” According to Hopkins the chief cause of that “self-bent” of man that made him “thriftless reave our rich round world bare/And none reck of world after” (“Ribblesdale”) was increasing urbanization.

    Hence it was in Hopkins’s first extended comparison of the city and the country, “The Sea and the Skylark” (1877), that he first fully expressed his tragic vision of environmental degradation. For Hopkins the sounds of the sea and the skylark ushered out like bells at the end of the year his own “sordid turbid time.” His representation of his “sordid turbid time” breaking down to man’s last “dust,” draining fast toward man’s first “slime,” recalls similar accounts of dust, slime, and pollution in the works of Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and other Victorian writers.

    In October of 1877, not long after he completed “The Sea and the Skylark” and only a month after he had been ordained as a priest, Hopkins took up his duties as subminister and teacher at Mount St. Mary’s College, Chesterfield. From this time until his death the pollution of the industrial cities to which he was assigned took a mounting toll on his energies and his spirit. Of his life in Chesterfield in 1878 he wrote, “Life here is as dank as ditch-water.... My muse turned utterly sullen in the Sheffield smoke-ridden air.” In July of that year he became curate at the Jesuit church in Mount Street, London. In December he became curate at St. Aloysius’s Church, Oxford. While at Oxford he composed “Binsey Poplars” and “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” but in October 1879, he was put on the temporary staff as curate at St. Joseph’s, Bedford Leigh, near Manchester, which he described as “very gloomy.... there are a dozen mills or so, and coalpits also; the air charged with smoke as well as damp.” In December 1879 he began as select preacher at St. Xavier’s, Liverpool; there “the river was coated with dirty yellow ice from shore to shore.” In September of 1881 Hopkins was put on the temporary staff at St. Joseph’s, Glasgow, and he wrote, “My Liverpool and Glasgow experience laid upon my mind a conviction, a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of town life ... of the degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this century’s civilisation: it made even life a burden to me to have daily thrust upon me the things I saw.” After his third year novitiate at Roehampton and two years as a teacher of classics at Stonyhurst College, in 1884 Hopkins took up his post as fellow in classics at the Royal University of Ireland and professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, which he described as “a joyless place and I think in my heart as smoky as London is.” In 1889 Hopkins died in Dublin of typhoid fever, apparently caused by the polluted urban water supply, and was buried in Glasnevin cemetery.

    Although from the time of his departure from Wales in 1877 until his death Hopkins composed nature poems, his assignments in Victorian cities forced him to change the focus of his life and art from nature to man, and finally to one man—himself. No longer able to identify as completely with nature, an orphan in the surrounding world, Hopkins’s speaker in “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” (1884) becomes “sheathe-and shelterless.” Shifting from the outward way to God back to the inward, he decides to strip down to the essential self to concentrate on the generation of a “new self and nobler me,” as he puts it in “The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe.”

    Shifting his energies from admiration of nature to attempts to bring love and grace to urban man, Hopkins often succeeded, as “Felix Randal” (1880) so eloquently testifies, but he also frequently experienced frustration and the increased sense of social degeneration lamented in “Tom’s Garland” (1887) and in the undated “The Times are nightfall.” In the last Hopkins can find only one alternative: “Or what is else? There is your world within. / There rid the dragons, root out there the sin. /Your will is law in that small commonweal.” “Rooting out sin” in the “world within” had been the subject of previous poems such as “The Candle Indoors” (1879) and his religious poems at Oxford, but it soon became the preoccupation of most of the poems of Hopkins’s final years. Most of these poems focus on acedia, the fourth deadly sin, the sin of “spiritual sloth” or “desolation.” These sonnets of desolation consist of the six original “terrible sonnets” of 1885—”Carrion Comfort,” “No worst, there is none,” “To seem the stranger,” “I wake and feel,” “Patience,” and “My own heart”—and three sonnets of 1889—”Thou art indeed just,” “The Shepherd’s Brow,” and “To R. B.”

    According to his own testimony Hopkins was subject to melancholy all his life, but his “terrible pathos,” as Dixon called it, is most obvious in these late sonnets. Following Saint Ignatius, Hopkins defined “spiritual sloth” or “desolation” as “darkness and confusion of soul ... diffidence without hope and without love, so that [the soul] finds itself altogether slothful, tepid, sad, and as it were separated from its Creator and Lord.” Called acedia in Latin, this sin is differentiated from physical sloth by the fact that the victim realizes his predicament, worries about it, and tries to overcome it.

    The sense of coldness, impotence, and wastefulness evident in Hopkins’s religious poetry of the 1860s is an important feature of acedia, but by far the most important is “world sorrow,” the predicament lamented in Hopkins’s “No worst, there is none” (1885). A great range of emotions are “herded and huddled” together in this “main” or “chief” woe as Hopkins calls it in the poem. Besides impotence and world sorrow per se, the acedia syndrome includes feelings of exile and estrangement, darkness, the disappearance of God, despair, the death wish, and attraction to suicide—all emotions which recur throughout Hopkins’s life and art but become particularly evident toward the end.

    While Hopkins’s sonnets of desolation are generally considered his most modern poems, they are virtually a recapitulation of the medieval treatises on acedia. Even the kind of estrangement from one’s family described in Hopkins’s “To seem the stranger” is an important feature of acedia in Saint John Chrysostom’s fourth-century Exhortations to Stagirius, for instance. John, whose homily on Eutropius Hopkins translated, begins with a summary of the tristitia or world-sorrow syndrome in Stagirius which bears a remarkable resemblance to Hopkins’s situation. A man converts, gives up his family and his position in society, and then struggles manfully against, yet often succumbs to, tristitia.

    Just as in Hopkins’s “To seem the stranger,” Stagirius’s problem is exacerbated by the fact that he is exiled from his family. As in Hopkins’s “Carrion Comfort,” Stagirius also feels that he is both a passive victim of various tortures and one who battles with God Himself in nightmares. Like Hopkins’s “No worst,” moreover, John’s final exhortation implies that tristitia is a universal phenomenon, that the whole “terrestrial kingdom” is full of causes for acedia, and John also uses the imagery of mountains and cliffs to represent the lure of insanity and suicide. Thus, although pride is usually regarded as the deadliest of the seven sins, John concluded that excessive sorrow was the most ruinous diabolic obsession.

    One of the results of acedia is a feeling of the disappearance or withdrawal of God. This is most obvious in Hopkins’s “Nondum” (1866) and in his phrase “dearest him that lives alas! away” in “I wake and feel,” but is also implied in “Comforter, where, where is your comforting?” in “No worst.” We think of this feeling as a modern phenomenon, but it is a common experience of the absence of spiritual consolation, and darkness is its traditional imagery, especially in Saint Bernard, Dante, Milton, and Saint John of the Cross, as it is in Hopkins’s “Nondum,” “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” “Carrion Comfort,” and “My own heart.” The darkness and confusion of soul represented in the first quatrain of Hopkins’s “I wake and feel” recall specifically the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “In the middle of the journey of my life I awoke to mystery in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”

    The ultimate result of God’s withdrawal from the soul and the consequent darkness is often the temptation to despair, that loss of all hope which is the state of the damned in Dante’s Inferno. This despair, the temptation resisted in the opening of Hopkins’s “Carrion Comfort,” was the natural culmination of acedia according to John Chrysostom and others. Despair in turn often leads to the death wish, as implied in the conclusion of Hopkins’s “No worst,” in his “The Times are nightfall,” and in his lament in “To seem the stranger”: “Not but in all removes I can/Kind love both give and get.”

    However, the conclusion of Hopkins’s “I wake and feel”—”The lost are like this, and their scourge to be/As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse”—is an allusion to Dante which clearly distinguishes the speaker of Hopkins’s terrible sonnets from the damned who are continually referred to in the Inferno as “the lost” and the “sorrowful” who have lost all hope, even hope of death. Like Dante, Hopkins faced the “lost” and that which was most like them in his own soul, but his speaker also remains separated from the lost in that he is a living soul still addressing God in his prayers, still purging himself of his sins, and still living by hope in grace.

    The ultimate context of Hopkins’s purgation, therefore, as of Dante’s, was the Bible. One of the biblical incidents echoed in the imagery and phraseology of “No worst,” for instance, is that of Jesus’ exorcism of the demons of Gadara. Like the imagery of Dante’s Purgatorio, this exorcism imagery obviously provides a significant counterpoint of meaning. The suggestion is that the speaker is attempting to herd and huddle all the demons of ennui together in one category, “world-sorrow,” and “heave” them out of himself. Hopkins’s sonnets of desolation are especially suited to this cathartic, purging function because they are prayers as well as poems. Like Jesus’ cry on the cross, Hopkins’s sonnets of desolation are addressed to God and are themselves consolations.

    Eventually, Hopkins, like Dante, was granted a glimpse of Paradise. Hopkins’s sonnet of 1888, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” is apparently a direct reply to “No worst, there is none”: the question in the earlier poem, “Comforter, where, where is your comforting?” is answered in the title of the later poem. Acedia has been conquered: “Enough! the Resurrection, /A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.”As Dante put it, “The inborn and perpetual thirst for the godlike kingdom bore us away.... It seemed to me that a cloud covered us, shining, dense, solid and smooth; like a diamond smit by the sun.” Hopkins concludes this poem with similar imagery: “I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and / This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, /Is immortal diamond.”
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Modern Poetry
    Rabindranath Tagore
    Writing about modern English poets is by no means an easy task, for who defines the limit of the modern age in terms of the almanac? It is not so much a question of time as of spirit.

    After flowing straight for a while, most rivers take a sudden turn. Likewise, literature does not always follow the straight path; when it takes a turn, that turn must be called modern. We call it adhunik in Bengali. This modernity depends not upon time but upon temperament.

    The poetry to which I was introduced in my boyhood might have been classed as modern in those days. Poetry had taken a new turn, beginning from Robert Burns, and the same movement brought forth many other great poets, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats.

    The manners and customs of a society are shown in social usage. In countries where these social customs suppress all freedom and individual taste, man becomes a puppet, and his conduct conforms meticulously to social etiquette. Society appreciates this traditional and habitual way of life. Sometimes literature remains in this groove for long periods of time, and whosoever wears the sacred marks of perfect literary style is looked upon as a saintly person. During the age of English poetry that followed Burns, the barriers of style were broken down, and temperament made its debut. ``The lake adorned with lotus and the lily'' became a lake seen through the special view of official blinkers fashioned in the classic workshop. When a daring writer removes those blinkers and catch phrases, and looks upon the lake with open eyes, he also opens up a view through which the lake assumes different aspects and various fancies. But classic judgement cries ``fie for shame'' on him.

    When we began to read English poetry, this unconventionally individualistic mood had already been acknowledge in literature, and the clamor raised by the Edinburgh Review had died down. Even so, that period of our life was a new era in modernism.

    In those days, the sign of modernism in poetry was an individual's measure of delight. Wordsworth expressed in his own style the spirit of delight that he realized in nature. Shelley's was a Platonic contemplation, accompanied by a spirit of revolt against every kind of obstacle, political, religious or otherwise. Keat's poetry was wrought out of the meditation and creation of beauty. In that age, the stream of poetry took a turn from outwardness to inwardness.

    A poet's deepest feelings strive for immortality by assuming a form in language. Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. There was a time when humanity in its moments of leisure sought to beautify that portion of the universe with which it came into contact, and this outer adornment was the expression of its inner love, and with this love, there could be no indifference. In those days, in the exuberance of his sense of beauty man began to decorate the common articles of daily use; his inspiration lent creative power to his fingers. In every land and village, household utensils and the adornment of the home and person bound man, in color and form, to these outward insignia of life. Many ceremonies were evolved for adding zest to social life, many new melodies, arts and crafts in wood and metal, clay and stone, silk, wool and cotton. In those days, the husband called his wife: ``beloved disciple in the fine arts.'' The bank balance did not constitute the principal asset of the married couple in the work of setting up house; the arts were a more necessary item. Flower garlands were woven, the art of dancing was taught, accompanied by lessons in the vina, the flute and singing, and young women knew how to paint the ends of their saris of China silk. Then, there was beauty in human relationships.

    The English poets with whom we came into contact in my early youth saw the universe with their own eyes; it had become their personal property. Not only did their own imaginations, opinions and tastes humanize and intellectualize the universe, but they molded it according to their individual desires. The universe of Wordsworth was specially ``Wordsworthian,'' of Shelley, ``Shelleyan,'' of Byron, ``Byronic.'' By creative magic it also became the reader's universe. The joy that we felt in a poet's world was the joy of enjoying the delight of a particular world aroma. The flower sent its invitation to the bee through a distinctive smell and color, and the note of invitation was sweet. The poet's invitation possessed a spontaneous charm. In the days when the chief bond between man and universe was individuality, the personal touch in the invitation had to be fostered with care, a sort of competition had to be set up in dress and ornament and manners, in order to show oneself off to the best advantage.

    Thus, we find that in the beginning of the nineteenth century the tradition which held priority in the English poetry of the previous age had given place to self-expression. This was called modernism.

    But now that modernism is dubbed mid-Victorian senility and made to recline on an easy chair in the next room. Now is the day of the modernism of lopped skirts and lopped hair. Powder is applied to the cheeks and rouge to the lips, and it is proclaimed that the days of illusion are over. But there is always illusion at every step of the creation, and it is only the variety of that illusions which plays so many tunes in so many forms. Science has throughly examined every pulse beat, and declares that at the root of things there is no illusion; there is carbon and nitrogen, there is physiology and psychology. We old-fashioned poets thought the illusion was the main thing and carbon and physiology the by-products. Therefore, we must confess that we had striven to compete with the Creator in spreading the snare of illusion through rhyme and rhythm, language and style. In our metaphors and nuances there was some hide-and-seek; we were unable to lift aside that veil of modesty which adorns but does not contradict truth. In the colored light that filtered through the haze, the dawns and evenings appeared in a beauty as tender as a new bride. The modern, Duhshashsan, engaged in publicly disrobing Draupadi is a sight we are not accustomed to. Is it merely habit that makes us uncomfortable; is there no truth in this sense of shame; does not Beauty become bankrupt when divested of the veil which reveals rather than conceals?

    But the modern age is in a hurry, and livelihood is more important. Man races through his work and rushes through his pleasure in a crowd of accelerating machines. The human being who used to create his own intimate world at leisure now delegates his duties to factory and rigs up some sort of provisional affair to suit his needs according to some official standard. Feasts are out of fashion; only meals remain. There is no desire to consider whether life is in harmony with the intellect, for the mind of man is also engaged in pulling the rope of the huge car of livelihood. Instead of music, we hear hoarse shouts of ``Push, boys, push!'' He has to spend most of his time with the crowed, not in the company of his friends; his mentality is the mentality of the hustler. In the midst of all this bustle he has no will power to bypass unadorned ugliness.

    Which path must poetry now follow, then, and what is her destination? It is not possible these days to follow one's own taste, to select, to arrange. Science does not select, it accepts whatever is; it does not appraise by the standard of personal taste nor embellish with the eagerness of personal involvement. The chief delight of the scientific mind consists in curiosity, not in forming ties of relationship. It does not regard what ``I'' want as the main consideration, but rather what the thing in itself exactly is, leaving ``me'' out of the question; and without ``me,'' the preparation of illusion is unnecessary.

    Therefore, in the process of economizing that is being carried out in the poetry of this scientific age, it is adornment that has suffered the biggest loss. A fastidious selectivity in the matter of rhyme, rhythm and words has become almost obsolete. The change is not taking place smoothly, but in order to break the spell of the past, it has become the fashion to repudiate it aggressively, like trying to arrange bits of broken glass in an ugly manner, lest the selective faculty should enter the house by jumping over the garden wall. A poet writes, ``I am the greatest laugher of all, greater than the sun, than the oak tree, than the frog and Apollo.'' ``Than the frog and Apollo'' is where the bits of broken glass come in, out of fear that someone will think that the poet is arranging his words sweetly and prettily. If the word ``sea'' were used instead of ``frog,'' the modernists might object to it as regular poetizing. That may be so, but mentioning the frog is a more regular poetizing of the opposite kind. That is to say, it is not introduced naturally, but is like intentionally walking on your toes; that would be modern.

    But the fact of the matter is, the days are gone for the frog to be admitted into poetry with the same respect as other creatures. In the category of reality, the frog now belongs to a higher class than Apollo. I do not wish to regard the frog with contempt; rather, in an appropriate context, the croaking laugh of the frog might be juxtaposed with the laugh of the poet's beloved, even if she objected. But even according to the most ultra-scientific theory of equality, the laugh of the sun, of the oak tree, of Apollo, is not that of the frog. It has been dragged in by force in order to destroy the illusion.

    Today. this veil of illusion must be removed and the thing must be seen exactly as it is. The illusion which colored the nineteenth century has now faded, and the mere suggestion of sweetness is not enough to satisfy one's hunger - something tangible is required. When we say that smelling is half the eating, we exaggerate by nearly three quarters. Let me quote a few lines from a poem addressed to a beauty of bygone days.

    You are beautiful and faded Like an old opera tune
    Played upon a harpsichord;
    Or like the sun-flooded silks
    Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
    In your eyes
    Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
    And the perfume of your soul Is vague and suffusing,
    With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
    Your half-tones delight me,
    And I grow mad with gazing
    At your blent colors.

    My vigor is a new-minted penny,
    Which I cast at your feet.
    Gather it up from the dust,
    That its sparkle may amuse you.

    This kind of modern coinage is cheaper but stronger, and very definite; it clearly sounds the modern note. Old-fashioned charm had an intoxicating effect, but this poem has insolence; and there is nothing misty about it.

    The subject matter of modern poetry odes not seek to attract the mind by its charm. Its strength consists in firm self-reliance, that which is called ``character'' in English. It calls out: Ho there! behold me, here am I. The same poetess, whose name is Amy Lowell, has written a poem on a shop of red slippers. The theme is that in the evening the snowflakes are whirling outside in the wind; inside, behind polished glass windows, rows of red slippers hang like garlands, ``like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of passers-by with dripping color, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the street, plopping their little round maroon lights upon the tops of umbrellas. The row of white, sparkling shop-fronts is gashed and bleeding, it bleeds red slippers.'' The whole poem deals with slippers.

    This is called impersonal. There is no ground for being particularly attached to these garlands of slippers, either as a buyer or a seller, but one has to stop and look; as soon as the character of the picture as a whole becomes apparent, it no longer remains trifling. Those concerned with meaning will ask, ``What does it all mean, sir? Why so much bother about slippers, even if they are red?'' To which one replies - ``Just look at them yourself.'' But the questioner asks, ``What's the good of looking?'' To which there is no reply.

    Let us take another example. There is a poem by Ezra Pound called ``A Study in Aesthetics,'' in which a girl walks along the street, and a boy in patched clothes cries out in uncontrollable excitement, ``Oh! look, look, how beautiful!'' Three years later, the poet meets the boy again during a great haul of sardines. The father and uncles box the fish in order to send them to the market at Breschia. The boy jumps about, handling the fish, and his elders scold him to be quiet. The boy strokes the neatly-arranged fish, and mutters to himself in a tone of satisfaction ``How beautiful!'' On hearing this the poet says, ``I was mildly abashed.''

    The pretty girl and the sardines elicit the same comment, "How beautiful!" This observation is impersonal, pure and simple; even the slipper-shop is not outside its purview.

    In the nineteenth century poetry was subjective in character; in the twentieth it is objective. Hence, emphasis is now laid on the realism of the subject-matter, not on its adornment; for adornment expresses individual taste, whereas the power of reality consists in expressing the subject itself.

    Before making its appearance in literature, this modernism exposed itself in painting. By creating disturbances, it sought to contradict the idea that painting was one of the fine arts. The function of art is not to charm but to conquer the mind, it argued; its sign is not beauty but truth. It did not acknowledge the illusion of form but rather the advertisement of the whole. This form has no other introduction to offer; it only wants to proclaim the fact that it is worth observing. This strong case for being observed is not made by appeals of gesture and posture, nor by copying nature, but by its own inherent truth, which is neither religious, moral, nor ideal - it is natural. That is to say, it must be acknowledged simply because it exists, just as we acknowledge the peacock and the vulture, just as we cannot deny the existence of the the pig or the deer.

    Some are beautiful, others are ugly; some are useful, others harmful; but there is no possible pretext for discarding any from the sphere of creation. It is the same with literature and art. If any beauty has been created, it needs no apology; but if it possesses no innate strength of being, only sweetness, then it must be rejected.

    Hence, present day literature that has accepted the creed of modernity, scorns to keep caste by carefully adjusting itself to bygone standards of aristocracy; it does not pick and choose. Eliot's poetry is modern in this sense, but not Bridges'. Eliot writes:

    The winter evening settles down
    With smell of steaks in passageways,
    Six o'clock.
    The burnt out ends of smoky days.
    And now a gusty shower wraps
    The grimy scraps
    Of whithered leaves about your feet
    And newspapers from vacant lots;
    The showers beat
    On broken blinds and chimney-pots.
    And at the corner of the street
    A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
    And then the lighting of the lamps.

    Then comes a description of a muddy morning filled with the smell of stale beer. On such a morning, the following words are addressed to a girl:

    You tossed a blanket from the bed,
    You lay upon your back, and waited;
    You dozed, and watched the night revealing
    The thousand sordid images
    Of which your soul was constituted;

    And this is the account given of the man:

    His soul stretched tight across the skies
    That fade behind a city block,
    Or trampled by insistent feet
    At four and five and six o'clock;
    And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
    And evening newspapers, and eyes
    Assured of certain certainties,
    The conscience of a blackened street
    Impatient to assume the world.

    In the midst of this smoky, this muddy, this altogether dingy morning and evening, full of many stale odors, and waste papers, the opposite picture is evoked in the poet's mind. He says:

    I am moved by fancies that are curled
    Around these images, and cling:
    The notion of some infinitely gentle
    Infinitely suffering thing.

    Here the link between Apollo and the frog is broken. Here the croaking of the frog in the well hurts the laughter of Apollo. It is clearly evident that the poet is not absolutely and scientifically impersonal. His loathing for this tawdry world is expressed through the very description he gives of it. Hence the bitter words with which he ends the poem:

    Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
    The worlds revolve like ancient women
    Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

    The poet's distaste for this gathering world is evident. The difference from the past consists in there being no desire to delude oneself with an imaginary world of rosy dreams. The poet makes his poetry trudge through this mire regardless of his laundered clothes; not because he is fond of mud, but because in this muddy world one must look at mud with open eyes, and accept it. If Apollo's laugh reaches one's ears in the mud, well and good; if not, then one need not despise the loud, leaping laughter of the frog. One can look at it for a moment in the context of the universe; there is something to be said for this. The frog will seem out of place in the cultured language of the drawing-room; but then most of the world lies outside the drawing-room....

    But if modernism has any philosophy, and if that philosophy is to be called impersonal, then one must admit that this attitude of aggressive disbelief and calumny toward the universe, is also a personal mental aberration owing to the sudden revolution. This also is an illusion, in which there is no serious attempt to accept reality naturally in a calm and dispassionate frame of mind. Many people think that this aggressiveness, this wantonly destructive challenging is what is called modernity.

    I myself don't think so. Even though thousands of people are attacked by influenza today, I shall not say that influenza is the natural condition of the body in modern times. The natural bodily state exists behind influenza.

    Pure modernism, then, consists in looking upon the universe, not in a personal and self-regarding manner, but in an impersonal and matter-of-fact manner. This point of view is bright and pure, and there is real delight in this unclouded vision. In the same dispassionate way that modern science analyzes reality, modern poetry looks upon the universe as a whole; this is what is eternally modern.

    But, actually, it is nonsense to call this modern. The joy of a natural and detached way of looking at things belongs to no particular age; it belongs to everyone whose eyes know how to wander over the naked earth. It is over a thousand years since the Chinese poet Li Po wrote his verses, but he was a modern; he looked upon the universe with freshly-opened eyes. In a verse of four lines he writes simply:

    Why do I live among the mountains?
    I laugh and answer not, my soul is serene;
    It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man,
    The peach trees are in flower, and the water flows on....

    Another picture:

    Blue water ... a clear moon ...
    In the moonlight the white herons are flying.
    Listen! Do you hear the girls who gather water-chestnuts?
    They are going home in the night, singing.

    Another:

    Naked I lie in the green forest of summer...
    Too lazy to wave my white-feathered fan.
    I hang my cap on a crag,
    And bare my head to the wind that comes
    Blowing through the pine trees.

    A river merchant's wife writes:

    I would play, plucking flowers by the gate;
    My hair scarcely covered my forehead, then.
    You would come, riding on your bamboo horse,
    And loiter about the bench with green plums for toys.
    So we both dwelt in Chang-kan town,
    We were two children, suspecting nothing.

    At fourteen I became your wife,
    And so bashful I could never bare my face,
    But hung my head, and turned to the dark wall;
    You would call me a thousand times,
    But I could not look back even once.

    At fifteen I was able to compose my eyebrows,
    And beg you to love me till we were dust and ashes.

    I was sixteen when you went on a long journey.
    Traveling beyond the Ken-Tang gorge,
    Where the giant rocks heap up the swift river,
    And the rapids are not passable in May.
    Did you hear the monkeys wailing
    Up on the skyey height of the crags?

    Do you know your footmarks by our gate are old,
    And each and every one is filled up with green moss?
    The mosses are too deep for me to sweep away;
    And already in the autumn wind the leaves are falling.

    The yellow butterflies of October
    Flutter in pairs over the grass of the west garden
    My heart aches at seeing them ...
    I sit sorrowing alone, and alas!
    The vermillion of my face is fading.

    Some day when you return down the river,
    If you will write me a letter beforehand,
    I will come to meet you - the way is not long -
    I will come as far as the Long Wind Bench instantly.

    In this poem the sentiment is neither maudlin nor ridiculous. The subject is familiar, and there is feeling. If the tone were sarcastic and there was ridicule, then the poem would be modern, because the moderns scorn to acknowledge in poetry that which everybody acknowledges naturally. Most probably a modern poet would have added at the end of this poem that the husband went his way after wiping his eyes and looking back repeatedly, and the girl at once set about frying dried prawn fish-balls. For whom? In reply there are a line-and-a-half of asterisks. The old-fashioned reader would ask, ``What does this mean?'' The modern poet would answer ``Things happen like this.'' The reader would say, ``But they also happen otherwise.'' And the modern would answer, ``Yes, they do, but that is too respectable. Unless it sheds its refinement, it does not become modern....''

    Edwin Arlington Robinson has described an aristocrat thus:

    Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
    We people on the pavement looked at him:
    He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
    Clean favored, and imperially slim.

    And he was always quietly arrayed,
    And he was always human when he talked;
    But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
    "Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.

    And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
    And admirably schooled in every grace:
    In fine, we thought that he was everything
    To make us wish that we were in his place.

    So on we worked, and waited for the light,
    And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
    And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
    Went home a put a bullet through his head.

    There is no modern sarcasm or loud laughter in this poem; on the contrary, there is pathos, which consists in the fact that there may be some fatal disease lurking inside the apparently healthy and beautiful.

    He whom we consider rich has a hidden personality. The anchorites spoke in the same way. They remind the living that one day they would go to the burning-ground slung on bamboo poles. European monks have described how the decomposed body beneath the soil is eaten by worms. In dissertations on morality we have seen attempts to destroy our illusion by reminding us that the body which seems beautiful is a repulsive compound of bones and flesh and blood and fluids. The best way of cultivating detachment is repeatedly to instil into our minds a contempt for the reality which we perceive. But the poet is not a disciple of detachment, he has come to cultivate attachment. Is the modern age so very degenerate that even the poet is infected with the atmosphere of cremation, that he begins to take pleasure in saying that which we consider great is decayed, that which we admire as beautiful is untouchable at the core? ...

    The mid-Victorian age felt a respect for reality and wished to accord it a place of honor; the modern age thinks it part of its program to insult reality and tear aside all the veils of decency.

    If you call a reverence for universal things sentimentalism, then you must also call your rebellion against them by the same name. If the mind becomes bitter, for whatever reason, the vision can never be natural. Hence, if the mid-Victorian age is to be ridiculed as being the leader of ultra-respectability, then the Edwardian age must also be ridiculed with the opposite adjectives. The thing is not natural and therefore not perennial. As for science, so for art, the detached mind is the best vehicle. Europe has gained that mind in science, but not in literature.

    Edwin Arlington Robinson has described an aristocrat thus:

    Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
    We people on the pavement looked at him:
    He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
    Clean favored, and imperially slim.

    And he was always quietly arrayed,
    And he was always human when he talked;
    But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
    "Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.

    And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
    And admirably schooled in every grace:
    In fine, we thought that he was everything
    To make us wish that we were in his place.

    So on we worked, and waited for the light,
    And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
    And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
    Went home a put a bullet through his head.

    There is no modern sarcasm or loud laughter in this poem; on the contrary, there is pathos, which consists in the fact that there may be some fatal disease lurking inside the apparently healthy and beautiful.

    He whom we consider rich has a hidden personality. The anchorites spoke in the same way. They remind the living that one day they would go to the burning-ground slung on bamboo poles. European monks have described how the decomposed body beneath the soil is eaten by worms. In dissertations on morality we have seen attempts to destroy our illusion by reminding us that the body which seems beautiful is a repulsive compound of bones and flesh and blood and fluids. The best way of cultivating detachment is repeatedly to instil into our minds a contempt for the reality which we perceive. But the poet is not a disciple of detachment, he has come to cultivate attachment. Is the modern age so very degenerate that even the poet is infected with the atmosphere of cremation, that he begins to take pleasure in saying that which we consider great is decayed, that which we admire as beautiful is untouchable at the core? ...

    The mid-Victorian age felt a respect for reality and wished to accord it a place of honor; the modern age thinks it part of its program to insult reality and tear aside all the veils of decency.
    ^^^^^^^^^^ ---This is truth to savor. Beauty oft hides dark and ugly underneath. Those that gaze into the world's well polished mirrors for inspiration ,have already abandoned the search for truth and honor..--Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 09-17-2017 at 11:50 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
    1661–1720


    Although she has always enjoyed some fame as a poet, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, has only recently received greater praise and renewed attention. Her diverse and considerable body of work records her private thoughts and personal struggles but also illustrates her awareness of the social and political climate of her era. Not only do Finch’s poems reveal a sensitive mind and a religious soul, but they exhibit great generic range and demonstrate her fluent use of Augustan diction and forms.

    Descended from an ancient Hampshire family, Finch was born in April 1661, the third and youngest child of Anne Haselwood and Sir William Kingsmill. At the age of twenty-one, Finch was appointed one of six maids of honor to Mary of Modena, wife of the Duke of York, in the court of Charles II. Her interest in verse writing began during this period and was probably encouraged by her friendships with Sarah Churchill and Anne Killigrew, also maids of honor and women of literary interests. It was during her residence in the court of Charles II that she met Colonel Heneage Finch, uncle of the fifth earl of Winchilsea and gentleman to the Duke of York. Finch fell in love with Anne and courted her persistently until they married. She resigned her post, although Heneage Finch continued to serve in various government positions. Their marriage was a happy one, as attested by his letters and several of her early poems. They led a quiet life, residing first in Westminster and then in London, as Heneage Finch became more involved in public affairs with the accession of James II in 1685. The couple wholly supported James throughout his brief and difficult reign and remained forever sympathetic to the interests of the Stuart court.

    Following the revolution and deposition of James in 1689, Finch lost his government position and permanently severed himself from public life by refusing allegiance to the incoming monarchs, William and Mary. The subsequent loss of income forced the Finches to take temporary refuge with various friends in London until Heneage’s nephew Charles invited them to settle permanently on the family’s estate in Eastwell in 1689 or 1690, where they resided for more than twenty-five years. It was during the happy yet trying years of her early married life that Anne Finch began to pursue more seriously her interest in writing poetry. She adopted the pseudonym Ardelia, and not surprisingly, many of her earliest poems are dedicated to her “much lov’d husband,” who appears as “Dafnis” in her work. Finch’s poetry to her husband connects passionate love and poetry in subtle ways. In “A Letter to the Same Person,” she makes explicit the intertwined nature of love and verse, insisting that one is dependent on the other:

    Love without Poetry’s refining Aid

    Is a dull Bargain, and but coarsely made;

    Nor e’er cou’d Poetry successful prove,

    Or touch the Soul, but when the Sense was Love.

    Oh! Cou’d they both in Absence now impart

    Skill to my Hand, but to describe my Heart;

    Finch’s early poems to her husband demonstrate her awareness of the guiding poetic conventions of the day, yet also point to the problems such conventions pose to the expression of intimate thought. In “To Mr F Now Earl of Winchilsea,” for example, she appropriately invokes the Muses for inspiration, only to reject such external sources in favor of her own emotion.

    In addition to celebrating her love, Finch’s earliest verse also records her own frustration and sense of loss following her departure from court in 1689. She and her husband remained loyal to the Catholic Stuarts, a tenuous stance to assume given the popularity of the Protestant William and Mary in Britain in the 1690s. Finch’s most explicit recognition of the problem of succession and of the difficulty of her relationship to the Stuarts appears in her first published poem, an elegy for James II anonymously published in 1701 and titled Upon the Death of King James the Second. Writing the elegy herself, since “abler Writers” refuse to honor the unpopular James, Finch calls to those loyal to James to “let your Tears a heavier Tribute pay,” and acknowledges the problem of succession, since James was robbed of the throne by his daughter and her foreign husband, although it was his “right by birth.” The poem ends with an appeal to Britain’s “Maternal Bosome”—an attack on William and possibly on the currently reigning queen as well—to honor “Rightful Kings” and “All who shall intend thy Good.” Curiously, the speaker retreats in the final lines as one “devoted only to the Pen” who “craves” for “a safe Retreat amidst thee…/ Below th’ ambitious World and just above my Grave.” Here, Finch’s benign acceptance of her exile from court may reflect the comfort of her retirement in Eastwell. Yet the reversal of the bitter start attests to the poem’s politically unpopular and even dangerous attitude and to Finch’s own inability to speak very openly of her loyalty to the Stuart court. Although her sense of loss seemed to dissipate after the turn of the century as she became more comfortable with her husband’s family in Eastwell, Finch never forgot her happy days at court, or the devastation she felt after 1689. Even as late as 1717, in “A Supplication for the joys of Heaven,” Finch refers to her deep sense of loss following the revolution and her subsequent turn to God and Heaven for comfort.

    As her work developed more fully during her retirement at Eastwell, Finch demonstrated an increasing awareness of the poetic traditions of her own period as well as those governing older verse. Her work’s affinity with the metaphysical tradition is evident in poems such as “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat,” which represents the distanced perspective of the speaker through the image of the telescope, an emblem common to much religious poetry of the seventeenth century. Finch experimented with rhyme and meter and imitated several popular genres, including occasional poems, satirical verse, and religious meditations, but fables comprise the largest portion of her oeuvre. Most likely inspired by the popularity of the genre at the turn of the century, Finch wrote dozens of these often satiric vignettes between 1700 and 1713. Most of them were modeled after the short tales of Jean La Fontaine, the French fable writer made popular by Charles II. Finch mocked these playful trifles, and her fables offer interesting bits of social criticism in the satiric spirit of her age.

    However, Finch’s more serious poems have received greater critical attention than her fables. “A Nocturnal Reverie,” for instance, is clearly Augustan in its perspective and technique, although many admirers have tended to praise the poem as pre-Romantic: William Wordsworth mentioned its “new images of external nature” in his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” collected in his Poems, first published in 1815. Finch’s poem opens with classical references and proceeds through characteristically Augustan descriptions of the foxglove, the cowslip, the glowworm, and the moon. Finch imitates Augustan preferences for decorum and balance in her use of heroic couplets and the medial caesura in setting the peaceful, nocturnal atmosphere of the poem:

    Or from some Tree, fam’d for the Owl’s delight,

    She, hollowing clear, directs the Wand’rer right:

    In such a Night, when passing Clouds give place,

    Or thinly vail the Heav’ns mysterious Face;

    When Odours, which declin’d repelling Day,

    Thro temp’rate Air uninterrupted stray;

    While Finch’s verse occasionally displays slight antitheses of idea and some structural balances of line and phrase, she never attains the epigrammatic couplet form that Alexander Pope perfected in the early eighteenth century. Her admission in “A Nocturnal Reverie” that her verse attempts “Something, too high for Syllables to speak” might be linked to the Romantic recognition of the discrepancy between human aspiration and achievement. But ultimately she retreats to God and solitude and displays a more properly Augustan attitude in the acceptance of her human limitations. At times her descriptions of natural detail bear some likeness to poets such as James Thomson, but Finch’s expression is more immediate and simple, and her versification ultimately exhibits an Augustan rather than a pre-Romantic sensibility.

    Another form Finch appropriates is the Pindaric ode. Between 1694 and 1703 she wrote three such odes in the form introduced in England by Abraham Cowley in the 1650s, following his preference for complex and irregular stanzaic structures and rhyme schemes. These poems—”All is Vanity,” The Spleen (1709), and “On the Hurricane”—all depict metaphysical entities working against humanity to test its strength and faith in God. The Spleen, possibly Finch’s most well-known poem, was first published anonymously in 1709. The ode was immediately popular and received much attention for its accurate description of the symptoms of melancholia—the disease often associated with the spleen—which Finch suffered from throughout her life. The speaker begins by acknowledging that hypochondria is also often associated with the spleen, the “pretended Fits,” the “sullen Husband’s feign’d Excuse,” and the coquette’s melancholy pose, “careless Posture, and the Head reclin’d.” She then proceeds to undermine these portraits of feigned illness, treating the disease as a real and terrifying affliction:

    From Speech restrain’d, by thy Deceits abus’d,

    To Deserts banish’d or in Cells reclus’d,

    Mistaken Vot’ries to the Pow’rs Divine,

    Wilst they a purer Sacrifice design,

    Do but the Spleen obey, and worship at thy Shrine.

    In “Ardelia to Melancholy” Finch similarly presents a struggle against melancholy and depression, casting the disease as an “inveterate foe” and “Tyrant pow’r” from which “heav’n alone” can set her “free.” The poem shifts from the first to the third person, generalizing Ardelia’s particular experience to encompass all those who suffer from melancholia: “All, that cou’d ere thy ill got rule, invade, / Their uselesse arms, before thy feet have laid; / The Fort is thine, now ruin’d, all within, / Whilst by decays without, thy Conquest too, is seen.” The imperial language of the poem might also suggest a more abstract relation between her submission to the spleen and her status as a political exile.

    Finch circulated two manuscripts of her work before she published Miscellany Poems, and several of her poems were published individually in broadsheets and smaller collections. Finch experienced some additional, though limited, recognition after the publication of her Miscellany Poems. Richard Steele, for instance, published several of her poems in his Miscellanies of 1714. She was personally acquainted with both Swift and Pope, though the full extent of her relationships with them is unknown. Finch is mentioned in several compilations, memoirs, and literary dictionaries during the 18th century, and to a lesser extent, in the 19th century, but has received sustained attention only recently. The first modern edition of her work, though incomplete, appeared in 1903. Much of the recent interest in Finch arises from current academic efforts to recover the work of previously neglected women writers, exploring how those writers depict themselves as poetic subjects and examining the ways in which they adopt and alter the poetic standards of a particular period. In addition to her representations of melancholy and the spleen—an affliction common to women—Finch also called attention to the need for the education of women and recorded the isolation and solitude that marked women’s lives. In “The Bird and the Arras,” for instance, a female bird enclosed in a room mistakes the arras for a real scene and flies happily into it. But she is soon trapped, “Flutt’ring in endless circles of dismay” until she finally escapes to “ample space,” the “only Heav’n of Birds.” Such images of entrapment and frustration are echoed in Finch’s description of the limitations of women’s social roles in England at the turn of the 18th century. In “The Unequal Fetters,” the speaker notes her fear of fading youth, but later refuses to be a “pris’ner” in marriage. Finch admits that marriage does “slightly tye Men,” yet insists that women remain “close Pris’ners” in the union, while men can continue to function “At the full length of all their chain.” For the most part, however, Finch’s message is subtle in its persistent decorum and final resignation and consolation in God. Although she was certainly aware of the problems many of her countrywomen faced, and particularly of the difficulties confronting women writers, Finch offers a playful yet firm protest rather than an outspoken condemnation of the social position of women. And although she endured a loss of affluence with James’s deposition, there is little evidence that she abhorred her twenty-five-year retirement in Eastwell, which afforded her the leisure in which to pursue her creative interests.

    Finch died quietly on 5 August 1720 after several years of increasingly ill health. Following her funeral, Heneage Finch praised her Christian virtues and persistent loyalty to her friends and family, noting as well her talents as a writer: “To draw her...just character requires a masterly pen like her own. We shall only presume to say she was the most faithful servant to her Royall Mistresse, the best wife to her noble Lord, and in every other relation public and private so illustrious an example of all moral and divine virtues.” Much of the immediate appeal of Finch’s verse to a post-Romantic modern audience lies in the sincerity with which she expressed the Christian values her husband recalls in his eulogy. But clearly Anne Finch belongs to her age and merits greater appreciation for her poetic experimentation and her fluent use of Augustan diction and forms. Her voice is clear and self-assured, evidence of the controlled and confident poise of an aristocratic poet.

    [Updated 2010]
    A very enlightening read. Obvious that she being female did not get the recognition that her poetic talent deserved.
    Yet such happened the men that had great poetic talent but were of lower class in society. Never having resources enough to pursue a writing career nor respect in society high enough to ever attain a wealthy sponsor as did other famous poets/painters, etc.--Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    The Death Poems of Emily Dickinson
    Written by: Ross Vassilev

    If each person's life were laid out as a book, then all these billions of books would end with the same concluding chapter: death. While such a thought might be depressing, it is nonetheless an inescapable fact. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), one of America's greatest poets, wrote approximately 1800 poems over the course of her life, and many of her best and most famous poems deal with the subject of death, which she explored more deeply than any other American writer. While it might seem an odd motif for a poet to focus on, it was the loss of many loved ones when she and they were still young that laid the basis for Dickinson's preoccupation with death.

    Dickinson's early life started normally enough. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, she was enrolled from age ten at Amherst Academy, a prestigious private school, alongside her younger sister, Lavinia. Emily was apparently a bright student and excelled at composition. According to Dickinson biographer Connie Ann Kirk, one of her teachers called twelve-year-old Emily's writings “strikingly original” (28). But then came a series of deaths that would change Dickinson's life forever. The first occurred when Dickinson was only thirteen—her cousin Sophia Holland, a girl only a few years older than herself, died of typhus on April 29th, 1844. As Cynthia Wolff notes in her biography of Dickinson, she visited her ailing cousin often and was at her bedside in the girl's final hours (76-77). Grief over her cousin's untimely passing caused Dickinson herself to fall ill—her parents temporarily withdrew her from school and sent her to stay with her Aunt Lavinia in Boston for a month to recuperate (Kirk 63).

    Upon returning to Amherst Academy in autumn of that year, she befriended the school's new principal, Leonard Humphrey, a young man only several years older than herself. In spite of her frequent absences due to illness, Emily saw enough of Humphrey so that she came to regard him as a kind of mentor, writes Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger (216). Sadly, Humphrey died of illness suddenly in 1850, a few years after Dickinson had graduated from Amherst Academy. Writing to Abiah Root, a girlfriend from her days at the academy, Dickinson confided, “The tears come, and I cannot brush them away; I would not if I could, for they are the only tribute I can pay the departed Humphrey” (Habegger 150). In 1847-1848, Dickinson studied for roughly two semesters at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, a small women's college near Amherst. Her roommate there had been another cousin, Emily Lavinia Norcross. The two were of the same age and had been close since they were little. In 1852, Emily Norcross died of tuberculosis—yet another heartbreaking loss for Dickinson (Wolff 60).

    Another young man with whom Dickinson had become acquainted was Benjamin Franklin Newton, a legal apprentice at Dickinson and Bowdoin, her father's law firm. Nine years her senior, Newton became to Dickinson, in her own words, “a gentle, yet grave Preceptor, teaching me what to read, what authors to admire, what was most grand or beautiful in nature, and that sublimer lesson, a faith in things unseen....” (Habegger 217). Tragically, Newton died of tuberculosis in 1853, only a few years after they had first met. In one of her poems, Dickinson wrote mournfully of her lost friend, who had “slipped my simple fingers through / While just a girl at school” (“Benjamin Franklin Newton,” par. 5). These and other deaths of those near and dear to her were no doubt the catalyst for Dickinson's many poems on the subject of death. It might also be one reason why Dickinson became increasingly reclusive as she grew older, remaining a spinster all her life and rarely leaving her prominent family's stately manorial home (“Emily Dickinson” 177).

    Having become familiar with Dickinson's biography, one better understands why she chose to write so many poems on the subject of dying and what might come after. The reader can now better comprehend lines such as “I never lost as much but twice / And that was in the sod”—with “the sod” obviously referring to loved ones now dead and buried (Dickinson 178-179, lines 1-2). One can easily speculate that the word “twice” in the first line most likely refers to among the aforementioned deaths of those dear to her. These tragedies hurt Dickinson terribly, as she makes clear in the following brief but exquisite poem:

    "Each that we lose takes part of us;

    A crescent still abides,

    Which like the moon, some turbid night,

    Is summoned by the tides." (Bartleby.com)

    One of the more noteworthy aspects of Dickinson's poetic studies of death is that she evidently took it for granted that she and those she had lost would one day meet up again. In her poem “Death is a Dialogue between,” she affirms that she did not believe that death is truly the end:

    "Death is a Dialogue between

    The spirit and the Dust.

    'Dissolve' says Death—The Spirit 'Sir

    I have another Trust'—

    Death doubts it—Argues from the Ground—

    The Spirit turns away

    Just laying off for evidence

    An Overcoat of Clay." (quoted in McMichael 192)

    The “laying off” of “An Overcoat of Clay” in the last two lines is obviously The Spirit's release from the grave, and thus its vindication and triumph over Death, who is left defeated in “the Ground,” presumably to argue with “the Dust” if He wishes. She expresses this same belief in another poem, especially in its last three lines:

    "The Bustle in a House

    The Morning after Death

    Is solemnest of industries

    Enacted upon Earth—

    The Sweeping up the Heart

    And putting Love away

    We shall not want to use again

    Until Eternity." (quoted in McMichael 193)

    Having lost so many close to her at such a young age, and the fact that they had all died quite young—perhaps the thought of someday reuniting with them was the only thing that made her pain bearable. Then again, no one should be surprised at Dickinson's earnest faith in a life hereafter. She had been raised, after all, in a devoutly Calvinist home and took her faith seriously all her life, even if her inclinations were mostly at odds with New England's stodgy Puritan orthodoxy (“Emily Dickinson” 178). She eloquently affirms her belief in God and her vision of a Christian afterlife in the following poem:

    "I never saw a Moor—

    Death PoemsI never saw the Sea—

    Yet know I how the Heather looks

    And what a Billow be.

    I never spoke with God

    Nor visited in Heaven—

    Yet certain am I of the spot

    As if the Checks were given" (quoted in McMichael 193)

    These deaths of close family and friends also made Dickinson consider her own mortality, inspiring two of her most famous poems, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” and “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” in which she imagines—hypnotically—what it must be like to experience the moment of death:

    "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

    And Mourners to and fro

    Kept treading—treading—till it seemed

    That Sense was breaking through—

    And when they all were seated,

    A Service, like a Drum—

    Kept beating—beating—till I thought

    My mind was going numb—

    And then I heard them lift a Box

    And creak across my Soul

    With those same Boots of Lead, again,

    Then Space—began to toll,

    As all the Heavens were a Bell,

    And Being, but an Ear,

    And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

    Wrecked, solitary, here—

    And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

    And I dropped down, and down—

    And hit a World, at every plunge,

    And Finished knowing—then—" (quoted in McMichael 182)



    And also,

    "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—

    The Stillness in the Room

    Was like the Stillness in the Air—

    Between the Heaves of Storm—

    The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—

    And Breaths were gathering firm

    For that last Onset—when the King

    Be witnessed—in the Room—

    I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away

    What portion of me be

    Assignable—and then it was

    There interposed a Fly—

    With Blue—uncertain—stumbling Buzz—

    Between the light—and me—

    And then the Windows failed—and then

    I could not see to see—" (quoted in McMichael 186-187)

    The two poems above are among the most unique in American literature. While it is common enough to write an elegy for the dearly departed, poems focusing on the moment of death are rare indeed—perhaps due to the unpleasantness of the idea, or it might be that most poets lack the imagination to compose such a dark fantasy. In yet another mesmerizing poem, Dickinson envisions the soul not at the moment of the body's death—but instead as it commences its journey afterward:

    "Because I could not stop for Death—

    He kindly stopped for me—

    The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

    And Immortality.

    We slowly drove—He knew no haste

    And I had put away

    My labor and my leisure too,

    For His Civility—

    We passed the School, where Children played

    At Recess—in the Ring

    We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—

    We passed the Setting Sun—

    Or rather—He passes Us—

    The Dews drew quivering and chill—

    For only Gossamer, my Gown—

    My Tippet—only Tulle—

    We paused before a House that seemed

    A Swelling of the Ground—

    The Roof was scarcely visible—

    The Cornice—in the Ground—

    Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet

    Feels shorter than the Day

    I first surmised the Horses' Heads

    Were toward Eternity—" (quoted in McMichael 191)

    In line 21 above, Dickinson makes it clear that the female speaker in the poem is not someone who is recently deceased, but rather a woman who has been dead a very long time, and yet the “Centuries” seem to her to have sped by in less than a day. Perhaps this is Dickinson affirming the old adage that life is short.

    Deaths of loved ones while she was a teenager and young woman profoundly affected the life and literary career of Emily Dickinson. As she wrote in the last two lines of her poem “My life closed twice before its close” (there's the word “twice” again): “Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell” (Dickinson 196, 7-8). Grieving over the loss of so many dear to her, Dickinson wrote poetry to help her cope with the pain, rather than let it destroy her. In doing so, she gave humanity a number of unforgettable and timeless poems that the world will never stop reading.



    Works Cited

    “Benjamin Franklin Newton.” Emily Dickinson Museum. Emily Dickinson Museum. 2009. Web. 2 Nov. 2014.

    Dickinson, Emily. “Because I could not stop for Death.” McMichael: 191.

    ---. “Death is a dialogue between.” McMichael: 192.

    ---. “Each that we lose takes part of us.” Bartleby.com. 2014. Web. 3 Nov. 2014.

    ---. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” McMichael: 182.

    ---. “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died.” McMichael: 186-187.

    ---. “I never lost as much but twice.” McMichael: 178-179.

    ---. “I never saw a Moor.” McMichael: 193.

    ---. “My life closed twice before its close.” McMichael: 196.

    ---. “The Bustle in a House.” McMichael: 193.

    “Emily Dickinson.” McMichael: 177.

    Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Random House, 2001. Print.

    Kirk, Connie A. Emily Dickinson: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004. Print.

    McMichael, George and James S. Leonard, eds. Anthology of American Literature, Tenth Edition, Volume II. Boston: Pearson, 2011. Print.

    Wolff, Cynthia G. Emily Dickinson. New York: Knopf, 1986. Print.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    The Poetry of Vincent Bourne
    Written by: Arthur Christopher Benson

    "I LOVE the memory of Vinny Bourne," said Cowper in a letter to Newton in 1781, thirty-four years after Bourne's death. "I think him," he went on, "a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him." Landor, in 1847, thought this criticism of Cowper's an unintelligent one; he could not conceive how a poet so great as Cowper came to pass such a judgment. The truth is that Landor was a better scholar than Cowper, and was thinking more of Bourne's Latinity than of his choice of subjects or mode of treatment. Cowper was not, it appears, a very acute Latinist, and his renderings of Vincent Bourne's poems, as we shall see, proved that he cared little for the simple terseness of Bourne's elegiacs. What is remarkable in Cowper's criticism is his preference of Ovid to Propertius. Ovid must almost have thought in pentameters; he had from boyhood an incredible facility in verse; "Et quod tentabam dicere, versus erat," he says, in that interesting autobiographical poem about his boyhood and youth; "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Ovid was a perfect master of his craft; he is one of the least amateurish of poets; he had the power of producing with luminous precision the exact effect that he intended, and as often as he intended. As a narrator he is perhaps without a rival; but his scope is limited, and his metrical scheme is, like Pope's, without variety. But if Ovid appears in his verse as a somewhat placid egotist, Propertius is full of unchastened fire and passion. His writing, like that of Catullus, bears the undefined stamp of something which can only be named genius. Bourne is more Ovidian perhaps than Propertian; and if his verses have not the easy and lucid movement of Ovid, this is amply compensated for by their originality of subject and treatment.

    And we may now call into court a still better critic than either Cowper or Landor, the surefooted Charles Lamb, who in his innumerable appreciations of writers both in verse and prose, hardly ever makes a false step, save from some affectionate bias of the heart, hardly ever pronounces a judgment that has not been cordially endorsed by posterity. Writing to Wordsworth in 1815, he says, "Since I saw you, I have had a treat in the reading way, which comes not every day, the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town schemes, a proper counterpoise to some people's rural extravaganzas! Why I mention him is that your 'Power of Music' reminded me of his poem of 'The Ballad-Singer in the Seven Dials.' Do you remember his epigram on the old woman who taught Newton the ABC, which, after all, he says, he hesitates not to call Newton's Principia? I was lately fatiguing myself by going through a volume of fine words by Lord Thurlow; excellent words; and if the heart could live by words alone, it could desire no better regales; but what an aching vacuum of matter! I don't stick at the madness of it, for that is only a consequence of shutting his eyes, and thinking he is in the age of the old Elizabeth poets. From thence I turned to Bourne. What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matterful creature! Sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything, his diction all Latin and his thoughts all English. Bless him! Latin wasn't good enough for him. Why was he not content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in?" And again, in one of the "Essays of Elia," "A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis," he says: "Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne, most classical, and, at the same time, most English of the Latinists, who has treated of this human and quadrupedal alliance, this dog-and-man friendship, in the sweetest of his poems, the 'Epitaphium ad Canem,' or 'Dog's Epitaph.' Reader, peruse it; and say if customary sights, which could call up such gentle poetry as this, were of a nature to do more harm or good to the moral sense of the passengers through the daily thoroughfares of a vast and busy metropolis." Here, of course, Lamb is really speaking of the spirit of the poems; his own Latinity, as shown by the Latin letters which he was fond of intermingling with his correspondence, was more copious than correct. Lamb, it is true, saw poetry in Bernard Barton, but that, as we have said, was an affair of the heart; if he could write as he did of Vincent Bourne, we may be sure that his words are worth attention.

    The biographical facts of Bourne's life are of the simplest. He was born in 1695, educated at Westminster and proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow in 1720. His earliest published poetical effort seems to have been a copy of congratulatory verses addressed to Addison on his recovery from a severe illness in 1717. In 1721 he editedCarmina Comitialia, containing Tripos verses, satirical poems on local events, and miscellaneous poems. From Cambridge he returned to Westminster as a master, and there he remained till his death in 1747. In 1734 he was appointed, perhaps through the influence of the Duke of Newcastle, who had been a boy at Westminster with him, and to whom he dedicated the first edition of his poems, Housekeeper and Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms to the House of Commons.

    As a teacher he seems to have been wholly without energy or practical power. He made no attempt to preserve discipline, and Cowper, who was in his form for a time, says that he remembers seeing the Duke of Richmond, then a boy at the school, set fire to his greasy locks and box his ears to put the conflagration out. He does not even appear to have stimulated, as absent-minded, unpractical teachers often do, the keener and more ardent minds among his pupils. "I lost more than I got by him," says Cowper, "for he made me as idle as himself." Cowper also says that he was so inattentive to his pupils, and so utterly indifferent whether they brought him good or bad exercises, that "he seemed determined, as he was the best, so to be the last, Latin poet of the Westminster line." As to his good-nature, however, there appear to have been two opinions, as can be seen from a trenchant entry in Nichol's Literary Anecdotes. "Vincent Bourne was usher to the Fourth Form at Westminster, and remarkably fond of me. I never heard much of the goodness of heart. T. F." He was noted, too, for extreme slovenlinessin attire. Cowper says: "He was such a sloven, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you in his person; and indeed in his writings, he has almost made amends for all." And again to Mr. Rose, in 1788, he writes: "I shall have great pleasure in taking now and then a peep at my old friend Vincent Bourne, the neatest of all men in his versification, though, when I was under his ushership at Westminster, the most slovenly in his person."

    So Vincent Bourne lived his shabby, unpretending life, the secretum iter, et fallentis semita vitæ. Every one must have known some one of this kind,—good-natured, easy-going, murmuring a phantom music in his head, indifferent to what went on about him, without ambition or personal dignity. His patron, the Duke of Newcastle, was anxious to benefit him, but Vinny could not be coerced into taking Orders, and so the Prebend at Westminster and the Canonry at Christchurch, which were destined for him, went elsewhere. And yet he seems to have had some obscure visions of preferment, founded on a promise given by Dr. Arbuthnot, the friend of Pope. Bourne wrote in a copy of Arbuthnot's work on Coins: "[As] to the reputation of Dr. Arbuthnot, I never met with less honour and generosity than I have received from him; I scorn to charge that upon his country which he has been guilty of in his private character; he should have remembered his promise, and would have done it, if he had not been a courtier;" and there is a preceding passage, which looks as if Bourne had given Arbuthnot literary assistance which had neither been acknowledged nor repaid.

    Bourne, in a curious letter to his wife, written shortly before and in anticipation of his death, gives her the reasons which prevented him from taking orders; he says that the importance of so great a charge, joined with a mistrust of his own sufficiency, made him fearful of undertaking it. And he adds, "If I have not in that capacity assisted in the salvation of souls, I have not been the means of losing any; if I have not brought reputation to the function by any merit of mine, I have the comfort of this reflection, I have given no scandal to it by my meanness and unworthiness." This letter shows that he considered the pastoral office in a different light from most of his contemporaries, as one of great personal responsibility; and the whole letter breathes a spirit of intense contrition and pathetic humility at the thought of the opportunities he has missed and the idleness and vanity of his life. He does not however write as if with any sense of his shortcomings as a teacher, for he says that his one desire has been to be humbly serviceable in his quiet sphere of duty. But the most touching part of the letter is the vague dismay which, in spite of his deep and sincerely Christian hope, he finds in the thought of dissolution; the terrors of the grave lie very hard upon him, as they would upon a man of imagination and sensibility who had lived a thoughtless and easy-going life. The whole letter is a singular contrast to another rhetorical epistle which has been preserved, addressed to a young lady on the thoughts suggested by a graveyard, in which he says with a pretentious philosophy that the more human document belies, that "the frequent perusal of gravestones and monuments, and the many walks I have taken in a churchyard, have given me so great a distaste for life." Poor Vinny! When he came to die he had little of the philosopher about him, but shivered and cried at the dark passage.

    It may be a matter of wonder how Bourne found time or inclination to marry; but he did so, and the maiden's name was Lucia. He even begat children, of whom one was a Lieutenant of Marines, and left some vague property, a house in Westminster and land in Bungay. The poet's death took place in 1747, not unexpected by himself, as I have said, and by a disease which, he records with grateful thankfulness, left him in full and calm possession of his faculties. He had written his own epitaph, which may be thus rendered: Vincent Bourne, of unfeigned piety and utter humility, who in no place forgot his God or forgot himself, descends into the silence which he loved. It is a touching estimate, and shows, in its anxiety to deal only with essentials, how incidental his work was to his character; he forms no pompous appreciation of the value of his writings, but leaves them, like Sibylline leaves, for the wind to whirl away, the only testimony to his quiet and observant eye, his love of simple things, his intense interest in nature and humanity. Qui bene latuit, bene vixit, he might have said.

    Cowper wrote to Newton in 1781, in reply to a letter suggesting that he should translate Vincent Bourne's Latin poems, and offering literary assistance. It appears to have been one of the few occasions on which Newton gave Cowper sensible advice. Cowper replies that he is much obliged for the offer of help: "It is but seldom, however, and never, except for my amusement, that I translate; because I find it impossible to work by another man's pattern. I should at least be sure to find it so in a business of any length. Again, that is epigrammatic and witty in Latin which would be perfectly insipid in English, and a translator of Bourne would frequently find himself obliged to supply what is called the turn.... If a Latin poem is neat, elegant, and musical, it is enough; but English readers are not so easily satisfied. To quote myself, you will find, on comparing 'The Jackdaw' with the original, that I was obliged to sharpen a point, which, though smart enough in the Latin, would in English have appeared as plain and blunt as the tag of a lace.... Vincent Bourne's humour is entirely original; he can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms so exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws, that one would suppose him animated by the spirit of the creature he describes. And with all his drollery, there is a mixture of rational and even religious reflection at times, and always an air of pleasantry, good-nature, and humanity, that makes him in my mind one of the most amiable writers in the world. It is not common to meet with an author who can make you smile, and yet at nobody's expense, who is always entertaining and yet always harmless; and who, though always elegant and classical to a degree not always found in the classics themselves, charms more, by the simplicity and playfulness of his ideas, than by the neatness and purity of his verse."

    To turn to the poems in detail, almost the first thing that strikes one is the originality of his subjects. Nothing was common or unclean to our poet, at a time when poetry, except in Cowper's hands, was grandiose and affected to an uncommon degree. Vincent Bourne may be held to have been in a remote connection the parent of the poetry of common life, for he undoubtedly exerted a strong influence on Cowper. I do not think it is too much to say that Cowper's best contributions to literature, his exquisite lyrics on birds and hares and dogs, which will live when "The Task" and "Tirocinium" have gone down to the dust, would never have been written had it not been for Vincent Bourne. In the year 1750, the future of English poetry was dark; there were only two considerable writers at work, Gray and Collins. There was, it is true, a certain respectful attitude to nature prevalent, but it was a conventional attitude. Cowper, as I believe inspired by Bourne, was the first to make it unconventional. Then came the sweet notes of Burns across the border, and the victory was won.

    Let me now give a few instances of Bourne. First must come "The Jackdaw," and I have given Cowper's rendering; but I have also ventured to subjoin a version of my own, not because I challenge even the most distant comparison with Cowper's sparkling and graceful lyric, but because Cowper's is in no sense a translation. It is a poem of which the line of thought is suggested by Bourne, and at a few points touches the Latin poem; but the turn, the colouring is Cowper's own. In my own translation, though I have several times sacrificed verbal accuracy, I have endeavoured to keep as closely to the Latin as is consistent with writing English at all.

    CORNICULA.

    Nigras inter aves avis est, quæ plurima turres,
    Antiquas ædes, celsaque fana colit.
    Nil tam sublime est, quod non audace volatu,
    Aeriis spernens inferiors, petit.
    Quo nemo ascendat, cui non vertigo cerebrum
    Corripiat, certe hunc seligit illa locum.
    Quo vix a terra tu suspicis absque tremore,
    Illa metus expers incolumisque sedet.
    Lamina delubri supra fastigia, ventus
    Qua cœli spiret de regione, docet;
    Hanc ea præ reliquis mavult, secura pericli,
    Nec curat, nedum cogitat, unde cadat.
    Res inde humanas, sed summa per otia, spectat,
    Et nihil ad sese, quas videt, esse videt.
    Concursus spectat, plateaque negotia in omni,
    Omnia pro nugis at sapienter habet.
    Clamores, quos infra audit, si forsitan audit,
    Pro rebus nihili negligit, et crocitat.
    Ille tibi invideat, felix cornicula, pennas,
    Qui sic humanis rebus abesse velit.

    THE JACKDAW.

    (By William Cowper.)

    There is a bird, who by his coat,
    And by the hoarseness of his note,
    Might be supposed a crow;
    A great frequenter of the church,
    Where bishop-like he finds a perch,
    And dormitory too.

    Above the steeple shines a plate,
    That turns and turns, to indicate
    From what point blows the weather;
    Look up—your brains begin to swim,
    'Tis in the clouds; that pleases him,
    He chooses it the rather.

    Fond of the speculative height,
    Thither he wings his airy flight,
    And thence securely sees
    The bustle and the raree-show
    That occupy mankind below,
    Secure and at his ease.

    You think, no doubt, he sits and muses
    Of future broken bones and bruises,
    If he should chance to fall;
    No! not a single thought like that
    Employs his philosophic pate,
    Or troubles it at all.

    He sees that this great roundabout
    The world, with all its motley rout,
    Church, army, physic, law,
    Its customs and its businesses
    Is no concern at all of his,
    And says—what says he?—Caw.

    Thrice happy bird! I too have seen
    Much of the vanities of men,
    And sick of having seen 'em,
    Would cheerfully these limbs resign
    For such a pair of wings as thine,
    And such a head between 'em.

    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

    Of fowls with black and glossy coat,
    One dear familiar bird I note;
    In towers and ancient piles he dwells,
    Above the din of sacred bells;
    High fanes he seeks; with daring flight
    Aspires, despising aught but height;
    He sits where mortals mount with pain
    Of reeling pulse and dizzy brain;
    And where you shudder with alarm,
    He's perched aloft, and free from harm.
    The vane that on the steeple shows
    Whither and whence the free wind blows,
    He choosing, owns no care at all,
    Much less is careful lest he fall;
    And thence in lofty ease surveys
    Mankind's inexplicable ways.
    He sees the streets, the concourse dim,
    They hold no interest for him;
    And if some murmur upward floats
    He heeds not, but with pensive notes
    Beguiles the hour. Blest bird, I'd be
    A winged and airy thing, like thee!
    From human things I'd sit aloof
    Like thee, above the minster-roof.

    Next shall come Lamb's favourite, the Epitaph on the Beggar's Dog. Lamb's rendering is very fairly exact.

    Pauperis hic Iri requiesco Lyciscus, herilis,
    Dum vixi, tutela vigil columenque senectæ,
    Dux cæco fidus; nec, me ducente, solebat,
    Prætenso hinc atque hinc baculo, per iniqua locorum
    Incertam explorare viam; sed fila secutus,
    Quæ dubios regerent passus, vestigia tuta
    Fixit inoffenso gressu; gelidumque sedile
    In nudo nactus saxo, qua prætereuntium
    Unda frequens confluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras
    Lamentis, noctemque oculis ploravit obortam.
    Ploravit nec frustra; obolum dedit alter et alter,
    Queis corda et mentem indiderat natura benignam.
    Ad latus interea jacui sopitus herile,
    Vel mediis vigil in somnis; ad herilia jussa
    Auresque atque animum arrectus, seu frustuia amice
    Porrexit sociasque dapes, seu longa diei
    Tædia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat.
    Hi mores, hæc vita fuit, dum fata sinebant,
    Dum neque languebam morbis, nec inerte senecta,
    Quæ tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite cæcum
    Orbavit dominum: prisci sed gratia facti
    Ne tota intereat, longos deleta per annos,
    Exiguum hunc Irus tumulum de cespite fecit,
    Et si inopis, non ingratæ munuscula dextræ;
    Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque canemque
    Quod memoret, fidumque canem dominumque benignum.

    ———

    Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie,
    That wont to tend my old blind master's steps,
    His guide and guard; nor, while my service lasted,
    Had he occasion for that staff, with which
    He now goes picking out his path in fear
    Over the highways and crossings, but would plant,
    Safe in the conduct of my friendly string,
    A firm foot forward still, till he had reach'd
    His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide
    Of passers-by in thickest confluence flow'd:
    To whom with loud and passionate laments
    From morn to eve his dark estate he wail'd.
    Nor wail'd to all in vain: some here and there,
    The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave;
    I meantime at his feet obsequious slept;
    Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear
    Prick'd up at his least motion: to receive
    At his kind hand my customary crumbs,
    And common portion in his feast of scraps;
    Or when night warned us homeward, tired and spent
    With our long day and tedious beggary.
    These were my manners, this my way of life,
    Till age and slow disease me overtook,
    And sever'd from my sightless master's side.
    But, lest the grace of so good deeds should die,
    Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost,
    This slender tomb of turf hath Irus rear'd,
    Cheap monument of no ungrudging hand,
    And with short verse inscribed it, to attest,
    In long and lasting union to attest,
    The virtues of the Beggar and the Dog.

    It may be noted that Lamb treats Lyciscus, which was evidently intended merely as a name, as referring to the species of dog; Virgil uses Lycisca as a dog's name in the third Eclogue. Probably Bourne was thinking of a fox-terrier, and the term wolf-dog is pompous and incongruous. Lamb's last line but three is a very lame one; it is a difficult point to determine, but did not he mean "no ungrateful hand"? The true sense of the original line is, "the slender gift of a hand which although poor is not ungrateful."

    Bourne shows also a remarkable observation of street life, the quaint water-side manners, the odd obscure life that eddied near the river highway and round about the smoky towers of Wren. Absent-minded he may have been, but observant he was to a peculiar degree, and that not of broad poetical effects, but of the minute detail and circumstance of every-day life. It would be easy to multiply instances, but this extract from the "Iter per Tamisin," of the bargeman lighting his pipe, will serve to show what I mean. Why does he call tobacco pœtum, it may be asked? The only solution that I can suggest is that Pink-eye, or Squint-eye, was a cant term for some species of the weed at the time. It can hardly be, I think, the word peat Latinised. The version, as in the case of those which follow, is my own.

    His ita dispositis, tubulum cum pyxide magna
    Depromit, nigrum longus quem fecerat usus.
    Hunc postquam implêrat pæto, silicemque pararat,
    Excussit scintillam; ubi copia ponitur atri
    Fomitis, hinc ignem sibi multum exugit, et haustu
    Accendens crebro, surgentes deprimit herbas
    Extremo digito: in cineres albescere pætum
    Incipit et naso gratos emittit odores.

    ———

    This thus disposed, a pipe with ample bowl
    He handles, blackened with familiar use;
    Stuffs with the fragrant herb, and flint prepares
    To strike the spark: and thence from fuel stored,
    Black provender, he spouts a plenteous flame,
    Kindling with frequent gusts of breath indrawn:
    Meanwhile he tends with cautions finger-tip
    The rising fibres; into lightest ash
    Whitening, they pour the aromatic fumes.

    Vincent Bourne had that passionate sympathy with and delight in youth that is the surest testimony to a heart that does not grow old. The pretty ways and natural gestures of childhood pleased him. He was fond of his boys, and allowed that fondness to be evident, at a time when brow-beating and insolent severity were too much the fashion. In his epitaphs it is curious to note how many deal with the young, and touch on the immemorial fragrance of early death with a peculiar pathos. There is an epitaph on a Westminster boy of twelve years old, where hemost touchingly alludes to the thought that he died both beautiful and innocent; and an epitaph on a little girl who, he said in quaint phrase, had the modest red of roses and the pure whiteness of lilies in her face. Again the inscription to the memory of the young Earl of Warwick, who died at the age of twenty-four, is full of delicate beauty; but I will give in full what seems to me the sweetest of all. It is printed among the authentic epitaphs, but it is, I imagine, purely fanciful.

    EPITAPHIUM IN SEPTEM ANNORUM PUELLULAM.

    Quam suavis mea Chloris, et venusta,
    Vitæ quam fuerit brevis, monebunt
    Hic circum violæ rosæque fusæ:
    Quarum purpura, vix aperta, clausa est.
    Sed nec dura nimis vocare fata,
    Nec fas est nimium queri caducæ
    De formæ brevitate, quam rependit
    Aeterni diuturnitas odoris.

    ———

    My pretty Chloris—ah, how sweet
    The roses o'er your head shall show;
    The violets, strewn above your feet
    How brief the life that sleeps below.
    We must not chide the grudging fates.
    Nor say how short a lot was thine,
    For, ah, how amply compensates
    The eternal fragrance of thy shrine.

    I subjoin to these a couple of epigrams which give a good idea of the natural and solemn way in which he approaches death, as an event not necessarily of a gloomy and forbidding character, but as tending to draw out and develop an intimate and regretful hope in the survivors. There is nothing austere about his philosophy; it puts aside pompous and formal consolations, and goes right to the heart of the matter, with a child-like simplicity. The first deals with the Pyramids, the second with an incident, real or fancied, connected with the burial of Queen Mary at Westminster.

    PYRAMIS.

    Pyramidum sumptus, ad cœlum et sidera ducti,
    Quid dignum tanta mole, quid intus habent?
    Ah! nihil intus habent, nisi nigrum informe cadaver;
    Durata in saxum est cui medicata caro.
    Ergone porrigitur monumentum in jugera tota!
    Ergo tot annorum, tot manuumque labor!
    Integra sit morum tibi vita: hæc pyramis esto,
    Et poterunt tumulo sex satis esse pedes.

    ———

    Aspiring monument of human toil
    What lies beneath that's worth so vast a coil?
    A shapeless blackened corpse, set all alone,
    Embalmed and mummied into silent stone.
    The mighty pile its ponderous circuit rears;
    Ah, ingenuity! ah, wasted years!
    Pure be thy life; let pompous trappings be!
    Six feet of kindly earth's enough for thee!

    PIETAS RUBECULÆ.

    Quæ tibi regalis dederant diadematis aurum,
    Dant et funereum fana, Maria, tholum.
    Quisque suis vicibus, mæsto stant ordine flentes;
    Oreque velato femina triste silet.
    Parva avis interea, residens in vertice summo,
    Emittit tremula lugubre voce melos.
    Vespera nec claudit, nec lucem Aurora recludit,
    Quin eadem repetat funebre carmen avis,
    Tale nihil dederint vel Mausolea; Mariæ
    Hæc pietas soli debita vera fuit.
    Venales lacrymæ, jussique facessite fletus;
    Sumptibus hic nullis luctus emendus erit.

    ———

    The ancient fane that crowned thy flashing head,
    Oh queen, oh mother! now receives thee dead.
    The mourning train, in funeral pomp arrayed,
    Weeping adore the venerable shade.
    A duteous bird the while, high perched above,
    Utters the tremulous notes of tender love.
    Each waning eve, each dewy opening day,
    That gentle heart repeats his solemn lay.
    No lamentable anthem pealing high
    Can match the gift of pious minstrelsy.
    Tears, venal tears, ye cannot give relief.
    No lavished gold can purchase natural grief!

    There have been several editions of Vincent Bourne; three of them deserve, bibliographically, a word. The first is the third of his publications, a very rare and beautiful book, which by the kindness of Mr. Austin Dobson I have been privileged to examine. This is Poematia, Latine partim reddita, partim scripta, printed by J. Watts, 1734, and dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle; it is a small volume printed in italics of the tribe of Aldus, with quaint head and tail pieces, and red lines ruled by hand. The next is the Miscellaneous Poems of 1772, a handsome quarto, published by subscription. The third is Poems by Vincent Bourne published by Pickering in 1840, with a memoir and notes by the Rev. John Mitford. This is a carefully and beautifully printed book, with but one drawback. Whenever an ornamental head-piece is inserted at the top of a page, the number of the page is omitted. This tiresome affectation makes it very difficult to find any particular poem.

    An exhaustive account of Vincent Bourne's Latinity would be a long enumeration of minute mistakes—mistakes arising from the imperfect acquaintance of the scholars of the day with the principles of correct Latinity. To give a few obvious instances, metrically, Bourne is not aware of the rule which forbids a short syllable to stand before sp, sc, st, sq. In classical Latin, such a collocation of consonants does not lengthen the preceding short syllable, but is simply inadmissible. Then again, he is very unsound in the quantity of final o. I am not speaking of such words as quando, ego, where there is a certain doubt. But he makes short such words as fallo, and even such a word as experiendo;, which is quite impossible. He also ends his pentameters with trisyllables such as niteat, a practice which has no Ovidian countenance. Grammatically, a considerable licence is observable in the use of the indicative for the subjunctive, as, for instance, after si forsitan and nedum. But these, it may be said, are minor points, and in form and arrangement his Latin is pure enough. His verse is of the school of Ovid and Tibullus, but his vocabulary is not Augustan; this, however, may be due to the fact that his choice of subjects necessitates the use of many words for which there is no Augustan authority.

    It can hardly be expected that Vincent Bourne will be read or appreciated by the general reader. But any one with an adequate stock of Latin, who is given to wandering among the byways of literature, will find him a singularly original and poetical writer. His was no academic spirit, writing, with his back to the window, of frigid generalities and classical ineptitudes. He was rather a man with a warm heart and a capacious eye, finding any trait of human character, any grouping of the grotesque or tender furniture of life, interesting and memorable. He reminds one of the man in Robert Browning's poem, "How it Strikes a Contemporary," who went about in his old cloak, with quiet observant eyes, noting the horse that was beaten, and trying the mortar of the new house with his stick, and came home and wrote it all to his lord the king. Vincent Bourne had of course no moral object in his writings; he had merely the impulse to sing, and we may regret with Lamb that so delicate and sensitive a spirit chose a vehicle which must debar so many from walking in his company. With his greasy locks and dirty gown, his indolence and his good-humour, the shabby usher of Westminster, with his pure spirit and clear eyes, has a place reserved for him in the stately procession, "where is nor first, nor last."
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Aeschylus: An Introduction to Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes
    Written by: Theodore Alois Buckley

    Æschylus, the first of the great Grecian writers of tragedy, was born at Eleusis, in 525 B.C. He was the son of Euphorion, who was probably a wealthy owner of rich vineyards. The poet's early employment was to watch the grapes and protect them from the ravages of men and other animals, and it is said that this occupation led to the development of his dramatic genius. It is more easy to believe that it was responsible for the development of certain other less admirable qualities of the poet.

    His first appearance as a tragic writer was in 499 B.C., and in 484 B.C. he won a prize in the tragic contests. He took part in the battle of Marathon, in 490 B.C., and also fought in the battle of Salamis, in 480 B.C. He visited Sicily twice, and probably spent some time in that country, as the use of many Sicilian words in his later plays would indicate.

    There is a curious story related as to his death, which took place at Gela in 456 B.C. It is said that an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a stone, dropped a tortoise upon it in order to break its shell, and that the blow quite killed Æschylus. Too much reliance should not be placed upon this story.

    It is not known how many plays the poet wrote, but vionly seven have been preserved to us. That these tragedies contain much that is undramatic is undoubtedly true, but it must be remembered that at the time he wrote, Æschylus found the drama in a very primitive state. The persons represented consisted of but a single actor, who related some narrative of mythological or legendary interest, and a chorus, who relieved the monotony of such a performance by the interspersing of a few songs and dances. To Æschylus belongs the credit of creating the dialogue in the Greek drama by the introduction of a second actor.

    In the following pages will be found a translation of two of the poet's greatest compositions, viz., the "Prometheus Chained" and the "Seven Against Thebes." The first of these dramas has been designated "The sublimest poem and simplest tragedy of antiquity," and the second, while probably an earlier work and containing much that is undramatic, presents such a splendid spectacle of true Grecian chivalry that it has been regarded as the equal of anything which the author ever attempted.

    The characters represented in the "Prometheus" are Strength, Force, Vulcan, Prometheus, Io, daughter of Inachus, Ocean and Mercury. The play opens with the appearance of Prometheus in company with Strength, Force and Vulcan, who have been bidden to bind Prometheus with adamantine fetters to the lofty cragged rocks of an untrodden Scythian desert, because he has offended Jupiter by stealing fire from heaven and bestowing it upon mortals.

    Vulcan is loth to obey the mandates of Jove, but urged on by Strength and Force and the fear of the consequences viiwhich disobedience will entail, with mighty force drives the wedges into the adamantine rocks and rivets the captive with galling shackles to the ruthless crags.

    Prometheus, being bound and left alone, bemoans his fate and relates to the chorus of nymphs the base ingratitude of Jove, who through his counsels having overwhelmed the aged Saturn beneath the murky abyss of Tartarus, now rewards his ally with indignities because he had compassion upon mortals.

    Ocean then comes to Prometheus, offering sympathy and counsel, urging him not to utter words thus harsh and whetted, lest Jupiter seated far aloft may hear them and inflict upon him added woes to which his present sufferings will seem but child's play.

    Ocean having taken his departure, Prometheus again complains to the chorus and enumerates the boons which he has bestowed upon mankind, with the comment that though he has discovered such inventions for mortals, he has no device whereby he may escape from his present misfortune.

    Io, daughter of Inachus, beloved by Jove, but forced, through the jealous hatred of Juno, to make many wanderings, then appears, and beseeches Prometheus to discover to her what time shall be the limit of her sufferings. Prometheus accedes to her request and relates how she shall wander over many lands and seas until she reaches the city of Canopus, at the mouth of the Nile, where she shall bring forth a Jove-begotten child, from whose seed shall finally spring a dauntless warrior renowned in archery, who will liberate Prometheus from his captivity and accomplish the downfall of Jove.

    viiiIo then resumes her wanderings, and Mercury, sent by Jove, comes to question Prometheus as to the nuptials which he has boasted will accomplish the overthrow of the ruler of the Gods. Him Prometheus reviles with opprobrious epithets, calling him a lackey of the Gods, and refuses to disclose anything concerning the matter on which he questions him. The winged God, replying, threatens him with dire calamities. A tempest will come upon him and overwhelm him with thunderbolts, and a bloodthirsting eagle shall feed upon his liver. Thus saying, he departs, and immediately the earth commences to heave, the noise of thunder is heard, vivid streaks of lightning blaze throughout the sky and a hurricane—the onslaught of Jove—sweeps Prometheus away in its blast.

    The "Seven against Thebes" includes in its cast of characters Eteocles, King of Thebes, Antigone and Ismene, Sisters of the King, a Messenger and a Herald. The play opens with the siege of Thebes. Eteocles appears upon the Acropolis in the early morning, and exhorts the citizens to be brave and be not over-dismayed at the rabble of alien besiegers. A messenger arrives and announces the rapid approach of the Argives. Eteocles goes to see that the battlements and the gates are properly manned, and during his absence the chorus of Theban maidens set up a great wail of distress and burst forth with violent lamentations. Eteocles, returning, upbraids them severely for their weakness and bids them begone and raise the sacred auspicious shout of the pæan as an encouragement to the Theban warriors. He then departs to prepare himself and six others to meet in combat the seven chieftains who have come against the city.

    ixHe soon re-enters, and at the same time comes the messenger from another part of the city with fresh tidings of the foe and the arrangement of the invaders around the walls of the city. By the gate of Prœtus stands the raging Tydeus with his helm of hairy crests and his buckler tricked out with a full moon and a gleaming sky full of stars, against whom Eteocles will marshal the wary son of Astacus, a noble and a modest youth, who detests vain boastings and yet is not a coward.

    By the Electron gate is stationed the giant Campaneus, who bears about him the device of a naked man with a gleaming torch in his hands, crying out "I will burn the city." Against him will be pitted the doughty Polyphontes, favored by Diana and other gods.

    Against the gate of Neis the mighty Eteoclus is wheeling his foaming steeds, bearing a buckler blazoned with a man in armor treading the steps of a ladder to his foeman's tower. Megareus, the offspring of Creon, is the valiant warrior who will either pay the debt of his nurture to his land or will decorate his father's house with the spoils of the conquered Eteoclus.

    The fiery Hippomedon is raging at the gate of Onca Minerva, bearing upon his buckler a Typhon darting forth smoke through his fire-breathing mouth, eager to meet the brave Hyperbius, son of Œnops, who has been selected to check his impetuous onslaught.

    At the gate of Boreas the youthful Parthenopæus takes his stand, a fair-faced stripling, upon whose face the youthful down is just making its appearance. Opposed to him stands Actor, a man who is no braggart, but who will not submit to boastful tauntings or permit the rash intruder to batter his way into the city.

    xThe mighty Amphiarus is waiting at the gate of Homolöis, and in the meantime reproaches his ally, Tydeus, calling him a homicide, and Polynices he rebukes with having brought a mighty armament into his native city. Lasthenes, he of the aged mind but youthful form, is the Thebian who has been chosen to marshal his forces against this invader.

    At the seventh gate stands Polynices, brother of Eteocles, bearing a well-wrought shield with a device constructed upon it of a woman leading on a mailed warrior, bringing havoc to his paternal city and desirous of becoming a fratricide. Against him Eteocles will go and face him in person, and leader against leader, brother against brother and foeman against foeman, take his stand.

    Eteocles then departs to engage in battle, and soon after the messenger enters to announce that six of the Theban warriors have been successful, but that Polynices and Eteocles have both fallen, slain by each other's hand.

    Antigone and Ismene then enter, each bewailing the death of their brothers. A herald interrupts them in the midst of their lamentations to announce to them the decree of the senate, which is that Eteocles, on account of his attachment to his country, though a fratricide, shall be honored with fitting funeral rites, but that Polynices, the would-be overturner of his native city, shall be cast out unburied, a prey to the dogs.

    Against this decree Antigone rebels, and with her final words announces her unalterable intention of burying her brother in spite of the fate which awaits her disobedience to the will of the senate.
    It is not known how many plays the poet wrote, but vionly seven have been preserved to us. That these tragedies contain much that is undramatic is undoubtedly true, but it must be remembered that at the time he wrote, Æschylus found the drama in a very primitive state. The persons represented consisted of but a single actor, who related some narrative of mythological or legendary interest, and a chorus, who relieved the monotony of such a performance by the interspersing of a few songs and dances. To Æschylus belongs the credit of creating the dialogue in the Greek drama by the introduction of a second actor.
    My love of history, Greeks, Romans, Epic History of Carthage, Vikings, Native Americans, Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, Assyrian, Germans,
    Nordic nations, etc. oft leads to me to reading such articles as this.
    Those ignorant of history, are doomed to repeats its mistakes, is a truism that I firmly believe in myself.
    Man's greatest weapon is his brain, IMHO.
    I BELIEVE IN HAVING GOOD WEAPONS... -TYR
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Walter de la Mare

    "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare Analytical Essay



    The poem opens with the scene being set. A mysterious man is knocking on the door only dimly lit by the moon. His horse is silently feeding on the grasses and ferns that cloak the forest floor. A bird flies out of a turret bound toward the moonlit sky. The Traveller, he is called, knocked on the dark door again but nobody came to him, nor did anybody peer out of the overgrown window to see who was calling upon them. The Traveller, grey eyed, is standing perfectly still and baffled.



    A number of phantoms lurk inside the dark, old, rotting mansion, listening to his every move. The house is crumbling, the light of the moon showing down upon the stairs. The ghosts have appeared to have been awakened. Somehow the Traveller feels their presence in his heart. The phantoms answered his call with the silence. Then the Traveller knocked a third time, louder, and states that he had come, and that he had kept his promise. His voice echoed in the empty house, and the ghost’s herd him depart. The silence slowly crept back and the Traveller was gone.



    The use of diction and imagery in the poem is not only profound but masterful. This is shown in phrases like “the forest ferny floor”, “phantom listeners”, and “the silence surges softly backward” give the poem an ominous and ere feel that adds to the mystery. This ominous feeling of supernatural suspense is what draws the reader in and makes them search for meaning, a purpose, an understanding. It is difficult to see why the author would write such an odd poem if it didn’t have a meaning.



    At first glance, the purpose may seem non-existent. Maybe Walter de la Mare intended for this poem to have no meaning at all. Maybe he wanted people to fill in the blanks; maybe he wanted them to take something from it as unique as the poem itself. Perhaps this is a method used by the author to make the reader think more, even if subconsciously, about the poem. The purpose may also be simply to give people something to read that is interesting to both the author and the reader. People write sometimes to educate and sometimes to get a point across, but most importantly because they are passionate and it is what they love. La mare was known to write dark and mysterious pieces, and maybe this was something that he wrote for pleasure and other people happened to enjoyed it too.



    There are many different possibilities of what happened to the Listeners. One theory of how the people of the house died is that they were killed by the bubonic plague. This was chosen because the Traveller was riding a horse, implying that the poem was set in older times. Also all of the people of the house were killed, supporting the theory. Another possible theory is that perhaps the ghosts where not ghosts at all. Maybe the Traveler was the ghost, maybe the phantoms where people still alive and the Traveller was the ghost lost in limbo between life and death…coming back to the house over and over every night for a reason that we may never know.


    The Listeners
    - Poem by Walter de la Mare


    "Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
    Knocking on the moonlit door;
    And his horse in the silence champed the grass
    Of the forest's ferny floor;
    And a bird flew up out of the turret,
    Above the Traveller's head:
    And he smote upon the door again a second time;
    "Is there anybody there?" he said.
    But no one descended to the Traveller;
    No head from the leaf-fringed sill
    Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
    Where he stood perplexed and still.
    But only a host of phantom listeners
    That dwelt in the lone house then
    Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
    To that voice from the world of men:
    Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
    That goes down to the empty hall,
    Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
    By the lonely Traveller's call.
    And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
    Their stillness answering his cry,
    While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
    'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
    For he suddenly smote on the door, even
    Louder, and lifted his head:--
    "Tell them I came, and no one answered,
    That I kept my word," he said.
    Never the least stir made the listeners,
    Though every word he spake
    Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
    From the one man left awake:
    Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
    And the sound of iron on stone,
    And how the silence surged softly backward,
    When the plunging hoofs were gone.
    Walter de la Mare
    This great poet is not as well known as he should be, IMHO.
    THIS IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE POEMS THIS MAGNIFICENT TALENT CREATED..-TYR
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    biography
    edmund wilson, jr.
    1895–1972


    as one of the nation’s foremost literary critics, edmund wilson enjoyed a high position in the world of american letters. L.e. Sissman called him “the greatest of our critics of this century, and among the three or four greatest—along with t.s. Eliot, wallace stevens, and f. Scott fitzgerald—of our literary men.” wilson, according to t.s. Matthews, was “the foremost american man of letters of the twentieth century.” norman podhoretz judged wilson as “one of the greatest men of letters this country has ever produced.”

    wilson’s influence upon american literature was substantial. Warner berthoff said that “for nearly every important development in contemporary writing edmund wilson was in some way a spokesman—an arbiter of taste, a supplier of perspective, at the least (to adapt his own phrase for hemingway) a gauge of intellectual morale.” leonard kriegel described wilson’s writing as “one of the standards of sanity in this culture.” despite misgivings about some of wilson’s strongly held opinions, berthoff believed that “all who have to do with literature have played parasite to his writings, his discoveries and revaluations, and are too much in his debt to allow much complaining. He has been one of his time’s indispensable teachers and transmitters of important news.”

    one of wilson’s most important contributions was his role in giving an international perspective to american literature. Speaking of this, sissman praised wilson for his “destruction of the literary isolationism of this continent.” “no man,” anthony burgess wrote, “has had a profounder influence on the capacity of a couple of generations (including my own) to form its own judgements on a very large and important sector of european literature.” a times literary supplement reviewer cited wilson’s “incontestably important task” as “explaining the world to america and explaining america to itself.”

    axel’s castle, wilson’s first book of literary criticism, established his reputation as a critic and still stands as one of his most important works. Sherman paul explained that the book, a study of the symbolist literary movement, “established the writers of the avant garde in the consciousness of the general reader: Not only did it place them in a significant historical development, it taught the uninitiated how to read them.” pointing out the book’s lasting value, taylor stated that “it is that rare work that can never really be dated or superseded.” kriegel agreed, writing that “the book remains one of the truly seminal works of literary criticism published in our century.”

    wilson’s strongly held opinions were expressed in a manner that drew respect from even those readers who did not agree with him. When reading wilson, burgess claimed, one was “enlightened with conclusions that, so well are they stated and so logically arrived at, appear inevitable and hence obvious.” george h. Douglas believed that “even when we find [wilson’s] ideas eccentric, perverse, and opinionated, as at times all of his readers must, we cannot but admire his ability to think through all of his problems for himself, his ceaseless endeavor to understand the world that confronts him and bring some order to it.” alfred kazin wrote that wilson “fascinates even when he is wrong.” joseph epstein observed that “the stamp of wilson’s personality was on every sentence he wrote, yet nothing he wrote could by any stretch of the imagination be called ‘personable’.” nevertheless, he admired wilson as “a living embodiment of the belief in literature . . . As a guide to life, and a weapon . . . With which to bring some sort of order to an otherwise possibly quite senseless world.”

    wilson’s concern with literary values was reflected in his concern for political values as well. “he always retained his strong faith in our american democratic traditions,” douglas wrote, “even though he found the original dream of the founding fathers foundering in a sea of commercial ethics and impersonal, insensate government.” after a brief interest in socialism, culminating in to the finland station, a study of the subject, wilson grew disillusioned with politics. His writings after world war ii ignored the contemporary scene. “having lived through two world wars in which he did not believe,” robert emmet long wrote, “[wilson could] no longer believe in the power of rationality to create a humane and meaningful world.” despite his disillusionment with politics, wilson protested the cold war of the 1950s by not paying his income taxes for nine years on the grounds that the money was used to purchase nuclear and bacteriological weapons.

    “some years before he died,” luckett stated, “[wilson] attempted an assessment of his own contribution to modern literature, and seemed content to stand on his achievements as an interpreter, explaining the characteristics of the literatures of other nations to readers in the united states. This was absurdly modest.” matthews believed that wilson’s “place in the hall of literary immortals is secure.” summing up wilson’s career, douglas wrote: “he was not only an imaginative writer of the first rank but a great democratic idealist, and a spokesman for liberal learning in the best sense. And the combination of these virtues produced for us a remarkable body of works which is sure to remain one of the great contributions to american literature of the 20th century.”

    wilson’s substantive contribution has continued even after his death, in the form of the many volumes of his writings that have been published in the ensuing decades. Among these are wilson’s journals from the 1930s to 1960s. According to lewis m. Dabney, editor of the final volume in the series, “the strength of wilson’s criticism and histories is his mastery of concrete details, and the journals illustrate his ability to catch the essence of a time and situation.” julian symons argued in the times literary supplement, “the primary impression left by any of these volumes covering the decades is of admiration for the power of wilson’s mind, and astonishment at the variety of his interests and the voracious curiosity with which he informs himself about them.”

    among the other notable posthumous publications of wilson’s writings, in the opinion of david castronovo, was letters on literature and politics 1912-1972. In an essay for the dictionary of literary biography, castronovo wrote that “this collection shows the range of wilson’s informal interests as well as a partial record of his varied and often hectic life. Many of the letters also reveal him in the role of friend and encourager—a guider and nurturer of talent and relentless battler with circumstances, both personal and social, that keep writers from working.”

    the portable edmund wilson, also edited by lewis dabney, gathered work that was representative of wilson’s remarkable career. Of its selections, saul goodwin proposed in the national review “that wilson, himself a pretty fair anthologist, would have been satisfied with the results.” r.w.b. Lewis, disappointed by the absence of representative fiction and poetry in the collection, nevertheless remarked in the new york times book review that the anthology does reveal wilson in the role of “critic of history.” lewis added, “to suggest the extraordinary reach of the man, one need only list the most powerful and comprehensive essays in [the portable edmund wilson,] those on marx and engels, dickens, the supreme court’s oliver wendell holmes, and the philoctetes myth.” gross expressed similar sentiments. “within the limits of portability,” he wrote, “it is everything that could reasonably be asked for, and even readers who know wilson’s work well will find that they come away from it with a renewed sense of his many-sidedness and his prodigious gifts.” christopher hawtree asserted in spectator: “a hod or a trolley would be necessary for the amount of edmund wilson’s writing one would wish to be in print.”

    more of wilson’s magazine essays and articles were brought together in book form in 1995 by castronovo and janet groth in from the uncollected edmund wilson. The 50 pieces in this collection, arranged chronologically, cover nearly 50 years, range over the course of wilson’s life from his student days prior to world war i up to 1959. Included are many of the articles and essays wilson wrote for the new yorker in the 1940s and 1950s. “the selections,” according to a reviewer for publishers weekly, “show wilson’s scholarship, the maturation of his keen, expressive voice and the emergence of his humanistic concerns. … a feast for wilson devotees.”

    in addition to his literary criticism, social commentary, and journalistic writings, wilson also penned novels, stories, poems, and plays. His first novel, i thought of daisy, is set in the 1920s in greenwich village in new york city. Described by a critic for kirkus reviews as “a tale of love, art, and politics,” i thought of daisy is a realistic narrative that relates the story of a young man who abandons bohemian life after he meets and falls in love with a chorus girl whom he sees as an american ideal. Picturesque characters abound in the portrait wilson paints of the era, including several based on real-life prototypes and friends such as john dos passos and edna st. Vincent millay. Wilson initially saw the novel as his own emulation of writers such as joyce and proust. However, the kirkus reviews critic noted “his episodic tale is more in the american grain.” in a 1950s edition of the novel, wilson added a preface that criticized his own work and described the book as flawed. The kirkus reviews critic concluded: “he was too hard on himself—the book stands up to time.”

    in the early 1940s wilson worked on a novel that remained unfinished. Covering a period of two years in the late 1920s and dealing with the end of the jazz age and the beginning of the great depression brought on by the stock market crash of 1929, the unfinished manuscript, edited by neale reinitz, was published in 1998 as the higher jazz (reinitz’s title). Yale-educated fritz dietrich, a young businessman and would-be composer, is the protagonist of the book. Fritz’s aim is to create a classical composition that incorporates the essence of american popular music. As in i thought of daisy, a number of characters in the higher jazz are thinly disguised fictions of prominent literary figures of the era, including robert benchley, dorothy parker, and f. Scott and zelda fitzgerald. In his review of the higher jazz for the new york times book review, david walton commented that “there are too many characters in the novel, and not much plot for them to be essential to.” walton also noted that the novel had “a lot of clever dialogue—all of it mildly engaging, but never very captivating.” walton felt that reinitz’s commentaries, which connected events and characters in the higher jazz to wilson’s life, were “the chief interest of the book.” expressing a different opinion was a writer for kirkus reviews, who noted the book’s “haunting set pieces that depict fritz’s uneasy circulation among manhattan’s nightclubs, burlesque shows, and florid artistic circles,” and went on to praise wilson’s “considerable skill as a novelist.” in a like vein, a reviewer for publishers weekly remarked: “with an eye and ear for fashion and upper-class folly that may remind admirers of tom wolfe, wilson treats us to a bird’s eye view of the ‘whole night club racket, the hudson valley gentry and the algonquin table regulars.”

    speaking of wilson’s standing in literature at the start of the twenty-first century, castronovo commented: “wilson’s name still stands for tireless dedication to literature, relentless pursuit of libertarian and progressive ideas, and yearning to transcend the limits of class, critical category, and fashion. His reputation, as well as threats to it, rests on his identity as a professor without a university, a critic without a field, a historian without a period, a thinker without a school.” in his review of jeffrey meyers’s edmund wilson: A biography for commentary, john gross stated: “the literary wilson will live. The longer the shadows cast over the field of literary studies by today’s deconstructionists and ideologues, the brighter his achievement will shine.”
    although i am no big fan of his political ideas, i do recognize his great talent and high intelligence, as well as his great poems.--tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    The HyperTexts

    Tom Merrill: Recognizing a Rare Voice

    by Michael R. Burch

    It has been said that familiarity breeds contempt. But I don't believe that applies to the best poetry, or at least not for me. I have never tired of reading the best poems of my favorite poets. I can still remember discovering poems by William Blake, Robert Burns, e. e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, A. E. Housman, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman and William Butler Yeats as I flipped forward through the pages of my high school English Literature textbook. I didn't bother with the prose sections; they could wait until the teacher imposed them. But there was something quite mysterious, even magical, about some of the poems. I wanted to read them, and I didn't want to wait. I was hooked. Nearly fifty years later, I'm still hooked by the best poems of the best poets: those poets I consider to be great.

    But are there any great poets left, today? Haven't great poets become mythical beings, like Orpheus, or a long-vanished species, like so many exotic butterflies that no longer grace the earth with their presences?

    For whatever it's worth, I'm going to nominate Tom Merrill as a candidate for what is commonly called the Canon. I do this realizing that my nomination is primarily a personal affair. Individual readers must decide which poets pass their tests for that sort of recognition, if the question interests them enough to consider it. The best I can do here is share the poems that convinced me Tom is worthy of such consideration. Perhaps you will agree with me, perhaps not. But I believe his poems below will make a strong case for your appreciation.

    Before anyone accuses me of nepotism, please let me point out that I published Tom more than any other poet for years, before asking him to become an advisory editor to The HyperTexts. My deep admiration for his abilities came first. So I don't think there is anything out of order if I simply affirm here what I have long believed: that Tom Merrill is an exceptional poet. For me, he is a great poet. And thus he is included in my personal Canon, along with the poets I mentioned above. Furthermore, I believe Tom's is a rare—indeed a singular—voice for the right of the unborn to remain unborn, for the rest of us to exit life whenever we please and by the most merciful means available, and for the permanent consignment of religion and its "gods" and all other forms of superstition to the realm of mythology and ancient history where they so rightly belong. To my knowledge, no poet of the past or present has advanced as far as Tom in these crucial areas. And now, without further ado on my part, here are the reasons I think so highly of Tom and his work ...



    Come Lord and Lift

    Come Lord, and lift the fallen bird
    Abandoned on the ground;
    The soul bereft and longing so
    To have the lost be found.

    The heart that cries—let it but hear
    Its sweet love answering,
    Or out of ether one faint note
    Of living comfort wring.



    Advice for Winston

    Why not just impose the old Zurich curfew,
    drive everyone indoors early, arrest
    anyone caught in the street past eleven.

    Surely that would bring to an end
    all disapproved transactions
    conducted in the blind of night

    as well as providing a superabundance
    of quietude, a lullaby
    for the fierce upholders of right.

    Maybe you've never been approached
    by someone peddling forbidden fruit
    and felt glad the option was there,

    but far better they, any day, I'd say
    than heaven's unleashed hounds
    accosting anyone they please

    with gratuitous curiosities.
    Do you really want to live that way?
    And now with all the good people

    being asked to spy on everyone else
    and supplement the force, Winston,
    make yourself thin, shrink

    out of the screen's wide eye,
    it's a quarter century ago,
    and so,

    1984, here we come.



    Novenas

    After defeat, in grief's most hopeless hours,
    With no resort remaining but the void,
    The vanquished yet may turn to hidden powers,
    Begging protection for a heart destroyed.
    As crown or cross perhaps recalls some scene,
    Bead by sad bead they may beseech the air,
    As though in precincts silent and unseen
    Lost angels could be helped by human prayer.

    Each may, as if some hearing had begun
    In secret parts where all the dead yet live,
    Cry out to walls the innocence of one
    Whom now no other aid is left to give.
    And whether justice anywhere may reign,
    None here can prove their witness was in vain.



    Filtering Out Impurities

    Now too, just as before,
    when others were hoping to slip smoothly through,
    grim-faced guards at every gate

    are keeping watch, alert for any
    suspicious sign
    or hint of possible heterodoxy.

    Between times
    as between places,
    it never yet has been assured

    that everything may pass, and words,
    when untrimmed to the reigning flimflam
    can count as much as any

    pinch of inspirational herb
    as dangerous contraband.
    History could make the thoughtful wonder

    what extant literature might include
    had many voices not been stopped
    for taking exception to The Truth,

    had speech been a protected species
    and braver tongues not failed to elude
    the flames of purgative centuries.

    And now, with anointed successors
    of book-burning masters of auto-da-fé
    becoming hi-tech-adept, who knows

    which insubordinate texts may get through
    to speak to newcomers facing the sure
    ineluctable purge of each new day.

    Some sanctified bug christened "error-free"
    and targeting the inexemplary
    could serve as well as fire to expunge

    all trace of thought that struck the wrong key.
    But life is rife with the righteous, you say
    and all their fraternal twins in the state

    have been just as given to radical cleansing,
    just as determined to root out the rot,
    and just as partial to choirboys as they.

    True, and the sun's no conservator either,
    and no words will last long either way,
    So maybe it comes out the same—saved or not.



    Officially Speaking

    What nugget gleaned may we bestow
    To mark the passing of the torch
    Who watch the darkness watch us go
    Steaming across a lamp-lit porch.
    A few steps off our haloed stage
    The boundless night with sealed lips
    Counts out the customary wage:
    An ineluctable eclipse.

    It comes to us in daily thought
    And haunts us every day we breathe,
    How we without a hope have sought
    To love where we could only grieve
    And only honed a skill so wise
    To take a sage to his demise.



    Current Attractions Besides Frère André

    Living alone in a box before you're dead
    can prove a bit of a trial, to wit
    how to remove a weight of hours

    from early-rise to early-abed
    when there's nothing but time ahead,
    not even a stint at the treadmill for fun,

    hardly a thing but forced absorptions,
    self-imposed puzzles or chores,
    evasive maneuvers performed to diminish

    a sense of infinitesimal progress,
    of standing still in a stagnant dimension
    stretching to kingdom come.

    So happily facing another black morning,
    its only stimulant chuggishly trickling
    into a stained pyrex pot,

    I lugged two bags of recyclables down,
    dropped them in their usual spot
    beside an ailing tree in the pre-dawn

    murk of an amber-lit sidewalk.
    And now, hooray, a check to be written
    presents itself as another fine way

    of slightly budging the clock.
    Later I'll probably latch onto other
    rare rungs in my climb through the day,

    the latest edition of Tass let's say
    (as I dub a local free speech organ)
    with its monolithic insipid array

    of enemy lines to be spied on,
    or maybe some noticed urgency,
    like recurrent gaps in my liquor stock.

    That's about what it's come to
    since they banned the entertainment industry,
    ran out the only wizards at hitting

    the daily jackpot of foreign spare income,
    crowned their virtue with a virtual ghosttown,
    brought to an utterly derelict end

    a nonstop ten-year winning spree
    that had showered down riches on everyone.
    So now,

    with the children safe as can be
    in a warm woolly sock of deprivation
    where only the rampant fuzz are free,

    with pretty much nothing left to see
    but strings of tots passing sluggishly
    through a sort of spiffed-up cemetery lot,

    I'm thinking of starting a free soup kitchen
    (for nothing but the company)
    as well as an overnight shelter (why not?)

    perhaps out of some recrudescent desire
    for even a lukewarm body's comfort
    as much as to nudge something hot.

    Knuckle down to the family life I say,
    bow to the dictates of the day,
    when things have entirely gone to pot

    there's hardly a reason for staying awake
    except to join the flock and Baa
    or methodically feel inspired to jot

    out a ditty, and sing
    hurrah.



    Time in Eternity

    When you were as an angel in my arms,
    Had laid your bare head just below my chin,
    Your length pressed up to mine, entrusting charms
    My whole youth's starward longing could not win;
    With still the murmur of your love in me,
    Miracle-tones of all my lifelong hope,
    I wished that there might start eternity
    And seal forever that sweet envelope;
    And as it did, my thoughts are now for you
    As every star is blotted by the sun,
    And so the sun itself
    Has perished too,
    And with it, every dream of mine
    But one.



    Madame LaBouche

    Her ears pricked up so much, Madame
    LaBouche, decrying all disturbance
    Insisted sounds around be less
    City-like and more suburban.

    One bistro gave Madame no rest
    Until it was at last subdued,
    And vexed by yakky cabbies next,
    She finally got their stand removed.

    Yet still, some night-owl might abort
    The dreamshift of LaBouche's week,
    And pop her prized unconsciousness
    By passing with a piercing shriek,

    Or other nuisances emerge—
    But when, for my part, out a window
    I spot Madame surveying things,
    Hard eye a-gleam, arms set akimbo

    All poised to nail some passerby
    With shrill bursts from her magic flute—
    I see the sole noisemaker I
    Have lately dreamed of going mute.



    Leitmotif

    The eye is turned inward these days,
    away from the gloom in the glass,
    the window's vacancy,

    the desolate picture left in the wake
    of the latest revanchist crusade
    to restore a compliant past.

    Facing the remains, an imposed deprivation,
    saddled with a heftier load of time,
    one begins to make adjustments,

    resorts to creating distractions
    like this very problem I'm solving now,
    whose unyielding grip on the mind

    won't be shaken until it's fully resolved.
    The social regime of rural religion
    leaves one in a doctor's waiting room

    and makes absorption in such problems
    useful in diverting
    consciousness from the creeping clock.

    So the eye is turned inward these days,
    turned inward because it has to be,
    though a few staunch rebels

    still lingering out there like sitting ducks
    ensure that even now
    ironically embellishing seats of wisdom

    with inspired masterstrokes relieves,
    a little at least, one's awareness the doctor
    is seeing countless other patients first,

    like that always too-busy god for which they wait.



    In God We Trust

    Absolve yourselves, believe them saved,
    Whom hungrily you brought to fare
    As chance decrees, and leave to them
    The fortune to which you rose heir.
    Now theirs shall be the kingdom too,
    This one and that, and all they hold,
    All marvels present, and as well
    Fresh wonders when the flesh turns cold.

    All you who by blind pulse renew
    The primal blessing cast in heat,
    And to a season's course entrust
    Frail issue weather can defeat,
    Who from flung seed grew anxious too—
    Deny earth feeds on them and you.



    A Brief Alarm

    Like everything, this too will soon be lost,
    Forever out of sight and out of mind,
    A brief alarm resorbed into the sum
    Of passing things that leave no trace behind.
    For its duration, it would summon all
    To a restraint heroic—to be brave
    Beyond all generations gone before,
    And make a sacrifice more sure to save:

    To starve the ground, and lay no further feast
    For bloated Earth's unflagging appetite,
    But be content to plow redemptively
    A barren field in which no seed seeks light
    And make your plots the last wherein to toss
    A harvest raised for neverending loss.



    A Demurral

    Why keep your senses grounded here,
    Or let them have you sharp and clear

    Who wakened you to numbered days
    To yoke you to their futile ways?

    While tickings winch you nearer toward
    Your execution and reward,

    Why not imbibe—or pick your trip,
    Let them ram home the standard script

    As you, absorbing what you like
    Risk transport on a one-way flight;

    Let our grand architects complain,
    Who pull their mighty weight in vain,

    Only to end as they began,
    Fragile freight of a circling hand

    That flicks the feeble out and in
    And each back to his origin.



    Who Long Kept Hid

    I prayed to stars, when I was young,
    To lure love where I lay
    Lone as a shore that calls a sea
    The tide has turned away.

    Love did not come, and oh they seemed
    Indifferent to my cry,
    Who long kept hid how love could be
    A kindness to deny.



    In the Stillness of Many

    Many nights when undrawn to the living,
    I have gone to the graveyard instead,
    And sought out my truth among ashes,
    And for beauty,
    Lain down with the dead.

    In the stillness of many a midnight,
    I have warmed to their wakening sound,
    The impassioned, and scorned, and unliving
    Who speak to my heart
    From the ground.



    How Only Cold

    If to such happiness an end must come,
    As ends may swallow all dear hopes and dreams,
    And should you vanish, and my heart grow numb
    With sorrow, as though yet so soon it seems;
    And if the bitterness should long consume
    My thoughts of you, who briefly lit the day,
    And sun no more return to re-illume
    And lift the flower withered in the clay;
    Yet memory of a distant atmosphere,
    Travail obscure as rock in some dark field,
    The glassed-in din's dull pulsing in my ear,
    Faint throb of stars, so long astir but sealed,
    Recalls a love left even more alone,
    How only cold released the ache of stone.



    I Had of Love

    I had of love, when it first came,
    A single, lonesome bolt;
    It had but one—and I could find
    No living antidote.

    And so, I made my cure of hearts
    A cold night wind instead,
    And all the sadly brimming stars
    Shone down on our chill bed.

    And then I hummed forgotten fields
    A lover's lullaby,
    And by the fallen gates of hope,
    We wept, the wind and I.



    Though Sorrow Mock

    I shall not give you up for lost,
    though grief prevail,
    tears overcome,
    strength fail;

    Though silence join with ash
    to prove all perish;
    though sorrow mock my hope
    for all I cherish.



    Incidental Effects of the Revival of Fascism on a Provincial French Island

    And now they begin
    to get uppity, par exemple
    as when Alex, a freewheeling

    handsome young local
    schizophrenic and militant
    tippler (I mean, it's

    his right. . .it's
    . . .his destiny!) on his way
    to my door the other day (de

    rigueur bottle in hand)
    was accosted by some smart
    superior new neighbor and advised

    to scram, take a hike
    exit the area, or
    Mr. Class would stick forth a grand

    digit, regally
    poke off a trio of beeps, blow
    his personal horn, order

    a special unscheduled pickup, and
    in short, summon
    some troops to sweep

    out the trash. Now, Alex, who was born
    just a few houses down,
    has lived in and around

    the neighborhood all his life,
    while the arriviste
    prick, whoever it was

    but likely equipped
    with a custom-crafted
    bathroom throne in the shape of

    an ice cream cone (that thick,
    squat waffle-wafer model, say)
    to sit on and be moved,

    as prompted by his muse,
    sublimely to extrude
    and duly
    t
    h
    e
    r
    i
    n

    drop

    impeccably, his
    most richly inspired passages
    in softly

    spiraling swirls (each maybe with
    a maraschino cherry on top)
    is only an imported gift,

    one tip of an insidious
    viral transmigration from
    a very correct, catechistic world. But,

    like Alexander, Julius and a lot
    of bugs, he has conquered, can afford
    the rent (perhaps not

    alone) in the adjacent
    newly refurbished Victorian
    flat-front apartment house adorned

    with sooty brick, stained and leaded
    windows, doors,
    iron-railed balconies and a few

    transitional art deco
    architectural frills,
    so of course

    supposes he's the boss,
    just like the tall
    bald guy with the little

    dog the other evening as I
    was putting out my
    weekly donation of well-drained

    bottles and stale news:
    "Contravention!" he yells
    (me thinking: Mon Dieu!

    not another
    Fudge Sundae on the block?) "Well,
    but what should one do?

    I'm asleep when the new
    law says to
    put it out," I protest. "It's true,"

    he admits, "but it's not
    very pretty, after all, and you'll
    be fined if they find

    your name in it." Recalling
    a sticker on The Gazette,
    I took my cue,

    hauled it back in,
    concerned lest Mr. Park Avenue
    should have a trigger

    finger
    too. It even occurred
    to me from his arresting yammer he

    might be an official
    Bloomenbroom Party member,
    or maybe

    a quaintly camouflaged cop. It anyway
    seems my turn had come
    to learn the price of Eden, see

    how it feels to be out of grace
    with the lord of the manor, welcome
    as a turd on the kitchen floor, invasively

    checked, challenged, monitored,
    saddled with the fate of being
    a foreigner

    in your own backyard. It's hard
    facing an alien infiltration,
    enduring the callous axioms

    of a purifying regime,
    a circumambient animus,
    a purging, pestilent atmosphere

    aggressively seeded with threats
    by slime-leaking snots. For
    the window boxes this year,

    I wanted black flowers,
    draping down from mon balcon, yes
    to mark a funereal mood, but more

    by way of displaying dissent
    from the clean, pretty, homogenous,
    uniform, ceaselessly

    patrolled and guarded
    stifling prison culture where
    blossoms are rife but somehow merde

    is still the only
    scent in the air (though,
    no doubt, they'd

    just be smelling gardenias there)
    but had to settle instead for the cheery
    standard party-colored rainbow

    of saumons, purples, yellows, reds,
    as if the daily promenade
    still featured la resistance francaise

    and not Bloomenbroomers on parade,
    as if there were cause
    to celebrate,

    anything more ahead than that
    when someday Alex and I are vagrantly
    sipping a vintage Armagnac

    from my popular crystal snifters,
    some sitting local resident bard
    will plosively half-evacuate

    both nether and nasal
    outlets, sniff his
    heady art, decide to apply

    for a patent on that nifty
    poetic device of mine for royal
    asses (in white or tan

    shiny gold-crested porcelain) and
    thereby
    make such a splashy killing off my

    cone-thrones he can scoop up every
    piece of the Skippy
    Peanut Butter pie, take

    Gray Poupon to the cleaner's, become
    The Emperor of Ice Cream, rake
    in shitloads of cash by

    providing a fitting place,
    a due
    repository for the race's

    ripest, most eloquent,
    most reliable product:
    ... waste.



    Praise the Lord!

    Some ensure their speech prevails
    by turning on their built-in microphone,
    mastering mass by volume.

    It's hardly a wonder when you see
    them all alone. Still,
    their agitated yapping

    meets less resistance in some people,
    borderline bestialists maybe,
    who perhaps derive a secret thrill

    from manic bursts of such weaponry.
    I hear one haranguing the world right now,
    jamming airways with high-amp yammer

    not unlike that obstreperous steeple
    down at the corner,
    whose tyrannic clangings and gongings

    flood mon balcon twice daily
    with an insurmountable clamor,
    enforcing its will that none but the bellwether's

    blustery ring should be heard,
    that all further persiflage be deferred,
    usurping acres of space with a grandly

    imposed reminder of hell's infernal
    contempt for any affairs but its own.
    A tiny bit softer tinkle or ding,

    something a little more in tune
    with their promise of heavenly harmony
    might seem just a tad less ironic,

    would certainly be less deafening,
    might even bolster one's sagging assurance
    God's welcome committee could maybe be more

    than a gang of roaring pigfaced louts.
    Try addressing a barking dog someday―
    then praise the Lord for not muzzling its snout.



    Unwithered

    Unwithered by all casting out
    My demon drives me yet
    Down the dark path that always ends
    In sorrow and regret,

    And leaves me to repent again
    My neverending part
    In injuring a perfect love,
    And breaking my own heart.



    Forever Lacking

    However well you show the way,
    My brave and ailing child,
    By meeting every demon with
    A spirit angel-mild,

    Still I go plunging toward regret,
    And cannot learn your art,
    Forever lacking strength to bind
    My action to my heart.



    Infiltration

    Useless though these walls have been
    For keeping out hell's horrors,
    Here they stand, against what glides
    With ease through solid borders;

    Or stand they must, if seeming no
    More bound to serve than I,
    Who know how fiends come drifting in,
    Yet wait love's urgent cry.



    Spring Fever

    The current outlook has started me brooding,
    asking myself as I writhe in my box
    how many long stretches more

    should be left to chance, to whatever
    common treacheries still lie in store.
    Of course,

    between decidedly wishful
    enlistments of any chore or bore,
    there's scenery galore,

    just oodles of riveting decoration
    to help expel the daily prospect
    of sluggish passage through a void

    and expand the rescue team of vital
    things like this still left to be done.
    Right now it's springtime again,

    and a week or two ago while pacing
    the space between uneasy escapes,
    I must've paused to check the view,

    a proscenium arch of chartreuse leaves
    disclosing an anemic row
    of daffodils over across in the park,

    all which might've seemed less deja vu
    had the politicos ordered a headstone or two
    to cap off their visionary landscape art.

    In the meantime, the scene's turned green,
    and I note the hanging half-wreath is capturing
    a bloomless bed's gray edging of cobbles,

    so I guess that brand of granite instead
    must serve to show how a dream of beauty
    can produce so engrossing a land of the dead.

    Well, don't expect anything great.
    It's just a way of knocking off
    another block of time.



    Pollyanna Having A Nightcap

    What's to say in the long run
    except that it all seemed useless.

    To augment drying up in the sun
    a few may have helped pump you juiceless

    but for any profounder wisdom
    you'd better consult Confucius.



    God's Universe

    Be as content as you can with being
    an item on the food chain,
    just another fine canapé

    suited for diners genetically steered
    to eat you all up.
    Be consoled that at least at present

    it's mainly the small fry,
    bacteria, viruses, fungi
    that visit you uninvited to sup.

    There's more than one way, mon frere,
    of feeding on celestial substance,
    and if other consumers someday arrive,

    perhaps equipped with man-sized
    Cuisinarts and Jennairs,
    your very own soul-bearing brand of beast,

    pleasingly plump or spare,
    could conceivably come to occupy
    a quite prominent place at the feast,

    might even culminate presented
    under glass just like a pheasant,
    who knows. Things

    could always be a tad worse, so why
    not just be glad you're not yet popping
    every scoping eye,

    may still be eluding the sensors of many
    space-hunting species with cravings akin
    to those of anthropophagi,

    that still for some you likely remain
    an undiscovered rare tidbit,
    yet to be tagged irresistible fare

    fit for a ravenous king in God's
    divinely inspired universe, where,
    let's face it, everything

    from microbes to stars,
    always sucks the brains out
    of everything else.



    Departure

    Well boxed, and neatly packaged like a thing,
    Back from the final purge he duly came,
    The pulverized reduction postmen bring
    When bodies have become cold feast for flame.
    Into a vessel made to store the crushed
    I poured the coarse remains of someone fine—
    A bag of bits, of gray and grainy dust,
    One shocking essence spirit leaves behind.
    Housed now in hard cement beneath the ground,
    He cannot share the living's deep concerns,
    Nor must he yet endure, unsafe, unsound
    As we who tremble while we wait our turns.
    Behind him lies the pain past all relief,
    The love that yet makes good its threat of grief.



    Quoth the Raven from the Ballroom Bar

    Neither the understanding of the dead
    nor that of the living, can ever be enough,
    can ever be more

    than a sort of dark familiar, say
    which, when perched on your belly at night
    often speaks to you when you gaze

    through its locked obsidian eyes
    and see a kind of chronic
    malady of mind,

    an inescapable vision reverting
    again and again to life's bright harvest,
    the permanent absence ahead,

    and you sense at the core a sort of shocked
    apprehension of being's essential neverness,
    of the blot-out factor in the blood,

    at least until an indifferently riddling
    tongue begins to block your thinking,
    and you start sinking

    down toward desired oblivion,
    down toward the ocean's nightbound floor,
    where seeing hopefully is done.

    There really is nothing more
    to share than this ultimate understanding
    of organic fact, the process of decay,

    innate corruptibility and the gradual
    breakdown of all that seemed solid
    and real. And yet, notwithstanding,

    it's a ball, an opera, a bar—your due
    and fully owed ration of every sought thrill
    though it's still,

    though none of it ever really happened,
    just whatever happens to you.



    Equestrian Event

    Their agenda being to keep all the stock
    in harness and pulling, right up to the grave,
    they discourage you from running wild
    and urge you to breed an amenable child
    they can hitch to a workload and duly enslave.

    "Industry and sobriety"
    are the gist of their merry marching song,
    since producing things is what they do,
    myriad things they hope that you
    will spend your cash (or credit) on.

    They're such a thrill to listen to,
    like the clock's relentless tick-tick-tick;
    who'd ever think to chuck their plan,
    jump the fence, say yoke be damned
    fuck the plow and go maverick?



    Between Frosts

    Framed in my front slider now,
    maples masquerading as giant
    forsythias in full bloom
    will very soon be revealing how
    an early leaf's a short-lived flower.

    But greater than any loss I prevision
    in April's fleeting golden hour
    is a building promise of release
    from another eternal winter's prison,
    wide-open doors and the long-awaited

    warm luxurious freedom of being
    part of the scene again, at least
    till its culminant powers unfold a final
    tapestry made to fade away . . .
    in earth's perennial pageant of decay.



    Romance by the Book

    Suppose just one might suffice, one
    matching your vision well enough
    to blind you to the rest.

    Imagine how in your covers at night
    you could fall apart,
    perish in the pillows together,

    vacate the present
    perhaps to reunite in the future,
    where one of you might awaken

    to behold again
    in the other's unshifting immortal light
    how nothing alone survives night.



    Our Bodies Are Our Sworn Enemies

    ― for B. Russell ("The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice")

    They're intent on their lives having meaning
    and on making them seem worth the price
    which is why they're so hellbent on screening
    out all futures but bright Paradise.

    But when fact points to nothing redeeming
    with its sweet gifts of torture and dread
    can it ever be more than pipedreaming
    to think earth augurs great things ahead?



    Epitaph

    "Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs...."―PL

    Too long it had only been for this
    that he slogged through each duplicate day:

    to sink so deep into sleep
    that no trespass of any perception

    could make his escape incomplete;
    only for perfect vacancy,

    space with no inner sense,
    a truly out-of-touch retreat,

    with no chance or threat of intrusion―
    no memory, no thought, no night-borne illusion.



    Consolation for the Disenchanted

    Time will stop
    and death will come;
    all will perish,
    fade,
    be done.

    Why complain then?
    Drink!
    Be merry!
    Life—
    is only temporary.



    The Suspicion of Being Noticed

    I sometimes see myself
    in what others say,
    in their descriptions
    as if I might've been their subject.

    Most likely not but still I've wondered
    if I've stirred some comment along the way.

    Do I give a damn?
    Probably only in rare jurisdictions.



    The Grand Bequeathal

    Soon enough the world will be theirs
    as once it was ours;
    only they (oremus) will know cares
    or wait out long hours;
    have dreams, dreads, body repairs,
    odd slants on dumb powers;
    retire to underground lairs
    where God freshens His flowers. (oremus)



    Porcine Predations

    Despoilers in their cochonmobiles
    have been gliding around today,
    and daily for years,

    like tiger sharks in a tank of puffers.
    A mean-eyed school of them
    has been steering alertly through

    intent on a catch. Even the low
    quasi-fastback body-make
    evokes that grim subtracter's shape.

    And there's indeed
    been a dwindling of merchant
    marine life in the pool.

    One stunningly veers to left or right,
    targeting this or that fucked fish,
    startling its prey with a sort of sinking

    blow on its inner tuba. Often
    another gap appears in the ranks.
    The tank has become so full of sharks,

    maybe soon they'll turn on themselves,
    start devouring one another.
    It almost

    gives one a tingle at the tip
    of one's pecker, to imagine them going
    after about all that's left.



    Mechanism Will Of Course Prevail

    Who really knows if what's borne by the born
    is confined to known mercies of sense
    or if death can be trusted to really provide
    a final escape from existence.

    Infinities more may lie in store
    (to hope not is not to be sure)
    and maybe once in, there's no way out
    and you're forced to forever endure.

    But why try to nudge with possible fates
    when those sure ones we all can see
    never seem to deter nature's tools from deploying
    their brute power to make a life be.



    Lost In The Crowd

    When a new grief sets in, the kind endured
    when the core of your life goes increasingly missing
    and "then there were none" seems to sum up your prospects

    a simmering anger mixed with gloom
    can mingle you more with streams of space-litter
    floating endlessly by on your vacant moon.

    Symptoms of heightened blankness return
    like my own recurrent mechanical pulsion
    toward extra journeys to shrink time with distance,

    excursions expanding a fixed routine
    which might be stale enough already
    without added tours of a desert scene.



    Never Quite Perfect

    There's always something better he said
    and it's true, since whatever you most long to touch
    will always remain untouchable
    like any shape in the realm of ideals.

    But if semblances of secret snapshots
    filed in your mind's most revisited album
    ever step up to talk businesswise
    you might sign some lines on proximate deals.



    Smoking Up an Image

    After a puff or two,
    I typically study myself,
    my composed reflections,
    something I never do when grounded,
    and am always struck by their alien sound
    and start wondering whom I'm talking to.

    No mirror provides an outside view
    but when scanning my mind's from illicit heights
    I sense an advance scout,
    one dispatched to gather data
    for the use of some future delegation
    unversed in the native milieu.



    A Response To A Friend Who Saw No Difference
    Between Characters In Sacred Poetic Fiction (e.g. Hopkins)
    And Those in Fantasies and Fairy Tales

    Well, Odin and Thor are fine, I agree;
    to us they're like figures from fables;
    but a trio like The Trinity.........

    are they seen as quite as unreal?

    Call out a name like The Paraclete's
    and some may jump from their seats as if seized
    and begin to shake and reel.
    Which kind of figure do you think is more likely

    to be taken to heart by anyone,
    and become as possessing as zeal?
    Not those embalmed in mythology,
    which only retain historic appeal.



    From a Bystander's Perspective

    They've all been winning prizes,
    and triumphantly getting published;
    you hear that some of their stuff's
    not being heaved and rubbished.

    It almost shakes your conviction
    that crowers so noncommittal
    could always be safely ignored
    having questioned so little.



    For The Seeing-Impaired

    The original cause is the culprit, God,
    accidental chemical interaction, the thing
    that started the whole ball rolling,
    call it whatever you like.

    Nature is too adept by far,
    either by chance or design,
    at dealing out incommutable sentences
    for forced engagement in a futile fight.

    To find it a great adventure, like Whitman,
    or to say like Jeffers that one part's majestic
    but another is monstrous, well, others just grow blind
    to any charm where justice is nowhere in sight.

    Heat engenders, darkness engulfs;
    diverse imaginations explain it all;
    but what it bodes for consciousness
    is anyone's call.



    Branding Branders

    Is there anything more to life-creation
    than mechanistic murder?

    Consider anyone's darling,
    some steamy union's hapless fruit

    that plumpened until it was time to be pushed
    out into Adam's lost Eden,

    a punitive state of perpetual peril
    where every arrival is left in the lurch

    and the ultimate prospect is soil enrichment
    and embedment beneath tended turf.

    If guilt is assuaged by supposing your loves
    are bound for compensatory bliss

    since anything less would be wrong,
    overriding all proud celebrations of birth

    a constant chorus of hopeless keenings
    keeps bewailing new tributes to earth.

    So whenever I hear they're out fighting crime,
    I recall what creation's Creator said

    about whom to finger first.



    Adventure Beckons

    Adventure beckons everywhere
    To any child at heart;

    Creation, just by being there,
    Precludes a life apart.

    Undimmed within by souls grown old
    They never lose the world,

    That oyster with its magic hold,
    For them forever pearled.



    Orbiting a Potentially Dead Star

    My heart got hooked again last week,
    and today,

    full of foreboding,
    I'm reading all the signs as grave,

    sensing an ominous vacancy,
    non-existence as fait accompli,

    a savior come and gone like a god
    no god can grant eternity.

    Two sacred little bottles missing
    from my quaint majolica humidor,

    a perpetual "sorry, call-limit reached,"
    that hopeless head two nights ago

    wet on my ceded chest and sobbing
    "I curse the day I was born" all seem

    to point to those two times before
    when he tried to rob the world of treasure,

    plunged deep enough for wakelessness,
    for being forever out of means

    to deflect a mind from helpless orbit
    around a single constant care,

    from a huge gravitational trap of feeling
    bound to a heart no longer there.



    A Minor Croak

    I hear them trilling bird songs to each other
    in the cherry blossom climate
    of togetherness.
    Pigeons on the roof
    seem to parody this pair—
    but they will go
    with the wandering summer ease of lovers
    along the river's turns, and I—
    I can only feel very
    like a frog held captive in a columbary.



    Outlaw's Retreat

    It runs through the yellowed,
    unblown leaves,
    where listening
    has rewards:

    Sweet stream
    of banished melodies
    whose song
    I hasten towards.



    Thanking Seashells

    for WS

    He lives, beyond his life, in many
    projections,
    in many imagined things,

    though only as speaker,
    as one to whom it is possible only
    to listen . . . and listen.

    He never listens himself anymore,
    his hearing having grown impaired;
    never hears ceilings or floors

    channeling rare selections
    through a medium uniquely attuned
    to whatever-the-matter's tongue;

    no, he only broadcasts now,
    a distant turbulence funneled
    like wind through a conch—like ocean's

    ferment echoed afar,
    like some deeply inconsolable sound
    from fathomable depths offshore.



    Tempis Fugit When They Go Slow

    Just say it's nothing much more
    than his latest accession to its never-yielding
    demand that it be done right,

    or call it the nearest proof to hand
    of maestro's having again been driven
    to demonstrate his might, or,

    quite possibly for
    no glorified reason, of his having given
    himself the glorious chore.

    The chore.

    So why not imagine
    some mundane explanation for
    his having forced himself to be forced

    to bring such a thing to completion . . . ?
    He had this insight he'd sometimes share
    with jobbers bobbing away with all their

    pistons firing in a hyper-rapid
    countdown to the launch, i.e.,
    how awareness of time precluded pleasure.

    Could that shed any light
    on what brought the finished thing about?
    He at any rate kept devising scores

    he knew were bound, like himself, for the furnace,
    devoting days to smoothing them out,
    whittling away at perishable substance

    though maybe he liked them better inchoate,
    preferred the vanished hours before
    the thing got done, when the outcome was still in doubt.



    Working For Peace

    It's not unlike a pressure valve: with a bit
    of manipulation, some of the pent-up
    element is released.

    I'm reminded of this
    because just a moment ago
    I spent a few minutes adjusting it.

    I never really notice
    how much of the stuff is sprung, so to speak,
    but it's done

    till further adjustment suggests itself.
    Probably not tonight.
    We'll see.

    For a modicum of manual labor,
    you can get back a seismically sizable burst
    (complete with an attendant shudder)

    and can feel, if you got your money's worth,
    relieved of sufficient supercharge
    to limply gravitate toward sleep.

    That's half the point of the exercise—
    a purpose, for me, it shares with reading
    a novel or poetry,

    or studying a foreign tongue.
    The other half? . . . to pull the mind free
    of a restless distraction, an urge for action

    disrupting its idle drift. Those then
    are the foremost reasons I often resolve
    to rise to the occasion, try my

    hand at the shooting-range, so to speak—
    and why I, fairly frequently,
    grab my trusty pistol and,

    with a will, start to polish my gun.
    It never lasts too long, the time
    between when the trip begins and the final

    bang, but it's still
    a nice enough way to depressurize
    the head-space of the mind,

    as well as pretty solid proof, I'd say
    that working for peace
    can sometimes be fun.

    It every now and then can seem
    as if you lived in a pressure cooker,
    the way the steam

    starts kicking at the lid, announcing
    it's soon about to blow and now's
    the time to lift the top and lose some heat.

    But be entirely assured,
    the intervals between
    your valve adjustments may grow longer . . .

    volcanoes sleep, after all,
    geysers dwindle,
    no one's upsurge is getting any stronger,

    and sadly enough
    your element's likely to grow more inert.
    But, for anyone oddly like me,

    who continues to find it a useful technique,
    you might want to keep on hand a special shirt
    . . . to catch any spillage or spurt.



    A Sad Instance of History for Once Not Repeating Itself

    Now that we're even more lost to each other,
    me to you, you to me,
    what's left, to one of us at least

    is a satellite bound
    to its conditioned orbit,
    an unreleased

    captive revolving by habit around
    its accustomed center, which keeps on
    exerting gravity though gone.

    Matter's physics isn't quite
    the same as that of the mind,
    which sometimes

    stays inconveniently locked in circuit
    however uncompanioned in space
    by anything solid or bright.

    You're asking me yet again to forgive you,
    to absorb and try to get beyond
    the latest shock in your latest militant

    marathon of recidivism,
    to stay in a recurrently losing
    game and keep paying to throw the dice.

    Many would rather suffer a crime
    in silence than summon assistance,
    because, however much needed

    when the help at hand is far from the kind
    you'd care to recruit for resistance,
    it's easy to get defeated,

    stalled in a squall of conflicted emotion,
    stuck just careening
    through the labyrinth of a paralyzed self.

    But after enough crazed laps in the maze,
    your dizzy head can start palpably pleading
    for any escape you can find,

    for any shutoff switch you can flick
    to unload the frenzied circuits
    and blow the storm out of your mind,

    even if the exit ticket's
    a force more adept at breeding tension
    than at hosting a comfortable time.

    Some funerals are bound to seem anticlimactic,
    but impeaching your judgment's the hard part,
    branding your standard trusty tactic

    for beating the odds as no more than a fond
    belief that your inner guidance system's
    so sound it could never keep driving you on

    toward most gamblers' fate.
    Faith is no easy thing to abandon
    when your heart's acuity's at stake.



    A Crack in the Confraternity

    Get out as early as you can,
    And don't have any kids yourself.—P.L.

    They hate it when truth
    is actually spoken;

    it contradicts everything
    they believe;

    and thus the pretense
    of kinship is broken:

    when their mantra's new life
    and yours is just leave.



    Peut-etre au Naturel!

    Bobby came two nights ago,
    his back still hurting (probably
    a lumbar strain, so-called, from a fall
    in basketball) but still
    performed without a flinch (and eagerly)
    exactly what I like

    despite the position (which isn't
    the simplest) and despite
    the trial of that lingering pinch.
    He came as soon as he could, too.
    (But then, last night, when he came again,
    he aborted the launch when he started to wince.)

    Some cynics might contend he came
    only for my salty rival (or should I say
    accomplice?. . . ) but every now and then
    I'm willing to bet (how much I'm not sure)
    that's just not true. (Chalk it up
    to all my antennae gone askew.)

    He looks, if you care to know—like what?—like . . .
    all I've got. Compact, small,
    bronze skin drum-tight
    over ripples, back bowed (and delectably curving
    into prominent mounds), a decent holding,
    if I say so myself, as hot properties go.

    By custom, we jauntily haggle
    over the fee, the outcome known (give or take a few)
    in advance. (But even for your slightly pricier
    pre-dawn special, sweetheart—take my word—
    you're never overcharging—plus, as we know
    I can always score on you for free . . .

    which reminds me . . . my birthday's coming,
    and you still owe me three! And,
    since I see you're back today with your back
    miraculously healed overnight,
    I guess I won't be afraid
    to execute my designs a smidgeon less guiltily.)



    Canadian Club vs. Catechism Class

    Can it be me?
    Or is it by chance
    that whenever I sing
    there's no one to dance?
    (I might as well put
    the whole world in a trance.)

    With my opulent view
    am I so out of touch?
    Too far out of sync?
    Not normal enough?
    Are my sparkling bijoux
    just a little too much?



    Going with the Flow

    Pick for yourself
    something you'd like;
    let it be deep
    or guiltily light;

    let it have rhythm,
    let it be sad,
    let it be happy,
    let it be mad.

    Who really cares
    if it's any of those;
    you might as well stick
    to conversing in prose;

    you might as well say
    what they'd all like to hear:
    how it's good, really good
    that we all landed here

    where nature's best laws
    backed by church and by state
    keep dispatching fresh ranks
    toward a heavenly fate.



    Love's Legacy

    Still Abraham, with ready blade
    Prepares the altar, hangs the vine
    Each season with new fruit to quench
    Earth's thirst for sacrificial wine.

    Executor of nature's will,
    He serves the sod, must till and bring
    With every celebrated birth
    His ancient lord an offering:

    His ripened yield, the precious fruit
    Half-shrunken back to seed in time
    Yet one more wrathful vintage crushed
    By rote transitions of the clime.



    Auscultation

    Inside oneself one sounds all parts:
    A vague suspension of the breeze,

    A rift between raw pulp and clime
    The first frost of the meta-freeze.

    A rugged oarsman's heave and pull
    Keeps muffled drumming audible,

    Mind mindful of an aural whir
    Like summer nightfall's teeming chirr,

    Of ice, locked hinges, treacheries,
    Cold timbers groaning on high seas.



    The Way of All Scents

    Good news! Someone's apprised me how
    To write the one true poetry:
    The key is sounding just like you,
    The one your friends all recognize,
    And not like one they never knew.

    As if it mattered either way,
    The stranger's voice, your own—Mon Dieu!
    More soundtracks made to be erased—
    More dying echoes to recall
    Your one-time residence in space.

    When history lapses and the words
    Go mute as all the blotted blessed,
    When not a nose is left to sniff
    Your gas, who then will even like
    Whiffs of his own emissions best?



    Chapeau Bouquet

    Magic lovers longed for more
    From seedlings sprung in restive hours,

    Some hint of happy times in store,
    A forecast bright as springtime flowers.

    He hatched them in his hat at night,
    Companions courted to advance

    The time, but struck by chilling light
    They withered like a failed romance.



    The Immortal Path

    "The assassin discloses himself,
    The force that destroys us is disclosed....
    an adventure to be endured
    With the politest helplessness...."—WS from EDM

    While Pater Noster blazed away above
    Cell blocks in Hartford, he would turn the dial
    And scan eclectic spaces of his mind
    For airings of a more dissenting style.
    Deaf-eared to channels wooing from the past
    He'd sound electric pipelines like the blind
    Until seditions took the place at last
    Of all illusions crooned to toys of time.

    Perhaps a vision came of Heraclitus
    A fireball packed with rabbits in his hand
    Dispersing from his hot magician's hat
    Menageries to fertilize the land,
    While farther off he saw our father raze
    His daughters, sons, the search, each novel phrase.



    ee cummings

    some say ee cummings had a poets soul
    loved his motherfather (wifefriends) could write
    most beautifully (if always on the whole
    not as those with higher eyes and oes might;
    but then it was lamented sorely by
    a few at harvard at the time that all
    the best poems had been written;so why
    try to climb old mountains but to fall
    (having etched short of the supreme engrav (e)
    ing) back into a crumpled ball; and why not
    try hand at some quite unbeforedone (brave
    thing) and outjink the comparative blot
    of shakespeare shelley byron moore hood keats
    and leave them towering high; in
    (old) dead beats



    Frequent Flyer Program

    Life sometimes seems like slower suicide,
    Since taking happy flights is half what kills:
    The fuel consumed, the surge and beat past dawn
    Of countless re-accelerated thrills.
    Still, why put off all flying stunts till heaven
    When now or never's when to claim your due—
    With yeast to hand, and Sodom yet uncrushed
    Why not let geysers gush in Xanadu?

    Embarrassment abates inside a cloud,
    Where blushing selves more freely join the act—
    Sworn tipplers lose and find themselves in fog,
    With other trippers who steer off the track.
    Some say it's best to live before you die,
    And silent choirs of angels all know why.



    On the Urgency of Replenishing the Workforce

    When all earth's paths are bound to double back
    Upon themselves, no matter what we do,
    It somehow seems mere critical presumption
    To be demanding anything of you
    As if one bore more claim to any right.
    The fly is on the wheel, and we are on it,
    All brought around in time, to something black,
    Dumb and unknowing, cured of every zeal,
    The race's bluster, and all pride of reason.
    Enough to bear with that, to where it leads
    Without a superadded servitude.
    No wonder some slip harness and secede,
    Go snatching wages where and how they dare,
    Then fling them cavalierly in the air.



    The Rock of the Redeemer

    Each week he orbits back again to mine
    Old quarries, prop the faithful, and be swept
    Rock-borne from door to door, through days and nights
    And on to where revered remains are kept.
    Some groomed disciple then will softly keep
    Long watch, until the moment when at last
    All done with sacrifice, the rock rolled back,
    The lamb bursts forth, intent on breaking fast;

    So weekly feasts are hastily prepared,
    By way of thanks for many feats performed
    And toils endured to keep old fans attached—
    Some scourging, blood, and other gifts to leaven
    The outlook of his flock, which deems the rock
    His church stands on, the keystone of their heaven.



    Behind Enemy Lines

    "I have learned that to be with those I like
    is enough."—Walt Whitman

    Spotted where dropped, its neat, unread
    Still folded pages testified
    I'd been afloat inside my head,
    So buoyed by a presence I'd
    Escaped resorting to the trends,
    Or tracking our squirearchy's scheme
    For locking my more wayward friends
    Out of the landscape of their dream.

    Then—lift for lift—I'd played chauffeur—
    Slipped out an outcast who slips in
    And braves the backlash of the pure
    To smuggle me my favorite sin
    Or just pass out a room away
    While I drift in my mind all day.



    That Old-Time Religion

    "Now I want you to go out there
    and enjoy yourself, and yes, enjoy
    your philosophy of life, too."——-John Ashbery, from "My Philosophy Of Life"

    Ashbery wishes us good times,
    And me, I hope they won't abate.
    I want the moments I have now
    Never to evaporate.
    I've made a niche, and won some thrills
    By luck at playing hit or miss—
    Enough to keep my outlook rich
    And life appearing generous.

    Since one now holds a special claim,
    I tend desire's lesser leaks
    Until that bronze funicular
    Returns to run me to the peaks
    And sets an eager artist free
    To blanch a canvas jauntily.

    —————pour Beekerson Fleurimond



    A Loan and A Lease

    He lay so quietly I reached
    Over to feel if he was warm;
    Hearing no breath, I needed proof
    No chill was on that too-still form.
    He came without his one-track side,
    Just humbly handsome and polite,
    And it was good of him to both
    Show himself and spend the night.

    A switch I got to mute the bells
    Stays off or on as I allow,
    But at the moment keeps the peace.
    My house will not withstand its flaws,
    But while my lucky star shines on
    I'm hoping to renew the lease.



    Cell Theory

    Where they now go to catch a wink
    Who stretched out on the green before
    Or made hard benches beds because
    They lacked a key to any door,
    Who knows, but parks gone tenantless
    And prisons crammed and overfull
    Suggest how sudden aesthetes made
    The local scene so wonderful.
    Fat tabs for sleeping out of doors
    Collectible in cash or time
    Now equal several millions owed
    La ville by ones without a dime,
    And jail for all nonpaying guests
    Keeps flowerpaths more picturesque.



    Square Times Blues

    The only show in town shut down,
    Dispatched to some unknown address,
    A leafy peace has settled in
    Where none had come to convalesce.
    Le carnaval, for all those tricks
    Condignly sampled on the cheap,
    Still leavened with expectancy
    A long day's journey into sleep.
    Perhaps in some unpurged locale
    Yet free for all to occupy,
    Our banished horde of hawkers hail
    And hook such gamer passersby
    As we who, undeprived had plied
    A city not yet countrified.



    A Mon Vieux Mon'ray'al

    Not to clip sick summer leaves,
    Nor watch them drop like autumn gold
    Into a leafy lane nor see
    A mimic's rustic dream unfold,
    Not to endure a vision void
    Of promise more than early sleep,
    Not for a filtered view was my
    Balcony seat acquired cheap.
    It was because all clocks had stopped
    Before the wholesale cleansing came,
    And for a common ground where most
    Could set themselves and stake a claim,
    Or loose and slick and maverick, roam
    The scene, and almost feel at home.



    Palmistry in Paradise

    Strange, how in the park today,
    Three wheeled around on me and one
    Required the reason I was there;
    No doubt some wondered what I'd done,
    As I, best as I could impaired
    By lips gone gummy with alarm,
    In forced defense invoked the plot's
    Exclusive new Edenic charm.
    Directed—"for our safety"—next
    To show my palms, I did; and then,
    "We want no more dead bodies here,"
    Said he, who may, to weed out men
    Check lifelines of all comers who
    Resemble him he said I do.



    Preparing for the Pageant

    Our tiny central park transformed,
    Renewed, its state-appointed heirs
    On brighter workdays come at noon
    To claim the space an hour as theirs.
    Few, of the once emboldened who
    Had plied a seedy green unchecked,
    Now brave the odds and navigate
    The precincts of the New Elect.
    Unleashed by some contestant's dream,
    Wry rovers licensed to coerce
    Compliance, hound and hold them back,
    While I, who watch the tide reverse,
    See, where the undisturbed now tarry
    A pretty city cemetery.



    Bagatelle I

    "Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf." ― P.L.

    If brute nature's too strong for arresting
    in its drive to keep planting new seed
    the result so cries out for protesting
    no lost cause seems more worthy to plead.

    It concerns those at risk of induction
    into ills we all suffer and mourn
    and the facing of grief and destruction
    for no reason but having been born.

    It commends sparing others diseases
    and anger and fear and despair
    and such mercies as flow from sweet Jesus
    and the hopelessness driving all prayer.



    Bagatelle II

    "Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself." ― P.L.

    To do it ourselves would be faster,
    but since instinct seems bound to prevail
    it's more likely to be by disaster
    that we come to the end of travail.

    One could argue there's cause for heroics
    and good reason to expedite fate
    but it's asking too much of born stoics
    to do more than resignedly mate.

    So while forces too fierce for engaging
    go on beating us down till we're done
    we'll keep rearing new conscripts for waging
    the same war that can never be won.



    Death in Life

    Though his demise was not like that
    Of billions lodged beneath the ground,
    Yet it was cast as such to one
    Who must believe him buried now.
    It helped sidestep analysis
    Of faith's demolishment by phone,
    And rendered pointless idle queries
    About affairs no longer known.
    Should he be spotted on some rue
    Not visibly yet void of breath,
    That hunched ghost shinning into view
    Might but recall his sudden death,
    The funeral held, the obit quoted,
    And down an aisle a coffin toted.



    I Do Not See

    I do not see the stars tonight
    Nor wonder if they shine,
    For many years have passed since I
    Wished any beauty mine.

    I do not seek the flowered wood's
    Unworldly hush and stir,
    Nor are there cherished haunts of mind
    As long ago there were.

    I find no sail to lull me now
    Away to courts of dream,
    And upward from the sod I push
    Blue skies fade out unseen.



    Then to Thee Gladly

    O Lord,
    if in the sight of Thee
    is peace, and happiness
    fills all who look
    on Thee;
    And where Thou art,
    all troubles
    truly cease, and Thou
    art truly, and as said
    to be;
    Then to thee gladly
    I send forth
    my love—to Thy
    protection, speed
    an ill-used guest;
    From sorrow, anguish,
    tears, to aeons of
    that light,
    which but to look upon
    is rest.

    This poem hangs between two flags in the museum at the Cathedral of the Pines in New Hampshire.



    Return

    When somehow you appeared and took
    this heart not mine to give,
    and spring broke out again and gave
    me every cause
    to live,

    It seemed as if some power had sent
    a spirit to restore
    that other Eden
    that I knew,
    when all was lost before.



    Blessing the Cup

    While morning yet was rose,
    not thorn,
    earth glistening
    as if newly born,
    I came across
    a romance here:
    he hadn't seen
    the shadows clear,
    nor seemed
    to be at all aware;
    she watched,
    and was content to stare.

    I thought of how a love began,
    of Eden, too,
    the dawn of man
    and how that garden
    turned to grief;
    of sorrow
    borne without relief;
    and yet,
    I did not fail to bless
    the tainted cup of happiness,
    nor reverently to tiptoe by
    this sleeper in the flower's eye.

    The HyperTexts
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    The Importance of Poetry
    It's the key to happiness.

    Poetry is an art form that has survived for thousands and thousands of years. We study it in school and we hear quotes from poems scattered thorughout our life. But do we ever truly make meaning of it? Does it even matter? My answer to you is yes it does. Reading poetry and or writing poetry can drastically improve your life, because it has improved mine. In this article I will attempt to articulate why poetry is important to read and also to write

    Reading Poetry

    Poetry is one of the most powerful forms of writing because it takes the english language, a language we believe we know, and transforms it. Suddenly the words do not sound the same or mean the same. The pattern of the sentences sound new and melodious. It is truly another language exclusively for the writer and the reader. No poem can be read in the same way, because the words mean something different to each of us. For this reason, many find poetry and elusive art form. However, the issue in understanding poetry lies in how you read poetry. Reading it logically results in an overall comprehension, rigid and unchanging. However, reading it emotionally allows the nuances and paradoxes to enter our understanding. Anyone who writes poetry can attest, you have to write it with an open heart. So as a reader, we must do the same. All poems are insights into the most intimate inner workings of the writer's mind and soul. To read it coldly and rationally would be shutting the door on the relationship that the writer is attempting to forge with you. Opening your heart to poetry is the only way to get fulfillment from it.

    If you imagine poetry as a journey, you must be willing to trust the writer to guide you. Unwilling readers will never experience every part of the adventure in the same way open minded readers do. The journey may be filled with dead ends and suffering or endless joy and happiness. And still, you go. You pick up the poem, you read, you listen, and you feel.

    In our culture we are experiencing a crisis where American people are the unhappiest people in the world statistically. How do we solve this? I answer: Mindfullness, gratitude, and poetry.

    Writing Poetry

    From a writer’s perspective, writing poetry can be equally elusive as reading poetry. When I first started writing poetry, the advice I always heard was practice, find your voice, keep a journal. I did all these things but still my poems were flat and inert. What was I missing? I poured over poems by Angelou, Shakespeare, Austen, and Wilde looking for a pattern, something I could emulate. This was the problem. I was unwilling to open my heart. I thought poetry could be a mask I could craft. But no matter how beautiful I made it, it would never come to life. It would never fit on another person’s face. It did not eve fit on mine.
    Like Odyssey on Facebook

    My first poem that came alive was written in the dark late at night. I was lying in bed and I felt something stifling me. I could not sleep. I let the thoughts stew in my head until they could not remain locked away forever. I reached for my journal and I wrote.

    Vulnerability was the key. Poetry is about expressing those thoughts and feelings we keep the most suppressed. We must be honest with ourselves about what we feel in order to write anything worth reading. It’s stopping and grabbing a thought by the tail and pulling it up into our conscious mind. It’s trying to express the beauty, and wonder we see. It’s about connecting our hearts and our minds to ourselves and our surroundings. It’s about finding peace.

    Poetry is perhaps a more effective stress relief than working out or meditating because it forces you to express your feelings through words, which helps you not only understand your feelings but also communicate them more effectively. Furthermore, it is a skill that will remain in use for your entire life no matter what you end up doing professionally.

    So reach for the pen, and let go of those things that have been burdening your freedom. Read poetry with your heart and let it affect you. The answer to our questions about the meaning of life, and the purpose of pain were written in poems. They have always been there.

    Much wisdom in this article. If one can not write poetry, they can read and enjoy it.
    If neither appeals, then there is no need to try to belittle poets. I know of no poets that try to force the reading of their poetry upon others.
    Yet it is a true art form.
    True Poetry is not Prose nor is it mindless blather, stupidity, sign of weakness or any other negative applied to it by some..
    If one is intelligent enough to read and understand the great Classic Poets, they have aleg up on those that do not -Or else do not care to read, tho' they could understand, IMHO.
    Poetry writing is not a sign of manly weakness, if any think it is, they only have to face me-one on one-- to see the folly and great error in that thinking.
    I can and will assure any--nothing weak about me , never has been-- with the exception of my being a bit weaker in my old age, that I have now been blessed to have lived long enough to enjoy with my family.-TYR
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 11-07-2017 at 11:57 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Default Why I primarily write in varying sonnet forms......

    The Advantages of the Sonnet Form in Poems
    by Anita Weingarten
    The sonnet form has been used since the thirteenth century.
    Related Articles
    Different Types of Poetry
    Traditional Subjects of Sonnets
    The Parts of a Sonnet
    What Is the Significance of a Sonnet?
    Romantic Italian Sonnet Poetry
    What Is the Difference Between an Elizabethan & Petrarchan Sonnet?

    Poetry, like other kinds of artistic expression, comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. The sonnet, which originated in the thirteenth century and is still used today, is a poetic form to which writers as varied as John Donne, Robert Frost and e.e. cummings have been drawn. There are reasons the form has been around for so long. For both writers and readers, the sonnet offers advantages, including its versatility, its place within a long poetic tradition, and the way it lends itself to a concentrated focus and the rigorous use of language.

    Rigorous Language

    One advantage of a sonnet, or of any poem in which form, rhythm and rhyme are strictly defined, is that it forces the poet to work within very specific parameters, which results in an increase of poetic discipline. Whereas free verse allows a poet to follow his whimsy to a large extent, the demands of the sonnet form require every word to be carefully weighed, leading to potentially more satisfying poetry, as the poet is forced to become more intentional and careful with the words he chooses.

    Concentrated Focus

    According to the website Poeticon, the sonnet may be the perfect poetic form for the expression or elaboration of a single thought or feeling. With its relatively short length -- just fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter -- the sonnet provides the perfect laboratory for a poet's exploration of an intense emotion. Short enough to be manageable to writer and reader alike, the sonnet is nevertheless long enough to do justice to complex poetic subjects.

    Versatility

    Another reason the sonnet is so popular among poets is that it has shown a great ability to adapt to different needs and purposes. Sonnets lend themselves to many subjects and themes, such as love, politics, nature, death -- the possibilities are endless. Even the sonnet’s meter and rhyme, which in some ways define the form, have proven to be fair game for poets who favor innovation and experimentation. For instance, George Starbuck's poem "Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree," while having more than fourteen lines, roughly follows a sonnet's traditional rhyme scheme.

    A Long Tradition

    The sonnet has endured the test of time. From the earliest sonnets of 14th-century Italy to sonnets written today, every sonnet is a part of this great tradition. Whether obediently following the rules for rhythm and rhyme scheme or flouting those rules to break new ground and shake things up, every sonneteer has to, in some measure, reckon with the poets who have come before him. Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 130, for example, plays on and against the tradition of love sonnets that idealize the women they take as their subjects. Like all traditions, the demands of the sonnet can be both limiting and liberating, but they can never be ignored.

    References

    Folger Shakespeare Library: A Short History of the Sonnet
    Poeticon: Sonnet
    Poetry Foundation: Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree

    About the Author

    Anita Weingarten holds a Master's Degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh, and has been writing professionally since 2001. Her writing experience ranges from technical manuals and marketing materials to guides designed to help young people understand classic literature.
    ************************
    What Is the Significance of a Sonnet?
    by Jordan Weagly
    William William Shakespeare wrote an important collection of sonnets that discuss the emotional experiences of love.
    Related Articles

    What Is the Difference Between an Elizabethan & Petrarchan Sonnet?
    What Are Five Characteristics of a Sonnet?
    Romantic Italian Sonnet Poetry
    The Parts of a Sonnet
    The Parts of a Sonnet Poem
    Traditional Subjects of Sonnets

    Understanding the significance of a sonnet can help you strengthen close reading and analytical skills, build a better appreciation for poetry, and derive more meaning from your reading. The sonnet is a significant form of poetry with a set structure. In Western literary traditions, sonnets have played an important role because of the works of authors such as Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and William Shakespeare. Since these early beginnings, the sonnet has held a significant place in literature for both its unique form and presentation of content.

    Form

    Sonnets are poems with 14 lines, usually with 10 syllables in each line, following the traditional English rhythm of unstressed and stressed beats called iambic pentameter. Like haiku, sonnets are strong examples of poetry with a strict form, as opposed to free verse, which allows for unrestricted use of rhyme and stanza structure. The significance of the sonnet is closely linked to this form and how it has been used by authors. Rhyme schemes vary, but notable types have developed throughout literary history.

    The most prominent types of sonnets in English are the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet and the English or Shakespearean sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of one eight-line stanza (an octave) followed by one six-line stanza (a sestet), traditionally with a rhyme scheme such as abbaabba cdecde. The English sonnet consists of three four-line stanzas (quatrains) followed by a single two-line stanza (a couplet), following a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. The Spenserian sonnet is another prominent type of English sonnet, which has a traditional rhyme scheme of abab bcbc cdcd ee.

    Historic Significance

    According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, sonnets first became prominent during the 14th century when the form used by Petrarch became significant in Italy. The form then spread during the Renaissance to England, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and France, and in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare mastered the sonnet in the English language. During the Romantic period in Germany, the work of August Wilhelm von Schlegel gave sonnets significance in the German literary tradition. After Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, the sonnet form continued to be used in poetry, but it was not until the work of writers during the English Romantic period like William Wordsworth that they became popular again. It remained a significant poetic form in the 20th century through the work of American poets such as Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Gwendolyn Brooks.

    Content

    Dating back to Petrarch, traditional sonnets contain strong themes of love. Petrarch discussed unattainable love and the pain that it can bring, and English poets such as Shakespeare followed this example during his time. While sonnets often discuss the difficulties of love, other themes are also appropriate. According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, Petrarch’s sonnets also explored the notion that poems, and art works in general, will outlive their creators.

    Contemporary Significance

    Sonnets remain significant because they offer examples of how strict, formal poetry can also offer some flexibility to authors. For example, switching the rhythm of a sonnet’s typical unstressed/stressed pattern to a stressed/unstressed pattern in one line draws attention to the line and does not violate the more important formal requirements such as stanza length. Contemporary poets have used the traditional rules of line, rhythm and rhyme and the opportunity to bend these rules as a way to add new meaning and unique expression to their poetry.
    **************************


    Sidney and Shakespeare:

    Contrasting Approaches to the Art of the Sonnet


    By Jimmy Maher

    The sonnet is among the most restrictive of poetic forms. Its list of requirements are long and daunting, as anyone who has tried to write one can well attest. Paradoxically, though, great flexibility and creativity is possible within the form. Many poets would likely argue that, by placing such restrictions on them at virtually every turn, and by forcing them to distill their words down to such a brief length, the sonnet actually aids their creativity, forcing them to write only those words that are absolutely essential to the experience being conveyed. Like an even more restrictive form of poetry, the haiku, a well-written sonnet is a little jewel reflecting an instant’s feeling distilled down to its absolute essence. As D.G. Rossetti wrote:

    The Sonnet is a moment’s monument,
    Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
    To one dead deathless hour. ("The Sonnet", 1-3)

    I will examine the work of two famous practitioners of the art of the sonnet, Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare, and in the process try to convey something of the great potential for innovation within the form when in the hands of a master. Sidney made important changes to the technical form of the sonnet, while Shakespeare vastly expanded the scope of what a poet could write sonnets about and in the process produced work of human relevance unmatched by Sidney or his contemporaries, who remained wedded to Petrarch’s conception of courtly love.

    Proof that poets of the English Renaissance considered the sonnet an aid rather than restriction to creativity is provided when we consider the obvious fact that no one forced them to write in this form. These poets were not even strict traditionalists, for they proved willing to alter the form to suit their purposes. Sidney found the traditional Italian form too restrictive and rather unsuited for the different rhythms of the English language, and so he chose to write his important Astrophil and Stella sequence using a modified form of his own devising which freed him from the strict rhyming requirements of the traditional Italian approach. Sidney’s rhymes vary quite widely from sonnet to sonnet, depending on the requirements of the poem. Structurally, he constructs his sonnets as two quatrains followed by a pair of triplets, each generally expressing one complete and separate thought.

    If Sidney was willing to alter the traditional structure of the sonnet to suit his purposes, he proved less interested in changing its subject matter. Like virtually everyone who used the form before him, Sidney writes exclusively about courtly love in the tradition of Petrarch. His Astrophil and Stella tells the story in archly romantic terms of the doomed love of the former for the latter. As everyone in Sidney’s own time knew, the narrative is based on real events. Sidney did in fact fall in love with a beautiful, cultured young lady nine years his junior by the name of Penelope Devereux, and claimed Astrophil and Stella to be a chronicle of those events. Whatever their origins, though, it is hard to see these poems as realistic accounts of being in love. They are too romanticized, too idealized. One cannot help but feel at times that these verses are as much about the poet’s pride in his craft and his desire for acceptance in polite literary society as they are about the sweat and passion of a real love affair. The poet himself all but admits to an ulterior motive. In the very first sonnet of the sequence, he tells us that he seeks "studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain" (Damrosch 1043). In the fifteenth sonnet, he halts proceedings long enough to engage in a bit of boasting at the expense of those that believe they can match his eloquence:

    You that do Dictionary's method bring
    Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows
    You that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes
    With new-born sighs and denizened wit do sing,
    You take wrong ways, those far-fetched helps be such
    As do betray a want of inward touch (Jokinen).

    He concludes by smugly telling these pour second-class poets that they should first "Stella behold, and then begin to endite" (Jokinen), yet I sense that his access to the fair Stella has little to do with the condescension just displayed.

    Much of Sidney’s verse is beautiful. In that sense, he is justified in his egotism. Yet it is beautiful in such a mannered, ornamental way that it threatens at times to fly away on its own silvery wings of eloquence. Stella is an angelic creature, described in the 81st sonnet as "Breathing all bliss and sweet'ning to the heart; / Teaching dumb lips a nobler exercise!" (Joniken), and Astrophil is defined only by his hopeless love for her. There is little of flesh and blood reality to be found here.

    The mannered nature of Sidney’s work stands in contrast to that of a slightly later Renaissance poet, William Shakespeare. Unlike Sidney, Shakespeare did not particularly innovate when it comes to the technical form of the sonnet. By the time he began to write, his chosen form, consisting of three quatrains followed by a couplet, all using a fixed rhyme scheme, was already quite well established. In one of the great ironies of literary history, this form became known after Shakespeare’s time as the Shakespearean sonnet, even though Shakespeare had little or nothing to do with its development. Still, if Shakespeare did little to advance the sonnet’s technical form, he had a huge impact on its tone.

    It is not as if Shakespeare revolutionized the subject matter of the sonnet. Like Sidney, he writes mostly about love, whether it is between man and man or man and woman. His diction is often equally elevated, and like Sidney he often chooses to compare his beloved to the wonders of nature: "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate" (Harbage 1456). It is even true that at times he seems more concerned with making sure his verse preserves his genius for posterity than with the beloved to whom he is allegedly writing, as in Sonnet 19: "Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong / My love shall in my verse ever live young" (Harbage 1456). Yet at other times he displays a realistic maturity far beyond anything Sidney is capable of, and the sentiments he expresses are made all the more touching by the aura of real life, difficult, disappointing, and painful, that underlies them. Consider Sonnet 29. Here, Shakespeare’s narrator spends the first two quatrains bemoaning his state. He is a poor man of no great talent, looking upon the rich and powerful of the world with envy while living a discontented and dreary existence. Then there is a change in tone, though, as he remembers his love, and suddenly "thy sweet love remem’red such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings" (Harbage 1458). This poem displays an emotional maturity that eludes Sidney. While Sidney describes one whose "beauty draws thy heart to love" (Damrosch 1045), Shakespeare describes the strength that a man draws from a love that one suspects has been with him for years. Sidney describes, albeit beautifully and with consummate skill, what we might today term puppy love; Shakespeare describes the mellow luster of a strong and lasting relationship.

    Even more striking in their earthy realism are the so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets. These are written to a lover who possesses none of the ethereal virtues of Sidney’s Stella. She is neither good, beautiful, nor even trustworthy. In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare writes:

    My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
    Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
    If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
    If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head (Harbage 1475).

    Shakespeare almost seems to be deliberately subversive in this poem and others like it, mocking the fairy-tale world of Sidney and his contemporaries. Yes there is more to these works than just the desire to shock. As we read them, Shakespeare gradually draws for us a picture of a mutual dependency between his narrator and Dark Lady that is not ideal or romantic, but nevertheless rings very true to life. The narrator is filled with both love and loathing for his lady, with both attraction and repulsion. The complex feelings thus aroused have a mature relevance to life, both then and now, that Sidney (and many of Shakespeare’s more "traditional" sonnets, for that matter) never approaches. Consider Sonnet 138, in which Shakespeare informs us that "When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her, though I know she lies" (Harbage 1477). He goes on to describe a relationship built on self-absorption and self-deception on the parts of both parties. His Dark Lady knows that the narrator is not the handsome young man she flatters him to be, and the narrator knows that she is not faithful to him. Yet as long as nothing shatters the illusion, both can continue to deceive themselves and draw sustenance from the relationship. The psychological complexity and knowing, melancholic wisdom here is quite unlike anything to be found elsewhere at the time. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare more so than of his contemporaries is still so widely read and discussed today.

    The sonnet in Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s time was not the archaic straightjacket that it might first appear. Both poets freely adopted the form to suit their own styles and purposes while using its sense of structure as a spur to their creativity. Shakespeare then proceeded to explode the possibilities not only for the sonnet but for all poetry by choosing to abandon, at least at times, other poets’ world of romantic fantasy and to explore the possibilities offered by a realistic exploration of thoughts and feelings in the real world. His poetry continues to be a "moment’s monument" to "one dead, deathless hour." However, the sense of honest ambiguity within that "hour" increases exponentially, and because of that his poetry rings true in a way that Sidney’s does not. Sidney’s sonnets are ornate works of artifice, often beautiful but dead on the page and always of their time; Shakespeare’s are real, breathing evocations of life. His work is for all times.

    Works Cited

    Shakespeare, William. "Shakespeare’s Sonnets." The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Ed. Alfred Harbage. New York: Penguin, 1969. 1453-1479.

    Sidney, Sir Philip. "Astrophil and Stella." The Longman Anthology of British Literature (2nd ed.) Ed. David Damrosch. New York: Pearson Longman, 1043-1050.

    Sidney, Sir Philip. "Astrophil and Stella." The Works of Sir Philip Sidney. January 2, Luminarium. October 3, 2005. http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/sidbib.htm.
    Now that free verse is all the rage--oft because it is so much easier to write, sonnets are too oft ignored or even criticized as being inferior and unworthy by modern poets and many publishers.
    Yet, one should learn about a thing before condemning it and calling it inferior or unworthy to be read or admired.
    Myself, I admire many free verse poems and have been awed by many.
    But I do not go on a path to vilify, condemn and even castigate poets that only write in free verse!
    Which happens today, to poets that only or primarily write in sonnet form.......
    If one but stretches the limits in the sonnet form, any subject can be written about well.
    Thus creativity immensely expanded and a poet's freedom greatly enlarged.--Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Default Why I primarily write in varying sonnet forms......

    The Advantages of the Sonnet Form in Poems
    by Anita Weingarten
    The sonnet form has been used since the thirteenth century.
    Related Articles
    Different Types of Poetry
    Traditional Subjects of Sonnets
    The Parts of a Sonnet
    What Is the Significance of a Sonnet?
    Romantic Italian Sonnet Poetry
    What Is the Difference Between an Elizabethan & Petrarchan Sonnet?

    Poetry, like other kinds of artistic expression, comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. The sonnet, which originated in the thirteenth century and is still used today, is a poetic form to which writers as varied as John Donne, Robert Frost and e.e. cummings have been drawn. There are reasons the form has been around for so long. For both writers and readers, the sonnet offers advantages, including its versatility, its place within a long poetic tradition, and the way it lends itself to a concentrated focus and the rigorous use of language.

    Rigorous Language

    One advantage of a sonnet, or of any poem in which form, rhythm and rhyme are strictly defined, is that it forces the poet to work within very specific parameters, which results in an increase of poetic discipline. Whereas free verse allows a poet to follow his whimsy to a large extent, the demands of the sonnet form require every word to be carefully weighed, leading to potentially more satisfying poetry, as the poet is forced to become more intentional and careful with the words he chooses.

    Concentrated Focus

    According to the website Poeticon, the sonnet may be the perfect poetic form for the expression or elaboration of a single thought or feeling. With its relatively short length -- just fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter -- the sonnet provides the perfect laboratory for a poet's exploration of an intense emotion. Short enough to be manageable to writer and reader alike, the sonnet is nevertheless long enough to do justice to complex poetic subjects.

    Versatility

    Another reason the sonnet is so popular among poets is that it has shown a great ability to adapt to different needs and purposes. Sonnets lend themselves to many subjects and themes, such as love, politics, nature, death -- the possibilities are endless. Even the sonnet’s meter and rhyme, which in some ways define the form, have proven to be fair game for poets who favor innovation and experimentation. For instance, George Starbuck's poem "Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree," while having more than fourteen lines, roughly follows a sonnet's traditional rhyme scheme.

    A Long Tradition

    The sonnet has endured the test of time. From the earliest sonnets of 14th-century Italy to sonnets written today, every sonnet is a part of this great tradition. Whether obediently following the rules for rhythm and rhyme scheme or flouting those rules to break new ground and shake things up, every sonneteer has to, in some measure, reckon with the poets who have come before him. Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 130, for example, plays on and against the tradition of love sonnets that idealize the women they take as their subjects. Like all traditions, the demands of the sonnet can be both limiting and liberating, but they can never be ignored.

    References

    Folger Shakespeare Library: A Short History of the Sonnet
    Poeticon: Sonnet
    Poetry Foundation: Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree

    About the Author

    Anita Weingarten holds a Master's Degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh, and has been writing professionally since 2001. Her writing experience ranges from technical manuals and marketing materials to guides designed to help young people understand classic literature.
    ************************
    What Is the Significance of a Sonnet?
    by Jordan Weagly
    William William Shakespeare wrote an important collection of sonnets that discuss the emotional experiences of love.
    Related Articles

    What Is the Difference Between an Elizabethan & Petrarchan Sonnet?
    What Are Five Characteristics of a Sonnet?
    Romantic Italian Sonnet Poetry
    The Parts of a Sonnet
    The Parts of a Sonnet Poem
    Traditional Subjects of Sonnets

    Understanding the significance of a sonnet can help you strengthen close reading and analytical skills, build a better appreciation for poetry, and derive more meaning from your reading. The sonnet is a significant form of poetry with a set structure. In Western literary traditions, sonnets have played an important role because of the works of authors such as Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and William Shakespeare. Since these early beginnings, the sonnet has held a significant place in literature for both its unique form and presentation of content.

    Form

    Sonnets are poems with 14 lines, usually with 10 syllables in each line, following the traditional English rhythm of unstressed and stressed beats called iambic pentameter. Like haiku, sonnets are strong examples of poetry with a strict form, as opposed to free verse, which allows for unrestricted use of rhyme and stanza structure. The significance of the sonnet is closely linked to this form and how it has been used by authors. Rhyme schemes vary, but notable types have developed throughout literary history.

    The most prominent types of sonnets in English are the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet and the English or Shakespearean sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of one eight-line stanza (an octave) followed by one six-line stanza (a sestet), traditionally with a rhyme scheme such as abbaabba cdecde. The English sonnet consists of three four-line stanzas (quatrains) followed by a single two-line stanza (a couplet), following a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. The Spenserian sonnet is another prominent type of English sonnet, which has a traditional rhyme scheme of abab bcbc cdcd ee.

    Historic Significance

    According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, sonnets first became prominent during the 14th century when the form used by Petrarch became significant in Italy. The form then spread during the Renaissance to England, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and France, and in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare mastered the sonnet in the English language. During the Romantic period in Germany, the work of August Wilhelm von Schlegel gave sonnets significance in the German literary tradition. After Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, the sonnet form continued to be used in poetry, but it was not until the work of writers during the English Romantic period like William Wordsworth that they became popular again. It remained a significant poetic form in the 20th century through the work of American poets such as Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Gwendolyn Brooks.

    Content

    Dating back to Petrarch, traditional sonnets contain strong themes of love. Petrarch discussed unattainable love and the pain that it can bring, and English poets such as Shakespeare followed this example during his time. While sonnets often discuss the difficulties of love, other themes are also appropriate. According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, Petrarch’s sonnets also explored the notion that poems, and art works in general, will outlive their creators.

    Contemporary Significance

    Sonnets remain significant because they offer examples of how strict, formal poetry can also offer some flexibility to authors. For example, switching the rhythm of a sonnet’s typical unstressed/stressed pattern to a stressed/unstressed pattern in one line draws attention to the line and does not violate the more important formal requirements such as stanza length. Contemporary poets have used the traditional rules of line, rhythm and rhyme and the opportunity to bend these rules as a way to add new meaning and unique expression to their poetry.
    **************************


    Sidney and Shakespeare:

    Contrasting Approaches to the Art of the Sonnet


    By Jimmy Maher

    The sonnet is among the most restrictive of poetic forms. Its list of requirements are long and daunting, as anyone who has tried to write one can well attest. Paradoxically, though, great flexibility and creativity is possible within the form. Many poets would likely argue that, by placing such restrictions on them at virtually every turn, and by forcing them to distill their words down to such a brief length, the sonnet actually aids their creativity, forcing them to write only those words that are absolutely essential to the experience being conveyed. Like an even more restrictive form of poetry, the haiku, a well-written sonnet is a little jewel reflecting an instant’s feeling distilled down to its absolute essence. As D.G. Rossetti wrote:

    The Sonnet is a moment’s monument,
    Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
    To one dead deathless hour. ("The Sonnet", 1-3)

    I will examine the work of two famous practitioners of the art of the sonnet, Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare, and in the process try to convey something of the great potential for innovation within the form when in the hands of a master. Sidney made important changes to the technical form of the sonnet, while Shakespeare vastly expanded the scope of what a poet could write sonnets about and in the process produced work of human relevance unmatched by Sidney or his contemporaries, who remained wedded to Petrarch’s conception of courtly love.

    Proof that poets of the English Renaissance considered the sonnet an aid rather than restriction to creativity is provided when we consider the obvious fact that no one forced them to write in this form. These poets were not even strict traditionalists, for they proved willing to alter the form to suit their purposes. Sidney found the traditional Italian form too restrictive and rather unsuited for the different rhythms of the English language, and so he chose to write his important Astrophil and Stella sequence using a modified form of his own devising which freed him from the strict rhyming requirements of the traditional Italian approach. Sidney’s rhymes vary quite widely from sonnet to sonnet, depending on the requirements of the poem. Structurally, he constructs his sonnets as two quatrains followed by a pair of triplets, each generally expressing one complete and separate thought.

    If Sidney was willing to alter the traditional structure of the sonnet to suit his purposes, he proved less interested in changing its subject matter. Like virtually everyone who used the form before him, Sidney writes exclusively about courtly love in the tradition of Petrarch. His Astrophil and Stella tells the story in archly romantic terms of the doomed love of the former for the latter. As everyone in Sidney’s own time knew, the narrative is based on real events. Sidney did in fact fall in love with a beautiful, cultured young lady nine years his junior by the name of Penelope Devereux, and claimed Astrophil and Stella to be a chronicle of those events. Whatever their origins, though, it is hard to see these poems as realistic accounts of being in love. They are too romanticized, too idealized. One cannot help but feel at times that these verses are as much about the poet’s pride in his craft and his desire for acceptance in polite literary society as they are about the sweat and passion of a real love affair. The poet himself all but admits to an ulterior motive. In the very first sonnet of the sequence, he tells us that he seeks "studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain" (Damrosch 1043). In the fifteenth sonnet, he halts proceedings long enough to engage in a bit of boasting at the expense of those that believe they can match his eloquence:

    You that do Dictionary's method bring
    Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows
    You that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes
    With new-born sighs and denizened wit do sing,
    You take wrong ways, those far-fetched helps be such
    As do betray a want of inward touch (Jokinen).

    He concludes by smugly telling these pour second-class poets that they should first "Stella behold, and then begin to endite" (Jokinen), yet I sense that his access to the fair Stella has little to do with the condescension just displayed.

    Much of Sidney’s verse is beautiful. In that sense, he is justified in his egotism. Yet it is beautiful in such a mannered, ornamental way that it threatens at times to fly away on its own silvery wings of eloquence. Stella is an angelic creature, described in the 81st sonnet as "Breathing all bliss and sweet'ning to the heart; / Teaching dumb lips a nobler exercise!" (Joniken), and Astrophil is defined only by his hopeless love for her. There is little of flesh and blood reality to be found here.

    The mannered nature of Sidney’s work stands in contrast to that of a slightly later Renaissance poet, William Shakespeare. Unlike Sidney, Shakespeare did not particularly innovate when it comes to the technical form of the sonnet. By the time he began to write, his chosen form, consisting of three quatrains followed by a couplet, all using a fixed rhyme scheme, was already quite well established. In one of the great ironies of literary history, this form became known after Shakespeare’s time as the Shakespearean sonnet, even though Shakespeare had little or nothing to do with its development. Still, if Shakespeare did little to advance the sonnet’s technical form, he had a huge impact on its tone.

    It is not as if Shakespeare revolutionized the subject matter of the sonnet. Like Sidney, he writes mostly about love, whether it is between man and man or man and woman. His diction is often equally elevated, and like Sidney he often chooses to compare his beloved to the wonders of nature: "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate" (Harbage 1456). It is even true that at times he seems more concerned with making sure his verse preserves his genius for posterity than with the beloved to whom he is allegedly writing, as in Sonnet 19: "Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong / My love shall in my verse ever live young" (Harbage 1456). Yet at other times he displays a realistic maturity far beyond anything Sidney is capable of, and the sentiments he expresses are made all the more touching by the aura of real life, difficult, disappointing, and painful, that underlies them. Consider Sonnet 29. Here, Shakespeare’s narrator spends the first two quatrains bemoaning his state. He is a poor man of no great talent, looking upon the rich and powerful of the world with envy while living a discontented and dreary existence. Then there is a change in tone, though, as he remembers his love, and suddenly "thy sweet love remem’red such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings" (Harbage 1458). This poem displays an emotional maturity that eludes Sidney. While Sidney describes one whose "beauty draws thy heart to love" (Damrosch 1045), Shakespeare describes the strength that a man draws from a love that one suspects has been with him for years. Sidney describes, albeit beautifully and with consummate skill, what we might today term puppy love; Shakespeare describes the mellow luster of a strong and lasting relationship.

    Even more striking in their earthy realism are the so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets. These are written to a lover who possesses none of the ethereal virtues of Sidney’s Stella. She is neither good, beautiful, nor even trustworthy. In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare writes:

    My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
    Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
    If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
    If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head (Harbage 1475).

    Shakespeare almost seems to be deliberately subversive in this poem and others like it, mocking the fairy-tale world of Sidney and his contemporaries. Yes there is more to these works than just the desire to shock. As we read them, Shakespeare gradually draws for us a picture of a mutual dependency between his narrator and Dark Lady that is not ideal or romantic, but nevertheless rings very true to life. The narrator is filled with both love and loathing for his lady, with both attraction and repulsion. The complex feelings thus aroused have a mature relevance to life, both then and now, that Sidney (and many of Shakespeare’s more "traditional" sonnets, for that matter) never approaches. Consider Sonnet 138, in which Shakespeare informs us that "When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her, though I know she lies" (Harbage 1477). He goes on to describe a relationship built on self-absorption and self-deception on the parts of both parties. His Dark Lady knows that the narrator is not the handsome young man she flatters him to be, and the narrator knows that she is not faithful to him. Yet as long as nothing shatters the illusion, both can continue to deceive themselves and draw sustenance from the relationship. The psychological complexity and knowing, melancholic wisdom here is quite unlike anything to be found elsewhere at the time. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare more so than of his contemporaries is still so widely read and discussed today.

    The sonnet in Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s time was not the archaic straightjacket that it might first appear. Both poets freely adopted the form to suit their own styles and purposes while using its sense of structure as a spur to their creativity. Shakespeare then proceeded to explode the possibilities not only for the sonnet but for all poetry by choosing to abandon, at least at times, other poets’ world of romantic fantasy and to explore the possibilities offered by a realistic exploration of thoughts and feelings in the real world. His poetry continues to be a "moment’s monument" to "one dead, deathless hour." However, the sense of honest ambiguity within that "hour" increases exponentially, and because of that his poetry rings true in a way that Sidney’s does not. Sidney’s sonnets are ornate works of artifice, often beautiful but dead on the page and always of their time; Shakespeare’s are real, breathing evocations of life. His work is for all times.

    Works Cited

    Shakespeare, William. "Shakespeare’s Sonnets." The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Ed. Alfred Harbage. New York: Penguin, 1969. 1453-1479.

    Sidney, Sir Philip. "Astrophil and Stella." The Longman Anthology of British Literature (2nd ed.) Ed. David Damrosch. New York: Pearson Longman, 1043-1050.

    Sidney, Sir Philip. "Astrophil and Stella." The Works of Sir Philip Sidney. January 2, Luminarium. October 3, 2005. http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/sidbib.htm.
    Now that free verse is all the rage--oft because it is so much easier to write, sonnets are too oft ignored or even criticized as being inferior and unworthy by modern poets and many publishers.
    Yet, one should learn about a thing before condemning it and calling it inferior or unworthy to be read or admired.
    Myself, I admire many free verse poems and have been awed by many.
    But I do not go on a path to vilify, condemn and even castigate poets that only write in free verse!
    Which happens today, to poets that only or primarily write in sonnet form.......
    If one but stretches the limits in the sonnet form, any subject can be written about well.
    Thus creativity immensely expanded and a poet's freedom greatly enlarged.--Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Are Shakespeare and Dante Dead White European Males? Part 1
    Written by: David B. Gosselin

    The answer to the above question is of course no. Shakespeare and Dante are not dead because every true poet is immortal.

    However, much of our contemporary thinkers seem to be under the impression that they are dead, and that they are not as relevant and talented as first thought, but that rather their qualities were simply exaggerated because they happened to belong to a ‘historically dominant gender and ethnic group’. However any discerning eye will notice that such a ‘dead white European male’ argument avoids actually taking on the content of a Shakespeare’s or Dante’s ideas, which in fact have a continuity spanning over thousands of years, through the Golden Renaissance, through the Dark Ages, back to the times of ancient Greece and the Homeric epics. Moreover these ideas address some of the most fundamental questions concerning the human condition.

    However, before we continue, I can hear protests saying that the canon above mentioned, really only refers to dead white European males. But the truth is that this kind of humanist thinking has parallels in virtually every culture, from the Confucian traditions in China, to those of Tilak and Tagore in India, to those of Ibn Sina of Persia and the many bards of Moorish Spain. There are great thinkers from cultures across the world.

    Therefore, what the contemporary brand of thinking is really dismissing, is not a specific grouping or period, as the ideas embodied by these individuals span virtually as far back as recorded history, but rather they are witting or unwittingly dismissing those humanist ideas traced throughout history.

    Unfortunately much of what is referred to by the ‘contemporary’ and modernist schools of thinking,renders itself largely irrelevant by virtue of the fact that they wish to treat the recent decades of modernist thinking, which span mere seconds on the scale of human history, as some isolated phenomena detached from the entirety of that continuity out of which it unfolded.

    Were they to compare those few seconds with the universal arc of history, they would quickly discover the relevancy of a Shakespeare or Dante’s ideas.

    Take but one small example from Shakespeare, which in only 14 lines manages to capture and develop the most fundamental of paradoxes underlying our individual mortal existence:

    From fairest creatures we desire increase,
    That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
    But as the riper should by time decease,
    His tender heir might bear his memory:
    But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
    Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
    Making a famine where abundance lies,
    Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
    Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
    And only herald to the gaudy spring,
    Within thine own bud buriest thy content
    And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
    Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
    To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

    Shakespeare opens by saying we are all attracted to beauty and long for it, and desiring ‘increase’ i.e. to reproduce, yet even in the first two lines, it’s stated that this beauty fades and that even the fairest of creature’s is no match for time. Yet, in recognizing that this beauty does fade, only then is one ready to discover an even higher order of beauty: the power to generate new beauty.

    What does a world look like, where each individual is acting with the conscious idea that they are responsible for the re-creation and continued development of the human species; that they are not a mere individual but are defined and in turn define themselves by this eternal process for which they are now a mediating part. What does that look like vs. someone who has a baby because they made a mistake or someone who does not want children because it takes to much time and costs too much? What image of beauty are they after?

    The truth is they have not truly considered the paradox of their mortality, likely, they refuse to face it, and prefer to hang on to that ever fleeting image of earthly beauty, which so entices the senses, but ultimately 'eats itself by the grave and thee.'

    For more visit www.thechainedmuse.com

    Great article. Makes a damn lot of sense too.
    Now , we do follow our own paths and see the world( in regards to the opposite sex) and its beauty or lack thereof by way of our own self-interests, sexual desires and lusts.
    Truth is- Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
    In regards to fleshly beauty, it is a fleeting image , captured for a brief time by a soon to be deceased being.
    Yet what we would be or enjoy if not for that mutual treasure, that of love and love making?
    Poets and their words oft try to go past that state and create , words, images and thoughts that live longer--thousands of years
    and may serve to aid further man's development in this realm.---- Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Creative Writing Uncategorized
    I Would Totally Take my Panties off For The Right Poem, Part 4
    By Amanda Riggle on Sunday, September 22, 2013

    Is poetry the greatest form of seduction? I think many people would answer that question with a yes. I don’t know – maybe I’m seduction proof or just a big ol’ spoil sport, but I would have to stay that most seductive poetry is almost anything but seductive.

    Today I’m going to look at, No Platonic Love by William Cartwright.

    Tell me no more of minds embracing minds,
    And hearts exchang’d for hearts;
    That spirits spirits meet, as winds do winds,
    And mix their subt’lest parts;
    That two unbodied essences may kiss,
    And then like Angels, twist and feel one Bliss.

    I was that silly thing that once was wrought
    To practise this thin love;
    I climb’d from sex to soul, from soul to thought;
    But thinking there to move,
    Headlong I rolled from thought to soul, and then
    From soul I lighted at the sex again.

    As some strict down-looked men pretend to fast,
    Who yet in closets eat;
    So lovers who profess they spririts taste,
    Feed yet on grosser meat;
    I know they boast they souls to souls convey,
    Howe’r they meet, the body is the way.

    Come, I will undeceive thee, they that tread
    Those vain aerial ways
    Are like young heirs and alchemists misled
    To waste their wealth and days,
    For searching thus to be for ever rich,
    They only find a med’cine for the itch.

    Oh, William. I think we may have a winner here.

    While this poem is from the 1600’s and does use older diction, the idea contained within is very, shall we say, liberated.

    The speaker of this poem denounces the idea of platonic, disembodied love where souls mingle while bodies do not touch. The speaker flat out says that kind of love is B.S. and the only real love comes from physicality.

    Sure I think people can have emotional connections and that platonic love does exist between friends, but the idea that you can be in love with someone but never physically with them kind of sucks.

    What I really like about this poem is the way it addresses the audience – it doesn’t put down women or focus on their imagery like some Shakespeare sonnets do, it doesn’t have an imaginary conversation with the audience with strange, strange religious logical reasonings the way John Dunne’s The Flea does, and it doesn’t make sex sound creepy and wrong the way To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick does.

    This poem is logical, well presented, and if someone where have to written this to me and presented it in the hopes of getting me into bed, it probably would have worked. I don’t feel put down as a woman. I don’t feel religious pressures. I feel like, yeah, if I care about the speaker and want to express that, physical rather than spiritual would be the best avenue. The speaker really had me by the line “Come, I will undeceive thee,” because I now love the word undeceive and want to incorporate it into my personal vocabulary.

    I think this poem’s homerun worthy.
    – Amanda Riggle

    About Latest Posts

    Amanda Riggle
    Amanda Riggle
    Amanda is the Managing Editor at The Poetics Project and of The Socialist, the national magazine of The Socialist Party USA, as well as the Lead Editor of Pomona Valley Review's upcoming 11th issue. She graduated with a BA in English Education and a minor in Political Science. She is currently enrolled in an English MA program with an emphasis in Literature. During her free time, Amanda enjoys writing poetry, reading, traveling, crocheting, watching entire seasons of campy shows on Netflix, and, of course, writing blogs.
    Yes, being the red-bloodied American that I am, the title struck me--so I read the writings.
    That is the title about removing panties not the poem title. lol
    Although the poem is a great one my ind, still thinks of days of my youth , when the pretty gals were indeed the greatest treasure on earth!
    Now my beautiful wife is and my mind wandering is just an old man pondering youth and its treasures that were found over time...
    Yes, I know,I've written many poems on my youth, my adventures and wanderings....
    And yes , this article and source is from a SOCIALIST !!!!!!
    BUT KNOW THIS ,WHERE POETRY IS CONCERNED I HAVE NO BIAS IN REGARDS TO A PERSON'S POLITICAL LEANINGS, ETC..

    WHICH REMINDS ME OF THIS IN REGARDS TO THE PANTIES THING.
    BACK IN 1973, my first wife's exceptional beautiful and sexy friend, came to stay with us for a while.
    One morn , I was very late getting out the door to go to work, sitting in the living room putting my shoes on.
    My wife was in the kitchen and her friend knowing that I was always already gone to work at that time wandered right into the living room ,thinking I had left the house.
    She came from the shower completely naked and had a pair of blue panties in her hand!
    I saw everything and believe me it was glorious , for she could have posed for Playboy-she was that fine!
    Hell, I went into shock and could not break my eyes away until she look up and over at corner were I was sitting!
    My wife on hearing her scream ran into the room and helped break my trance.
    We sorted it all out and they laughed about it later-but know this-that sight never left me.......
    After a week of straying thoughts I demanded that my wife help her hurry up and find another place to live.
    My wife resisted rushing her to find an apartment until I told her about thoughts I was having--such is the power of a very beautiful naked women 's beauty. After being told why I demanded her early exit, my wife got very busy helping find her another place to live....
    Here it is 44 years later and I can still vividly see that tremendously beautiful and wondrously sexy image- so yes we men are dogs- genetically programmed towards visual images of beautiful women-especially if they are wearing no clothes.
    The article and its title about dropping panties, jogged that ancient memory, so you get this true story.
    And true, I have seen Playboy centerfolds that her friend could have put to shame....
    So perhaps this is just another example of how we men are dogs...
    To my credit,I resisted that overpowering urge to act upon my genetic impulses. To this day,I do not know how I did so--Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Prose from Poetry Magazine
    On Poetry
    The Cultural Revolution—and the necessity of culture.
    By Ai Weiwei

    My father, Ai Qing, was an early influence of mine. He was a true poet, viewing all subjects through an innocent and honest lens. For this, he suffered greatly. Exiled to the remote desert region of Xinjiang, he was forbidden to write. During the Cultural Revolution, he was made to clean the public toilets. At the time, those rural toilets were beyond one’s imagination, neglected by the entire village. This was as low as one’s condition could go. And yet, as a child 
I saw him making the greatest effort to keep each toilet as clean and as pleasant as possible, taking care of the waste with complete sincerity. To me, this is the best poetic act, and one that I will never forget.

    My father was punished for being a poet, and I grew up in its consequences. But even when things were at their most difficult, I saw his heart protected by an innocent understanding of the world. For poetry is against gravity. Reading Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, and Vladimir Mayakovsky at a young age, 
I discovered that all poetry has the same quality. It transports us to another place, away from the moment, away from our circumstances.

    In my own work, the process of creation always requires the understanding of aesthetics in relation to morality, to the pureness of a form, or to a personal language, one which extends us clearly to another. Many of my projects have poetic elements. In 2007, 
I brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany, for documenta 12. For many, it was their first time traveling outside of China. This was Fairytale. In 2008, we researched, under extremely harsh and restrictive conditions, the aftermath of the Great Sichuan Earthquake and unearthed the names and birth dates of 5,196 student victims, otherwise buried forever.

    I used to say that Twitter is the perfect form for poetry. It is the poetry of society in the modern age. In engaging social media and the forms of communication it makes possible, again and again we find ourselves deeply moved with emotion. By anger, joy, even feelings that are new and indescribable. This is poetic. It makes today a unique time.

    To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to discover that which is beyond the physical, to experience another life and another level of feeling. It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.
    Originally Published: July 1st, 2015

    Ai Weiwei is an artist. He resides and works in Beijing, China. He is an outspoken advocate of human rights and freedom of speech.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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