Household Opera

More botanizing

More spring foliage imagery. I just can't help myself; it was a beautiful day today, and the leaves on the trees are still that supercharged fluorescent green that always leaves me a little startled that such a color is actually found in nature.

This post is for frizzyLogic, whose photographs of London plane trees and their "baubles" were in my mind today after I noticed that the sweetgum tree outside my office was producing little green bobbles of its own. 

Incidentally, Wikipedia tells me that the spiky fruit of the sweetgum is sometimes called a "gumball." Hee.

I've been staring at the buds on that tree since March, waiting for them to open. Longest. Winter. Ever. But as of last week, there are finally leaves.

The oaks around campus are also leafing out like crazy:

(Actually, I think this image is one of the better pictures I've taken lately. It doesn't quite get the intensity of the colors, but I really like the way the composition turned out.)

Walking around, looking for places to stop and take pictures of leaves, I keep thinking of George Herbert's poem "The Flower," especially the parts of it that stayed with me during some of the worst moments in grad school:

Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
         Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown...
.................................
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
         I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing. Oh, my only light,
                      It cannot be
                      That I am he
         On whom thy tempests fell all night.

May we all recover greenness, however and wherever we manage to find it.

Commonplaces in all sorts of places

Not long ago, having realized that none of the other online to-read list options I'd been trying were really working out, I joined Goodreads. I like the ease of adding a book to one's to-read or currently-reading shelves; I like the tagging; I like being able to specify what page I'm on; and I like reading other people's reviews, and writing reviews of my own.

What I wasn't expecting to find was the "Quotes" feature. One can, if one likes, search for quotations from one's favorite authors, save quotations to a list of personal favorites, add in quotations that nobody else has added yet, and give them descriptive tags. My first thought, when I saw all this, was that the commonplace book phenomenon had popped up in another place I hadn't been looking for it.

A lot of the most popular quotations on Goodreads are of the banal sort that one sees on greeting cards and refrigerator magnets (if I had a dollar for every time I've seen that "Dance like no one is watching" bit, I could retire tomorrow), but people have used the Quotes feature to collect all kinds of quotations, some of them wonderful. When I found it, I promptly spent several hours going through old notebooks and adding favorite snippets of prose and poetry to my Goodreads list. Once I started, I couldn't stop.

It makes me just a little bit happier when I see a passage I typed in getting favorited by other readers, like I've introduced someone to something splendid they maybe hadn't seen before. Which, come to think of it, is perhaps how the compilers of the 19th-century commonplace books I've been looking at felt when they shared their extracts with friends and family members. Certainly the combination of "familiar quotations" and idiosyncratic personal tastes is something that's become very familiar to me as I look at 200-year-old collections of quotations.

And because I can't resist, here are a few extracts from my own Goodreads commonplace book:

***

Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH: 

        A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'd 
        By your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shade 
        Below the garden... 

His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship.

—Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel

***

"It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself — We fainted alternately on a sofa." —Jane Austen, Love and Freindship

***

So one can lose a good idea 
by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides 
it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations 
are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does 
recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier.

—John Ashbery, Flow Chart

***

Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something—constructive? 
Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?

—Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

***

"Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed."  —Thom Gunn, "Jamesian"

[This last one gets my personal vote for Best. Epigram. EVER.]

Personal anthology: Robertson Davies

The passage I'm about to quote is from Robertson Davies' novel Tempest-Tost, about a community theater company in a small Ontario town doing an outdoor production of The Tempest. The director, Valentine Rich, a local who's gone on to a theater career in New York, has returned to her home town and taken on this production as something of a favor. She's talking to her assistant director, Solomon Bridgetower, about why everyone in the cast is fretting so much at the final dress rehearsal:

"I wanted to get away," said she; "everybody wants to plague and worry me about nothing. They'll be all right tomorrow. What's worrying them?"

"They are sacrificing to our Canadian God," said Solly. "We all believe that if we fret and abuse ourselves sufficiently, Providence will take pity and smile upon anything we attempt. A light heart, or a consciousness of desert, attracts ill luck. You have been away from your native land too long. You have forgotten our folkways. Listen to that gang over there; they are scanning the heavens and hoping aloud that it won't rain tomorrow. This is to placate the Mean Old Man in the Sky, and persuade him to be kind to us."

— Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost, chapter 7

My father, born and bred in the kind of small Ontario town Davies wrote so well about, was the one who introduced me to this novel. "Sacrificing to the Canadian God" became our comic shorthand for the kind of fretting (born of a belief that optimism really will bring on bad luck, in a Murphy's Law kind of way) that both he and I were prone to. I've been making my share of burnt offerings to the Canadian God lately, so this passage has been on my mind. And every time I think of it, I have to smile.

Personal anthology: Emily Dickinson

I'm in a traveling mood this month, and this poem of Emily Dickinson's was running through my head:

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses – past the headlands –
Into deep Eternity –

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

So I pulled my selected ED off the shelf to look the poem up so I could post it, and found the book full of Post-It flags I hadn't removed since my grad school days. Vague memories surfaced of having written about poem 675, "Essential Oils – are wrung," as an aside somewhere in my dissertation, one of my periodic forays into later periods than the one I was officially writing about. But what was with all the other markers? Had I meant to write more about Dickinson and never gotten around to it?

I'd forgotten, for instance, all about #885, but I'm glad I didn't take out the flag marking its page:

The Poets light but Lamps –
Themselves – go out –
The Wicks they stimulate –
If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns –
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference –

And I'd also all but forgotten all about #1261, which takes a rather darker view of the same phenomenon:

A Word dropped careless on a Page
May stimulate an Eye
When folded in perpetual seam
The Wrinkled Maker lie

Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria –

(Literary immortality as a plague. It's almost a horror-movie conceit.) I remember now what I was about: Dickinson seems in some of these poems to be riffing on Shakespeare's sonnets, particularly the ones that are obsessed with preserving either the young man's image or the poet's own reputation. But I was also startled to find that whenever it was I went through the book flagging poems, one of the others I marked was #360:

Death sets a Thing significant
The Eye had hurried by
Except a perished Creature
Entreat us tenderly

To ponder little Workmanships
In Crayon, or in Wool,
With "This was last Her fingers did" –
Industrious until –

The Thimble weighed too heavy –
The stitches stopped – themselves –
And then 'twas put among the Dust
Upon the Closet shelves –

A Book I have – a friend gave –
Whose Pencil – here and there –
Had notched the place that pleased Him –
At Rest – His fingers are –

Now – when I read – I read not –
For interrupting Tears –
Obliterate the Etchings
Too Costly for Repairs.

Oddly enough, I've been wanting to write about that poem (in the context of memory traces and the marks of previous readers) as part of the ongoing commonplace-book project, because I'd encountered it in an article about 19th-century sentimental literature and thought "Aha!". But I'd forgotten that I'd wanted to write about it then, too. Uncanny. Or maybe not, really.

I wonder if I was really a closet Victorianist all through the grad school years when I was in training to be an early modernist?

Personal anthology: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In keeping with today's wanderlust theme, and with the Victorian-poetry kick I've been on lately: a favorite Tennyson poem, one that's run through my head at various points when I've changed course. I'm surprised, still, how much it moves me. All the more so because Tennyson's Ulysses is more reminiscent of Dante's Ulysses, who winds up in hell after his last voyage founders, than Homer's Odysseus.

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Those lines about how "all experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move" are maybe my favorite moment in all of Tennyson (that I've read so far, anyway). This poem and C.P. Cavafy's "Ithaka" make an interesting pair; I once taught them both in a class on retellings and adaptations of myths and fairy tales, and my students seemed to like that part of the syllabus, though that may have been partly relief at being done with the chunks of Homer I made them read first. Back then it didn't seem likely that I'd see much of the untravelled world gleaming through the arch of experience; now I'm hearing its call louder than ever.

Personal anthology: Thomas Hardy

I've been learning some very basic music theory lately (thank you, Open Yale Courses — it's so much easier to be an autodidact in the age of podcasts and Creative Commons educational materials). And one of the first things I realized was that I wish I'd known more about musical meter during all the years when I was learning about poetic meter.

In the lecture course I just finished listening to, the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" came up as an example of a triple rhythm — specifically, 3/4 time. (Hum it to yourself, tap your foot, and you can hear it: PICture yourSELF on a BOAT in a RIVer with TANgerine TREES...) 3/4 is also the oom-pah-pah rhythm of the great majority of waltzes, which, if you imagine waltzing to the Beatles' trippy psychedelia, only adds to the surreality of it all.

Anyway, I was listening to this example and I suddenly thought "Huh. Dactyls." The dactyl, for those of you who didn't spend your education obsessing over this kind of thing, is the metrical foot with one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones (DUM-da-da). And "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is full of three-syllable words with a dactylic stress pattern: tangerine, marmalade, cellophane, looking-glass, towering. I'd never particularly thought about the meter of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," or made the connection between dactylic meters and waltzing, but there it was.

Dactylic meters can be hard to pull off in English.* They can sound heavy (Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" is a standard example: "HALF a league, HALF a league, HALF a league, ONward"), but they're also sometimes used for comic effect. There's no intrinsic reason why a triple meter would be funnier, or more serious, than a duple one, but if you're used to the predominant iambic meter of a lot of poetry in English (da-DUM-da-DUM), anything else is going to stand out.

All of which is a rather long preamble to this Thomas Hardy poem, which is part of a group of poems about the memory of his first wife, Emma Gifford, who died in 1912, and which came to mind when I started thinking about triple meters:

The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

— Thomas Hardy (Satires of Circumstance, 1914)

If he'd kept up the dactylic meter of the first couple of stanzas throughout the poem, it wouldn't have been as striking; but as the remembered image of Emma that Hardy conjures in the second stanza dwindles into a ghostly voice in the wind, the triple rhythm starts falling apart along with it. "Heard no more again far or near?" marks the shift; it's as though syllables have started dropping out of the pattern we've come to expect, slowing down the bursts of energy we heard in the previous stanzas. And with the next line — "Thus I; faltering forward," with the only trace of the previous rhythm being the word "faltering" — we're in a different world entirely, a slower and sadder and bleaker one.

This was going to be a simple commonplace-book post, but I got a bit carried away. Prosody geekery and music theory: two great tastes that taste great together!

* The dactyl was the basic foot of ancient Greek and Latin epic, but those meters are based on syllable length rather than stress, so it's a different kind of sound altogether. I once encountered a verse translation of Homer that attempted dactylic hexameter in English, and the lines just sounded interminably exhausting.

Personal anthology: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Vacation looms, and I've been too excited about it to think any thoughts more interesting than "Whee!". Tomorrow I'm off for a week or so of travel, including a trip to Santa Fe for two operas and assorted sightseeing. I'll catch you all when I get back, at which point I'll no doubt be hyperventilating about seeing both Natalie Dessay and Patricia Racette, one after the other. (And will probably also have a kazillion Santa Fe photos to post. I've never been anywhere in the Southwest before!)

In the meantime, have some Edna St. Vincent Millay (an old favorite, and one that fits vaguely into the travel theme, but really I just wanted to post it because it's been in my head):

Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

(from A Few Figs From Thistles, 1922)

Personal anthology: Scenes of reading, 1: A.S. Byatt, Possession

It's hard to write a good fictional scene involving characters reading. As A.S. Byatt authorially interjects in the passage I'm about to quote from her novel Possession: A Romance, one risks pulling the reader into a "mise-en-abîme ... where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum." And yet the scene that comes after that disclaimer is one of my very favorite moments in the novel, one of those passages that makes you (or me, at least) draw in a breath and point and say "Yes. Yes. That, exactly." Byatt's main character, Roland Michell, is rereading a poem by the (fictitious) Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, a poem he knows inside and out:

There are readings — of the same text — that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are — believe it — impersonal readings — where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind's ear hears them sing.

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark — readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. ...

Roland read, or reread, The Golden Apples, as though the words were living creatures or stones of fire. He saw the tree, the fruit, the fountain, the woman, the grass, the serpent, single and multifarious in form. He heard Ash's voice, certainly his voice, his own unmistakable voice, and he heard the language moving around, weaving its own patterns, beyond the reach of any single human, writer or reader.

— A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance, chapter 26

Most of my readings aren't of the hair-standing-up variety, and yet: that line about knowing that we understand something we're reading before we even can say "what we know, or how" — that's something I've felt any number of times, but have never quite been able to articulate as well as this scene does.

I've been thinking about scenes of reading quite a bit lately. I may quote a few more here before I'm done.

Personal anthology: poems about haunting

I'd had Thomas Hardy's poem "A House with a History" on my mind for a while (see my post from a couple of weeks ago) when I ran across Wallace Stevens' "A Postcard from the Volcano," which, for some reason, I'd never read before. In one of those odd moments of literary synchrony, I found that each of them reminds me of the other. I don't think Stevens was consciously alluding to Hardy, but both poems seem to share the same preoccupation with what remains, if anything does, of a person's consciousness after they depart or die, and how that consciousness attaches itself to places, and houses in particular. One might call this haunting, except Hardy's poem is more about a kind of failure of haunting, about the new inhabitants' inability to recognize the traces of memory connected with the house. The children in Stevens' poem perceive something, at least, even if they can't perceive "what we felt / At what we saw."

Here's Hardy:

A House with a History

There is a house in a city street
Some past ones made their own;
Its floors were criss-crossed by their feet,
And their babblings beat
From ceiling to white hearth-stone.

And who are peopling its parlours now?
Who talk across its floor?
Mere freshlings are they, blank of brow,
Who read not how
Its prime had passed before

Their raw equipments, scenes, and says
Afflicted its memoried face,
That had seen every larger phase
Of human ways
Before these filled the place.

To them that house's tale is theirs,
No former voices call
Aloud therein. Its aspect bears
Their joys and cares
Alone, from wall to wall.

(from Late Lyrics and Earlier)

And here's Stevens:

A Postcard from the Volcano

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

(from Ideas of Order)

Try as I might, I can't think of other poems that dwell on houses, haunting, and memory in quite this way, though I'm sure there must be some. I thought of Walter de la Mare, but a quick scan through the only book of de la Mare's poems I own—Peacock Pie, in a Faber & Faber edition given to me when I was very young—didn't turn up anything quite in the same vein, though "The Old Stone House" comes close.

Reader, are there other poems out there that play with the haunted-house motif?

Personal anthology: W. H. Auden

It's been well below freezing in my part of New England this week, with attendant snow and ice and blasts of arctic air. My heating bills don't bear thinking of, and I've been wearing about fifteen layers and still can't get warm. (Though it could be worse. I could be living in Minnesota.)

So certain poems have been in my head lately. Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man," especially, and Thomas Hardy's "Snow in the Suburbs." But today I thought of W. H. Auden's "Brussels in Winter," which I first encountered ages ago in one of my favorite classes. And then I couldn't get it out of my head, so here it is:

Brussels in Winter

Wandering the cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains silent in the frost,
The city still escapes you; it has lost
The qualities that say "I am a Thing."

Only the homeless and the really humbled
Seem to be sure exactly where they are,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like the Opera.

Ridges of rich apartments rise tonight
Where isolated windows glow like farms:
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn the stranger right
To warm the heartless city in his arms.

—W. H. Auden