"Wet Evening in April" by Patrick Kavanagh

This poem by Patrick Kavanagh is a wonderful nutshelling of High Modernism.

Joyce’s Dublin, Pound’s dove sta memoria, Proust’s madelines, Eliot’s Four Quartets, Williams’ significant moments, Zukofsky’s treasured observations, Bunting’s Peggy. Copernican non-speciality places one in a timeline so long that one’s place in it loses significance. Troy happened, and is gone—but Homer gave us the griefs, rages, loves, and experiences of those whose lives converged at long-faded Ilium. The poet, intensely experiencing, wishes to preserve and share what is loved and what the poet values. This is one of the hearts of High Modernism, one of its foci—which seems to be missed by many people teaching undergraduates what Modernism was and what the Modernists were up to, creating thereby a Post-Modern reconstruction of Modernism.

As a birder (while I was writing the previous paragraph, a red-tailed hawk was calling from the big maple tree beside the house I am in), this poem speaks to me viscerally in more than one way.

The elderly couple in Yvoire when I was six, sitting on the old stone steps of their old stone house in the old stone village in the old stone walls with the old stone castle that overlooks Lac Léman. The beauty of the girl I loved at 17—the sun, the grass, the wind, the sky, the light, the music of her voice. And that hawk just now, calling from a tree with the white snow covering the awaking soil on a March morning with the Solstice a few days nigh. Dove sta memoria? Ecco, gli uccelli della memoria:

Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now

And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him

      The melancholy.

Such Is Our Time, Too

The last two lines of this poem by Herman Melville (1819 – 1891) are as apropos now, and here (where/when-ever now and here might be for you), as they were in his time, where he wrote it.

The Ravaged Villa

In shards the sylvan vases lie,

    Their links of dance undone,

And brambles wither by thy brim,

    Choked fountain of the sun!

The spider in the laurel spins,

    The weed exiles the flower:

And, flung to kiln, Apollo’s bust

    Makes lime for Mammon’s tower.

-----------
Lime is needed for concrete and cement.

The first two lines allude to Keats.

Apollo was the ancient Greek god of the Sun, and is associated with classical poetry and art. Nietsche divided poetry—and thus art—into two types, Apollonian and Dionysian. You can picture what was once a fountain with a statue of Apollo surrounded by laurels, Apollo’s symbol. Champions in Olympic games, and later Caesar, wore crowns of laurel leaves. Here in Connecticut, our State Flower is the mountain laurel, and at the season of my writing and posting this, they will soon be beautifully in bloom—a lovely part of Spring.

Why Poetry?

Here is one reason, given by Walter Savage Landor (1775 – 1864):

Past ruin’d Ilion Helen lives,

    Alcestis rises from the shades;

Verse calls them forth; ’tis verse that gives

    Immortal youth to mortal maids.

And in a line and a half, Landor gives us all of Keats.

(The last remark is tongue-in-cheek. By all means, read all of Keats!)

Pope, Possum, and Pound; Modernism and the Heroic Couplet

In the original draft of “The Wasteland” that T.S. Eliot sent to Ezra Pound for critique, T.S. Eliot had written a passage in heroic couplets (rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter).

Pound told Eliot to delete the heroic couplets because Alexander Pope and John Dryden had already done heroic couplets, mastered them, and Eliot could not equal Pope and Dryden at their game.

Does that sound like hubris? For a poet of Eliot’s gifts to be discouraged from writing in any form because Pope and Dryden, generations earlier, had done it might seem surprising at first--particularly in light of Pound's famous dictum, “make it new,” which by definition is an approach unabashed by tradition. Even now, with years having passed since I first read Pound’s comments, it seems troubling. But Eliot, himself one of the most perceptive writers of a gifted century, accepted Pound’s advice and deleted the passage in heroic couplets.

So what about Pope, Dryden, and Dr. Johnson? (I add Dr. Johnson because his life overlapped the others, he wrote in heroic couplets, and because Eliot admired him immensely—and because Dr. Johnson considered Pope and Dryden the greatest poets of the period [Milton, too, but that is another discussion, and Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes are all in blank verse]). And because I prefer Johnson to Dryden.)

I do not feel a connection with Dryden. “Alexander’s Feast” has always irritated me with its silly refrain, “Happy, happy, happy pair! / None but the brave, / None but the brave, / None but the brave deserves the fair.” Ugh.

I have tried to like Dryden. I find much of great value, such as “MacFlecknoe.” There is a reason that great minds such as Dr. Johnson have admired Dryden and why he is still studied, taught, and remains in print. But I do not connect with his work. I admit that the failing is mine, not Dryden’s. Part of the cause of my antipathy might be an unfamiliarity with the Anglian accent that informs Dryden’s verse. The rhymes fail more to a modern ear than do those of Pope, Johnson, Milton, or even earlier poets such as Shakespeare or Spenser.

Pope, on the other hand, is a genius of jaw-dropping facility. He is Mozartian in the seeming ease of the perfection of his lines. The parallel with Mozart is intriguing: Pope was one of the few child prodigies in literature. As a twelve-year-old, he was already composing verses of mature accomplishment. He was the master of the forms he chose, and his invention seems limitless. He never seems stale or stilted; his mots, like Mozart’s notes, are ever juste.

Pope never seems to flag. His lines never seem to strain to meet the demands of rhyme or meter. He doesn’t go in for poetic inversions or archaisms to make things work. It is as if the Muse flowed through him with a lilting lightness.

What brought me to these comments was a couplet of Pope’s that I encountered almost at random, on opening my copy of the Yale Press edition of the complete poems and focusing where my eyes fell. The perfection of the couplet, and the richness of thought it expresses, and the seeming ease of its flow arrested my attention and made me wish to share it.

Here is the couplet, from Pope’s “An Essay on Man: Epistle I”, lines 33 and 34:

Is the great chain, that draws all to agree,

And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee?

The meter is iambic pentameter. The rhyme is perfect. One could argue that the first foot on the first line is not an iamb but a trochee, but some variance is necessary or meter becomes mere rumpty-tum. Pope does not become rumpty-tum.

One might also be tempted to stress “great” rather than “chain”, but that would weaken the meaning. Pope plays with the word “draw”; “draw” is the pivotal conceit or play of wit within the couplet. What is drawn is the chain. Pope places the word carrying more meaning in the stressed syllable of the second foot; read it that way and the line—and the couplet—is drawn into focus.

The word “draw”, the only word used twice in the couplet, is used to mirror its own meaning. The first use (“draws”, active and in the present) means “to pull in or toward.” The second (“drawn”, in the past, having resulted from the original action) means “under tension”; the result of being pulled to. The shift in meaning echoes the movement toward tension. That tension is further riffed on: drawn ==> supports, supports ==> upheld. Whose force is the mover, the applier of the tension that keeps everything in its place? This was written by a poet whose life overlapped with that of Isaac Newton. The drawn chain is gravity; is inertia; is the “Great Chain of Being;” it is the tensile force whose tension makes the clockwork cosmos turn in all its ratios and harmony.

Though “drawn” is in the past tense, the next word, “supports” is in the present—once again, establishing a currency to the line: the temporal omnipresence of God.

The finesse and richness of Pope’s couplets are on display in this one couplet. In that crumb of verse his genius is manifest. This is what Pound meant—and why Eliot accepted the point.

Errour's Den

Sean Hannity does not understand this post from The Onion:

Hundreds of Miniature Sean Hannitys Burst From Roger Ailes’ Corpse

The paragraph-long post begins with this statement: “Clawing over each other and gasping for air as they emerged, hundreds of miniature Sean Hannitys reportedly burst from Roger Ailes’ corpse Thursday shortly after the former Fox News CEO’s death.” It goes on to state that the two-inch-tall Hannitys “were suddenly everywhere, shrieking about the war on Christmas, paid protesters, and coddled, crybaby liberals on college campuses....And, my Lord, they just smelled so foul.” The post closes with, “At press time, the miniature Sean Hannitys were ravenously devouring Ailes’ corpse.”

In one of his whinging responses in various media, Hannity Tweeted, “What is wrong with the left that they think these sorts of things are funny?”

He doesn't get it.

I remember, from more than 35 years ago, overhearing a comment from a student as she left a class taught by one of the most brilliant professors I ever had, a man whose lectures were improvisatory and masterful, insightful and encyclopedic. Nearly three and a half decades after his death, he is still a core pillar of my own intellectual life, a man who opened worlds to me. He didn't make things easy for the callow undergraduates and spoon-feed them pabulum that is easy to get down. They had to rise to his level, and I am not alone among his students who found that effort endlessly rewarding. He was giving us a model for how to think and how to read that could stand us in good stead for a lifetime. The student's comment was, “He's so stupid! I didn't understand a word he said.”

The reasons that Hannity doesn't get The Onion's post is threefold, and not a failing of “the left” any more than that student's lack of understanding so many years ago was the fault of the professor: 1. a lack of intelligence; 2. an ego too swollen to laugh at himself; and 3. a gross lack of education. (Hannity's being a college drop-out exposes both his intelligence and his gumption. Stupidity is not a virtue; particularly as ignorance can be ameliorated by--imagine this!--reading and learning.)

The Onion's piece was satirical. Hannity does not have the mind to grasp irony or to perceive the cognitive dissonances at the root of his own endlessly welling hypocrisies. (Strawmen and satire are not the same thing; he has no aversion to wallowing in fallacies, but, again, satire does not equal strawman argument.) Though shamefully uneducated, as I shall enlarge on below, he doesn't have the intellect to even grasp the point of the piece, as his comment shows. And then there's the problem of his ego--his blizzard hurlings of the epithet “snowflake”, for example, are pure projection. He's not constitutionally capable of the abstraction or objective introspection necessary to accept criticism or to see an opposing point of view--and then laugh along with the critics. His toddler's ego won't let a perceived slight go unwhined at, and satire is an area beyond him--it confuses, bewilders, and ultimately wounds his tender, precious narcissism. “Snowflake!” he sputters. “Snowflake!”

At the base of the image in The Onion's piece is a Christian archetype, best exemplified in Edmund Spenser's Elisabethan epic, The Faerie Queene. For all Hannity's posturing, he is woefully ignorant of Western culture and Christian intellectual tradition, to say nothing of basic classics of English literature.

Here I read the passage from The Faerie Queene on which The Onion based their satirical piece:

Here is the text of that passage, Stanzas 13 through 26 from Book I:

13

Yea but (quoth she) the perill of this place
I better wot then you, though now too late,
To wish you backe returne with foule disgrace,
Yet wisedome warnes, whilest foot is in the gate,
To stay the steppe, ere forced to retrate.
This is the wandring wood, this Errours den,
A monster vile, whom God and man does hate:
Therefore I read beware. Fly fly (quoth then

The fearefull Dwarfe:) this is no place for liuing men.

14

But full of fire and greedy hardiment,
The youthfull knight could not for ought be staide,
But forth vnto the darksome hole he went,
And looked in: his glistring armor made
A little glooming light, much like a shade,
By which he saw the vgly monster plaine,
Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide,
But th'other halfe did womans shape retaine,

Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.

15

And as she lay vpon the durtie ground,
Her huge long taile her den all ouerspred,
Yet was in knots and many boughtes vpwound,
Pointed with mortall sting. Of her there bred
A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed,
Sucking vpon her poisonous dugs, eachone
Of sundry shapes, yet all ill fauored:
Soone as that vncouth light vpon them shone,

Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone.

16

Their dam vpstart, out of her den effraide,
And rushed forth, hurling her hideous taile
About her cursed head, whose folds displaid
Were stretcht now forth at length without entraile.
She lookt about, and seeing one in mayle
Armed to point, sought backe to turne againe;
For light she hated as the deadly bale,
Ay wont in desert darknesse to remaine,

Where plaine none might her see, nor she see any plaine.

17

Which when the valiant Elfe perceiu'ed, he lept
As Lyon fierce vpon the flying pray,
And with his trenchand blade her boldly kept
From turning backe, and forced her to stay:
Therewith enrag'd she loudly gan to bray,
And turning fierce, her speckled taile aduaunst,
Threatning her angry sting, him to dismay:
Who naught aghast, his mightie hand enhaunst:

The stroke down from her head vnto her shoulder glaunst.

18

Much daunted with that dint, her sence was dazd,
Yet kindling rage, her selfe she gathered round,
and all attonce her beastly body raizd
With doubled forces high aboue the ground:
Tho wrapping vp her wrethed sterne arownd,
Lept fierce vpon his shield, and her huge traine
All suddenly about his body wound,
That hand or foot to stirre he stroue in vaine:

God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine.

19

His Lady sad to see his sore constraint,
Cride out, Now now Sir knight, shew what ye bee,
Add faith vnto your force, and be not faint:
Strangle her, else she sure will strangle thee.
That when he heard, in great perplexitie,
His gall did grate for griefe and high disdaine,
And knitting all his force got one hand free,
Wherewith he grypt her gorge with so great paine,

That soone to loose her wicked bands did her constraine.

20

Therewith she spewd out of her filthy maw
A flood of poyson horrible and blacke,
Full of great lumpes of flesh and gobbets raw,
Which stunck so vildly, that it forst him slacke
His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe:
Her vomit full of bookes and papers was,
With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke,
And creeping sought way in the weedy gras:

Her filthy parbreake all the place defiled has.

21

As when old father Nilus gins to swell
With timely pride aboue the Aegyptian vale,
His fattie waues do fertile slime outwell,
And ouerflow each plaine and lowly dale:
But when his later spring gins to auale,
Huge heapes of mudd he leaues, wherein there breed
Ten thousand kindes of creatures, partly male
And partly female of his fruitfull seed;

Such vgly monstrous shapes elswhere may no man reed.

22

The same so sore annoyed has the knight,
That welnigh choked with the deadly stinke,
His forces faile, ne can no longer fight.
Whose corage when the feend perceiu'd to shrinke,
She poured forth out of her hellish sinke
Her fruitfull cursed spawne of serpents small,
Deformed monsters, fowle, and blacke as inke,
Which swarming all about his legs did crall,

And him encombred sore, but could not hurt at all.

23

As gentle Shepheard in sweete euen-tide,
When ruddy Phoebus gins to welke in west,
High on an hill, his flocke to vewen wide,
Markes which do byte their hasty supper best;
A cloud of combrous gnattes do him molest,
All striuing to infixe their feeble stings,
That from their noyance he no where can rest,
But with his clownish hands their tender wings

He brusheth oft, and oft doth mar their murmurings.

24

Thus ill bestedd, and fearfull more of shame,
Then of the certaine perill he stood in,
Halfe furious vnto his foes he came,
Resolv'd in minde all suddenly to win,
Or soone to lose, before he once would lin;
And strooke at her with more than manly force,
That from her body full of filthie sin
He raft her hatefull head without remorse;

A streame of cole black bloud forth gushed from her corse.

25

Her scattred brood, soone as their Parent deare
They saw so rudely falling to the ground,
Groning full deadly, all with troublous feare,
Gathred themselues about her body round,
Weening their wonted entrance to haue found
At her wide mouth: but being there withstood
They flocked all about her bleeding wound,
And sucked vp their dying mothers blood,

Making her death their life, and eke her hurt their good.

26

That detestable sight him much amazde,
To see th'vnkindly Impes of heauen accurst,
Deuoure their dam; on whom while so he gazd,
Hauing all satisfide their bloudy thurst,
Their bellies swolne he saw with fullness burst,
And bowels gushing forth: well worthy end
Of such as drunke her life, the which them nurst;
Now needeth him no lenger labour spend,

His foes haue slaine themselues, with whom he should contend.

Spenser was English, but The Faerie Queene was written while Spenser lived in Ireland. Spenser had taken a position in service of the English Lord Deputy of Ireland; as such, Spenser was an active participant in the subjugation of Ireland and seizure of Irish land and resources. Eventually, he owned estates in Ireland, enriched as a fairly high-ranking personage in the colonial invasion. In prose work, Spenser wrote in favor of brutal measures to crush and control the Irish, including the elimination of the Irish language and the destruction of crops and livestock to impose devastating famine on the populace. Suffice it to say, Spenser the man is not held in cherished reverence in Ireland today.

The Faerie Queene is not an obscure reference, nor is the serpent or dragon form representing sin that gives birth to smaller monsters that retreat into it through its maw when threatened...and that turn on and consume her when she is defeated. [A variant is in the Beast Glatisant, or Questing Beast, from the Arthurian tales. In some versions, the Beast Glatisant is torn apart from the inside by her offspring; in one variant, the Beast Glatisant is pure white but smaller than a...fox.] Spenser turns the story of Saint George and the dragon into an allegory representing the theological upheavals of his time, and, like Dante before him, takes a position on theological questions thereby. The Faerie Queene is one of the major works of English Literature, and a Christian allegory as well as a rousing tale. It is considered the major work of literature between Chaucer and Shakespeare and the greatest epic poem between Chaucer and Milton. Spenser's influence on later poets was vast. The Faerie Queene is a major part of the canon.

Error here represents abstract sin (really, those sins into which mistaken thought or theology can lead one, those mistaken views being fundamentally sinful), and the imps she regurgitates that drink her blood when Redcrosse Knight, the symbol of righteousness, smites off her head represent the specific sins (heresies, misreadings, false beliefs, etc.) that descend from Errour.

Given the richness of the irony of The Onion's allusive reference, it is pretty deep trolling. Roger Ailes as Errour and Hannity as Errour's spawn, combined with the fact that Hannity still lives off of Ailes' work--the dissemination of and indoctrination in falsehoods and lies and malicious misrepresentation to bilk the gullible--and hopes to take his place as the Queene of Error's Den, works. What is Hannity-as-television-presence but the spawn of Ailes? Add to that Hannity's Fox [Faux] Irishness and his servile fawning to the Right Royals, particularly the Orange Usurper, and The Onion had him to a "t".

 

Reference:

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. London: Penguin Books, 1978. Print.

* * * * *

A further mythic encumbrance that is obscure to Western culture and that Hannity or the other Fox spawn can't be criticized for not knowing despite being deliciously apropos is the Chinese mythic Fox Spirit. The first time I read of that mythic creature, the name was translated as "fox sprite", and I prefer that translation. The fox sprite is a magical creature who is malignant and has great powers. It will take the form of a beautiful woman to seduce men and lead them to error. The fox sprite's intention is the undermining of society and the kingdom by lying to and misleading the man they seduce. Above all, the fox sprite is a danger when the man they seduce is the Emperor; she leads him to blindness and suspicion and cruel tyranny and can cause the Emperor to lose the Mandate of Heaven--and thereby bring down an entire dynasty. A particularly powerful use of the myth of the Fox Sprite is in the great Japanese movie, Ran, by Akira Kurosawa. The honorable General Kurogone alludes to the manipulative Lady Kaede as being such a creature. She wishes him to bring her the head of her chief rival, the Lady Sue [pronounced "Soo-eh", not as the English "Sue"]; Lady Kaede unwraps the object Kurogone brings to her, and it is a stone fox's head instead of Sue's. Finally, in a later scene, as the kingdom dissolves into civil war, he calls her a she-fox and beheads her.

Dactyl, Dactyl, Dactyl! [in the cadence of "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!"]

James Joyce pronounced the title of his great work as YOO-lysses, not as the U.S.ian yooLYSSes. Samuel Beckett pronounced his own most famous work as GOD-oh, not as the Frenchian god-OH.

This made Ulysses, like Mulligan, Dedalus, and Ursula, a dactyl. And Godot a trochee.

Milton's "Paradise Lost" is a dactyl followed by a single-syllable stressed foot. So is Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". I think that that is not an accident.*


 - - - - -

Metamorphosis unEncrypted:

If you take the letters K-A-F-K-A and keep the vowels as they are, but raise K eight letters counting up from the next letter in alphabetical order, you will get the letters S-A-_-S-A; if you count up the same interval from F, the uncyphered sequence is S-A-M-S-A.

Kafka concealed himself under the Samsa carapace as well, slipping in another layer--what Ezra Pound called a "ply"--to the richness of the work. It is like Raphael placing his self-portrait among the figures in a crowd scene aside from the attention-focus of the painting.



* And so Waiting for Godot is a dactyl followed by a trochee.

A Stanza from Tennyson

This is an excerpt from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's The Idylls of the King.

A couple of notes on pronunciation: I had heard from an early age that in the case of Tennyson's long masterwork on Arthurian themes, the word "Idylls" was to be pronounced as if it rhymed with the family that the Reverend Dodson knew in Oxford, the Liddells. And so I carefully became habited to call it. But then I read somewhere (I don't recall where, I won't search for it today) that Hallam said his father pronounced it in the same way as what a car does at a stop light in the United States--i.e., as "idles".

Gawain can be pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, as is most common: "GaWAIN" with the first syllable sounding schwa, OR with the stress on the first syllable, as I did here. Given the place on the line--and that Tennyson was too skilled to not have been able to compose the line elsehow to fit the meter--I expect that, here at least, Gawain was stressed on the first syllable.

Tennyson has fallen from favor. In part rightly so, in part not. As Ezra Pound said, referring to early in his re-working of the poetic diction of English in the 20th Century, "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave". But as a result, we fail now to hear what readers a century and a half ago heard. There is much beauty in much of Tennyson's work. But there is much tedious rumpty-tum, too. Tennyson was the towering figure of the Victorian pentameter that Pound needed to break in Modern poetry. Of all poets, Tennyson was probably, apart from the flocks of bad late Victorian and Edwardian poets that thought they had the aesthetic well in hand, the poet most antithetical to what Pound saw as needing to be done to create a new, Modern, revitalized poetry.

In Tennyson's further defense, The Idylls of the King was a long narrative work, and he made it cohere. It was no mean feat, and it is deserving of our 21st-Century attention. [And I had another reason to turn my attention this way recently; an interesting currency to Tennyson in American Modernism that I will discuss elsewhere.] :-)

A carcanet is a necklace or jeweled collar. "Fool" means the court jester.