a wind has blown the rain away

No poem on Friday as I was languishing in bed. As it's raining here (and everywhere else I gather), I unearthered this rainy poem by ee cummings. I think it does similar things to what Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty” does. I hope you're enjoying the rain as much as I am! 

a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand.  I think i too have known
autumn too long            

           (and what have you to say,
wind wind wind—did you love somebody
and have you the petal of somewhere in your heart
pinched from dumb summer?
                                          O crazy daddy
of death dance cruelly for us and start

the last leaf whirling in the final brain
of air!)Let us as we have seen see
doom’s integration………a wind has blown the rain

away and the leaves and the sky and the
trees stand:
             the trees stand.  The trees,
suddenly wait against the moon’s face.

Lost in Austen

I kind of fell into re-reading Mansfield Park this past week - I always mean to leave the Austens be for a while so as to enjoy them all the more after a break, but somehow they always find their way onto my bedside table or that spot beside my breakfast plate, clamouring (as I fondly suppose) to be read.

MP is one I enjoy more each time I read it. Interestingly, there are no particularly likeable characters in this one. Fanny and Edmund themselves are not especially appealing; Fanny is too shrinking and Edmund too grave. Someone has pointed out that Mary Crawford is not so very different from Elizabeth Bennet, but Austen is in such a different frame of mind when creating Fanny and Mary that Mary's wit and worldliness come across as serious faults of temper. 

I think the pleasure in this novel is the fineness of the moral sensibilities involved, and how vividly offences against true morality are depicted. Rife selfishness, ambition, greed, lust, jealousy, tyranny and oppression are all masked by the tranquillity and refinement of an English country house. The vices which grow unchecked and gradually break through this skin to the final exposure and disgrace of three of the protagonists are allowed to breed beneath this surface while outward decorum is preserved; they are felt only in Fanny’s consciousness and expressed only through her unspoken disapprobation. But worse than these is the relationship between Mrs Norris and Fanny, a real instance of one being exerting power cruelly and gratuitously over another. Indeed Mrs Norris, though petty and trifling in the scope of her mischief, is one of the worst characters to be found in English literature.

All things counter, original, spare, strange

I like this poem “Snow” by Louis Macneice, an Irish contemporary of Auden and Stephen Spender.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

I like the idea that the world is “incorrigibly plural.” Our minds tend to be reductive; we try to manage our experience by draining out the colour and complexity, sifting, sorting, simplifying. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. They are more generous than we.

I liked this poem, but I don't think its idea is fully embodied in it - there's no sense in the words and lines themselves of that breathless realisation of things being various. In contrast, Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty” is full of the dazzle and irregularity he praises.

GLORY be to God for dappled things— 
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 
  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;         
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 
 
All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:         
                  Praise him.  

On naïve reading

Henri Matisse said: “You study, you learn, but you guard the original naïveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.”

(Taking the point further, Lady Bracknell does “not approve of anything which tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit. Touch it, and the bloom is gone!”)

I have to agree with Matisse. Naïveté, or to be more precise, naive enjoyment and wonder, do need to be guarded against the erosions of study and learning. Study and learning add immeasurably to understanding, but they do sometimes threaten joy, which ought to be a primary goal of art.

Robert Pippin writes a Defence of Naïve Reading in the NY Times blog, which makes the point more emphatically. Excessive learning, particularly where it strays into the worst kinds of self-indulgent theorising, detracts from the simple pleasure of reading, so that it's no wonder students aren't attracted in the numbers they were to tertiary courses in literature or writing. The teachers I learned most from at university were those that gave me knowledge without taking away pleasure. Pleasure increased as knowledge increased. Indeed pleasure was understood as that Hesperidian island towards which we were sailing, not merely a by-product of our interest in boats.

Poetry is...

...indefinable. The prolific attempts to define it probably tell us more about its nature than any one definition. Nevertheless, there are some great lines trying to fill in this preeminent blank. Here’s a goodly number of them. The list doesn't include Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s line from the first in the House of Life sonnet sequence: “A sonnet is a moment's monument.” That to me is as good a definition as any.

Indefinability, though, is a palpable quality, not the absence of a quality. Saying we don't know the nature of something is not the same as saying it has no nature. American poet Marianne Moore, admired by TS Eliot, said “I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.” Poetry shouldn't be a basket into which anything indefinable can go. The same applies to art. Art is not that which falls short of reality but that which goes beyond it.