A dream of spring

There are many cultural anniversaries this year - the publication of Pride and Prejudice, the deaths of Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, and CS Lewis to name a few. But one in danger of being overlooked is the 1993 film Groundhog Day, turning 20 this year. This is one of those singular films that comes along every now and then that manages to combine comedy, novelty, and philosophy in a way that gives it a (if you'll pardon me) timeless appeal. Not all that popular at the time, the film has a vast critical afterlife, and a following among various faithful who all see in it their own theologies (as this 2003 New York Times article notes). Watching it for roughly the 114th time, I was struck less by the philosophical journey of Bill Murray's character Phil through hedonism, nihilism, charlatanism, to creative humanism (explored here) and more by the breadth of literary reference in the film.

Andie McDowell's character Rita quotes Sir Walter Scott, and has studied nineteenth-century French poetry in college. Phil quotes lines from Jacques Brel that roughly translate “The girl I will love / is like a fine wine / that gets a little better / every morning”; later he tries to entice her to his bed with promises of Baudelaire. When he begins to undergo his transformation, we find him reading Treasury of the Theatre: From Agamemnon to A Month in the Country in a cafe; the portent of further enlightenment to come. He cites Chekhov in his final weather broadcast. On his last evening with Rita, they are reading from an anthology called Poems for Every Mood, and Phil says the last thing Rita heard before falling asleep was “Only God can make a tree,” the last line of Joyce Kilmer's poem “Trees” (which I've posted before). All of these references (and I'm sure there are others) are significant in the film's imaginative schema, where mortality, time, seasons, weather, human and divine nature are all entwined.

One in particular leapt out at me, and it's one of those instances where the two lines quoted fit the scene nicely, but the entire poem fits the film in a much richer way. The lines are Coleridge's and Phil quotes them in passing to an inconsequential fellow guest: “Winter slumbering in the open air, / Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring.” They sound hopeful, but they're from a sonnet called “Work without Hope,” which speaks to Phil's predicament as a man at odds with nature's flow, “the sole unbusy thing” trapped in an eternal day that no tomorrow illumines with hope. The spell breaks, though, when Phil (“love” in Greek) learns to work, and to love, without hope. 

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair -

The bees are stirring - birds are on the wing - 

And Winter slumbering in the open air,

Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!

And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,

Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet, well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,

Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.

Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,

For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!

With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:

And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?

Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,

And hope without an object cannot live.

Thou among the wastes of time must go

I don't mind an extra hour or two of daylight, but when we turn the clocks forward at the start of summer's lease, I can't help but feel, like Hamlet, that time is out of joint. I'm relieved when they go back, though it plunges our evening walk into darkness. Oddly, daylight saving seems to chew up the hours more rapidly, and to put us even more at odds with the turning earth than our curious lives have already made us. No-one knows better than Shakespeare how time makes fools of us. Here's a sonnet, (aptly, it's number 12) where the clock is the harbinger of our hastening doom. 

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls, all silver'd o'er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer's green all girded up in sheaves,

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,

And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence

Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Unscenery

Henry James described Jane Austen as a great “painter of life,” but the metaphor cannot be pushed too far. In Austen you rarely get any real description of a scene, either an interior or a landscape, and when you do it reads more like a guidebook than a word picture. Mostly you're left to imagine the contours and colours that form the background for her human subjects. 

James, on the other hand, is an almost unparalleled describer of rooms. Their dimensions and decor, the fine detail of their furnishings whether large or soft. Where the windows are placed, and what can be seen through them. The pattern and colour of the wallpaper, and perhaps one or two of its predecessors. How many ornaments adorn the occasional tables, and how they were gradually collected. Sofas and mantelshelves, vases, miniatures, mirrors, candles, silks, lacework.  He is always at pains to thoroughly set the scene before any characters appear, and the rooms always reflect the histories, manners and moods of their inhabitants. 

That's why I was struck, recently rereading Washington Square, by this passage describing so vividly an outdoor scene. 

“One day at the end of the summer, the two travellers found themselves in a lonely valley of the Alps. [Catherine] sat upon a stone and looked about her at the hard-featured rocks and the glowing sky. It was late in the afternoon, in the last of August; night was coming on, and, as they had reached a great elevation, the air was cold and sharp. In the west there was a great suffusion of cold, red light, which made the sides of the little valley look only the more rugged and dusky. During one of their pauses, her father left her and wandered away to some high place, at a distance, to get a view. He was out of sight; she sat there alone, in the stillness, which was just touched by the vague murmur, somewhere, of a mountain brook. She thought of Morris Townsend, and the place was so desolate and lonely that he seemed very far away. Her father remained absent a long time; she began to wonder what had become of him. But at last he reappeared, coming towards her in the clear twilight, and she got up, to go on. He made no motion to proceed, however, but came close to her, as if he had something to say. He stopped in front of her and stood looking at her, with eyes that had kept the light of the flushing snow-summits on which they had just been fixed."

James is not often a painter of romantic landscape, but even here, the psychological interior dominates. Catherine thinks only of the distance between her and her lover, but the hard-featured, rugged valley is emblematic of her arid relationship with her father and the Doctor's grim determination not to yield his high ground no matter how weary Catherine becomes. He is remote and lofty, and when he gazes on her there is ice, as well as the flush of anger, in his eyes. This scene, though so extramural, is in fact as claustrophobic as anything that happens in their house in Washington Square. 

Thou wast up by break of day

“Easter,” by George Herbert, 1633.

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen.  Sing his praise

                                                  Without delays,

Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise

                                                  With him mayst rise:

That, as his death calcined thee to dust,

His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part

                                                  With all thy art.

The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,

                                                  Who bore the same.

His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key

Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song

                                                  Pleasant and long:

Or, since all music is but three parts vied

                                                  And multiplied,

O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,

And make up our defects with his sweet art.

I got me flowers to straw thy way;

I got me boughs off many a tree:

But thou wast up by break of day,

And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sun arising in the East,

Though he give light, & th’ East perfume;

If they should offer to contest

With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,

Though many suns to shine endeavour?

We count three hundred, but we miss:

There is but one, and that one ever.

Good Friday, 1613

On its 400th anniversary, what better poem to choose today than John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward." While his body travels west, his mind and soul look toward Easter. There are echoes of Ignatian meditation in his attempts to see with the mind's eye what the mind itself cannot comprehend. Yet the sheer weight of imagery in the spectacle of Christ's death is overwhelming. He prays to be made worthy to turn, and see. 

Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, 

The intelligence that moves, devotion is; 

And as the other spheres, by being grown 

Subject to foreign motion, lose their own, 

And being by others hurried every day, 

Scarce in a year their natural form obey; 

Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit 

For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.

Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,

This day, when my soul's form bends to the East.

There I should see a Sun by rising set,

And by that setting endless day beget.

But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,

Sin had eternally benighted all.

Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see

That spectacle of too much weight for me.

Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die;

What a death were it then to see God die?

It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,

It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.

Could I behold those hands, which span the poles

And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?

Could I behold that endless height, which is

Zenith to us and our antipodes,

Humbled below us? or that blood, which is

The seat of all our soul's, if not of His,

Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn

By God for His apparel, ragg'd and torn ?

If on these things I durst not look, durst I

On His distressed Mother cast mine eye,

Who was God's partner here, and furnish'd thus

Half of that sacrifice which ransom'd us ?

Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,

They're present yet unto my memory,

For that looks towards them; and Thou look'st towards me,

O Saviour, as Thou hang'st upon the tree.

I turn my back to thee but to receive

Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.

O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,

Burn off my rust, and my deformity;

Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,

That Thou mayst know me, and I'll turn my face.