I shall be telling this with a sigh

Today a poem that has been haunting this blog for several weeks in one way or another. It’s final lines are some of the most quoted among the American oeuvre, and it is truly a thing of elegance. However (and I'm indebted to Richard Strier here), a closer reading of the whole poem suggests the lines are often misquoted, or at least misunderstood.  Like Homer Simpson, we ‘fastforward’ the poem and wind up at its conclusion before we’ve understood its intent. 

The roads diverge, but the traveller says they were ‘just as fair...really about the same, / And both that morning equally lay’ untrodden. He chooses one, and leaves the other for another day, knowing he will not come back, because ‘way leads on to way.’ Already there is duplicity, or at least inconsistency, in his thoughts. Next comes deliberate blurring, as his choice between equals becomes a romantic tale told ages hence, and with a sigh. Time and distance soften and warp his view of the choice he made. The ‘difference’ at last is not coloured in - it could be either good or bad; his sigh could be sweet or sad.

The poem is often read as a statement of bold individualism, the romance of Whitman or Thoreau. Yet it seems to be more about the tricks of memory and the narrative impulses of the mind. About how telling gives shape and purpose to a life of indifferent alternatives, of myriad minor choices, in which way leads on to way, and you can see the way you came only when you look back.  Better known by its last lines, the poem is actually called ‘The Road Not Taken.’

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Judging covers

Yesterday's Book Show opened with an interesting conversation about copyright - literally the right to make copies - and the execution of literary estates, about which I've posted before. There's a court case at the moment between Christopher Tolkein, the executor of JRR's estate, and the writer of a book with the unpropitious title Mirkwood: A novel about JRR Tolkein. The issue seems to be reputational: not so much that the character of Tolkein is somehow copyrighted (how can it be?) but that the author, Hillard, is reaping where he has not sown by using, and probably abusing, Tolkein's literary reputation to advance his own. The case raises interesting questions about rights versus freedoms. Do we protect the legal rights of creators at the expense of creativity? If we relax the borders of the literary universe, do we create the conditions for a loss of creativity? Something like this loss can be seen in the film industry, where intertextuality has become naked looting, imagination plays on a narrow loop, and writers peddle endless reruns like rats in wheels. Should we then judge a case not by whether a writer has made use of another writer, but by whether she has made good use of him? Who will be the judge? 

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.