Tuesday, June 10, 2025

No Finer Ear for Poetry

 Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was English Poet Laureate during the reign of Queen Victoria. He is considered by many critics to be the greatest poet of that era and was easily the most popular poet writing in England. He had a particularly fine ear for musical rhythms and rhymes in his verse. T. S. Eliot said Tennyson had “the finest ear of any English poet since Milton (1608-1674). He tackled a variety of subjects in his poetry including classical mythology, religious issues, industrialization, mortality, etc. His most well-known and widely read poem is “Ulysses.” Another poem about the Greek hero, Ulysses, on one of his adventures, is “The Lotos Eaters.” Tennyson, who knew Homer’s epic The Odyssey by heart, took the short episode from Book IX. 82-97 in which Ulysses told King Alcinous about an encounter with the inhabitants on the island of the Lotos Eaters. Here is Homer’s episode, translated into prose by Samuel Butler (1900):

Monday, May 26, 2025

Dover Beach

Thursday, May 8, 2025

A Milton Sonnet

 In 1632, just past his twenty-third birthday, John Milton (1608-1674) seems to have had a touch of anxiety. Seven years earlier, he entered Christ College Cambridge and embarked on his studies. His intention was to take holy orders and become a Protestant minister. He worked his way through a Bachelor of Arts (1629) and a Master of Arts (1632). As he matured, Milton steeped himself in great literature. He read rapaciously and absorbed the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Edmund Spenser, and Shakespeare, to name a few. His love of these great poets most certainly affected his thinking and inspired him to compose his early great poems “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “On Shakespeare,” “L’Allegro,” and “Il Penseroso.” It was during this period that the trajectory of his life seems to have swerved from the path of a religious career to one dedicated to poetry. Of course, as with so many young people, Milton looked toward the future and worried over the choice he would make. His father wondered why at twenty-three Milton had yet to begin his career as a minister, which increased his angst. Perhaps to rationalize his delay and restrain his anxiety Milton wrote his sonnet, “How soon hath Time”:

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Wordsworth's Lucy Poems

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Sailing to Byzantium

From the earliest of his poems to the last ones he wrote, William Butler Yeats frequently dwelt on the subject of growing old. Perhaps his most famous poem that addresses aging is “Sailing to Byzantium.” For anyone who is interested in getting to know Yeats’s poetry, this poem is among the dozen or so that is essential to read. It was written in 1926, when Yeats was sixty-one. It is challenging intellectually, but also powerfully poignant.

                 Sailing to Byzantium

                                     1
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

                                      2
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing,
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

                                       3
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
and be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

                                       4
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

In this poem, Yeats rejects the sensuality of sexual passion and yearns to journey away from all things physical to a realm of abstract, idealized artistic beauty. Stanza 1 snaps our attention with the curt statement “That is no country for men. Ireland is “no country for old men” such as Yeats, since he sees the passionate young in “one another’s arms and hears birdsongs joyfully celebrating their fertility and believes he is too old and infirm to participate in that world of sensual fulfillment. The one quality he still possesses that should “commend” him to his country, his creative prowess, is of little value where “all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.”

In stanza 2, Yeats fashions a distressing image of himself: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick.” Yet, within this “paltry thing” still exists the soul, and if that “Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing, / For every tatter in its mortal dress,” it can transport him to a realm where “studying / Monuments of its own magnificence” is the true music to replace the music of sensuality. As stanza 2 closes, Yeats announces that he has actually already left Ireland: “And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” Why Byzantium? In A Vision, (1925) a book he published shortly before he wrote the poem, Yeats revealed his belief that artists were truly valued there: “I think that if I could be given a month of antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia...I think that early Byzantium, maybe never before or since recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architects and artificers…spoke to the multitude…”

In stanza 3, Yeats does not just imagine himself roaming the ancient city; he locates himself within Byzantium’s holiest structure, the Church of the Hagia Sophia. Once there, the speaker invokes the sages to leave “God’s” purifying “fire,” beseeching them to be the “singing-masters of my soul” and “Consume my heart away.” Of course, old age has withered him and would be enough to justify his request of the sages, but it is not old age or encroaching mortality only that compels his need to escape the physical world; he calls for a spiritual transformation to achieve artistic: immortality: “…and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.” His request flows also from the anguish he feels in stanza 1 and 2, his alienation from the fertile world of vigorous sexuality. Though his heart is “fastened to a dying animal” it is not his age or fear of death that makes him ill; it is the combination of having a heart made “sick” by the “desire” that can no longer be fulfilled.

Stanza 4 is curious in that Yeats seems to have moved back in time to Ireland and is once again imagining himself out of his physical body and transformed into art. In the first two lines he employs the future tense verb to indicates what he intends to do: “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing” [.] He continues in this future frame with what he envisions to be one possible “form” of existence he could assume: “But such form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enameling” [.] As a work of gold sculpture, Yeats will be transformed into an aesthetic untouched by deprivations of old age. But this “artifice of eternity” takes away his poetic voice making him a static figure, seen but never heard. His second idea of a bird set upon a “golden bough to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come” immortalizes Yeats’s poetry through both time and space.

Monday, April 7, 2025

September 1913

William Butler Yeats’s “September 1913” is one of his best and most anthologized political poems. The poem’s title was originally “Romance in Ireland (On reading much of the correspondence against the Art Gallery).” Its present title appeared in his collection Responsibilities 1914. Knowing the social context of Ireland at the time of the poem’s composition deepens the reader’s understanding and appreciation of this great poem. For five years prior to the poem, the Irish art dealer Hugh Lane offered to bequeath paintings he had acquired during his years as a collector to the city of Dublin. His only condition was that the Dublin Corporation provide funds to build a municipal art gallery to house the works. These paintings would include works by Corot, Manet, Degas and Renoir. During five years of negotiation between Lane and the Corporation, William Martin Murphy, a railroad magnet and publisher of the Irish Independent, vehemently opposed funding for the gallery. His newspaper published dozens of letters from middle- and upper-class Dubliners who also objected to the gallery, but not because of the money it would require constructing it. Rather, many of them claimed that the art intended for the gallery was vulgar and violated Catholic morals. Arguing in favor of the proposed gallery, Yeats initially wrote a poem explicitly about the controversy, “To a Wealthy Man who promised a second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures,” which lambasts the shallow middle- and upper-class attitudes toward art. In “September 1913,” Yeats not only exposes the middle- and upper-classes as philistines who value materialism above all else; he also grieves for a heroic, “romantic” Ireland he believed existed in the past but now is “dead.” The poem is composed as a ballad, with a refrain closing each stanza with a reference to John O’Leary, (1830-1907). O’Leary was an Irish patriot who was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He agitated for Irish Home Rule in the 19th century and was arrested for treason and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. He served five years then was exiled for the remainder of his sentence.

                   September 1913
 What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
The have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wings upon every tide;
For this that all the blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry, "Some woman's yellow hair
Had maddened every mother's son":
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

In the first stanza, Yeats scorns his countrymen who are only interested in adding their “halfpence to the pence” and timidly saying their prayers. Ireland no longer produces men who possess the noble and heroic qualities of the past. Men like O’Leary who sacrificed their liberty or life in the struggle to free Ireland from British rule. Stanza 2 alludes to the men of the past, “names that stilled your childish play,” who without reservation gave themselves to the “hangman’s rope.” Stanza 3 identifies noble men of the past, FitzgeraldTone, and Emmet who died fighting for Ireland against England’s oppressive rule.

Yeats’s contempt for the shallow materialism and religious hypocrisy of his Irish countrymen is easy to understand and justify. No doubt, there was much of both circulating among the citizens of Dublin when he wrote the poem. Yeats seems to have been unaware in this poem that in Dublin at the time was also a nobility and bravery that was growing and would surface in the Easter rebellion of 1916. That week-long hopeless but valiant uprising would reverse Yeats’s thinking and inspire his other great poem about what the Irish were capable of.

Thursday, March 27, 2025

Yeats and Maud Gonne

 The poetry of William Butler Yeats spans fifty years. During that course of time, Yeats evolved stylistically and thematically. His early poems often reflect his interest in Irish myth, legends and tales. His later poems shift toward politics, the contrast between youth and age, the Irish fight for independence and civil war and his personal mythology regarding human history. The single most repeated presence in Yeats’s poetry is Maud Gonne, his unrequited love. In every collection of his poetry except one, is at least one poem alluding to or metaphorically suggesting Maud Gonne. Yeats met Gonne in January 1889, and soon after fell hopelessly in love with her. She was born in 1866 and became an Irish patriot, an actress and a feminist. She was a political activist, one of the founders of Sinn Fein and was fervent in her work for Irish independence from Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She also was a successful actress and the heroine in Yeats’s first play, Cathleen ni Houlihan. In 1891, Yeats, asked her to marry him, but she refused. Undeterred, he asked her four more times, but each time she said they could only be friends. To his horror, Gonne married Major John MacBride in 1903, and though a “drunken vainglorious lout,” MacBride was one of the heroes of the Easter 1916 uprising, executed after the revolt failed. He was an abusive husband, and he and Gonne separated in 1905. Her separation from MacBride gave Yeats hope that Maud might finally love him as he loved her. That was never to be, but all was not lost since his heartache fermented much of his verse he was to compose. Here is an early poem, written shortly after Gonne first refused to marry Yeats; it subtly alludes to her in the second stanza.

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Spring Poems

 Geoffery Chaucer, in his opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, suggests that each April brings a promise of rebirth and renewal. Relieved and grateful that the life-engendering power of spring has returned after the dark, cold winter days, his pilgrims happily set off on a journey to offer prayers of thanks to the saint of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, for protecting their health through the bleak period of winter.

When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Has run half its course in Aries,
And small fowls make melody,
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
So Nature incites them in their hearts,
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages...
Harvard's Chaucer Website

Poems celebrating the return of spring after the desolation of winter is a well-worn tradition in poetry. But spring has not always elicited relief or joy in poets. Later poets have explored how spring arouses regret, dismay, sorrow or even despondency. Wordsworth’s spring poem, “Lines Written in Early Spring,” (1798) commences with a musical serenity but quickly descends into a mournful mood.

         Lines Written in Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man had man made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
the periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure--
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

Reclining in a grove, the speaker hears "a thousand blended notes”—nature’s music and feels a “sweet mood” come over him. Nevertheless, that “sweet mood” is one in which “pleasure thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” Why do “pleasant thoughts” make him think of “sad thoughts”? In stanza 2, Wordsworth implies what had made him sad. He believed that human beings and nature are essentially interconnected: “To her fair works did Nature link / The human soul that through me ran.” Moreover, he was convinced that sharing in the “fair works” of nature should induce human beings to appreciate not only the sublime beauty of the physical world but also elevate their minds and spirits, making them kind, gentle, charitable, and noble. Instead, the world around him had been undergoing turbulent economic changes. The Industrial Revolution had given birth to sprawling manufacturing towns that forced swaths of the population from small villages to work in “dark satanic mills” as characterized by the fellow poet Willaim Blake. In addition, the enclosure of open-field farms by privately owned large agricultural interests displaced hundreds from small farms and drove many into poverty. Wordsworth saw cruelty and greed of these economic policies as directly contradicting the true relationship humans were supposed to have with nature. Nature inspires Wordsworth with joy, but the behavior of men blighted the potential joy of spring: “And much it grieved my heart to think / What man has made of man.”

Through the next three stanzas of the poem, Wordsworth continues to embrace nature but the feeling in stanza 1 haunts him. In stanza 3, he states ‘‘tis my faith that flowers enjoy flower / Enjoys the air it breathes.” But in stanza (4), that “faith” or certainty recedes slightly as he admits that he cannot know what the birds think, but he wants (“seemed”) to believe their movement denotes “a thrill of pleasure.” In stanza 5, he watches the leaves emerge from their winter sleep and “catch the breezy air.” The “pleasure” he should experience spontaneously from this seasonal gift of nature has to be compelled by his mind into thoughts: “think, do all I can, / That there was pleasure there.” The exertion here is as much emotional as it is intellectual. As the poem concludes, Wordsworth constructs a logical proposition in the form of a question. If the beauty and glory of nature is a gift or “holy plan,” what else can he do but “lament / What man has made of man?”

Perhaps the most despondent utterance about the arrival of spring comes from T. S. Eliot’s famous opening lines of The Waste Land. (1922)

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

It should be clear that these lines echo Chaucer’s from The Canterbury Tales. When first encountering the poem, many readers are bewildered by them. However, considering them after reading Wordsworth’s “What man has made of man,” their meaning and power can be more easily grasped. Eliot wrote his poem in the aftermath of the enormous death and destruction of the First World War. The shock of the war filled Eliot with a genuine dread, and a fear that life had become morally and spiritually sterile. For him, humans were trapped in a nightmare of existential alienation. How could spring with its “promise” of resurrection be sustained for Eliot in this modern world that “man had made”? Eliot meanders among the consciousness of the dead souls in his poem, through that waste land, and if you read his poem, you will be surprised what he, and ultimately you, discover.    

Monday, March 17, 2025

Saint Patrick's Day Poem

During the Easter week of 1916 Irish rebels took over the General Post Office in Dublin and battled British forces for control of the city. The Irish surrender and the British government executed several leaders of the revolt. William Butler Yeats, who believed strongly that violence was the wrong way to shake off English rule, nevertheless commemorated those who led the Irish and were executed in his poem Easter 1916:

           Easter 1916

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter of desk among gray
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too has been changed in hi turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
the horse that comes from the road,
the rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
changes minute by minute;
A horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moorhens  dive,
And hens to moorcocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of it all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
On limbs that had run wild.
What was it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Yeats begins by thinking of times he had encountered a few of the rebel leaders in the course of everyday life. What unfolds is a mini narrative of previous encounters with those who fought that Easter week. He had “met them at close of day,” acknowledged them as they “passed,” exchanged “polite meaningless words,” and essentially felt that they and he “But lived where motley is worn.” These men and women seemed to him plain, insignificant human beings. But something has changed, and the stanza closes with the refrain that proclaims, “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”

Stanza 2 drops us abruptly among “characters” who obviously fought against the British. Each seems quite ordinary and certainly far from heroic. Yeats withholds their names: “That” woman who apparently argue for the Irish cause “Until her voice grew shrill”; two other men, one who “had kept a school,” and the other who possessed a “sensitive…nature”; finally, “A drunken, vainglorious lout.” All of them have performed in what Yeats terms “the casual comedy;” but as in stanza 1, the poem’s refrain tells us the revolt was certainly no comedy, and that these rebels are “Transformed utterly” by what they did and again that within Ireland “A terrible beauty is born.”

Something quite unexpected and unusual happens in stanza 3. He contrasts devotion to a single purpose to the “living stream” of time and change. The unnamed persons above become “Hearts with one purpose alone / Through summer and winter seem / Enchanted to a stone.” The rebel’s single-minded resort to violence disturbed Yeats. He supported the Irish goal of self- determination but recoiled from the violence that the rebels used to achieve that end. How could he resolve these conflicting points of view?

In the final stanza, Yeats moves back and forth within his ambivalence regarding the violent methods of the rebels. He asks first whether “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart?” Fighting against the stronger, dominant English seemed to harden hearts and cause senseless deaths. His judgment of the rebels quickly falls back as he decides to leave judgment to “heaven’s part.” He muses that the rebels are akin to children to be named by the poet the way “a mother names her child / When sleep at last has come / On limbs that had run wild.” This fantasy fades when he asks and answers, “Was is it but nightfall? / No, no, not night but death.” He realizes that the rebels are more than simply zealous, unbending ideologues; they were “Bewildered” by “excess of love” and were patriots who fought and died for their freedom. The ambivalence he expressed earlier in the poem gives way to his view that they are the agents of the terrible beauty [that] is born.” He pronounces the names he left unsaid before in a roster of heroes to be honored forever:

I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.


Sunday, March 2, 2025

Why Read Paradise Lost?

 John Milton’s Paradise Lost is often recognized as the greatest poem in the English Language. The poem is a powerful masterpiece that Milton hoped would “find” a “fit audience…though few.” (VII, 31) Although it never had a broad, popular “audience,” today, the poem is less read than it should be, which is attributable to less apt or oblivious reading public.

Monday, February 3, 2025

Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"

      Percy Shelley is one of the great 19th century Romantic poets. Unfortunately, his poems have not always enjoyed high praise from all who have read his work. For instance, the poet T. S. Eliot once dismissed Shelley, writing that “The Ideas of Shelley seem to me always to be ideas of adolescence…I find his ideas repellent.” In spite of this critical judgment, Eliot’s own poetry was influenced by Shelley’s, and later in his life Eliot even acknowledged the profundity of Shelley’s final unfinished poem “The Triumph of Life.” Among critics today, there isn’t much dispute about the quality of Shelley’s poetry. But that quality does not assure that someone reading Shelley’s poems for the first time will find them inspiring or even interesting. That is true because his poems can often extend well beyond a reader’s comprehension. His most anthologized poem, “Ode to the West Wind” exemplifies this point.


                            Ode to the West Wind
                                             I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, lie ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou,              5
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within 'tis grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion e'er the dreaming earth, and fill         10
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

                                             II
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, 15
Loose clouds like Earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head           20

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm.  Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which tis closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre                  25
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!

                                             III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,                 30
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers             35
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level's powers

Cleave themselves into chasm, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know                40

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

                                             IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share           45

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed             50
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed         55
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

                                               V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies                    60

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!          65
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?            70       

The first thing to know about this poem is that the Romantic poets (e.g. Coleridge, Wordsworth) connected the wind with the changing of the seasons, from autumn through winter and into spring. Shelley begins his poem by addressing the west wind as a “Wild Spirit” and depicting through his imagery this “Wind” as an animated presence that has the power to bring death and rebirth on earth. It drives the dead “Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red” leaves from the trees and “chariotest” the “winged seeds” to “their dark wintry” beds, where they “lie cold and low,/Each like a corpse…until/Thine azure sister (west wind) of the Spring” blows her trumpet and the world is reborn with “sweet buds” and fills “With living hues and odours plain and hill.” At the end of section I Shelley calls to the wind to “hear” him. What he wishes to communicate with this awesome “presence” is withheld until sections IV and V of the poem.

In section II of the poem, Shelley lifts his eyes to the sky and sees “clouds,” which his imagination connects to the dying leaves of section I. However, something rather unexpected and strange happens. Those clouds/leaves become “Angels of rain and lightning” which then become “Like the bright hair uplifted from the head/Of some fierce Maenad…/The locks of the approaching storm.” Shelley’s similes have taken us from analogies of fall and spring to biblical/apocalyptic imagery to the imagery of the frenzied women of the Greek myth of Dionysus, who was believed to die each fall and rise each spring. At the end of this section, he once again calls to the wind, asking it to “hear” him. The reader must wonder, what is it Shelley seeks? The first section suggests Shelley wants to express and celebrate the changing seasons and the cycle of life. But here the biblical and Greek imagery conveys something much more.

In section III, Shelley’s imagination looks seaward, to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and envisions the west wind’s effect upon the waters. The wind’s “presence” awakens the Mediterranean from its “summer dreams” to mirror the “palaces and towers,” Roman emperors built above Baiae bay near Naples and now “All overgrown with azure moss and flowers/So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.” After his looking backward to Ancient Rome, Shelley pictures the Atlantic and sees the west wind cleaving its waves into “chasms,” while in the depths below, “The sapless foliage of the ocean, know/Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,/And tremble and despoil themselves.” The key word in the passage is the verb “know,” and in this section, Shelley affirms that like the leaves and clouds of the previous sections, the waters of Baiae Bay, the Atlantic’s waves, and the vegetation beneath the sea all “know” the west wind’s voice and obey its commands. Again, he cries “O hear!”

In the last two sections of the poem Shelley reveals what it is he wants the wind to “hear.” In lines 43-45, Shelley imagines himself as an object of the Wind’s power. Perhaps by being blown about by the wind, Shelley could “share” “The impulse of thy (wind’s) strength.” He remembers when he was young that the imagination of his “boyhood,” made him a “comrade” of the wind’s “wandering…to outstrip the skiey speed.” For the Romantic poets, childhood imagination, uncontaminated by the adult knowledge that can manacle it, could receive spiritual insights from nature. But this experience, freely open to those in childhood innocence, is no longer available to the adult Shelley. A way to receive the wind’s spirit is told in the next line: “I would never have striven/As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.” Striving with the wind in “prayer”? If Shelley’s language sounds familiar, that is because it has echoes of biblical characters (e.g. the Psalms, Job) who call on God to relieve their suffering. For the first time in the poem, he directly appeals to the wind and cries out for it to “lift [him] as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!” because “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!/A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed/One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.” According to Shelley, the wind possesses the power to heal him, to relieve his suffering, to lift him beyond the limits of ordinary life. But he remains frustrated in his “striving” to be as the leaves, clouds and sea until in the final section he discovers a means to unchain his spirit.

In this concluding section, Shelley returns to Greek myth with the first four words: “Make me thy lyre.” The “lyre” is the Eolian lyre (it was also called a harp) is a musical instrument that produces sounds when the wind passes through its strings. The Greek poet and prophet Orpheus could charm all animate and inanimate objects with its music. Envisioning himself as the musical instrument upon which the west wind can play its harmonies, he can receive the “Spirit fierce” of the west wind, become one with that spirit, “Be thou me, impetuous one!” and have his “dead thoughts” driven “over the universe/Like withered leaves to quicken new birth!” The thoughts fall dead to the ground but are “quicken[ed] to a new birth” by the wind. The poem accelerates through lines 65-70, and Shelley rises like a poet/prophet calling on humanity to hear in his voice “the incantation of this verse,” which will “Scatter” his “words” among mankind!” This “incantation” will awaken humanity through the prophetic power of Shelley’s words: “Be through my lips to unawakened Earth/The Trumpet of a prophecy!” Finally able to receive the inspiration the west wind breathes into all life, Shelley is quietly confident and whispers the poem’s conclusion: “O Wind,/If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”  

Monday, January 13, 2025

Thomas Traherne

      Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) was an Anglican clergyman and mystical writer who has often been associated with the Metaphysical poets John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw. His poetry was largely unknown until a manuscript of his poems was discovered by William Brooke in a London bookstall in 1897. Many of Traherne’s poems employ metaphors that illustrate his understanding of the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds. “Shadows in the Water” is one of his most popular poems and an interesting illustration of his work: