A bit of a departure today. Here's a very short extract from a longish poem by Wallace Stevens based on a painting by Pablo Picasso. It's called “The Man with the Blue Guitar.”
You can read more of the poem here, but I think this excerpt contains an extraordinarily profound and succinct definition of art.
They said,“You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied,
“Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
At the recent Sydney Writers Festival, NewYork-based Peter Carey told his audience that Australians “are getting dumber everyday…literally [sic] forgetting how to read.” He complained that cookbooks and Dan Brown novels consistently top our bestseller lists, and that we don’t grasp how destructive of democracy is the “cultural junk” we seem to prefer. Carey’s cultural cringe is part of a great tradition, (and one to which Carey’s claim to belong is, I think, dubious). Australian intellectuals, artists and authors, many of them expat, have always been contemptuous of the Aussie predilections for beer and barbecues over boffins and books, and more broadly of Australia’s contempt for intellectuals.
I too lie awake at night fretting about the unhallowed masses who read nothing but junk, and whose nearest approach to high culture is that guy from Masterchef who wears a cravat. And I too treat with a certain misgiving the statistical finding that what with digital books and latte-enhanced book emporiums we are reading more than ever. However, I think Carey’s brand of elitism (which borrows heavily from Patrick White) is unhelpful, and unreflective of literary history.
A bestseller list, or a top 100, or a ‘Borders recommends’, is always going to be an eclectic mix of the good, the great, and the ordinary. That’s because reading matter always has been. Since the invention of printing and the subsequent spread of literacy, reading has been inherently democratic, and democracy, as bestseller lists remind us, inherently involves giving equal weight to the great and the very, very ordinary. Carey wants 14-year-olds to read Shakespeare and Dickens. No doubt 14-year-olds in the 17th century and the 19th were exhorted to read Horace and Sophocles instead of ‘popular’ authors. If Dan Brown is our Dickens it’s a pretty sad indictment on us, but it doesn’t mean that Dickens has vanished from our cultural landscape. He is still there, and anyone who wants to can pick up a cheap edition or download a cheaper file. How democratic is that? A 14-year-old who is lucky enough to discover Shakespeare can pursue her newfound taste to her heart’s content; and no doubt he will lead her to other magicians of the language whose version of human experience is indestructible and irreplaceable. Nothing is stopping her but the serfdom of her peers in the feudal sway of junk.
Well, it's still Autumn, and there are plenty more Autumn poems to subject you to. Since Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind” is probably the next best after Keats, and since the whole thing is very long, here's the finale, which is really rather fine:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
I've been thinking about the assertion in my last post that there are more poems about autumn than about any other season. I'm not going to back it up with any metrics, but I have an inkling it's true. And I have an inkling I know why it's true.
First of all, spring and autumn both have a more powerful grip on the poetic imagination than summer and winter. Both are voluptuous, abundant; both have infinite variety. Winter has undoubtedly a spare, silent poetics of its own (Christina Rossetti's “Winter my Secret”), and summer inspires a kind of warm, blowsy doggerel (“Sumer is icumen in”). But both are more active than reflective: in winter the action is survival; in summer, play. Spring and autumn induce an imaginative contemplation, not only because of their richer colours and more profuse growth, but because they bring change. They are heralds and harbingers, and therefore more eloquent than the seasons they usher in. They are full of a promise which summer and winter never quite fulfil (CS Lewis' “What the bird said early in the year”).
But why does autumn beat spring? Partly because spring is perfection, and as Samuel Johnson said, you can't praise perfection. But partly I think because autumn is beauty in the act of mortality (Keats' “Ode on Melancholy”). Autumn is the pith and resin of that everlasting truth in the seeds of all creation that nothing lasts. As Gertrude tells Hamlet, all that lives must die. This thought has obsessed the poets since the very beginning. What we are most enraptured by is what soonest falters and fades. There is no halting the turn and fall of leaves, but they are rapturously beautiful in their fall, and to hymn that fall is the closest we get to immortality (GM Hopkins' “As kingfishers catch fire”). Autumn is an opera of the great paradox of human being: life is death.
Since today is an exquisite Autumn day, and since Brad suggested it some while ago, I thought I would post an Autumn poem. There are heaps - probably more than for any other season - but I find it hard to go past Keats. I wrote about him in my honours thesis, and seem to remember arguing that this poem was in fact his greatest achievement. Anyway, here it is:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.