Louis MacNeice--"The British Museum Reading Room" (1939)

The reader has had a stroke of luck today. I was going to put up more of my old vacation pictures here in commemoration of my recent item about Shelley, but my wife seems to have appropriated the scanner for her work.

Louis MacNeice was right in the thick of that generation of elite educated English writers born between about 1903 and 1907 that I frequently extol here, which puts him right in my wheelhouse, not of what I understand, of course, but of what I like. Do I like them too much? No, I don't think so. Do I envy their lives, their attitudes? Certain aspects of the life of the era appeal to me when I contrast it with my own, but on the whole, not really . If I do envy them anything it is their easy and elegant mastery of the language. This group is more comfortable, more precise, sparer and simpler, and wields a lighter touch, almost in the manner of the more exquisite French authors, than any other set of modern writers in English, in my opinion. Indeed, I liked what I read of MacNeice in the Norton Anthology so much that I went out and picked up an old copy of his early collected poems (which volume itself presents an arresting front in the socialist-realist style of the time). That is not to say that these are for the most part great poems, but I will say that they are the kind of thing along the lines of which, in tone, in style, in subject matter, in their frequent slightness and unaffected conversational air, I would like to do if I were to ever try my hand at writing poems, or even do more of in short stories. These poems tend to form themselves about fleeting moments or thoughts, and often feel like fragments of larger poems that are either inccessible or lost. Some sample titles: "Poussin"; "A Classical Education"; "Birmingham"; "Museums"; "To a Communist"; "The Brandy Glass"; "Chess"; even "Evening in Connecticut" ("Life on a china cup", the poet says of this). The best of them are not so much impressionistic as small and fine slices of thought. They have a freedom and air of freshness about them--this is wherein their charm resides--that something straining to be an all-encompassing expression of the author's soul or the nature of existence itself would probably be lacking.

This is the old original reading room, of course, before the British library was moved to its new, modern quarters ten or so years ago. The poem is very short so I am going to write it out, and comment on the things I like about it. I will attempt to avoid any callow analysis, since interpretation I would offer would be fairly obvious to any ordinarily intelligent and decently read person.

Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers

Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge--

I should note that this poem is very precisely dated as July, 1939, which circumstance I think must inform any reading of it pretty blatantly. While the hive imagery is not an original conceit, I still like it here.

Honey and wax, the accumulation of years--

This line is good, it carries the metaphor a little further, which was needed, and suggests both the earnestness and energy applied to building up civilization (both British and European/Western) over the course of centuries, and the very possible imminent demonstration of the futility of all that effort.

Some on commission, some for the love of learning,

Some because they have nothing better to do

Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden

The drumming of the demon in their ears.

This poem has a classic three stanza construction--I'm just starting to notice these patterns, sorry--in which the first introduces the subject or theme, the second lays bare that which urgently needs to be revealed about the subject, and the third either lays bare the unfortunate or inevitable resolution to this revelation, or, as in this instance, contrasts it with some scene distinctly opposed to it in vitality, or understanding, often with a strong ironic sense. The last two lines of this first stanza I think have a lot to be said for them. They can be extrapolated to mean more than just what the immediate situation implies. The image of the hope of the walls of books 'deadening' difficult distractions and thoughts one would prefer not to have to cope with was very effective for me in its natural seeming straightforwardness. They also have a nice alliteration.

Pretty good-looking guy. He seems to have been the serial marriage/affair type where women were concerned right up until the end of his life. Doubtless a lot of one night stand type business too, a successful, suave upper class British poet of the 40s and 50s, that's what those guys could do, and did do. He drank heavily, late in his life to the point where he barely bothered to eat, which indicates to me that he was quite serious, and not one of these dilettante alcoholics like you get nowadays. He was just short of 56 years old when he died. Nothing in the poems about keeping tabs on his 403b plan or eating health food or anything like that. Just as I prefer it.

Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,

In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards

And cherishing their hobby or their doom

Some are too much alive and some are asleep

Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,

Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent:

I don't have anything to add to this, except to note that I think 'cherishing' is at first a surprising word to use here, but then he nicely illuminates what he means by it in the next line, and that the bat imagery is also a good choice, because most people I think think of bats as more than ordinarily despicable and insignificant creatures, although I am not sure why this is so--perhaps because they operate at obscure hours and in obscure ways.

This is the British Museum Reading Room.

Hey, this re-statement of the poem's title in emphasis to close the second stanza is just like in "Sailing to Byzantium". I'm sure it is a common device, almost unreflexively so, in hundreds of other poems too. It is part of that universal grammar of poetic construction I suppose that I have not up to this point really been able to tap into a strong sense of so as to bring with me into all of my readings.

Out on the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting,

Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking

A sun-bath at their ease

And under the totem poles--the ancient terror--

Now anyone who saw this or had it pointed out to him under similar circumstances very likely would be inclined to note the contrast and ponder the meaning that I believe is intended here, so what is special about the particular arrangement of the words here? I think the images and actions presented do a very vivid job of making, and suggesting, a picture of a freedom and vitality that will strike even the fairly dull reader. The sun is referred to twice, and the sensation is of emerging from the dimness of the museum into the world of action again out on the steps, which is usually a short-lived jolt of vigor, but nonetheless an impressionable one. (When I came out of the British Museum on my one visit there--I saw the Elgin Marbles, which took a couple of hours, and figured I would be back another time for the Egyptian collection, etc--I went across to the no doubt tourist-oriented and inauthentic pub right across the street from the museum, though it wasn't actually crowded and the beer and the fish fry were quite good. There had apparently been a tavern of some kind in that location for a long time, for the establishment advertised that Karl Marx used to frequent it after one of his long sessions of work in the museum.)

Between the enormous fluted Ionic columns

There seeps like heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces

The guttural sorrow of the refugees.

It's well done. It gives you a context, a civilized one, in the 1st and 3rd verses a very calm one, in which to consider what it wants you to consider. This is the sort of thing I find appealing, and which is more common in continental European than in English and certainly American poetry. I remember George Seferis's poems and writings as having a similar effect, local culture and tradition, and relation to the land dating back the whole of the extent of cultural memory hover over and dictate the form and meaning of every poem, however topical to contemporary times.

Thomas Hardy--"Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave" (1914)

I was having one of my especially pessimistic weeks anyway, so it is opportune that Hardy should be the next author on my list.

While one reads, or has the option of reading anyway, a great deal about the ever-ongoing decline of a traditional, largely literary-informed understanding of education and the world itself, at least most of these critics have some small consolation in considering or knowing themselves to have absorbed a substantial part of this traditional and solid body of human learning and wisdom. The failings of the age in partaking of and contributing to the further vitality of these areas one can believe with some confidence lie largely with others. Being a serious person almost wholly surrounded by unserious people throughout most of life is doubtless a lonely and frustrating consolation, but still, it is a consolation.

It is not a consolation I am able, except on increasingly rare occasions, to feel myself. The great challenge of all education that would call itself good really is to synthesize one's varied learning in such a way as to become a person of worth to any reasonable community somewhat commensurate with one's potential. I have no sense of having attained this. The obvious solution is to work harder, albeit I suppose in some other direction which I am either resisting or cannot at this time perceive, for I seem to have reached the upper limits of my potential in the direction I have gone in hitherto, and where that has left me is not really acceptable I would not think. I would think that in this mindset the wisdom of meditative poetry, a rhythm and process of thought so noticeably lacking from contemporary life, would be a great help to settling my mind. However I cannot seem to focus on it with the necessary clearness and easiness of intellection. I am too distracted. Hardy of course famously wrote pessimistic novels until, at age 56, he stopped doing that and began writing pessimistic poems. These poems he wrote in his old age are much praised, to the point where I think the most up-to-date experts consider him to be more historically significant as a poet than a novelist. I hadn't read any of his poems before this, though I had read 3 of the novels. Jude the Obscure, his last novel, I thought was the best, though that may be because the unhappy protagonist has superficially a lot in common with me. It is certainly one of the most relentlessly grim books ever written. Tess of the D'Urbervilles I remember thinking was good too, though I was quite young when I read that. The Mayor of Casterbridge I did not like as much as the other two, though its depiction of the narrowness and general lack of appeal of rural life in Victorian England was even more convincing than in the other two books, which at least had some characters I found sympathetic. Hardy is thirty years younger than Dickens, but there is very little sense of anything modern, let alone of the energy and bustle, or outrageousness, that one finds in Dickens's books. Hardy's is a world where people walk ten miles (and back) to post a letter at the end of a long day of work as if it were nothing, go to market in the county town every Wednesday for forty years during which nothing substantially changes, taverns are either dreary or dangerous places where no one ever has any fun, and sex is primarily a lure to personal ruin (did I say I liked this guy?). This contrast in the general approach to reality between two obviously talented writers who were more or less contemporaneous is part of what makes literature interesting however.

I like this poem. That is to say, it scans well, it would probably not be difficult to memorize, and it fits in very nicely with the tradition of English meditative poetry of this type (which even had a "Graveyard School" in the 18th century, four or five of which poets I read, including Young's interminable and now inexplicably once-celebrated "Night Thoughts". Fortunately this was all before the blog). The theme appears to be pretty straightforward. If you haven't read it, the soul of a dead woman perceives someone to be visiting her grave and digging up the earth about it, she asks in turn if it is her husband, her kinfolk and her enemy, all of whom have largely ceased to think about her. Finally she gives up and asks who it is, the visitor reveals itself to be her old dog, who is merely burying a bone and had forgotten that the remains of his old mistress lay there. As far as I can tell that is all there is to it, but the pace, the patter of the poem is very effective and affecting.

Just a couple of observations:

(ll 5-6) The husband's statement on his remarriage (the implication being that it was rather too sudden). H's characteristic pessimism, though really cynicism:

"'It cannot hurt her now,' he said,
That I should not be true.'"

(ll. 26-30) This reference to the English faith in dogs is obviously meant as a joke:

"Why flashed it not on me
That one true heart was left behind!
What feeling do we ever find
To equal among human kind
A dog's fidelity!"

Reading Update

I have been occupied for the past few weeks with a number of poems, which I will briefly comment on.

Tennyson-- "The Princess"

I generally look forward to Tennyson's coming up on my list. In his longer poems, he can be a little over-indulgent in his metaphors and romantic details, but his technique and sense of how the language works are so good that there is still much that is satisfying in them. "The Princess", a poem which our author clearly invested a significant amount of time and effort on in the prime years of his life, is not much remembered today except for the songs, especially "Tears, Idle Tears", which are inserted as breaks of comparative lightness from the main action. The plot, for those unfamiliar with this poem, centers around a castle where the women of a romanticized country have retreated to set up a university in order to pursue science and other learning and free themselves from the slavery of marriage, their leader being the gorgeous and fiery princess of the title, who was betrothed as an infant to the prince of a neighboring kingdom, who refuses to relinquish his prerogatives, foremost those of a prince but also those of a man, though he is partially sympathetic to the idea of the ladies being exposed to learning; unlike his more old-school father, who does not even try to fathom what is going on but simply lays siege to the castle with his army to put an end to the nonsense and ensure that the contract he made be fulfilled. In the end the men, their dominance and superiority challenged, hold firm, and demonstrate even to the princess that her proper place is ultimately in submission to a man worthy of ruling over her. One can only imagine how some feminist Phd students must have had a field day with this poem. In imagining the university of women in convocation our poet can only conceive of an ornate hall full of glittering pre-Raphaelite beauties in academic gowns trying to get their gorgeous glowing heads around philosophy and mathematics. No obesity, no frumpiness, no myopia, no slouching posture are to be found in this college. As for possible lesbians there are a few stout farmgirls who seem to serve primarily as the princess's security detail, and one bitter middle-aged woman who expresses feelings of betrayal by the same. There are some humorous details about the various statuary that is found all over the grounds, all of which commemorates the deeds of the most valiant and warlike women and goddesses recorded by antiquity, which parts are well done if a little precious and perhaps a little too amused by the idea of women founding and maintaining a glorious institution of learning.

In the song "Tears, Idle Tears" where he does not have to maintain a narrative but can declaim for twenty lines or so on a general, rather evanescent theme that he is equal to ("the days that are no more") his strengths are better displayed, as, probably are most poets'. To the sensibilities of our time the most striking thing about a work like "The Princess" is that the author either conceived or thought it necessary to render in quite richly and elaborately wrought verse. I don't think it would occur to anyone today, certainly not anyone with the slightest credentials as a poet, to write about such a subject. A novelist of some esteem might take it on but would probably fail due to an inability to understand free from irony. A middling professional-type writer could probably turn a sellable gothic/teen type book out of it, and then a good filmmaker given a $90 million budget and the most gorgeous 17 year old in Ontario to play the lead could make an iconic film that would live...well, it would live for a while, anyway. That is where the creative sensibility of the time seems to be. Not with poetry.

Coleridge--"Christabel"

Since I secretly like romances and old European forests and castles and princesses and dark winters and all of that I enjoyed reading this as an escape from my tedious yet incessantly tasking day to day life. That said, I couldn't really get into the poetry, which compared to Tennyson is rather stripped down, even blah. For example:

"But now unrobe yourself: for I
Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie."

or:

"And Christabel saw the lady's eye,
And nothing else saw she thereby,
Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall,
Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall."

This is not the sort of stuff that is going to impress your modern hard science/mathematical/ economist type of intellectuals who are unitiated in and skeptical of the wonders of poetry. Who cares, you say? Well, I think life would be more interesting if the rich heritage of our spoken and written languages were more widely shared and appreciated, especially among people whose superior intelligence is supposed to be their dominant quality (and it would likewise be good for myriad reasons if the wonders of science and mathematics were more widely understood as well). One of the most ridiculous spectacles of modern life is to be somewhere where everybody has a master's degree and no one has anything to talk about with anybody else (and believe me, I am the worst of the worst in this). In fact, in one such circle as this, of the three people who do the bulk of the talking, two of them actually never attended any college, and the 3rd, a very learned man who worked on the early Enniac computers and moved on to building pipe-organs, is 86 years old (people from that generation don't seem to suffer from this affliction).

Auden-"Musee des Beaux Arts"

Ahh, now we're talking. Really, is there anybody who does not love this poem? It matters little how much or how little of it we really understand. It is extremely satisfying. It is delivered just as if the poet were sitting with his intellectual companions, maybe even a woman, in the Grande Place after spending the afternoon with the Flemish Masters, perhaps some Trappist ale and a dish of frites moules set before him, expressing what we all wish to say in such company at such a moment. "About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters..." Of course, to be able to continue on for 21 lines at a leisurely, thoughtful pace uninterrupted in any company or public place is probably a dream, but that makes it no less a successful poem. The poet convinces me that a mature human being could have spoken these thoughts in this way to another mature human being, that the tidy flow of the lines constitutes an action, a scene of life.

Auden is anyway from that same generation as Powell, Greene, Orwell, Betjeman, Waugh, etc whose writing I always like so much. Their style of English is remarkably natural and unaffected; they know their language, they are comfortable in their possession of it, and they have confidence in it in turn to adequately convey anything important or worthwhile that they have to say in its most regular form. Now, is it poetry like the old poetry, like something the Elizabethans would write? No, it is a different beast in its spirit as well as its language, it has not the same capacity for immersing itself fully in the events, emotions, etc it describes. it is too intellectual, its critical eye is a little two well educated. This is a fault of most poetry that comes very late in the history of a language. The idea of the poem is a worthwhile one. At first I wondered if the 1930s interpretation of the painting (Bruegel's Fall of Icarus) was more pessimistic than the painter intended, but I later came to the conclusion that it was not.

William Carlos Williams--"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"

Another poem on the same Bruegel painting. I am sure all my readers are familiar with it but maybe just for practice I ought to try to get it up here:

Oh dear, it's up at the top. And it's rather small. I will continue to practice with this.

I don't get this guy at all. It says in his biography in the Norton Anthology that his poetry looks easy until one tries to write like him (don't they say the same thing about Danielle Steele?) His voice, shall we say, has yet to come through to me. While I can hear and see Auden at the museum or at the table giving us his poem, or I can hear and see the poet and the scene even in a minimalist American poem like "We Real Cool", what Dr. Williams is conveying that I would not otherwise have had any sense of is not immediately apparent. His Icarus poem was written, it looks like, 24 years after Auden's, and seems to play with the same idea of human nonchalance towards the catastrophes and failures that beset their fellow men. The Auden poem was written by a 31-year old man in Europe in 1938, when the spectre of civilizational horror seemed to have loomed as an inevitability to every cognizant person, Williams's by a 79-year old man in New Jersey in 1962, which was certainly a much less existentially threatening environment, whatever dark secrets and hatreds its population may have been harboring. The production of the Williams poem does not speak with the authority of having great necessity or particular insight that I can see. Getting back to the point made by the anthologizers about the admiration by other poets of Williams's techniques, as someone who has tried to write novels, I have obviously come across many instances where the difficulty of what an author has succeeded in pulling off has perhaps impressed me more than other people reading the same books. Henry James, Joyce, Garcia Marquez, some of the things John Fowles did in The Magus come immediately to mind (note by the way how many experimental and self-consciously "innovative" writers, which in America has been held up as pretty much the supreme achievement to be attained in all the arts for a hundred years, are from countries that were colonies or otherwise far removed in space and ancestral memory from the home territory of their languages). People who attempt to paint or act or play music seriously obviously will be more likely to notice strokes of virtuosity and brilliance of conception in fellow practitioners of their arts than unpractised neophytes. However the appreciation of technique in itself is generally a secondary consideration which one examines as a result of the satisfaction one has received from the initial reading/performance, not in search of it (see the next poem). I am going to amuse myself by rearranging the lines of a couple of William Carlos Williams poems and see what happens, because his breaks of line and stanza do not make any obvious sense to me.

Forgive me there was
the icebox According to Brueghel
I have eaten the whole pageantry
and so cold concerned
the plums unsignificantly
saving when Icarus fell
you were probably near
that were in off the coast
and which his field
so sweet the wings' wax
for breakfast awake tingling
they were delicious it was spring
Icarus drowning
a farmer was ploughing
sweating in the sun
with itself
of the year was
the edge of the sea
this was
that melted
a splash quite unnoticed

Shakespeare--Sonnet 130 ("My mistress's are nothing like the sun", etc)

Obviously this is one of the master models by which, whether one likes it or not, English language poetry and the English poetic mind will always be defined and against which newer poets in this tradition--which we are as yet far from escaping and conquering, however dead the culture may be said to be--will ultimately be measured. When I say measured, I do not mean by the professional critics and university professors either, but by the poet's own intellect, which if he has any sensibility regarding his art, will always recognize the excellences and necessities of mind/spirit/mental composition, whatever, in its highest examples.

Since my understanding of poetry is generally poor, and since I always have some piece of it to read, you can expect to see me tackle it again sometime in the future; Shakespeare too, for the simple reason that most contemporary writing on Shakespeare is horrible, either presuming an unearned and too low intimacy with the man or setting him pointlessly far beyond any bounds of actual life, even in a college classroom or at the theater, where one should expect some accessibility to him. I apologize for the length and sloppiness of composition of this post.