Dappled Glory: Gerard Manley Hopkins

The first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty” is an incredibly well-known one: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” The reader necessarily wonders: what is it about dappled things that are especially worthy of praise? Hopkins spends the rest of the stanza describing these pied or dappled things: “skies of couple-color as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; / Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough” (lines 2-5), including so many images that would not normally be placed together. The sky, cows, trout, chestnuts, birds’ wings, farmed landscapes: these images are some animal, some vegetable, and some mineral. I find the image of the “landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough” (line 5) to be perhaps most interesting, since it describes not natural outdoor beauty but something man-made. A fallow field could often be taken to represent man’s corruption of God’s created beauty, since man had to take his rusty tools to the land and dig it up in order to produce his crops. Yet Hopkins counts its dappled beauty among that of shining trout and the beautiful fluttering wings of finches.

In short, Hopkins praises God for “Whatever is fickle, freckled,” and imperfect (line 8). He may be insinuating that the very dapples that render these objects apparently imperfect are, in Hopkins’ mind, what makes them even more beautiful. In wisdom, God chose to give some things freckles and spots, and leave some things without. Though that seems a simple, even an insignificant, choice, Hopkins wishes his readership to know that he sees the beauty in this imperfection.

However, even if “dappled” is not intended to represent imperfection, I see as the point of Hopkins’ choosing that particular trait to communicate to his reader that to focus on all of God’s beauty would be an insurmountably large task. Instead, even only focusing on “things counter, original, spare, strange,” and dappled (line 7), Hopkins still finds so much there that he can scarcely express his gratitude and amazement at it all. He must narrow down creation to even attempt to describe or appropriately glorify it; still there is so much beauty that even as masterful an artist as Hopkins cannot remotely express it. God “whose beauty is past change” can still change so much in the world, and he does so for the sheer glory of it (line 10). Ultimately, Hopkins’ reaction to all the “dappled things” in the world, from clouded skies to fallow fields, is to implore his reader: “Praise him” who made those things, and who continues to produce in all ways elements of his glory (line 12).

Unrequited Love: Yeats

Helen of Troy, famously the most beautiful woman in the world, merits varying descriptions as to her role in the entire Trojan War. It was she who began the whole war by leaving her husband for another man, thus causing the two men to fight; however, perhaps her beauty made her role in the war a foregone conclusion, rather than a mistake on her part. William Butler Yeats uses this ambiguity to describe his own Helen—named Maud Gonne—and her effect upon him. He begins his “No Second Troy” by musing, “Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery?” (lines 1-2). Maud cannot help her beauty or that men desire it, just as Helen of Troy could not help but be desired. No matter a beautiful woman’s decisions, even if she is the chastest woman in the world, her beauty can cause problems. When Yeats remarks that “she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways” (lines 2-3), he may be speaking not of her having actually taught violence, but rather her beauty inspiring a sort of violence in him: a violence that kills not other men, but himself.

Ultimately Yeats decides that her character, regrettably, is unchangeable: “What could have made her peaceful with a mind / That nobleness made simple as a fire?” (lines 6-7). Her mind has “fire” in it, not peace as Yeats would wish her to have. Her beauty—along with all her other positive qualities—are nothing if the bad qualities remain forever. He even begins describing her beauty as less than ideal: her beauty is “like a tightened bow, a kind / That is not natural” (lines 8-9). A tightened bow is a cause for alarm, as it could shoot at any moment, killing or wounding anyone. Her beauty is like Helen’s: Helen must have enjoyed her beauty in her youth, getting preferential treatment and always being told of her loveliness, but once the “tightened bow” of Helen’s beauty went off, creating the situation with Paris described in Homer’s The Iliad, then she must well have wished that she had never been beautiful. Yeats regrets his lovely Maud being “high and solitary and most stern,” rather than pleasing to more than just the eye (line 10). Yet he knows, as he muses, “Why, what could she have done, being what she is?” (line 11), that it is not truly Maud’s fault that she inspired such churning emotions within him, just as it is not her fault that she is eternally unsatisfied with love and life, as Helen was.

However, since there is not “another Troy for her to burn” (line 12), Yeats’ Maud must burn something else: the poet himself. Yeats apparently proposed to her multiple times, being refused every single one of them (1116). As far as he is concerned, his Helen does not need a whole city to watch burn, since she has him. A cold beauty, hotly desired but determined to remain distant, Maud Gonne has beauty like a “tightened bow,” ready to go off at any time with unpredictable consequences. And like the situation with Helen, Yeats—like Paris—knows better than to get involved with such a woman, but he does so anyway, to his own disastrous consequence.

The Unsaved Magi: T. S. Eliot

Though T. S. Eliot’s dense writing makes his “Journey of the Magi” difficult to understand—though it is clearly more accessible than his more famous “The Waste Land”—it clearly bears many differences to the Biblical tale of the Magi. Eliot relies on some Biblical imagery, notably describing “three trees on the low sky” (line 24), an obvious reference to the circumstances of Jesus’ eventual death, where he is crucified on a hill with two other men. When the Magi go to the tavern, they see “Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver” (line 27), which seems to recall both the Roman soldiers “dicing,” or gambling, for Jesus’ clothes as well as Judas’ betrayal of Jesus for nothing more than “pieces of silver.”

When the Magi arrive, they do not get the answers that they seek, and leave still wondering: “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” (lines 35-36). Of course, they went to see a birth, Jesus’ birth, but the speaker fearfully acknowledges that “this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death” (lines 38-39). Perhaps these Magi represent some of the many who came in contact with Jesus and did not personally believe in him as the son of God, which would be a great cause for disillusionment indeed. All of this contrasts with the Biblical description of the Magi: Matthew 2:10 of the New International Version states that “When they saw the star, they were overjoyed,” and Eliot’s Magi do not seem like those who would be overjoyed. In fact, Eliot does everything possible to remind his reader of death rather than life throughout the poem. All of the Christ symbolism and imagery are those images surrounding his death: his crucifixion, the gambling for his clothes, Judas betraying him. Nowhere does Eliot include references to Jesus’ many supposed miracles or his loving ministry while on earth; instead, the Magi see nothing but references to Christ’s death.

Perhaps because of all these references, they “should be glad of another death” by the end of having been with Jesus (line 43). Instead of the story in the Bible, where the Magi joyfully returned to their lands by another route, after seeing a vision from God to that effect (Matthew 2:12), these Magi “returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here,” in the place that Jesus has apparently come to save (lines 40-41). I wonder, at this poem’s end, why the Magi came at all: the Bible tells that they happily sought the Savior so that they could give him gifts of their own free will, but Eliot’s account tells neither of gifts nor happiness. Instead, the Magi describe their suffering as cold, long, and unrelenting, with “the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, / And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly / And the villages dirty and charging high prices” (lines 13-15). Eliot’s continual use of polysyndeton—the many times he uses “and”—seems to prolong the sentence itself, leading to a heightened awareness of the remorseless suffering that these Magi suffered. Perhaps they only began the journey because of King Herod, as related in the Bible, though Eliot’s poem also says nothing of Herod’s commands. Whatever their reasons for coming to the birthplace of Christ, they do not leave changed men: instead, they leave uneasy, and the fact that this poem is supposed to have been written much later (“All this was a long time ago, I remember” (line 32)) only makes it more clear that, despite their persistence in our nativity scenes and quaint Christmas stories, the Magi are not among those to whom Jesus granted salvation during his tenure on the earth.

Fighting the Angel: Virginia Woolf

At the time of Virginia Woolf’s writing, a modern woman was so different from women of the past that Woolf—as modern a woman as could be—felt as though her struggle against becoming a docile, passive creature like her foremothers should best be compared to a literal battle to the death. Woolf describes herself as nothing more than “a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand,” any ordinary woman. Her only achievement, simple as it is, has been “to move that pen from left to right—from ten o’clock to one.” In doing so, Woolf brands herself as an average woman. She is not a writer as such; she is merely a woman who occasionally writes. Still describing herself, Woolf relates the process of publication: “Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all—to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner.” Her becoming a writer is a series of chance decisions, then, and nothing highly intentional or artistic.

Far more difficult than writing, continues Woolf, is her discovery “that if [she] were going to review books [she] should need to do battle with a certain phantom.” This phantom, as she calls it, is the ghost of women past: quiet, unassuming women who would never dream of putting down their own ideas on paper. Woman, in popular belief, was “intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily,” and she did all of it joyfully. Any wife and mother became, automatically and without being asked, one of these women—these Angels in the House—and “every house had its Angel.” From the beginning, Woolf acknowledges that this Angel is her enemy. The Angel whispers in Woolf’s ear as she writes: “‘Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” Out of this seduction into traditional femininity, Woolf describes her reaction as “the one act for which [she] takes some credit to [herself]”: she battles the Angel, the ghost of all that society calls her to be. Writing, getting published, even buying her cat were not really acts of her own doing, but this—killing the Angel that haunts her—is.

Woolf, however, continued to be haunted by this apparition, as “Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her.” The ideal of the Angel, so deeply ingrained into people of society as to be almost indistinguishable from truth, cannot fall easily. In the conclusion to this short excerpt Woolf redefines herself, saying that “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” At the start—less than a page earlier—Woolf firmly characterizes herself to be a woman who writes, not a woman writer. She claims that her writing and even publication are sort of happy accidents that help her to live comfortably, but do not define her. After her battle with the Angel in the House, the fateful battle that would determine Woolf’s attitude toward modern women including herself, she defines herself anew: “a woman writer,” she says, solidly placing the word “writer” as noun and “woman” as descriptor. The one event able to turn “a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand” into, at last, “a woman writer,” was not writing itself: rather, it was the decision of what to do with the looming shadow, ever present, of the Angel in the House and the popular conception of femininity.

Happiness in a Blue Stone: William Butler Yeats

On the eve of World War II, during a time when life was uncertain and the English tendency was toward depressing modernity, William Butler Yeats remarks in his “Lapis Lazuli” of “hysterical women [who] say / They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, / Of poets that are always gay” (lines 1-3). In these cynical times, modern folk had grown apparently tired of constant gaiety, and they felt the poets and artists to be the ones who most espoused this hated trait. According to the popular mentality, “everybody knows or else should know / That if nothing drastic is done,” terrible things will happen (lines 4-5). Of course, in the midst of this atmosphere, where everyday people are faced with the threat of “Aeroplane and Zeppelin” (line 6) and “King Billy bomb-balls” falling from the sky and flattening towns and people (line 7), it is understandable why poetic gaiety—seen as frivolous, even indecent—might be frowned upon.

However, Yeats argues, the poetic cannot help it. Even those who “perform their tragic play” (line 9), like the characters in famed tragedies as Hamlet and King Lear, cannot truly feel tragic because of the very nature of art itself. If these actors are “worthy [of] their prominent part in the play, / [they] Do not break up their lines to weep” (lines 14-15). Indeed, even “Hamlet and Lear are gay” (line 16), refusing to succumb to the tragedies that they represent. Something about art itself, then, leads to gaiety; the fact that these men play those whom they are not, walking about a curtained stage and learning a part, wearing fancy dress and stage makeup, renders them incapable of true tragedy. And even “[t]hough Hamlet rambles and Lear rages” (line 21), neither feels the imminent war, the shortage of food and supplies, or the prevailing cynical mindset, so each is gay.

Portentous of the war—perhaps with World War I in his mind—Yeats assures his readership that “All things fall and are built again,” over and over throughout history (line 35). Great civilizations, small civilizations, ancient cities and modern ones, have all been felled and rebuilt. Once rebuilt, as would be the case with the War that would start within just a few years, they are destined to someday fall again and be rebuilt again. However, Yeats joyfully acknowledges that, universally, “those that build them again are gay,” not somber, in doing so (line 36). The “hysterical women” of line 1 who condemn gaiety simply do not consider its repercussions: without the relentless gaiety of the 1920s, for example, the American and English societies would still be in ruins. Yeats puts it upon himself, the poet, to remain gay even in the face of war, death, and hysterical women.

Yeats recounts a beautiful artistic piece that he has been given, depicting “Two Chinamen, behind them a third / . . . carved in Lapis Lazuli, / Over them flies a long-legged bird / A symbol of longevity” (lines 37-40). This lovely craft-piece is, ultimately, pointless: it will not feed or clothe anyone, and is merely to look at and enjoy. Those cynics who denounce gaiety would likely disapprove of its very existence, let alone a poet’s glorification of it. And so Yeats describes it in great detail, saying how to him “Every discolouration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent / Seems a water-course or an avalanche” (lines 43-45). He studies this stone and projects meaning into even its cracks and faults. Yeats imagines further meaning into the men it depicts, “[delighting] to imagine them seated” at a small temple (line 50), worshiping, as “One asks for mournful melodies; / Accomplished fingers begin to play” for the men, enrapturing them (53-54). These melodies, like the performances of Hamlet and Lear, are “mournful” in nature, though players and listeners alike derive joy from them. Of the Chinamen on the stone, “Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, / Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay” (lines 55-56). These men, literally as ancient as the stone itself, know enough to be gay in spite of their long journey and all their hardships. Yeats ends with this implicit lesson to the “hysterical women”: gaiety is not a measure of idiocy or naïveté, but rather of wisdom and art.

Pure Cynicism: The Corrupting War of Siegfried Sassoon

If Rupert Brooke writes to show the good of war, then Siegfried Sassoon has got the bad and ugly combined. His poem “Glory of Women” clearly aims to depict the war as hideous, self-defeating, and futile. The war is to him so repugnant that he must use women—traditionally symbols of virtuousness and goodness—to convey the war’s ultimately corrupting influence.

The women “love us when we’re heroes, home on leave, / Or wounded in a mentionable place” (lines 1-2), writes Sassoon, sneeringly insinuating that the women (and, by extension, all living in countries at war who are not a part of the war), though claiming to dread and fear the war, really relish in it. These naïve women “worship decorations . . . believe / That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace” (lines 3-4). What is worse, however, they “listen with delight, / By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled” as told by their soldiers (lines 5-6). These bloodthirsty women are not the fair prim conservative lasses of yesteryear; they believe at least as much in the glory of a bloody war as their sons and husbands. However, this poem is intended to be about war, not women. I believe that Sassoon uses women as his symbol because they have historically been viewed as morally above men, incorruptible and pure. If a war can turn a woman into a cruel glorifier of death, then its effect on men must be immeasurable, in other words.

The poem’s ending lines provide an interesting twist to the poem, as Sassoon speaks suddenly to another woman affected by the war: “O German mother dreaming by the fire, / While you are knitting socks to send your son / His face is trodden deeper in the mud” (lines 12-15). The German mother, like the women who “make us shells” (line 5), uses her creative and productive energy to fuel a war that she does not know anything about. Her efforts are futile, since her son is “trodden deeper in the mud,” and already dead. This ending suggests that the similar earlier line about women making shells is equally futile an enterprise: they produce shells because they think that they will help, when truly this conflict and the men involved in it are beyond help.

Like Brooke’s “The Soldier,” Sassoon’s poem is addressed to the loved ones: the mothers, sisters, and wives of soldiers. In both poems, the mention of the women is nothing more than a vehicle to get across the poet’s idea of war. Sassoon would have been familiar with Brooke’s poetry, since by 1917 it was already quite famous. Knowing the convention of addressing reassuring epistles to unknowing women, he may have decided to address his more realistic ideas of war to the women as well. Sassoon clearly uses some shocking imagery: he depicts women listening in glee as they hear how “British troops ‘retire’ / When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run, / Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood” (lines 9-11). These women love the stories of war not because they are inherently vicious or murderous, but because society has made them that way: a war-glorifying country has corrupted its every vestige of purity, even its mothers and daughters, to become like men: morally formless, increasingly disillusioned, and worshipful of a war that does no-one any good.

Self-Delusion: The Beautiful War of Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke’s 1915 poem “The Soldier” may have been just what the boys of England needed to get through the war. The poem portrays not the loud, clanging glory of the battlefield, but a different kind of war-glory: a quieter kind that persists long after the war is over, and long after some boys have gone home while others remain forever. Brooke’s poem is addressed to the loved ones of the speaker, who is a soldier; the poem is, then, spoken entirely to his wife, family, or close friends. He calmly acknowledges his own imminent death, but not to focus on himself; rather, he intends to instruct his loved ones on what to do: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England” (lines 1-3). The scariest part of any war throughout the ages has always been the sense of ceasing to be. On a personal level, the young man in question will die. But countries, ideologies, revolutions, cultures, and ways of life are all truly mortal, and never more so than during wartime. But Brooke reassures his audience that England, unlike all those mortal, worry-filled boys on the lines, can never die, since “some corner of a foreign field,” unnamed and unmarked, will nevertheless be “forever England,” and it will forever espouse English beliefs and ideals. By this poem’s inception, cynicism had already entered the war, and it would be long years before the war came to a close. But Rupert Brooke’s nameless soldier does not let those thoughts enter into his mind; he merely reminds himself and his loved ones that England is more important than any of them.

Along with the immortality of England comes its glorification through praise. The speaker of this poem is a righteous, patriotic, upstanding citizen who is worthy of public admiration; however, he credits his country with all. He claims himself nothing more than “A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, / Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam” (lines 5-6). All of this boy’s goodness and greatness he owes to a country even more good and great that made him that way. Love for his country, gratefulness at having been “A body of England’s, breathing English air, / Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home” (lines 7-8), and awe at merely being allowed to represent England in the great conflict all enable this speaker to reassure his family so much.

Brooke ignores the realistically bloody parts of war, however. His speaker “shall be / In that rich earth a richer dust concealed” (lines 3-4), saying nothing of the mangled, disfigured, bloody corpses that actually lay strewn about the battlefield. By the end of the poem, the man is nothing more than his “heart, all evil shed away, / A pulse in the Eternal mind” (lines 9-10). In truth, bodies piled high littered the battlefield, as shown in photos and in more realistic descriptions of the war. Brooke, however, chooses to ignore that gritty reality so that he can focus instead on the poetic, even beautiful parts of war. Dying, for him, is a chance to “[give] somewhere back the thoughts by England given, / Her sights and sounds; / dreams happy as her day” (lines 11-12), an opportunity at which he elates. The final line of the poem labels the man as a “[heart] at peace, under an English heaven” (line 14). In truth, it is the man’s now-useless body, lying gory and lifeless with no-one to comfort him, who lies under the supposed “English heaven.” Yet the speaker’s instructions were clear from the beginning: his loved ones should “think only this” and nothing more of him: that, however terrible his conditions of life or death may be, that he is forever England, which is forever strong.

Hopeless in Love: Thomas Hardy, continued

We like to believe that love is not based on chance: that, out in the world somewhere, someone exists for each of us, with whom each of us will someday cross paths and fall in love. Though this philosophy of love provides for a lot of successful date films, many of the world’s writers and philosophers have not subscribed to it. In Thomas Hardy’s short story “On the Western Circuit,” love is not a product of grace, fate, or any other universal force than chance. Lives are formed and ruined over the smallest circumstances, many of them totally incidental. From the first moments of the story, in fact, tiny chance decisions ultimately determine the fate of years of people’s lives.

Charles Bradford Raye, Hardy’s protagonist of sorts, did not intend to fall in love with a girl on a merry-go-round. He is merely “detained in Melchester by a small arbitration after his brethren had moved on to the next county-town” (Hardy 2). Chance brought the man to Melchester; once there, chance drew him to the throng of people at the carnival; even upon his arrival at the carnival, nothing other than chance draws him to Anna. In discovering her, he is merely looking to see the prettiest girl riding the glittering horses, and for several moments he cannot decide: “It was not that one with the light frock and light hat whom he had been at first attracted by; no, it was the one with the black cape, grey skirt, light gloves and—no, not even she, but the one behind her; she with the crimson skirt, dark jacket, brown hat and brown gloves” (Hardy 1). Had his subjective eye decided at last upon the one with the light frock or she with the black cape, the entire turn of events would have played out differently. A small decision again determined the fate of three different people.

When Mrs. Harnham, Anna’s caretaker, becomes involved, it is another chance event. Raye attempts to stroke Anna’s hand, yet “Mrs. Harnham then felt a man’s hand clasping her fingers, and from the look of consciousness on the young fellow’s face she knew the hand to be his” (Hardy 3). By chance, Raye caresses the wrong hand, and “[w]hat prompted her to refrain from undeceiving him she could hardly tell” (Hardy 3). Thus, one woman failing to correct an awkward situation can clearly lead to more confusion than what anyone involved could have considered.

These chance events and decisions prompt the rest of a story in which maid and mistress both fall in love, tragically, with the same man. Their infatuation leads to the situation where Raye marries Anna, but comes, in talking with Mrs. Harnham, to his terrible realization: “in soul and spirit I have married you, and no other woman in the world!” (Hardy 9). The bond that Raye thinks that he shares with his new wife is actually a bond that he shares with an older, and a married, woman. Love, then, in their case was not predestination or fate; rather, a simple a matter as a pretty girl being unable to read was enough to run the rails off-track for good. Chance encounters and decisions ensure that Raye, Anna, and Mrs. Harnham will always remain not quite fully satisfied in their respective marriages. None of the people involved made distinctly poor choices: Raye was a bit selfish, Anna somewhat naïve, and Mrs. Harnham too willing to indulge her senses ever more, but all are basically average people. Thus, love and attraction exist to foil plans and derail relationships, which they do with extreme effectiveness.

Hope in Death: Thomas Hardy

Writers probably always wonder what people will think of them after they pass from the world. Thomas Hardy especially, with his “strangely bifurcated literary career” (1071), must have wondered which of his writings people would remember, or even if they would remember at all. Hardy’s “Afterwards” explores this concept, as it is spoken from the point of view of a man obsessed with his own death, but concerned mostly with what people will say of him.

The most interesting part of this poem to me is the characterization of those left wondering and thinking about the speaker when he dies. Some are just “the neighbors” (line 3), one is nothing more than “a gazer” (line 7), and none are mentioned to be any close relation to the speaker. These are not family members and close friends, then, or even ardent admirers of the man who remember that “‘He was a man who used to notice such things’” (line 4); instead, they are those whom he hardly knows. This speaker, perhaps Hardy himself, cares about influencing those who will never know him well. As a writer who achieved great fame during his lifetime, Hrady influenced lots of people whom he would never meet; if his speaker in “Afterwards” is in fact himself, perhaps the poem shows a concern with how well his words will last after his passing: not to his family or friends, who will of course always remember him, but to all the others.

The speaker does not seem to fear death. Hardy writes of no grim, grisly, evil Reaper; he does not characterize death as a monster. Instead, “the Present . . . [latches] its postern behind [his] tremulous stay,” gently but firmly bidding him good-bye from the world (line 1). Many would fear dying, especially alone or at night, but Hardy only describes that fateful night as “mothy and warm, / When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,” giving it an air of comfort and familiarity rather than the alienating effect often ascribed to death (lines 9-10). In fact, he even has hope in his death; describing the church bell ringing upon his death, he says that “a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, / Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s bloom” (lines 18-19). The very bells that announce the tragedy of a man’s passing, then, can provide hope as they “rise again.” Even when the bells themselves stop, the people remain: the neighbors, acquaintances, and admirers who remark that “‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things” (line 20).

Lightning and A Warm Breast: Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur"

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur,” though concerned with the state of an overworked world, retains hope in the everlastingness of nature and God. Though “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod” along, increasingly bored and disillusioned with life, God’s glory remains. Hopkins’ picture of what man has done to the earth is not a pretty one: “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil / Is bare now” (lines 6-8). Trade and toil were to represent progress; an increase in either would lead to greater internationalism and development. Yet Hopkins characterizes this trade and toil extremely negatively: trade “sear[s],” as toil makes everything “bleared, smeared,” and filthy. Amidst all of this—perhaps the worst effect of all—people lose their humanity: “nor can foot feel, being shod” (line 8). Even a foot, the most basic and down-to-earth part of a man, can no longer feel the earth beneath it, since it has been clothed and desensitized. That, it seems, is how Hopkins sees this so-called progress: clothing that man can put on. Trade and toil make us money and give us possessions; they provide for our families; they determine our success, but all at the price of really feeling and knowing the glory of God.

Interestingly, this negative series of lines about humanity is sandwiched between two parts describing God and nature. The first four lines of the poem are about God’s lightning-powerful love. God’s glory is everywhere; “[t]he world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as it would be charged before a thunderstorm (line 1). This glory does not merely build up and remain passive. Instead, “[i]t will flame out, like shining from shook foil” (line 2). God’s glory flutters down, catching the light and sparkling as it falls to the earth. Yet there is a gradualness even still to it, since it “gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed” (lines 3-4). The reference to something being crushed is probably intended to refer to olive oil, which is also referenced quite often in the Bible. Olive oil is used for anointing people, as well as for cooking, for providing light, and many other functions. Thus, as God’s grandeur is a mysterious, impossible, incredible phenomenon like lightning, it is also in the everyday miracle of simple fruit.

The end of the poem brings the reader back to this sort of happy, hopeful note. Nature, fortunately, “is never spent,” despite all of man’s failures (line 9). In Nature, the “dearest freshness” lives “deep down things,” where it cannot be quenched (line 10). Man could always repent, implies Hopkins. Nature and God are both accepting of repentant sinners against them: Nature because it can never be extinguished, and God in his infinite grace. At the last, Hopkins declares his eternal surprise with Nature, as “the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings” (lines 13-14). Even in his last line of the poem, Hopkins discovers something new and beautiful about creation. Nature, then, is ever-surprising and ever-evolving, which complements God as the eternal, unchanging one. Between these two points of hope, man has only to turn from his world of trade and toil to be enveloped in shook foil, a warm breast, and bright wings.

Nurture Making Nature: Oscar Wilde's Art of Lying

It’s hard for me to see Oscar Wilde as anything but witticisms and aphorisms; though he was one of the most wildly intelligent writers of the Victorian (or perhaps any) Era, my experiences with his writing, mostly because of having read The Importance of Being Earnest about three dozen times, have led me to believe the comedy-of-manners sort of writing to be his forte. I would never have anticipated Wilde to have written such beautiful poetry, or the Platonic-style dialogue as is the excerpt from The Decay of Lying. However, even in this short except, Wilde’s persistent prose style of pithy observations and witty remarks remains, and I think the style of Platonic dialogue very much suits him.

Wilde’s inimitable style comes through even with Vivian’s first lines: “Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty” (832). Such a seemingly nonsensical and flippant statement, characteristic of much of Wilde’s writing, often comes immediately prior to an interesting description or criticism of the world. Indeed, Vivian does not disappoint, next remarking that “[p]eople tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us . . . My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature” (832). Vivian goes on to claim that Art merely shows Nature’s own imperfections, which runs expressly contrary to Plato’s assertion that art is merely a shadow of nature (footnote 1, p. 831). Plato believed that all art came from nature, and that it therefore could never be as good as nature. It is out of this tradition that Wilde can claim that the art of lying is a lost art that ought to be revived.

Vivian believes that “Nature follows the landscape painter then, and takes her effects from him,” instead of the other way around (840). He references the Impressionistic painters, who glorified such mundane subjects as bridges and dank, murky London streets as artistic objects. Instead of Nature being some “great mother who has borne us,” she is “our creation . . . Things are because we see them, and how we see it, depend son the Arts that have influenced us” (840). Therefore, though a painter or poet may be inspired by a beautiful scene, an even more beautiful description, whether in words or some other artistic medium, will make the original scene even more beautiful. William Wordsworth taught us to appreciate daffodils, Monet water-lilies. Without these men, we would not have the beauty of Nature that we have, claims Wilde. Fog is the example that he uses, since they were artistically in fashion: “people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects” (841). Indeed, Nature itself occasionally falls out of fashion, persisting in showing sunsets when everyone knows that “[s]unsets are quite old-fashioned” (841).

Wilde gives a great deal of respect (though much of it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek) to what man has produced. In his more famous works, like his plays as well as his only novel, he focuses on very trivial things, like the famous passages in The Importance of Being Earnest that legislate rules for casual flirting, or the eating of cucumber sandwiches. Wilde seemed to find his passion in the seemingly trivial: those elements of Nature, art, or culture that seemed unimportant to the rest of the world, but truly speak volumes about the nature of people. By having Nature imitate Art instead of the other way around, Wilde sets his readership up to make his art—his ridiculous and hilarious interpretations of high-society people—be the truth, leading (hopefully!) to a radical rethinking of actual society.

Leaving Glory for Yellow Hair: the Poetry of Robert Browning

Robert Browning wrote about all sorts of inherently fascinating, even alluring, subjects: his Childe Roland, his many engaging plays, and all of the beguiling characters apparent in his dramatic monologues. Yet he saves an innovative stanza form that he invented himself to describe nothing more than a love story taking place on an historic location. This apparent contradiction speaks at once to the themes present in “Love Among the Ruins,” a beautiful poem about present love’s triumph over past glory. The place described is singularly beautiful: “such plenty and perfection, see, of grass / Never was!” (lines 25-26). Rolling, gorgeous hills frame the speaker’s sight, and it is a perfect scenic representation of a thoroughly lovely pasture.

Not only is this place beautiful; it is significant: here, “a multitude of men breathed joy and woe / Long ago; / Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame / Struck them tame” (31-34). Clearly, this site is that of some epic war, a war that inspired men to do things they had never done and feel emotions they had never felt before. Browning’s speaker spends several stanzas idolizing this great city of old, that gave so much to the modern day and left such wonderful stories.

In fact, the speaker seems so wrapped up in the circumstances of this ancient city that it is scarcely noticeable when he transitions away from it, to the plain statement “That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair / Waits [him] there” (lines 55-56). Browning proceeds to compare this yellow-haired, eager-eyed girl with the great kind of old, describing where “the king looked, where she looks now,” as being the same (line 59). Of course, the poem advances to its oft-quoted conclusion, scorning material and warlike glory: “For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin! / Shut them in, / With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best” (lines 81-84). If taken line-by-line, Browning spends many more precious words on the beauty of the ancient city than the beauty of the girl; he tells its story more thoroughly and well before he makes any mention of her. Thus, the reader knows that he really means his final statement—“Love is best”—after giving the matter careful consideration.

The distinctive stanza scheme of this poem, with its long trochaic lines punctuated by short rhymes, can be a puzzle indeed. Initially, the poem is difficult to access; the wildly atypical rhyme scheme seems unnecessary. However, given the general theme of the poem—that of love being best, and of individual happiness, no matter how ordinary, triumphing over any story of blood and glory—the line scheme fits quite well. Browning is a man given to extravagance in his words, but not in these short lines. Indeed, he saves his most flowing, graceful turns of phrase for the long lines, leaving his short ones simple and to-the-point. All the while, however, Browning knows which lines people pay more attention to: the short ones. His beautiful, memorable words (like “the quiet-coloured end of evening” (line 1) as well as many others), in a sense, pale in comparison to the simple ones with their equally simple words, in the same way that the stories and glories of war pale in comparison to one simple yellow-haired girl, waiting in an old tower for her love.

Three Little Words, Tried but True: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Perhaps every great poet eventually explores the power of the written or spoken word in his or her literature. In her sonnet numbered 21 in Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barrett Browning deals with this very topic: specifically, the words of love. Her poem is primarily an exhortation to her love, that he might “[s]ay over again, and yet once over again, / That thou dost love me” (lines 1-2). No matter how many times her lover Robert may utter those words, she knows that she cannot be satiated in them. She knows that to Robert, himself a writer, “the word repeated / Should seem ‘a cuckoo-song’” (lines 2-3), a mindless repetition. Cuckoos are known not only for their repetitive song but also for being daft, thoughtless birds; no lover would want his words to amount to nothing more than a cuckoo-song. But Browning reminds her love that “never to the hill or plain, / Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain / Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed” (lines 4-6). If Robert’s loving words are the “cuckoo-strain,” then Elizabeth herself is “the fresh Spring in all her green completed.” Browning, as described in the introduction to her life and works (528-29), was a bit of a recluse during these years of her life, though she had already achieved poetic fame. It took a cuckoo-song—repetitive, unoriginal, seemingly mindless to all but the lovers themselves—to draw Elizabeth out of her seclusion and into her being Spring incarnate, the epitome of newness and freshness. The simplest of phrases, then, when completely sincere, can accomplish more than all the world’s flowery language ever could.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning deals with her own doubts in this poem, as well. She describes to her love: “I amid the darkness greeted / By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt’s pain / Cry, ‘Speak once more—thou lovest!’” (lines 8-9). To allay her doubts—doubts that many a lover faces, especially a new lovers—Browning requests no more tokens of love than words, which are so precious to both of them. She needs nothing but to hear (or, rather, read) simple words of love. Though her lover may fear that these words, with great frequency, will lose meaning, Barrett Browning argues: “Who can fear / Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll, / Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?” (lines 9-11). The stars of the sky and flowers of the field are so insurmountably numerous, yet additions to them only leave them looking lovelier and more spectacular. So it is with words that really mean something, like the words “I love you”: false, cheap words would fade with repetition, but true lovers need not worry about the potency of their words.

Only in the last two lines of her sonnet does Browning turn from the central themes of repetition and words. Almost as an afterthought, she adds, “only minding, Dear, / To love me also in silence with thy soul” (lines 13-14). In this final couplet, Browning acknowledges the potential emptiness of words alone. In tradition surrounding the English sonnet form, the final couplet provides a “turn” and is generally the most meaningful portion of the poem; essentially, then, Browning communicates to her reader—her lover and eventual husband, Robert Browning—that all of the assurances she made regarding words and their meaning only work if the speaker or writer truly means his words. If Robert says that he loves her but the “silence” of his “soul” does not agree, then the spell will be broken: the beautiful cuckoo-song, the “fresh Spring in all her green completed,” the stars in the sky and flowers in the field, all of it will be rendered totally meaningless. Thus, the conventions of love are beautiful, never trite, and always welcomed unless they are not heartfelt, at which point the lovers are wrong to even bother pretending.

The Tide of Sorrow: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break,” he begins and ends with the image of the sea, breaking on cold unfeeling stones, while he misses a dearly departed friend. Two distinct ideas permeate this short poem: in one, Tennyson describes his surroundings; in the other, meanwhile, he describes his own sorrow at the loss of a close one. These two developing strains in his short poem do not meld together; they remain separate entities. The first stanza of Tennyson’s poem evinces this trend perfectly: “Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! / And I would that my tongue could utter / The thoughts that arise in me” (lines 1-4). The first two lines fit with one another, but clearly do not logically lead to the next two lines. Tennyson seems to go from a description of a gray beach scene to a one of his own frustration with his emotions.

Tennyson’s poem captures this divergence especially in the third stanza: “And the stately ships go on / To their haven under the hill; / But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand, / And the sound of a voice that is still!” (lines 9-12). Again, the last two lines seem oddly inserted, especially coming as they do after images of a fisherman’s boy, a sailor lad, and stately ships. The grammatical structure of the stanza (including the fact that it is all written to be one sentence) would seem to indicate that it contains one idea, though clearly two distinct ideas are present within it. This inconsistency is characteristic of the human mind when it is consumed by something: by fear, by anxiety, or especially by sorrow. Tennyson’s words, which come across as a failed attempt to escape his grief, actually express the nature of that grief better than a poem devoted solely to a description of it; there is something undeniably tragic about a person surrounded by the joy of one boy who “shouts with his sister at play” (line 6) and another who “sings in his boat on the bat” (line 8), but he cannot focus for more than a fleeting moment on the joys of life, when he is so consumed by its sorrows.

The structure of the poem itself mirrors the waves: the beginning and ending, with their similar images of waves breaking on a cold shore, are sharply contrasted with the jubilant images in the middle. All the while, the poem similarly undulates between setting and feeling as it does between joyful and sorrowful images. The sea can be as cold and insistent as it is warm and enfolding. The fisherman’s boy and the sailor lad are helped and loved by the sea, and the stately ships that “go on / To their haven under the hill” float serenely above the sea, admiring of its sparkle. But for Tennyson, his experience at the sea is all “cold gray stones” (line 2) in an unfeeling, indifferent world. Tennyson knows that the world moves on without him, just as the waves rise and fall with the tide, and he is left with the sorrow of loss.

The Sacrifices for Progress: Dickens and the Railroad

Charles Dickens seems to try all sorts of analogies to understand and justify the spread of the railroad, but he finds—as he intends his audience to find—that he cannot. One way that he tries to reconcile this atrocious phenomenon is by describing it as accidental, as if by wishful thinking he could make it so. In an excerpt from his Dombey and Son, he begins his description of the railroad as “[t]he first shock of a great earthquake” which “had . . . rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre” (496). If Earth itself had torn the land apart, the experience could have been written off as an unfortunate but unplanned incident. It is as if Dickens cannot face the full reality: people brainstormed, planned, measured, and dug in the ground, ruining nature and people for the sake of a questionable progress. Dickens goes on to further describe the wreckage as “a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, [laying] topsy-turvy”: whatever this development may be, it is not going as planned (496). Elsewhere, “confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond,” but should not have been one (496). Dickens’ wording provides a stark contrast: “treasures” have been neglected as they steep in filthy water that should not exist; no wonder these treasures are “confused” as they, like the land and people around them, fade away to dingy pollution.

Throughout the entire first paragraph, where Dickens first describes the “great earthquake,” down through “Babel towers of chimneys” to “[h]ot springs and fiery eruptions,” it is difficult to know precisely to what Dickens refers (496). In the second paragraph, Dickens relents and provides a more prosaic description: “the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and . . . trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement” (496). This single sentence comprises the second paragraph in its entirety; it looks and reads rather out of place in comparison to the preceding paragraph. This formal element serves to enhance Dickens’ view. Dickens, a man generally given to lengthy descriptions, would only give such apparent short shrift to an idea if he were making a specific point by this stylistic element. In short, he is being sarcastic. Dickens lengthily pans this so-called improvement, and even in attempting to be approving, he quickly falls away in disgust.

Probably my favorite description in that first paragraph is that of “Babel towers of chimneys” (496). The reference to the Babel tower, an Old Testament story wherein a group of people trying to build a tower to reach God only to have God splinter the group and divide them, not only refers to the height of the chimneys but also the circumstances of their being built. The Babel tower was built in the name of progress and even in the name of God, though it was truly for neither; as a result, it led to confusion and strife. Dickens makes a poignant parallel to his world: these “towers” of sorts, also built in the name of progress, may well suffer the same fate. God split the Babel tower builders by inventing a new language for each of them, so that they were unable to understand one another ever again. Perhaps, Dickens suggests, these railroad tycoons speak a new, frightening language. People who once communicated freely may never again understand one another, all thanks to these supposed beacons of progress.

By the end of this excerpt, Dickens outright compares the ground to the people: “If the miserable waste ground . . . could have laughed, it would have laughed it to scorn, like many of the miserable neighbors” (497). The land has become gray, dry, filthy, poor, and miserable; the people had become the same way. As the railroads deplete the land of its precious natural resources, leaving behind rusting pools of filthy water and dingy soil, so it leaves gray, dusty people, desperate people. People became wretched, like “patches of wretched vegetation,” and had their life depleted from them, as the soil itself was depleted. In fact, the railroad barons treated people as if they were land, and nothing more than a resource to be used and then forgotten, a behavior with which Dickens seems to take great exception.

Oh Dear, Not Another Sonnet: John Keats

John Keats introduces his “Incipit Altera Sonneta,” originally found in a letter to his brothers, by criticizing other sonnet forms: the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet “does not suit the language over-well,” while the English or Shakespearean “has seldom a pleasing effect” at its end (437). The sonnet’s very title, literally translated “here begins another sonnet,” expresses his boredom and disillusionment with the form. Though he does “not pretend to have succeeded,” further suggesting that he thinks the sonnet—indeed, perhaps even the English poetic tradition itself—is irreparably poor at expression. However, Keats is a man who made his living out of words: a man who, by the very nature of his life and profession, has placed implicated trust in the systems of poetry and the English language. Thus, he speaks not only about the futility of the language itself, but largely about the inability of poets and supposed masters of English to use it well.

Keats acknowledges in his first line that perhaps “English must be chain’d,” never to be set free. Her captors are “dull rhymes” (line 1), representing equally dull poets. Not only is she chained, however; Keats intensifies the fate of English in the next line, referring to it as Andromeda, who was tied down only to be continuously ravaged by a monster. Not only do poets routinely chain English, tragically not allowing her to reach her full poetic potential, but they torture her. Almost as quickly as Keats fashions this horrific image of the poor personified language, he leaves it. Instead of resolving to rescue English, Keats resigns himself to finding “[s]andals more interwoven & complete / To fit the naked foot of Poesy” (lines 6-7). Poor poetry is tied to a rock and raped, and Keats offers to find her better shoes. This image echoes his introduction to his poem, where he claims not to have succeeded in writing a better sonnet. Using their genius, he seems to imply, poets like him could free the poor Andromeda-like beauty, yet they continually fail, and must be content with finding her sandals and, later, better garlands.

Keats’ view of the poet’s relationship to the poem is much like the intended relationship between a man and a woman. The language is poor, helpless, dependent upon the poet to unlock it before it can become anything; even when it is unlocked, it belongs to the poet in question: in that sense, it could never really be free. The poet, on the other hand, has responsibility of the language and mastery over it, just as a husband has over his wife. The Muse of language, then, does not really inspire the poet. Instead, he owns her. Keats depicts poets uncaring of the plight of language, garlanding and dressing her for their own purposes instead of loving her. I think Keats implicates himself, as well: he concludes that “if we may not let the Muse be free, / She will be bound with Garlands” (lines 13-14). His use of “we” includes himself among the list of poets that systematically own the Muse.

These masters, he knows, are not always kind or generous ones. He calls poets “Misers of sound & syllable,” hoarding their possessions and only dispensing of them extremely meticulously (line 10). They are grudging of their literary possessions “no less / Than Midas of his coinage,” referring to the famous legend of King Midas, who hoarded gold until it became his downfall (lines 10-11). Midas was so tightfisted with his gold despite having an abundance of wealth, and so are the poets: every English poet has all the words of the language available to him, yet he pinches them like Midas his pennies. Ultimately, Midas’ fate was sealed when he got the one wish of his dreams: to have everything he touched turn to gold. He could not eat, for his every morsel turned to inedible gold before his eyes. His downfall came from his initial assumption that gold was his to possess, to manipulate, and to idolize. This assumption fits with the way Keats has described the poet’s relationship to language: they put her up on a pedestal, both to idolize her and so that she cannot escape.

Keats implores his fellow poets: “let us be / Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath Crown” (lines 11-12). These leaves, representing poetic achievement, are the desire of all poets. However, the leaves themselves are not the misers of language that Keats has just described; on the contrary, they inspire men to countless sounds and syllables and always have more to spare. They keep men writing and effectively produce more poetic words than imaginable. Keats cannot imagine a totally free Muse, he freely admits, suggesting that perhaps a far greater poet than he could be up to the task. Yet as long as he must possess poor English, he may as well bind her with garlands that she finds pleasing, so that she will bless him with her gift.

Remembering the Man, not the Poet: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his own epitaph, a literary task daunting for many reasons. He begins his epitaph with a command: “Stop, Christian Passer-by—Stop, child of God,” he instructs (line 1). He uses “Christian Passer-by” to refer to anyone who might pass his gravestone; therefore, he commands all who come near him to look upon his gravestone. From the first words, it would seem that Coleridge has some important message to impart to all God-fearing souls. He continues the demands, later instructing the reader to “lift one thought in prayer” for his soul (line 4); at the epitaph’s end, he recalls having asked Christ for “Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame” (line 7) and charges to his reader: “Do thou the same!” (line 8). I am not sure whether he wants the reader of his epitaph to pray for mercy and forgiveness for Coleridge, or for themselves: the wording is too vague to know conclusively. Perhaps this command is, as Dr. Glance mentions in the accompanying podcast, Coleridge’s attempt to talk about anything and eventually talk about everything. Perhaps he is using himself as an example and effectively saying to all people, ‘do not care about praise and fame! Be only concerned with the fate of your own souls, for Christ can give you more than fickle humanity ever can!’ If his final command does refer to all people in this way, this order would be precisely the reason why Coleridge began his poem with such urgency that all people would pause to read his short poem: their fulfillment of life may depend upon it.

Coleridge’s only description of himself as a poet—which is how anyone today would remember him—is decidedly unsure. He does say that “Beneath this sod / A poet lies” (lines 2-3), but then he tentatively qualifies this statement: “or that which once seem’d he” (line 3), rendering the description of himself as a poet uncertain. The use of the word “seem” in particular, reminiscent of many English poets—among them Shakespeare, in famous lines from Hamlet (“Seems? Nay, madam, I know not ‘seems’”)—who used the word to refer to pretense, makes Coleridge’s status as a true poet dubious. Soon, Coleridge arrives upon a description of himself that he is more able to support: “That he who many a year with toil of breath / Found death in life, may here find life in death!” (lines 5-6), he pleads. This statement is a much more bold one than the earlier description of himself, and a more purposefully well-crafted statement: it is more poetic, with the second half of line six being a reverse of the first half (a technique that I believe is called chiasmus), and it’s even got an exclamation point at the end. Coleridge clearly intends this statement of his being to be more powerful and convincing than the previous.

Coleridge’s work does not seem like that of a man who “[f]ound death in life,” whatever description he may use of himself. His poetry often concerns itself with the supernatural, the beautiful, that which is full of life. Yet as a dying wish, he would prefer to be known as the man who found death in life than a poet. As a poet, he had achieved significant success prior to his death in 1834, but apparently it was not the kind of success that meant much to him. Regardless, he asks at last what all men should ask: “Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame” (line 7). These words, penned by a man already glorified with praise and fame (though not as much as literary scholars give to him now), can be interpreted in many ways. On one hand, perhaps it’s easy for him to say that he doesn’t care for laudation now that he has already achieved those ends. However—a theory I believe to be more in tune with the rest of his work, as well as the rest of his poem and the details of his life—perhaps Coleridge, looking back on his own sins and failures (most notably his drug addiction), wishes that he could trade his praise for mercy, and his fame for forgiveness. Apparently tortured throughout his life by his inability to break his addiction to opium (324), Coleridge would no doubt, on his deathbed, regret some of his life’s decisions. In the end, he has no captivating ancient mariner and no stately pleasure-dome: Coleridge has only his own demons to face, with no hope of fighting them.

The Accidental Poet: Dorothy Wordsworth

Dorothy Wordsworth “should detest the idea of setting [herself] as an Author,” yet that is precisely what the editors of this anthology, and many others, do (290). As students of literature, both in the lifelong sense and the summer-of-2009 sense, we cannot possibly divorce ourselves from the additional meaning that being published lends a writer, particularly when this publication is in such an anthology. Thus, when we read lines like those in “When Shall I Treat Your Garden Path?” or the other poetry chosen for inclusion in our anthology, we are immediately moved to liken them to lines of great literature like that of Dorothy’s brother. However, that little eight-line poem is no more than a cute letter to a friend, written competently but very simply. Many, if not most, women of the time composed short verses to their friends and for their own amusement; Dorothy’s literary genius is not such that it ought to secure her place among the hallowed poets through English history, an illustrious group of which her brother is certainly a part. Dorothy’s inclusion in the studies of her contemporaries as well as modern scholars may be more circumstantial than merit-based: she lived and wrote at a time when literary critics were beginning to reconsider the value of a woman in literature.

All this is not to say that Dorothy Wordsworth is insignificant; she most certainly is not. In fact, she and her associated work may even be more significant than the equivalent work from men of the early 19th century—but such significance stems not from the absolute value of the poetry itself, but rather from her circumstances. Dorothy was born a mere four years before Jane Austen; by the time of Dorothy’s first bout of illness, when she did a fair amount of her writing, Austen had already published all of her works: in fact, she had already died. Other significant women, too, wrote around the same time period, and wrote works of poetry and prose that have endured through the generations. These women, including Dorothy Wordsworth who did not even consider herself a writer, proved themselves to be intellectually and literarily the equals of men.

Despite Dorothy Wordsworth being an average woman and an average poet, her prose is indeed full of beautiful imagery, though it, too, is little more than an average journal. The description of the field of daffodils, perhaps the same scene that inspired William Wordsworth to pen his “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud,” is full of imagery and figurative language. She writes that she and her brother “fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up,” showing a lively imagination and a cleverness with words (296). She personifies the daffodils, describing how “some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced” (296), an image strikingly similar to those found in her brother’s poem. In fact, Dorothy may have directly influenced her brother’s poem of a similar theme, which would be quite a literary achievement indeed. Though she is an average woman simply writing in a journal, she clearly has a natural affinity for the finer points of language. She appreciated beauty and knew how to create it for herself with words. Perhaps this quality does not make her a literary genius of the line of Milton, Shakespeare, and even her brother; yet it does make her a talented writer, moved by the same beauty as her brother and equal to the task of evoking that beauty in language.

In fact, it may be Dorothy Wordworth’s average-ness that makes her so significant on a large scale. A woman in the past would have to have been extraordinarily talented to even merit mention, let alone garner fame. The realms of literature and politics, though, evolved; they evolved to the point where a simple woman with a gift for words can stand alongside men in the history and literature books. It is, therefore, Dorothy’s circumstance more than her genius that grants her the right to be a revered writer, which makes her a small part of some of the greatest achievements a writer can attain: to change the way people think, to right widespread wrongs in the world, and to add a new kind of voice to the great dialogue of history.

Learning from a Child: the "Experiemental" Poetry of William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth’s short poem “We Are Seven,” composed from a trifling meeting with one hardly significant young girl, well represents the ideals of the Romantic period that Wordsworth himself assisted in inaugurating. Even the subject matter itself rings of Romantic ideals: Wordsworth writes of “[a] simple child,” nothing more or less (line 1). The Romantics railed against industrialism and urban sprawl, necessarily focusing on the individual to advance their theoretical purposes. Wordsworth contains his views on life, death, and even God within this single poem: a poem simple in rhyme and meter, small in scope, and not terribly significant in subject matter.

Wordsworth clearly relies upon Biblical number symbolism in the writing of his poem. Six tends to represent sinfulness, or the best that man (or another created being; hence, why Satan’s number is 666) can do on his own, while seven always refers to the perfection of God and what man can accomplish by relying solely on God. The child in the poem has six siblings, divided into pairs: “‘two of us at Conway dwell, / And two are gone to sea. / Two of us in the church-yard lie,’” she tells the speaker (lines 19-21). Without her, the children make six: two at Conway, two at sea, two dead. Neither speaker nor readers meet any of these siblings, so no-one receives any revelation or enlightenment from their existence. This seventh girl—symbolic of God’s perfection—is the one who makes meaning of the rest. This little eight-year-old, who “[has] a rustic, woodland air” (line 9) about her seems simple, but it is she who becomes the teacher. She, though young and apparently unworthy, teaches a nonbeliever about life and death, an occupation strikingly similar to that of Jesus, the poor carpenter’s son who, at a similar age, was found in the temple preaching about life and death. Implicitly, then, the reader comes to trust the wisdom of this little girl, because the girl is compared in the purest way to God’s own wisdom and perfection. Romantics, who could be critical of the organized church, are likely to see more of God in the faith of a little girl than in the pomp and splendor of the Church. Wordsworth imbues this young “cottage girl” (line 5) with the authority necessary to disperse wisdom on life and death.

Death, then, is not the end of anything. This little girl loves her siblings who have died as much as she did when they lived; in fact, she treats them much the same, sitting near the spots where they are buried, she “[sits] and [sings] to them” (line 44). Though the speaker of the poem protests much, arguing, “‘But they are dead; those two are dead! / Their spirits are in heaven,” so their sister must no longer count them among her siblings, the girl will not be swayed (lines 65-66). The girl is kind but persistent, and the speaker ends with this image of her: “The little Maid would have her will, / And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’” (lines 68-69). Though death may be the end for the speaker—implied to be well into adulthood, by the opening four lines fondly and distantly describing youth—such is not the case for this wise young girl. Life is comprised of so much more than merely walking upon the surface of the earth: life is all around, and the faithful can find companionship in lifeless bodies just as much as in boys and girls who run and play.

As brilliant with wordplay as he is with the play of ideas, Wordsworth chose to write his last stanza—only one of seventeen stanzas in “We Are Seven”—with five lines instead of four. While each previous stanza contains the simple rhyme scheme of ABAB, this final stanza displays the rhyme scheme ABCCB. One line in the entirety of the poem, one line out of 69 lines, has no partner: the already-quoted line “‘But they are dead; those two are dead!’” (line 65). This line was not meant to have a companion line to validate its existence: though Wordsworth writes as though he were the speaker, his words throughout the poem side with the young girl’s views on life and death, not the speaker’s. This line summarizes the ideas found in the rest of the poem: Wordsworth comments upon an old society that refuses to change its views of life, death, and nature, and a new one, willing to open itself up to a world that defies boundaries.

Confusion, Religion, and Poetry: William Blake

William Blake proposes a new definition for a poet: speaking of Milton, he estimates that "'[t]he reason Milton wrote in fetters when / he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of / Devils & Hell . . . is because he was a true Poet and / of the Devils party without knowing it" (75). Blake, a poet himself and a man careful with words, chose "true Poet" intentionally; he intends the word to describe not only Milton but many before him and many after him, including himself. To be poet, then, is to feel the attraction toward "the Devils party." 

            Given his "All Religions Are One," then, in which he claims that "The Religions of all Nat-/-ions are derived from each/ Nations different reception/ of the Poetic Genius," by which he means the poetic soul inherent in every man (77). Men created religion, and different men created different religions. If every man possesses within himself a true poet, and every true poet is concerned more with hell than heaven, it is no small wonder that the cultures and religions of the world spend far more time imagining and fearing their negative afterlife than their positive. In the same way that Hell provided a far more colorful backdrop for Milton's Paradise Lost than Heaven with its boring angels, hell enters into our imaginations, our literature, our television programming, and our swear word vocabulary. Far more people come to Christianity out of paralyzing fear of Hell than of rapturous joy at the prospect of Heaven. 

            Perhaps to be a poet is also to be contradictory about one's ideas of heaven and of hell. In "The Little Black Boy," found in Songs of Innocence and of Experience," Blake writes from the perspective of this little black boy: "I am black, but O! my soul is white . . . But I am black as if bereav'd of light" (80, line 2, 4). While little white boys are "White as an angel," (80, line 3), this boy is black: black as devils, black as evil, black as hell, black as a place with no light, say the implied comparisons. In fact, the little black boy is black--"sun-burnt," describes his mother (80, line 15) because of excess light, not lack of it. Our purpose on the earth, the boy's mother goes on to say, is for "our souls [to learn] the heat [of God] to bear" (81, line 17). In that case, the black boy--the boy described as looking like hell itself because of his blackness--is more able to bear heat, and therefore closer to God's will. 

            At the poem's end, Blake writes that the black boy and the white boy will both rejoice around God's tent once they are able. At that time, 

  Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear, 

  To lean in joy upon our fathers knee

  And then Ill stand and stroke his silver hair, 

  And be like him and he will then love me. (81, 25-29)

The mention of "silver hair" sounds like an image that would be associated with God, but Blake seems to be still speaking of the "little English boy," the white boy that he has always longed to be. The little black boy will "be like him" somehow, and then he can be loved by this boy, who bears the properties of God and the angels themselves. It is unclear whether the white boy and the black boy both change to be something new and like each other, or whether Blake imagines the black boy changing and the white boy staying as he was: "White as an angel," as he was from the beginning (80, line 3). 

            This confusion is mirrored in the color plates that Blake illustrated for this poem. The plate depicts Christ, holding a praying white boy in his arms, while the black boy stands behind, his hand on the shoulder of the English boy (color plates 6 and 7). In some versions, the black boy and white boy are still different colors, and in some they are both the same shadowy grey color. So whether the black boy means a physical change when he insists that he will be like the white boy or merely a spiritual change is not even concluded by a graphic representation of their relationship. One thing is clear: the black boy ends the poem speaking of the white boy, saying that "he will then love me," (line 28), but in the plate, the white boy does not seem to be paying him any attention at all, let alone loving him. Clearly, Blake does not intend a clear-cut description of the black boy, the white boy, God, or their situation as a whole. This ambiguity is characteristic of Blake's writing in general: he asks more questions than he answers, and he pours great meaning into symbols that he subsequently casts doubt upon. 

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Ms. Smith!

     Howdy! I'm Hannah. I'm a rising senior and an English/education major who has somehow managed to evade ENG264 until now (I'm minoring in anthropology and theatre, which provides for some interesting scheduling!). Someday I hope to attend graduate school for linguistic anthropology (feel free to ask me what that is; everyone else does). I'm taking other classes this summer, as well: first session I have intro to theatre at 8AM, and second session I am precepting for English108, a class that rising freshmen will be taking. 

     I have never taken an online course before, but my roommate Meredith took this same class last summer and had a great experience with it. I've also never had a class with Dr. Glance before, which seems crazy, given that I'm a fourth-year English major, so here's my chance. I have a lot of questions about an online class. Dr. Glance proposes to "emulate" a traditional classroom setting, and I wonder first, if that can be done. My bigger question, though, is to what degree should that be done? An online course is a unique experience, and perhaps trying to make it match the traditional classroom setting that it can never be is selling it short. Regardless, I'm interested to explore my own ideas and those of others regarding the existence and existentialism of the online course. Mostly because I'm a nerd. 

     I would ordinarily be nervous about remembering assignments and chats when I don't have a professor and classmates to remind me, but fortunately my boyfriend and I are both in this class; therefore, it's his fault if I forget, not y'all's. I will confess that I am a bit nervous about getting it all done. Between classes and working (I work at Wendy's...thrilling, no?), some of my days are busier than others. It may require some, uh, creative scheduling to get it all in. Ultimately, that's why I'm taking an online class: for the flexibility that it provides. 

     Glancing over the roster in Blackboard, I only know two people in this class, I think (hi Laura and Corbs!), so I'm also glad to be getting to know sixteen new people this summer. And now you know me!