No solid happiness

The few women poets contemporary with Shakespeare and Donne were more or less completely overshadowed. (Germaine Greer and others have helped a few of them into the light.) Later in the seventeenth century, women poets were better known, particularly the introspective, devotional kind. George Herbert did a lot to make poetry part of being devout, and Ann (or sometimes An) Collins was one of the more gifted of his many admirers. The themes and images here are conventional, but she brings a simplicity and felicity of phrase that are very pleasing, and a gentle conviction that she knows of what she speaks. I like the last line especially. This is “The Soul's Home,” published around 1650.

Such is the force of each created thing
That it no solid happiness can bring,
Which to our minds can give contentment sound;
For, like as Noah’s dove no succour found,
Till she returned to him that sent her out,
Just so, the soul in vain may seek about
For rest or satisfaction any where,
Save in his presence who hath sent her here;
Yea though all earthly glories should unite
Their pomp and splendour to give such delight,
Yet could they no more sound contentment bring
Than star-light can make grass or flowers spring.

Bookmark

More soon, I promise, but till I have more time, here's where I'm up to:

I picked up two books today ($5 each) from the big discount store that has moved in where Borders was. A gorgeous Vintage edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and Chesterton's biography of Dickens, which I shall place on the shelf next his biography of Browning. Chesterton is a marvellous biographer simply because he breaks all the rules: fiercely partial, wildly speculative, intrusively pontifical - in short, a delight. I won't read the Chesterton immediately because I'm knee-deep in Middlemarch, which I'm reading for the third time.  This time around my sympathies are given differently, and I have a much better grasp of Eliot's peripatetic narration. The sensations of my 19-year-old self reading it for the first time are there as a kind of watermark, against which I can measure my progress. I'm also thinking about how far Dorothea Brooke might be compared with Isabel Archer, of Henry James' masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady: both young women affronting their destinies, making fatal choices about where to bestow their promise. Indeed, both might be the objects of sonnet 87:

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gavest, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gavest it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgment making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

I recall that James, though with the highest admiration for her, called Eliot a 'great horse-faced blue-stocking.' Surely one of the great literary insults, of which even Chesterton might have been proud.

Freedom and the sea

Gaddafi's dead. Another reign of terror ends and people rejoice in the streets. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands are tortured and perishing in North Korean camps as another dictator flourishes. Pablo Neruda, Chile's greatest poet, died in 1973 within months of the military coup that ousted the democratically elected president and installed General Pinochet. Thousands broke the curfew and defied the junta to mourn his death. Throughout the next seventeen years of ruthless oppression, torture, imprisonment, disappearances, he remained a voice that sang of courage and beauty to a miserable people. There will always be dictators, and regimes that maim and crush their own people. But there will always be poets, like Neruda, whose vocation is to sing of freedom. This is “Poet's Obligation.”

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell;
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying “How can I reach the sea?”
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of the sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.

The benefit of doubt

The execution of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia came as a shock, though he was sentenced more than twenty years ago. The shock came in part because his execution had been stayed three times before, and in part because doubt had been cast on the case against him. And if he was innocent, he wouldn't be the first innocent man to be put to death by the state. According to the Northwestern University School of Law Center on Wrongful Convictions, at least 39 executions in America have been carried out in the face of evidence of innocence or serious doubt of guilt. More than 100 people sentenced to death have been released from death row, exonerated by new evidence. Though seven of the nine witnesses on whose testimony Davis was convicted later recanted their stories, the last minute appeal to the Supreme Court was denied. Davis was killed at 11:08pm on 21 September.

Among the more shocking things in the Davis case was Ann Coulter's column “Cop-killer is media's latest baby seal,” in which she stated that Davis, like every other prisoner executed in the past sixty years, was “guilty as hell.” Such unshakeable confidence goes beyond a persuasion that capital punishment is a sound legal principle. Coulter asserts, in defiance of doubt, that fallible humans have never once erred in its application. She seems to imply that capital punishment works because it kills a lot of people. (And, strangely, that baby seals somehow represent objects of misplaced compassion.)

I'm reminded of Chesterton, who said “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.” Unfortunately, bigotry in this sense is regarded by many on the right as a strength. Imagining that you might be wrong is unAmerican. Having a capacity for doubt, or even for entertaining another point of view, is weakness. It shows a heart not sufficiently whole, and a mind unforgivably muddled.

Not long before Davis died, Texan Governor Rick Perry was asked at a Republican presidential debate whether he'd ever lost sleep over the deaths of people his state has executed (over 200 on his watch). He replied "I've never struggled with that at all." It's hard to know whether this response was honest or calculated, but either way it means Perry's view of strength includes no capacity for doubt, for thinking about what he already thinks he knows. It means that for him justice is about good guys and cop killers, and a moment's hesitation - or a night's - might cost you. It means he hasn't allowed himself to think very much at all (nor, I would hazard, has Coulter) about what it means to kill a human being, especially one that might very well be innocent.

Micro-reviewing

My recent reads include Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Franzen and Tim Winton. I'd love to dwell on them, but since time's scarce, here are my 140-character reviews:

Cloudstreet is the house where two ramshackle families shack up in a post war pact, on which Lady Luck and the Lord each cast their shadows.

The Corrections puts a modern family whose foibles border on surreal near the heart of a sharp critique of almost everything America now is.

Housekeeping’s reflections on sorrow and transience pool in the hollows of a gentle story of finding and keeping family in the face of loss.