Tuesday, December 4, 2012

#251 To Violets - Robert Herrick

Oh good, a flower poem, short and sweet, like its subject. I like flower poems a lot, and they seem to sum up a lot of what I like about poetry. The sort of flower poem I really enjoy is an exercise in enlightened greed. It takes a simple subject and sucks the marrow from its bones. The flower is enjoyed, explored and, perhaps most importantly for me, gloated over. I love the sensation of rubbing my hands in glee at the fact that I have, in the imaginary treasure trove where I keep my joys, another intricate fancy stashed away. I am essentially a very frivolous Smaug.

This poem is not of my very favourite sort. The flower subject is a starting point here, an opportunity to play with flower symbolism, and perhaps the set-up for a slightly bitter joke. I'm not sure about that last one myself, but bear with me.

The author is someone whom we shall eventually get to know quite well, as Q has given us a decent handful of his poems to look at. Robert Herrick (1591-1674) was a clergyman, Royalist and advocate of a life well-lived. Before clicking through to the Wikipedia article, I advise you to brace yourself for the sights you will see there. Herrick seems to have been a sort of 17th Century equivalent to a 1980s footballer, all bubble-perm and luxuriant moustache. A kind of ur-Keegan, if you must.

One key aspect of Herrick's work seems to have been his insistence upon the importance of the good life. He dealt in the romanticised ideals of the Cavalier, those of wine, love, sensuality and song. This poem seems like quite a good introduction to some of this.
To Violets
 WELCOME, maids of honour!
    You do bring
    In the spring,
And wait upon her.
She has virgins many,
    Fresh and fair;
    Yet you are
More sweet than any.
You're the maiden posies,
    And so graced
    To be placed
'Fore damask roses.
Yet, though thus respected,
    By-and-by
    Ye do lie,
Poor girls, neglected.
The dual symbolism of the violet, as a flower of virginity and of the funeral, is what is being exploited here. It is neatly done, I think. Several aspects appeal to me greatly. Firstly, the brevity with which the procession from honoured maid to neglected corpse is conducted. We move swiftly from welcome to departure in short, snappy lines. The poem is perhaps easiest for me to understand as two verses, each presenting first the preservation of virginity and then a criticism of it.

The first verse, if that's what it is, starts with salutation and plain description, but then seems to become almost facetious. I can't help but read the poem's tone in this way. The violets are described as sweeter than any of the other virgins, but virgins are suggested to be commonplace. It is the preservation of virginity, perhaps, which lends the special sweetness, but which also seems to be implicated in an uncommon pride. This theme seems to continue into the second verse. The violets are graced to be placed first of all, and yet this does them no good. They end up lying neglected, just 'poor girls'. It is here that the funeral symbolism of the flower is employed. It seems that those who preserve their virtue too well end up with no joy of it in the end.


I think that I read this facetious tone in the way the poem employs its mixture of short and long syllables. The words that find a special weight and slowness in my mouth, among what are largely clipped and tripping phrases, are those that relate directly to the concept of virginity: 'maids', 'virgins', 'sweet', 'maiden', 'respected', 'poor', 'neglected'. It feels like I trip from point to point, coming up against the emphasis thrown upon these words, and almost drawling them. If we imagine that this list forms the argument of the poem, a shift appears from one archetype of virginity to another, from sweetness to spinsterhood, from maiden to maiden-aunt.

As to what I think of this, I'm not sure. Criticisms of virginity can all too easily devolve into criticisms of female sexual agency. There is something very unpleasant in the idea that the value of female sexuality is as a currency to be spent or hoarded, and which must either be debased or neglected. Shades of the Madonna-whore complex fall too easily here for me to feel very friendly toward this poem, despite my respect for its functioning.

I suspend judgement on Herrick and women, however (much to his relief, I am sure). From my brief reading around, it seems that Herrick himself may have been much more chaste than his poetry might imply. The idea that this poem might represent a sort of self-mockery is appealing to me. If the true subject of the poem were not women, but the poet himself, my concerns would essentially evaporate. Reading the poem on the basis of this assumption, the tone seems to deepen and soften for me. If the clipped syllables represent a self-deprecatory glibness (that tone many of us use to dig at ourselves without wishing to be thought self-pitying) then the whole piece seems, to me a least, a little funnier, a little sadder and a lot more likeable.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

#763 The Toys - Coventry Patmore

Oh thank goodness for that. Second chance out and we've got something that looks much like a winner, 'The Toys' by Coventry Patmore (1823-96). For context, the key thing in readings of Patmore seems to be gender politics, in particular the significance of his poem 'The Angel in the House' (1854-62), a study of marriage, which contained a highly influential account of idealised Victorian womanhood. While Patmore's ideas of femininity are not the subject of the poem today, the notion of the ideal woman does seem relevant. It's worth noting, on this point, that 'The Toys' was originally published in a volume, The Victories of Love (1862), that included a section of 'The Angel in the House'

    The Toys
    MY little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
    And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
    Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
    I struck him, and dismiss'd
    With hard words and unkiss'd,
    —His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
    Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
    I visited his bed,
    But found him slumbering deep,
    With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet
    From his late sobbing wet.
    And I, with moan,
    Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
    For, on a table drawn beside his head,
    He had put, within his reach,
    A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,
    A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
    And six or seven shells,
    A bottle with bluebells,
    And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
    To comfort his sad heart.
    So when that night I pray'd
    To God, I wept, and said:
    Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
    Not vexing Thee in death,
    And Thou rememberest of what toys
    We made our joys,
    How weakly understood
    Thy great commanded good,
    Then, fatherly not less
    Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
    Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
    'I will be sorry for their childishness.'
Two things really strike me here. The obvious things, of course. First, the accuracy and pathos of the description of childish fancy in the face of overmastering distress. Second, the difficulty and pain of governing others and punishing their sins, and the religious significance of this.

To take the second first, the religious aspect to the poem enters early on, with "having my law the seventh time disobey'd". While seven is obviously a proper biblical number for all sorts of reasons, I suspect that, here, a specific allusion is being made to Matthew 18:21-22. This is the bit where Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive the sins of his brother, and whether seven times is the charm. Jesus replies that he should forgive not "Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven". The Matthew author is perhaps making reference to Proverbs 24:16, where it is asserted that a just man may fall seven times and still yet rise again. On this reading the poem seems to suggest that, in punishing his son as he does, the narrator has made a moral mistake.

The feminine motif enters the poem at this point. The reason given for the narrator's conduct is that his son's mother is dead. There is a certain blunt brilliance to the delivery of this news, particularly poignant because of its autobiographical nature. Patmore's first wife, born Emily Andrews, did indeed die, in 1860, when Patmore's youngest son was around two years old. 'The Toys' seems to have been first published in 1862, and is so dealing with a new grief. In the poem, the fact of the absence seems defining. The narrator's conduct is apparently wholly explained by the absence of his wife. One might initially call this mere Victorian misogyny, and I'm sure there's a helping of that in there, but I think there is something more interesting too.

Victorian romantic love was, in significant part, connected to the notion of the union of souls. While such love was in some sense genderless, then, a heteronormative culture will inevitably require that the standard union is between the soul of a man and the soul of a woman. The notion that a complete soul requires both masculine and feminine elements does not seem too great a stretch from this point.

"So what?", you ask? Well, I think this becomes interesting when considered in respect of the God perspective invoked at the end of the poem. One might argue that a shift is represented from the Old Testament hypermasculine God of Proverbs, who allows 7 transgressions (and those only to the just), to the New Testament God of Matthew, who provides at least 490 chances to be forgiven, and whose nature is less emphatically male. Jesus as feminiser is hardly a new concept, but it's interesting to detect an echo of it here. The plea, in the narrator's prayer, for mercy, taken with the implication that a just and good God would feel sorry for the childishness of humanity, reinforces the notion that what is presented is not simply an account of hope about the nature of God, but rather an argument for what that nature might or must be.

Moving on from speculation, I have really only a little to say about the thing that moves me the most in this piece, which is its account of the distractions and treasures arranged near the child's head for comfort. We all reach out for comforts in life. We're OK while we're being distracted. For many of us, it can seem like distraction is all we have. We have disposed of the Father, with his "great commanded good", there is no possibility of ultimate forgiveness for our sins or for our pitiable triviality. It's a comfortingly depressing, anti-materialist and anti-modern reading. But you know what? Screw that.

This poem functions by taking the reality of human forgiveness and love and imposing them on an imagined creator. We should take this seriously; both represented aspects of life are real. Yes, our joys are as trivial as the toys of a child, but our responsibilities are as weighty as those we once placed on the shoulders of a god made in our image. The responsibilities were always ours. Growing up, as a person or as a culture, involves embracing both the triviality and the seriousness of existence, not insisting upon an idolatry that values one at the expense of the other. Only by being both the son and father is there any hope for the human spirit.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

#204 Sweet Content - Thomas Dekker

And so the first number is drawn from the tombola and the task begins. Turning to #204, we find Thomas Dekker's 'Sweet Content'. This is the only Dekker poem included by Q, and at first glance, I wonder whether even so meagre a selection might not have been overgenerous.
Sweet Content
ART thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?
            O sweet content!
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex'd?
            O punishment!
Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vex'd
To add to golden numbers golden numbers?
    O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!

Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour bears a lovely face;
Then hey nonny nonny—hey nonny nonny!
Canst drink the waters of the crisped spring?
            O sweet content!
Swim'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears?
            O punishment!

Then he that patiently want's burden bears,
No burden bears, but is a king, a king!
    O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour bears a lovely face;
Then hey nonny nonny—hey nonny nonny!
Well maybe we have to cut Dekker (c.1572 – 1632) a little slack. He was, after all, a dramatist and pamphleteer, rather than a poet, and this song is drawn from his 1603 play Patient Grissel, written in collaboration with Henry Chettle and William Haughton. It is identified as a song in the text, by the way, and perhaps the fact that it is intended for a musical setting goes some way toward excusing its imperfections. Perhaps.

Certainly the imperfections, taking this as poetry for the page, are apparent. The amount of fruitless repetition starts to grate on me long before I get to the end. I make it eight "nonnies" in total and the same of "apaces". Not to mention a round half-dozen "contents" and sundry "sweets". It rather reminds me of that writer on Lord Gnome's distinguished organ, Mr Phil Space. In the context of melody perhaps this would be acceptable, but it seems very unlikely that it will actually be good. One reason I say this is that Dekker seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of a refrain. Instead of summarising the disparate elements of the song with strong repetition, the scattered refrains merely further split an already confusing whole.

The other reason for doubting whether melody can work much magic here is that it has been tried, relatively recently, with distinctly lacklustre effect. Here's the Spotify link: Ruth Golden – Sweet Content. This is a performance of Peter Warlock's 1919 musical setting of the lyric. As you can hear, it's pretty terrible. I know nothing about Warlock, apart from the fact that he possessed an idiotically snazzy beard, but he seems to have been reasonably well-respected by his contemporaries, and I've no particular reason to doubt their estimation. Simply listening to the piece, I can hear the lack of coherence in the lyric infecting the music. We're not going anywhere apart from stir-crazy with this one.

What really puzzles and disappoints me about this piece is the incomprehensible rhyme scheme, although the term 'scheme' dignifies that which does not deserve the honour. The first chunk is actually a relatively interesting and pleasing ABCBCAB. The repeated "golden numbers" in line 6 reinforces the rhyme with line 1 really quite sweetly. After that, though, we're off to the races, and losing badly. The second and third stanzas seem to have no interest whatever in employing rhyme to any purpose, and those rhymes there are seem shoved in pretty much at random.

So no, I don't like it, and I'm not really sure how anyone could. However, the words "golden slumbers" should provide a clue to the fact that Dekker was capable of producing a pretty lyric on occasion, and even that he did so in the piece 'Sweet Content' is drawn from. The more familiar lines, found later in Patient Grissel, are these:
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby…
A lyric familiar to millions as adapted by Paul McCartney for the Abbey Road medley. Now one might argue that, in 1969, McCartney could've adapted anything and made it sweet. All I have to say to that is that I'd like to have seen him try with this piece of dreck.

A poor start Q, a poor start indeed. But I trust you to lead me on to much better things, old friend.