Friday’s poetry seminar

Last Friday was my final encounter with Richard Strier - a three-hour seminar on a single Herbert poem, “Love,” which I've posted before.  I thought three hours seemed like a lot for one short poem, but the Professor said he could easily have spent a week on it.

We spent the first hour on the poem's form - the rhyme scheme (ABABCC), line lengths (10,6,10,6,10,6 x 3), metre (mostly alternating iambic pentameter, trimeter), and syntax (a move from longer to shorter phrases, from softer to harder punctuation). I confess this left me a bit cold - or perhaps I should say it found me cold; I'm never one to dive into group discussion before it's properly warmed up, and I felt terribly rusty on the technical stuff; my grasp of all those Greek terms (trochees, iambs, dactyls) has always been tenuous. I think form is tremendously important, but to plunge into it before any work on the meaning or tone of the poem felt premature, putting the cart before the horse.  How can we know what's significant about the form, I thought, until we know what the poem's about? Perhaps it showed a lack of intellectual courage on my part.

Then we moved on to meaning. Word by word and line by line, we went deeply into the poem's emotional, social, theological, and intellectual world. We felt the courtesy and hospitality of the poem's atmosphere. We found it odd in the beginning that the speaker would “draw back,” from Love's welcome. We noted an increasing urgency and assertion in his resistance to Love's lovely invitations, his insistence on his unworthiness to the point, in the final stanza, of demanding to be sent to hell, rather than be Loved. A sort of paraphrase of what Milton's Satan says: better to reign in hell than be served in heaven. In the end, Love insists: you must sit down and taste my meat. And in the end, the speaker sits, submits, allows himself to be served, to eat, to be satisfied, to no longer be “ungrateful” but to be the willing object of grace.

In some ways a complex and prolonged analysis sits uneasily with a poem of such breathtaking simplicity. But the beauty of such poetry is that however much you break it open, it is never broken. Relentless interrogation will not weary or stale it, and there is no limit to the number of times or ways to encounter it. Like grace, it is new every morning. Like love, it always bids us welcome.

Death for his ambition

Today is the Ides of March, and so the 2055th anniversary (give or take) of Julius Caesar's death. Caesar scorned the famous warning, and was slain by a group of conspirators, among them Brutus. Allegedly the conspirators feared that Caesar would end the republic by making himself a monarch, but traditionally, Brutus is the only one motivated solely by the good of Rome. Following the story roughly, Shakespeare takes some liberties. Making Brutus a libertarian hero, he furnishes him with these lines:

Romans, countrymen, and lovers! ...If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say, that Brutus' love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: - Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition… With this I depart, that, as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death.

The mutiny gives rise to civil strife, and a counter-revolution led by Caesar's loyalists, Mark Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus, who stir up the distracted multitude against the rebels. Cassius and then Brutus fall on their swords, and the triumvirs take power. Shakespeare ends there, but the rest is not silence: Octavius fought and defeated Mark Antony and became Augustus, a more ambitious Caesar, and the first monarch of imperial Rome. 

More than 2000 years on, we don't seem to have escaped this cycle of ambition and death. Almost inexorably, the freedom fighters of one generation are the tyrants of the next. For all our sophistication, our long history, we still live with monomaniacs who would obliterate their own people rather than give up power. Who drop bombs on hospitals, poison lands and waters, shoot little girls who learn to read. Who would kill every last one of their countrymen before themselves.

There is fruit, and thou hast hands

Part of Professor Strier's talk yesterday involved close readings of four poems: a Shakespeare sonnet (“The expense of spirit in a waste of shame”), a Donne sonnet (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”), Herbert's poem “The Collar,” and Robert Frost's “The Road not Taken.” It's a pleasure to watch someone expertly and gently pull apart a poem to show you how it works, and I especially enjoyed his reading of “The Collar,” one of Herbert's better known and certainly one of his better poems. There are a number of different inflections available to the sensitive reader, and the ending is famously ambiguous. Though, as the Professor pointed out, however you interpret the final two lines, they really have to be seen as positive if we understand Herbert at all. Which brings us back to the idea that constraint - this time within a loving, if disciplined, familial relationship with God - is more fruitful than the freedom to follow the road, or chase the wind. 

I struck the board, and cry’d, No more.
I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me bloud, and not restore
What I have lost with cordiall fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did drie it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the yeare onely lost to me?
Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away; take heed:
I will abroad.
Call in thy deaths head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.
But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe:
And I reply'd, My Lord.

Lyric and Bondage

Professor Richard Strier's talk on this topic was about the simple thesis that the idea of psychological bondage is central to the tradition of lyric poetry, not only in its subject matter but in the very nature of its form as well. In lyric poems, we are faced with what seems an opposition between freedom and constraint, but as we interrogate the poems further, this opposition comes to seem misleading. The poems, from Petrarch on, yearn for freedom, though they're more explicit about what they want freedom from (to borrow Isaiah Berlin's terms) than what freedom, sheer and absolute, would allow them to do or to be. The poets on the other hand consistently and freely choose constraint - whether the constraint of loving someone, of loving God, or of writing within the severe constraints of the sonnet. And ultimately, these constraints prove more fruitful than the unimaginable state of pure freedom. The constraint of relation to a biological other produces offspring (a good answer if your kid is asking where babies come from), and that of relation to a spiritual Other produces growth. Similarly, the constraints of literary form produce works of art; as Robert Frost said, writing poetry without form is like playing tennis without a net. Perhaps freedom itself is a misleading concept; Luther thought so, since free will is impossible for humans who must either be enslaved to the devil or to God. Our freedom is limited by the fact that we are free to choose, but we are not free not to choose. The history of lyric poetry, almost in opposition to its own protesting voice, suggests that the free choice of constraint is what makes the world turn.

Life and art in The Winter’s Tale

Last night I was lucky enough to hear Professor Richard Strier, head of the School of English and Divinity at the University of Chicago, give a public lecture on The Winter's Tale. He started off by telling us that literary value was something real and demonstrable, which was tremendously refreshing after years of being told by critics that it wasn't. He went on, in his wry and erudite manner, to make a case for the great literary value of this unusual play at the tale end (sorry) of Shakespeare's career, based on its substantiation of the thought that life (contra Renaissance in general) is better than art.

A strange mix of tragedy, comedy and romance, the play has a view of nature as benign and of natural, biological life as something to be celebrated. Against this is the warping proclivity of the human mind which unravels when it breaks its tether to real things in nature. To wit King Leontes, maddened by jealousy, convinced of an imaginary affair between his wife Hermione and his friend, recoils from nature, particularly its components of play and sexuality, and assigns pathology to its rhythms and workings, rather than to his own deluded state of mind. His “diseased opinion” threatens to destroy everything around him, including wife, friend, son and baby daughter. They are saved by the resistance of one Camillo, a usually faithful retainer, and by the redemption in the second half of the play, mostly by his now grown daughter Perdita, of the things he has maligned: nature, sex, play, affection, fancy.

The extraordinary and ambiguous scene at the play's close, where a statue of Hermione (looking mysteriously older) comes to life, brings to its climax the rivalry between art and life that runs through all the earlier scenes. Her living person is worthy of the love and worship her statue, as art or as icon, was patently not, and her resurrection confirms the irrepressible and beautiful fact of biological life. After sixteen years of living with the loss he inflicted upon himself, Leontes has wife and daughter restored along with his mental health, which, in this play, constitutes a correlation between what's in his mind and what's outside it. We are left with the question of whether Shakespeare intended to exalt life above art, or whether, by doing so artfully, he really intended the opposite. Professor Strier thought (in contradistinction to many other critics) that Shakespeare in fact wanted to affirm life above art, and art was simply his medium for doing so. To privilege art, he concluded, was idolatrous, and in general artists are much less idolatrous than critics.