I've avoided writing about John Ashbery because, while I love his poetry deeply, he is such a formidable presence that I feel intimidated. But in spite of the difficulty of his poems, I don't associate him with a faux weightiness. When he makes significant pronouncements, they do not provide the reader with a moral: they leave the reader with more questions.
Take, for instance, "A Man of Words," from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. It begins simply enough: "His case inspires interest / But little sympathy; it is smaller / Than at first appeared." I read this as Ashbery's take on writing about oneself. It might be interesting to tell autobiographical stories, and readers might enjoy them, but in the end they are small. They are mere fact, not the fullness of truth.
Then he asks, "Does the first nettle / Make any difference as what grows / Becomes a skit?" The speaker is implying that the difficulty or problem that inspires the writer to write is ultimately less important than the act of creation it inspires--the skit, the made-up part.
The speaker describes the skit as follows:
Three sides enclosed,
The fourth open to a wash of the weather,
Exits and entrances, gestures theatrically meant
To punctuate like doubled-over weeds as
The garden fills up with snow?
Here the created world and the "real" or natural world have overlapped. Ashbery has a deep disinterest in fact. He seems much more focused on creation, how it spills over into life, which then affects creation, so that in the end the line between the two is blurred irreparably. The created world lets in the "weather" from the natural world and the two become one.
But then the speaker begins to address the reader from a remove. He has described this overlapping of creation and natural world, but he startles himself, snaps back to yet another "reality": "Ah, but this would have been another, quite other / Entertainment, not the metallic taste / In my mouth as I look away." That skit, the three created walls that allowed in the natural world, were a creation within a creation, a poem within a poem. Merely by writing about it, he makes it unreal, untruthful--a construct.
He describes "the angles where the grass writing goes on, / Rose-red in unexpected places like the pressure / Of fingers on a book suddenly snapped shut." In other words, the skit that he feels removed from continues in spite of his remove. And even when he snaps the book shut, or attempts to stop it from existing, the fingers holding the book closed take on the color of the images it sought to destroy. The created world continues to penetrate the world of the speaker, which is itself a created world, ad infinitum. Or is it that by writing about himself, the speaker loses reality and becomes a part of the creation?
The implication is that writing about anything directly tends to lessen the thing--the image or idea loses its truth if it is confronted directly. Only by writing about a thing indirectly, telling it slant, so to speak, can the truth be approached.
As the speaker says, "Those tangled versions of the truth are / Combed out, the snarls ripped out / And spread around." That is, the complexity of truth is simplified through the act of writing, and the best writing is that which allows the complexity to be the primary focus.
The speaker is in search of "what is fine, rarely appears and when it does is already / Dying on the breeze that brought it to the threshold / Of speech." The idea, the truth, is killed by the act of speaking and, by extension, the act of writing.
He provides us with another image to confirm this: "All diaries are alike, clear and cold, with / The outlook for continued cold." The speaker finds autobiography, the rattling off of the daily events of one's life, to be cold, lifeless. And he describes it like weather, like the snow that blew into the three walls of the skit, which lost its reality for the speaker.
The poem ends: "Just time to reread this / And the past slips through your fingers, wishing you were there." The speaker once again calls attention to the fact that this poem is not reality--it is a construction. Something false. And while you are reading, reality is slipping past you, leaving you behind.
"A Man of Words" is a gorgeous, poignant work that demonstrates a deep ambivalence about the effect of art and its relationship to what we think of as the real world.
Read the full poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=32703
Friday, September 8, 2017
Monday, May 7, 2012
Merrill on Fire
As summer approaches, many of you will be having cocktail nights with your friends, so I thought we could look at one of my favorite poems, a short narrative about beauty, appearance, and drinking.
"Charles on Fire" is by James Merrill, one of my favorite poets, and I believe one of the finest and most lasting poets of the 20th century. Let's look at the poem, written in the mid-sixties:
CHARLES ON FIRE
Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false calms),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
"Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man, you are sunk." No one but squared
The shoulders of his own unloveliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,
They do it this way"--bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once gloved itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.
*
If you are at all interested in writing and the writing process, I encourage you to look at some early drafts of the poem here: http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/merrill/charlesonfire.html
In one of the drafts, he has written "the beautiful" but then replaces it with "Appearances." He also writes in one draft that good looks no longer launch one in life, but this seems to contradict the heart of the poem, and beauty, unlike appearance, is not always skin-deep.
What Merrill wants us to see is a group of people focused on superficiality, appearances, fashion (i.e. what Parisians do), and good looks. This is not a group of people much concerned with depth. And other than Charles and the young man, no one is given any sense of individuality. This is a group of people that functions only as a group because they do not have enough depth to be distinguishable from each other.
When the bearded young man says, "Without your intellectual and spiritual / Values, man, you are sunk," the group responds with discomfort, aware of their own shortcomings. So even tepid platitudes about depth are enough to make the group respond negatively. This foreshadows the true moment of depth in the poem.
The liquor is lit on fire and the vessel cracks. In other words, what is inside is coming out, and the surface is being destroyed. The group, and Charles in particular, is being asked to step down from its crystal coach, to rid itself of pretension. Then, "Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand / All at once gloved itself in eeriness." Note the pun on spirit here - liquor and otherworldly presence. We are seeing the mysterious interior of a human leak out, just as the liquor leaked from the glass.
What is Charles's response to this moment of power? He wants to ignore it. He looks in the mirror--once again he is concerned with appearance. And then he "sank down among us." Whereas before they were above it all in their crystal coach, now they are below. They see that their sense of hierarchy is an inversion -- a focus on surface lowers oneself, while a focus on the spirit, the inside of things, raises oneself. But this inwardness is uncomfortable, and no one in this group -- perhaps few people in any group -- is able to sustain it.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Reality and Illusion in Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes
I mentioned Keats while discussing Tate in my last post, so I thought we could take a look at one of my favorite of Keats's poems, The Eve of St. Agnes. I value this one as much as I value his great odes--there is a strange beauty to this poem, and I find it deeply ambiguous. Its ambiguity means that it can and has been interpreted in dozens and dozens of ways, so I don't aim for a final word on the matter. I just want to look at some of the more Gothic aspects of it, and the ways the poem engages with ideas of reality and illusion.
The poem is too long to paste here, but I encourage you to read it in its entirety: http://www.bartleby.com/126/39.html
Let's start with a brief summary. The poem takes place on the feast day of the title, and fair Madeline leaves the huge celebration in her familial castle because she has heard a superstition that if you go to bed on the Eve of St. Agnes, say your prayers, and don't look around or behind you, your true love will come to you. Meanwhile, Porphyro (from the word porphyry, a red rock that is igneous, meaning created in intense heat - this is a clue that underscores the fire of his passions) sneaks across the meadows and moors, into the castle. He is hated by Madeline's family and is literally risking his life here. With help from Madeline's nurse, he sneaks into Madeline's room, hides in her dresser, and waits for her to come in. He waits till she falls asleep, then wakes her up, and after some suggested hanky-panky, they escape and . . . Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. Their fate is uncertain, and we'll look at it in a bit.
I don't think we are supposed to see the couple's escape as a victory - I think we are supposed to see it as a giving in to illusion. One clue is the repeated use of the word "seem." Keats uses some conjugation of that word six times in ten pages. This undermines the poem's sense of reality, but I think it does more than that. Keats was an avid reader of Shakespeare, and would have been familiar with Hamlet's retort to his mother when she suggests he should leave off mourning his father:
Gertrude. Why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet. "Seems," madam? Nay, it is; I know not "seems."
Hamlet is saying that his surface does not represent what's going on inside of him. He goes on: "I have that within which passeth show." In other words, his insides give substance to his outsides. He is not just surface, he is also depth.
I'm not convinced that Madeline and Porphyro have such depth, and I think Keats alludes to Shakespeare here to contrast them to Hamlet. The nurse is initially shocked by Porphyro's decision to invade Madeline's room, and she says, "Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem." Later, when Porphyro is watching Madeline undress, we get the following lines: "She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest / Save wings, for heaven." These are people who seem but who do not have the depth to back up what they seem to be. They are types, characters made intentionally two-dimensional by Keats. Keats is indicating that naivete, lack of depth, weak imaginations lead to a loss of reality. Reality is hard-won.
Let's look at their escape. They creep out of Madeline's room, and Madeline, afraid, thinks "there were sleeping dragons all around." The danger is much more real than dragons, but Madeline has been drawn into a shared dream. Next,
"They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms to the iron porch they glide"
They are losing their substance. Keats says twice in two lines that they are like phantoms. This is not the stuff of young romance, the liveliness of youth. This is the opposite--a kind of death. And then we never know exactly what happens to them:
"And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm."
Does this sound like a triumphant escape? It sounds to me like a death. And everyone else in the castle seems to be under the grip of a spell or a dream, too:
"That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe
And all his warrior-guests with shade and form
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm
Were long be-nightmared."
Nothing is what it seems. Even the supposedly holy day is really just a cover for the manipulations of a hot-blooded young man "with heart on fire."
I think Keats wants us to see how imagination can be dangerous if it is linked with ignorance and naivete. Imagination must be coupled with reality, with solidity, with intellect, or else it's like wandering into a fairy storm, living an illusion, which is ultimately the same as losing your life, becoming a phantom.
The poem is too long to paste here, but I encourage you to read it in its entirety: http://www.bartleby.com/126/39.html
Let's start with a brief summary. The poem takes place on the feast day of the title, and fair Madeline leaves the huge celebration in her familial castle because she has heard a superstition that if you go to bed on the Eve of St. Agnes, say your prayers, and don't look around or behind you, your true love will come to you. Meanwhile, Porphyro (from the word porphyry, a red rock that is igneous, meaning created in intense heat - this is a clue that underscores the fire of his passions) sneaks across the meadows and moors, into the castle. He is hated by Madeline's family and is literally risking his life here. With help from Madeline's nurse, he sneaks into Madeline's room, hides in her dresser, and waits for her to come in. He waits till she falls asleep, then wakes her up, and after some suggested hanky-panky, they escape and . . . Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. Their fate is uncertain, and we'll look at it in a bit.
I don't think we are supposed to see the couple's escape as a victory - I think we are supposed to see it as a giving in to illusion. One clue is the repeated use of the word "seem." Keats uses some conjugation of that word six times in ten pages. This undermines the poem's sense of reality, but I think it does more than that. Keats was an avid reader of Shakespeare, and would have been familiar with Hamlet's retort to his mother when she suggests he should leave off mourning his father:
Gertrude. Why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet. "Seems," madam? Nay, it is; I know not "seems."
Hamlet is saying that his surface does not represent what's going on inside of him. He goes on: "I have that within which passeth show." In other words, his insides give substance to his outsides. He is not just surface, he is also depth.
I'm not convinced that Madeline and Porphyro have such depth, and I think Keats alludes to Shakespeare here to contrast them to Hamlet. The nurse is initially shocked by Porphyro's decision to invade Madeline's room, and she says, "Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem." Later, when Porphyro is watching Madeline undress, we get the following lines: "She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest / Save wings, for heaven." These are people who seem but who do not have the depth to back up what they seem to be. They are types, characters made intentionally two-dimensional by Keats. Keats is indicating that naivete, lack of depth, weak imaginations lead to a loss of reality. Reality is hard-won.
Let's look at their escape. They creep out of Madeline's room, and Madeline, afraid, thinks "there were sleeping dragons all around." The danger is much more real than dragons, but Madeline has been drawn into a shared dream. Next,
"They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms to the iron porch they glide"
They are losing their substance. Keats says twice in two lines that they are like phantoms. This is not the stuff of young romance, the liveliness of youth. This is the opposite--a kind of death. And then we never know exactly what happens to them:
"And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm."
Does this sound like a triumphant escape? It sounds to me like a death. And everyone else in the castle seems to be under the grip of a spell or a dream, too:
"That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe
And all his warrior-guests with shade and form
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm
Were long be-nightmared."
Nothing is what it seems. Even the supposedly holy day is really just a cover for the manipulations of a hot-blooded young man "with heart on fire."
I think Keats wants us to see how imagination can be dangerous if it is linked with ignorance and naivete. Imagination must be coupled with reality, with solidity, with intellect, or else it's like wandering into a fairy storm, living an illusion, which is ultimately the same as losing your life, becoming a phantom.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Go, Youth
The warm, sunny weather has put me in the mood for something contemporary (not Adult Contemporary), so I thought we could look at James Tate's "Go, Youth," the first poem in his Worshipful Company of Fletchers, which won the National Book Award in 1994.
Tate's work is full of paradoxes and contradictions and hilarity and shadows. "Go, Youth" lacks none of these:
GO, YOUTH
I was in a dreamstate and this was causing a problem
with the traffic. I felt lonely, like I'd missed the boat,
or I'd found the boat and it was deserted. In the middle
of the road a child's shoe glistened. I walked around it.
It woke me up a little. The child had disappeared. Some
mysteries are better left alone. Others are dreary, distasteful,
and can disarrange a shadow into a thing of unspeakable beauty.
Whose child is that?
Where to begin with this one? So much is going on in such a small space. Some of the strangeness is mitigated by the fact that the speaker is in a "dreamstate," but this is almost a way for Tate to smilingly distract from the depth of what he's trying to communicate.
Look at his use of cliches. First he says his loneliness is a result of having "missed the boat," a common enough cliche meaning he was left behind or did not act quickly enough. But then he twists the cliche, takes it literally: "or I'd found the boat and it was deserted." This is both funny and chilling, an upsetting of our expectations of the cliche and a suggestion that loneliness will follow us around regardless of how timely or untimely our actions are. Loneliness, it seems for this speaker, is inescapable.
Check out the next cliche, used almost more subtly: "In the middle / of the road a child's shoe glistened." Here again he takes a cliche literally. "Middle of the road" is another way of saying mainstream, bland, inoffensive. And yet in the poem it is also a specific location, not an abstraction. And what do we find there? An empty shoe. What happened to the child? Was the shoe lost? Was the child stolen or killed? After all, the shoe is in the middle of traffic. So Tate takes a cliche that suggests inoffensiveness and finds in it a sign of something very wrong. The shoe is as empty as the boat.
Tate says "Some / mysteries are better left alone. Others are dreary, distasteful, / and can disarrange a shadow into a thing of unspeakable beauty." Into which of these categories does the missing child fall? Should we leave it alone? What are we to make of the second option? How can something dreary and distasteful lead to "unspeakable beauty"? Are we to read "unspeakable" as meaning "so awful it should not be spoken" or as "something that cannot be put into words"? My guess is a combination of the two.
For reference, let's look at a poem to which Tate seems to be referring here: John Keats's Endymion. Endymion opens with the famous line, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." The poem continues:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Keats suggests that beauty is an eternal Good, that in contrast to the decay of human existence, Nature and Poetry hold a timeless beauty that will always be there for us.
If we are to believe Tate's speaker, his dreams are far from sweet, and yet that is not from a lack of beauty. Some beauty, according to the speaker, is unspeakable. Some beauty is caused by mystery, by tragedy, by fear, by loneliness, by absence. Beauty is not a thing that is only located in goodness - it seems to be behind every aspect of this strange world we live in, even in the supposedly ugly parts. "Whose child is that?" the speaker asks. In other words, who or what is responsible for the beauty that lurks behind the world's shadows, on the lonely peripheries of existence? Another mystery, but one that Tate would not have us leave alone.
Tate's work is full of paradoxes and contradictions and hilarity and shadows. "Go, Youth" lacks none of these:
GO, YOUTH
I was in a dreamstate and this was causing a problem
with the traffic. I felt lonely, like I'd missed the boat,
or I'd found the boat and it was deserted. In the middle
of the road a child's shoe glistened. I walked around it.
It woke me up a little. The child had disappeared. Some
mysteries are better left alone. Others are dreary, distasteful,
and can disarrange a shadow into a thing of unspeakable beauty.
Whose child is that?
Where to begin with this one? So much is going on in such a small space. Some of the strangeness is mitigated by the fact that the speaker is in a "dreamstate," but this is almost a way for Tate to smilingly distract from the depth of what he's trying to communicate.
Look at his use of cliches. First he says his loneliness is a result of having "missed the boat," a common enough cliche meaning he was left behind or did not act quickly enough. But then he twists the cliche, takes it literally: "or I'd found the boat and it was deserted." This is both funny and chilling, an upsetting of our expectations of the cliche and a suggestion that loneliness will follow us around regardless of how timely or untimely our actions are. Loneliness, it seems for this speaker, is inescapable.
Check out the next cliche, used almost more subtly: "In the middle / of the road a child's shoe glistened." Here again he takes a cliche literally. "Middle of the road" is another way of saying mainstream, bland, inoffensive. And yet in the poem it is also a specific location, not an abstraction. And what do we find there? An empty shoe. What happened to the child? Was the shoe lost? Was the child stolen or killed? After all, the shoe is in the middle of traffic. So Tate takes a cliche that suggests inoffensiveness and finds in it a sign of something very wrong. The shoe is as empty as the boat.
Tate says "Some / mysteries are better left alone. Others are dreary, distasteful, / and can disarrange a shadow into a thing of unspeakable beauty." Into which of these categories does the missing child fall? Should we leave it alone? What are we to make of the second option? How can something dreary and distasteful lead to "unspeakable beauty"? Are we to read "unspeakable" as meaning "so awful it should not be spoken" or as "something that cannot be put into words"? My guess is a combination of the two.
For reference, let's look at a poem to which Tate seems to be referring here: John Keats's Endymion. Endymion opens with the famous line, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." The poem continues:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Keats suggests that beauty is an eternal Good, that in contrast to the decay of human existence, Nature and Poetry hold a timeless beauty that will always be there for us.
If we are to believe Tate's speaker, his dreams are far from sweet, and yet that is not from a lack of beauty. Some beauty, according to the speaker, is unspeakable. Some beauty is caused by mystery, by tragedy, by fear, by loneliness, by absence. Beauty is not a thing that is only located in goodness - it seems to be behind every aspect of this strange world we live in, even in the supposedly ugly parts. "Whose child is that?" the speaker asks. In other words, who or what is responsible for the beauty that lurks behind the world's shadows, on the lonely peripheries of existence? Another mystery, but one that Tate would not have us leave alone.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
What Your High School English Teacher Probably Didn't Teach You About "The Tyger"
If you're anything like me, your exposure to poetry in high school was spotty at best. But odds are that you came across William Blake's "The Tyger" at some point in one of your classes.
I have an odd relationship with Blake. I have known for a long time that he was one of the giants of Western literature, and yet I found myself consistently shying away from his body of work. I read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Song of Innocence and Experience, and I loved them. But somehow I still felt distant from him.
Lately I have come back to his poetry and I think I am finally piercing the veil. I am starting to get a sense of the scope of his work, and I am beginning to see his ironies more clearly. They are often amazingly subtle.
So back to "The Tyger." And speaking of subtle irony, a beginner to Blake is likely to mistake the voice of the speaker of the poem for Blake's own. Let's look at the poem in its entirety.
The Tyger
by William Blake
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
from Songs of Innocence and Experience
If you don't have a good sense of Blake's antipathy toward religion, you're liable to hear this poem as awe-struck praise and fear of a God that could create such a dreadful and powerful creature. However, Blake wanted us to hear this poem as a satire of such a view. Look what he has to say in the late epic Jerusalem:
Go, tell them that the Worship of God, is honouring his gifts
In other men; & loving the greatest men best, each according
To his Genius: which is the Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other
God, than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity
Blake distrusted religion because it locates divinity outside of man. Grace is given because Man lacks it. Blake felt that divinity, to the extent that it existed, was located inside of Man. He views the worship of a divinity outside of Man to be Satanic. Thus in the Marriage he tells us, "the Jehovah of the Bible [is] no other than he who dwells in flaming fire."
Now that we have a sense of Blake's view of religion and the poem's irony, let's look the details of "The Tyger."
One of the things that stuck out to me most when I was in high school was the clanging slant rhyme of "hand or eye" and "symmetry." We expect the singsong-y full rhymes of the rest of the poem, and we are let down. Think about the words he's choosing here, though. The full rhyme of the rest of the poem creates the symmetry of couplets. How interesting, then, that he chooses to ruin this symmetry with the word symmetry. Something is wrong.
Blake believed that the world thrives on contrarieties. He chooses a couple of dialectics to express this idea. Two examples are the Prolific & the Devourer and Energy & Reason. Energy and the Prolific are creators. Reason and the Devourer are limiters. Creation and limitation, constantly pushing against each other. If we had only the Prolific or Energy, existence would be chaos. If we had only the Devourer or Reason, we would have what Harold Bloom calls "the static Heaven of Milton." We would exist in utter stasis.
So the asymmetry of Blake's rhyme reflects the asymmetry of the speaker's religious beliefs. By locating divinity outside of man, he is falling prey to the trap of Reason, of the Devourer. He is an uncreative or non-creative speaker. He needs the balance of Energy, which comes from Hell in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
The speaker ends in mystery, which Blake detested. He thought that religion's tendency to resort to Mystery was, in so many words, a cop-out. Here's what Bloom has to say about it: "The speaker has worked himself into the dilemma of orthodox theology in regard to the problem of God's Mercy and His Wrath, and resorts to the orthodox resolution of bringing forth a Mystery."
Though this might satisfy the reader who is comfortable with orthodox theology, Blake wanted his readers to add another layer of meaning: locating divinity outside of Man results in paradoxes that can only be solved with anti-intellectual smoke and mirrors. Blake challenges us to see our own divinity, which is to say strengthen our intellects.
I have an odd relationship with Blake. I have known for a long time that he was one of the giants of Western literature, and yet I found myself consistently shying away from his body of work. I read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Song of Innocence and Experience, and I loved them. But somehow I still felt distant from him.
Lately I have come back to his poetry and I think I am finally piercing the veil. I am starting to get a sense of the scope of his work, and I am beginning to see his ironies more clearly. They are often amazingly subtle.
So back to "The Tyger." And speaking of subtle irony, a beginner to Blake is likely to mistake the voice of the speaker of the poem for Blake's own. Let's look at the poem in its entirety.
The Tyger
by William Blake
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
from Songs of Innocence and Experience
If you don't have a good sense of Blake's antipathy toward religion, you're liable to hear this poem as awe-struck praise and fear of a God that could create such a dreadful and powerful creature. However, Blake wanted us to hear this poem as a satire of such a view. Look what he has to say in the late epic Jerusalem:
Go, tell them that the Worship of God, is honouring his gifts
In other men; & loving the greatest men best, each according
To his Genius: which is the Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other
God, than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity
Blake distrusted religion because it locates divinity outside of man. Grace is given because Man lacks it. Blake felt that divinity, to the extent that it existed, was located inside of Man. He views the worship of a divinity outside of Man to be Satanic. Thus in the Marriage he tells us, "the Jehovah of the Bible [is] no other than he who dwells in flaming fire."
Now that we have a sense of Blake's view of religion and the poem's irony, let's look the details of "The Tyger."
One of the things that stuck out to me most when I was in high school was the clanging slant rhyme of "hand or eye" and "symmetry." We expect the singsong-y full rhymes of the rest of the poem, and we are let down. Think about the words he's choosing here, though. The full rhyme of the rest of the poem creates the symmetry of couplets. How interesting, then, that he chooses to ruin this symmetry with the word symmetry. Something is wrong.
Blake believed that the world thrives on contrarieties. He chooses a couple of dialectics to express this idea. Two examples are the Prolific & the Devourer and Energy & Reason. Energy and the Prolific are creators. Reason and the Devourer are limiters. Creation and limitation, constantly pushing against each other. If we had only the Prolific or Energy, existence would be chaos. If we had only the Devourer or Reason, we would have what Harold Bloom calls "the static Heaven of Milton." We would exist in utter stasis.
So the asymmetry of Blake's rhyme reflects the asymmetry of the speaker's religious beliefs. By locating divinity outside of man, he is falling prey to the trap of Reason, of the Devourer. He is an uncreative or non-creative speaker. He needs the balance of Energy, which comes from Hell in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
The speaker ends in mystery, which Blake detested. He thought that religion's tendency to resort to Mystery was, in so many words, a cop-out. Here's what Bloom has to say about it: "The speaker has worked himself into the dilemma of orthodox theology in regard to the problem of God's Mercy and His Wrath, and resorts to the orthodox resolution of bringing forth a Mystery."
Though this might satisfy the reader who is comfortable with orthodox theology, Blake wanted his readers to add another layer of meaning: locating divinity outside of Man results in paradoxes that can only be solved with anti-intellectual smoke and mirrors. Blake challenges us to see our own divinity, which is to say strengthen our intellects.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Before I got my eye put out--
I think it's only appropriate to start with a response to a poem by my favorite writer, Emily Dickinson. So here goes. This is poem number 336 in the Franklin edition.
Before I got my eye put out –
But were it told to me, Today,
The Meadows – mine –
The Motions of the Dipping Birds –
So safer – guess – with just my soul
Before I got my eye put out –
I liked as well to see
As other creatures, that have eyes –
And know no other way –
But were it told to me, Today,
That I might have the Sky
For mine, I tell you that my Heart
Would split, for size of me –
The Meadows – mine –
The Mountains – mine –
All Forests – Stintless stars –
As much of noon, as I could take –
Between my finite eyes –
The Motions of the Dipping Birds –
The Morning’s Amber Road –
For mine – to look at when I liked,
The news would strike me dead –
So safer – guess – with just my soul
Opon the window pane
Where other creatures put their eyes –
Incautious – of the Sun –
Many of Dickinson's considerable strengths are on display in this poem. Dickinson sets up a binary between the expansive outdoors and the inner life—the domestic life. While we can read this poem literally as being a poem from the point of view of a blind person, we can also read sight as a signifier of some spiritual quality. There is also a connection between sight and owning—if her sight were returned, she wouldn’t just see the “Meadows” and “Mountains” and “Stars.” She would own them: “That I might have the sky/ For mine.” This possibility is so overwhelming that it might kill her, so “safer—guess—with just my soul/ Upon the windowpane.” Without sight, she sits inside her house and puts her soul in a vantage point that is usually reserved for looking. It seems the soul is replacing the eyes as the vehicle for a kind of sight. Perhaps. What troubles me about this last stanza is that word “guess” in the first line. She could be saying, “so safer—I guess” this way, and if so, the lack of the word “I” does two things. For one, it adds a tone of apathy to the speaker’s voice, making her sound exhausted and sad. But it also recalls the speaker’s missing eye: she is missing both an “I” and an “eye.” An interesting pun, but I think it does more than that. It suggests that in losing her sight, she has lost her self.
Dickinson astounds me.
Welcome to My Blog!
For years my friends have encouraged me to start a blog, but the time never felt right to me.
Today, the time was finally right. I was mid-way through a five mile run and my head exploded into wonder. I came to so many conclusions, one of which is that I am not writing nearly enough. This blog is going to be one of my much-needed literary outlets.
So here's the skinny on what to expect from Dream Barker: I'm going to post poems I like and brief, informal responses to those poems. Sometimes I'll discuss short prose passages. Maybe some other stuff here and there. I have not yet decided whether or not I will post my own poetry. Let me know in the comments what you think!
I feel like in my constant reading I stumble upon so many beautiful passages and poems and sentences, and I just want to share them. They help me. They keep me afloat. Some of them might help you out, too, or at least make you smile or harrumph approvingly.
A note on the blog title - "Dream Barker" is the title poem of the first book by one of my favorite poets, Jean Valentine. Her poetry has meant so much to me that it only seemed natural for me to invoke her early work. And the poems I love and the poems I write are often dream-like correspondences from vague, shadowy figures and places. Hopefully the title will guide me into profundity. Here's hoping.
I don't just welcome your comments, I NEED them. So please, please, please, let me know what you think.
Tim
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