Wordsworth Westminster Bridge

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a poet profoundly affected by nature. He was not only struck by its beauty, but also felt a deep, spiritual presence permeating trees, hills, valleys and rivers which one’s imagination could possess and later experience as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility.” For him, nature was a divine teacher through which human beings could attain a deep moral communion as he demonstrates in these lines from his poem Tintern Abbey.

                                 These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: — feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: — that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, —
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
                                                    (23-49)

Living on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, Wordsworth saw the incipient damage and dislocation the Revolution was having on society. London was becoming intensely urbanized as the population exploded and factories expanded across the city. From Tintern Abbey, one might sense that he clearly would prefer to live beyond the “din” of city life and reside in the quiet rural countryside surrounded by nature. He reinforces this notion in the opening of his epic, autobiographical poem The Prelude (1805), when he greets nature’s “gentle breeze” as he escapes the confines of the city:

Book First Introduction:
Childhood and School-time

OH, there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky; it beats against my cheek,
And seems half conscious of the joy it gives.
O welcome messenger! O welcome friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.
Now I am free, enfranchised and at large,
May fix my habitation where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me, in what vale
Shall be my harbour, underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home, and what sweet stream
Shall with its murmurs lull me to my rest?
The earth is all before me—with a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about, and should the guide I chuse
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again—
Trances of thought and mountings of the mind
Come fast upon me. It is shaken off,
As by miraculous gift ’tis shaken off,
That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
Long months of peace—if such bold word accord
With any promises of human life—
Long months of ease and undisturbed delight
Are mine in prospect. Whither shall I turn,
By road or pathway, or through open field,
Or shall a twig or any floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course?
                                                                 (1. 1-30)

On another occasion, Wordsworth saw a very different London, one dressed in beauty and “majesty.” This London appears in his Petrarchan sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, 
September 3, 1802

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

In this poem Wordsworth is able to transform the ills of the city by comparing it to nature. The “City” is personified, clothed in the “The beauty of the morning.” Its “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples, lie / Open unto the fields, and to the sky.” The city, illuminated in the morning sunlight, fills Wordsworth with a “calm so deep!”— a serenity akin to what he experiences in nature. Wordsworth transforms the city into a sublime vision not unlike what the reader encounters in the language of Tintern Abbey.

This poem illustrates what is essential for readers to fully appreciate Wordsworth’s poetry. If one thinks Wordsworth is just a “poet of nature,” and that the phrase “poet of nature” defines his work, one would be only partially right. Clearly, Wordsworth believed nature could be a spiritual guide that could teach morality and humility and connect humans with the Divine. Westminster Bridge demonstrates how the power of poetic imagination also can shape one’s perception of the world, enabling one to see transcendent beauty.

Andrew Marvell's "The Garden"

 In the Penguin Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series volume of Garden Poems, the editor John Hollander included well over a hundred poems about gardens. Gardens have not always been popular to grow, but also popular to write poems about. Their peacefulness, beauty, and order fascinate us and provide us with an undisturbed and serene sensibility. They are also a way of managing nature, of exercising creative, God-like power over our environment. The prototypal garden is the Garden of Eden. One of the poems in Hollander’s book is Andrew Marvell’s (1621-1678) “The Garden.” In this poem, Marvell engages in the debate between living the public, active life and residing in the seclusive country home with one’s garden. Marvell incorporates allusions to biblical and classical literature.

                  The Garden
I
How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays,
And their uncessant labours see
Crown’d from some single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow verged shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid;
While all flow’rs and all trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.

II
Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men;
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow.
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.

III
No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous as this lovely green.
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress’ name;
Little, alas, they know or heed
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound,
No name shall but your own be found.

IV
When we have run our passion’s heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow;
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed.

V
What wond’rous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

VI
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

VII
Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepar’d for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.

VIII
Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walk’d without a mate;
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet!
But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises ’twere in one
To live in paradise alone.

IX
How well the skillful gardener drew
Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new,
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works, th’ industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!

The poem champions the reclusive, solitary life in one’s garden contrasted with the folly of believing worldly success and honors bring happiness. In stanza 1, the speaker criticizes “vainly men” who pursue fame and glory, hoping to win “the palm, the oak, or bays,” which symbolize military victory, political victory, and artistic glory respectively. Nature mocks these efforts, “their toils upbraid” and in their place offers instead “all flowers and all trees” which “weave” a greater, more profound gift than any of these so-called honors.

In stanza 2, the speaker recognizes two personified entities, “Fair Quiet and “Innocence thy sister dear,” whom he once believed he would find in society, “In busy companies of men,” only to learn that “Society is all but rude” when compared to the “delicious solitude” of country life where “Fair Quiet…/ And Innocence” make their home. In Marvell’s time, “[R]ude” meant not only obnoxious, but also uncultivated,” when comparing the “quiet” and “innocence,” while one is among “delicious solitude” as compared to worldly pursuits” among men. The society of men is both ill-mannered and unsophisticated.

The speaker turns from the realm of politics and business to focus on love and passion in stanza 3. He cites “white and red,” the lily and the rose, as the true inspired passion of the garden. Love and lovers are “cruel as their flame,” and love itself is purely foolish and destructive, illustrated by the wounding of the tree bark: “Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, / Cut in these trees their mistress’ name.” Furthermore, the simple beauty of the garden trees “far…exceed” the attractiveness of the beloved’s beauty.

Continuing his discourse on love and passion in stanza 4, the speaker seems to reduce lovemaking to mere physical lust and wants to escape from this “degradation” to the sanctuary of the garden: “When we have run our passion’s heat / Love hither makes his best retreat.” He employs two Greek myths as a kind of locus classicus (classic case) to refashion human love into a love of nature and its lyricism. Apollo and Pan pursued Daphne and Syrinx not to make love to them, but rather to transform each into musical instruments. These two myths of unbridled lust become purged of carnal desire. From this stanza, it becomes obvious that the speaker is not only looking to escape the “rude” and fierce world politics and business. The idyllic serenity of a garden is also one in which solitude frees him from the messy complications of love and sexual passion.

Implicit in stanzas 3 and 4 is the speaker’s desire to exclude not only the world of politics and business from his garden, but also women. “What a wondrous life in this I lead!” he states in the first line of stanza 5, as if he has discovered true happiness and more importantly, the purest little world in which to live. Here he can indulge in the luscious clusters of the vine…/The nectarine and curious peach” without effort and without interference from other human beings. His delight carries him through the garden until he stumbles “on melons,” becomes “Ensnared with flowers” and falls “on grass.” His “fall” is a parody of the Fall of Adam and Eve, but being alone, safe from the temptation of an Eve, his fall lands him benignly and unsullied on soft grass.

The “fall” in stanza 5 initiates the speaker’s metaphysical meditation that follows in stanzas 6 and 7. The speaker professes how in this garden his “mind from pleasure less / Withdraws into its happiness,” then transcends the limits of physical life to create “Far other worlds, and other seas.” As the mind expands with this vital energy, with an almost God-like power, his imagination frees the soul from the body and glides into unity with nature:

Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepar’d for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.

The speaker’s fusing with the “boughs,” and “buds,” seems to look ahead to the 19th century the Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, who celebrated man by linking or connecting one with nature in a harmonious union.

In the eighth stanza, “Such was that happy Garde-state…”, the speaker explicitly refers to the “happy garden-state,” the Garden of Eden, but a garden before the creation of Eve, when “man walked without a mate.” Implicit is that God’s subsequent creation of Eve brought evil into paradise. Thus, “After a place so pure and sweet, / What other help could yet be meet!” For the speaker, solitude is just as essential for happiness as the beauty of the garden is.

In the ninth and final stanza, the speaker mentions the “skillful gardener” who made a sundial out of the flowers and herbs. This ordinary gardener is an artist, and his work/creation emulates God’s creation in Genesis. Planting the “dial new” effectively measures time, establishing control over the force in nature that rules over humanity. The metaphor extends not to the hours of the day, but the “zodiac,” the movement of time through the months.

Marvell’s The Garden exalts the solitary, contemplative life over the active one. But more than that, his poem reaches back through time searching for the perfect, harmonious state in which man enjoyed immorality in a garden replicating Adam’s experience before the creation of Eve. For modern readers, this “happy garden-state / While man there walk’d without a mate” will seem misogynistic because the speaker implies man needed no “mate,” no Eve. Yet, it is important to remember that the 17th man lived in a benighted age that did not possess the truth that men and women are equal in every imaginable way. Marvell’s poem is nevertheless a fascinating treatment of our desire to be at peace with ourselves through a unity with nature and our fantasy of living in a contemplative paradise.

Shakespeare and Jealousy

 Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ.”

Othello, 3.3. 323-325

In Shakespeare’s plays, Characters are often beset by a destructive flaw that overwhelms their minds. For Julius Caesar it is vanity; for Macbeth it is ambition; and for poor Othello is jealousy. In fact, Othello is the iconic example of jealousy’s power to twist the mind into suspicious madness and murderous rage. In his 154 sonnets, Shakespeare occasionally probes the psychology of this pernicious passion in ways that are curiously subtle: Sonnet 61 offers an interesting example:

                               Sonnet 61

Is it thy will thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thy desire my slumbers should be broken
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?
O, no. Thy love, though much, is not so great.
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake,
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat
To play the watchman ever for thy sake.
  For thee watch I whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
  From me far off, with others all too near.

This sonnet is arranged in typical Shakespearean structure, with three quatrains, and a couplet. But as you read the sonnet, you might notice a second structural layer of the Petrarchan form of an octave and a sestet. The first quatrain (lines 1-4), poses two questions: “Is it thy will thy image should keep open / My heavy eye lids to weary sight?” and “Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken / While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?” The first question seems merely rhetorical, that the speaker might be so enamored of his beloved that his passion continually raises the beloved’s “image” in his mind, chasing off the heaviness of sleep. It does not appear in any way critical of the beloved.

The second question initially seems more or less similar in tone to the first, but the word “shadows” in the latter part of the question replaces “image,” which alters the tone and when reflected back upon the first question, the quatrain on the whole becomes tinged with something accusatory in the speaker’s voice. The accusation erupts as the fourth line ends with “do mock my sight?” In lines 1-2, the beloved’s image hovers in the speaker’s sight, but in lines 3-4 the beloved’s image darkens ominously and taunts the speaker.

Following the questions of the first four lines, the second quatrain asks a third question which introduces the sonnet’s general subject, “jealousy.” Now, the speaker appears to specify what is haunting his nights. It is his beloved’s jealousy that is torturing him so that sleep and its balm elude him:

 Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?

But not so fast. The third quatrain and the couplet combine to reverse what we have been told so far, and what we have come to expect from this poem. In doing so, they form a unified part of the sonnet and consequently create a sestet out of the third quatrain and the couplet. These six lines directly respond to the questions asked in the first two quatrains and reveal what is behind the speaker’s insomnia. First, he states that “Thy love, though much, is not so great.” Anxiety about the degree and quality of his beloved’s feelings for him might be what is preventing the speaker’s sleep. Then he acknowledges that “It is my love that keeps mine eyes awake, / Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat…” The speaker’s love is absolute (“true”) while the beloved’s is incomplete (“not so great”). But then drops this curious line: “To play the watchman ever for thy sake.” Why is the speaker “play[ing]" the watchman ever for thy shake?” The answer, both to that question and the diagnosis of the speaker’s insomnia unfolds in the couplet. “For thee watch I whilst thou dost wake elsewhere, / From me far off, with others all too near.”

It is not the “image,” “jealousy,” “true love,” or “watchman” (concern) of or for the beloved that nettles the speaker’s mind and deprives him of sleep. It is his own jealousy and anxiety that keeps him awake as he wonders where his beloved is and with whom.

At the beginning of this post, I used the adjective “poor” to describe Othello. No doubt it is Desdemona who really deserves our sympathy and compassion. Anyone who has read the play understands what I mean. Nevertheless, Othello remains for me also a victim whose innocence was preyed upon by the most cunning and malignant agent of evil Shakespeare ever created.

Shakespeare's Dark Lady and a Little Botox

 As I mentioned in my last post, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. He addressed sonnets 1-126 to a young man, an idealized youth who has been labeled the “fair youth,” the object of the poet’s love. There have been many thoughts as to his identity, since the 1609 dedication to the sonnets is to a Mr. W. H., which has led to much speculation and research, but the real importance of the sonnets lay in the poems’ extraordinary linguistic play and intriguing themes. Sonnets 127-152 revolve around the “Dark Lady.” Unlike the idealized concepts of the “fair youth,” these sonnets about the Dark Lady, whose identity also remains a mystery, express a different dynamic, exploring such themes as genuine and false beauty, lust, infidelity, sexual jealousy and frustration. Sonnet 127 initiates this group and discusses the concept of female beauty in a nontraditional manner:

           Sonnet 127

In old days, black was not counted fair,
Or, if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.
For since each hand hath put on nature's power,
Fairing the foul with art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with false esteem.
  Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
  That every tongue says beauty should look so.

In the first three lines of this sonnet, the speaker suggests that the conventional Elizabethan standard of female beauty, fair skin and light hair, has changed. The dark complexion and dark eyes of his mistress are “beauty’s successive heir,” to the fair complexion and light blue eyes that once embodied ideal beauty. However, in the fourth line of quatrain 1 appears something that disturbs the speaker. As if changing the subject, the speaker begins to describe how beauty in general is being “slandered with a bastard shame,” being defamed by a different, illegitimate form of beauty. That illegitimate beauty is produced by women who use cosmetics, since even a “foul” woman can transform herself into an image of beauty with the application of the right make-up.

Now focused on this second subject, the speaker in quatrain 2, draws an image of women using cosmetics to beautify their faces: “For since each hand hath put on nature’s power, / Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face”. The speaker’s words are cutting. Foul looking women can counterfeit their appearance with false art. Beauty has lost its sacred sanctuary, its “holy bower,” since it may be pilfered from nature easily by any woman applying cosmetics. As a result, the ideal sanctity of beauty itself is “profaned, if not lives in disgrace.”

Quatrain 3 unites the two subjects, black as the new standard of beauty and the “evil” of using cosmetics to transform one’s face. His mistress’ eyes are beautiful since they “are raven black” but their darkness suggests sadness since they “seem” to mourn those who “not born fair.” Yet, those who apply cosmetics to lighten their skin, falsify their appearance and artificially beautify their faces, succeeding in a deceit: “not born fair no beauty lack.” In the end, the speaker’s mistress commands true admiration for her natural appearance. In effect, according to the speaker, those who cosmetically alter their looks are “sland’ring creation with false esteem.”

An Additional note about Shakespeare’s “interest” in true, female beauty and facial appearance in general:

In Shakespeare’s play, a comedy, (1598) Love’s Labor’s Lost, the King of Navarre and three of his lords agree to avoid any contact with women, eat only once a day, sleep only three hours a night, so they can devote themselves to a three-year period of uninterrupted, intense study. Of course, this scheme goes awry when the Princess of France and her attending ladies visit the King’s court. All of the men fall in love with the ladies and one of the King’s lords, Berowne, falls in love with the Princess’ lady Rosaline, who happens to have black hair and dark eyes. When Berowne’s passion is revealed to the King, a comic scene ensues in which the King and Berowne argue over Rosaline’s beauty. The similarity between Berowne’s words and Sonnet 127 is interesting and highlights the issue of true versus false beauty.” Both the sonnet and the play may have been composed in the same decade, during the 1590’s. Yet, as we know, their official publications come later.

Act 4, 3, 267-285
KING 
 By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.
BEROWNE 
Is ebony like her? O word divine!
 A wife of such wood were felicity.
O, who can give an oath? Where is a book,
 That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack
If that she learn not of her eye to look?
 No face is fair that is not full so black.
KING 
O, paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
 The hue of dungeons and the school of night,
And beauty’s crest becomes the heavens well.
BEROWNE 
 Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light.
O, if in black my lady’s brows be decked,
 It mourns that painting and usurping hair
Should ravish doters with a false aspect:
 And therefore is she born to make black fair.
Her favor turns the fashion of the days,
 For native blood is counted painting now.
And therefore red, that would avoid dispraise,
 Paints itself black to imitate her brow. 

The parallels between the sonnet and Berowne’s speech compel comparison. As we read one, the words of the other echo in our ears. When the King states “By heaven, thy love is as black as ebony!” Berowne replies:

O, who can give an oath? Where is a book?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack
If that she learn not of her eye to look?
No face is fair that is not full so black.

To counter the King’s argument, Berowne asserts that women in general need to learn from Rosaline’s dark appearance the true image of beauty. In the sonnet, we also read the words “beauty lack,” though there the speaker is criticizing women’s use of cosmetics to lighten their naturally dark complexion. In the play, when the King contradicts Berowne, saying:

O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons and the school of night;
And beauty's crest becomes the heavens well. 

Berowne cleverly retorts:

Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light.
O, if in black my lady’s brows be decked,
It mourns that painting and usurping hair
Should ravish doters with a false aspect:
And therefore is she born to make black fair.

Berowne posits that the devil make himself resemble “spirits of light,” and if Rosaline’s eyebrows were painted black instead of naturally black, she would deceive with a false appearance, in a similar manner the way the “foul” women attempt to do in Sonnet 127 when they, “Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face.” The logic of Berowne’s argument in the play corresponds in obvious ways to what the speaker offers in Sonnet 127, and his submission to the implacable Rosaline is delightfully entertaining.

A woman’s facial appearance was a popular topic in Elizabethan England. (See Hamlet, III, 1) And, for that matter, a young man’s. (See Sonnet 20) Today, women and men expend more time and money over their appearance than Shakespeare’s contemporaries did. How many use cosmetics and that magical elixir Botox to arrest the effect of the passing years? Is Hamlet right when he says,

I have heard of your paintings too, well
enough. God hath given you one face, and you
make yourselves another.

It is fascinating to witness how astutely Shakespeare renders in his plays and poems the ways we think and behave. Although reading him requires much more effort and time than many contemporary novels, plays and poems, the reward we receive always grows the more we continue to enjoy the brilliance of his works.

A Shakespeare Sonnet

As a playwright, William Shakespeare’s reputation remains as strong as ever. Although bent toward the latest literary trends and a penchant for the cutting edge, some high school English departments no longer require teaching his plays in their English classes. Some universities and colleges have foolishly dropped Shakespeare as required reading for their English majors, yet his dramatic works continue to be widely read and performed by both professional and amateur artists worldwide. Besides being the world’s greatest dramatist, Shakespeare’s sonnets qualify him as one of the greatest lyric poets. Reading them, though challenging, is highly rewarding. Sonnet 73 is a good place to introduce a new reader to a journey worth traveling:

                            Sonnet 73 

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
    This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
    To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, excluding the ones he incorporated in some of his plays. As you read this Shakespearean or English sonnet, you will notice a structure that all his sonnets follow. It has four parts, three groups of four lines and two concluding lines. The four-line sections are called quatrains and the final two lines a couplet. This particular structure is named after Shakespeare, not because he invented the form, that credit goes to Henry Howard. When reading his sonnets, it is interesting to observe the ways in which Shakespeare varies and relates the contents of these “parts.”

In the first quatrain, the speaker addresses his beloved, “thou,” and depicts himself as old and nearing the end of his life. The imagery of the empty “boughs which shake against the cold” as “bare ruined choirs” is unambiguous. The music of youth has long left the speaker, and his physical state is frail. The quatrain’s effect is not necessarily tragic but certainly tinged with rueful sadness.

The second quatrain employs a second metaphor, one in which the speaker states that his beloved recognizes in him “the twilight of such day” after the sun has set. That “twilight” denotes unequivocally what the speaker only suggested in quatrain 1, that death is near and soon will arrive. The sorrow of the first quatrain has progressed and seems deeper and darker at this point in the poem.

Both quatrains 1 and 2 proceed along linear trajectories. Quatrain 1 intimates the process of youth to old age, from spring, summer, autumn and winter. Quatrain 2 measures time through the hours of a day, from morning to noon to afternoon, to sunset to twilight and finally into darkest night. In quatrain 1 one hears a note of nostalgia of those departed “sweet birds” along with the frailty of old age. Quatrain 2 positions the speaker nearer death yet also introduces a serene acceptance of final “rest”: “seals up all in rest.”

Whereas quatrains 1 and 2 follow similar linear formulations, quatrain 3 offer a different mode of change. The speaker now fashions his last metaphor into one of a dying fire. In quatrains 1 and 2, the speaker identifies with the image “bare ruined choirs,” and “black night” signify emptiness and darkest oblivion respectively, and it is time that impels the speaker into his old age of fragile limbs and toward “black night” of oblivion. In quatrain 3, he represents himself as a “glowing fire,” which is part of a continuous process that is a chemical rather than temporal process. Of course, this continuous process also denotes the change the speaker is experiencing. But in this metaphor of “ashes” and “glowing fire” he retains part of his essential vitality (“fire”) of who he is.

The declarative couplet that ties up the sonnet ascribes the thoughts that are traced through the quatrains directly to the beloved addressed by the speaker. As such, the beloved becomes a mirror of the speaker’s complex mind and the poem that offers a reflection of a relationship that spans 126 of the 154 sonnets.

This is just one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. His sonnets explore love, mortality, time, humor, lust, jealousy, and so on. Shakespeare was a master at characterization, which you will discover in his plays but also in his sonnets. In the next few posts, we will consider these themes while reading through a selection of Shakespeare’s works.

Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"

 In my previous post, I featured a poem by Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus. Yeats derived his idea for the poem from the eighth century Irish myth The Dream of Aengus. For easy reference, here is Yeats’s poem again:

 The Song of the Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

This phenomenal poem of magic, beauty, desire and visionary quest ends with Aengus not forlorn but determined to search on forever. His perseverance to find the “girl” and “pluck…The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun” calls to mind a sentence Yeats later wrote: The “passionate feed their flame in wanderings and absences, when the whole being of the beloved, every little charm of body and soul, is always present in the mind, filling it with subtleties and desires.” Aengus’ physical “quest” for his “glimmering girl” who “called me by my name” will not succeed, but his memory of her voice and his desire of hearing it once more evoke a simple joy and hopefulness in him and the reader all the same. An obvious theme in this poem is Yeats’s love and hopeless pursuit of Maud Gonne.

Like Yeats, John Keats (1795-1820), found inspiration in the lore of medieval tales. He was fascinated with The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser’s (1551-1599), an epic poem of knights and damsels in distress. In Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, A medieval knight believes he finds love, but instead becomes ensnared by a bewitching beauty:

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

I.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

II.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

III.

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

IV.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

V.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

VI.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song.

VII.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
"I love thee true."

VIII.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

IX.

And there she lulled me asleep.
And there I dream'd—Ah! woe betide
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill's side.

X.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—"La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!"

XI.

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.

XII.

And is this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
 

Keats wrote La Belle Dame San Merci on April 21, 1819. He wrote it in the style of a short, medieval ballad and tells the story of a knight beguiled and destroyed by a bewitching fairy lady. The opening two lines are famous and introduce the unnamed speaker who comes upon this knight and asks what is troubling him: “O what can ail thee, knight at arms, / Alone and palely loitering?” The next two lines end the stanza, and the reader should notice that Keats did not enclose the words in quotation marks, which leaves unclear who speaks these words. Is this still the unnamed speaker who initiates the poem or is it the response of the knight?

Most readers take the words as a continuation of the speaker’s question. It makes more sense to see them as the knight’s reply to the speaker’s question, since the imagery mirrors the knight’s wasting physical and spiritual condition: “the sedge has wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing.” When the speaker repeats his question in stanza 2, his perception of the knight’s condition deepens as he notices the knight’s deathlike appearance and irreversible despair: “O what can ail thee, knight at arms, / So haggard and so woe begone?” The knight again directly replies, and his mysterious response affirms his condition: “The squirrel’s granary is full, / And the harvest’s done.” Though the harvest imagery can suggest abundance, with Keats it also presages death. (See Keats’s later poem, To Autumn, stanza 2)

The third stanza concludes the Questions and answers with the speaker enunciating without acknowledging the knight is dying:

I see a lily on thy brow
    With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
        Fast withereth too.

After stanza 3, the knight reveals what has sickened him. Just as there is a back and forth between the speaker and the knight, the knight and the “lady in the meads” also engage in a form of communication in stanzas 4-8. The knight meets the lady, is immediately smitten with her and then makes her gifts, “garlands,” “bracelets,” “fragrant zone” (a girdle). She in turn, “look’d at me as she did love, / And made sweet moan.” The knight woos the lady with these gifts, but does he succeed in winning her love? The line, “She look’d at me as she did love,” seems to suggest he succeeds. But a closer reading of the line reveals its ambiguity. It could be read as either “she did love him,” or the line might mean she looked at him only “as if she did love” him.

Stanzas 7 complicates matters further. The knight swoops the lady onto his horse and rides “all day long,” which reads like an abduction and the lady’s response further obscures what is taking place. Is she mutually engaged with the knight or is she his captive victim? She sings “A fairy’s song,” feeds him “roots,” “honey,” and “manna,” then “sure in language strange she said— / I love thee true.” The knight is confident her words are a declaration of love for him, even though the language she speaks is beyond his understanding.

In stanzas 8, and 9 his [over]confidence leads him to be led into her “grot” where he kisses her “wild wild eyes,” and she lulls him “asleep.” While asleep he dreams of all the “pale kings,” “princes,” and “Pale warriors” who have been victims beguiled by the “lady in the meads.” He sees “their starv’d lips…/With horrid warning gaped wide…” When he awakes, he finds himself alone on “the cold hill’s side.”

The gothic imagery of love and death, of dreaming and waking, and the knight’s inescapable despondency are the effects of the knight’s being seduced by the lady “sans merci.” The final stanza circles the reader back to stanza 1 and encloses the loop which encircles the knight in an eternal psychological inferno.

Poems for St. Patrick's Day

In The Sewanee Review, Oct. 1920, Vol. 28, Norreys Jephson O’Connor wrote: “Ireland is the country of Fairies. The reason for this is not mere popular superstition, but because in the Gaelic literature which is the inheritance of the Irish race Fairies and Fairyland play an important part…In Ireland the Fairies have never been forgotten: Brian Merriman, the last Gaelic poet of prominence, speaks of them as the treasure of his country in time of trouble, and Patrick MacGill, the Donegal poet, expressed the same idea when, amid the terrors of the battlefield, he wrote

 'If we forget the Fairies,
 And tread upon their rings,
 God will perchance forget us,
 And think of other things.
 
When we forget you, Fairies,
 Who guard our spirits' light:
 God will forget the morrow,
 And Day forget the Night.'

The Irish imagination is indeed permeated with myths and folklore and reading these stories and poems about fairies, giants and heroes is no frivolous pastime. Becoming steeped in the legends and myths can forge a bulwark in the mind for preserving Irish culture, which is an essential intelligence for the growth of the Irish imagination in this contemporary world.

As a child growing up in the west of Ireland in Sligo, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) listened to and read stories of Irish fairies. In 1886, he published a book, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. In this book, he wanted to showcase Irish Fairy stories that “live and rule in the imaginations of the innumerable Irish men and women, and not merely in remote places, but close even to big cities.” Yeats’s interest in Irish folklore appears in poems throughout his career but is particularly prominent in his earlier poetry. One of his most popular early poems that incorporates Irish Fairies is The Stolen Child.

       The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

The Stolen Child, one of Yeats’s early poems written in 1886, highlights a tension between a romantic idealism and secular modernity, but with an interesting twist. The plot is straightforward. The faeries offer the child a chance in the poem’s refrain to “come away” with them:

For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

And their “call” is quite alluring. The imagery of “Where” they will take the child depicts a setting that ripples with serenity and beauty. There are the “flapping herons” in stanza 1, “the wave of moonlight glosses,” in stanza 2 and “the wandering water gushes / from the hills above Glen-Car, / In pools among the rushes” in stanza 3. The faeries offer companionship, taking the child “hand in hand,” “Mingling Hands and mingling glances.” The kind of escape the faeries offer the child call to mind the escape Keats seeks in Ode to a Nightingale:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
         What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
         Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
         Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
                Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

Such serenity and such an escape could lull the reader into desiring to join the child in escaping. But then, the reader would miss what ripples through Yeats’s verse. The land of the faeries may churn with “frothy bubbles” and may have “Wandering water [that] gushes…/ In pools,” but the poem also intimates something sinister. That sinister something arrives in the last stanza. The child is beguiled into joining the faeries and as he does. he moves with “solemn” eyes. He escapes the painful world of human existence but loses the sound of “calves on the warm hillside” and the domestic “peace” that “the kettle on the hob sing[s].” The poem’s final refrain shifts from enticement to triumphant.

Another poem based on Irish folklore is Yeats’s The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun. 

In Irish myth, Aengus is the God of youth, beauty, love and poetry, and on the symbolic level, it could be said that his quest represents Yeats’s lifelong passion for Maude Gonne, who of course would be the “glimmering girl.” In his Autobiography, Yeats writes of her reaction to first meeting her: “Her complexion was luminous like that of the apple blossom through which the light falls, and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such blossoms in the window."

The Stolen Child and The Song of Wandering Aengus bring to our eyes the rich, evocative folklore of Ireland. Reading Yeats’s masterful poetic rendering of these “wee” stories and a pint or two of Guinness for those who are so inclined, will uplift our spirits this St. Patrick’s Day.