Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair

My eye was caught by the story of a message in a bottle, washing up on a Croatian beach after spending 28 years crossing the Atlantic. What could be more romantic than this unlooked for redemption of a human voice, a human appeal, from the unregarding years, the oblivious depths? Unfortunately, the message was a deep disappointment for anyone of a romantic turn of mind. Here's what it said:

Mary

You are a really great person.

I hope we can keep in correspondence.

I said I would write.

Your friend always,

Jonathan

Nova Scotia ’85

Against this inconsequential blather, so miraculously preserved, the soul cries out: How utterly banal! How bland! How jejune! And, the soul might add, how '80s. I'm sure it was not Jonathan's intention to offend; quite the reverse. His subtext is patently "Hey, let's just be friends. But I'm too chicken to tell you that in person so I'll just throw this into the sea." There is an insult to Mary in that, but there's also an insult to language and its innate poetic possibility. There's an insult to mystery and the mind's imaginings; an insult flung out against the great romance of the turning world. It's as if we translated the Rosetta Stone and it revealed itself as mere doggerel or drivel. Or as if we saw from afar some writing on the moon, and when we looked more closely it said "Buzz woz here '69".

Humans, it seems, have more capacity for inconsequence, as well as for consequence, than any other creature. If the '80s bore witness to this, how much more our present moment, when texts you wouldn't cross the street to read, let alone an ocean, are preserved still more carefully and irrevocably than by the crude method of an ocean-going vase? Seeing our words and works are likely to last, perhaps unto immortality, we should take care that they should be worth the lasting.

My heart is like an apple-tree

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me. 

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,

In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;

Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.

Christina Rossetti, "A Birthday," April 1861.

Aubade for Anzacs

Now from the gently-swelling flood profound

The sun arising, with his earliest rays

In his ascent to heaven smote on the fields

When Greeks and Trojans met. Scarce could the slain

Be clear distinguish'd, but they cleansed from each

His clotted gore with water, and warm tears

Distilling copious, heaved them to the wains.

But wailing none was heard, for such command

Had Priam issued; therefore heaping high

The bodies, silent and with sorrowing hearts

They burn'd them, and to sacred Troy return'd.

(From William Cowper's translation of Homer's Iliad)

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.