Friday, December 10, 2010

Keats and Milton

          When reading the poems of Shakespeare or Milton, Wordsworth or Keats, I am often struck by the graceful lines of verse that belie what arduous exertion poetry writing demands.  As W. B. Yeats famously said:

            “A line will take us hours maybe;
           Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
           Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

          Though Yeats possessed the unusual mind that combines an extraordinary lyrical gift with an uncanny perception, to write poetry for him was to work harder than “all these” who labor physically in order to earn their livelihood.  Such hyperbole might raise our incredulity, but the burden of composition requires poets to summon the patience to wade through weary hours for the right words and phrases to arrive.  And if time draws from them a poem that is less than their ideas conceived, their disappointment must be more than ours.  John Keats wrote while struggling against the illness (tuberculosis) that he knew would kill him before he reached thirty years of age.  His sonnet "When I have fears that I may cease to be" offers an eloquent and touching portrait of his fear that death would preempt his success as a poet. Milton, who lived long and wrote abundantly in prose and poetry, had to endure the blindness that threatened his aspirations for poetic achievement.  His sought solace in God through his sonnet: “When I considered how my light is spent.”
            In the poem Keats anguishes over thought that death will eclipse his life before he fully realizes his poetic gifts and achieves “Fame”:



       When I have fears that I may cease to be
       Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
       Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
       Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
       When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
       Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
       And think that I may never live to trace
       Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
       And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
       That I shall never look upon thee more,
       Never have relish in the faery power
       Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
       Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
       Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
  

Lines 2-12 enumerate the opportunities death would deny him.  Though death did cut short his life, this early demise did not diminish Keats’ reputation as a great Romantic poet.  Some wonder if Keats would have ascended to even loftier poetic heights had he lived longer.  But who knows?  I would argue that the imminent threat of illness and death sharpened Keats’ poetic power and hastened his pace of composition.  Seeing clearly how soon he to “nothingness [might] sink,” Keats imagined what death would have taken from him, and seized it for himself to write his sonnet. 

          In Milton’s sonnet he laments his increasing loss of sight and how that loss will deprive him of his talent to write poetry:

       When I consider how my light is spent
      Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
      And that one talent which is death to hide
      Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
      To serve therewith my Maker, and present
      My true account, lest he returning chide,
      "Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
       I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
      That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
      Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
      Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.  His state
      Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
      And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
      They also serve who only stand and wait."

 I can’t help but feel sympathy and frustration when reading this sonnet.  Milton questions the divine logic of his affliction, even though he submits to God’s Will.  Could it be that he, like Job, accepts without doubt the tenet: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord?”  Or does Milton challenge that tenet in the octave of the poem? 
          While reading Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” this week, I thought of Milton’s response to his blindness as presented in his sonnet.  In the story, Sisyphus’ punishment is to roll a stone forever up a hill and accomplish “nothing.”  Yet, he has a victory over his punishers (gods): he “knows himself to be the master of his days”…and that his fate is “created by him” alone.  Though it is impossible to know whether Milton’s belief that they “who best/Bear his mild yoke” reveals his Christian humility or exposes his craven supplication for the deity’s help, he should be admired for foiling his blindness in composing this sonnet.  It seems without realizing it Milton already possessed the means (his daughters as amanuenses) to produce what would become the greatest epic in the English language.  He could not foresee that the politics of the time would continue to divert for a time his attention from his grand scheme of writing his epic.  Would he have laughed or even smile had he known what he would eventually accomplish?  It is hard to imagine the grim Puritan Milton smiling, and unlike Sisyphus, who “One must imagine …happy,” impossible to imagine him happy.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Shakespeare Illimitable

A number of Shakespeare’s sonnets assert that they will transcend the poet’s death and become a record for all eternity(15,18,19, 55, 60, 63, 81,101). The speakers in these sonnets denote graphically the destructive force of Time, but always subordinate it to the eternity of a language cast in terse dramas about life, love, aging, death. Sonnet number 55, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments” best illustrates the poet’s triumph over Time’s various powers that efface marble monuments and grind men and women along with their most exalted deeds into dust:  


SONNET 55  

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents 
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time. 
When wasteful war shall statues overturn, 
And broils root out the work of masonry, 
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn 
The living record of your memory. 
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity 
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room 
Even in the eyes of all posterity 
That wear this world out to the ending doom. 
So, till the judgment that yourself arise, 
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.


Not to be outdone by marbled monuments that preserve the memory and record of men and women, Shakespeare parades his words against and beyond “death” and “all-oblivious enmity.” However, like those monuments to great men and woman, the stately grandeur of this poem might be said to elevate it to an impersonal aesthetic that sacrifices emotion to monumental nobility and fortitude. Such an elevation, befitting in say, Milton’s sonnet “To the Lord General Cromwell,” would be incompatible with a love poem. However, the diction (and thus tone) of the last line softens the imagery of time’s violence and the resolute momentum of the poem as a “living record” that marches stalwartly forward. It seems, that by line fourteen, the speaker has won his battle. Now he can breathe more comfortably, relent in his attack on Time and embrace the future readers who will “dwell” with him and his lover in the illimitable world the those fourteen lines create

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Samuel Johnson


Beginnings

            The purpose of this blog will be to discuss topics, quotations, literature, and politics, history, and just about anything that comes to mind.  As is the case with so many of us on this planet, I often have thoughts that I would like to share with an audience.  Not being a professional writer and, obviously, not having a venue (publication) through which to express ideas, maintaining a blog excites me with this possibility.  If my thoughts stimulate little interest, then at least the passages I cite should provide some diversion from the daily routines of work and home.  

The first quotation that I cite was suggested to me by my stepson Matthew and comes from Dr. Johnson's Idler essay # 31:






"But Idleness predominates in many lives where it is not suspected; for being a vice which terminates in itself, it may be enjoyed without injury to others; and is therefore not watched like Fraud, which endangers property, or like Pride, which naturally seeks its gratifications in another's inferiority. Idleness is a silent and peaceful quality, that neither raises envy by ostentation, nor hatred by opposition; and therefore no body is busy to censure or detect it."
-from 'The Idler' no. 31, (Saturday, 18th November 1758), Samuel Johnson


     Here Dr. Johnson exposes the subtlety with which "Idleness" eases us into inaction.  Its attractiveness is specious; it's seemingly harmless as it too much resembles rest.   It dulls the vigilance of those twin sentinels of responsibility, duty and diligence. 

    
     In his day, Johnson could not have foreseen how Idleness has discovered even more subtle means to lure us into profitless uses of time.  To sit for hours and surf the web, nibbling now and then on some newsworthy story, keeps us busy while the accompany eyestrain kids us into thinking that something more productive has taken place.  Though there is no way to predict how Johnson would react to this technology that offers infinite riches of literary sources, his understanding of its abuse is adumbrated in his essay:

            There are others to whom Idleness dictates another expedient, by which life may be passed  unprofitably away without the tediousness of many vacant hours. The art is, to fill the day with petty business, to have always something in hand which may raise curiosity, but not solicitude, and keep the mind in a state of action, but not of labour.


Cheers.




The Works of Samuel Johnson – Google Books
Books.google.com/books