Three Hundred Years in One Breath

Over the summer, I gave myself a little crash-course in a few key writers whom I had somehow managed to miss, thanks to the overspecialization of how my B.A. worked out. I took all sorts of classes in undergrad, and learned a great deal, but I took very few broad survey courses, and a lot more very specific studies--Chaucer or Dickens or the Bloomsbury Group, for example. As a result, I could tell you a dozen things about Woolf's novels or Chaucer's dream visions, but there were long tracts of literary history I only knew by rumor. Since I was only working a part-time job this summer, I decided to take the chance to fill in those gaps, a chance I knew I wouldn't be getting again for a few years: a summer of rest and non-necessary reading is nowhere on my horizon for the next few years, I think.

With the help of my friend and adviser, Tom, we came up with a little plan to cover the brief span of about 1600 to 1900. So, with a self-made course reader (a few thousand pages) I photocopied out of my Norton Anthologies, I set out to brush up on just about everything in preparation for grad school.

I'm not so cruel as to go through every piece I read, but I haven't yet gotten the chance to actually work out my thoughts on the readings verbally. I'll just give a few brief impressions of some pieces and authors that really struck me. Consider this part two of my introduction from the last post.

The first of the poets who truly stood out to me--aside perhaps from Marlow, whose lusty energy and playfulness in works like Hero and Leander caught my eye, if not really inspiring me--was John Donne. I'd encountered Donne before, but really only in the context of a few of his most well known poems, and mostly for the purpose of recognition on the GRE rather than real study or enjoyment. What caught me about Donne is the sort of wry subtlety of Donne's speakers. He has an elasticity in the personas he assumes, so that even in a set of poems like the Holy Sonnets, he is able to mold his subject around a group of speakers that are in many ways subtly different, but always in conversation with each other. Even while denouncing his own sinfulness, there is still a hint of the lover that creeps through his most prophetic moments. What comes between those bouts of painful remorse is a kind of courting, wherein God is seen as a wooer of souls (in poem 17), and the speaker, though lacking confidence, hopes to inspire God's favor. His speakers take on the various aspects of one troubled mind--now pleading, now defiant, now coy, now dejected. Considering the form of these sonnets is an apostophic address, usually to God, it is interesting to track the movements of the speaker's prospective as he reasons with the divine, and the divine judgment he sees impending. There is a subtle mind at work in these poems, and it is wrestling--sometimes playfully or slyly, sometimes pitiably or defiantly--with the immense logical dilemma of salvation and damnation. The effect is a poetics that is at once unexpected, while being completely intelligible and weighty.

I mention Robert Herrick next because I found him to be, more than anything else, a great deal of fun. His poems tend to have in them a very measured, well tuned meter and design, which give them a bounce and liveliness that matches their subject. Of course, he loves the seduction poems and the carpe diem themes--think of "Corianna's Going A-Maying" or "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time." What I think sets them apart is the almost self-mocking absurdity of his tone. He has these little gems of poems like "Upon the Nipples of Julia's Breast" or "Upon His Verses" that have the most delightful creativity in them, and a real sparkle in their language and tone. My very favorite, for a number of reasons, was "The Vine." It is a quaint little poem about a dream the speaker has which begins,

I dreamed this mortal part of mine
Was metamorphosed to a vine,
Which, crawling one and every way,
Enthralled my dainty Lucia.
(lines 1 - 4)

He then commences to describe how his creeping "mortal part" explores and entwines his beloved in very explicit terms. He wakes, however, before the moment of consummation, to bemoan, "(ah me!) this flesh of mine / More like a stock than like a vine" (lines 21 - 22). In so many ways, what attracts about this poem, and about Herrick generally, is the same thing I find enchanting in Chaucer. There is a sort of earnestness in his jovial playfulness, and no matter how ridiculous he lets himself get within the poems, their form and polish are always carefully controlled.

It's a shame to skip over anyone, but I'm going to skip over a great many people. In fact, I loved much of the Restoration with its measured wit and biting satire. Dryden and Pope both had their respective cunning and intelligence, though perhaps one more than the other. Swift's penchant for satire seemed to be without bounds. Johnson and Austen and Wollstonecraft, oh my. This is why I've resigned myself to only impressions. But still, there is too much to say, so onward to the 19th century.

--now, Wordsworth, I hear you say. There is something in Wordsworth that speaks to me, and I feel that I've found in him a writer whom I can really invest some time in. I think of a poem like "Michael," which is in so many ways a very simple poem. The story is pretty conventional; the writing is direct. In some ways, what catches me most are the broad movements of emotionality throughout the poem as these minute and everyday details, the elements that make up each person's experience of life, seem to form themselves into sorts of emotional tides, swelling and ebbing with great force. It seems like he uses nostalgia, or nature, or something else as universal and everyday, to tap into this hotbed of emotion. If I ever get the occasion, I'd like to invest a good deal more time in Wordsworth, which I know is quite a weighty investment indeed.

Matthew Arnold was another figure I found particularly alluring. I suppose I see in Arnold's poetry the same kind of weightiness that moves through T.S. Eliot and other modernists, this sort of disillusionment and disorder. For Arnold, however, his sense of loss is always tempered by an exquisite beauty of image, as if beauty could beat back the tide of despair (while all the while collapsing beneith the weight of it). I think of a poem like "Dover Beach." The first part of the poem shows the speaker observing a beach at night, reflecting on the beauty of the landscape. But the poem quickly takes on a sort of violence, everything becomes more harsh, and instead of being the picturesque scene of the moon-bathed beach, it all becomes drenched in an "eternal note of sadness" (line 14). Here are the last two stanzas, which I was going to cut up to talk about, but thought I might as well present them whole:

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

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, no peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(lines 21 - 37)

He takes this wonderful, iconic image of the shore, and strips it down, exposing the world that troubles him at its most violent. Still, he finds hope--though I think it is an insufficient hope, ultimately--in the simple human love that can exist between two people. Yet the final image comes very close to stripping away that meager hope, because when all things are counted, it is only that chance of love being true that can protect you, and you remain alone in a dark world, where "ignorant armies clash by night." Beautiful and rich, for sure, and perhaps someone I need to read more of in the future.

I'm going to finish up by taking a quick look--far too quick, like all of these--at someone whom I know I will be reading more of, and that's Walter Pater. He was my very last stop on my literary time warp this summer, and I have to say, one of the most rewarding. Seeing as I'm decidedly a Woolf man, I knew going in that I would probably find much in Pater to enjoy. His prose, for instance, has a skill and beauty to it that is enchanting--now balanced and logical, now elastic and stretching around some unexpected image. The philosophy of his writing (and I mean from The Renaissance, mainly) is equally elastic, in a way. Yes, he is working through a persuasive argument, but his mode of presenting it moves from the logical, to the historical, to the imagistic in a way that is as much mesmerizing as it is convincing. I can see why an entire generation of writers (for good or ill) latched onto Pater's philosophies as basis for (or occasionally as an attempted justification of) their own. I only got the smallest of tastes of Pater, but I think it will probably lead to something more.

Now, with that all behind me, though still working through my brain, I am thrown upon the shores of graduate education. I would like to say so much more, and give even these few works and authors mentioned their due, to say nothing of the ones I've left out (which is sadly exactly what I'll be saying about them)! Still, I have thoughts and opinions on everything I passed my eyes and attention over this summer, so if you have any particular thoughts on Marlowe, Donne, B. Johnson, Herbert, Marvell, Herrick, Suckling, Milton, Dryden, Behn, Finch, Swift, Pope, S. Johnson, Gray, Burns, Wollstonecraft, Austen, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, P. Shelly, M. Shelly, Byron, Ruskin, Tennyson, R. Browning, E. B. Browning, Arnold, D. Rossetti, C. Rossetti, Swinburne, Pater, or Wilde, send them my way through a comment or an email and we'll have a chat. If you'd rather not, then I will be happy in my memories of a summer well spent, and the finding of some new literary friends.