Notes

I’ve omitted a briefer and inferior second stanza which, to judge from a note by Carleton Brown, editor of English Lyrics of the XIII Century, didn’t originally belong with the poem.

I’ve resisted the temptation to modernize the spelling at all. Even changing –et to –eth (slacket/slaketh) weakens the bite of the lines.

Gordon Harvey found this one.

I’ve taken the text from R.T. Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics (1964). The online version is less user-friendly. I’ve limited the glosses, most of them Davies’s, to words whose meanings it’s difficult or impossible for the non-specialist to guess. By and large, given the concreteness of the situation and the primal feelings being voiced, what a word looks as if it ought to mean is most likely what it does mean. “Childis” and “sonis,” for example, are obviously “child’s” and “son’s.”

The spelling is more or less phonetic, but with “e” on the end of a word (“make”) mostly sounded slightly, like the “e” in “Rilke,” when the next word begins with a consonant, but unvoiced when the next word begins with a vowel. The movement of the verse is lilting, so if a line seems jerky and too short, it’s probably because one’s mispronouncing something. In a line like “Thus to be bored with nailes sere,” all the “e’s” need to be sounded. With “And pulle it out sore bledand,” there has to be a slight pause after “out,” and the “e” of “sore” needs sounding slightly. The second syllable of “bledand,” Ian Robinson informs me, is simply a regional variant of “-ing,” and it was acceptable then to rhyme a stressed syllable with an unstressed one. Each line contains a slight pause (caesura) somewhere, with two stressed syllables on either side of it.

The term “stress” as used here does not imply any dramatic departure from normal speech. In the sentence just completed, the first syllable of “normal”  and the second syllables of “imply,” “dramatic,” and “departure” are stressed (i.e., receive more emphasis), relative to the other syllables in those words.
 

This magnificent seven-stanza poem comes from Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, in which faithless Cresseid (Chaucer’s Creseyde, Shakespeare’s Cressida) is smitten with leprosy by the gods. When you click onto the scrollable page, search with “Cresseid’s Complaint” or “O sop of sorrow”. “Lament” seems a better (modern) characterization of it than “complaint.”

The poem is a poem and not a linguistic obstacle-course, the lines are essentially ten-syllable ones, and a number of unglossed words become more familiar when one reads the poem out loud and endeavours to feel and sound Scottish.

The Elizabeth here is the first queen of Henry VII, who died in childbirth in 1502.

The text is from Emrys Jones’ New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse (1991). The spelling is modernized there, so you lose the distinction between “ask’d” (one syllable) and “asked” (two), which functions a bit like the mute terminal “e” in French poetry, which is sounded or has a sounded value when followed by a consonant, with benefit to the flexibility and heft of a line. But the gain in non-“period” immediacy more than compensates for it, and I’ve simply added a few stress marks.

The metre is of the same flexible kind that one has in various poems by Wyatt. One needs to adjust to get the feel of speech as one reads. In the first line of stanza 2, ”old” and the first syllable of “worthy” would have about equal weight. “Marriage,” coming from the French, probably would not have collapsed yet into “marridge,” and would be three syllables. Probably too, “ prince,” the first syllable of “Arthur,” and “mine” would be about equal, with less emphasis on “own.”

It’s a lovely poem, about loving as much as about dying.

In Forms of Discovery, Yvor Winters remarks that though “Lament of the Maister of Erskyn”

I’ve done my bit to help keep it afloat.

However, he quotes the poem (from an 1821 edition) in what seems to me an unappealing form—long-line quatrains with strong caesuras, plus internal rhymes that the mind’s eye and ear keep hunting for, at the expense of the sentiments expressed. E.g.,

Since the printed text is a score for aural performance and no good purpose seems served by tucking away the rhymes, I’ve reformatted the poem. The original is on pages 12–13 of Forms.

The reverse practice on the Web of printing stanzaic poems without breaks between the stanzas lacks any excuse that I can think of.

Center-aligning lines so that normal stanzaic poems look like miniature odes presumably results from a mistaken notion of what looks nice to the eye, regardless of resulting interferences with the ear.

Imperfect computer skills may be responsible for the left-aligning of poems like Donne’s “The Sun Rising” and Yeats’ “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” in which the indents are necessary indicators of the rhetorical structures of the stanzas.

So too with the stepped effect that Hölderlin favoured in a number of poems, where each stanza progresses from left to right as well as downwards, so that as we move from stanza to stanza, there’s an effect of advance and return, advance and return.

However, I’ve now (2009) discovered that on my own screen Safari, which earlier had performed as it was supposed to, is left-aligning. With Firefox there’s no problem.

I’ve made no attempt to adjust Scott’s spelling. If one wants to dwell rather than skim, one can take heart (hart, hairt) and recognize that almost all the words are familiar ones spelt and presumably pronounced somewhat differently—master, alas, hear, remedy, deed, pains, sight, what, ground, merry, shall, should, she, weep, sigh, earthly, and so on.

In the third stanza, I’ve changed “wilderness” to “wild,” which fits syntactically and eliminates an anomaly that feels like an error in transcribing, like the inconsistencies in spelling.

The Tudor period was, as Thom Gunn puts it in “A Mirror for Poets, a time of “Wheels, racks, and fires,” as well as of poetic conventions and dramatic fictions. Writers of poems died at the hands of government—Walter Raleigh, Henry Howard, Robert Southwell, Chiddiock Tichborne, and heroic Anne Askew among them. In a later century, Edgar Bowers would try in “From William Tyndale to John Frith” to think his way into the consciousnesses of a couple of other Tudor figures facing the prospect of terrible deaths. In another poem from the Renaissance, an anonymous writer is pleased by the fact that the powerful, in politics, can be brought low and made to suffer extreme penalties.

This poem comes from Vivian de Sola Pinto and Allan Rodway’s The Common Muse; an Anthology of British Ballad Poetry, 15th–20th Century.

Lines like “Make her to reigne over Englande” or “That all may be to his pleasure” aren’t examples of metrical uncertainty. Words were pronounced differently. “Englande” rhymes straightforward with “understande,” “hande,” and “bande”; “pleasure” with “endure”. The lines are all accentual-syllabic iambic pentameters, with normal substitutions. One simply has to listen to how the lines are going, as one does with French verse, where mute-E’s on the ends of words—sottise, chante, bête—,when they come in front of consonants, count as syllables and make up a line to the required number of syllables, regular French verse being syllabic in the sense that the number of syllables are fixed but not the number of stresses.

Called simply “The Marigold,” and without the information about the occasion of its writing, or the name of its author, an almost identical version is in Robert Jamieson, ed., Popular Ballads and Songs from Trdition, Manuscripts, and Scarce Editions; with Translations of Similar Pieces from the Ancient Danish Language and a Few Originals by the Editor, 2.vols. (Edinburgh 1806), vol. II, pp.215–220; facsimile reprint, two volumes in one.

Jamieson remarks drily that, “This Ballad is preserved on account of the subject; as the time may come, when a Panegyric of any kind upon poor Mary, will be as great a curiosity as a Panegyric upon Nero or Caligula would be.”

But the poem isn’t the equivalent of some Communist flack hailing the wisdom, learning, and warm common humanity of Comrade Stalin. In G.J. Meyer’s refreshingly revisionist The Tudors; the Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty (2010) one reads:

William Forrest, one of her chaplains, wasn’t eulogizing a monster. He was hailing a devout Catholic and the prospect of a return to the Faith from which, far more bloodily than Mary would ever become, it had been ripped by her father, to the puzzlement and dismay of a lot of the populace, and with the creation, through the looting of the monasteries, of indecent wealth at the top and grinding poverty at the bottom.

The torturing and burning of Anne Askew as a Protestant heretic had occurred during Henry’s reign.

But of course, what with the Marian persecutions during those four terrible years, the Inquisition horrors, the rebellious Irish, expansionist Spain under Philip II, and Foxe’s Book of Martyres, Catholicism then was as charged with political energy and, as seen through Protestant eyes, as dangerous as Islam is now.

A poem like this, as it seems to me, lovely ballade is another reminder of the strength of religious beliefs during the Renaissance. Histories-of-Ideas don’t burn people; theologies do. A century later, the author of “A History of Insipids” voices a common anger with Charles II’s religious toleration after the Restoration, and the troublesome Catholic Irish figure for him as treacherous “Teague.” In my own London youth in the Thirties and Forties, English Catholics were considerably odder and more alien for me than Jews, and the claim of papal infallibility a monstrous absurdity.

The anonymous “A Prognostication” is a reminder of the intensity of the religio-political passions that resulted in the British Civil War and are notably absent from the writings of clerics like Herrick and Herbert.

The poem was evidently written after the learned William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was one of the most powerful men in the England of Charles 1, and a brilliant Chancellor of Oxford University, had been accused of treason by Parliament in 1641 and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

During his thirteen years as the head of the Church, he had been rigorously imposing uniformity in church practices and putting down dissent. Among the things that had outraged persons of a Puritan persuasion, especially Scottish Presbyterians, were the imposition of church canons (laws), the compulsory use of the Book of Common Prayer, the wearing of loose-fitting and big-sleeved white surplices over the customary black cassocks, an increased power for bishops, and a shift in emphasis from the pulpit (and preaching) to the communion table. In 1637 three Puritans had had their ears cut off and their faces branded for having engaged in “seditious” publication.

As a principal advisor to the King, Laud had encouraged Charles’ own authoritarianism, and was perceived as looking favourably on Catholicism. In 1639-40, an army of outraged Presbyterians crossed the border into northern England, in the so-called Bishops’ War. In 1640, too (Google), “Five hundred London apprentices marched to Lambeth Palace to seize him; but the Archbishop, being apprised of their design, effected his escape. One of the ringleaders, a tailor, was hung for this attempt.”

Persons accused of treason were brought into the Tower through the so-called Traitors’ Gate, opening onto the river and guarded by a portcullis. The normal punishment for high treason was hanging, drawing, and quartering—hanging almost to the point of death, disemboweling, and dismembering.

Finch was a high government official who fled the country to save his life and didn’t return until the Restoration. Sir Francis Windebanke, Secretary of State, was a close associate of Laud’s. Matthew Wren, Bishop of Norwich, who had been zealous in the persecution of Puritans, was another.

In 1644, after what was evidently a flagrantly unfair trial by Parliament, Laud was beheaded on Tower Hill.

All of this comes courtesy of Google.

In the poems here, and in various others by Ronsard, we have love poems in which the context of ordinary ongoing daily life is present without strain—an adolescent lying in bed late, women sitting beside the fire spinning. Ronsard’s discourse could accommodate at times culs, cons, even—for the length of a whole sonnet—a nombril (navel). He could talk in sonnets about gaydom at the court of the libidinous Henri II, and the fact that Henri didn’t fancy him when he was a page because he was too hairy.

Among the handful of other sexually frank poems is (notoriously, it would appear) the following:

The standard text has “Portia” in the last line. In Le Cabinet Secret du Parnasse: Pierre de Ronsard et la Pleiade (Paris 1928), Louis Perceau lists a repeated “Lucresse” as an alternate reading, and I’ve opted for that, slightly modified, to avoid the too-strong pull of Shakespeare’s Portia, not yet in existence at the time.

I’d be surprised if there were an equivalent to this poem in the English Renaissance, and not just because it’s indecorous, but because of the straightforward acknowledgment of the beloved (or lusted-after) as an individual character with her own physical being and desires. What kind of profile could we construct even of Donne’s partner in “Going to Bed”?

The consciousness here, as in Villon’s “Ballade of Big Margot” where they fart while love-making, of the everyday shared corporeality of the Other probably permits more in the way of substantial psychological interactions. Lazy, lie-abed young Marie feels more realistically “there” for me than Herricks’ gorgeously theatrical Corinna. And the awareness of the body, even when unverbalized, may still be there in the relatively abstract classical tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Racine’s famous “C’est Vénus tout entière/ À sa proie attachée” doesn’t come out of nowhere.

But much was lost when the robust French classicism of the Renaissance was chastened into neo-classical propriety, and an important aspect of French Romanticism was the restoration of corporeality.

In the same anthology, Le Cabinet Secret, is a six-hundred-line poem in decasyllabic couplets, “La Vieille Courtisanne,” by Ronsard’s fellow-poet Joachim du Bellay, in which a retired and nominally repentant old courtesan describes her guilt-free and largely successful career, starting with her losing her virginity to a mere “serf” (sic) when she was twelve or thirteen—three years with a priest during which she acquired social skills; setting up in business in Rome behind a façade of respectability; having a conversion which didn’t take; opening a “boutique” (sic); etc. And a free spirit.

There’s no cruelty in the narrative, or obscenity, but she was surely an ancestress of Sade’s Juliette.

As to Ronsard’s “glaire espessie,” literally, thickened egg-white, a google almost at random the other day (May 2009) brought up the following on an advice site:

“When I use a dildo and I cum, my cum is almost like a guy's cum, not as thick though. Whenever I pull out the dildo, the end is covered in my cum. It's not that much, maybe a teaspoon full, but I’m worried I might have a health problem.”

I forget where I acquired the Voices version of the poem, but it seems to me superior to the one that is generally printed. I mean, who needs a tacked-on moralizing couplet when the three stanzas have spoken so powerfully for themselves? (Voices>Personals>Comments II)

Since writing the foregoing, I’ve gone to the library, and, eureka!, there we have the poem ending the way “my” version does, in The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh: a Historical Edition, edited by Michael Rudeck , Tempe, Arizona, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999. I’ve corrected a few words in my own text, but have indulged myself (and the poem) and kept the divisions between the quatrains, which aren’t there in the Rudeck text.

Rudeck glosses “frets” as “tightens, cinches,” and that may indeed have been one of the meanings, but limiting it to that would miss the fact that when the three things meet “they one another mar.” I see that in my excellent Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed., 2004), the first of the principal definitions of “mar” is “to eat away; gnaw.”

The text of this delightful poem comes from Pinto and Rodway’s The Common Muse, where they speak of it as Elizabethan. It helps fill that gap that appears when one wonders what ordinary people back in that time were really like, given their heightened theatricality in the plays. Mutatis mutandis, practically every complaint, ploy, frustration that we see here could have been encountered in the twentieth-century (I won’t risk speaking about the twenty-first). A later poem like Dibdin’t “The Lady’s Diary” fills the same need for me.

There were of course large differences in social structures and the behaviours that they required. But some of the intensities, particularly where questions of power, social order, marriages as adjuncts to politics, and religion were concerned, were probably confined to a fairly small minority. And in a number of the broadsides, the relationships between men and women at the level here was not one of masters and slaves.

Has Margery, or whatever her non-classical name might be, simply written him off as a hopeless nerd? Or is she engaged in the game of testing him out and establishing (like Shakespeare’s Beatrice and others.) her own power, given what will be demanded of her in marriage, at least when pregnancies start. The kinds of things that go on in traditional ballads, which mostly turn out tragically, are another matter, of course, another side of the sex coin.

A lot of defining of realworld relationships, as later in the Blues, obviously went on in broadside poetry, in contrast to all those highfalutin’ sonnets, skewed by the need to demonstrate, under the much-flattered Queen, one’s awareness that adoration was the proper stance in a relationship between Woman and mere men.

By the sound of it, Phillida, if of a practical turn of mind, could go further and fare worse. He’s an adorer, prosperous enough to have a maid and maybe other servants, and with open-purse ideas as to what might please a young bride. He might be a nuisance for awhile with his attentiveness, and have little spurts of rebelliousness, as in, “I am not half so bad as she would paint me.” But this isn’t poor Charlotte Lucas and the unspeakable Mr. Collins.

I love his taking pride in Doll splashing milk on him and Winifred playing with his nose, making him feel like one of the lads.

It’s all practically a short story miniaturized.

This is number 15 in A Pepysian Garland: Black-Letter Broadside Ballads of the Years 1595–1639, chiefly from the collection of Samuel Pepys, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge U.P., 1922).

In his prefatory note to the poem, Rollins comments:

The poem, regardless of its accuracy, seems to me a moving piece of political writing displaying a good deal of sympathy for the sixty-six-year-old Raleigh. It had obviously been a major case. Rollins quotes someone in November of that year as saying that “We are so full still of Sir Walter Raleigh …,” about whom there had been a number of “ballets” (i.e., ballads).

It can be interesting, as with Mary Montagu on Swift, to have the self-definings of poets (in this connection, especially, Raleigh’s “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage”) supplemented by poets gazing from the outside at their social selves.

This curiosity is in volume 1 of The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. Charles Hindley (1873), the introduction to which begins:

So, between 1560 and 1700. The costumes in the woodcut illustrations seem Elizabethan or early Stuart.

Apart from removing the capitalization of all but obvious proper names, and tweaking the spelling of a few words that would otherwise be mispronounced (e.g. sprit>sprite), I’ve left the text as I found it.

Among the online definitions of “medley” is “a piece composed from parts of existing pieces played one after another, sometimes overlapping.”

To judge from the final stanza, the kind of medley that we have here is what a street-singer might offer, maybe as an aid to advertizing his wares or skills. It’s obviously a medley of allusions, some to past historical figures, such as Margery Kempe, some to type-figures, such as the simpleton John-a-Nokes, some to current events, some to proverbs, and much more. Some of the material may come from other broadsides.

Tray-trip was a form of hopscotch.

In another medley, “Ione” is clearly Joan, with “I” generally doing typographical duty for “J”. But could it, with a typo, be Jove here?

The butcher’s “masty” dog might be a mastiff.

Connie-skins are coney skins, i.e., rabbit skins.

Apparently no water was involved with the cuck-stool. Googling gives:

“Maw” was a card game.

“Gelt” may mean gelded.

I have followed the order in which the poems appear in Herrick’s collected poems, published during his lifetime—Hesperides: or The Works both Humane & Divine of Robert Herrick Esq. (1648), which is the principal text of the 1965 Oxford University Press edition. The editor, L.C. Martin, reports that:

There are over fourteen-hundred poems there, including over eight-hundred epigrams, all mixed together within the two general categories of secular and (much smaller) religious. Over and above changing taste, an unusual amount of work would have been required of readers trying to get their bearings there and taking, perhaps, the more or less classical epigrams as the true voicings of the poet, with a resultant lessening of attention to other kinds of poems.

Nor, given the variousness even among the religious poems, is there any obvious Herrick Story, any straightforward progression from, say, hedonism to austerity.

He seems to have quit poetry for good after the collected poems. He was not an intellectual or a political writer, and his sympathies were with the losing side in the escalating struggle between King and Parliament. The year before the book appeared, he was shut out from employment as a cleric for refusing to take the equivalent of a loyalty oath to the new government. The culture of the Commonwealth was not hospitable to the writing of epigrams like his, dependent as they were on the at times amused enjoyment of sophisticated readers and auditors. (“Have you heard the one about…?”)

As to the paths discernible in his more “personal” poems, he may have simply lacked the will or desire, having done this or that kind of thing once, to keep going.

He was an exemplary craftsman, even when the results are not especially interesting. I doubt that there’s a single bad poem in his oeuvre.

Winters plucked the following out of obscurity for his and Field’s Quest for Reality (1969)

In The Simpsons there’s an episode in which the characters have heroically made their way up a wooded hillside at night until exhaustion overtakes them. Next morning, when they take the remaining few steps up to the top, they find that there’s a shopping mall down on the highway on the other side.

Enabled to access it electronically, in facsimile, I made my way through the 1706 edition of James Watson, A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems both Ancient and Modern (Edinburgh, 1706), and came across a poem of which I’d never heard, “Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament,” which while a bit rough in places, was moving and interesting. So I copied it out for inclusion in A New Book.

I have now taken the few remaining steps and googled for Lady Anne Bothwell.

Well, to pick a few main items in sequence:

A shorter, neater, and emotionally simpler rewrite of the poem (done when and by whom?) is on the Web, with instrumental accompaniment, at www.contemplator.com/scotland/bothwell.html

It’s a good poem in its own right, but lost are the resentment, the anger, the conflicted feelings that make the earlier and technically rougher version distinctive. And the biographical information about an actual Lady Anne Bothwell is a distracting and intrusive irrelevance for my purposes. The poem is Anywoman speaking.

Another Web page contains the first four stanzas, slightly tweaked, of the Watson version. The opening reads:

Baloo, my babe, lie still and sleep;
It grieves me sore to see thee weep.
When thou art merry, I am glad;,
Thy weeping makes my heart full sad.
Baloo my boy, thy mother’s joy,
Thy father breeds thee much annoy,
Baloo, my babe, Baloo, my boy, thy mother’s joy,
Baloo my babe, lie still and sleep.

A musical setting of it was attributed to William Lawes (1602–1645).

Another version, shortened from thirteen stanzas to seven, and with tweaks to the phrasing, is at http://www.exclassics.com/percy/perc84.htma

A thirteen-stanza version is in Francis James Child, ed., English and Scottish Ballads (1857–58) in which some of the stanzas are identical, others tweaked here and there, and the sequence made more expositorily tidier. A bit of texture is lost here and there. E.g., “And in thy Bravery thou did’st vaunt/That I no Maintenance should want” has gone, and stanza 11, beginning, “Now Peace, my Comfort, curse not him,” becomes

But curse not him; perhaps now he,
Stung with remorse, is blessing thee:
Perhaps at death; for who can tell
Whether the judge of heaven or hell,
By some proud foe has struck the blow,
And laid the dear deceiver low.

What is reportedly Allan Ramsay’s version is at www.glasgowguide.co.uk/wjmc/balowmyb.shtml.

Some of the stanzas are identical with Watson, but there are changes in the sequence and some tweaks.

It’s probably a good thing I haven’t moved in on Tin Pan Alley, otherwise I might be “discovering” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

“Lady Anne’s Lullaby,” in any version, isn’t in The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse or the Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, nor is it in Representative Poetry Online.

But in a neat demonstration of Auden’s “When have we not preferred some going round/ To going straight to where we are?” I see, after a nudge from the Web, that a neatened seven-stanza version is buried among some early Anonyouses in the copy of Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse which I have owned since the 1940s, where it’s labeled 16th century.

“The Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan” is in The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, chosen by H.J.C. Grierson and G. Bullough (1938), with no glossary. It isn’t in Alastair Fowler’s New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (1991).

The editor and publishers may have decided that too big a glossary would have been required, though I see that twenty-six words or phrases are glossed at the foot of two pages of Joshua Sylvester’s “The Zodiac.” But there’s also, for me, a whiff of gentrification here, Bunyan’s “Little Bird,” Suckling’s “plebean” ballad about a wedding, and the anonymous “An Old Souldier of the Queen” having also been discarded. The greater inclusiveness of which Fowler speaks in his introduction seems in places to consist of finding marginal figures who are doing the same kind of art-respectable thing as better-known ones, but less distinctively.

Sempill’s poem, which is well enough known to have been translated into Russian, does present problems, though. There are too many places in Grierson and Bullough’s text which, when one goes in search of help in the great online Dictionary of the Scots Language, remain obstinately unclear. The facsimile broadsheet text online seems an improvement, at least where intelligibility is concerned, though no doubt it has its own problems for expert eyes.

Among its virtues is that the names of individuals and places are italicized, though not (until I did a tweak) the titles of tunes. Even so, there are places where I haven’t had success with the dictionary or with the glossings of others, and simply don’t know what has been going on, or have made uncertain guesses. Scots was a language in which teuche, teugh, tewche, tewgh, tewich, thewch, tuche, tuich, tugh, tw(i)ch(e), teoch, touch, tough, tuff were all spellings of our “tough.”

There is flat disagreement about the meaning of “Kittoch.” Is that a familiar contraction of “Katherine” signifying something like “wench,” or the name of Habbie’s dirk? What you opt for, and whether it’s “she” or “we” who are left guideless by his death, will affect your visualization of the action. There would have been no uncertainty for hearers and readers at the time.

The poem is there, the online dictionary is there, there may be online commentaries or glossings that I’ve missed, and I’ve provided a tentative glossary of sorts. The poem, like lots of other New Book ones, is there to be enjoyed if one feels like it, even if, since this is partly a foreign language, with lacunae.

It’s a fine poem, full of what Leavis called “felt life” as the character of a loved and admired figure, along with aspects of his community, is built up for us in the recollections of the narrator.

It’s one that Auden and John Garrett might have included in their remarkable anthology for schools The Poet’s Tongue (1935), in which ballads, nursery rhymes, epigrams, folk-songs, nonsense verse, and “real” poems or bits from poems all jostled together anonymously, with the energy of versification as a common denominator—a work whose influence in schools, along with Auden’s own “pop” poems, would be a factor later in the verse of poets like John Whitworth and Kit Wright, who found other routes away from stylistic modernism than the “Movement” work of poets like Larkin , Jennings, and Gunn.

According to a Web item, Sempill’s poem was important for Scottish verse, its stanza form being used by Allan Ramsay, Burns, Fergusson, Stevenson, and no doubt others. It’s a curious form.

In contrast to the more common aabccb narrative stanza, the balancing of which permits of a steady advance, we have here each time, a three-line surge forward, and then a kind of check and diminuendo, which makes each stanza slightly more individual. Hence there is more opportunity for the kinds of variations in subject and syntax that can enable one to feel that, yes, there is indeed progression going on, a progression in the thinking and/or recalling of the speaking voice.

I wish that I understood the poem at a literal level all the way through. But there are enough parts that I do understand for me to feel confident that the meaning is there for recovery in the others, enabling one to enter more fully into those recreated times and rituals and minds.

Even if not absolutely the first outing for the stanza, it was the one that established it as the form that would be used by Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns, Stevenson, and no doubt others. The facsimile is here:
www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15860

In his 1849 collection The Poems of the Sempills of Beltrees, James Paterson reports that “The Blythsome Wedding” was first published in James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Poems (Edinburgh, 1706) and that he himself has used that text, the poem having been a good deal reprinted subsequently.

I myself have settled on the one in Allan Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany: A Collection of Choice Songs, Scots and English, 14th ed., 2 vols. (reprinted 1871). The spelling is a little less, to modern eyes, idiosyncratic, the phrasing is a bit more robust in places, and small syntactical changes, such as beginning a particular line with “With” rather than “And,” slightly improve the sense and contribute to a tightening of the whole. Ramsay, himself a poet, evidently brought a craftsman’s eye to texts. The one for “Bonnie Barbara Allan,” for example, appearing here in print for probably the first time, is in the classic form in which we still have it.

The text in W.MacNeile Dixon’s Edinburgh Book of Scottish Verse (1910) is basically Ramsay’s, but with some tweaks here and there that make it marginally more decorous, though still strong and chewy, and with some good lines that aren’t in Ramsay. Dixon ascribes the poem to Anonymous. Apart from a handful by Gay, Ramsay attaches no names to his picks.

Paterson’s brief commentary is chiefly devoted to resisting the attribution of the poem to Sir William Scott of Thirlestane. He sees the poem as valuable for “furnishing an imperishable record of bygone manners, and of the dainties which used to garnish the tables of the peasantry, on occasions of festivity, a century or two ago.” Remarking that “Most readers of Scottish poetry will be able to peruse it without the aid of a glossary,” he glosses only the terms for the dainties at the feast.

So Dixon’s glosses are all the more welcome. As is the aid provided by the great online Dictionary of the Scots Language.

Fortunately one doesn’t need assistance for figures like thumbless Kate and blinking daft Barbara.

Ramsay’s glossary is of help in a few places. Paterson’s identification of “Mons-meg” as an antique canon and city landmark doesn’t seem obviously related to the pregnancy of the lass with the lilly-white leg who’s sent down “south” to Edinburgh to learn good manners. Ramsay makes the connection.

The relishing of naming in the poem puts me in mind of Villon, whose “Berthe au grand pie” (Bigfoot Bertha) is echoed, whether or not intentionally, by Sempill’s (or Anon’s) “splee/splae/splay-fitted/footed Bessie” in Paterson’s version. I see in Google that David Hume acquired a 1723 edition of Villon’s Oeuvres for the National Library of Scotland.

Robert Ford’s Vagabond Songs and Ballads of Scotland, with Many Old and Familiar Melodies (1901) includes the poem in what is essentially the Dixon version, with sensible slight tweakings of spellings.

For whatever reason, the poems in the General Books print-on-demand edition of it are not printed in stanza form, which shortens the book by over half and makes the page numbers in the Table of Contents useless. “A Bridal” is on pp. 89–90.

I came upon this poem in Vivian de Sola Pinto and Allan Rodway’s excellent The Common Muse; An Anthology of Popular British Ballad poetry 15th-20th Century (1965/1957). It is on at least a couple of websites.

Here, cobbled together from several sources, is a bit of glossing:

This powerful invective was directed at the notorious Frances Carr, Countess of Somerset (1590–1632), the novelistic complications of whose life included seeking a marriage annulment on the grounds that she was still a virgin (entailing a physical examination by a committee) and a murder by poison, for which she and her second husband were imprisoned. Judging from the refrain, the poem probably appeared around 1622, when James I gave her a pardon.

But as with various other satires, such as MacFlecknoe and Book IV of the Dunciad the allegorical figures take on larger-than-life lives of their own, thanks to a remarkable rhetorical richness.

Here the anonymous writer has drawn on an intense creepy poem by Horace involving a Neapolitan witch, with snakes braided in her hair, engaged with her minions in a plot to bury a page up to his neck in a graveyard, with food set tantalizing out of his reach, so that his liver will dry up as he starves to death, and be used later for spells. See: http://europrogovision.blogspot.com/2010/03/satyre-entituled-witch.html

Which is to say, a figure out of nightmare.

We also have horrorstory biblical allusions, classical myths, and legendary monsters.

And there’s an abundance of what might be called Metaphysical compressions—painting her heart as smoothly as her face, instigating swordplay with her silken words, closing up her extended vagina to give the appearance of virginity, giving kisses that drew men down below her waist, etcetera.

The insistences towards the end that there be no celebrations of her release from confinement, and the expressed hope that supernatural retribution will catch up with her, have the kind of intensity evoked in the later 20th-century by figures like Myra Hindley and Karla Homolka.

In fact she lived for ten more years, no doubt with an untroubled conscience. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Carr,_Countess_of_Somerset

In his delightful “Paris Letter” (1926), D.H. Lawrence suggests that French men “are just worn out, making offerings on the shrine of Aphrodite in elastic garters.” Cavendish’s “Upon the Theme of Love” points to a similar weariness with respect to the Renaissance tradition of poetic adoration.

There are robust departures from that tradition in the jaunty impatience of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (“C’mon, let’s boogie!”) and the deglamorizing candour of Wilmot’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” Alternative routes for men of feeling open up in Cowley’s “On the Death of Mr. William Harvey” (intimate male friendship). Vaughan’s “To His Books” (the joys of solitary study), and the sublimated eroticism of Marvell’s “The Garden”.

In the 17th- and 18th-century poems by woman here, we have the persistence of a genuinely classical realism about human behaviour, as witnessed in their own lives.

“A Poor Client’s Complaint” comes from James Watson, A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems both Ancient and Modern (Edinburgh, 1706). I have transcribed exactly the capitalization, which signals nouns, and the italicization, whose function seems mixed, partly indicating technical legal terms, partly doing—what?

Symson is identified as the author in a facsimile passage quoted on the Web, which I reached by googling for “The Poor Client’s Complaint” and then clicking on “The Court of Session Garland.” Reportedly Symson confessed to the authorship to his son and a lodger in 1707 “and thereafter.” Apparently he was “well known for his zeal and suffering for Episcopacy,” and the author of “various works controversial, topographical, and poetical.” According to another site, he “belonged to a family which had occupied an important place in the ecclesiastical history of Scotland since the Reformation.”

None of this biographical information, apart from his dates, is of the slightest relevance to the poem, but having been enabled to find it, I may as well pass it on.

The text that I have used comes from Pills to Purge Melancholy; Songs Compleat, Pleasant and Divertive, by Thomas D’Urfey, 5 vols., London 1719–20, via Vivian de Sola Pinto and Allan Rodway, eds., The Common Muse; An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry, 15th-20th Century, 1965 (1957). What is going on in it would appear to be a spring fertility festival on southern English downland. I don’t recognize a number of the terms, but it moves along with a fine dancing swing, one gets the general idea, the names have a lot of life in them (cf. Sempill’s wedding poem), the mingling of gods and humans is interesting, and everyone is having a great time. The lines don’t settle down into a mechanical jog-trot, so one has to pay attention to how the words are going, as if singing them.

Apparently an alternative title was “The Fetching Home of the May”—i.e., Mayflowers? I imagine that gowns became green from wriggling around on the grass with someone on top of you. The Green Gown Wedding Boutique is advertised on the Web.

The text of “The Progress of Marriage” used here is basically the one in Herbert Davis’s authoritative edition of Swift’s Poetical Works (Oxford, 1967). I have tweaked punctuation and spelling in the interests of narrative readability—e.g., “answered” for “answer’d,” the modern pronunciation being the same.

Whoever substituted “Poor Lady Jane has thrice miscarry’d” for “His Lady has twelve times miscarried” in the text used in John Hollander’s excellent Marriage Poems anthology in the Everyman’s Series, where I first found the poem, had missed the point. She had been practicing some form of birth control, probably a sponge, and didn’t miss a period.

I tweaked “Lady Acheson Weary of the Dean” in the same way, and removed non-functional roman numerals between stanzas. Apparently the Achesons were one of several landed families with whom Swift would stay, recovering some of that spaciousness that he had enjoyed during his early years as secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park.

The text here is that of Poetical Works, unaltered.

Anne Savage Acheson’s birthdate seems to be unknown, but she married Sir Arthur in 1715 and died in 1737 after having borne six surviving children.

On a website devoted to Gosford Forest Park, the renamed Gosford Demesne, one reads that “The ‘grottoes and seats’ and the ‘bow’r’ referred to near the end of the poem may be what are known today as Dean Swift’s Well and the Dean’s Chair where, rumour has it, he spent time writing and chatting with locals passing by on the nearby road.”

Walmsley and Whaley, like Jenny, were friends of the family in County Armagh. But who is intended here by “Daniel”?

The rhyming, as in Swift elsewhere, is exact—elbows, Panthayon, start-led, Jinny. Except maybe for Lady/play-day?

The poem is remarkable for Swift’s double vision of his own behaviour and of how it would/could have appeared to her. But given her thinness and early death, is it possible that she was by nature of low energy, and that in his bullying way he was trying to stimulate her?

Apparently he stayed with the Achesons twice more, though not for so long.

I deal with Swift’s concern for energy and effectiveness in “Swift and the Decay of Letters,” The Name of Action: Critical Essays (Cambridge U.P, 1984).

T.S. Eliot famously said that true poetry can communicate before it is understood. This is nonsense, obviously, if the text on the page is in Hungarian or Cantonese, at least if you have no knowledge of those languages. But it makes sense if meaning that you can follow the words along metrically and, up to a point, syntactically, “hearing” the poem, with the diction clear enough in places for you to have a general sense of what’s going on.

Which, in the present instance, entails treating the spelling as relatively phonetic, and giving the sounds such Scottishness as you can summon up.

Ramsay, like Burns, could write standard English verse when he wanted to. Here he’s using dialect. And with dialect, and slang, and jargon, a certain caution is required with respect to sought one-to-one equivalents. If someone tells you that he felt royally screwed, you know that he isn’t saying he was literally fucked, but that replacing “screwed” with “cheated, “or “swindled,” or “treated unfairly” (the options in my Webster’s New World College Dictionary) misses something, a sense of penetration or violation, such as hovers around the sexual sense of “screw.”

In fact, I now see that the etymology of the word is: Middle English screwe, from Middle French escroue, hole in which the screw turns, from Latin scrofa, sow, influenced by—ta-dah!— scrobis, vulva!

Dialect words and idioms are mostly more tactile, more physical than their received standard equivalents. They certainly are in this robustly humorous poem, Scots having retained a vitality that had dwindled down from the Renaissance in what was already standard English, and which Victorian poets like William Barnes, in his phonetic Dorset dialect poems (a bit misguided in their eschewal of Latinisms), and Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his recourse to older or regional usages and at times his ad hoc coinages, would try to recover. As would twentieth-century Scottish poets employing Scots for a variety of purposes, like Hugh MacDiarmid.

So the glossary here, derived partly from the superb online Dictionary of the Scots Language, with its numerous examples, is an approximative aid and not a list telling you what each and every term really means. Particularly since idioms are often runs of words.

I myself have no expertise in this matter. At one-thirty-second-part Scottish, I’m a Sassenach here myself, and have had to do the delving and guessing for my own benefit. And I’m frustrated by the parts that I still don’t understand at a literal level, such as that “siller ca’” and the whistling. To judge from the spottiness of the glossings by others, my ignorance isn’t unique.

But the poem, with its linguistic richness, is splendid and reminds me of Villon. Its humour arises out of a lot of three-dimensional social observation and a tolerant enjoyment of rogueishness. It is much the best of Ramsay’s poems.

An enquiring Martian would no doubt also require enlightenment about that “royally.” Royally screwed?

For “A Receipt to Cure the Vapours,” I’ve used a tweaked online text rather than the one in Montagu’s Essays and Poems, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford, 1977). Online, “idly” in the second line has been added. I myself added “For” to the penultimate line. An alternate title of the poem, which was set to music, was “Song.” When all the other lines in a poem are regular, it seems likely that such anomalies were not intentional.

The online page containing “Epistle from Mrs. Y[onge] to Her Husbnnd” also contains “The Reasons That Induced Dr Swift to Write a Poem Called ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’” , both of them with 18^th-century spelling and punctuation.

I can imagine the Swift poem having been dismissed later as “scurrilous,” as if that instantly denied any truth to it. But there’s an element of poetic justice to a bit of feminine payback to the author of “The Lady’s Dressing Room” and the cruel and repulsive “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” denying him, as it were, a protective Benefit of Satirist. One does, too, rather wonder how Swift had come to make the kinds of observations in them.

And while there could obviously be no decisive evidence one way or the other, suppose the basic claim that Swift had been unable (like Rochester in “The Imperfect Enoyment”) to get it up, took a self-justifying revenge, and wasn’t simply playing the satirist were true? Saying “So what?” wouldn’t quite do it, since what is being challenged is an aspect of Swift’s literary persona. Could the author of the Stella poems, the poet celebrated in those poems elsewhere in A New Book by James Wright and J.V. Cunningham, and in Yeats’ “Swift’s Epitaph” (“…he/ Served human liberty.”) really …?

But asking the question points up the dangers in what I have called the Story approach to a writer—the Yeats Story, the Coleridge Story, the Swift story, and so on—in which a writer’s poems, essays, letters, journal entries, and so on are all viewed as aids to arriving at an understanding of what he or she, it is presumed, essentially was—that spring-fed lake from which the various texts flowed.

Scrupulous and sensitive scholarship knows what it knows, and doesn’t know, and can never know. The slacker kind is liable to be haunted by the Demon of the Binary—the premature closure on a praiseworth image of a self which then, as contrary facts emerge, is thought to crumble into an ignoble and really real image, as if the ignoble were always more real.

Binary-antithetical thinking, whatever it may do for the self-esteem of the diagnostician, is generally as blunt an instrument when dealing with good writers as would be a typology in which the opposite of “greedy” is presumed to be “abstemious,” which slides into becoming its either/or alternative. So—sniff, sniff, probe, probe—maybe that saintly austere figure is really, secretly, don’t you know, greedy?

I used the term “Story” forty years ago in a review-article on Yvor Winters’ Forms of Discovery, in which I pointed out that such was not the approach used in that great book or in his other criticism, where what he did was look always at individual poems without any presumptions, deriving from the Romantic notion of the Organic, as to how they must fit together with one another, or how they must, being “poems,” cohere from start to finish.

Relationships between texts could exist and be perceived, of course. But the relationships were between particular speech-acts, particular formal articulatings of grief, or love, or nostalgia, or indignation, or religious dread, or moral perplexity, and not, in the conventional sense of the terms, biographical or autobiographical ones.

So maybe the flesh-and-blood and testicular Swift indeed behaved at times as foolishly as you or me.

So what?

[From Allan Ramsay, The Tea Table Miscellany: A Collection of Choice Songs, Scots and English, reprinted from the fourteenth edition, 2 vols. (1871 [1740])]

In the summer of 1957, having arrived there by boat from Dubrovnik, I prowled around Venice with a camera for a day, without a guidebook or map, and with only a general sense of the Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal as landmarks. It was a comfortable experience. You felt safe everywhere, and threaded your way without any goal in mind, and with no signs announcing that this or that building or piazza that you happened upon had major importance. There were few other tourists away from San Marco, and I took what turned out to be a reasonably good photograph (the second image in “Then”).

Browsing in a reprint of Allan Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany has been a bit like that. The well over four-hundred songs, so-called, are nameless and not arranged in any obvious sequences that I can see. The announcement at the start of the two indexes that “The /songs marked C, D, H, L, M, O, &c are new words by different hands; X, the authors unknown; Z, old songs; Q, old songs with additions” has been ignored in the 1871 reprint. There is a group that is explicitly from The Beggar’s Opera, and a poem that seems to be attributed to Swift. But otherwise you’re on your own.

Classic texts of “Bonnie Barbara Allan,” “O Waly, Waly,” “The Bonnie Earl of Murray,” and one or two other traditional ballads are scattered in there. But apart from Suckling’s “Why so pale and wan, fond lover?” I can identify (unaided) nothing else. Some feel Cavalierish, some eighteenth-century. And that’s just about that. Which is to say that this is that uncommon thing, an anthology of poems, not of poets or periods. Tunes are named for some of the songs. No doubt contemporary readers would have known tunes for some of the others. In any event, it’s clear that perusers of the volumes were not seeking out the “minds” of authors, they were enjoying the feelings in individual texts.

Predominantly these are poems dealing with aspects of Eros—love and sex, sought and denied—and mostly from a male perspective, but without either swoonings from hopeless eternal passion or obscenity. As Ramsay puts it in his preface to the fourteenth edition,

In this regard, the anthology seems to me superior to Burns’ rather depressing and unfunny Merry Muses of Caledonia. Obscene songs need to have the full-throated gusto and wit of the great after-football and military narratives about old ladies locked in lavatories, the good ship Venus, the finest f---ing family in the land, and so forth, in which it’s the doings of the characters that are entertaining.

The Miscellany, by and large, is a comfortable and mildly theatrical mulch of the social, without any romantic agonies.

For my own purposes in A New Book, a lot of it isn’t of special interest, either in sentiments or versification, lacking the je ne sais quoi or certain something that gives you the pleasant slight shock or tweak of the unfamiliar. But I’ve extracted eight poems, and may find one or two more, that aren’t simply mainstream, at least insofar as that is what is defined by the standard big historical anthologies and a lot of New Book poems. All, obviously, are very minor, and not with the crispness that makes “minor” epigrams last. But all offer their linguistic pleasures. One technically violates the principle of no excerpts in A New Book. But I wasn’t doing the excerpting, and in theory it could be free-standing, an as-if-from slice of the carnivalesque.

On our last day in Venice I made the mistake of ascending the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco. Suddenly what had felt like being in a warren without borders was turned into a three-dimensional map, Oh yes, there’s the Rialto, and the this, and the that, and the Grand Canal has its curves and bridges, and so on. It had become more of a tourist site, rather than a lived-in environment.

The Web, like the campanile and maps, can put a lot of information almost instantly, at one’s fingertips, and I now know the provenance of some of the poems, fortunately only in a general way. But there is still a loss of hiddenness and remoteness and temporality, meaning the time that in pre-electronic days might be required for finding out about the arcane.

The poems in Tea-Table Miscellany were obviously assembled to be shared, sung, enjoyed—not studied. My own mini-miscellany will not be on the exam, and I’ve not attempted any glossing. I wonder what some of those things are that the Nurse is saying, though. Obviously she’s not just spouting nonsense syllables.

I came upon this poem in Allan Ramsay’s The Ever Green; a Collection of Scots Poems Written by the Ingenious before 1600, 2 vols (1875 [1724]). For the purposes of A New Book, it belongs better here than back in the Renaissance. It has a linguistic richness absent by then from English verse, and must have been challenging to English readers in its Rabelasian tactility and exuberant myth-making. Scotland, after all, was, in the American sense, England’s South back then—wilder, weirder, more verbal, and still potentially, as had been demonstrated in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion, dangerous.

But perhaps such a poem was also liberating for some in its underground fashion, the way the great horror and gangster movies of the early 1930s had been when set beside portentous historical movies. And even when a lot of the diction may have been Greek to them, there would still have been a welcome aura of the indecorous.

Ramsay may have been making a political statement of sorts with The Ever Green.

His Tea Table Miscellany, which came out in the same year was mainly a very English and user-friendly assemblage of love-game and friendship poems extending the modes of the Cavalier poets, and presented anonymously.

The Ever Green, in contrast, drew heavily, on 15th and 16th-century Scottish verse, one of the great phases in British poetry, with Dunbar, David Lyndsay, John Stewart, Walter Kennedy, and Alexander Scott among the named authors. On another website “Ane little Interlude” is attributed to Dunbar and presented in a somewhat longer and slacker version. But to judge from James Kinsley, ed, The Poems of William Dunbar (Oxford, 1979), the attribution would have been among a number that have been rejected.

The roman-numeral dividers were provided by Ramsay for all the poems in the anthology. But they serve here, as they did for Yeats in poems like “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” to block things out more.

It’s still a wild ride. It deserves to be savoured.

I’m indebted to Tiree MacGregor for “Cartane” in place of Ramsay’s “Bartane,” and for the point that she is so huge that when she’s cold the only way that she can warm up is with a raging fever every four days.

I didn’t discover until I was into the glossing that this poem, untitled, was by Dunbar. But it seemed best to stay with Ramsay’s text, since that was the one that readers of The Ever Green would have been confronted by. If the one from Dunbar’s collected poems were used, it would be natural to wonder what kind of sea-change it suffered during the intervening couple of centuries.

In fact the changes in the body of the text are almost all a matter of spelling. This complicates searching in the 120-page Dunbar glossary, and Ramsay omits some alternative meanings in his, and doesn’t tackle some words at all. But while he spares female readers the, ahem! pudendum, and leaves open the question of what activity the couple are engaging in at the end, the line about his “Stang” and her “Towdy,” which Ramsay gives simply as “the Arse,” is more kinky than it appears to be in Dunbar. And one doesn’t need a degree in Scottish Studies to come up with a plausible rhyme for “chukit.”

Moreover, the basic monosyllabic indelicacies that Ramsay, in his introduction to the parallel Tea Table Miscellany in the same year, made a point of saying weren’t present in that collection, pale beside what imaginations might sense behind terms like “Belly Hudrom,” “Honneyguks,” and “Capercalyeane.”

Some of which, it occurs to me, may have been nonce terms, as if someone nowadays were to refer to an inamorata as an iggly-wiggly sucksiebubble.

The reference to Morpheus and poppies is obviously to laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol), on which see Alethea Hayter. In this poem from the mid-point of the century, we see, as it were, a chrysalis starting to break open. But for her, with a classical good sense that persists even though the classical verities aren’t working for her as they should, it is the “wildfire, ” the frenzy, the intoxication that is the poet’s bane, not blessing. Laudanum will simply induce a voiceless calm of sorts.

I see from the notes in one of my Nortons that Henry Fox, first Baron Holland, was, “despite his great gifts, one of the most hated statesmen of the century,” and that St. Peter’s was an alternate name for Westminster Abbey. A BBC website reports that:

I quote the passage for its general interest. Though little of this is actually present verbally in the poem, there is something here of Edmund Burke’s Sublime, as in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

It is interesting to see the growing eighteenth-century fascination with romantic ruins and picturesquely wild nature metamorphosing, perhaps with Piranesi’s great etchings of ruined Imperial Rome in mind, into a preference for apocalyptic destruction over the political to-and-fro of conventional social order.

We owe the critical foregrounding of this poem to F.R. Leavis, who printed it in full in his essay “Johnson and Augustanism” (1952).

I’ve chosen Arthur Quiller-Couch’s text and glossary in The Oxford Book of English Verse over those in the Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005 [1970]).

Though the Battle of Flodden, back in 1513, is the nominal subject of the poem, the Battle of Culloden, with its ensuing butchery and “pacification” of the Highlands, was less than three decades in the past, in 1746.

i

In Forms of Discovery, Yvor Winters, who first drew attention to it in the 1930s, calls Churchill’s “Dedication” “the greatest English poem of the eighteenth century and one of the greatest in our language.”

However, his discussion of it is one of his less satisfying critical performances—mostly information about the individuals and their relationships referred to in the poem, plus descriptions of its metrical and syntactical features. Nothing, on the other hand, that throws light on the talk about wills (why would someone be bothered by receiving a bequest?), or whether the lines ensuing on the extended reference to “thy Love-commanding eye” imply extra-marital cavortings, or if the sire’s being “unknown” hints at illegitimacy, or whether the Welsh genealogy was fake, or other points of phrasing. And he blurs the distinction between actual personages (as described elsewhere) and how their names operate in the poem.

ii

The practice of providing fictive names for character-types—Lip, Bastides, etc,—has its advantages. When “Poor Cornus sees his frantic wife elope,/ And curses Wit, and Poetry, and Pope,” we don’t, or at least shouldn’t, feel we have to know who the cuckold in this thumbnail sketch really was. And when, conversely, Pope’s twenty-nine-line characterization of Sporus invites us into the drama of Pope’s engagement with what feels like (and was) an actual person, Sporus would still be there for us in the poem if we knew nothing about Lord John Hervey, and we would recall, if we knew our Classics or had just Googled, that in Imperial Rome Sporus was the castrated boy-toy of Nero. At times, too, one size fits many, as in Timothy Steele’s

The proper names in “Dedication” lack those kinds of substantiality, and a minimal glossing is necessary, since we can’t get by on a single working assumption, as we can when we take it that Bute, Shelburne, Rigby, and Calcraft in Gray’s “On Lord Holland’s Seat” are more or less reprehensible aristocratic politicians.

So, a detour, courtesy of Arthur H. Cash (see below) and Google.

iii

William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester (1698–1779), was living on the estate of his wealthy father-in-law, Ralph Allen. Thomas Potter, a mere name to me initially, was very likely the father of Warburton’s son and collaborated with John Wilkes in creating “An Essay on Woman,” a mildly obscene parody of Pope’s “Essay on Man,” with a few obscene footnotes attributed (falsely) to Warburton, whose friend the Lord Chief Justice Lord Mansfield found Wilkes guilty of an obscene libel and obliged him to spend four years of exile in Paris.

Well, words to that effect. This is family-quarrel stuff and tedious if you don’t have independent knowledge of the players when Cousin Harry goes into his perennial routine about Aunt Sylvia.

You would never, for example, gather from the poem, or from Winters’ commentary, that Warburton served for eighteen years as a country clergyman, that he was a serious and prolific theologian, that Pope made him his literary executor, that Boswell reports that Johnson “had always a high opinion of Warburton” and called him “perhaps the last man who has written with a mind full of reading and reflection,” that the home of the public-spirited and benevolent-sounding Ralph Allen was a graceful piece of Palladian architecture, that according to the editor of a year-2000 edition of the poem (Arthur H. Cash) Thomas Potter, who was a rakish M.P. and son of the future Archbishop of Canterbury, and loathed Warburton personally, and had an affair with his delightful young wife, most likely authored the principal part of the parody (with Wilkes, a dozen or more years his junior, supplying the supporting material), and that Wilkes had intended to hand-print a dozen copies for the amusement of fellow rakes in the Hell Fire Club, and that the Government, having obtained page-proofs, seized on the opportunity to discredit him and have him expelled from Parliament, and that when his case came to trial, he was already in Paris after having been wounded in a duel, and I’ve forgotten what the duel was about, and that the parody, as seen in the dual-text 2000 edition, dexterously parallels below the belt what Pope does above the collar, but lacks Rochester’s kinetic vigour, and by now it will be clear what I mean about family grievances, the kind where you’re being asked to take sides.

William Warburton and Cousin Harry might indeed be unpleasant personalities, but while the trigger for Churchill’s polemic was evidently the treatment of Wilkes, no serious matter of principle appears to have been involved in the creation of the parody, which was indeed both obscene and technically libelous, though a more generous-spirited victim could have shrugged it off.

Enough of all that. Back to the poem.

iv

In the standard text, the eighteenth-century practice of capitalizing proper names suggests misleadingly that the ones here should be pronounced with special force. I’ve modernized that part of the typography.

But maybe the absences that I’ve pointed to accord with the general instability of the poem. There is no comfortable distance here between satirist and satirized, nor is the satirical tone consistent. One soon, as a sophisticated reader, takes the point that when Warburton is praised for something we should probably assume that the opposite is true, and that the character we are invited to construct for ourselves is without redeeming traits. When, for example, Warburton waxes indignant in the House of Lords against Wilkes for having written blasphemously as well as libelously and obscenely, we are to see this as inconsistent with Warburton himself having argued in print on behalf of religious tolerance.

But the poem reads oddly as the dedication of an actual volume of Churchill’s own reportedly rather dull sermons from the time when he was still a practicing cleric. A contemporary picking up such a volume in ignorance of the Warburton-Wilkes-Churchill story might be impressed for a bit by the fulsomeness of the praise, and by the writer’s assurance that he wasn’t on the make in this. But there are odd little early wobbles in the references to “thy true and proper love of wealth” (not exactly a saintly characteristic), “thy tinsel trumpery of state,” and the ease “which all priests love,” and to Warburton’s unpriestly sexiness, and it would not have been customary for humble dedicators to wind up by cautioning their lordly dedicatees against the sin of pride.

But then, the lowly dedicator here was apparently for awhile, according to Winters, the best-known living English writer. And far from being sexy, the acidulous Warburton was reported to be impotent in his marriage to a charming, vivacious, penniless eighteen-year-old girl, less than half his age— a marriage that Potter, and with him Wilkes and Churchill, may have viewed with disgust. There are layers below layers here.

v

And the speaker?

Well, he gives himself some good marks,—proud, candid, orthodox in his Christianity, unimpressed by Gloster’s social position, etc. But by his own account he was an unsatisfactory clergyman whose parishioners disapproved of his morals and slept during his sermons, and who decided to quit the Church and try to make a go of it as a writer. And now he’s poor, it seems, and with numerous dependents, or maybe numerous creditors.

But he does protest a bit much about how he’s unimpressed by Warburton’s success, and there’s a touch of self-reassurance, maybe, in the detailing of how social position can be faked or achieved by chance or royal whim. And what are we to make of his grumbling about how Warburton didn’t help him as a writer? What he seems to have been after was ploys in literary gamesmanship (“Where Pope was wrong, where Shakespear was not right.”) Warburton may—I say may, for I’ve not read him— have been a bad critic and editor, but Churchill here is mad at him because he wouldn’t condescend to help HIM.

But maybe these features, and the slippages from and swerves back to a poised tone of conventional classical moralizing, help to give the poem its peculiar weight. Churchill, one might hazard, is trying to come to terms personally, in his head, with someone who is indeed more wealthy, more rich, more powerful, a better perceiver of career routes, and all-round more successful than himself, and who started life at the same modest social level. There is no hint here of Churchill’s own literary celebrity, let alone any deserved satisfaction in it or any sense of Poetry as a realm with its own high traditions and honours. This is writing de bas en haut.

It brings to mind for me that characteristic mode of Rousseau’s in his Confessions, where after a bit you know that when he starts a long paragraph by telling you how wonderfully helpful some nobleman had been to him, there will be a sequence of second thoughts, one triggering another, that culminate at the end of the paragraph in Rousseau’s realization of how ill-disposed towards him that nobleman had actually been.

And as “Dedication” unscrolls, who will be listening to the speaker and nodding assent? Is there anyone out there who’s there, the way the, by invocation, decent-minded audiences are for those two Prologues of Johnson’s? We have neither a substantial context of social allusions and institutions, such as we get in Pope’s “Epistle to Arbuthnot,” nor supportive references to good guys whose goodness would instantly be acknowledged—Swift, Gay, “Granville the polite,” etc. Only Wilkes is here, and Wilkes, ugly physically and threateningly radical in his politics (though actually, in Yeats’ words about Swift, “he/ Served human liberty”), did not have the most savoury of reputations.

vi

But it is an intense poem, and the engagement here of one individual with another is dramatic. And intrinsic to the drama, as Winters shows us, are the long and complex sentences, with their departures from and returns to the balanced couplet norm, their interjections, their parentheses, their shifts in tone—

In spirit I’m right proud, nor can endure
The mention of a bribe—thy pocket’s free,
I, though a Dedicator, scorn a fee.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We see thy mind at large, and through thy skin
Peeps out that Courtesy that dwells within.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                                         Methinks I now
See stern Rebuke enthroned on his brow,
And armed with tenfold terrors—from his tongue,
Where fiery zeal, and Christian fury hung,
Methinks I hear the deep-toned thunders rull,
And chill with horror every sinner’s soul . .

Winters is generally thought to have disapproved of the mimetic. My take on that now is that what he disapproved of was the kind of generalized mimesis in which someone is furious and the whole poem or passage has the choppiness and incoherence of rage, or is depressed and the sentences and rhythms droop. What we have in “Dedication” is something more like the effect in Macbeth’s “If it were done, when ’tis done” soliloquy, in which one meaning-charged metaphor succeeds another rapidly in metrically coherent and expressive lines.

Winters says finely of the poem,

As happens at times in his criticism, what Winters gives us here in eighty-two words is more powerful than what is manifest in the words of the poem itself. But the poem is indeed about, and charged with, power, and was written within a year or two of power-charged works like the reworked edition of Piranesi’s Prisons (1761) and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764).

vii

Was the poem left unfinished, as an early editor suggested? Was “Kubla Khan” finished? Winters rightly says that it’s hard to see where “Dedication” could go next. Where could it go after the climactic evocation of heights and depths in the final paragraph—a figure high up there on “the topmost round/ Of Fortune’s ladder,” another far below him looking up, a sense of psychological peril?

Let not thy Brain (as Brains less potent might,
Dizzy, confounded, giddy with the height,
Turn round and lose distinction, lose her skill
And wonted powers of knowing good from ill,
Of sifting Truth from falsehood, friends from foes.....

And the possibility of a Satanic fall.

But maybe there could have been more infill, more consolidation of what is there already? Maybe But maybe, too, as with “Kubla Khan,” that’s all there was, there wasn’t any more.

viii

The Reason that Winters defended wasn’t bloodless, any more than were the literary forms whose potentials he explored. Maybe what so moved him about this particular poem, over and above his own detestation of certain literary/academic types, was precisely the struggle in it, with imperfect success, to find a stance that would accord both with a traditional moral perception of the deplorable aspects of Gloster and with Churchill’s own highly personal angers and resentments, resulting in part, like Wilmot’s, from a dissolute life.

But Wilmot, as Lord Rochester, had his estate and rank to buoy him up, and an intimate acquaintance with the doings of Court and Town. Both the figure speaking in “The Dedication” and its author feel a bit lonely, like Truman Capote after he had burned too many social bridges at both ends. But their plight isn’t glamorized, and all that goes on here is susceptible of the judgments of moral reason.

This charming poem and the glossary items without question marks come from James Hogg, Selected Poems, ed. Douglas S. Mack (1970). The name “Birniebouzle” would appear to be fictitious. According to the online Dictionary of the Scots Language, the adjective “birny,” “birnie,” “birney” is “used to describe a birn stalk or land covered with birns,” and a birn is “a pasture on dry, heathy land.” The following web page contains a present-day folksong condensation of the poem, plus notes. www.mysongbook.de/msb/songs/b/birniebo.html

The poem itself became a popular song.

There’s no doubt a touch of Cockaigne here, but this isn’t Marlowe’s shepherd inviting her to come live with him and be his love. Like John Clare, Hogg, who was scraping a hard living as a young shepherd when an intelligent employer gave him the chance to become literate, with subsequent encouragement by Scott, knew the harsh rural realities. But the yearnings expressed here seem grounded in not impossible actualities (he knew country things), which probably helps account for the popularity of the poem as a song. And in Scotland it may have been easier for merit to rise and sustain itself than it was in Clare’s enclosures England, where engaging in some of the activities described would have got you transported to Van Dieman’s Land. Hogg was obviously tougher-minded than Clare, but he also had the advantage of a popular Scottish poetic tradition to tap into, starting with ballads collected by his mother, whereas Clare had to work out his own wonderful poetic discourse on his own.

Glossary

According to the notes in Christopher MacLachlan’s Before Burns; Eighteenth-Century Scottish Poetry (2002), Johnson and Boswell were entertained at St. Andrews on August 19, 1773, and Robert Fergusson’s poem appeared a fortnight later. This was near the outset of their tour of Scotland and the Hebrides.

St. Andrews, in the county of Fife on the east coast of Scotland, was the third-oldest university in the English-speaking world. The River Eden flows into the sea there.

“The Roast Beef of Old England” and “East Neuk of Fife” were popular tunes. (MacLachlan). As to the concluding lines, Alexander Kinghorn and Alexander Law report in their edition of Poems by Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson (1974) that Fergusson “had recently been challenged to a duel by a native of Dunfermline, angered by his criticism of Fifan inhospitality and bigotry …” He had been an undergraduate at St. Andrew’s.

Johnson was a very great man, and remains England’s greatest man of letters, though the reiterated claim that he was a great Shakespeare critic seems to rest on the fact that he wasn’t as bad as, back at that time, he might have been. His career, rightly viewed, was a saga of crippling handicaps heroically overcome after strings of failures. He was in his mid-sixties, overweight, and with various ailments, when he allowed Boswell to lure him into the discomforts and potential dangers of their quasi-sociological journey around darkest Scotland.

But Fergusson’s poem is a salutary and I think humanizing reminder that Johnson, a boon to caricaturists in England, was not yet Boswellized into everyone’s favourite eccentric uncle, warm-hearted beneath his bearlike exterior, and given, all in sport of course, to provocative one-liners, usually beginning with “Sir,” like those, before he visited it, about Scotland and the Scots. (Boswell’s Johnson must be supplemented with Hester Thrale’s.) It can be insidiously easy, when following the Johnson Story in Boswell’s delightful Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, to see all the encountered Scots on that trip as somewhat Hollywoodish supporting players.

There is a dangerous energy to the poem. Eighteenth-century Scotland was in some ways England’s Old South—a source of graceful songs from fairly early on in the century, and, towards the end of the century, of heroic martial-erotic deeds as celebrated in the Border ballads. But it had been a land of Jacobite risings, most recently the rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the latter being put down with a savagery that ensured that there would never be a another. Like Ireland, it had been, in part, an occupied country. And in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it had had one of the great literary cultures of Europe to look back on with pride. Allan Ramsay’s The Ever Green; a Collection of Scots Poems Wrote by the Ingenious before 1600 (1724) provided generous samplings of Dunbar, Henryson, Kennedy, Lindsay, Alexander Scot, and others. Including the over-the-top ferocious Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy.

Fergusson had previously published the unfunny seventy-four lines of blank-verse satire, “To Dr. Samuel Johnson: Food for a New Edition of his Dictionary,” crammed with actual and fictive Latinate words, but not sounding in the least like Johnson; e.g., “To meminate thy name in after times, / The mighty Mayor of each regalian town/ Shall consignate thy work to parchment fair …”

According to MacLachlan, Fergusson “seems to have realized that Johnson’s attempt to standardize English spelling and meaning posed a threat to non-standard forms, including Scots.”

Copying out a poem can be a good way of getting inside it. I was feeling a bit depressed by the authoritative-looking text in The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols., ed. James Kinley (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1968). The speaker seemed a little too concerned with his own virtuousness in the face of difficulties, and almost legalistic in his assurances of how, nevertheless, she will be loved and cherished. So I was pleased to find the poem feeling different in W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, eds., Romantic Poets, Blake to Poe, vol. 4 of Poets of the English Language (Viking, 1950), as a result of one or two changes in the sequence of stanzas, and a few lesser tweaks. The textual footnotes in the Oxford volume indicate that there was some authority for a number of the differences.

I

In his important edition of Walter Scott’s major collection of ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 4 vols. 1902 [1802–10], Thomas Finlayson Henderson writes:

Apparently “the ballad versions of Scott’s minstrelsy are often extremely composite, some of them not retaining a single complete stanza of any of the copies obtained from recitation.” (I, xxxii)

II

Scott’s version of “Sir Patrick Spens” contains twenty-six stanzas. Thirteen of those, in among others that fill out the narrative, are, with a few minor differences, the poem as it has come to figure in our own general anthologies.

It’s not hard to see nowadays why the poem is better without stanzas like

and

And it’s reassuring to learn from Henderson’s footnotes that the first of those stanzas is one of a group of three that Scott had lifted from another version and added to the version in Percy’s Reliques, as he did with the first half of the second stanza, and that “the second half of that stanza is apparently Scott’s own.”

But if, like readers at the time, one were to come to Scott’s version cold in an anthology, and knowing little about ballads, it would probably be natural to assume that this was the real thing, the real original (and slightly primitive) ballad from, maybe, the Renaissance or later Middle Ages.

III

Scott’s version of “The Demon Lover,” on the other hand, is almost all “ours,” apart from

And the five stanzas of “The Twa Corbies” are ours entirely.

Of it Scott writes:

The Ritson version, given here by Scott, is the one, also “ours,” that goes, as “The Three Ravens”,

With its literally impossible action, its stylized symbolism, its supernaturally benign creatures, and its traditional religious overtones, it is quasi-medieval in feeling, and according to Francis James Child in his monumental English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1898) was first printed in 1611.

The bleak and great “Twa Corbies,” with its implicit murder and abandonment, and its leap from the up-close physical details of the fourth stanza (“I’ll pike out his bonny blue eyn,” etc) to the wide-world mourning and the wind’s blowing for evermore, is obviously later.

In a footnote, Henderson remarks:

IV

Scott, it appears, had been inspired to become a collector of ballads by Thomas Percy’s very popular Relics of Ancient English Poetry, aka Percy’s Reliques (1765).

It wasn’t until I went to it myself that I realized that Percy’s Reliques (a rather off-putting title) wasn’t just a collection of ballads, but also contained poems by Marlow, Raleigh, Daniel, Beaumont and Fletcher, Shirley, Jonson, Chaucer, Carew, Gascoigne, Elizabeth I, Suckling, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other readables,

Despite Henderson’s sniffiness about his editorial “improvements”, Percy’s texts for “Edward, Edward,” “Sir Patrick Spens,” and “The Bonnie Earl of Murray” are what are now the popular ones.

So, apart from the formatting, is “O Waly Waly,” which is the same as the one in Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany, with its misguided consolidation of ten quatrains into five eight-line stanzas. Which inevitably weakens the impact of the five subordinate quatrains particularly when there isn’t a sufficient connection between the two halves. E.g.,:

The tweaks to “Barbara Allen” in Percy are less jarring than the changes to “Sir Patrick Spens” in Scott. E.g,

Percy had got it right, aesthetically, about “Sir Patrick Spens,” and Scott had got it wrong—but got it very right for “The Twa Corbies,” and also with “Lord Randal.”

Allan Ramsay’s “Bonnie Barbara Allan” is also virtually ours.

V

What we have here, in other words, is texts, not pedigrees, and deciding which of those texts is aesthetically the best, regardless of known or imagined origins is, properly, a matter of critical judgments, and not a wallowing in “mere subjectivity.”

Informed scholarly-critical opinion would appear to be that insofar as there are certainties, they are the dates of first print publication, and that the ballads that are automatically on short-lists now largely appeared for the first time in print in the eighteenth century.

But if the best ballads weren’t originally composed by the folk, their evolution has been in part a collective one, a matter of preferences by audiences, and their entertainers and would-be enlighteners.

In his Oxford Book of Ballads (1910) and Oxford Book of English Verse (1919), Arthur Quiller-Couch, who in the latter, presumably with a clear conscience, printed Abraham Cowley’s “On the Death of Mr. William Harvey” with several stanzas discreetly omitted (much to its benefit), used the twenty-two stanza version of “Sir Patrick Spens” stanza.

When in An Approach to Literature (1936), Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks opted for Percy’s shorter version, it obviously imprinted itself on the consciousnesses of generations of American undergraduates, and persisted in that form into the folksong years, because readers liked its dramatic elisions.

VI

But the currents don’t all flow in one direction.

In the invaluable Representative Poetry Online, the version of “Lord Randall” is a Frankensteinian monstrosity, in which Percy’s version, tweaked, is supplemented with stanzas from an “Edward, Edward” narrative. The mounting fear and despair below the understated dialogue is lost, and those eels boiled wriggling and slimy in broth are prosaically fried in a pan.

It evidently comes from Child, the note by whom doesn’t inspire confidence in its “authenticity”:

The two other versions that follow it in Child—“Lord Donald” (Kinloch MSS, vii, 80. Kinloch’s Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 110. From Mrs. Commie, Aberdeen”) and “The Bonnie Wee Croodlin’ Dow” (Motherwell’s MS, p. 238. From the recitation of Miss Maxwell, of Brediland”)— take us even further from the tragic. E.g.

and

Scott’s version isn’t in Child.

Representative Poetry Online also opts for the eight-line-stanza “O Waly, Waly.”

A self-correction, though. If “the best” is too protean a term, how about “the best for specific purposes?” “The Bonnie Wee Croodlin’ Dow” was obviously better for kids than “Lord Randall” would have been.

VII

The hovering spirit of Jorge-Luis Borges enquires why the improved version of the Cowley poem couldn’t still be used in A New Book.

Unfortunately there would need to be indications that parts were missing, and once the statement or the ellipsis marks were there, it would be hard, while reading what’s there, to wonder about what isn’t.

Not that alternate texts can’t have their functions. In De/Composition; 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong (2001) W.D. Snodgrass reworks 101 classic poems so cunningly that if you come to a rewrite without the original clearly in mind, there may seem (until you’ve gone back to the original) nothing to regret, the rewrites being just as much poems in their own right as the originals. Professor John Baxter assures me that it’s an excellent classroom text.

And Wendy Cope’s rendering down of The Waste Land to five limericks is famously a delight that doesn’t, in contrast to an odious movie pastiche like Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, undermine one’s responses to the original.

VIII

The number of traditional border ballads that are memorable as poetry when standing alone and without musical accompaniment seems to be pretty small, unless one enjoys reading about endless feuds, frays, sexual relationships (often political) resulting in violence, and the like. The same names keep coming up.

Tune

I first came upon this moving early-19th-century poem in 1951, in W.H. Auden and John Garrett’s The Poet’s Tongue (1935), when I myself had just left the British Isles, and I got it by heart. It did not at that time figure for me, or, I’m sure, to readers in general, as a protest- poem. It was a poem of loving forgiveness, partly overlapping “Grief of a Girl’s Heart.” To judge from Google, Johnny, like other Irishmen from Athy in County Kildare, had been in the army of the British East India company in Ceylon (Sulloon) after it had been declared a Crown Colony in 1802.The heaviest fighting there was with the kingdom of Kandy in the interior in 1803. The Kandian forces were equipped with firearms, including canon, and repulsed the British, eventually surrendering peacefully a dozen or so years later.

But for the poem all that really matters is that, in the words of another poem, Johnny had gone for a soldier and come back.

In the text that I’ve provided here, and which Auden and Garrett had taken from Lennox Robertson’s A Golden Treasure of Irish Verse (1925), it was with their drums and guns that the enemy had nearly slain him. There is no irony here about the British, despite their superior armaments, being unable to subdue a “primitive” people. Enlisting in the army, with its perils and rewards, was one of the few ways in which young men of spirit, particulalry ones needing to leave their community in a hurry, could find gainful employment elsewhere that wasn’t mere drudgery. There were lots of Irish in the armies of Europe.

The Irish have not, on the whole, been notable for their pacifism.

Variants like “With your drums and guns and drums and guns,” “Why did ye skedaddle from me and the child,” “Where are the legs that used to run,” and “You’ll have to go out on the streets to beg” all weakening the poem as it stands here. But anonymous ballads take their chances, and the poem does indeed evoke the ravages of battle, just as the earlier “An Old Souldier” gives us the discomforts and coarse stoicism of a common soldier’s life.

There are anti-war poems elsewhere in the Table of Contents, or at least poems against particular wars, by Siegrfried Sassoon, Bertoldt Brecht, Auden, Robert Barth, and James Fenton.

Could Robertson’s friend and associate at the Abbey Theatre, W.B. Yeats, have tweaked the poem to its present crispness? Yeats himself, in his own poems, was no pacifist.

Desbordes-Valmore was one of the six poets whom Verlaine discussed in his Les Poètes Maudits (1880), along with Tristran Corbière, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and a couple of others—which is to say, heavy-hitters.. As well as writing poignantly and intelligently about love, she could also, in a poem like “Cantique des Mères,” speak with admirable clarity about politics.

Addressed to the Queen on behalf of the silk-weavers of Lyons who had been imprisoned after a labour conflict in the 1830s, the poem is in a ballade-like mode, with a repeated refrain, that would not have been out of keeping in the fifteenth century of Villon. But there is nothing anachronistic or fustian about it, and in the middle of the French High Romantic period, it has a verbal and moral clarity, and a sense of the speaker and the auditor as both being under the governance of the same values, for which there was no equivalent in English Romanticism.

The ballade- or quasi-ballade form is repetitive and incremental rather than linear and developmental, and hence more impersonal and public than sonnets or couplets, which have to get somewhere and which had dominated in the English Renaissance. You could address the Queen of Heaven in a ballade if you wished, without being either disrespectful or servile, conscious also of owing loyalty to, and being sustained by, the traditional values of art as craft.

Marilyn Hacker’s “Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found” is a splendid ballade from our own time. See also Chaucer’s “Hyd, Absalon, thy gilte tresses clere” and Villon’s “Frères humains qui après nous vivez” and “Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis.”

This poignant analysis of the possibilities for implosion in certain kinds of poeticizing seems to me the equivalent in Clare’s oeuvre of Samuel Coleridge’s “Dejection; an Ode,” just as Clare’s “The Skylark” is obviously a reaction to the skylarking of Percy Shelley, only a year Clare’s senior, but born into vastly more fortunate circumstances. The fineness of Clare’s mind is manifest in the simultaneous lovely cantabile evocation of how things used to glow and quiver with Being for him, and the desolation of how they are now, with the numinousness, and the love, and the delight in analogies perceived as actuality all gone and “the brambles dwindled to a bramble.”

A good deal of intelligent poetic effort would go subsequently into grounding values, including those of “Nature,” in ways that would not be so vulnerable, most memorably in Paul Valéry’s “Le Cimitière Marin.” See also part 3, “Vision and Craft,” of my “Powers of Style.”

An interesting demonstration of that grounding is provided in Clive Wilmer’s “The Natural History of the Rook,” in which we see a literary-romantic supernaturalizing giving way to a perception of complex moral beauties in the natural, when viewed with a naturalist’s understanding.

I

In his introduction to the dual-text edition of The Lazarus Poems (1979), Alistair Elliot says:

When able to work, he “would compose in his head, often at night when sleepless, and dictate the verses in the morning.”

Mathilde was his wife, married after a number of years as his mistress—a peasant girl from Normandy who didn’t know German.

II

Here, to provide a taste of the originals, is the German text of “Anniversary”:

The metre is trochaic (falling) and regular, without being monotonous. The final e’s on “Tage,” “homme,” “Montmartre,” “habe,” etc, would be pronounced like the “e” on Goethe or, of course, Mathilde. “Fiaker” is the French “fiacre” (hackney cab). The way Luftwaffe pilots say “Achtung! Achtung!” in old movies sufficiently takes care of the “ch” sound here.

Reading the poem aloud as a poem, which is to say metrically, rather than as a grab-bag of words in a vocabulary test, can help with the meaning. If your pronunciation is wrong for Hamburg, it will no doubt be OK for somewhere deep in the Black Forest ☺. If one wants more precision, there’s Google.

The flexibility in the syntax is an important element in the flow of the poem. “Goes to walk in Montmartre with Pauline Frau Mathilde,” rather than “Frau Mathilde goes to walk in Montmartre with Pauline,” or “Frau Mathilde goes to walk with Pauline in Montmartre,” puts the final emphasis on Mathilde, where it belongs, after foregrounding the action along the way. The hovering of uncompleted meaning as a sentence proceeds is partly why the metrical regularity doesn’t feel mechanical.

And a compound word like “Sterbetagen” is no more pretentious than “death-days” would be in English. If German used hyphens, we’d presumably have Sterbe-Tagen, since nouns in German are capitalized. In Middle English, “sterven,” my Webster’s New World College Dictionary tells me, meant to die or perish.

III

Here is the more complex and metrically more flexible original of “Mrs. Worry.”

III

Alistair Elliot is the author of a number of other volumes of translations, including Women/Men; the Secret Poems of Paul Verlaine (1979), French Love Poems (1991), Italian Landscape Poems (1993), and Roman Food Poems (2003). His translation of Euripedes’ Medea ran in theatres in London and New York. He’s hoping that the same will happen with his reconstruction of Euripedes’ Phaethon (Oberon Books, 2008)

Among the several books of his own poems is My Country: Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1989.

i

I’m grateful to have been allowed to reproduce the translations here—poems in their own right—from E.H. and AM. Blackmore’s Selected Poems of Victor Hugo; a bilingual edition (University of Chicago Press, 2001), with their range of perfectly controlled tones within relatively small forms and their grounding in the physical world even when they soar towards the top.

The missing French originals will be added later.

“J’aime. O vents, chassez l’hiver” and the translation are on pages 418–421 of the section “Le Cantique de Bethphagé” and, like the nine other poems by various speakers in that section, aren’t indexed.

ii

The “he” of “The Imperial Cloak” (1853), one of the great poems of political invective, is Emperor Napoleon III. According to the Blackmores:

Hugo, born in 1802, and an outspoken opponent of his, went into exile in the Channel Islands, where he continued to pour out works until the fall of the Emperor in 1870 during his disastrous war with Prussia.

iii

Like The Rape of the Lock,” “Goblin Market,” and “House of Words,” La Rose de l’Infante/ The Infanta’s Rose is too long for physical inclusion here, at least for the time being. But it shouldn’t be missed.

It juxtaposes the imperious five-year-old Royal Princess having the unaccustomed experience of disappointment out in the garden of the Escorial and her father, Philip II, up in his rooms in the massive palace, lost in imaginings of the glorious victory of his great Armada, which in fact is about to be ruined by the wind, like the rose in the Infanta’s hand.

I

The poems of Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) apparently occupy only a fraction of the space in the three-volume Pléiade edition of his collected works, which probably, if volume II, which is all that’s currently available to me, is anything to go by, contain two or three thousand pages of texts by Nerval himself, much of it probably journalism.

The handful of poems that I’ve picked are taken from Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Wagner (1968/58) and Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Richard Sieburth (1999), and give an idea of his stylistic variousness and the distance he traveled.

Sieburth’s translation of “El Desdichado” can be found elsewhere on this site. His “Hieronymo’s Mad Againe; On Translating Nerval” interestingly supplements what he has to say in Selected Writings.

II

The following commentary on Nerval’s most famous poem can if one prefers, be read elsewhere on the Web, in white print on a black ground, accompanied by photos of C.S. Lewis, a youthful T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, and the author himself, J.R.R. Tolkien, in among his books. See http://sesquipadalianmusings.blogspot.com/2009/09/el-desdichado-translation.html

Different accounts of the poem must by now be legion, and I have never myself, to put it gently, been a Tolkien groupie. But this one has the virtues of getting well down into romance and myth, as Nerval himself did, and of possessing emotional coherence. It suggests, lucidly and unanchronistically, some of the kinds of concerns that could have obtained in an actual mind during its composition in the 1850s. At least it’s a starting point.

Tolkien is presumably writing for his fellow Inklings at Oxford, a group that collectively defined a very different view of “English” as an academic subject from that of the Leavises and their circle at Cambridge.

An interesting and, it seems to me, appealing account, regardless of what may have been done elsewhere.

III

As for the other poems that I’ve included, all of them good in their own right:

Louis XIII reigned from 1601 to 1643. The chateau in “Fantaisie” would be one of those large brick country houses with stone edgings at the corners, not a stone castle. The scene is peaceful, the brick walls warm in the sunset.

Posilipo, which figures in a couple of poems, is described by Sieburth as a “volcanic ridge projecting into the Bay of Naples, site of Virgil’s grave.” The important fact of its being volcanic is missing from guidebook descriptions in which it is simply a headland at one end of the Bay.

According to Wikipedia, “In the following centuries [Virgil’s] name became associated with miraculous powers, his tomb the object of pilgrimages and pagan veneration.” Among the “relatively severe” eruptions of Vesuvius (Wikipedia again) were ones in 1834, 1839, and 1850.

The name “Myrtho” is apparently an allusion to Venus, to whom the dark myrtle was sacred, entwined in the poem of that name with the pale Christian hydrangea.

IV

The book in English through which I myself recently entered the continent of Nerval was Robert Emmet Jones’s Gérard de Nerval (1974), in the Twayne series. It is excellent, but also intimidating. Nerval, in this take on him, knows so immensely much, and the arcane is so strong an element in his reading and consciousness, that a tyro is simply never going to be able to catch up, or to read with any sense of competence the handful of highly compressed poems from the early 1850s which stand, by seemingly general consent, at the peak of his oeuvre. Jones’ account of “El Desdichado” is of course, a good deal different from Tolkien’s.

And Nerval’s literary life, starting out as a young Romantic, admirer of Hugo, friend of Gautier, Dumas père, Baudelaire, and others, first translator of Goethe’s Faust into French, traveler, dramatist, music critic, and so on who blows his inheritance on a literary journal, and has attacks of acute schizophrenia (perhaps drug-related) requiring hospitalization, and dies in poverty at forty-six by his own hands, has the dimensions of a novel written with the wisdom of hindsight by someone concerned to create a figure in whom numerous subsequent dispositions and strategies--—Romantic, Symbolist, Surrealist, Postmodernist—can be observed in embryo.

No wonder so much has been written about him.

But caution seems in order.

V

A New Book of Verse comprises poems that, as far as possible, are free-standing and could be read individually with little or no loss were they anonymous. The reality is this or that particular voicing of grief, affection, amusement, bitterness, nostalgia, love, religious devotion, moral perplexity, and so on, not a hypothesized “mind” of which it is taken to be an emanation, though as one reads more poems by a poet a poetic self—inevitably loose, and not to be confused with autobiographical-seeming statements made in the poems— builds up.

But obviously the realworld lives and doings and utterances of individual writers are as much subjects for examination as those of statesmen, or movie directors, or serial killers, or anyone else, and in would-be holistic studies, nothing is off the board.

What matters is not to confuse the two modes of reading, of which, logically, the first takes precedence. Back when records were 78’s and hard to come by, what you fastened on to and listened to over and over again was “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” and “Potato Head Blues,” with “Louis Armstrong” and the name of a group on the label, in which the trumpet/cornet solos were stylistically different from Bix’s in “Singin’ the Blues,” and “I’m Coming, Virginia,’ and Bunny Berrigan’s in “I Can’t Get Started.” You were not being deprived in that thrilled hearing of Armstrong because you hadn’t read someone rabiting on about the discography of the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens.

And no one, I hope, would seriously argue that one can’t enjoy the Trout Quintet without having been instructed about Schubert’s life and works.

Enrichment can come, of course, as it can when an art critic like—why not?—Wendy Becker in 1000 Masterpieces of Western Art— draws your attention to elements in a painting that you hadn’t noticed and are glad to see now.

But a reader of poems is just as entitled to resist the claims and pretensions of the broader approach if he or she wishes, otherwise nothing can really be read without expert guidance.

The guidance of which experts?

One is entitled not to be bullied, intimidated, overwhelmed.

VI

Some of those dozen short poems from Nerval’s last year or two that are all that Sieburth includes in his volume indeed have an almost Mallarméan difficulty, mostly because of their allusiveness.

But one needs to resist the sensation of having penetrated into the innermost shrine of an immense temple of whose mysteries they are the quintessence. And in this regard, Sieburth’s volume, which is preponderantly a selection of Nerval’s prose writing, is liberating. Reading the prose itself, the various voicings in that volume, is a very different experience from reading about Nerval in general.

The author may indeed be someone who has gone on unusual mental voyages in his reading, and during the constructions and deconstructions resulting from them. But he is not, in these pieces, writing as a seer who has authority because of those experiences. If he were, he would not have inspired the affection that he has, and the trajectory of his life would not be as poignant as it is.

And while the allusions in a poem like “El Desdichado” may not be self-explanatory, how they are functioning still has emotional heft. We recognize attempts at coping with feelings of loss, isolation, uncertainty about one’s identity, uncertainty about which direction (s) to commit oneself to, and so forth. There may be uncertainties about what is intended by “Lusignan or Biron.” But if someone were to ask in an American poem, “Am I Tecumseh or Stonewall?” we would at least, even if we had to go to Wikipedia for it, have a general sense of different of types of temperament.

I shall now glance at the three most important prose pieces, “Sylvie,” “Angélique,” and “Aurélia,” all from the last handful of years remaining to him, during which Nerval did his most important creating.

I shall do a good deal of quoting. These are definitely works where quoting is superior to summarizing, especially “Sylvie,” and I have not done as well as I would like in my summarizing of the narrative line. Nerval himself always says which of the pasts or presents in “Sylvie” something is happening in. But keeping the sequences in one’s head isn’t easy, and a straightforward story line obviously isn’t what he’s interested in. “Sylvie” is an affair of episodes and passages, and I’ve only been able to present a few of them.

It is the textures that matter most here.

VII

Sieburth reports that “In a 1909 essay on ‘Sylvie,’ drafted as he was about to embark on his own epic investigation into time lost and regained, Marcel Proust discerned in the condensed compass of Nerval’s novella the germ of his own magnum opus to come.”

And that he

But it’s not as though there were no anchoring, no baseline of discourse anywhere in this novella that feel much longer than its forty-two pages.

On the second page is the following lucid account of what things were like were back in the 1830s for bright young men like the narrator (with the ruined Emperor, though he doesn’t mention him, dead out on St. Helena’s barely a decade earlier.

And we have already heard how he himself, “night after night, would make my appearance in one of the stage boxes, dressed in the elegant garb of an ardent suitor,” and what happened when a particular actress was on-stage:

No, this is certainly not a sage or seer. Nor is what follows particularly cerebral or, as we have come to understand the terms, modernist or post-modernist.

The occasional slippages, elisions, lacunae. uncertainties in his perceptions, recollections, dreams, imaginings are not offered as manifesting a new kind of abstract wisdom and order, or applauded for their underminings. They have psychological heft. They are how minds, or at least this one, can work. But we aren’t into a swamp of mere solipsistic subjectivity. The moves are always heuristic, the moves of a mind concerned not with the truth, la verité, but with local truths, local perceptions, local recollections, or what appear to be recollections, re-entering the mind involuntarily or sought out by it.

There is no superior self standing outside them, like that of Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Nabokov in Pale Fire. Which does not, however, mean that we are into the disjunctions and fragmentation of The Waste Land, or the corrosive rhetorical scepticism of Robbe-Grillet.

VIII

Having been accidentally reminded of an episode in his youth involving the peasant girl Sylvie and the well-born Antoinette, the narrator takes off impulsively to the village where, so far as he knows, the unwed Sylvie still lives. En route,

Attending a village fête some years before, he had run into Sylvie and her brother after what sounds like a considerable absence. The next day, Sylvie had taken him to call on an old aunt of hers, widow of a gamekeeper, where she casually, up in the bedroom, removed her calico dress and put on an old-fashioned one of shot silk, remarking that it would make her look like a fairy, and got him to put on the gamekeeper’s wedding-day costume. On the coach another memory comes, from which I will quote later, involving himself and Sylvie’s brother visiting another quasi-theatrical event. The coach arrives, a ball is going on, the maturer Sylvie, who now has a boyfriend, is there.

There are conversations. But no grand operatic passions and counter-passions, no contests, no closures. Or not exactly.

I say that because there is an ongoing theatricality in the festivities and settings and backdrops—A Wood at Night, A Ruined Convent, A Peasant Interior, A Castle, as it were. And throughout there is an air of strangeness, of his not being engaged in familiar goal-oriented activities, of his being moved by feelings that he hasn’t organized, and that to varying extents disrupt the kinds of orderings that he has achieved, such as in that coolly summarizing paragraph about the period. It feels odd, for example, when Sylvie’s aunt, when they come back downstairs to eat, sees them like a side-by-side married couple. And at one point he becomes pretty silly. Walking Sylvie home after the ball at Loisy, suddenly,

But she herself isn’t silly, and nothing comes of it.

IX

The festivities themselves are occasions for passing beyond the everyday, for an opening up of consciousness that is more than merely personal.

The initial re-entry of Sylvie into his awareness is rightly famous:

And that night (he’s still in Paris), as he lies there half-asleep in “this state in which the mind is still fending off the bizrre concatenations of dreams,” he revisits (sees? imagines?) a fête on the grounds of a chateau, with girls dancing and he the only boy among them. He is there, in an extended paragraph, with dark-eyed Sylvie, “my only love.”

But the dance brings him together with tall aristocratic Adrienne, whose blonde ringlets brush his cheek as he gives her an obligatory ritual kiss, and he’s gone.

And she beautifully sings, again as part of the ritual, an old sad ballad about the misfortunes of a princess who has been locked away in a tower by her father as a punishment for having fallen in love.

In the silence ensuing after she finished, he runs and gets a couple of laurel branches and plaits them into a crown for her, so that with the wreath on her hair “She resembled Dante’s Beatrice, smiling upon the poet as he wandered at the outer reaches of her blessed abode.” (150)

When he rejoins Sylvie, she is crying and refuses to speak to him when he walks her home. The next day Adrienne returns to the convent where she is a boarder, and we, or do we? see no more of her.

X

XI

I would like to go on quoting, but the following major passage about the visit of himself and Sylvie’s brother to another theatrical event will have to do, with the gorgeous build up of intensity in the first paragraph and then—but read on.

The questioning in the next paragraph is not destructive. There is no implication in it of any inevitable collapsing back of the exalted into the everyday, or of the merely imagined, if that is what it is, being without value because unreal. The beauty is there, whether elicited by the event itself or by what, in recollection, the event had elicited as a natural enlargement of itself. And the “real” in this second paragraph—the symbolic objects, the actualities of French history—is not banal.

This is, brilliantly, a psychological novel, not a philosophical one, even if philosophical extrapolations can be made from it about identity and perception and social structurings. And it doesn’t seem to me a disintegrative one.

XII

At the end of his introductory remarks about “Sylvie,” Sieburth informs us that:

I can only report that I didn’t experience the narrative myself in that perhaps rather “American” fashion, with its hunger for ultimate depths. Nerval wasn’t here the H.P. Lovecraft of “The Rats in the Walls” before the fact.

No, the past in “Sylvie” is not a deconstructive intrusion into the real or supposed real of the present. It is a part of the presesent, a shaping of consciousness in the present. One more quotation, then.

On his way to visit Sylvie again, he walks, during a silent noon of summer perfection, along a forest road, and en route, arrives at

XIII

That final sentence is worthy of note. For it is clear that “knowledge,” here, refers primarily to the kinds of knowledge sought and displayed in these pages. It does not refer to mere discourse, however clever, or to the philosophical compulsion that Yeats was pointing to in “Meru,” where

We do not, in “Sylvie,” have the kind of implosion and collapse menacing or overtaking various other minds with the fading of the high-romantic exultations—the menace of a draining away of meaning and value as felt at various times by writers like Senancourt, Mallarmé, Hofmanstahl, Valéry, Conrad, and so on; the state of mind described by Amiel in his journal in which

XIV

The 72-page Angélique is entertaining. I mean, in places you laugh. Well, I did.

Nerval himself had extracted it from his glorious The Salt Smugglers (Les Faux Saulniers), serialized in a newspaper in 1850, and taking off from a preposterous (real) law forbidding newspapers, upon pain of heavy fines, from publishing serialized novels, especially ones featuring l’Amour .

The narrative in both is a quasi-Sternean explanation, in a series of letters to his editor, of how the narrator has been scrupulously factual in his account of his quest for biographical information about a particular cleric, the abbé de Bucquoy, with research trips, and burrowings in libraries and bookstores in search of a volume glanced at in Frankfurt.

And since he wants his reader(s) to experience that quest in all its details, and with all its perplexities, he is able, in a rich variety of digressions, but without Sterne’s stylistic mannerisms, to bring in anything that feels remotely relevant, including in The Salt Smugglers, performing seals.

XV

Here are the journalist-narrator of “Angélique” and his somewhat bucolic friend Sylvain (the brother of Sylvie, actually, but there are no references to her), the two of them bearded and obviously not from around those parts, being asked for their papers by a police officer, which of course they don’t have. The ellipsis marks are in the text.

And there are great moments after the narrator gets hold of a manuscript in which “that lovely adventuress” Angélique de Longueval, high-born great-aunt of the Abbé, recalls in an MS memoir her elopement and rackety life with one of her father’s servants, the wastrel son of a pork-butcher.

Here she is, accompanied by her lover, breaking into her parents strong-box with a kitchen shovel to get at the silverware that will finance their elopement.

I love that “chandeliers”.

Here they are in the coach.

(She is wearing boots and spurs.)

Here, apropos of her pregnancy, we are informed that.

Here we learn how, when they’re in Germany, La Corbinière

Here is the autodidact Sylvain, “a talented and thoughtful fellow.”

XVI

On the first day of the 1848 Revolution, a bibliophile makes his way through the mob to the Palais-National.

Where, not unreasonably, “they looked at him as if he were stark mad.” (121-122)

On another occasion a bibliophile is trying, increasing desperately, to extract from a blandly stonewalling fellow collector a little volume, a mere nothing, of no value really, but…

Concluding with:

XVII

At the start of the brief conclusion, titled “Reflections,” we have:

But the humour isn’t “literary” in the show-offy Nabokovian fashion, nor is it binary like that of Candide, in which a whole world-view is being shown up as ridiculous and all the incidents point in the same direction. Angélique’s life with La Corbiniére has its ups as well as downs, and she goes on loving the jerk, and her memoirs aren’t a diatribe

In a curious way, the humour seems to me psychological realism.

What is delicious, at least for me, is the glimpses of faux-reasonableness, whether in the doing or the saying—the fumbling logic on both sides in the exchange with the police officer, those chandeliers (with the sack already bulging), the imagined husband (they’re not at that point married) deliberately dressing his wife like that, the acknowledgment that you can’t have lodgers if they’ve nowhere to sit or lie, the sadly limited compass, the thoughtful reflection about the church fathers— with immediately “but that’s neither here nor there.”

I am reminded of nothing so much as the realworld ponderings and figurings and self-presentations in the great early-talkies Laurel and Hardy shorts—the times when Ollie magisterially sweeps Stan aside and steps forward to negotiate (disastrously, of coure) with the police officer or judge; the sublime moment when the two of them are sharing a bed and Ollie observes meditatively about his wife :

There’s an ancestry in the humour of “Angélique” that can be traced a long way back.

XVIII

“Angéique” is more or less the first two-thirds of The Salt-Smugglers,” The remaining pages are devoted to the lively abbé de Bucquoy, the narrator having now found the volume that he has been seeking.

After what, for me, were a few longueurs, my interest in some of the finer points of French history being slight, and introduced by a robust demonstration of how historical facts could be jazzed up in the manner of Walter Scott if one were one permitted—as of course one isn’t—to fictionalize, we’re introduced into the Bastille, to which Bucquoy, who has already escaped from a prison at Vincennes, has been committed after an accidental involvement with salt bootleggers (salt being at that time heavily taxed).

And what we have is a beautifully realistic forebear of umpteen good prison-escape narratives—La Grand Illusion, The Colditz Story, Billy Rags, etc., with inmates feeling one another out as possible partners, and piecing together equipment, and facing being moved from the cell where they have to be, and suffering betrayal by a fink seeking better conditions for himself, and working out the routines of sentries, and the rest of it.

There are enough understated unpleasantness too—the Hole (i.e. deepest dungeon) with its toads and rats and darkness, the abuse and death of a young woman prisoner, a reference to bullwhipping, the incarceration by the State for the smallest-seeming offences (a possibly satirical couplet)—to reinforce Sieburth’s reminder in his Afterword that “Angélique” is seriously a political novel, especially concerning the sought control of speech.

Though Sieburth himself doesn’t make the point in so many words, it strikes me that the strategies throughout for slipping things past the authorities while claiming, virtuously, to be scrupulously respecting the letter of the law, must have been familiar later to dissidents under a variety of authoritarian regimes.

After asking at one point, “And you are surprised by the persecution the abbé de Bucquoy would later face,—at the hands of minister Pontchartrain?” the narrator adds, “As for Angélique de Longueval, she is the petticoat version of this tradition of Opposition …”

Sieburth remarks that Nerval is “rarely read as a writer of worldliness.” (SS 139).

I had assumed as much.

XIX

“Aurélia” isn’t funny at all. It is about Nerval’s attacks of insanity, and was begun, it appears, as part of the process of recovery from one of them.

It is remarkable for his ability to recreate states of hallucination without the writing itself becoming insane or his losing sight of the fact of his own self adrift in the Paris streets, often at night, and requiring to be rescued by concerned friends or the authorities, and helped by what seems to have been a remarkably non-invasive doctor at a time when French doctors were becoming monsters of self-importance.

Here (and it will be my only quotation) is an extended excerpt about one of his hospitalizations.

It is a remarkable work, and obviously one of the most interesting of those in which detailed visions and hallucinations figure.

The first of the two parts appeared in January 1855.

In February, in his forty-seventh year, Gérard de Nerval, born Gérard Labrunie, hanged himself one night, out in the street, in the rue de la Vieille Lanterne…

XX

For Yvor Winters, I imagine, the arc of Nerval’s career, like that of the also suiciding Hart Crane, would have been only an appalling warning about the perils of Romanticism.

Nerval was indeed a Romantic, the first translator into French of Goethe’s Faust and transmitter of other aspect of German thought, the enthusiastic explorer of esoteric modes of knowledge, the disrupter of conventional barriers between fact and fiction, truth and lies, the explorer and celebrator (as was André Breton later) of a pre-Roman France, and a man increasingly incompetent at the business of everyday living.

He was also, it appears, intermittently a member of the so-called Club des Haschischins, the group of significant creators who, during the 1840s, met to engage in and discuss the drug experience in the house on the at that time bohemian Île de la Cité. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/oct/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview34

But, unless I’ve been reading carelessly or there has been a cover-up, he wasn’t hopelessly in the grip of hashish or alcohol. And he was extraordinarily productive in his writing, in contrast to sad little fin-de-siècle British figures like Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson. Baudelaire, in Sieburth’s words, “observed that he was one of the few authors of his age who had successfully managed, even in death, to remain ‘forever lucid.”

The story of his leading a lobster on a leash in—what was it?—the public garden of the Palais-Royale, across the Rue de Rivoli from the Louvre, appears to have been made up, though apparently at one point he kept in his room as a pet, presumably in a tank, a lobster he had saved from the boiling.

Nor did he simply become and remain insane, like Hölderlin. He was right to maintain, even without the benefit of retroactive assistance from Foucault, that he wasn’t a madman. Like Virginia Woolf he had episodes of insanity and was ontologically fragile, but that’s not the same thing.

It seems to me arguable, too, that if he was the first of the heroic French Symbolist voyagers of the mind like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Lautréamont, with the Surrealists after them, and capable, in some of the things that he did with language, of acting on the minds of others like Acid, he was also to some extent a warning for others in France as well as an inspiration, particularly when it came to questing after ultimate esoteric truths.

Baudelaire, while sympathetically acknowledging the hunger for vision and transcendence, brilliantly defined in the Les Paradis Artificiel (1860) the delusoriness of some of the claims being made on behalf of the drug experience, and observed, “Wine makes men happy and sociable, hashish isolates them. Wine exalts the will, hashish annihilates it.” Rimbaud quit cold turkey as a writer in favour of realworld action when he had gone as far as he could, or wanted to, in pursuit of the transcendent. Lautréamont was already turning away from the “evil” fury of Les Chants deMaldoror (1868-69) when he died at the age of twenty-four, perhaps of “fever,” during the Siege of Paris. Mallarmé pulled from back from the philosophical abyss that had yawned in front of him in his twenties. And Breton went on working at finding ways of inhabiting the surreal without being destroyed thereby or needing drugs or booze to remain visionary. The madness that overtook Artaud was the exception rather than the rule.

Where the damage was really done was in America, where alcoholic suicides like avant-garde poet and publisher Harry Crosby and Hart Crane, in 1929 and 1932 respectively, and a number of subsequent figures who, in contrats to Rimbaud, had never gone through the discipline of a formal classical French education, were encouraged in their yearnings for the Ultimate by an Emersonian belief in the goodness of what one sincerely did and thought.

It was in that context that Winters’ concern with reason—not to be confused with cool or sweet reasonableness and a readiness to compromise in the interests of social harmony—deserves to be seen. He himself, after all, as an adolescent, would jump into a chilly nighttime canal to cool a body fevered by his reading, thereby contributing to the onset of the TB that would confine him for two years to a New Mexico sanitarium, and whose own writing in the Twenties was fragmented, modernist, and, yes, reaching hungrily towards the absolute and infinite.

XXI

Sieburth’s restriction of the poems to the late ones seems to me an unwarranted attempt to increase Nerval’s strangeness and downplay the features that relate him to, rather than differentiate him from, other poets.

The earlier poems that I have included are simply—poems. Nor is the neo-paganism of “Myrtho” particularly difficult.

Nerval’s best poems, with their preference for forms from before the dominance of the neoclassical couplet, and the garrulity that it permitted to non-dramatic poets, are noteworthy for their concision and control, and at times lyrical or meditative charm.

In a serious reading of several of the difficult, at times almost opaquely different later ones, a problem as with commentaries on Mallarmé, is not to so over-allegorize as to convert them into condensed prose statements, or to have all manner of biographical associations accumulate round them like weeds on the bottom of an old-time sailing vessel.

A test is always, it seems to me, what happens when you read a poem out aloud from start to finish without stopping along the way. Being able to flesh out in the mind’s eye the term “le Pausillippe,” which, cold on the page, can mean just about anything for the tyro, really matters. But a one-line note equating a classical name with the name of an obscure woman in a poet’s early life will simply, in itself, do nothing to firm up the poem as one reads. And it is insidiously easy to overlook the “How” of a poem, always the hardest thing to talk about, if one concentrates on the “What.”

Nor are these poems simply the versified moans of a victim.

“El Desdichado" is in fact, in its decisiveness, chivalric allusions, and Orphic analogies, a curiously heroic work, befitting, perhaps, the son of someone who had been a doctor in Napoleon’s Grande Armée. The opening announcement, after the title’s evocation of Scott’s Ivanhoe, has something in it of the knight entering the tourney and proclaiming who he is and what his heraldic device signifies. And, descending like Orpheus into the Underworld, the “I” of the poem has kept on singing and been twice victorious, an allusion perhaps to surviving bouts of insanity.

Nerval’s life had indeed, in ways vastly different from that canard about the lobster, been a heroic one, and there is an extraordinary poignancy to his terminating it after the achievements of those packed final five years.

For more about vision, drugs, creativity, and romanticism, see Part 2 of the annotated bibliography for this site.

2009

I

If I’ve given Dickinson the maximum number of poems in the Table of Contents, it’s because of the difficulty of choosing from among the 1775 poems and fragments in the 1960 Complete Poems. There are more poems to dislike or be irritated by in there, depending on one’s disposition, than in any other poet of comparable distinction. There is also the temptation to homogenize so as to get at the presumed essential mind there, particularly the philosophizing one, and to perceive it as being as unique in its American fashion as is, for its admirers, the poetic mind of Hopkins or, in France, that of Mallarmé.

I’ve opted for diversity, because that in itself is part of her interactions with what might loosely be called reality. There are multiple “languages” there. She isn’t always doing the same kind of thing but lapsing at times below a certain level of seriousness, or just going flat. Lightness, playfulness, linguistic inventiveness are all elements in the various ad hoc modes of being that make her heartening even when death and dying are recurring topics. Amazingly, she wasn’t, at least in the poetry, morbidly depressive, any more than was Hardy, who was also mostly at his best writing about death and the dead.

Here are a dozen more poems, not all of them fondled and smoothed (or complicated) into over-familiarity. Only the last-but-one of them made the cut into Yvor Winters’ list in the notes to Forms of Discovery of the thirty-two “irreducible minimum” of her poems that should be in any volume of selections. But they are all linguistically fresh. If one were to find one or two of them in the works of a poet like Christina Rossetti or Charlotte Mew, I think one’s antennae would start twitching. Mine would, anyway.

The sequence, as with the ten in the Table of Contents, is how they appear in Complete Poems.

II

III

The morning in “She lay as in play” is evidently figuring how to awaken the sleeper. Van Dieman’s land was what became Tasmania, and, if you were a convict being shipped there from England, was as far as you could get from home.

In Webster’s New World Dictionary (4th ed., 2004), a phoebe is “any of a genus of tyrant flycatchers with a grayish or brown back.” Phoebe in Greek mythology (same source) was Artemis, “goddess of the moon; identified with the Roman Diana”; also “the moon personified”; also, “the small outermost satellite of Saturn, having an unusual retrograde orbit.” I have no idea what was in the poet’s mind at the time. I don’t know what is intended by “disc.”

“Ritardando” is defined as “Musical direction becoming gradually slower when used other than in a musical score.” The phials presumably held her medications. The poem has a discernible rhythm and isn’t just for the eye.

IV

Emily Dickinson, poète disloqué; or, Not Damned but Dashed

Yvor Winters seems to me almost spot-on in his vehement objections in Forms of Discovery (pp.264–5) to the dashes inflicted editorially by Thomas H. Johnson on a lot of the poems, like a series of hiccups. Combined with Dickinson’s over-use of capitalization, they make her more eccentric than she was, tend towards a homogenization of different styles, and interfere with her rhythms. They are a coarsening, not a refining. A poem as delicate as “Good morning, Midnight” is ruined.

At times, as in an opening line like, “Noon—is the hinge of day” she is clearly using them as if scoring for performance, slowing down a line or unit of phrasing. Most of the time, though, they are positioned where conventional punctuation marks would have been if the poems had received normal publication at the time.

Conventional punctuation marks—commas, periods, colons, semi-colons, parentheses, ellipsis marks, and, yes, dashes—are more subtle, being themselves partly, in their origins, indicators of degree of pause, but also having more complex syntactical and semantic functions. A conventional dash can be either a pointer to an appositive, like a colon—“Only one thing terrified him—hurricanes”—or, as here, be the first of a pair of parenthesis indicators, leaving the enclosed part a bit more dynamic than if one had had (“Only one thing terrified him: hurricanes”).

A fair bit of the time she seems to be getting them to do the work of commas. At others, they’re like semi-colons, holding units together without the aid of syntax. At times they’re performing like periods. At others, it can be unclear, at least on a first reading, whether a stanza has reached conclusion or we have to keep going into the next one.

Dashes are—heavy punctuation marks.

To judge from the fact that she also used dashes in letters, and, at times, together with a comma and period or two in the same poem, she simply didn’t have a sufficient mastery of punctuation to render more subtly the pausings and connectings that she was hearing.

V

Among the papers left behind by the artist Carol Hoorn Fraser are a batch of poems, or bits of poems, that she wrote as an undergraduate at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota in the late 1940s. They exist in a variety of forms—ink, pencil, typescript, print (the student ’zine)—, at times on ragged scraps of paper, at times imperfectly legible, with sometimes confusing crossings-out and substitutions, and usually undated. Transcribing them increased my respect for textual editors.

A number of them are punctuated with small dashes, little more than horizontal flicks of the pen. These were the results, obviously, of writing fast, and probably also of not being quite sure at some times of what the correct punctuation mark ought to be. The punctuation on the fair-copy typescripts and in the printed versions was normal.

I would imagine that she was by no means unique among girls of her generation in punctuating like that.

VI

The following facsimile, facing page 266 of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, shows how much lighter and more wavering Dickinson’s own markings could be. The one-stanza poem or jotting for a poem goes:

 

Where the evidence of the eyes is concerned, Johnson’s decisions as to which of those particular specks is what seem wholly subjective.

VII

Dickinson’s over-capitalization is also a coarsening.

Partly it is simply the automatic capitalizing of nouns, as is still done in German, and which continued in British poetry until at least the middle of the eighteenth century, as in, “The needy Traveller, serene and gay/ Walks the wild Heath, and sings his Toil away” in Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes.

But at times, a number of times, it’s evidently intended to give a special weight to a word functioning as a proper name (“Good morning, Midnight”), or charged with ad hoc significance (“I’ve stopped being Theirs”), or, as in “Is Bliss then, such Abyss,” making an abstraction more concrete or a concretion more abstract, rather as happens in French with the omnipresent particles—la verité, the truth, instead of just “truth.”

The trouble is, one doesn’t know when she’s doing what.

VIII

I said above that Winters’ critique of Johnson’s texts was almost spot-on. I’d failed to read, or at least to notice, the following by Johnson himself in the variant-readings Harvard Poems of Emily Dickinson (1979).

If so—I mean, if the oddities and anomalies of the Johnson texts are simply there , for him as for us, for the limited purposes of what is thought to be an accurate conflation of the various sources—then the whole game opens up, since there is no obligation for compilers of selections to wait for a definitive normalized text of the whole oeuvre. There never can be such an edition.

That was over half-a-century ago. But the dashes have clung in there with bedbug tenacity.

IX

Obviously there are problems with becoming to some extent a textual editor oneself. But it seems an abnegation of responsibility to say to the general reader, in effect, “Make up your own mind.” Of course editorial errors, or what are claimed to be errors, occur. But a text doesn’t crumble into vacuity because of a, perhaps, misreading or two, and the gains in readability with normalization, as discernible in several selections from her work, far outweigh possible drawbacks.

What’s that? “Readability”? Don’t we know that, like Mallarmé, an experimental poet like Dickinson is meant to be difficult?

Well, as a matter of fact, yes, she is indeed Mallarméan (or he Dickinsonian) in her transpositions of psychological abstractions into concretions, and her syntactical daring. But if, as one reads along, one has to keep dealing with avoidable syntactical difficulties and unintended ambiguities in the interests of maintaining her status as a proto-modernist, one will be less able to appreciate her expressive originality, including her reworkings of “popular” elements that relate her to Hardy.

X

Given the penumbra of uncertainty around a lot of her poems—uncertainty as to whether a transcribed poem is hers at every point; uncertainty as to whether something is wholly finished up; uncertainty as to which of two variants she would finally have settled on; uncertainty as to what would have happened, and with what degree of approbation on her part, had the punctuation been normalized for publication during her lifetime—textual decisions will unavoidably at times, as that ferocious textual editor A.E. Housman knew, be partly critical ones.

Does something feel right, bearing in mind the whole progression of a poem, and what goes on in other poems by the author which in some ways it resembles? Does a particular difficulty feel like one that inheres naturally in one or more of the author’s modes—or not?

And often, at least until we get into the later and at times obviously hurried jottings, it seems to be mostly a matter of an occasional crux, some problematical local piece of diction, syntax, or punctuation. If, with Johnson, you’re happier with the penultimate line of “This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies” as “Exist an Oriental Circuit,” rather than “Fulfilled an oriental circuit,” well, both versions (see Johnson) are in the sources.

Ditto with “No one” as opposed to “No man” in the final stanza of “I started early.” Personally I found the former puzzling before I knew that there was another option. He’s a stranger there? He enters the town? What? Whereas “No man he seemed to know” suggests a gentleman so intently focused on the lady he’s dogging along the road to town that he has no interest in any men coming the other way and ignores the normal hat-raising courtesies.

(Johnson’s mystifying choice of “at most” over “almost” in “Summer begins to have the look” is a non-starter.)

It also, so far as I can see, doesn’t in fact matter greatly, most of the time, so long as the syntax is reasonably clear, whether at some particular point there’s a semi-colon or a period, a colon or a dash. Her use of those pen-flicks testified to a desire to keep things flowing, rather than crispening them up, including flows at times from one quatrain to the next. A quatrain poet like A.E. Housman she isn’t. Rhymes are not emphatic boundary-markers. They can miss precision, at times even vanish.. And the poem isn’t necessarily wrecked.

XI

In any event, one needs to resist the temptation to believe, especially where Dickinson is concerned, that the more difficult is always to be preferred to the less, and that the more gnomic something is, the better.

That belief has its pedagogical advantages, of course. The deeper the difficulties, the more the teacher is needed, the more the students can indulge in interpretive ingenuity, and the more reassuringly distant the poet becomes from the seeming simplesse and preachiness of a lot of the poems. Also, one is emphatically not being guilty of the kinds of smoothings and simplifyings of lines by poets like Shakespeare, or Hopkins, or, as done by her early advisor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson herself, that have become Awful Warnings.

And once a text is solidly there in print, it willy-nilly looks authoritative, as if the author Has Spoken. Logically it needn’t. But it does. And Johnson’s is a Harvard publication, I mean HARVARD.

But the belief that Harvard is some kind of critical Mount Olympus seems to me one of the embedded academic myths, and I find reassuring the statement by Stanford’s Winters that: “there is no question about one thing: the early versions, especially those of Mrs. Todd, are the best poems, and by a wide margin” (Forms, 264).

Winters was a greater critic than anyone who ever operated out of Harvard.

XII

The disposition to see profundity as inhering in individual words and phrases from which it can be extruded under the right pressure—a disposition going back to the Romantic belief in the synthesizing power of the Imagination, and adrenalin-boosted by William Empson’s Fifty-Seven Types of Ambiguity—in fact hinders an empathetic participation in the start-to-finish heard progression of a good or great poem.

And with a poet like Dickinson—whose best poems, as Winters points out, are often not instantly different from her preponderant worst—to extrapolate from the best ones and make the others all part of the postulated Mind of the poet can in fact, like a photographer’s preponderant weaker photographs, cast doubt backwards upon the distinction of the best ones.

As happens for me, I must confess, when I run my eye over the forty-one poems in the 2006 Oxford Book of American Verse, with the drum-taps of those dashes signaling, as for a contingent at a summer-camp jamboree, WE ARE EMILY DICKINSON POEMS.

The even more generous selections in one or two other anthologies, particularly when specifically Christian items are excluded, make me wonder whether she hasn’t become, for some readers, a sort of higher-level replacement for the spirituality of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

XIII

Was Winters’ right in his trail-blazing claim in Maule’s Curse (1938) that “except for Melville, she is surpassed by no writer that this country has produced; she is one of the greatest lyric poets of all time.”? (In Defense of Reason, 299)

I don’t know. By my count, there wouldn’t be more than seventy of her seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-five poems in a volume of her poems picked strictly for their poetic merit, rather than as components of the Emily Dickinson Story. That’s not a bad score, and anyway, greatness, as Winters rightly insisted, is not a matter of bulk. But there are numerous poems in A New Book that speak to me more than do hers.

In any event, exploring her in Johnson’s edition is a lot more interesting than doing so in the 1933 Bianchi-Hampson Definitive Complete Edition, a thousand poems shorter.

I’ve tried to pick poems that can stand on their own, that have varying degrees of seriousness without, at the lighter end of the spectrum, being merely cute, and that display, for the most part, her remarkable stylistic inventiveness. In other words, I’ve tried to approach her as a normal maker and shaper of poems, rather than as a cult—a maker and shaper who can obviously enjoy the element of formal play.

XIV

I have now read R.W. Franklin’s introduction to his reading edition of Dickinson, and the relevant parts of his bibliographically formidable The Editing of Emily Dickinson; a Reconsideration (1967).

It’s curious.

His evidence and arguments almost all serve to support and develop that crucial paragraph of Johnson’s. An examination of her manuscripts, he reports in Editing, shows that they “were merely a habit of handwriting and that Emily Dickinson used them inconsistently, without system.” The capitals were “used on nouns, but not every noun, at times on every other part of speech, and on important and unimportant words alike.… Frequently several autograph copies of the same poem exist, each with variant punctuation and capitalization.”

Moreover, “That the capitals and dashes were merely habits of handwriting without special significance is also shown by the poet’s using them not only for poems but for letters too,” and by how, when she copied out passages from other writers “she translated type into her own peculiar writing, complete with capitals and dashes where they had not been.” (120–121)

Furthermore, a box containing “some of the correspondence associated with the nineteenth-century editing of the Dickinson poems” includes “at last thirty letters by twenty-four different writers in which the dash was used in place of conventional punctuation.” (124)

But when Franklin quotes her verse, the dashes and capitals are still there. And they are there twenty-three years later in the Reading Edition accompanying his own variorum edition.

XV

Presumably Harvard wouldn’t spring for a modernized reading edition to accompany Franklin’s two-volume variorum, though it would be nice to think that he had tried to persuade them. After all, he himself had said in Editing that

But the extra work and time required would have been daunting, and no doubt market research had indicated that a lot of readers at various levels of sophistication genuinely liked, or weren’t bothered by, the typographical idiosyncracies.

However, his apologetics on behalf of the status quo in his reading edition are so perfunctory that it’s hard to believe that he was really trying.

When he says straightfacedly, ““The basic choice has been either to follow her private intentions and characteristics … or to lay onto the poems social conventions and judgments that were not hers” (11) such a dichotomy and its subtext would de-legitimize legions of edited texts by earlier authors.

And he himself had said in Editing that “We lack … authorial final intention throughout the poems of Emily Dickinson.” (133), and that

Crucially, too, when ten of her poems were published in the normal way behind her back,

Plainly, the normal presentation of her works in print was an acceptable terminus for her, though she wouldn’t herself seek it, with all the interventions by others, and misunderstandings, and public praisings and jeerings, and erosions of her identity, and weakening of her self-confidence, which that would have entailed, not to mention her own enforced decision-making.

She wasn’t, thank goodness, a Gertrude Stein or Laura Riding.

XVI

But it does indeed seem to be a case of de gustibus here.

Presumably the dashes and capitals slow down the movement of what might otherwise be too tripping lines, and give more of a sense of presence, as if the poet herself were reading out the poems with appropriate emphases. Personally I think that conventional punctuation does the job better, because being more semantically precise and allowing one more freedom to hear the movements of the lines in one’s own fashion.

But then, I’ve found myself preferring the “period” texts of a number of older British poems that I’ve transcribed, with the capitalization of nouns, the italics for proper names, the older spellings, and so on, all serving to slow things down and counteract the tendency to flesh things out in present-day terms with one’s mind’s eye. At least there are consistent principles at work there. But no doubt there are readers who would prefer modernizations.

De gustibus.

Evidently, too, with Dickinson’s image, as with Whitman’s, we are into narratives of American exceptionalism in which the two of them were the great American poetic prophets in the biblical sense, with every utterance by them of consequence—Whitman engaged in a “masculine” reaching ever further and more comprehensively out into the “real” social world, Dickinson going deep deep deep into the “feminine” soul.

And in this regard the eccentricities, while weakening the best poems, serve to bring the others up by implicitly emphasizing that they’re all from the same dash-flicking and capitalizing mind.

XVII

Franklin seems to me right on target, though, when he says, in Editing, that logically what we should all be talking about is poems, but that we (well, not all of us) have opted for poets.

Which is to say, if I may extrapolate, opting for “minds” embodying their insights in verse, particularly the insights of “real” poets, in contrast to texts as speech-acts incarnating possibilities of a variety of kinds, to be approached without preconceptions as to their intrinsic worth and interconnectedness.

From which, as they accumulate, an in fact more accurate sense of a self, or aspects of a self, may emerge.

XVIII

Apropos of which, I have just been looking at the introduction to the selected poems of a writer about as different from Dickinson in some ways as one might get. It begins

But perhaps the negatives are in some ways positives, reminding us, as they do, of the fictiveness of attempts to reach through biographically to the real self of a poet as a generative principle which, once found, can be used to explain the origins of individual poems and clarify what they “really” mean.

For we do indeed have a very strong sense of a personality, a configuration, that we loosely call Dunbar. What we are reading is individual and strongly flavoured poems in a variety of modes and without a base-line (Dunbar-as-cleric, say, or Dunbar-as-courtier) from which other things can be considered variants, or a narrative in which one mode of being modulates, explanatorily, into another.

The primary question, if we want to ask it, is a What and not a How—what are the various voicings, and modes of being, and rhetorics here, not how is it that so much variety can exist within an individual consciousness. And the individual poems for the most part are sufficiently strong and self-sufficient for the reading of them to be scarcely less rewarding an experience were they all anonymous.

It might indeed be interesting to know more about the poets in the great “Lament for the Makaris” who are simply names. And yet when one reads references to “the noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,” or “Maister Robert Henryson,” I don’t know that they enter into one’s head in any detail. What counts is someone recalling, with realistic brevity, a lot of fellow poets for whom he has respect, and without necessarily having some particular aspect of each of them in mind at that moment.

Getting involved in guessing games, did one know more from other sources, about why this or that poet was here and what Dunbar’s attitude to him was would in all likelihood be counterproductive, because introducing irrelevant details and maybe even inviting the claim that since Dunbar doesn’t seem in fact to have had friendly relations with some of them, the poems is therefore simply a formulaic ubi sunt—as if formulae haven’t had the durability that they do because of their ability to embody real feelings.

And, in speaking as he did, the poet may well have known that for a number of readers and hearers the names would indeed not be meaningful., so that the poem is both public, in the general meditation at the outset, and private, like a blues singer recalling other blues singers dead and gone. And the various ways of recalling at the outset of each stanza, which avoid a monotony of enumeration, are part of the mimetic workings of a mind skillfully rendered—and, so far as the evidence of the poem itself is concerned, felt.

Etcetera.

Were there more characterization, as in Yeats’ “Easter 1916,” with the obligation to say something about each figure, attention would in fact be shifted away from a quasi-everyman thinking about death to a literary gent engaged in aesthetic judgments.

And in general, engaging with individual poems without the normal aids is an engagement with another “mind,” in its speech-act variousness, in a way truer to human complexities than the normal kind of quasi-novelistic tidying-up.

IXX

There is a welcome openness too, for me, in the twenty-two dash-free poems by Dickinson that I have included in A New Book, and in some of the others, in contrast to the depressing sense of all those almost two-thousand texts as codes to be cracked that will stitch them into a master narrative. And too much of a to-do can be made about the difficulties of editing, particularly where punctuation is concerned.

Robert Graves began it with his polemic against the modernized punctuation of a Shakespeare sonnet, and William Empson took the hints and ran with them in ways that would probably have puzzled Graves, whose own poetry was notable for its classical unambiguousness. But Empson’s through-the-loupe- readings could be as counterproductive in their overloadings as the biographical or “Thought-of-the-Poet” approaches.

When you have the start-to finish-flow, and a real musculature, things will usually fall into place, and inconsistencies be visible, and individual words not be obliged to bear too heavy burdens of meaning.

If one were to read, as transcribed by someone who copied it down from a talk,

it wouldn’t take much to figure out, given Tim Steele’s practices in other poems, that the penultimate word in the first line should probably be “diplomatic,” particularly since “dipsomatic” has no dictionary existence.

On the other hand, a good deal more work is required to cope with those redundant and space-filling “stones” in Wordsworth’s more loosely structured “A slumber did my spirit seal.” When I mentioned this to a science-oriented friend, he suggested “worms” as a replacement.

XX

Given the exciting possibilities of the “personality” approach, we will no doubt soon be getting Emily in apotheosis as a Miss Marple, whisperingly solving the dark puzzles of Amherst, Mass., as conveyed to her by a confidante, without ever leaving the screwball family compound.

May–June

The juxtaposition here of the intensely private Dickinson and the very privately public Mallarmé with the intensely public Michel—Communard and subsequent indomitable propagandist for Anarchism, despite imprisonments, exile, and police harassment—is piquant. But in her larger-than-life Romantic courage, compassion, sense of occasions, brilliant manipulation of the authorities, and, in her commitment to the cause of what she saw as true social justice, selflessness, she was one of those organically unified figures, like Victor Hugo—whom she admired, learned from in her poetry, and corresponded with for years—who are simultaneously public and private.

Like Germaine de Staël, she was, of course, quite “impossible” if you were trying to make her do or stop doing something against her wishes. But she was beloved of many, and a true saint of radicalism.

I don’t at present know whether her crows or Rimbaud’s came first, or whether there was coincidence or, as seems more likely dialogic adaptaton.

“Chanson du Cirque” feels as though it was written in response to French Society’s taking a fashionable interest in bull-fights of the mise à mort kind in, at a guess, the decadently thrill-seeking 1890s. The Bloody Week of street-fighting in May 1871, and the executions of ten-? twenty-thousand? active or suspected Communards were barely two decades in the past.

Michel loathed cruelty to animals.

According to Wikipedia, “Jacques Bonhomme” was the contemptuous term of the aristocracy for the peasants who revolted in northern France in 1358, in the so-called Jacquerie. Apparently “Jacques” came from the short jacket worn by peasants. “Jacques Goodfellow,” one suggested rendering of “Bonhomme,” doesn’t sound particularly contemptuous to me. “Goodman Jack” might be more condescending, but neither seem to me to resonate now. “Clown” was of course an older English term for yokels, as in Shakespeare, and still, in some connexions, carries associations of clumsiness and ignorance.

But the clumsiness of circus clowns is only a feigned clumsiness.

The Roman arenas were the sites of circuses. I don’t know when bullfighting was started up again in modern times in the Arena in Arles.

The lower-case “sacré coeur” in “V’la le choléra” presumably fuses ironically the Catholic doctrine of the compassionate Sacred Heart of Christ and the sepulchre-white Sacré Coeur Basilica perched on top of Montmartre. According to Wikipedia,

The construction of this highly controversial edifice began in 1875 and continued until 1914.

August 2009

This version of “Le Pitre Chatié” comes from an 1864 notebook of Mallarme’s. Elsewhere I say a few words about the revised version of the poem published in1887 and the linguistic energizing in it, beginning with the mysterious first line, “Yeux, lacs avecs ma simple ivresse de renaitre”—mysterious, that is, if one doesn’t know the earlier version.

The earlier version is obviously a symbolic enactment and critique of the Romantic fantasy, strongest among young German males, of the pure young woman as a beautiful soul, repository of a spirituality that will transform and focus creatively the untidy life of the male. On the disjunctions of such relationships in practice, see, for example, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Penelope Fitzgerald’s marvelous succinct historical novel The Blue Flower (1995) about the two-year fixation of the poet known as Novalis on an ordinary, ill-educated, unintellectual, but amiable young miss of a respectable family, who’s a good deal baffled by his intensity and the insights that he attributes to her.

The first version of the poem is already pretty concrete in its evocation of the excitement, a flurry of new leaves turned over, etcetera, of the early stages of such a relationship, before it has settled down into routine. The “she” of the poem, as distinct from the ambitions generated by her, is there only as the pair of eyes into whose attributed interior mindscape of symbolic values, above all purity, one feels oneself being erotically and somewhat narcissistically drawn.

But the male messiness, show-offiness, self-dramatization, wildness, even clownishness are, alas, all part of the dynamics of creativity. Of creativity in general, or that of this particular figure? A friend and correspondent of Mallarmé’s noted that at one point earlier, Mallarmé had in fact written “de ma génie,” maybe more honestly.

Mallarmé was a very tactile poet, but in a very different fashion from Villon or the Ronsard of the erotica, setting up physical sites in which intense but narrowed ranges of emotions are elicited—a frozen lake, a buried temple, a huge fallen boulder, a mysteriously empty room, etc.

The punished clown? The chastised clown? The chastened clown? The purified clown?

The Muse will punish him by withdrawing her inspiration from him because of his disloyalty, his belief that he no longer needs the traditional cultural dialoguing of audience-related poetry but can have an unmediated access to the Absolute, as with the purer-than-pure cold of the distant glacier, a taste of whose waters has entered these lakes.

But do we feel him, in his consciousness, as chastised, purified, or, in his realization of where his egoistical and more than a little adolescent impetuosity has landed him, chastened?

I take the text of the poem and the information about its provenance from Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, texte établi et annoté par Henri Mondor et G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, Gallimard, 1945), pp. 1416–1417.

I

The usefulness of online translations in which several different translations of a poem are given may be a matter of personal taste. Being reminded that there’s no one right translation of a poem can be welcome, and seeing the options may allow one to pick ones that feel more, or less, right than others. On the other hand, there may be too much clutter and static.

Of the eight translations of the impeccable and influential “Colloque Sentimentale,” the two best seem to me those by Joanna Richardson and Gertrude Hall.

Solomon’s is passable.

With its irregular line lengths and the weird importation of “mirror” in place of “glace”, “frozen,” Klein’s is considerably below what he’s done elsewhere. “Dark slopes” does not evoke the original’s “dark sky.”

Kirkup’s seems a series of glosses, with rhythms and tone completely lost.

Mulroney loses rhythms, tone, “poetry.”

Dale’s opting for eight-syllable over ten-syllable lines sacrifices the quiet cool steadiness of the lines’ advance.

Dean’s is awkward and in places inaccurate, or, if that seems “judgmental,” too big a stretch, such as “It’s unbelievable” as the equivalent of “C’est possible” (meaning, “It’s possible” “Possibly,” “Maybe,” “ “If you say so”) and “The night alone heard and of them took toll” for “Et la nuit seule entendit leur paroles,” which you scarcely need French to understand. Hearing something is not like taking toll.

With a poem so deftly economical and steady in its ironical progression, the less extraneous baggage you introduce the better.

But then, God knows it must be hard coming up with metre, and not just metre but rhymes.

II

Verlaine’s under-the-counter erotic poems are remarkable, and can be found in industrial strength in Women/Men, Femmes/Hombres, accompanied by Alistair Elliott’s own brilliant translations. They are the convincing utterances of someone who was truly bisexual, reveled in the bodily activities on both sides of the line, including the smelly parts, enjoyed his partners as individuals, and was not, at a time when it was a strong presence in erotica, sadomasochistic.

I would like to have included the exuberantly heterosexual “Gamineries” (rendered by Elliot as “The way the ladies ride”), and its also joyously explicit homosexual counterpart “Même quand tu ne bandes pas … “ (Elliot’s “Even without presenting arms…”). But I stretched Elliot’s generosity to the limit with his superb Heine translations, and, to be honest, there seemed a risk of the two “outlaw” poems overwhelming the more delicate ones.

The two poems are online in French at
http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Gamineries
and
http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/«_Même_quand_tu_ne_bandes_pas_»

Verlaine’s thirty-some paeons to Eros are in the several times reprinted dual-text Women/Men; Femmes/Hombres, trans. Alistair Elliot (Anvil Press Poetry, 2004 [1979]). Translations of these poems have to be in formal verse, and I can’t imagine this being done better than by Elliott.

“Pensionnaires,” not in that book, comes from the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade Oeuvres poétiques complètes. The girls were not doing anything illegal, and it is unlikely that the staff, privately at least, would have been appalled had it come to their attention.

The tone is very different from that of Baudelaire’s “Femmes Damnés: Delphine at Hippolyte,” one of the poems that had got Les Fleurs du Mal into trouble with the authorities a quarter of a century earlier.

I have not included a sample of his religious poems, which I find less interesting. But it seems more and more obvious that it is Verlaine, with his cultural omniverousness, his ability to speak with unforced naturalness in a great variety of forms, his alertness all the time to the details of what I hope can still be called the real, or at least the physical, world, his unironical commitment to each act of poetic definition, his all-too-human common humanity, and his continuing affirmativeness even under the most appalling conditions (often of his own making), who is the most viable of the great 19th-century French poets as a continuing presence now in poetic creation—Verlaine and, in his less turbulently visionary poems, Rimbaud.

III

In the great later-19^th-century French dictionary of Emile Littré, the saying “Il faut hurler avec les loups” is defined as,”Il faut s’accoutemer aux manière de ceux avec qui l’on se trouve quoique’on ne les approuve pas.” /“One must become accustomed to the manners of those with whom one finds oneself although one doesn’t approve of them.” My Cassells dictionary gives, “do as others do.” Online we have ”repeat what others say so as to better become one of the group,” “repeat what everyone says without giving a personal opinion,” and “ so as not to look bad in other’s eyes,” and ‘join in criticisms or attacks on someone so as to conform to the dominant opinion.”

Online suggestions for English equivalents are: “when in Rome, do as the Romans do, “ “bay with the pack,” and “go with the flow.” In Verlaine’s poem, the last of those seems the most functional, given what appear to be shifts in meaning shift between the first stanza (grieve, but accept the way things are), the second one (that’s good; behave the way others behave), and maybe even the third (see, what did I tell you, go along and you’ll get along).

It’s a curious idiom, and different in its connotations from what “bleating with the flock” would be. Wolves, whether the implacable sledge-hunters of myth or the small family units of actuality, are free-ranging and plurisignative, at times deadly (“homo homini lupus”), at others, as with the infancy of Romulus and Remus, nurturing. The American “It’s my night to howl” signified cutting loose for a bit and having a good time.

Since Ezra Pound is credited with “The River Merchant’s Wife: a Letter,” adapted from a translation by Ernest Fenollosa of a poem by an eighth-century Chinese poet (Li Po/ Rihaku), Augusta Gregory, patron of Yeats, Synge, and others of the modern Irish Renaissance can surely be credited with this one, translated from the Irish (written? spoken?), and further edited by persons unknown, a matter of lineation and the omission of plainly weaker portions, not any changes in phrasing. For more about it, see Comments I.

Wyatt Mason’s translation of “Les Corbeaux” in his comely and deservedly admired Modern Library Rimbaud Complete demonstrates why wariness about translations is desirable. The poem acquires difficulties that simply aren’t there in the poem that Rimbaud wrote. Rimbaud can be difficult, at times very difficult, but he can also be clear, and there’s no gain in making him difficult needlessly.

Rimbaud’s language, like Hugo’s. is rich and precise, not rich and fuzzy. Tinkering with it inappropriately for the sake of metre and rhymes can bring losses, including false ideas of the poetical. Some of the stylistic features of Hart Crane resulted from tackling poets like Rimbaud and Mallarmé with insufficient French.

The most helpful translation of the poem that I’ve come across is by Oliver Bernard. It’s a “found poem” here, lifted from the Penguin Rimbaud, where it nestles humbly as prose at the foot of the page. I imagine that the lineation that I’ve restored to it was Bernard’s own while working on it.

Mason’s version opens:

Mason’s crows and the meadows are the Lord’s, but that’s not there in the text. Mason has “boundless skies,” Rimbaud “grands cieux” (big/great skies) Rimbaud’s Angeluses are “long.” Mason’s are “endless,” adding a touch of mystery. His speaker’s command to the Lord to “Strike down your dear, delicious crows” is senseless. It’s the crows that are hurling themselves downwards—sweeping down, swooping down, a magnificent image of organic mass in motion. Their cries are “sevères” (Bernard’s “stern”). They don’t “crack.”

Mason calls them “Heavenly saints,” linking them further to God, but Rimbaud’s are “saints du ciel,” saints of the sky. When we speak, if we still do, of looking up at the heavens, we’re thinking of the deep spaces of the sky, not the pearly gates.

The subsequent assertion (Mason) that “No passerby forgets” the dead gets things ass-backwards. The crows’ wheeling and crying is to make men remember what they would otherwise forget, or have already forgotten.

The poem is an expressionist intensification of what we have in Baudelaire’s “Les Petites Vieilles” when, in Barbara Gibbs’ translation, one of his little old women listens to

John Kinsella ratchets things up with his “bizarre shock-troops,” “jaundiced rivers,” “decrepit” calvaries, falling crows that swallow fields, “imprisoned” grass, and the defeated “chained.” “Down on defoliated tracks of wildness” is a bit mysterious—ah that crazy Arthur!—but mightn’t “tracks” be “tracts”?

Making the poem less four-square and coherently kinetic encourages seeing it as more subjective and “personal,” because sounding more agitated.

But allegorizing it, as I’ve seen done on the web, into young Arthur bitching about his own situation is surely only possible with a programmatic conviction that a young proto-Beat with bad hair and terrible manners couldn’t possibly feel indignant about the bourgeois inability to perceive the shame of a national debacle that reversed the Napoleonic grandeur just about as far as it could go.

A few years later, Rimbaud himself, who’d escaped conscription in France, voluntarily joined an army—admittedly only a Dutch one, and colonial, and he soon deserted. But there were guns with bullets in them, and all. Christopher Middleton does a fine riff on the episode in “A Ballad of Arthur Rimbaud.”

Bernard’s title for his translation is “The Rooks.” I can see this working for England, since a rook, according to my dictionary, is “a gregarious European crow.” In Hardy’s “Weathers, “rooks in families homeward go,” and there was a lively rookery just outside my grandparents’ Wiltshire village, in a tall stand of trees in an abandoned chalk-pit.

But it’s crows, not rooks, who do the advising in folk tales, and those corbies/corbeauux in “The Twa Corbies” are obviously crows and not, as I’ve seen suggested, ravens, and the French for rook is “freux” or “corneille.” Ted Hughes’ poetic sequence wouldn’t have had its quasi-mythic dimension if it had been about Rook.

Mason’s edition is a book to own, and he knows vastly more French than I do, but there are things that a translator shouldn’t do to save a rhyme-scheme. If a reader can get the literal meaning of Rimbaud’s words right, at least in poems like this, and then follow the French along as metred discourse, Rimbaud himself will provide the music.

That indomitable Communard and saint of anarchism Louise Michel (1830-1905) has a powerful poem of her own that partly overlaps Rimbaud’s, also called “Les Corbeaux.”

The so-called Trinity Sundays are apparently those of the six months between the close of the Easter cycle and the start of the Christmas one.

William Boyce (1711–1779), according to Wikipedia, “is widely regarded as one of the most important English-born composers of the 18th century,” Oh Where Shall Wisdom? being among his liturgical creations.

Googling also discloses that hodie mihi, cras tibi (“It is my lot today, yours to-morrow”) is “a line often found in old epitaphs,” presumably on tombstones.

Omnia vanitas takes us to “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity (Ecclesiastes)

Post pugnam pausa fiet sounds as though it means something like, “Let there be a respite after the struggle” Emmanuel (Wikipedia again) is evidently a name here for Jesus, considered as the Messiah.

This lovely poem is in Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), and may be the best of his discoveries there. If one wanted a quick take on the appeal of Church-of-England Christianity at its purest, one couldn’t do better than this. Here in the sequence of annual festivals and feast days, as observed by the devout, is a cycle of ordered significances in the natural year—the natural English, probably southern English, year—out of which the stages in the Book of Common Prayer partly evolved.

Personally I think it makes better sense than the high Romantic cult of Nature as observable in an influential novel like Senancourt’s Obermann (1804) the prime drawback of which was its formlessness. I mean, you can only gaze so much at a landscape, even a mountainous one, and have, or hope to have, inspired thoughts about the Spirit that moves through all things. That kind of thing wears out, as John Clare notes in his poignant “Decay: a Ballad”. The order in “After Trinity” is an intellectually structured one that permits the natural particulars to have their own identities, without the somewhat hectic personalizing of Catholicism’s Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Insofar as the poems in A New Book display what F.R. Leavis would have called “realized” states of being, the frame of mind in “After Trinity” belongs here just as much as the chaos in Mary F. Robinson’s poignant “Neurasthenia” adjoining it. Hardy would have understood where it was coming from.

John Holcombe’s thirteen-page exploration of the kinds of options involved in translating “Herbsttag” is of considerable interest with respect to translating in general.

http://www.textetc.com/workshop/wt-rilke-1.html

A frustrating feature of the art is how the diction and syntax of a line can be so plain and direct and perfect that almost any change will weaken it.

“Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.”

The summer was very great?
very big?
superlative?
profuse?
profound?
towering
vast?
lofty?
too long?
(All in quoted translations.)

The “immense” of several translations seems to me the closest to getting the kind of feeling that would make you say in conversation that something was “very great” (or “so great”) and then follow it up, by way of amplification, with “immense”, which you wouldn’t do with “profuse,” “profound,” “towering,” or “lofty.”

It strikes me that there may be an implicit difference between translating free-standing and translating double-text. In the latter, if the reader has enough of the language to be able to hear his/her way along a line as a line, there can be a kind of overlapping of the experience of the original with the words of the translation.

So that here, in the present instance, it’s not a simple dictionary problem of finding a one-to-one equivalent for “gross.”

We’ve had the calm four-word opening statement or command: “Lord, it is time.” And then, in the expansion, there’s what feels to my ears like a four-step ascent with “-er war sehr gross, “ in which, as in the last four syllables of Ben Jonson’s “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” the “weak” syllable of the final foot is in fact stronger than the strong one preceding it. And the metrically enriched “gross” gets further enriched, subliminally, by its linking back to “Herr” at the start of the line.

So that even if it’s only “very great,” there’s that concealed charge of feeling in the words.

Apparently rhombs weren’t musical instruments, as I had long assumed, but devices used by Roman witches, who claimed among other things to be able to charm down the moon. The ritual just concluded was presumably meant to alleviate the beloved’s sickness. When the poem first appeared, in Pound’s Quia Pauper Amavi (1919), the third line read, “And the moon still declined wholly to descend out of heaven.” That seems to me much better than what he later changed it to (“The moon still declined to descend out of heaven.”).

Rob Stevenson writes:

The translations by Waley, British sinologist, come from his Japanese Poetry: the “Uta” (London, 1919). Yvor Winters says of him in Forms of Discovery (1968):

Winters calls the poem about the deer “the finest English poem which we have from the Japanese.” How true that remains forty years later I have no idea.

The other poems that I’ve picked are ones which immediately evoke a cross-cultural kinship, rather than a feeling, like back during the early-modernist discovery of haiku, of how (interestingly) different that culture was.

“Sister” obviously doesn’t mean literally sister.

“1742: declared of unsound mind and body [var. mad, insane] by committee of 19 in 1742, ‘a shocking object, though in person a very venerable figure’ (acc. Mary Delaney); exhibited by his manservant Patrick Brell.” (Web)

“There is a great mystery and controversy over Swift's relationship with Esther Johnson nicknamed ‘Stella’. Many hold that they were secretly married in 1716.” (Web)

“Hester Vanhomrigh, whom Swift had met in 1708, and whom he had tutored, followed him to Ireland after her mother had died. She was 22 years younger than Swift, who nicknamed her Vanessa. In the poem 'Cadenus and Vanessa' from 1713 Swift wrote about the affair: "Each girl, when pleased with what is taught, / Will have the teacher in her thought." In 1723 Swift broke off the relationship; she never recovered form his rejection.” (Web)

There are apparently almost two hundred versions of this poem, though presumably always with the central core of a steel-driving man beating a machine. The version here comes from John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs (Dover, 1994 [1934])

In Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford U.P. 2006), historian Scott Reynolds Nelson fascinatingly uncovers an actual John Henry working under lethal conditions during the construction of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in Virginia after the Civil War, and provides a lot of interesting socio-cultural information, including details about how, “As the song was assembled its composer or composers borrowed phrases from much older Anglo-American ballads.” (102)

Evidently many versions contain “those very old lines” near the end about who will now buy shoes for her little feet and gloves for her hands.

In 1917–1919, the great British folksong collector Cecil Sharp and his associate Helen Karpeles spent some forty weeks in the Appalachian region recording folksongs as performed by over two hundred singers, all ordinary members of their communities. While Sharp jotted down the music, Karpeles used shorthand for the words. According to Sharp in his 1917 introduction to English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, what she set down wasn’t tweaked later.

The texts had obviously shed a number of details during their decades of oral transmission in communities where “a few of those we met with were able to read and write, but the majority were illiterate.” (xxiii) Though Sharp reports that “their speech is English, not American” (England itself, after all, being an affair of regions), the four poems here, in their relative sparseness and abruptness, seem to me indeed American, though with British precursors that Sharp identifies. Social contexts have thinned out, explanations are mostly dispensed with, and the moral frameworks are less tidy. Crime here is not inevitably followed by punishment.

In those Calvinistic communities, where actual violences had, at least until recently, been a lot more common than they had been for a long time in England, the emphasis in the singing was on describing deeds, without personal editorializing or musical theatrics, the singer’s “attention being wholly concentrated upon what he’s singing, and not upon the effect which he is producing.” (xxiv) Presumably a higher Authority would be sorting out the goats from the sheep.

In the twenty-seven stanzas of “Lamkin” in Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1857–58), we have details like:

Lord Wearie returns in stanza 23 and discovers what had gone on. In the final stanza the nurse is crying when she’s fastened to the stake to be burned.

The version of “The Three Butchers” on the Web at www.contemplator.com/england/butchers.html was collected, we are told, in peaceable Sussex in 1893.

In that one, three actual butchers, Gibson, Wilson, and Johnson, are returning from market flush with cash. In the second of the ten stanzas,

Now as they rode along the road,
As fast as they could ride,
Spur on your horses, says Johnson,
For I head a woman cry.
And as they rode into the wood,
The scene they spied around
And there they found a woman lay
A-swooning on the ground.

In the final stanza

Now, just as she had done the deed
Some men came riding by
And, seeing what this woman had done,
They raised a dreadful cry.
Then she was condemned to die in links
And iron chains so strong
For killing of bold Johnson,
That great and valiant man

The tighter-textured “Miller’s Apprentice” feels as though it could be fairly close to whatever British broadside versions preceded it, though I would expect the wicked apprenticeship to have ended on the gallows in the latter.

“A Single Woman” comes from the second of the two volumes, which is devoted to some two hundred songs (Sharp’s term) of various kinds, and by Sharp’s own account less interesting than the ballads. The more or less impersonal ballad mode is replaced, often, with the personalities of suffering selves. And there is a lessening of specific gravity (Winters’useful term for relative poetic density) when what is being talked about is merely personal experience, rather than iconic social behaviour.

But “The Single Grl” conveys an all-too-believable and far from unique wretchedness, lacking even the formal articulation and solidarity provided for Black women by the Blues.

The third and fourth lines in the first stanza no doubt served as a refrain in the subsequent ones.

The first edition of the collection was published by Putnam’s in 1917, at a time when an exhausted Britain had a very strong interest in America’s entering the war. I would guess that there are implications in it about the continuity of British and America culture, the mountain folk being, in Sharp’s words, “a leisurely, cheery people in their quiet way, in whom the social instinct is very highly developed” (xxii), and who have “the unselfconscious manners of the well-bred.” (xxiii) Blood-feuds are evidently a thing of the past.

But as poems like the three ballads demonstrate, there are uncivilized people in the world who are innately destructive and do wicked things to the innocent. And the Bryce Report about German atrocities in Belgium in 1914, containing lots of allegedly first-person reports of sufferings at their hands, had come out the previous year in a massive printing by the British Stationary Office.

But Karpeles and Sharp (who uses at one point the term “national type”) were obviously scrupulous scholars, and what I have picked are probably the bleakest poems in their great collection, whose music I regret being unable to read.

2010

I

In choosing the blues lyrics, I have tried to pick ones that can stand well enough on their own, rather than be dependent on the melody for the necessary slowing down and rhythmic expressiveness. In this respect, Bessie Smith, with her liking for the longer line and pronounced caesuras, seems to me more successful than Ma Rainey, though I share the feeling of that prince of jazz reviewers Philip Larkin that “Ma Rainey’s talent was mellower, more musical and at times more enjoyable than her pupil Bessie’s” (All What Jazz, revised edition [Faber, 1985]), p. 153

Billie Holiday, the greatest performer of the three, wasn’t in the formal sense a blues singer, and while her work was a distillation of the blues yearnings and grievings of love, there was a lot more to the blues than that.

Here are three more of the blues sung by Smith, taken from Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism; Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (Vintage Books, 1998).

II

There are fine “print” blues by Sterling Brown, W.H. Auden, Donald Justice, A.E. Stallings, and no doubt a number of other poets. There is a superb recording of “Backwater Blues” by Carrie Smith—not a relative, I think. An excellent compilation of classic women blues singers is I Can’t Be Satisfied; Early American Women Blues Singers, two disks, available separately (Yazoo, 1997). Personally I find the women singers preferable to the men, with obvious exceptions like Robert Johnson. When it comes to sexual relationships, women in the blues grieve, men bitch. Well, much of the time.

I

“Zone Libre,” first published in 1941, is set in 1940. The Unoccupied or Free Zone was the area of France—roughly the lower half, minus the Atlantic coast—that was left unoccupied by German troops after the armistice negotiated with Hitler on June 22. The new government of France, under Marshal Petain, was located in the town of Vichy, virtually in the dead centre of the country.

There is a good verse translation of the poem by Louis MacNeice, beginning,

It is in The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. E.R. Dodds (1966). But I can’t afford copyright fees, and continue to be dependent for permissions on the kindness of strangers.

The French of the opening stanza goes:

For the whole poem see:
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~rodina/19thc-poems.htm

II

Bierstube Magie allemande is probably the best-known of the numerous poems in a variety of forms composing Aragon’s Le roman inachevé (The Unfinished Novel), 1956, a quasi-autobiography in which, as the Stalinist certainties crumbled, he swerved away from Soviet realism and endeavoured to re-access the experiential realities of his—his own, not Socialist Man's—individual development.

The 1966 Gallimard edition of the book glosses “Bierstube” as “Brasserie” and “Gaense-Liesel” as “La Liesel à l’oie, statue à Strasbourg” (“oie” meaning “goose”).

With one small exception, only proper names and the first letters of lines are capitalized in the French text. “Magie” means “magic” (noun) in both German and French. I have assumed that what we have is the name of the beer-hall, parallel with constructions like “Café Etoile” (Star Café), and not an ascription of magical powers.

I’m not 100% certain of what’s going on in the Gaenze-Liesel bit.

The poem was famously adapted by songwriter Léo Ferré, a matter of omissions at the outset. See “Est-ce ainsi que les homes vivent?”

Yves Montand was among the important performers of it. I have been helped with some difficult lines by the expansive translation provided in Yves Montand paris recital, recorded live at the Théâtre d’Etoile and surely one of his greatest records.

III

To hear the poems here by Aragon as verse, it’s advisable to put out of one’s head the too often repeated claim that, in contrast to English accentual-syllabic verse (most typically, the iambic pentameter), French verse is only syllabic, as if all that French writers and their readers need do is see whether or not there are the requisite number of syllables in a line.

Insisters on this may be insufficiently conscious of the variations possible in English verse. Stresses, so-called, are relative to other syllables, not absolutes. “Upon,” “recalled,” and “shortchanged” are all iambs. “Then rose the King and moved his host by night” and “The murmuring of immemorial elms” are both what are considered iambic pentameters.

But in French, the stresses in polysyllabic words normally fall on the final syllable. In English it’s Paris, in French Paree. Hence the probable incomprehension when a visitor to London asks the way to “PiccadillEE CirCOOS” rather than PIC-a-DILL-y CIR-cus.

Lines of formal French verse may indeed sound oddly irregular and indeterminate in the manner of syllabic verse in English (not a form natural to the language). But, in addition to having done the equivalent of hearing Paree as Paree, this is likely to be because of the so-called mute “e” on the ends of numerous words, which has no duration when followed by vowels, but when followed by words beginning with consonants is like a weak, at times an almost notional, version of the second “e” in Goethe, or not so weak when you’re down in Provence with Italy not far off.

(“Tristesse,” “cendre,” “pense,” etc.)

The classical twelve-syllable French alexandrine is a special case, and I’m not speaking of that here.

But the Aragon poems sing along pretty much like iambic eight-syllable English verse, as do those by Viau and Voltaire, and Hugo’s Attente and Le Manteau Impérial, and some others. And to my ear the ten-syllable lines of Villon don’t sound notably different from English ones.

It helps to know that in the kind of French verse that I’m speaking of here there are no extra syllables introduced, as in

Ten, eleven, and twelve syllables, but the mind’s ear still hears them as the same basic kind of line. That wouldn’t happen in French, where ten syllables means ten syllables, no more, no less. However, since one or more “sounded” mute-e may be among them, a line can be rhythmically quite light.

Since the mute “e” may be on the end of a one-syllable word, you can also have the equivalent of reversed feet in English: “Cette douleur sans souvenir.” “Drinking the wine of summer’s blaze.” If uncertain about where a stress falls in a word, try exaggerating another syllable or syllables: “DrinkING.” No, no, that’s not how it’s said. And two-syllable words in which both syllables are equally stressed are so uncommon in English as to be effectively invisible.

For other remarks about metrics in the site, see
http://www.jottings.ca/john/voices/per_metrics.html

The big thing is not to be intimidated, any more than if an oenophile insisted that one shouldn’t be drinking vintage wines unless one’s able to pick out those subtly intermingled flavours of scorched tarpaper, roadkill fawn, and the like.

To hear French verse as verse, however imperfectly, can be a great pleasure, and when one does so, the meaning may become clearer too.

The text used here comes from W.H. Auden’s Oxford Book of Light Verse (1938). I’ve no idea where he found it. I like the fullness of the narrative, including details like Frankie’s working in a cheap crib while Johnny is living it up with whorehouse parlour whores (with Jelly Roll Morton at the piano?), and her telling the “chippies” not to mess with her. There is a start-to-finish chain of consequences here, not just a romantic explosion of love, sex, and death, as in the also fine shorter version in Cleanth Brooks, John Thibaut Purser, and Robert Penn Warren’s An Approach to Literature (1936).

In that respect, I’m reminded of Auden’s own ballad narratives from the later thirties—“James Honeyman,” “Miss Gee,” and “Victor,” of which the best, because closest to the uncondescending energy of traditional ballads, is the third. Did he tweak “Frankie and Johnny” here and there, I wonder? Did Robert Penn Warren? Had Yeats tweaked “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye”?

Among the excellent features of the Oxford anthology is the number of American ballads and folk songs. Auden hasn’t include anything by pop masters like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Ira Gershwin, who presented an America that was West-End popular in those years. (He himself could do pop with feeling.) The anthology, as the interesting introduction makes clear, isn’t “light” in that fashion. But Sweet Betsy from Pike, John Henry, Stagolee, Casey Jones, and even Cocaine Lil are there.

I would guess that the Oxford Book and, even more, Auden and John Garrett’s anthology for schools, The Poet’s Tongue (1935) had been presences in the evolving youthful consciousnesses of some good later poets.

George Grosz’s famous drawing “Fit for Active Service” (1918) shows a military doctor listening to the chest cavity of a rotted corpse-skeleton standing in front of a German draft board, and pronouncing it fit for active service. “Whitewings” sounds as though it might refer to nuns in elaborate headdresses acting as nurses (as in The Third Man). The official German executioner at that time wore evening dress and a top hat and appears with his axe in the final drawing in Ecce Homo.

Apparently the Apfelböck poem derives from an actual case of that name at that time, seen here, presumably, as analogous with the persistence of combatant nations during a war that should never have started.

The most spine-tingling rendition of the Pirate Jenny song must surely be that of Nina Simone.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed., 2004) defines “lurcher” as “a crossbred dog trained to hunt silently: used by poachers.” Googling discloses, among other things, that “The lurcher is a silent hunting dog used for hunting and running down game. Usually a cross between a greyhound (sometimes a whippet or saluki) and other breeds. . . . Lurchers are also used to chase hares; a sport known as hare coursing.” Apparently they are gentle with humans.

The Manacles are described on one website as “an area of granite reef” off southern Cornwall. On another the author reports that “the Manacles are truly notorious [for shipwrecks], and have virtually no redeeming features. Its sinister and evil reputation is matched only by its bleak and forbidding appearance, as it stretches out nearly one and a half miles into the sea, where it lies mostly submerged waiting to entrap the careless or just plain unlucky.”

The two poems by Levertov were in her first collection, Double Image (1946), published before she emigrated to the States. In them she achieves, it seems to me, a greater and more expressive rhythmic subtlety than she did after she became a convert to William Carlos Williams’ versification.

Yvor Winters says of this poem:

I can’t afford the copyright fees for the two poems by Elizabeth Jennings that I picked—indeed, I can’t afford any such fees.

But since A New Book of Verse is a critical enterprise, de-emphasizing (dislodging?) some works and foregrounding others, I trust that I won’t be landed on like Grampa Simpson quoting Chaplin and Jimmy Durante if I say that the opening stanza of “Song at the Beginning of Autumn” provides a taste of an especially lovely poem, to be added conceptually to the several other autumnal poems in A New Book.

In the line “Autumn is bonfires, marble, smoke,” “marble” should surely be “marbles,” the sidewalk and school-playground game.

I can imagine a critical gloss about the contrast between the fragile impermanence of the seasons and, by implication, individual human lives (“In our middle is our ending,” and so forth) and the permanent truths (“marble”) of, well, whatever you want them to be of—Roman Catholicism maybe?

But “To a Friend with a Religious Vocation” is poignant in its four-stanza heuristic development of the themes announced in the opening lines.

A poem like that shows up the philistinism of the current crop of polemical British atheists. You really can’t beat the Brits when it comes to philistinism, as Matthew Arnold no doubt knew when he coined the term.

The reference to breeding and building brings to mind some phrasing in Gerard Hopkins’ late sonnet “Thou art indeed just Lord, if I contend,” but needs handling with care.

I have the impression that explicitly Christian, or Christian-related, poems, at least twentieth-century ones, are a vanishing species in anthologies for the college market, along with disagreeable subjects like death and dying.

I

In 1876, having ended his affair with Verlaine and ceased writing poetry, Rimbaud, aged twenty-one, enlisted in the Dutch Colonial Army, and, after some basic training, was shipped east towards Java on a three-masted steamship, the Prins va Oranje.

In Rimbaud (2000), from which I take this information, Graham Robb reports that “Between 26 June and 2 July, nine men jumped into the Red Sea and swam for shore. At least one was drowned”(p. 281). Before I checked and rechecked, I would have sworn that at some point he speaks of Rimbaud, too, as jumping overboard somewhere.

I was wrong, but I wish I had been right. The nominally factual Arthur Rimbaud of Robb’s book seems to me to have less connection with the Rimbaud of the poems than does the Rimbaud of Christopher Middleton’s poem, become a semi-mythical type-figure. The term “Ballad” is presumably intended to recall also inaccurate ballads about Billy the Kid and other “outlaw” figures.

Biographical pseudo-factuality, where Rimbaud’s creative years are concerned, is an especial betrayal, the gap between the glimpsed unpreposessing schoolboy and the razor-sharp observing intelligence and effortless-seeming technical mastery—the genius— in the earlier poems being so unbridgeable..

That isn’t the prose of brilliant biography, it’s the prose of mediocre fiction. Who is Robb that he—or anyone—knows what was going on in the mind of that prodigious young genius at that time? I won’t quote his coarse contextualizing of “Au Cabaret Vert,” a poem with which he is so little engaged that he translates its last two lines as “and filled my outsize mug with froth, /Gilded by a late ray of sun.” (58) With froth? Filled a beer mug with froth? You couldn’t be there in the evoked reality of the poem and come up with that.

Far better Middleton’s overtly fictional contrasting of Rimbaud immersing himself in the destructive element and more commonsensical types and attitudes, especially since he isn’t claiming some mystically inspired status for him. I offer some observations about genius elsewhere.

The odd thing is that Robb’s The Discovery of France; a Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War (2007) in which he intercuts bicycling into the obscurest corners of that country and summoning back from the documents, unpatronizingly, the lives of French peasants who up until well into the 19th century were often leading existences as remote from us now as those of any “primitive” peoples discovered by anthropologists, is a fascinating read. And his Rimbaud picks up once he’s simply talking about the company agent and trader in exotic parts.

“A Ballad of Arthur Rimbaud” is the penultimate poem in the section of Middleton’s 732-page Collected Poems (2008) called “Twenty Tropes for Doctor Dark.” The sea appears in several other poems in that section, most kinetically in “The Diving Apprentices,” about archaeological searches.

The two other poems here are the only ones in which Doctor Dark is a character, and I am unclear as to what relationship is being suggested between him and the “tropes.” But the two poems effectively evoke, in their different ways, a kind of decadent aestheticism that I associate particularly with fascism, as explored, for example, in that remarkable movie Docteur Petiot (1990), about a histrionic serial killer for money (and pleasure) in Occupied France.

II

Since the appearance of the foregoing, Christopher Middleton has now, in response to my solicitation, kindly provided the following:

The note about “Envoi” in Collected Poems, which my eye had slid over, reads:

There are three speakers in this poem—the introducing one and two others. In the author’s own words,

Near the end of Winters’ life, I assembled manuscripts of his favorite poems, and week after week we pored over them, deciding which poems would comprise [sic] the anthology, Quest for Reality. I still have a box of the poems that nearly made it into print. One was a tiny poem by William Carlos Williams, “The Nightingales,” that he had often included in references to Williams. We did include “To a Dead Journalist,” a poem that is rarely anthologized. But one day when I came out to retrieve the latest installments, he handed back “The Nightingales.” “They’re going to hate this book, anyway,” he grinned, referring to the anonymous mass of critics he imagined. “This one would just drive them crazy.”