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

[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".