Your person, your place

Philip Larkin has, I think, antecendents in the nineteenth century, in writers like Hardy and Swinburne, but he's deeply modern as well, in that bleak, self-pitying, tragic-banal kind of way. This rare interview in the Paris Review in 1982 gives an insight into his character (he was a crabby librarian), and it concludes with this interesting reflection on poetry:  

“You must realize I’ve never had ‘ideas’ about poetry. To me it’s always been a personal, almost physical release or solution to a complex pressure of needs—wanting to create, to justify, to praise, to explain, to externalize, depending on the circumstances. And I’ve never been much interested in other people’s poetry—one reason for writing, of course, is that no one’s written what you want to read.”

Places, Loved Ones

No, I have never found
The place where one could say
This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay;
Nor met my special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name;

To find such seems to prove
You want no choice in where
To build, or whom to love;
You ask them to bear
You off irrevocably,
So that it's not your fault
Should the town turn dreary
Or the girl a dolt.

Yet, having missed them, you're
Bound, none the less, to act
As if what you settled for
Mashed you, in fact;
And wiser to keep away
From thinking you still might trace
Uncalled-for to this day
Your person, your place.

Eyre(s) apparent

Musing upon Jane Eyre led me to muse upon some of the ‘intertextualities’ (for want of a smaller word) that the novel has attracted since it was first published in 1847. Of course the most famous is Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea; and at this point I have to confess that I read post-colonial texts because I ought to not because I want to.  Is that a horrible thing to say? Part of me cherishes a fondness still for dear old snobby, wry, admittedly quite brutally repressive Englishness. In a writer like Bronte, I slide over the racist traces with a kind of tender diffidence; there are much less forgivable writers, whose racism, sexism or other failings are not atoned for by largeness of heart, beauty and poetry. 

Then there's Jasper Fforde. I thought The Eyre Affair had some interesting ideas, but on the whole I found it shoddy. One can't build a whole novel, much less a parallel world, on one slender conceit.

And then there's this gorgeous sketch from Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie:

Customer: Did you write this?
Shopkeep: Jane Eyre. No, that was Charlotte Bronte.
C: Right. Well I'd like to see her then please.
S: I'm afraid she's no longer with us.
C: Oh? Indeed? I can hardly say I'm surprised.

Watch the whole thing here.

Eyre up there

I've just devoured Jane Eyre. Late last year, Nick mentioned that he was enjoying it, and I think I suggested that having devoured it as an adolescent, I hadn't bothered to return to it. I felt what I had relished as a fifteen-year-old would seem tawdry or overblown to me now. However, something made me pick it up last week, and I only put it down this morning.  

My enjoyment is somewhat qualified; my taste doesn't really run as far into faery as all that. So some of the purple passages are a little too purple for me, but you can't beat this one for sheer seat-gripping emotional intensity, and for cataracts of eloquence on the subject of love. I doubt any modern romance could rival Jane's first confession to her Reader that she, the insignificant slip of a governess, loves Rochester, her Byronic master:

“I feel akin to him, - I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him...Every good, true, vigorous feeling I have, gathers impulsively round him. [Though] we are for ever sundered - yet, while I breathe and think I must love him.”

And here she is giving him a serve:

“Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you?...Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? - You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.”

Finally, when they are reunited, and he questions her ability to love him, blind and lamed as he is:

“Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value - to press my lips to what I love - to repose on what I trust: is that to make a sacrifice?”

I feel ashamed that I didn't think this book would stand up to rereading; I'd be surprised if anything new could stand up to this book.

A poetics of piety

I just came across an old lecture I gave on Christina Rossetti and found, besides this lovely sketch of her in coloured chalks by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, this quote from Virginia Woolf, penned in 1918:

“…if I were bringing a case against God she is one of the first witnesses I should call…First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded…Poetry was castrated too.  She would set herself to do the psalms into verse; & to make all her poetry subservient to the Christian doctrines.  Consequently, as I think, she starved into emaciation a very fine original gift, which only wanted licence to take to itself a far finer form than, shall we say, Mrs [Elizabeth Barrett] Browning’s …She has the natural singing power.  She thinks, too. She has fancy. She could, one is profane enough to guess, have been ribald & witty. And, as a reward for all her sacrifices, she died in terror, uncertain of salvation.”

I agree that often religious asceticism is at odds with creativity, but I don't think anyone could look at the canon of religious poetry in English, least of all at Rossetti's contribution, and conclude that religion had stifled the poetic imagination. Making poetry subservient to Christian doctrines may in some cases have produced some God awful poems, but I think in far more cases it has been a fusion or collision out of which has erupted great beauty. Some of the best English poetry has been hurled from the sheer cliff faces of religious faith, or whispered from the darkest corners of self-sacrifice. The tension in Rossetti, as in many others, between discipline and effusion, between revelation and imagination, is the magnetic force that draws us, century by century, back to the poets that forsake licence for the sake of piety.

Enshaded in forgetfulness divine

Of course this week's Friday poem has to be Keats, and though I like his early poem “Sleep and Poetry,” I prefer this late sonnet “To Sleep.” His ode to the nightingale famously ends with a question that shades all his work: “Do I wake or sleep?” I love that twilit dream-state he evokes so beautifully, especially with unreal words like ‘embowered’ and ‘enshaded.’ (I remember with what ecstasy I first found ‘emparadised’ in Donne). I like his inversion of dark and light: light is harsh and relentless, soothed by the gentle dark. 

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the 'Amen,' ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes, -
Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.