"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.

Protean Prosody

In the third chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the novel's main characters, young Stephen Dedalus, walks on the beach and wallows in angst and intellection. Stephen is preoccupied with, among other things, prosody. He is composing a poem along the way. As he walks and introspects, he tries on different metrical hats, much of it centered around tetrameter.

In drafts, Joyce had named chapters, but in galleys he removed the chapter names. In Joyce studies, the chapters of Ulysses are traditionally referred to by those original names. Hence, the third chapter, which is neither named nor numbered, is known as “Proteus”. Proteus is a sea-god Odysseus encounters on a beach in Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus seeks information from Proteus, but to get that information from the uncooperative divinity, Odysseus will have to seize and hold him until Proteus relents and tells Odysseus what Odysseus wishes to know. But things are never easy on an odyssey, and Proteus has the power to change form, instantly metamorphosing into different animals, each one difficult to hold on to or terrifying in aspect. The parallel in James Joyce's novel is that Steven walks along the beach while his mind explores many issues with his intimidatingly educated and incisive mind, including the terrifying: mortality, the nature of reality, salvation, and the eternal question of “will anyone see me if, here and now, I....”

I will quote the first five paragraphs of Proteus herebelow. The text is as printed in the 1992 Modern Library Edition of Ulysses by James Joyce (Modern 37).

INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusy boot. Snotgreet, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

          Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

                    Won't you come to Sandymount,

                    Madeline the mare?

          Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

          Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

          See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

So now I come to the point: the 1986 Gabler edition of Ulysses (Gabler 31) introduces an error into the above passage—an error based on a misreading that is itself based on an ignorance of prosody. That error has propagated through other editions and electronic versions of the text. If one has an even rudimentary understanding of English-language prosody—an understanding far below that of Stephen Dedalus, let alone that of Stephen's Author—it doesn't make sense.

I refer to the revision in the Gabler edition (devision is more appropriate) of the words “A catalectic” to the word “Acatalectic”.

“Catalexis” is a technique in poetry in which a foot at the end or the beginning of a line has a syllable lopped off. It can be used to emphasize a particular word, impose a startling brevity, to unsettle the reader's rhythmic expectations with a syncopation, or to break up a pattern to keep a poem's form from becoming monotonous or predictable.

For instance, if Tennyson had decided to “change up” the incessant ta-tum of iambic tetrameter in “The Lady of Shallot” and changed “On either side the river lie” to “Either side the river lie” or “And through the field the road runs by” to “Through the field the road runs by”, by dropping a syllable from the opening foot, that would be catalexis. William Blake's “The Tyger” is a famous example of end-line catalexis: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright”. The meter Blake employed was catalectic trochaic tetrameter. If that line were acatalectic, it would read thus: “Tyger, tyger, burning brightly.”

To reiterate: An acatalectic line has no truncated metrical feet. An acatalectic line of iambic (or trochaic) tetrameter has eight syllables, not seven. An acatalectic line of iambic (or trochaic) trimeter has six syllables, not five.

So, for Gabler's change to be appropriate, the lines of verse preceding “acatalectic”--the verses in Stephen's stream of consciousness, so we know what he's thinking about--would have to be acatalectic, not catalectic.

A traditional verse form often used in Irish songs and poetry is the ballad stanza. Ballads are composed of quatrains alternating iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter/iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter.

Here are the two lines of Stephen's verse again:

                    Won't you come to Sandymount,

                    Madeline the mare?

These are two catalectic lines from a ballad stanza—seven syllables/five syllables. Here is what the lines look like with an insertion to make them acatalectic:

                    Oh, won't you come to Sandymount,

                    Oh, Madeline the mare?

Admittedly, the “oh” in both cases is ad hoc, but it clearly delineates (“delines”) what the rhythm would be if the lines were acatalectic. The change of “A catalectic” to “Acatalectic” in the Gabler edition is erroneous.

At the root of this error, and its propagation thereafter, is ignorance of basic English-language prosody on the part of a surprising number of scholars, some of whom are quite eminent.

To re-reiterate, the two lines Stephen recites to himself are both catalectic, a couplet, in ballad form. They are, as he says, iambs marching.

And Stephen himself, following the row of seawrack along Sandymount strand, “delines the mare”--mare being Latin for the sea but conflated with the English word for an adult female horse so that Stephen can refer to meter as “agallop”.

All through this passage, Stephen is engaging in metric play. Let's take a look at the intermediary passage between “Madeline the mare” and “a catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching”:

                    Rhythm begins, you see. I hear.

By calling the passage out isolated and indented similarly to Stephen's lines of verse, it becomes apparent that it is itself tetrametric. But it is not purely iambic: the word “rhythm” is a trochee. “Begins”, “you see”, and “I hear” are all iambs. (“'I am's” is a pun that runs beneath “Proteus” as a tacit organum. Many people are put off by Stephen's introspection throughout Proteus, but a Joycean joke is behind Stephen's angst. The Arranger has Stephen wrestling with prosodic composition; Stephen has no choice as to what he can think about: It is “I am”s all the way down.)

Joycean play is amok through this delightful passage. “Rhythm begins” brings us (by a commodious recirculation) back to Los, the Blakean Demiurge. The music of the spheres is a testament to the rhythm as well as the harmony initiated with Creation. (What Galileo saw, God “hears”.) The conversational “you see” separated by the period from “I hear” turns the period into the crux of a chiasmus. “I hear” is a homonym for “I here”, which is an iamb...so the first-person present of the verb to be inheres: iamb is present, making it “I am here” by yet another commodious circulation—while riffing on Stephen's earlier counterpoint of the modalities of sight and sound: “Stephen closed his eyes to hear”.

An intriguing exercise in tetrameter is in the sound of Stephen's unseen (sea <=> see) footsteps on the seawrack of Sandymount Strand:

                    Crush, crack, crick, crick.

Seewrack heard. But not in iambs--the world speaks to Stephen in monosyllabic feet. It is tetrametric, but in Stephen's slow blind pace. One syllable, one foot, one step. It is an interesting exercise in prosodic composition: To write a metric line in single-syllable, stressed feet. Stephen is trying out his Dedalean wings; a different rhythm to the same beat. And what could be more catalectic than an entire line of missing syllables? After all, the happy patter of little iambs proceed heel-toe; Stephen's cracking crush on drying wrack is flat: sole, sole, sole, sole.

- - - - -

Addendum I

This is the poem that Stephen composes in Proteus:

                    On swift sail flaming

                    From storm and south

                    He comes, pale vampire,

                    Mouth to my mouth.

We don't see what Stephen wrote on the strand until Chapter 7, “Aeolus”, when Stephen recalls what he had written on a scrap of paper torn from Mr. Deasy's letter to the editor on hoof and mouth disease (Everyman 132). When Stephen hands in Mr. Deasey's letter at the newspaper, one of the newspapermen, Lenehan notices that the bottom of the last page was torn off, and jests “Who tore it? Was he short taken.” “Short taken.” The Arranger has given Lenehan a winking reference to Stephen's catalexis. [Gabler here makes a change that holds water, changing the full stop after “short taken” to a question mark (Gabler 109), thereby reinstating the punctuation of the first edition of 1922 (Dover 127).]

Note the last line of Stephen's quatrain. The source for the meter employed in Stephen's poem, and in particular for the last line, is “My Grief on the Sea”, a poem by Douglas Hyde (Gifford 62):

                    My grief on the sea,
                    How the waves of it roll!
                    For they heave between me
                    And the love of my soul!

                    Abandon'd, forsaken,
                    To grief and to care,
                    Will the sea ever waken
                    Relief from despair?

                    My grief and my trouble!
                    Would he and I were,
                    In the province of Leinster,
                    Or County of Clare!

                    Were I and my darling--
                    O heart-bitter wound!--
                    On board of the ship
                    For America bound.

                    On a green bed of rushes
                    All last night I lay,
                    And I flung it abroad
                    With the heat of the day.

                    And my Love came behind me,
                    He came from the South;
                    His breast to my bosom,
                    His mouth to my mouth. (Hyde)

Stephen appropriates Hyde's last line for his own last line, but drops the first syllable, producing a catalectic variant on Hyde's original. Stephen's thinking is focused throughout on catalectic meter. To change “a catalectic” to “acatalectic” is simply wrong.

- - - - -

Addendum II

In the Oxford World Classics edition of Ulysses, an edited and endnoted edition of the original 1922 text, a note on the question of whether the text should read “a catalectic” or “acatalectic” quotes a letter from James Joyce to Harriet Weaver in which Joyce writes “divide better A catalectic” (Oxford 785). The editor concludes the note, “That ought to settle the matter.” Indeed.

- - - - -

Works Cited

Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

Hyde, Douglas. “My Grief on the Sea”. Poemhunter.com. Poemhunter.com, 1 January 2004. Web. 20 March 2015. <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-grief-on-the-sea/>.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Facsim. 1922 ed. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2009. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: The Modern Library, 1992. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Gabler, Hans Walter, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Johnson, Jeri. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

'I Am of Ireland' by William Butler Years

What Yeats could do with trimeter is amazing:

‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘Come out of charity,
Come dance with me in Ireland.’

One man, one man alone
In that outlandish gear,
One solitary man
Of all that rambled there
Had turned his stately head.
‘That is a long way off,
And time runs on,’ he said,
‘And the night grows rough.’

‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.’

‘The fiddlers are all thumbs,
Or the fiddle-string accursed,
The drums and the kettledrums
And the trumpets all are burst,
And the trombone,’ cried he,
‘The trumpet and trombone,’
And cocked a malicious eye,
‘But time runs on, runs on.’

‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.’

Chapter XXII from Derek Walcott's Caribbean Epic, Omeros

Dove sta memoria?

I was reminded of the following section of his epic poem Omeros after being introduced to this video of a connection opening temporarily between an elderly woman incapacitated by Alzheimer's Disease and a caregiver trying to reach her and evoke the inner person, howbeit briefly.

The poet Derek Walcott encountered a similar situation, and presents it in chapter XXXII of his masterpiece:

Omeros

by Derek Walcott

Chapter XXXII

I

She floated so lightly! One hand, frail as a swift,

gripping the verandah. The cotton halo fanned

from her shrunken crown, and I felt that I could lift

that fledgling, my mother, in the cup of my hand

and settle her somewhere else: away from the aged

women rubbing rosaries in the Marian Home,

but I was resigned like them. I no longer raged

at the humiliations of time. Her turn had come

to be bent by its weight, its indifferent process

that drummed in wrist and shank. Time was that fearful friend

they talked to, who sat beside them in empty chairs,

as deaf as they were; who sometimes simply listened.

They were all withdrawn. They'd entered a dimension

where every single thought was weightless, every form clouded

by its ephemeral halo. Time's intention

rather than death was what baffled them; in the deed

of dying there was terror, but what did time mean,

after some friend stopped talking and around her bed

they opened the panels of an unfolding screen?

The frail hair grew lovelier on my mother's head,

but when my arm rested on her hollow shoulder

it staggered slightly from the solicitous weight.

I was both father and son. I was as old as her

exhausted prayer, as her wisps of memory floated

with a vague patience, telling her body: “Wait,”

when all that brightness had withered like memory's flower,

like the allamanda's bells and the pale lilac

bougainvillea vines that had covered our gabled house.

They, like her natural memory, would not come back.

Her eyes were dim as dusk. There were no more hours.

From her cupped sleep, she wavered with recognition.

I would bring my face closer to hers and catch the

scent of her age. “Who am I? Mama, I'm your son.”

“My son.” She nodded. “You have two, and a daughter.

And a lot of grandchildren,” I shouted. “A lot to

remember.” “A lot.” She nodded, as she fought her

memory. “Sometimes I ask myself who I am.”

We looked at the hills together, at roofs that I knew

in childhood. “Their names are Derek, Roddy, and Pam.”

“I have to go back to the States again.”

“Well, we can't be together all the time,” she said, “I know.”

“There is too much absence,” I said. Then a blessed

lucidity broke through a cloud. She smiled. “I know

who you are. You are my son.” “Warwick's son,” she said.“Nature's gentleman.” His vine-leaves haloed her now.

I Have a New Blog

It won't be daily, but I do intend to post here again, and make a more regular blog of the whole thing. But for now, I wanted to call attention to my new blog, intended to be about English and literature. Unlike my earlier focus, this is intended for my U.S. college students, rather than my ESL friends. It is called "What's All This Then?" I have a new post there today about resources to listen to poetry and literature.

Time to Return to Blogging

I shall be posting to this blog again, and--I hope--on a more regular basis.

Stay tuned!

"The Tree" by Ezra Pound (1882 - 1973)

The Tree

                    I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
                    Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
                    Of Daphne and the laurel bough
                    And that god-feasting couple old
                    That grew elm-oak amid the wold.
                    'Twas not until the gods had been
                    Kindly entreated, and been brought within
                    Unto the hearth of their heart's home
                    That they might do this wonder thing;
                    Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
                    And many a new thing understood
                    That was rank folly to my head before.


This is an early poem by the U.S. poet, Ezra Pound.

Pound was relying on two tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses above all: The myth of Daphne and Apollo and the lovely story of Baucis and Philemon.

The story of Daphne and Apollo is a cautionary tale warning against the danger of pride. Apollo, the god of the Sun, music, poetry, medicine, and more, was also a warrior and divinely skilled at archery. In Ovid's version of the myth, Apollo is inflated with his own power and skill and scoffs at young Eros (Cupid), the son of Aphrodite (Venus), the goddess of love. Eros uses his arrows to strike men and women in the heart, causing them to fall in love. Caveat! Eros has two types of arrow: those with a gold tip inspire love, and those with a lead tip inspire loathing. Eros has the form of a young boy, and Apollo mocks him, telling him not to play with a man's weapon. To teach Apollo a lesson, Eros shoots him with one of his arrows--a gold-tipped one--and Daphne with another--a lead-tipped arrow. Apollo is consumed by love and pursues Daphne, but in abhorrence she flees. He gains! She flees on desperately, but sees Apollo is gaining on her, and pleads to the gods to save her. Suddenly, she can not run; she is rooted to the spot (this is where the colloquial phrase comes from); her skin is turning to bark; Daphne is metamorphosing into a laurel tree. Apollo can do nothing to stop the transformation, and soon she is entirely a tree. But Apollo still loves her, and uses his healing power to keep her leaves youthful and green year-round. And ever after, the laurel tree is beloved of Apollo and he takes it as his symbol. So much so, that the winners in the Olympic Games in ancient times were rewarded with crowns woven of laurel leaves.

The story of Baucis and Philemon is a lovely tale. Zeus (Jupiter) and Hermes (Mercury) come to Earth and take the form of wandering travelers. They are rejected by all the people in a village they visit except for a poor old couple, Baucis and her husband Philemon (whose name means "loving" or "one who loves"). Although the old couple are very poor, they give all they have to their guests. Zeus and Hermes are touched by the generosity and kindness of the old couple, but determine to destroy the other people of the village with a flood. Which they do. The gods thus having revealed themselves, Baucis and Philemon dedicate themselves to their service as keepers of a temple. Zeus offers them reward for their goodness, but all they ask for is the gift that they might die together, so that neither should live on alone, which Zeus grants--but in his own way. Rather than dying, when their time comes, the two metamorphose into two trees, a linden and an oak, and those two trees grow entwining with each other, their love living on after them.

In Ezra Pound's poem, the poet's persona visits a quiet wood and sees the forest through eyes informed by Ovid's work. The forest is alive with love--both passionate and importunate and patient and abiding. As he sits and observes the forest, he feels the numinous and the real intermingle; he reflects on Nature and love and in his quiet, outward-looking introspection has an epiphany and comes to understand nature and love in ways that had seemed foolish to him before.

Ezra Pound had an ear for lyric beauty, and this poem is a masterpiece. The fluidity of the rhythm, and the cadence of the assonances are exquisite. It expresses a Romantic appreciation of love and pantheistic Nature, and yet at the same time, an American pragmatism and straightforwardness that twine and resolve in one, just as the elm and the oak (he changed the linden to an elm for his poem) twine and resolve into one.

It is a poem about a man unafraid to see what others disdain or fail to grasp, and a man who is willing, like Daphne, Baucis, and Philemon, to be transformed by love and Nature. As in their tales, contrary qualities harmonize within himself, and the poet's persona undergoes a sea-change that leaves him wiser and more at one in his many-mindedness.


Definitions:
"wold"--a high, wild, open area of rolling hills (in England, also called a "moor")
"entreated"--treated (the word usually means to ask, plead
"wonder thing"--wondrous thing
"nathless"--nonetheless
"rank folly"--total foolishness

New International Center Web Site and Facebook Page

The New International Center has a new Web page, and also a new Facebook page.

The original International Center will close for good on Friday. It is a milestone in many people's lives. Lucy Benedikt, for example, has been there from before the beginning--she volunteered before the Center even opened, more than 50 years ago. She is the senior of hundreds of us volunteers.

I taught my first class at the International Center in December of 1985, the year I came to New York City from Connecticut. My last class ever at the International Center in New York was last night, April 17, 2012. We stopped on a line from my favorite poet to teach, "The Dry Salvages" from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

I used to stop by the International Center to see my buddy Vladimir Malukoff, who used to be Program Director there. (My tenure at the Center is now more ancient than I was when I started.) Staff and volunteers used to ask me to teach, and I always declined, thinking that teaching wasn't for me. One particular day, a member of the staff asked me yet again if I would volunteer. I asked, "Can I teach a literature class?" She shrugged and said, "Whatever you would like." I said, "OK. She asked me when I could start, and I replied, "A week from Friday."

The first poem I taught was "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas. I had one or two people the first class. But I proceeded the way I have since, word by word, discussing definitions, meaning, context, history, culture, whatever comes to mind as we go. It was a success.

Since "Fern Hill", I have done many poems in my classes. And books: For ten years, we chugged through Ulysses by James Joyce. Three hours, every Saturday, word by word; digression; background; questions. It was slow going, and in those years we only got about 280 pages in. But some of my best moments as a teacher were during Ulysses. (I started the book a few weeks after my daughter was born. She was born on Bloomsday. When she was little, we used to refer to Ulysses as her "birthday book". She will be 18 on Bloomsday this year.) The Hobbit. Essays by Stephen Jay Gould. About 30 of the Cantos by Ezra Pound. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (three times each, over the years). On Saturday afternoons now, we are reading The Wind in the Willows, which has been a joyous find for several people. How can one not love Mole and Rat? Probably my greatest success is the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The current exigetical journey through Four Quartets is the third time I've traversed it at the International Center. We started with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and proceeded through "Gerontion", "Ash Wednesday", "Preludes", and "The Wasteland." What else? Short poems by William Carlos Williams. What else? I can't recall right now; so many.

My philosophy of teaching is to not dumb down to people because they are learning. Their English is still limited, but their minds are not. Language is a tool for the day-to-day, but there is no pleasure in that; why not teach by means of the most interesting ideas and the richest use of language? Poetry as text! I didn't want to teach the same things that others were doing when I started. "The...pen...is...on...the...table." Or the newspaper, or magazines. I felt I had a gift to bring words to life and to teach at the same time. So I used literature as the text. And people get to appreciate, feel, delight in, and learn from literature that they might not have the confidence to approach on their own. I remember one Japanese woman telling me she had been told sternly by her U.S.-born son that she could not read Ulysses because it is too difficult. Ha! She loved Poldy and the cat.

And my approach works. I was the first to teach English this way at the Center. Then others started doing it. Now there are others, and my students glow when they tell me the classics they have read in the other classes. Sometimes, they know the works from translation in their own country, sometimes it is new to them. But there is a feeling of pride and satisfaction that they have read and felt and understood such a book in their laboriously studied new language.

The moment when we reached the end of the fourth chapter of Ulysses (Calypso) and Adam Wroblewsky, who had come to the U.S. as a refuge with no English, read the last two words, "Poor Dignam", and suddenly understood them and gasped out loud in the class at the beauty and meaning of the words was perhaps the moment that validated these 25 years. So long as my brain is my own, I will remember and treasure that moment.

There have been many bad times, many strange, there have been days when it just seemed pointless. But through it all, poetry and sharing poetry has been my compass and my tether keeping me somewhat bound to my self. And the International Center has been my center as well.