Household Opera

Glory be to God for knitted things; or, Knitting with Gerard Manley Hopkins

I blame Lady Penelope for my latest oddball knitting obsession. Had she not dropped the word "inscape" into this recent post about stranded knitting, I might not have gone off on the train of thought that began with "Oh, Hopkins! I should reread those poems again" and quickly led into "Wouldn't 'Goldengrove Unleaving' be a terrific name for some knitted thing?" and then "If I design a Goldengrove Unleaving pattern, I should do something similar for 'Pied Beauty' and 'The Windhover' and 'Inversnaid' and..."

(Then again, the idea had probably been in the back of my mind since a friend for whom I made a pair of multicolored wristwarmers thanked me with a line from Hopkins: "Glory be to God for dappled things!" And I'd also been thinking about Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems and how one might design a shawl to be called "Willowwood." If this becomes a project, I might work my way through any number of poets. An Easter Wings wrap for George Herbert? A fisherman sweater that riffs on Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses"?)

I'm still at the stage where I fantasize a lot about designing knitting patterns but haven't yet actually tried to do it. But this might be the project that propels me into action. I have a fairly clear idea of what I'd like Goldengrove Unleaving to look like: a long rectangular stole, deep yellow with tinges of orange, more or less like the "Golden Glow" colorway in this yarn. I'm envisioning a leafy lace pattern, like Double Vine or Vine Lace or Bleeding Hearts, at one end, and a few trails of eyelet holes going up to the other end, to suggest leaves falling.

"Pied Beauty," I think, should be a circular shawl. (Circular to make a pun on pi, of course.) And because the poem praises "dappled things," one would have to select the yarn with care: variegated enough to form patches of color instead of long streaks, and in colors that suggest the things in the poem. The only disadvantage is that I'm not sure what color Hopkins' finches' wings and trout scales would have been. But these things can be found out (and, in the process, I've noticed something I hadn't before about the way Hopkins evokes color without naming any actual colors except "rose" in line 3).

And "The Windhover": I was thinking of a Fair Isle hat with a kestrel motif, but I see someone's already designed something like that. I may have to master stranded knitting, my as-yet-unconquered frontier, before I start in on my own version. As Hopkins would say: the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

I have a feeling that if I really wanted to get obsessive about Project Knitting With Hopkins, I'd read up on sprung rhythm and try to translate that into stitch patterns. But I suspect that that way lies madness. So I'll start with Goldengrove Unleaving instead.

 

[Edited to add: I think I've found the yarn for Pied Beauty. I mean, look at this gorgeous yarn!]

The past is a foreign country; they write poems differently there.

My Material Cultures paper is coming together at last, with a little over a month and a half to go before I present it. I suspect a lot of the points I'm making have been made at least once or twice before, but I'm working with a body of evidence that doesn't seem to have been examined in a lot of detail, and I have so much to say about it that I'm going to have a hard time cramming it all into 20 minutes. There are so many more commonplace books I want to look at that I think this could very easily become an extended project of some sort: perhaps a journal article, or if I get wildly ambitious, I'd still like to build a database to track the reputations of individual poets and poems among Victorian readers.*

One of the things I've been realizing, as I pore over extract books from various points in the 19th century, is how different my own literary tastes are from those of the people I'm studying. One finds Familiar Canonical Poets in these commonplace books, of course. Shakespeare turns up regularly, mostly in the form of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations-style snippets from the plays; Byron was wildly popular, much more so than his fellow Romantic poets; the most famous 19th-century Americans—Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant—are heavily represented as well.

But one also finds dozens of now-obscure poets, not to mention reams of poetry that strikes the modern ear as sentimental, even treacly. The poems in these collections tend to be heavy on the moralizing, or on the kind of pathos that Mark Twain sent up so vividly in the person of Emmeline Grangerford. I've paged through entire albums filled with sad poems about dead children, pious poems about Christian resignation, and upbeat love songs. One can resuscitate the reputation of a Felicia Hemans or a Letitia Elizabeth Landon; but it's harder to do that with Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House (quoted seven times in one Boston woman's extract book), especially after reading what Virginia Woolf had to say about it.

On my most recent visit to Brown I encountered a poem by Edward Augustus Rand, an Episcopalian minister born in Vermont, which began:

Across the sands, strange darkness fell;
The sun had dipped beneath a cloud;
The waves now sullenly swept on,
The surf fast whitened to a shroud.

But then the speaker sees a sunlit white sail in the distance, and neatly unpacks the metaphor to conclude with "O souls that find in Christ the light, / Sail on across life's shadowed sea!" I rather liked the ominous first stanza, but I felt a distinct flash of disappointment when I saw how it ended. The combination of religiosity and sunny optimism was off-putting to my tastes, which were honed, like every other English major's tastes, on the irony and disjunctiveness and unsettlement of Modernism and its aftermath. This kind of poetry is exactly what 20th century literary culture revolted against.

But people clearly loved this kind of poetry—cut it out of newspapers, saved it in their albums and scrapbooks, copied it out by hand, shared it with each other, kept their compilations and passed them on to friends and relatives. And one of the things I'm interested in is getting past my own aesthetic prejudices, which are very much of my own time and place, to try to understand what the Victorians saw in their (rather different) canon.** There's something moving about all the effort so many people went through to preserve these poems; staying aware of that has been a useful corrective to my own literary snobbery.

Take, for instance, Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life," which was much beloved by Victorian readers but is apt to sound almost unbearably earnest nowadays. Not long ago, I found one of its most famous stanzas emblazoned on a vintage postcard from around 1913:

One's first impulse may be to roll one's eyes; but the fact that postcard companies could print poems like this on cards and sell them is yet another piece of evidence for their popularity. And the appetite for reassuring, uplifting, optimistic poetry hasn't gone away. I used to see "A Psalm of Life" quite regularly on the backs of Celestial Seasonings tea boxes, before they stopped putting entire poems on their packaging. (I could probably do an entire spinoff project on the detachable poetic quotation as it appears on various types of commercial products. But I have to finish this stage of the project first.)

Most of this won't fit in the paper, which is less concerned with aesthetics than with reading practices and with the physical construction of homemade texts, although I do plan to sneak that postcard into my slides. But I wanted to share it anyway, because it seemed to interesting not to think through.

* It would be an enormous amount of work, and there would be all sorts of logistical challenges, but I still think it would be a very cool project. Had I but world enough and time, &c.

** Joanne Dobson's "Reclaiming Sentimental Literature" (American Literature 69 no. 2, 1997) says a lot of what I'd like to say about the mismatch between 19th-century poetry and 20th-century aesthetic sensibilities.

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.

What is the sound of one melancholy wave withdrawing?

My new absolute favorite thing on the web is FreeSound, an archive of Creative Commons-licensed sound files uploaded by users, like an aural version of Flickr's Creative Commons pool. They're tagged with keywords, and some of them (to the delight of someone as map-obsessed as I am) are geotagged so that if you want to hear what a hot spring in Iceland sounds like, you can browse for it on a map of the world.

My first thought, when I found the site, was that this would make a wonderful source of chill-out background sounds. One could download a whole set of sound files of cats purring, or rain falling, or birds singing at dawn, or whatever; assemble them into an album in iTunes; turn on one's computer or plug in one's earphones; and ta-da: instant de-stressification. (I've been working on various solo projects at work that require concentration but still make me want to listen to something in the background. All of the above fit the bill admirably. I especially recommend the cat purrs.)

And my second thought was "Ooh, one of their top recordings is a nightingale singing. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever heard a nightingale. I've always wondered what all those poets were talking about. Wait a minute — someone should totally put together a set of sound files to go with the Norton Anthology of Poetry! Think of all those students who've never heard a nightingale or don't know what a dulcimer sounds like!" And I still think it's a rather good idea. I mean, imagine the possibilities:

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window...

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring...

The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination....

But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Who else wants to build an open-source multimedia poetry anthology? I think it would be really cool if such a thing existed.

Notes toward an ongoing project: poetry, space, and mapping

I've blogged previously about my map obsession, and about wanting to do something with poetry and spatial or geographic visualization. And since one of my plans for this summer is attending THATCamp 2009 (yay!), I've been thinking a lot about what kinds of projects these interests might lead to. What follows is some thinking-out-loud.

As I said in the previous post, I love applications that let you georeference various types of information, but I keep finding myself wishing for something that would indicate vaguer (or even imaginary) locations, such as one tends to find in poetry and fiction. And I'd like to be able to indicate motion from one place to another within a text—the westward movement in the last paragraph of Joyce's "The Dead," for instance, from the Dublin hotel where Gabriel watches the snow to the churchyard in Oughterard.

I've been thinking a lot about the connections between space and memory in Thomas Hardy's poems, about the way he repeatedly uses a single location to juxtapose a scene in the present with memory of what happened there in the past. (I'm thinking of any number of Hardy poems, but especially "The Walk," "At Castle Boterel," "A House with a History," "Paths of Former Time," "The Self-Unseeing," and "Sacred to the Memory.") I don't know how you'd visualize that, actually. I think you'd have to show movement in time as well as space. A lyric space-time continuum?

I also think it would be a nifty project to map the history of various poetic forms in both space and time: to show the emergence of the sonnet in Italy and its spread to England during the Renaissance, to explore the complicated multilingual history of the ghazal in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Among many others. Kind of like the Atlas of Early Printing.

And, as much for my own reference as anything else, here are a few of the links I've been bookmarking:

• A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in Historical Research, by Ian Gregory
• The Spatial History Project at Stanford University and its tools wiki for spatial humanities
• The New Geography, a roundtable from the April/May 2009 Bookforum
• Mapping the Digital Humanities, a HASTAC discussion (April 2009)
• "Literary Geospaces," a Chronicle of Higher Ed article by Jennifer Howard (paywalled, sorry) (link fixed; thanks, Dave!)
• Gutenkarte geographic text browser (not a lot of texts yet, but an intriguing idea)

The poem fragments in the back of your mind

Emily Lloyd at Poesy Galore has tagged me with an irresistible meme:

"What are ten lines from poems that stick in your head when you are walking around your day? Or, if you stop a minute and think of some lines of poetry, what comes up? It’s fine if you distort the line as you remember it, if you misremember it."

Here are mine. I suspect that I'd probably give a different set of answers tomorrow or next week; some are lines that come to me often, and others presented themselves when I started writing them all down.

1. Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. [This one pops into my head all the time when I'm bored, reminding me that I probably have no Inner Resources.]
2. And now that the end is near / The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
3. ...Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.
4. Green is night, green kindled and appareled.
5. Love's the boy stood on the burning deck / trying to recite "The boy stood on / the burning deck."
6. Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.
7. For Juliana comes, and she / What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
8. Small comfort the candle / Of moon on the maple; / The steeple of poplar, / The arch of the birch. [I don't know who wrote this poem; I read it in a children's poetry anthology at least twenty years ago, and Google hasn't yet been able to tell me anything about it.]
9. And is the white sail free on its walled infinity? [Another one I read decades ago, on a placard in a bus in Santa Monica. I didn't think to write down the author's name, and the rest of it fell out of my head a long time ago. It's probably not nearly as good a poem as I thought at the time, but I remember it because it's something of a mystery.]
10. Song, tuneful song, built a palace in the wild.
11. [Bonus, because it was in my head all morning:] Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet, / Over the splendor and speed of thy feet.

I tag anyone who wants to be tagged. Have at it!

Battlestar Galactica, or (Paradise) Lost in Space

(Warning: This post contains major spoilers for recent episodes of Battlestar Galactica, so if you don't want to know, you'd best stop reading now.)

When I first started watching Battlestar Galactica, I saw it as, among many other things, a reimagining of Vergil's Aeneid. Now that another couple of seasons have passed and the emphasis has shifted away from the search for Earth, the show's range of references has shifted, from classical myth and legend to Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." A few weeks ago, I was startled to hear Emily Dickinson quoted by a weary Bill Adama; maybe, I thought, given the show's preoccupation with the Cylons' religion, there'd be a Milton reference at some point.

Boy, was I ever on-target with that prediction. Friday's episode, "No Exit," was Miltonic beyond my wildest dreams, and made my English-major heart positively leap. Not only did we get Anders quoting Paradise Lost, twice, in the midst of the raving brought on by his brain injury,* we also got a whole series of confrontations between two of the later-model Cylons and their creator, not to mention invocations of free will and a scene with an apple that I thought was too obvious, at least until I started to think about it.

I suspect that a lot of contemporary reworkings of Paradise Lost (e.g. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials) are mediated in one way or another through the Romantic poets' reading of the poem—Shelley's reference to Satan as "the hero of Paradise Lost," Blake's famous line in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell about Milton being "a true Poet and of the devil's party without knowing it." What interests me about the direction that BSG has taken is that it's not entirely in this mode. Cavil, who envies the godlike perfection he thinks he could have had, who passionately resents his creators' favoritism toward their later creations, who schemes and rebels and sows dissent, is clearly the Satan figure here. The parallel is underlined when Anders mutters "he...whose guile, / Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived / The mother of mankind" and there's a quick cut to a flashback of Cavil. And I don't think we're meant to dismiss Cavil as unidimensionally evil, but it's impossible to see him as a tragic hero figure, either.

But Cavil is also fallen Adam, unavoidably aware of his own human(oid) limitations, insisting that "If I'm so irredeemable, if I'm such a mistake, if I'm so broken, then whose fault is that? It's my maker's fault." ("Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man?" Adam asks in Book 10 of Paradise Lost—a line that also serves as the epigraph to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, another story of an artificial human who turns on his creator.) And Ellen, who created him, is simultaneously Milton's God, reminding him of his free will, and Milton's Satan, offering that symbolically overloaded apple to Boomer before biting into it herself.** And Boomer, instead of following Cavil's lead (he for machine perfection only, she for machine perfection in him?), breaks with him at the last minute and accepts the offer that went with the apple.

BSG has always refused to let any one character or group of characters stay in the roles of "good guys" or "bad guys" for very long. The moral ambiguity that's characterized the show from the beginning extends even to the Milton intertext. As Milton saw it, with free will, you can choose good or choose evil; but without it, you're a robot. Except this is the world of science fiction, and the robots are often indistinguishable from the humans.

* One could also say a lot about the recurring figure of the insane or at least slightly altered prophet in BSG: Roslin's chamalla-induced visions, the Hybrid's glossolalia, Starbuck's dreams, Number Three's near-death experiences, and now Anders with the bullet in his brain.

** And then there's the way she came to earth as a human (like the other final four Cylons) and allowed herself to be sacrificed for the greater good. And there's also the weird incestuous vibe to the Ellen/Cavil relationship, which almost reminds me of the Satan/Sin dynamic in Book 2 of PL. I love the way the parallels are never stable or one-to-one.

More on poetry and quotation (or, One-hit wonders of the literary canon)

So I was thinking about quotation a few months ago, and then yesterday morning I was working on a reference question about a very, very obscure Victorian poet. (So obscure he doesn't even get a mention in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and only a handful of libraries on this side of the Atlantic own any of his poems.) Said poet is one of those minor figures best known for a single often-quoted poem, or, in this poet's case, a single line from a single poem, which is at once hard to find and strangely familiar. After a bit of sleuthing around, it occurred to me that the poem probably sounded so recognizable because it's been anthologized to bits, and Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies confirmed that it appeared in The Best-Loved Poems of the American People in 1936. I suspect it's also cropped up in others as well, and probably in a host of quotation dictionaries, because the familiar line had that kind of "heard it a million times before" ring to it.

I'm intrigued by minor poets—or rather, intrigued by the mechanisms by which minor poets become known as minor poets, represented by a token poem here or there, or a quotation in Bartlett's. And I'm intrigued by the afterlives they have in anthologies. In front of me is my great-grandmother's copy of Palgrave's Golden Treasury, in an edition published in New York in 1888. Palgrave's is a very Victorian sampler, heavy on Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Shelley and the more lyrical Elizabethans, with no poetry by anyone born later than Keats. But some of the lesser poets in it sound hauntingly recognizable. There's Henry Vaughan with an extremely truncated version of "The World," no doubt included largely for the famous first line "I saw Eternity the other night." There's John Lyly with "Cupid and my Campaspe play'd / At cards for kisses; Cupid paid," an anthology favorite from an otherwise barely-remembered Elizabethan author. And I've finally realized that the author of the line "I am monarch of all I survey" was William Cowper, in "The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk." I'd never read the poem in its entirety, but that line (like the one I was hunting down yesterday) is one I've known for years and years.

It would be interesting to compare the Golden Treasury with more modern anthologies to see which minor poets are consistently represented and which ones aren't. I'm not really interested in canon-formation so much as minor-poet canon-formation. Someday I want to do a study of poetry anthologies from a book-history perspective, looking at why editors chose the poems they do, and what kinds of audiences anthologies were intended for, and where the connections might lie between anthologizing and other practices like classroom memorization and recitation. (Some of this, I'm sure, has been done already.) Some of the poets who seem minor now were major in their day, and vice versa; it would be interesting to find out if any of them were the always-already minor figures who managed to write one well-remembered poem and then fade into obscurity.

Come to think of it, that might be a good project to pursue sooner rather than later. Time to do a little research and see what I can find to start with.

The quotation effect

The other night, wanting something to read, I asked my Twitter friends if they could recommend any poems they liked. One of them suggested Conrad Aiken's "Morning Song of Senlin," which I'd never read before but was very glad to have pointed out to me. At the end of the first stanza I was stopped short by the lines

Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in the saffron mist and seem to die
And I myself upon a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie...

"Oh," I thought, "so that's where Madeleine L'Engle got that title." And that got me thinking about the belated quotation effect: the odd jolt when you realize that a line you've already heard or read is actually a quotation from something you're just now reading. The Belated Quotation Effect kicks in, for instance, when one realizes at one's first performance of Hamlet (or one's first viewing of Casablanca) that that's where all those famous lines come from; or when one suddenly identifies Act 3 of Die Walküre as the music behind Elmer Fudd's "Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit!"

In college, during my classics-major phase, I took a course on Petronius's Satyricon. One day in class, we translated section 48, which contains a line we all recognized: "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω"—a line best known as the epigraph to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." We all stopped and wondered out loud whether that line about the Sibyl hanging in her cage would sound half so eerie if it weren't for Eliot's quotation of it, and our association of it with "The Waste Land." And I don't think it would. But it's impossible to read it now without thinking of Eliot.

The thing about the Belated Quotation Effect is that it makes for a sort of reversal of chronology: Text A was created first, and Text B, which quotes Text A, came afterward. But if you encounter Text B first, something funny happens to your perception of both. The quotation keeps some of the flavor of wherever you've heard it quoted. The earlier author can seem almost to be quoting the later one, rather than the other way around.* And it's the anachronistic effect that interests me.

No real conclusions to this ongoing train of thought, except to say "Isn't intertextuality neat?" Have any of you noticed the Belated Quotation Effect?

* Harold Bloom says something similar in The Anxiety of Influence, and, although most of what I've read of Bloom's work makes me break out in hives of annoyance, I do think it's an interesting idea.

Google poetry goes...paper?

Actual book summary encountered today while I was selecting new books:

"Poetry consisting of found text from Google search results."

And I find myself surprised, not at the fact that someone would publish a book of found poetry from collaged text, or that they'd assemble it out of Google-fragments, but that the resulting poems would end up published in print. It's a little odd to think of an all-but-born-digital form jumping backward into older media. (Although not so surprising when you recall the various paper-based Dadaist experiments with collage and cadavres exquis.)

I'm kind of intrigued, actually, because I've always liked the found poem genre, and I'm curious as to how the poet put the found text together. One can always auto-generate Google poems, after all, but presumably these are assembled differently.