Poe--Eliot--Keats

[porphyry]

My wife has maintained for years that Poe is second-rate, that he has a dead ear—little there but sing-song. My view of the matter is quite different, but she always insisted this is because I read—or rather heard—Poe as a child and have maintained a childish predilection for him.

Now, our daughter has the unfortunate habit of occasionally pulling a book from the shelf and flinging it across the room. This morning she did so with a book of Eliot’s criticism which happened to have landed open to the passage below, which my wife claims never to have read (altogether a co-incidence as remarkable as Augustine’s conversion):

I believe the view of Poe taken by the ordinary cultivated English or American reader is something like this: Poe is the author of a few, a very few short poems which enchanted him for a time when he was a boy, and which somehow stick in the memory. I do not think he re-reads the poems, unless he turns to them in the pages of an anthology; his enjoyment of them is rather the memory of an enjoyment which he may for a moment recapture. They seem to him to belong to a particular period when his interest in poetry had just awakened. Certain images, and still more certain rhythms, abide with him.

Though we did not read so far this morning, I see Eliot goes on to say:

Poe had, to an exceptional degree, the feeling for the incantatory element in poetry, of that which may, in the most nearly literal sense, me called ‘the magic of verse’.

This reading has more, I think to recommend it myself, than it will to her when she reads it tomorrow.

Naturally, she prefers Keats in all the very categories in which Poe seems to excel. It would be hard to argue with her.









Poe
Ulalume

The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere--
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir--
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul--
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll--
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole--
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.
Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere--
Our memories were treacherous and sere,--
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)--
We noted not the dim lake of Auber
(Though once we had journeyed down here)--
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
And now, as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn--
As the star-dials hinted of morn--
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn--
Astarte's bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.
And I said: "She is warmer than Dian;
She rolls through an ether of sighs--
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies--
To the Lethean peace of the skies--
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes--
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes."
But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said: "Sadly this star I mistrust--
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Ah, hasten! -ah, let us not linger!
Ah, fly! -let us fly! -for we must."
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust--
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust--
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.
I replied: "This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sybilic splendour is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty tonight!--
See! -it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright--
We safely may trust to a gleaming,
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom--
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb--
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: "What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied: "Ulalume -Ulalume--
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere--
As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: "It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed -I journeyed down here!--
That I brought a dread burden down here--
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber--
This misty mid region of Weir--
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."
Retrieved from "http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ulalume"



(incidentally, Elliot blasts Poe’s use of ‘immemorial’ in the 5th line. While Poe does often misuse words—no denying Eliot is right about that—in this case while the usual English meaning of the word is ‘beyond memory’ or ‘without memory, that is deriving it from the Latin memoria + in- nugatory, but one could just as well derive it from in- intensive, in which case it would mean ‘impossible to forget.’ No doubt Eliot knew this, but would have dismissed it as a school boyish trick.

A worse blunder is ‘Ulalume’ itself. Ululare indeed signifies the sound or mourning, but not the gentle moaning Poe obviously has in mind, but rather the sound often now heard in films whenever Arab women are shown mourning—it is the same weird sound Greek and Roman women made at the moment of animal sacrifice)



J. Keats

CCLV. Ode to Autumn

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 5
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease; 10
For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; 15
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook; 20
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day 25
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; 30
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Comments

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

How about the immortal Thomas Holley Chivers?

'Many mellow Cydonian suckets,
Sweet apples, anthosmial, divine,
From the ruby-brimmed beryline buckets,
Star-gemmed, lily-shaped, hyaline:
Like the sweet golden goblet found growing
On the wild emerald cucumber-tree,
Rich, brilliant, like chrysoprase glowing,
Was my beautiful Rosalie Lee.'


'The Apollo Belvidere was adorning
The chamber where Eulalie lay,
While Aurora, the Rose of the Morning,
Smiled full in the face of the Day.
All around stood the beautiful Graces
Bathing Venus - some combing her hair-
While she lay in her husband's embraces
A-moulding my Lily Adair-
Of my fawn-like Lily Adair-
Of my dove-like Lily Adair-
Of my beautiful, dutiful Lily Adair.

Where the opaline swan circled, singing,
With her eider-down cygnets at noon,
In the tall jasper Reeds that were springing
From the marge of the crystal Lagoon,
Rich Canticles, clarion-like, golden,
Such as only true love can declare,
Like an Archangel's voice in times olden-
I went with my Lily Adair-
With my lamb-like Lily Adair-
With my saint-like Lily Adair-
With my beautiful, dutiful Lily Adair...

From her Paradise Isles in the ocean,
To the beautiful city of On,
By the mellifluous rivers of Goschen,
My beautiful Lily is gone!
In her Chariot of Fire translated,
Like Elijah she passsed through the air,
To the City of God, golden-gated-
The home of my Lily Adair-
Of my star-crowned Lily Adair-
Of my God-loved Lily Adair-
Of my beautiful, dutiful Lily Adair.'

Such are the benefits of a classical education.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

In mine we somehow overlooked this gem.

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

I suppose he might be regarded as Georgia's riposte to Julia Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, who did not have the benefit of an education at Transylvania University or an acquaintance with Edgar Alan Poe, but compensated for it to some extent by her fine moral and critical sense:

SKETCH OF LORD BYRON'S LIFE

"Lord Byron" was an Englishman
A poet I believe,
His first works in old England
Was poorly received.
Perhaps it was "Lord Byron's" fault
And perhaps it was not.
His life was full of misfortunes,
Ah, strange was his lot.
The character of "Lord Byron"
Was of a low degree,
Caused by his reckless conduct,
And bad company.
He sprung from an ancient house,
Noble, but poor, indeed.
His career on earth, was marred
By his own misdeeds.

Generous and tender hearted,
Affectionate by extreme,
In temper he was wayward,
A poor "Lord" without means;
Ah, he was a handsome fellow
With great poetic skill,
His great intellectual powers
He could use at his will.

He was a sad child of nature,
Of fortune and of fame;
Also sad child to society,
For nothing did he gain
But slander and ridicule,
Throughout his native land.
Thus the "poet of the passions,"
Lived, unappreciated, man.

Yet at the age of 24,
"Lord Byron" then had gained
The highest, highest, pinacle
Of literary fame.
Ah, he had such violent passions
They was beyond his control,
Yet the public with its justice,
Sometimes would him extol.

Sometimes again "Lord Byron"
Was censured by the press,
Such obloquy, he could not endure,
So he done what was the best.
He left his native country,
This great unhappy man;
The only wish he had, "'tis said,"
He might die, sword in hand.

He had joined the Grecian Army;
This man of delicate frame;
And there he died in a distant land,
And left on earth his fame.
"Lord Byron's" age was 36 years,
Then closed the sad career,
Of the most celebrated "Englishman"
Of the nineteenth century.


I too have pleasant youthful memories of Poe, but of his gothic tales rather than of his poetry; my grandfather used to read them aloud to myself and my brother when we were still of an age be quite alarmed by some of the fancies that they contain. The illustrations by Arthur Rackham were also quite scary, e.g the Ourang-Outang with his razor and victim in the Murders in the Rue Morgue. I now have that book in my own shelves; and leafing through, I see that there is in fact a fair amount of poetry in it-

Out-out are the lights-out all!
And over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man",
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

-strong meat for a young child, but I don't remember hearing these, I suspect that my grandfather just passed them by. My first memories of Poe's poetry come from my school-days, where I learned one or two to recite (at one stage we had to do this once a week). The only poems that I can now remember as having learnt in that way are one by Thomas Arnold and one by Poe, so I suppose that Poe's must have made an impression on me if only for its strangeness.

(The Arnold poem was Dover Beach, which has some bearing on matters that you were recently discussing here-

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the bright folds of a girdle furl'd;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear
and naked shingles of the world.

- What on earth did I make of that as a 14 year old child? At least they did not condescend to children in those days.)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

The Bryon one--well that sort of thing used to be widely published in American newspapers.

The Poe you quote, every American of my age knows from the reading of Vincent Price in a truly awful film based on the Masque of the Red Death.

I confess I never developed a tase for Arnold's poetry--it always seems to me as if the structure is working against the meaning in a way that's jsut confusing, although I appreciate his work on Greek astronomy. My wife, by the way, was aghast at reading this and insisted I correct your mistake of Thomas for Matthew--she does that poem in almost every class she teaches.

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

I must confess for my part that I greatly enjoy Vincent Price's films; as with Hammer horrors, the awfulness is part of the fun. I don't know why I said Thomas Arnold; Arnold jr. is disconcerting as a poet because he veers so wildly from one extreme to another, often within the same poem, sometimes reaching real heights and sometimes writing the flattest of prize-poetry (as at the beginning of the second verse of Dover Beach:
'Sophocles heard it long ago
Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery..' Well, really!)
I'm sure if your wife had been present to guide me on my way, I would have made something of that poem even at a very tender age. My experiences of university teaching (on the other side of the pond) have doubtless made me unduly cynical about what goes on in schools.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Regrettably, I (that is, not Malkhos but his far better half) still devote a large portion of my literature classes to reading poetry, and rather traditional poetry at that, including Arnold's "Dover Beach"--not so much for its great achievement in terms of technique but rather for its ability to articulate the loss of the old foundations of culture and its replacement by the one we now stand on. T.S. Eliot picks up this theme later and better in "The Wasteland." One of the dominant themes of art in the 20th century came to be the isolated individual; Arnold's poem seems to be trying to recognize this--"Ah, love, let us be true to one another, for the world, which seems to lie before us as a land of dreams, hath really neither hope, nor joy, nor help for pain" etc. I always show my students a copy of Munch's painting, "The Scream," to help illustrate the modern condition Arnold was trying to address.

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

I don't know why you say 'regrettably', that all sounds admirable to me. You seem to take a very pessimistic view of the modern condition; I would certainly share it if I thought that modern commercial culture - or pluto-democratic civilization - had become wholly dominant, pushing aside any higher and more deeply-rooted traditions; but the situation seems to me to be far more complicated than that. Here in Britain at least, I sense that there is an ever-increasing polarization between circles in which consumer culture is largely dominant and others that either adhere to more traditional patterns (not necessarily altogether admirable) or in which high culture exercises a notable or even determining influence.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

When I said "regrettably," I was being a bit tongue in cheek; but thank you for saying that what I try to do is admirable.

I do take a somewhat pessimistic view of modern culture; I tend to view the world through a traditional lens. This is not to say that I idealize the past as being better than we are--my objection is that in our time, despite the availabilty of information and access to education, people willfully turn away from what is beautiful and good, for the exact reason you bring up--consumer culture has replaced high culture. To many of my students, for example, the most recent product of consumer culture is high art; the most current popular Hollywood starlet is the ideal of beauty. In addition, their opinions and assessments of what is good or virtuous boils down to personal perspective alone. They feel competent to assess and reject high culture based on their understanding of popular culture.

My stubborn refusal in the classroom to pander to this sort of thinking sometimes makes me feel like a voice crying alone in the wilderness, but every once in a while I get a happy ending. This term, for example, three students have shyly approached me after class with anthologies of authors they purchased on their own, to thank me for opening them up to this world. If I were the weeping sort, that could make me weep.

Perhaps too, here in the U.S., there is the idea that if knowledge hasn't a practical application, it isn't worth knowing.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Doesn't it seem to you that those circles are a patch of foam shrinking in the sunlight atop an ocean of pluto-democracy, soon to vanish from sight?

To add to what the auburn-haired one wrote, I can attest that in a group of 13 year olds who had never heard any music except 'rap' (unless perhaps some kind of spiritual mediated through Mo-town once a week) on the mention of the word opera became instantly dismisive of it as something risable, and when asked how they could possibly have formed that opinion pretended a deep knowledge of the subject.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Upon further reflection, I am also concerned that the two worlds are less separate than you put it.

In 1940 Wells in Citizen Kane presented the task of making a talentless singer into a world famous opera star through publicity as hopeless; no amount of dressing up could deceive a discriminating public. But today a certain “singer” (who shall remain nameless, though he is like Tiresius with his power of prophecy stripped away and replaced by a certain mesmeric enchantment), whose voice is painful to listen to and is as manipulated on recording as any popular entertainer’s, who lip-synchs (what a vulgar expression!) in live performance, accounts for a fluxuation in the annual sale of Classical CDs by a quarter depending on whether he releases an album that year or not.

So it seems to me that taste is being heavily besieged by ignorance.

I am sure you will counter that that doesn’t matter in the slightest to those who appreciate beauty. But I wonder why that appreciation can’t be more widely propagated. But now that I think about it, and I would never have examined my assupmtions in just this way before reading your various posts here, that taste can’t be propagated by any general means. It would always end in kitsch—the “music and meaning” lecture in The Remains of the Day. “Why a Goblin?” indeed. By that stage beauty becomes a goblin.

[siamhussein.livejournal.com]

I suppose I share (or shared) your wife's view until I became intrigued by Denis Donoghue's notion of Poe as one of the accidental inventors of Modernism in ON BEING MODERN TOGETHER. Donoghue is an uncommonly readable critic, one of the few I can be bothered with nowadays.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Modernism through the alienation of self, I guess?

[siamhussein.livejournal.com]

So far as I can remember. But also the notion of being alone together. î think the story in question is "A Man in a Crowd".