Anne Finch and the Poetry of Retirement

Dear friends and readers,

Let’s begin with a beautiful reading aloud of a poem once one of my favorites (I’d read it again and again): Anne Finch’s The Tree:

The Tree:

The picture is by Joseph Farrington (1747-1821), The Oak Tree, the musical group, Epping Forest, and here’s the text for you to read along as you listen:

Fair tree! for thy delightful shade
‘Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return is due from me
To thy cool shadows, and to thee.
When thou to birds dost shelter give,
Thou music dost from them receive;
If travellers beneath thee stay
Till storms have worn themselves away,
That time in praising thee they spend
And thy protecting pow’r commend.
The shepherd here, from scorching freed,
Tunes to thy dancing leaves his reed;
Whilst his lov’d nymph, in thanks, bestows
Her flow’ry chaplets on thy boughs.
Shall I then only silent be,
And no return be made by me?
No; let this wish upon thee wait,
And still to flourish be thy fate.
To future ages may’st thou stand
Untouch’d by the rash workman’s hand,
Till that large stock of sap is spent,
Which gives thy summer’s ornament;
Till the fierce winds, that vainly strive
To shock thy greatness whilst alive,
Shall on thy lifeless hour attend,
Prevent the axe, and grace thy end;
Their scatter’d strength together call
And to the clouds proclaim thy fall;
Who then their ev’ning dews may spare
When thou no longer art their care,
But shalt, like ancient heroes, burn,
And some bright hearth be made thy urn.

Good news. My proposal for a panel for the next fall conference (November 2013) in Philadelphia has been accepted. It’s one I enjoyed doing which will take me back to the poetry I used to read a great deal, still love, the poetry of retirement, especially those written in the meditative style. I spent hours yesterday rereading poetry by Anne Finch and a paper I wrote about her and Mary Wortley Montagu as sister poets.

Here’s the description of the conference’s theme: “Retirement, Reappraisal, and Renewal in the Eighteenth Century”, from which I cull:

Retirement … had then and continues now to have resonances in [disparate] fields [and] almost invariably leads to many open-ended questions. Retirement from what or to what, or more simply, what next? Is retirement even possible? Is retirement an end in itself, a momentary pause, a strategic withdrawal, an evasion, or a new beginning? Is retirement a necessary fiction, and if so, necessary for whom? Is retirement enough to hope for, or is there something more to be wished?

Here’s what I came up with:

CFP: The Retirement Poem

It’s telling that one of the most frequently-written kinds of poems in the century and one half where the social role of the poet was seen as central to the writer’s ethical function is the retirement poem. Its aesthetic conventions vary as it mixes with Horatian imitations, Georgics, and pastoral, and friendship and nature poetry, or the act of retirement (or contemplating it) turns into groundwork for political statements (from exile), and court satire. It may arise from life experiences like depression, the death of someone, or destruction of a way of life that meant a lot to the poet and now seems irretrievable, or reactive defiance when ambition, a path to advancement has been thwarted, blocked. Paula Backscheider finds the poet’s gender leads to characteristic fault-lines in retirement poetry. The male poem explores a political terrain; they may be country house estate poems which while ostensibly exemplifying a useful virtuous life carve out space which projects power, what one should do with wealth. Female poems show the poet re-creating herself in a counter-universe, where the poet has time and follows “reason” (individual judgment), learning, memory; these poems are often visionary. There are many other fault-lines, genre is one, purpose another: the poet seeks to renounce or denounce social authorities, is reappraising a life, seeking renewal, or health. To try to promote a coherent discussion I call for papers which seek fault-lines in retirement poetry, shaping elements either in the poem, its context or era (including who is the poet), genre, themes, imagery, which seem to lead the poet into taking his or her text(s) in a specific direction.

An Image:

Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743): Afternoon: Backgammon

The organizers liked it very much.

What I’d like to do is also write an deliver a poetry on Anne Finch, return to her poetry and write about how she used the poetry of retirement to work out a modus vivendi for herself that she could live with: she had to give up ambition when she saw its price and milieu to find peace. Often people speak of her poetry as coming in two types: the satirical, fables, pindarics, which analyze her depressions and argue for the perspective she took on life as ethical; then there is the romantic and visionary, the half-mad and allegorical-poetic in retreat. I will show these are really one body of poetry, just different genres, which forms are made too much of, some of which (Wordsworth was right) got in her way, prevented her from expressing herself from a deep level which finds its own form. And will go against the fashion for preferring her more analytical and feminist complaints, and return to an earlier view, suggesting her finest poetry remains the romantic lyrics, the landscapes (inward and outer), picturesque and wild. The Tree is a good example of what I mean. Many of her poems are not well-known, not in the one supposed standard edition of her poetry, which leaves out a lot of them. So here’s another, dwelling on Eastwell Park, as her Arcadia, the abode of poetry. Invocation to the Southern Winds.

And I’ll be biographical, which I think one central way to read literature. It gets us to the core. As when I finally wrote frankly about rape in Clarissa, why the book was and is so important (to me too), so writing about this center of Anne Finch (much of which I do have scattered on the Net) will be deeply satisfying. Pure happenstance the society’s topic of retirement coincides with the year I’ve retired from teaching for money (though not reading, writing, studying, going to conferences or anything else).

Ellen

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Dahlia Ravikovitch and Alice Oswald: poetry of war and peace

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves — Simone Weil

Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), Place Vintimille, a vertical pair of murals, Paris

Dear friends and readers,

While away in Boston, I happily read different books than I usually do when I’m at home (that’s one of the ways I vacation, I break from my usual books to try others), and read poems by and about Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005), an Israeli poet writing in Hebrew who was a passionate protester (among other poets) of the Israeli gov’t's horrendous (barbaric) policies towards the Palestinian people; she is introduced by Ilana Szobel’s reading of her “poetics of trauma.” A second woman poet I had read before, Alice Oswald (b. 1966), but not this unusual translation from Homer’s Iliad, Memorial. “; Oswald reaches deep into the Iliad to find its core electrifying depiction of death-in-life and the natural world. I bring in Simone Weil’s The Poem of Force, which I need to re-read. A fourth witness is Christa Wolff whose Cassandra and Four Essays brings forth the same territory.

The poetry intrigues me: all of it is translated. I am reading Ravikovitch through Szobel’s translations after all. Oswald’s translation (and Weil’s) shows that one must sometimes be diametrically unfaithful to one’s text to bring out truths in it and about life. All three show how gender continually shapes what we write.

*******************

I was so stirred by Oswald’s stanzas: what she did was omit all features of Homer’s poem except the descriptions of each person’s death, which the poem abounds in, and are often accompanied by some succinct review of his life; and the similes and metaphors, which the poem equally abounds in. These taken together bring home to the reader the visceral and moving core of the poem.

Here is one series:

….

Like snow falling like snow
When the living winds shake the clouds into pieces
Like flutters of silence hurrying down
To put a stop to the earth at her leafwork

Like snow falling like snow
When the living winds shake the clouds into pieces
Like flutters of silence hurrying down
To put a stop to the earth at her leafwork

SCAMANDRIUS the hunter
Knew every deer in the woods
He used to hear the voice of Artemis
Calling out to him in the lunar
No man’s land of the mountains
She taught him to track her animals
But impartial death has killed the killer
Now Artemis with all her arrows can’t help him up
His accurate firing arm is useless
Menelaus stabbed him
One spear-thrust through the shoulders
And the point came out through the ribs
His father was Strophius

Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won’t let her walk

Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip

Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won’t let her walk

Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip

Beloved of Athene Pherecles son of Harmion
Brilliant with his hands and born of a long line of craftsmen
It was he who built the cursed fleet of Paris
Little knowing it was his own death boat
Died on his knees screaming
Meriones speared him in the buttock
And the point pierced him in the bladder …

In her afterword Eavon Boland (who has edited a volume of anti-war 20th century poetry by women) suggests Oswald geologizes Homer. For a nanosecond’s visibility, a young man is before us, and each individually horribly cut down as all around them the life of the natural world goes down. From having read other translations of Homer, I know the secret to Oswald’s continual interest is she free translates the death’s with far greater variety than Homer, who is inclined to repeat lines like, the spear went between his teeth, he feel and especially “and his armor clattered upon him.”

Alice Oswald

********************

The originality of approach, and deep call for peace, for life is matched by and reminded me of Simone Weil’s The Iliad or The Poem of Force, another unusual translation. The text consists of selected passages translated (freely) and embedded in mediations, explanations. At the back is commentary. All of it the poem.

*********************

Lastly I came across in one of the exhibits, Ilana Szobel’s literary critical book on Ravikovitch’s poetry. Since she is not as well-known as the other two women, let me say quickly: Ravikovitch’s father died when she was very young; she spent long periods away from her mother on a kibbutz; two marriages, and one child and serious emotional breakdowns form the autobiographical background of her poems. The early poetry reminds me of Adrienne Rich, and like hers, Ravikovitch moves from the more personally-centered and feminist poem, to large political issues.

For all three women — Ravikovitch and Weil and Oswald — the greatness lies in long lines and narrative so I can share just a little and that plucked out of a larger whole.

Benighted children,
at their age
they don’t even have a real worldview.
And their future is shrouded too:
refugee shacks, unwashed faces,
sewage flowing in the streets,
infected eyes,
a negative outlook on life.
And thus began the flight from city to village,
from village to burrows in the hills.
As when a man did flee from a lion,
as when he did flee from a bear,
as when he did flee from a cannon,
from an airplane, from our own troops.

(“On the Attitude toward Children in Times of War”)

He who destroys thirty babies,
it is as if he’d destroyed one thousand and thirty,
or one thousand and seventy,
thousand upon thousand.
And for that alone shall he find
no peace.

(cr, 208; BK, 197-98)

Terror-struck women scrambled up, frantic,
on a mound of earth:
“They’re butchering us down there,
in Shatila.”

Our own soldiers lit up the place with searchlights
till it was bright as day.
“Back to the camp, marschl” the soldier commanded
the shrieking women of Sabra and Shatila.
After all, he had his orders.

Those sweet soldiers of ours,
There was nothing in it for them.
Their one and only desire
was to come home in peace.

A book on Ravikovitch’s poetry

Ellen

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Out the window haiku

The very air shadowed grey
fresh with coolness … white light
a quiet leaf strays downward
dark evergreens thin against the sky
auburn grass
here’s what I delight in
early morning waking

***
p.m.: Then, remembering by contrast, Leeds late November afternoons (not the head picture for this blog — look, the woman has a little dog next to her):

John Atkinson Grimshaw

Ellen

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Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde: interiors and landscapes

Richard Glover, Cattle Watering

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve some happy news. I’ve agreed with the publisher of Valancourt books to produce an edition of Charlotte Smith’s second original novel, Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1789). There is no standard scholarly 20th century edition of this novel available for an affordable cost. The novel has been reprinted by Elibron in a 5 volume facsimile of the 2nd edition of 1790 (corrected by Smith) and as part of the horrendously expensive 20+ volume set produced by Chatto and Windus. You cannot buy the volumes separately. I have the Elibron reprint, have downloaded from ECCO a second copy of the same edition text printed in 3 volumes. I’m told I can google and put together an e-text that way. It would save me typing and I could correct against the other three copies I have, for I do have the volume in the Chatto and Windus set out from a university library.

It’s a startlingly good book, strong, despite its languors the result of over-the-top emotionalisms, especially when a character is deprived of some treasured project (that can be marriage too). Thus far all the friends I’ve told about it, they come back grateful for now knowing a new author to turn to. This is the fourth text by Smith I’ve read in the last few months. The others; translation and adaptation of Prevost’s Manan Lescaut, of Francois Gayot Pitaval’s and Francois Richer’s, published court cases, Celebres et Interessants (1735-44), and her late long Rousseau-supporting novel, The Young Philosopher)

What follows is a summary, evaluation account of the novel as I read it in the context of the politics of the era, its economics, Smith’s own life, and the aesthetics of the novel. In the comments are an explanation of one way of reading it as a picturesque novel. Landscape is central to the text morally as well as aesthetically.

I know my deep abiding interest in this book comes from its tone: one of corrosive reflections (a phrase which echoes throughout). I don’t deal directly with this aspect of the book here.

*******************
Volume 1 & 2:

Richard Westall, Harvest Storm

It opens with impressive beautiful descriptions of Cumberland — using a technique of glimpsing visibility and intertwining eyes seeing something and movement in a landscape that has been attributed to Radcliffe:

At length they came within view of Grasmere Water, and passing between two enormous fells — one of which descended, clothed with wood, almost perpendicularly to the lake; while the other hung over it, in bold masses of staring rock — they turned round a sharp point formed by the root of the latter; and entering a lawn, the abbey, embosomed among the hills, and half-concealed by old elms which seemed coeval with the building, appeared with its gothic windows, and long pointed roof of a pale grey stone, bearing every where the marks of great antiquity. The great projecting buttresses were covered with old fruit trees, which from their knotted trunks seemed to have been planted by the first inhabitants of the mansion. In some of the windows, the heavy stone work still remained, and they were totally darkened at the top by stained glass: in others, the sashes had been substituted; and the windows had been contracted by brick work, to make them appear square within; but, even in these, the stained glass had been replaced, which generally represented the arms of Newenden with those of Brandon.

Smith’s hero, Sir Edward Newenden is unhappily married to a narrow cold shallow society type (think of a cross between Fanny Dashwood and Lady Middleton), and slowly falls in love with her cousin, Etheline Chesterville. It’s a story of adulterous love. Etheline is innocent of such feelings, but she is their cynosure. Desmond tells a similar story but in the case of Desmond the married woman with children loves a man she is not married to (Desmond, the hero).

Smith is very good at depicting uncongeniality, misery, hurt — no one does mismarriage better than she, though she does not develop the outlines quite inwardly enough in the way of a 19th century novel. Then again respectable 19th century novels don’t tell this tale.

The recluse of the lake, Mrs Montgomery, the mother of the hero who appears suddenly and saves the heroine in much the manner of Willoughby in S&S, though she is saved as was Jane Fairfax from drowning; the moment resembles the first meeting with dozens of heroines saved o the brink of disaster (see Caroline with hers in Caroline de Lichtfield). This is utter archetype.

Mrs Caroline Montgomery has had a chequered history. Her mother had been married to a wealthy nobleman killed fighting on behalf of Charles Edward in 1745; she was cast off and ignored by her husband’s family and could not get them to pay her jointure nor did she have means to force them. This is reality in the period. In London she meets a man who had been forcibly married to someone else; they fall in love and she goes to live with him — as a financial support and protector and has two further children by him.

He dies, and now her daughter and sons have no resources or connections without begging and harassing his family; a male friend of her now dead companion takes them in, a Mr Montgomery. The woman’s husband’s brother attempts to seduce the daughter, Caroline (the woman who tells the story) as the daughter of someone who fell from rectitude can demand no respect. Montgomery succours them and helps them, and Caroline falls in love with him’; he is the father of her son — and they marry. Montgomery is Catholic so he cannot hold an office and has little money. When we meet this second generation of gentlewomen, her beloved husband is dead and she too has been refused succour and endured insults by someone who offered to keep her in a relationship which would subordinate and humiliate her (“Pretty affectation in a girl who has been brought up on the wages of prostitution”).

I admire Smith’s analysis of family as well as social life. She delves more deeply than Austen in the way she takes account of sexual motivations and the clarity of the class and money clashes underlying her characters behavior. I really do feel her working with a sense of ideal hope that this book will be good and meaningful and speak to people — after her two successes. Not yet at this point is she beginning to pretend she doesn’t care about her novels and writing them but for money. In this sense of giving it her all I’m reminded of Mansfield Park. Desmond would correspond to Emma as attempts to do something new or other from the previous three.

The novel moves slowly and gravely — she worked hard on it. There is an equal weight given to interior life that I miss in her later novels and the transitions are carefully done. She is especially good at developing the sort of thing Austen only implies: how bad someone feels when someone else hits at them in teasing or quizzing: so Ethelinde (like Elinor) has to endure teasing, and it’s not good-natured over her love for the impoverished but handsome Montgomery: “uttered in a sort of malicious raillery, as they frequently uttered it, gave her the most unpleasant sensations of impatience and sometimes resentment. She is very daring to enter into Edward’s mind and his love for Ethelinde as a married man.

Montolieu’s remark that Austen’s curious pattern of having a heroine in love forbiddenly, tabooed against utterance for a variety of reasons stops love scenes comes to mind. Smith falls down when it comes to these; the way the characters talk is unreal, something that happens only occasionally and at the close of Austen’s novels when the lovers come together as when Darcy says “by you have I been properly humbled.” Montolieu was aware how hard a love scene is to do — Trollope is unusually good at it.

Smith has set up a pattern of intense marital disappointment and temptations to adultery as well as much else destructive in society; we find ourselves in a world of gambling, drinking, parties which is not at all extravagant (or a vortex of dissipation) but reads as a probable imitation of how the gentry and upper class spent their lives. The very quietness with which Smith traces agons and losses makes them more intense. Once you have read her other novels you realize there is not more variety of patterns (like Austen the patterns obsessively repeat themselves and can be linked to Smith’s life), but the patterns are more active and they bring to the fore genuinely risky behaviors that are part of everyday life and how these continually impinge on women in particular — as well as vulnerable males.

The volume closes with Edward’s misery. He has done the right thing: he has insisted that Danesforth leave the house and said if Lady Neweden follows him, she will not be allowed into his house again. He asks her if she thinks about what will happen to her children by him. She appears not to care a jot about them. This is a misogynistic portrait in part: she is made too bad, too one-sided, but her quarrels with her father who is horrified at her indifference to scandal and then her children are powerful.

Montgomery as we know has not yet gone to India; he comes back to the house and leaves with Mr Chesterville and Ethelinde whom rumours about (with Edward) have made it impossible for her to say. Her father continues playing for high stakes (he cannot resist for every once in a while he makes badly needed money even if on the whole he’s losing) and we hear her brother has is a financial burden.

This is a strong book, highly original really, exposing the realities of this world before any reforms that mattered (social programs, redistribution of income) or changes in patriarchal, militaristic hierarchical norms had taken place, even a little. It’s power is in the analysis of the psychology though in these last scenes which are not idealized emotions, Smith rises to the challenge and writes believable enough dialogue.

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Volume 3

Canaletto, Lord and Lady (detail)

I’m beginning to wonder why the novel is called “the recluse of the lake.” As far as I can tell the only character who fits that description is the hero’s mother, and although she told a moving story of her life in Volume 1, she has not been seen since; all we’ve had is the occasional letter to her son now in London.

The heroine’s brother is now in debtor’s prison and there have been some remarkable persuasive pictures of his confinement — and his hysteria. The depiction is overtly presented as an argument against imprisonment for debt.
It looks forward to 19th century fiction in this.

There is a troubling anti-feminism in the book despite it’s being a heroine’s text by a woman. Most of the men in the book are good to very good; most of the women except for the heroine and the hero’s mother are variously awful. The heroine’s cousin has committed adultery and the cousin’s husband left her cousin; he is in love with the heroine and very deeply. This adultery theme recurs in Desmond and is deeply felt. The husband is dissatisfied; the wife is
frivolous, mean, cares little about their children. It’s done with intense emotion and is persuasive, but this cousin and other females we meet are used to mock women as such. When a male in the book is a gambler or rake or mean, somehow the criticism seems directed at him individually; when an erring female is presented, we get shaping comments which direct the invective at females as such.

Smith’s Bath is a different place in this book: one which includes high gambling, drinking, sex too. Austen’s heroines never have any such overtly vivid active experiences as Ethelinde or the cousin’s husband, Sir Edward, who is the second most dominating character in the book. The ostensible “lead male,” Montgomery who loves Ethelinde and whose mother lives deep in Scotland (and is thus far the only recluse of the lake in sight) are really far more marginalized in the action and scenes and emotion. Ethelinde’s family is made of gamblers and they bring her to debtor’s prison. Sir Edward’s family which includes the adulterous wife accounts for the other half of the vivid sharply satiric scenes of social life. I find this interesting too. There is a pull in an unusual direction for Smith.

The real hero is Edward Newenden who is in love with his wife’s cousin. He endures as humiliation his wife’s taking a lover (a cavalier servente in public) so Smith explodes the idea that’s enjoyable. It’s he who can be reasoned against not duelling (again important in the era). It’s his strength and heart and ethics that are at the core compass of the book — and yet how he longs to leave the wife that withers his soul, ignores his children and go take up life with Ethy.

An extraordinary energy emerges when Smith flowers in smaller stories, plots within plots, lyrically and simply told. Chesterville, the brother has a wife, and Victorine’s story again includes a mother who had sex outside marriage. I see this as a pattern in Smith. She does not have the courage to have her heroine have sex outside marriage, or a present living women, but one just dead, a mother, and she’s free. (This is also the pattern of Montalbert.) The full story of Victorine’s mother taking place on Jamaica is moving.

We also get a multiple adulterous pattern too – with unhappiness in marriage and the inability to separate underlying what is protested against here. Now in French novels this inference is made explicit — Madame de Stael comes to mind (Delphine especially which Napoleon singled out for particular hate): during the 1790s a more liberal divorce law was put in place by the Parlement than has been in France until the last 20 years and a huge percentage of women (it was mostly women) filed.

Ethelinde is absurdly virtuous to us when she refuses to marry Montgomery because he has no money even after her father recognizes marriage to Montgomery is her only safety. but we might remember how many of us will give up our lives to 5 day a week jobs we might detest or not respect at all at any time in order to make money.

I did not go over the life of Victorine’s mother: yet another woman who defies the sexual prohibition before marriage. Mrs Royston, but rather like Lady Newenden, she is presented as amoral, aggressive, and just awful in her adulterous behavior. She seeks Montgomery as a lover and when he refuses her, she is angry.

Most novels that are artful will have a core of repeating patterns or some set of interrelated themes: this one is about the sexual angle of dysfunctional social and familial life as experienced under the inhumane and unjust conditions of the time and our own time insofar as it mirrors then. Again and again we are shown sexual transgression in all its forms, sometimes moral and understandable, sometimes amoral and cruel.

Money is so central too: when Mr Chesterville dies, his brother at long last shows remorse, but when he attempts or thinks to go to the corpse to give it decent burial and perhaps take his niece and nephew in — he had refused this in life when Montgomery approached him — very like Chapter 2 of S&S his wife argues him out of it (pp. 236-43). I think the scene is actually stronger than Austen’s because the terms of what she is saying are made more explicit, the underlying vicious impulses and overt social norms brought out. But Austen’s lives because her dialogue is more dynamic and ironical, less obvious and it opens a book of concise art, while this is lost in the back of Volume 3 after a series of impossibly neurotic (over-the-top) sentimental scenes few but 18th century specialists will endure.

Smith carries on this delving into the inner lives of people driven by these sexual mores that destroy their very fibre: we get a sense of why characters are so often presented as sickening in novels. Here we see the process. The ending includes: Sir Edward finding that the Chesterville brother-lord type is willing to misrepresent all that has happened — the adulterous wife, the woman who abandoned her children (and the tenderness there is Smith remembering how she couldn’t live her children) and accuses the impossibly virtuous Ethelinde — this is so appalling to him hat he can hardly contain himself from murderous anger. Edward wants to murder the man who is now exploiting the sexuality of his vicious wife.

Before I get too over-the-top irritated at Ethelinde for refusing to marry Montgomery out of stupendously virtuous concern for what will happen to his finances — I have to remember how I allow the norms of other people to drive me wild and make me feel bad about myself. These are not about sex for me but money and position, but the insecurity and self-obsessive thoughts are the same. Luckily I live with someone who tells me to ignore them and myself know I should. Ethy does not.

I also like how Smith exposes the whole patronage system. We are expected to remember the young Chesterville cannot save himself and Victorine by going to India because he hasn’t begun to have it in him to exert the self-control necessary to rob all the people he comes across through the means the company provides.

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Volume 4: the powerlessness of women.

Caspar Friedrich, Woman at a Window (1822)

Ethelinde’s father dies and since he gambled leaves her nothing a reflection of Smith’s father). Her brother, another inveterate gambler ends up in debtor’s prison and is freed because the hero, Sir Edward, pays his debt; Sir Edward also helps the brother find a post in India. The story is presented as Sir Edward’s love for Ethelinde when his vicious wife commits adultery, but the way the action of the plot works out is the reader is worried about Ethelinde succumbing to Sir Edward’s love because she has nowhere else to turn to because of her gambling father and brother.

Smith’s secondary hero, Montgomery, the young man who is justifiably in love with Ethelinde and to whom she is in effect engaged, must travel to India to make his fortune. The hardship of this kind of thing comes out. This is colonialism
from the point of view of those who do the work. Austen’s brothers had to go to sea; reading about Rosalie de Constant, a French woman artist of the very early 19th century, you will find a story of her brother who went to India several times and suffered much from loneliness and boredom and the social conditions in India. He came back more than once; he never made anything more than enough to support himself. In Ethelinde our young man doesn’t want to go any more than Rosalie de Constant’s brother did.

So Montgomery, is being driven by everyone he knows to leave England, sail for India and attempt to make his fortune there. Every instinct in him finds this course of action repellent, from his knowledge of what making money from India means. to his fear for what will happen to Ethelinde when he leaves her without any source of income or shelter but what Sir Edward can offer.

At the climax of Volume 4, Montgomery turns to Ethelinde and makes an impassioned argument on behalf of dropping out of their caste, of taking a job which requires manual labour which will leave him dependent on a wage (but free of a patron), which will require them to return to Scotland to live very modestly. She is just about yielding, when she is pulled away by his mother who through her experience, her own tiny income (which is inadequate for her own needs and would be pulled upon by these two young people) and her knowledge of what can happen (visions of too many children hover over the text), counsels Ethelinde to urge her Montgomery to go to India. But before she is pulled away, Montgomery erupts into French and quotes a long passage from a text by Rousseau (which I don’t recognize) but which argues for breaking from their caste:

Soyons heureux et pauvres; ah! quel tresor nous aurons acquis! J’ai des bras, je suis robuste; le pain gagné par mon travail te paroitra plus delicieux que les mets des festins. Un repas appreté par l’amour, peut — il jamais, être insipide?

This scene between the hero and heroine is followed by one between Montgomery and Sir Edward in which Montgomery tries to enlist Sir Edward to argue Ethelinde into at least marrying him before he goes to India. This climax is to me slightly astonishing because as the emotion between the two men becomes overwrough, Sir Edward confesses to Montgomery his intense love for Ethelinde. This is the equivalent of the Princess de Cleves’s confession of her longing for Nemours to her husband. The Princess’s confession has often been called improbable, but my experience tells me this is not true. It is probable for a certain kind of sensitive sincere person who wants to live a life of candour.

I have come across more modern variants of the Princess’s confession to her husband, e.g., Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?where Lady Glencora Palliser confesses her love for Burgo to her husband. Trollope solves the crisis by having Plantagenet, her husband behave as ideally as Lady Glen: he forgives and blames himself; as narrator, Trollope also suggests to the reader who may doubt this scene an out: the husband is not taking his wife seriously; she does not really want to commit adultery; this enables readers who would get upset at their favorite heroine wanting to commit adultery to dismiss the scene as trivial or non-serious.

I have never before come across it between two men. Mrs Smith, as narrator, is well aware the reader will expect an explosion from Montgomery much worse than the Prince de Cleves inflicted on the Princess. Montgomery almost does this, but he controls himself when he is told by Sir Edward that he will leave Ethelinde with his sister, return to his wife and travel with his wife to Europe. He feels deeply sorry for this man and appreciates his candour. The scene of course enables Smith to pour out what a person who longed to marry another and couldn’t might feel when stuck with someone who is betraying and treating them awfully — and is simply uncongenial.

In Ethelinde, after the scene where Edward Newenden confesses his love for Ethelinde, Montgomery does not know what to do. Certainly it’s an ambiguous gesture; again in La Princesse de Cleves the heroine confesses her adulterous longings to her husband and by so doing destroys his peace; he cannot forgive and understand. She is innocent and means well and perhaps Edward does this to control himself; it also keeps Montgomery’s suspicions at bay.

Mrs Montgomery is at risk of losing all her money and thus Montgomery must go to India. Smith means to expose the intense hardship and loss the global colonial system inflicts on ordinary people — it only comes out indirectly in Austen say. I keep likening Ethelinde to MP and then Persuasion, only Austen is apparently comfortable with such demands on men. She protests against the forced marriage (sale) of women in India (Catherine or the Bower), but that’s all.

Edward is an ambiguous figure. As I say, we can’t really feel for his wife since she is presented so negatively but were that not the case and she allowed to speak for herself (we never see into her mind), we might see her as having been sold by her parents for this man with a title. Smith’s Sir Edward anticipates the males which begin to inhabit the books as of Desmond: the selfless older man who does everything for the heroine, loves her and asks nothing. One I remember well in Montalbert was very moving. But they are kept at a distance; this first time she is allowing us to see inside the figure to understand why she is so sympathetic to him.

When we get to Volume 5 we realize that Montgomery was not wrong, for what has happened is Ethelinde has gone to live with Sir Edward’s sister who is indifferent to her. In her house are living her ruthless amoral husband and a man who attempts to seduce and then brutally to force Ethelinde to
have sex with him and become his mistress. The scenes here read as what could easily happen

Then we have the astonishing shake-down savage talk between Sir Edward Neweden and Lady Newenden’s parents, the Maltravers’: the frank needling accusatory conversation over who brought what money to the marriage and who owes who what, the open lying of the mother and father are utterly modern. The thought that comes to mind is we don’t experience this so directly in marriage since we have — through our norm of marrying for love — to some extent freed the marital relationship of such viciousness.

I found myself also moved by the over-sentimentalization in a way of Montgomery and Ethelinde and Mrs Montgomery’s goodbye where they think they may never met again. In a way it’s better than Austen’s almost automatic mockery of emotional goodbyes. Why should people not mourn and deeply at such forced emigrations, trips, ejections. It’s Austen who should justify her refusal to acknowledge these destructive wrenches.

Less interesting is the attack on Ethelinde by Davenent and his salacious friend at Ellen Newenden’s. Ellen is Edward’s sister. Ellen’s portrait, as horsewoman of a lesbian tendency is one that carries on through the 19th century into our own time. In the last quarter of the Poldark novels, the villain-protagonist, George Warleggan marries such a woman, Harriet, and we see how Harriet’s cold carelessness can destroy a semi-vicious man, Stephen Carrington because he is someone who buys into the class and hierarchical values.

Until reading this novel I had the impression it was filled with beautiful landscape and high sensibility. It’s famous for its descriptions of Scotland. In fact while these are good, they are very few and far between. Most of the book takes place in London or in houses in countryside comparable to the ones Austen uses.

It is every bit as realistic as Burney’s Cecilia. For example, as part of the threads in Volume 4 and 5 Montgomery’s mother goes to Lyons when she hears that her income in an investment is threatened by a bankruptcy. A letter comes in which she reports this is what happened. A hard cash mentality is what lies behind most novel-stories and at one point Mrs Montgomery puts to Montgomery what is the problem: can he and Ethelinde live on £70 a year with her and what income he could get given that he has no education to do anything under his caste? It is this sort of hard detail that characterizes numbers of the scenes in Ethelinde and helps make it the strong serious book it is.

***********
Volume 5:

Bifrons Park, Kent (1695-1700), artist unknown

It ends in a mood or atmosphere that is reminiscent of Austen: a few close good people make a small circle of friends, the center of which is a wedded couple. The central male of the book, Sir Edward, goes to Europe with his wife, but she finally leaves him for the rake-villain of the novel.

Ethelinde endures a realistic near rape. She flees Ellen Newenden’s house with the help of servants and we see her take lodgings where she pays small amounts of money. We get the sense of what a gentlewoman walking alone in the 18th century might fear. She is driven to take residence in an unpleasant aunt’s (Lady Ludford, see below) where she is despised (this is in the vein of Austen’s books). The whole adventure of escape, including the servants’ fear of the master who wants to help his friend get at Ethelinde is persuasive.

I find this a painful book to read. I end up dreading what’s to come, at the same time as it’s moving, I find grasting the endless passages of mixed distress, and that the characters do what’s expected of them by the society (however vicious it may be). This makes for this pain. So Edward goes abroad ostensibly with his wife (she never appears again on the stage of the novel) but it’s all misery the ugly scenes with her parents he endures. Mrs Montgomery loses all her money so Montgomery must go abroad.

Then what I expected to happen happens. The near rape. Why does no one in the book think of it? who is to protect Ethelinde? she seems incapable of a job. The book turns to a Clarissa mode where Ellen Newdenden having made the mistake of marrying Woolaston allows Davenant to prey on Ethelinde. Ethelinde of course is as cagey as Clary and she has no problem in rejecting a man she has never felt any attraction to.

This is a bit of improbability surely: given how realistic Smith has tried to be it doesn’t make sense that no one foresees this determined pursuit. I realize Smith wanted it to occur to keep interest up and involve flight with landscape.

***************************

Henry Fuseli, Romeo and Juliet

I found some of this novel so painful in the last parts of Volume 4 to read, I really hesitated in going on with Volume 5. Once Ethelinde was safe outside the compound which contained Davenant, I was relieved and somehow don’t find the scorn that she receives from Lady Ludford and aroused jealousy from the daughter, another cousin, Clarinthia Ludford, hard to take. I am driven to wonder why. I know there is an analogy with the Clarissa story in that the men at Brackwood (Ellen Newenden, now Mrs Woolaston’s house — or should I say her husband’s) were planning to abduct and one had tried to rape Ethelinde — at least that’s what is implied. But I don’t think that’s it so much (though I was apprehensive lest she should change her mind and not flee). I can read other very painful kinds of stories (recently Doris Lessing’s Grassing is Singing) I don’t feel this.

It’s the peculiar form of feeling in Ethelinde that the humiliation wrests that is probably so hard to take. Her pride so seared by these sexual-social attacks. Her erstwhile protector, Ellen Newendon now become Mrs Woolaston, comes in and asks how dare she be so choosy? What does it matter who she fucks with? or marries for that matter? individually? Partly also that she is so obedient; I can’t stand how she buys into some of the norms used to control and destroy her.

The book has a transcendent beauty in the fifth volume too — that kept me going. When Ethelinde goes walking along the beaches by herself, into the wilds, Smith writes prose akin to her poetry (see the 2nd edition, 1790, Vol 5, Ch 3, one sequence on pp. 75-76).

Unfortunately when she meets up with an interesting ethical looking man who likes solitude like herself, he turns out to be not another Edward Neweden type (the kind of male heroines meet in the other novels seen from outside) but we are back to the more sentimental improbable tripe: the older man is a long-forgotten uncle, Mr Harcourt seeking out his long lost daughter, Victorine, now in the East Indies with Ethelinde’s brother.

Smith does not seem aware that in the West Indies money is made based on slavery as she is that in India it’s made by wresting it corruptly from the natives (not paying taxes for example). Victorine and Ethelinde’s brother have gone to the West Indies to recoup their fortunes.

********************************

An illustration of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, 18th century: a prison

The deus ex machina of the novel is money — which has lain at the center of the action all along. Not only does Sir Edward return with his, but so does this long-lost uncle, Mr Harcourt, who turns out to be brother to the widowed mother, Mrs Montgomery of the young secondary hero, Montgomery. Mr Harcourt has grown very rich in the West Indies. This is not a novel where the source of this wealth — slavery — has reached the novelist’s consciousness. So two males with money solve most of the problems of the family.

Some individual bravery and moral decisions come into play. Montgomery himself returns on his own from India after he discovers that the kind of work and behavior he will have to enact in order to become rich is beyond his reach. It’s not put morally but rather in terms of his character. His return occasions some of the suspense of the action. His ship becomes lost and he is thought dead for a while. Ethelinde almost marries Sir Edward. There are several paragraphs which make it clear that the moral of this is the young man and young woman should have married without money. They had something worth taking a risk for and what they thought was out there was not except at terrible moral cost. Further, their concern was over “false” ideas of status. This then takes the theme of Persuasion up (one finds it also in Crabbe, the young couple advised to be prudent who destroy their happiness in life for nothing) very strongly and does not qualify it in the manner of Austen’s novel. The only character to come near this in Austen is Edward Bertram when in Mansfield Park he tells Mary that it will cost him a price he doesn’t want to pay to become rich. And the conversation is buried and all we are really asked to pay attention to is Mary’s deflating and mockery of him to see how her moral character is wanting.

The introduction of Mr Harcourt with his huge wealth produces a series of turns and twists in the plot-design which allow Smith to show us how each of her characters reacts to the presence of great money. Her real strength is in just this sort of exposure of the greed and manipulation and hypocrisies of social life.

The Ludfords: Mr becomes obsequious, Mrs intensely envious and raw with resentment, Clarinthia only glad that the money will remove Ethelinde from Southampton where she attracts suitors. Clarinthia rejected a nice man, Southcote, because he was decent, yet when she sees him turning to Ethelinde, she is livid.

They return to London and meet Mrs Montgomery who is presented as unable to lift herself above anxiety; whatever happens in the letters from her son, it’s a new reason to dread the future. Had Smith represented this attitude of mind as what’s engendered by her history and circumstance it would have been effective, but it’s just represented as innate (as kind of typical universal characteristic). Montgomery writes he is well but not making money as he can’t do what’s asked; she worries he is unhappy; he writes to Ethelinde he is and she worries he will sicken, and then he will drown on the way back.

Ethelinde’s brother, Chesterville, resumes his selfish profligate ways and his wife is a vain creature. Another dialogue emerges about sharing the money with their uncle’s half-sister’s son — so Ehtelinde’s brother and his wife become just like John and Fanny Dashwood, only much bitterer and more is explained. Ethelinde’s brother does not want to share any of the uncle’s wealth with anyone and he talks in language strongly reminiscent of Chapter 2 of Austen’s S&S. What could his sister and her widowed friend possibly need more than a tiny income? This suggests Austen need not have heard what her brother wrote in a letter after their father died. This dismissive callous way of talking was commonplace. The brother does gamble and his wife is frivolous: the gambling is a behavior we don’t find in Austen, but an attempt on the part of other relatives to ensnare Mr Harcourt into marriage recalls the marriage manipulations of Austen’s novels. (The analogue in life is again Smith’s father.)

While some of Volume 4 takes place in a countryside and among houses very like what we find in Austen’s P&P, a good deal now takes place in Scotland. This includes a sequence out in the landscape which has some brooding lovely poetry, and two near visions one of which takes place in a church burial ground. These visions are not ghosts but are projections of Ethelinde’s loneliness and distress. She almost sees her dead father and has a sense of Montgomery’s presence. These two sequences are very well done.

*********************************

Wm Turner, Abingdon

The qualified happy ending at last. Montgomery miraculously survives and returns to marry Ethelinde; they get enough money from Mr Harcourt, Mrs Montgomery’s fantastically rich half-brother, and Sir Edward Newenden whose wife has died. We are not told of the hinted terrible circumstances: miscarriage, abortion (?) childbirth, Danescourt beating the hell out of her, or tossing her into the streets to survive as a prostitute. Even Ethelinde’s brother begins to behave when he sees that Mr Harcourt might marry a cold-hearted gold-digger, conveniently part of the Ludford group. Woolaston has spent all Ellen Newenden’s money and fled so again Sir Edward comes forward to do the right thing for his sister.

It’s in some of the realistic working out of the stories that the novel manages to hold this reader. I had remembered Ethelinde’s visit to her father’s tomb. That is a gothic-picturesque scene – and is found in other women’s novels of the era, to my memory close is a scene in Sophie Cottin’s Amelia Mansfield. Again Austen skirts this (her NA).

I was most moved by Sir Edward who when he thinks that Montgomery is dead offers his hand in marriage to Ethelinde. Of course she refuses: her reason is not unsound: Montgomery has become ‘interwoven” in her existence,” Vol 5, Ch 13, p 294. She is so aware of his moral nature and goodness and pressure is about to consent to stay by him as friend and semi-sister. They also have the one believable love dialogue: for a moment she almost yields and says “Sir Edward, my dear Sir Edward — ” and he “Dear! …” (p. 296) One of the few believable erotic love gestures is that of Ethelinde and Edward as they say goodbye after Montgomery has returned. She does respond at last: “almost involuntarily she lifted his hand to her lips …” (and then a paragraph follows of their quiet gestures and his departure) (Vol 5, ch 13, p 305).

So much better than all the verbiage the novel subjects us to. Real feeling for a moment. He is the presence in the novel that most moves me — a variant on Smith herself who seems ever to have dreamed of finding some mate in marriage when it was closed off forever by her terrible marriage. It’s been suggested that Smith did have a chance to have a partner after she left her husband, but refused this because it would hurt her children’s future.

I was involved enough to hope that Montgomery was dead and Ethelinde and Edward would marry. But I knew it was hopeless. Smith would not permit it — as she knew that this would be unacceptable. I don’t know that people would see it was her, but she just couldn’t let herself go.

And so it ends with the same sort of language of quiet resignation and happiness with a qualifying note that one finds at the close of several of Smith’s and Austen’s mature books.

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve chosen Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) for this week’s foremother poet because when I’ve come across any of her poems, I find them so just, humane, so lucid and appealing in tone, and this past couple of weeks, the world as depicted in the public media has been so demoralizing and (as it were) intent on harm; her perspective is wide-ranging and (while she does not give the personal details of her life in such a way as to differentiate herself from others) intimate, and explicitly politically aware. Personal generosity and strength align themselves as traits with knowing how hard life is. I haven’t presented her before because I don’t know that much personally about her (see “A life” in the comments) and find it difficult to present her poems in a blog because she uses spaces within lines between words and indents irregularly to make stanzas.

But it just seemed so wrong to set up a page for the women’s canon, and not have Rukeyser among the 20th century voices.

I begin with a direct seemingly personal statement I find visceral and then a stanzaic address capturing a general vision of stratified cities made out of indifference:

Effort at Speech Between Two People

Speak to me.     Take my hand.     What are you now?
I will tell you all.     I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a
rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair:
a pink rabbit:     &it was my birthday, and a candle
burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be
happy.

Oh, grow to know me.     I am not happy.     I will
be open:
Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like
music,
like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm
about me.
There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

Speak to me.     Take my hand.     What are you now?
When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,
fluid: and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.
I want now to be close to you.     I would
link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your
days.

I am not happy.     I will be open.
I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet
poems.
There has been fear in my life.     Sometimes I
speculate
On what a tragedy his life was, really.

Take my hand.     Fist my mind in your hand.     What
are you now?
When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
and I stood a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward
death:
if the light had not melted clouds and plains to
beauty,
if light had not transformed that day, I would have
leapt,
I am unhappy.     I am lonely.     Speak to me.
I will be open.     I think he never loved me:
he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
he said with a gay mouth:     I love you.      Grow to
know me.

What are you now?     If we could touch you another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . .yesterday
I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand.     Speak
to me

Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Frozen Assets (1930)

Ballad of Orange and Grape

After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you’re read your reading
after you’ve written your say –
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and across the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century.

Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack–
sticking out of the crummy garage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who’d like to break your back.
But here’s a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose andpink, too.

Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog-man leans –
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking.

I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked ORANGE
orange in the one marked GRAPE,
the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
and orange drink in the GRAPE.
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, on each machine.

I ask him: How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? –
How can they write and believe what they’re writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE –?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write and we hear and we say and we do?)

He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be white and black women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not be, what we do and what we don’t do.

On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE,
pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.

Kathe Kollwitz 91867-1945), Woman with her Dead Child

A poem to a fellow greatw woman artist:

From “Kathe Kollwitz”

II.

Women, as gates, saying:
“The process is after all, like music:
like the development of a piece of music.
The fugues come back and
          again and again
interweave.
A theme may seem to have been put aside,
but it keeps returning—
the same thing modulated,
somewhat changed in form.
Usually richer.
And it is very good that this is so.”

A woman pouring her opposites.
“After all there are happy things in life too.
Why do you show only the dark side?”
“I could not answer this. But I know–
in the beginning my impulse to know
the working life
          had little to do with
pity or sympathy.
I simply felt that the life of the workers was beautiful.”

She said, “I am groping in the dark.”

She said, “When the door opens, of sensuality,
then you will understand it too. The struggle begins.
Never again to be free of it,
often you will feel it to be your enemy.
Sometimes
I you will almost suffocate,
such joy it brings.”

Saying of her husband:
“My wish I is to die after Karl.
I know no person who can love as he can,
with his whole soul.
Often this love has oppressed me;
I wanted to be free.
But often too it has made me I so terribly happy.”

She said : “We rowed over to Carrara at dawn,
climbed up to the marble quarries
and rowed back at night. The drops of water
fc!l like glittering stars
from our oars.”

She said: “As a matter of fact,
I believe
          that bisexuality
is almost a necessary factor
in artistic production; at any rate,
the tinge of masculinity within me
helped me
          in my work.”

She said : “The only technique I can still manage.
It’s hardly a technique at all, lithography.
In it
          only the essentials count.”

A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night
          saying to me:
“Kollwitz? She’s too black-and-white.”

Ill

Held among wars, watching
all of them
all these people
weavers,
Carmagnole

Looking at
all of them
death, the children
patients in waiting-rooms
famine
the street
the corpse with the baby
floating, on the dark river

A woman seeing
the violent, inexorable
movement of nakedness
and the confession of No
the confession of great weakness, war,
all streaming to one son killed, Peter;
even the son left living; repeated,
the father, the mother; the grandson
another Peter killed in another war; firestorm;
dark, light, as two hands,
this pole and that pole as the gates.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open ….

4 Song: The Calling-Up

Rumor, stir of ripeness
rising within this girl
sensual blossoming
of meaning, its light and form.

The birth-cry summoning
out of the male, the father
from the warm woman
a mother in response.

The word of death
calls up the fight with stone
wrestle with grief with time
from the material make
an art harder than bronze.

5 Self-Portrait

Month looking directly at you
eyes in their inwardness looking ,
directly at you
ha1f light half darkness
woman, strong, German, young artist
flows into
wide sensual mouth meditating
lookking right at you
eyes shadowed with brave hand
looking deep at you
flows into
wounded brave mouth
grieving and hooded eyes
alive, German, in her first War
flows into
strength of the worn face 2
a skein of lines
broods, flows into
mothers among the war graves
bent over death
facing the father
stubborn upon the field
flows into
the marks of her knowing­_
Nie Wieder Krieg
repeated in the eyes
flows into
“Seedcorn must not be ground”
and the grooved cheek
lips drawn fine
the down-drawn grief
face of our age
flows into
Pieta, mother and
between her knees
life as her son in death
pouring from the sky of
one more war
flows into
face almost obliterated
hand over the mouth forever
hand over one eye now
the other great eye
closed (1971)

Each of the sections of the above poem are descriptions of Kollwitz’s art. I like the repetition of “flows into,” one era, one woman’s grief flowing into the next, the man standing there stubborn.

Rightly famous:

Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The news would pour out of various devices
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

*********************
Muriel Rukeyser’s life is told in a number of places on the Net, from wikipedia, to poetry sites and webpages devoted to her. Her poems are not about her personally, and when she tells of some personal private experience (“Night Feeding”) she generalizes as to include as many people in her revealed world as she can. I notice though she doesn’t stress it, most often her central victim fires are women (Mrs Walpurga); my favorite poems are often the medium length wide line spoken ones

Poem out of Childhood

I
Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry-
Not Angles, angels-and the magnificent past
shot deep illuminations into high-school.
I opened the door into the concert-hall
and a rush of triumphant violins answered me
while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face
intruding upon Brahms. Suddenly, in an accident
the girl’s brother was killed, but her father had just died:
she stood against the wall, leaning her cheek,
dumbly her arms fell, “What will become of me?” and
I went into the corridor for a drink of water.
These bandages of image wrap my head,
when I put my hand up I hardly feel the wounds.
We sat on the steps of the unrented house
raining blood down on Loeb and Leopold
creating again how they removed his glasses
and philosophically slit his throat.
They who manipulated and misused our youth
smearing those centuries upon our hands,
trapping us in a welter of dead names,
snuffing and shaking heads at patent truth.
We were ready to go the long descent with Virgil
the bough’s gold shade advancing forever with us,
entering the populated cold of drawing-rooms;
Sappho, with her drowned hair trailing along Greek waters,
weed binding it, a fillet of kelp enclosing
the temples’ ardent fruit-
Not Sappho, Sacco.
Rebellion, pioneered among our lives,
viewing from far-off many-branching deltas,
innumerable seas.

II
In adolescence I knew travelers
speakers digressing from the ink-pocked rooms,
bearing the unequivocal sunny word.
Prinzip’s year bore us: see us turning at breast
quietly while the air throbs over Sarajevo
after the mechanic laugh of that bullet.
How could they know what sinister knowledge finds
its way among the brain’s wet palpitance
what words would nudge and giggle at the spine
what murders dance?
These horrors have approached the growing child;
now that the factory is sealed-up brick
the kids throw stones, smashing the windows
membranes of uselessness in desolation.
We grew older quickly, watching the father shave
and the splatter of lather harden on the glass,
playing in sand-boxes to escape paralysis,
being victimized by fataller sly things.
“Oh, and you,” he said, scraping his jaw, “What will you be?”
“Maybe-something-like- Joan–of-Arc •.. “
Allies Advance, we see,
Six Miles South to Soissons. And we beat the drums,
Watchsprings snap in the mind, uncoil, relax,
the leafy years all somber with foreign war.
How could we know what exposed guts resembled?
A wave, shocked to motion, babbles margins
from Asia to Far Rockaway, spiralling
among clocks in its four-dimensional circles.
Disturbed by war, we pedalled bicycles
breakneck down the decline, until the treads
conquered our speed, and pulled our feet behind them,
and pulled our heads.
We never knew the war, standing so small
looking at eye-level toward the puttees, searching
the picture-books for sceptres, pennants for truth;
see Galahad unaided by puberty.

Rat-tat a drum upon the armistice,
Kodak As You Go-photo: they danced late,
and we were a generation of grim children
leaning over the bedroom sills, watching
the music and the shoulders and how the war was over,
laughing until the blow on the mouth broke night
wide out from cover.
The child’s curls blow in a forgotten wind,
immortal ivy trembles on the wall:
the sun has crystallized these scenes, and tall
shadows remember time cannot rescind.

III
Organize the full results of that rich past,
open the windows-potent catalyst,
harsh theory of knowledge, running down the aisles,
crying out in the classrooms, March ravening on the plain,
inexorable sun and wind and natural thought.
Dialectically our youth unfolds:
the pale child walking to the river, passional
in ignorance, in loneliness, demanding
its habitations for the leaping dream, kissing
quick air, the vibrations of transient light,
not knowing substance or reserve, walking
in valvular air, each person in the street
conceived surrounded by his life and pain,
fixed against time, subtly by these impaled:
death and that shapeless war. Listening at dead doors,
our youth assumes a thousand differing fleshes
summoning fact from abandoned machines of trade,
knocking on the wall of the nailed-up power-plant,
telephoning hello, the deserted factory, ready
for the affirmative clap of truth
ricocheting from thought to thought among
the childhood, the gestures, the rigid travelers.

Emilio Longoni (1859–1932), Un gatto per amico (a cat for a friend) -1892

**********************
Rukeyser also identified as a Jewish poet and writer. Marilyn Hacker (also Jewish) Hacker wrote of the following two that they are “for Passover” and at the same time “for peoples’ liberation struggles today, as Rukeyser intended it.”

In this time of renewed terror and wrathful destruction of the vulnerable, powerless, poor in our world by the powerful, vicious, wealthy, Rukeyser calls out:

Lives
By Muriel Rukeyser
AKIBA

The Way Out

The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man,
with signs, and his journeys.     Where the rock is split
and speaks to the water;     the flame speaks to the cloud:
the red splatter, abstraction, on the door
speaks to the angel and the constellations.
The grains of sand on the sea floor speak at last to the noon.
And the loud hammering of the land behind
speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs,
we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea.

All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage.

Music of one child carried into the desert;
Firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid.
Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people
Led by the water drawn man to the smoke mountain.
The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs,
The burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening.
Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain.
Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child.
The meaning beginning to move, which is the song.

Music of those who have walked out of slavery.

Into that journey where all things speak to all things
Refusing to accept the curse, and taking
For signs the signs of all things, the world, the body
Which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world,
All creation being created in one image, creation.
This is not the past walking into the future,
the walk is painful, into the present, the dance
not visible as dance until much later.
These dancers are discoverers of God.

We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song.

Out of a life of building lack on lack:
The slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith:
An army who came to the ocean: the walkers
Who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou,
City and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo,
The ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes,
Swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris
And the glass black hearses: those on the Long March:
all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man.

Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world.

Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death
By his disciples carried from Jerusalem
in blackness journeying to find his journey
to whatever he was loving with his life.
The wilderness journey through which we move
Under the whirlwind truth into the new,
The only accurate. A cluster of lights at night:
faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching
while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in.

Barbarian music, a new song.

Acknowledging opened water, possibility:
Open like a woman to this meaning.
In a time of building statues of the stars,
Valuing certain partial ferocious skills
While past us the chill and immense wilderness
Spreads its one-color wings until we know
Rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea,
The world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find.
What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey.

Ways to discover. The song of the way in.

The Witness

Who is the witness? What voice moves across time,
Speaks for the life and death as witness voice?
Moving to night on this city, this river, my winter street?

He saw it, the one witness. Tonight the life as legend
Goes building a meeting for me in the veins of night
Adding its scenes and its songs. Here is the man transformed,

The tall shepherd, the law, the false messiah, all;
You who come after me far from tonight finding
These lives that ask you always Who is the witness –

Take from us acts of encounter we at night
Wake to attempt, as signs, seeds of beginning,
Given from darkness and remembering darkness,

Take from our light given to you our meetings.
Time tells us men and women, tells us You
The witness, your moment covered with signs, your self.

Tells us this moment, saying You are the meeting.
You are made of signs, your eyes and your song.
Your dance the dance, the walk into the present.

All this we are and accept, being made of signs, speaking
To you, in time not yet born.
          The witness is myself.
     And you,
The signs, the journeys of the night, survive.

*Note [by Rukeyser]: These two “Lives” [the other is about Kaethe Kollwitz] are part of a sequence. Akiba is the Jewish shepherd-scholar of the first and second century, identified with the Song of Songs and with the insurrection against Hadrian’s Rome, led in A. D. 132 by Bar Cochba (Son of the Star). After this lightning war, Jerusalem captured, the Romans driven out of the south, Rome increased its military machine; by 135, the last defenses fell, Bar Cochba was killed, Akiba was tortured to death at the command of his friend, the Roman Rufus, and a harrow was drawn over the ground where Jerusalem had stood, leaving only a corner of wall. The story in my mother’s family is that we are descended from Akiba –— unverifiable, but a great gift to a child.

Notes about the poem, by Rabbi Arthur Waskow:

I think this is one of the great poems of the 20th century — surely the greatest American Jewish poem. I encourage that it be read during Passover (it begins with a celebration of the Exodus) and perhaps during the all-night Torah study for Shavuot, and I hope it will increasingly be understood as a sacred text rooted in Jewish tradition but reaching far beyond it to the whole of Humanity — which indeed it celebrates.

This version corrects what is clearly a scribal error in every printed copy of the poem I have seen. The line “More than the calf wants to suck, the cow wants to give suck” shows up in printed versions as “More than the calf wants to suck, the cow wants to give such.” This “such” is a vague and meaningless word — terrible poetry — and the line as printed here echoes a teaching of Talmud that is a metaphor for teachers wanting to teach more than students want to learn. I have urged editors of Rukeyser’s work to correct the error, but so far to no avail.

References in the poem that may be obscure to many readers today: “Nauvoo” was a town in Illinois where the early Mormon community settled until (1844) suffering violence at the hands of mobs and resettling in Salt Lake City. The “Long March” was the trek of the early Chinese Communist Party all across China to build a political base in Yenan province. “The shivering children of Paris” is probably about the creation of a workers’ commune in Paris in 1870, which governed itself by direct socialist democracy until it was brutally destroyed by the invading Prussian army.

Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665), Winter (ca 1660)

Ellen

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From the Woman’s Canon

Paula Rego, Germaine Greer (1995)

Dear friends and readers,

At long last I have made a new section on my website. It will be a kind of online anthology of women poets, beginning in classical or the earliest recorded time we have and continuing to today. I call it “From The Woman’s Canon,” for it can represent only a small part of a canon that itself doesn’t properly exist. Paula Backscheider (whose Eighteenth Century Women Poets and their Poetry I reviewed) is just one of many women scholars who have demonstrated that a large and varied women’s canon would exist but that much of it has been destroyed and what was left censored, with its original perspectives changed, often reversed. I probably first became aware of this when a couple of years after finishing graduate school (1982) I discovered that there had been quite a number of Renaissance women poets, and a number of these had large oeuvres of poetry. No one had said anything about such a group when I was in graduate school, and for a time I majored in the Renaissance.

by 1984 I had begun to go once, twice, perhaps three times a week to the Library of Congress to do research on Anne Finch whose poetry I had fallen in love with while doing my dissertation on Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Grandison. During that time I had learned there were many women novelists who were good and had written fine novels; but their works were no longer available and what one could learn of their lives was the result of very recent compilations, surveys, books like Mothers of the Novel by Dale Spender. Now I began to discover more women poets, 17th through 18th century and many poetry that I loved and thought superb. They often took a woman’s view of the world. Among the critics I read then to whom I was grateful for her work was Germain Greer (whose picture you see heading this blog).

Well that was 30 years ago, and I’ve gone on to read many feminist (and not so feminist) histories of women’s literature, and seen an explosion in publication of women’s writing. I have myself now translated the complete poetry of two Renaissance women (Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara), done original researching on the still unpublished writing of a great 18th century poet, Anne Finch, and written for conventional publication as well as here online about many women writers.

I find especial solace and strength and write about women’s life-writing, novels, films, but poetry remains my special love. and sometime during 2005 I began to write short lives of women poets to which I attached what I thought were their best or most characteristic poems and evaluative commentary. I would also offer a list of essays or books by or essays on these poets, or anthologies which included them. I put these on my first blog, Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Too (see remnant of part of blog devoted to Jane Austen).

It was probably around 2005 I joined Wom-po, a listserv community devoted to talking about and sharing women’s poetry, and there I met the listowner, Annie Finch, poet and translator who had declared Wednesday to be a day for us all to share poems by women. She was committed to recovering a woman poets poetic tradition, to the reality that women “think back through our mothers” as writers, readers, artists.S She had declared Wednesday to be a day for us all to share poems by women. After I began to post, she declared Friday to be a day for posting poems about and lives of “foremother poets.” The custom continued for some months, but after that most of the people only contributed now and again. I was one of the people who contributed consistently and by the time of the First Annual Festival of Women’s Poetry (online), had with thirty lives and poetry ready to be put on the site.

Since then I’ve written more of these little lives, posting them to Wom-po and also the listservs I moderate (at Yahoo: Eighteenth Century Worlds, Women Writers through the Ages, Trollope19thCStudies), and when I opened my new blogs I began on Fridays to write them regularly (Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two, and Reveries Under the Sign of Austen). Now, in order to make these visible to others, to have one single handy place to reach them, and to fill in unnoticed gaps, I have decided to gather all I’ve done on my website onto this one place.

Foremother Poets: From the Women’s Canon

As you will see, I tell a version of the above little history, define “foremother” and have arranged the poets chronologically. To facilitate finding individuals I also provide

An Alphabetical Index

Stevie Smith (one of my favorite mid-20th century poets)

While my selection must reflect my own knowledge and tastes, I have a wider goal because I have gained so much in my life of meaning, strength, pleasure from women’s writing, and so have made a third section which I mean to add it. It is a list of

Anthologies, Handbooks, Histories & Essays, Blogs & Periodicals.

I had early on when I first made my website (1995-96), put together a bibliography of women’s literature. This was simply intended to help other researchers do research on any and all women writers; its origin in my studies of Renaissance literature is reflected in the choices, but it is wide-ranging and attempts to supplement all sorts of causes. This new site is narrower and perhaps shows my experience over the past 15 years of life on the Net, socializing with writers, readers, editors, publishers, and may useful for those coming to it beyond any needs for research or specific knowledge.

In Annie Finch’s “How to create a Poetic Tradition,” Finch demonstrates how central to visibility and thus a perceptible, findable, and usable context for writers and readers is “the entire literary apparatus of reviews, anthologies, journals, histories, panels, conferences, encyclopedias and textbooks.” Anthologies which are 90% male and where the choice of poem is often an unacknowledged masculinist bias (presented as universal or general) cripple the woman writer. Anthologies, handbooks, histories of literature come out of people’s desires, respect, point of view, what they think others will value. So the context is the manifestation of living people and people in the past reading, writing, talking, acting together: “numerous small acts of persistence … To edit, write, and create this apparatus is creative and fulfilling work in itself and tends to enrich a poet’s poetry.” I hope also to enrich other women’s lives as readers, as people, to be able to find a book or text that really speaks home to her.

The site is intended to help reading girls and now women especially not feel alone in their particular sensibility.

Cardplayers: Francis Coates Jones (1757-1932), called The Perplexed Player

If you want to find the books that Germaine Greer wrote as a feminist and specific research on feminism or any women writer, go to the bibliography; if you want to reach a picture of the woman’s poetry canon join in this is yet another place on my site where you will find women thought to be unusual because they were writers but whose lives were like your own in many ways gathered together.

****************

Paula Modersohn-Becker (“To sleep among my paintings is beautiful”)

I hope to keep adding to this website. I have written “lives and work” blogs for a few women artists and many more postings about many women artists for Women Writers Through the Ages, and mean eventually to include these on my site as blogs or linked in from the Yahoo site

My speciality has for the last 15 years been the 18th century, and I read French fluently and Italian pretty well, but would be happy to add material for other languages and women poets beyond my three. I realize how weak my site is in German anthologies, to say nothing of non-European texts.

If anyone knows of an anthology of women’s poetry you think ought to be included, please to let me know. The sole criteria is that it should be an anthology, history, handbook devoted to women poets. I know I have already broken this “rule” (consistency is a bugbear &c), but in the couple of cases where I did there were so many women poets in the supposed general anthology and the selection seemed so good or important I cited it; also I have a few general histories of women’s literature because they include many women poets or are historically important.

I have written about girls’ books and hope to make include this special and important subset of women, of whom I once was one. (See also Deborah O’Keefe, Good Girl Messages and Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading) I have two (biological) daughters of my own.

Vanessa Bell (1878-1961), “Her granddaughters [Amaryllis and Henrietta] reading” (with their dolls nearby)

Ellen

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Peter Grimes: Crabbe’s Borough & Britten’s Opera

I did not often see my Aunt with a book in her hand, but I beleive she was fond of reading and that she had read and did read a good deal. I doubt whether she ever much cared for poetry in general but she was a great admirer of Crabbe. She thoroughly enjoyed Crabbe … and would sometimes say, in jest, that if she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs Crabbe … — Caroline Austen, My Aunt Jane Austen

No. I have not seen the death of Mrs Crabbe. I have only just been making out from one of his prefaces that he probably was married. It was almost ridiculous. Poor woman! I will comfort him as well as I can, but I do not undertake to be good to her children. She had better not leave any . . . — Jane Austen, Thurs, 21 October 1813

The set for the Teatro alla Scala Peter Grimes — the rooms in which the actions take place are all inside trailers in a sort of car park, in front is the crashing dangerous sea and cliffs; to the back tenement apartment houses

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been thinking about writing about George Crabbe’s poetry here, and possible sources for Austen’s deep affinity with his spirit as seen in his poetry, partly because a while back now (more than two years) a couple of us on EighteenthCenturyWorlds @Yahoo read a number of his poems in The Borough and Tales 1812, and found them compelling in their grim realism. Since then I’ve read his son’s biography of him, and my good friend, Nick, has carried on reading Crabbe and books on his verse and every once in a while sends me a specimen of verse with his comments.

Then today Jim and I went to see an HD version of Richard Jones’s brilliant production at Teatro alla Scala (Milan, Italy) in the beautiful theater of the American Film Institute in Silver Springs. If the film is shown anywhere near it (or you are lucky enough to be in the vicinity where this is being performed live), rush out to see and hear it. Like other of the Britten operas I’ve seen, the perspective of Peter Grimes comes out of a mind imbued with the finest of humane values as he puts before us the dense unexamined needs, desires, angers, conscious and unconscious of people in and pushed outside of communities. Britten’s Peter Grimes is rightly sometimes called the greatest opera written in the 20th century and this is a production which makes all its parts understandable.

The daring Britten story and characters: Britten makes a victim and community scapegoat of a man who is violent, has cruelly driven one boy and drives another by relentless hard work in unameliorated circumstances to their deaths. He had not meant to kill them, but he had not taken care of them, and he was not adverse to roughing them up, beating them to get them to obey him and work harder, and we see him take out his resentments on the second. He certainly shows them no affection. The community is right to condemn him (in the opening scene, a court room in a trailer), but we are made to see that in their better circumstances they behave not much better than he does in his worse ones. His perverse (given their real indifference to him) need to prove himself better than them by growing rich and building himself a house (which paradoxically he says will enable him to stay apart from them) has been picked up by the town’s spinster-librarian, Ellen Orford, who sees in his character and goals an opportunity to marry and find a place for herself to thrive. When the community refuses to enable Grimes to hire another apprentice after the death of the first, she steps in to promise she will soften the boy’s life and make sure he is treated decently. And so a second boy is bought.

Peter Grimes (John Graham-Hall) and Ellen Orford (Susan Gritton)

But Ellen does not protect the boy sufficiently at all. She cannot control Grimes. He works the boy very hard all week and will not give the boy off on Sunday. She has tried to pretend to make friends with the boy (her caring for him is certainly limited as we watch her complacently embroider while she asks him to talk to her, confide in her), but the boy (rightly) will not speak. He is a bought slave. We see other boys his age jeer at him, and seem to threaten him. The citizens are not prepared to befriend Grimes in any way, nor take the one help he has, the boy, away from him until they see proof of beating; their laws and customs (making profits from such sales included) invite Grimes to act out his worst self. They include types: Mr Swallow, a libidinous lawyer, a judge, Rev. Adams, a hypocritically pious priest, Mrs Sedley, a female nosy-neighbor who is thrilled by the notion of violence and fueled by the excitement of relating slander (how true she doesn’t care); there is a tavern owner, Auntie, at which dances are held (very modern club like), her two nieces who are presented as over-sexed cock-teasers, the very quintessence of sick heterosexuality (some of the male dancers have shaved heads and dance with these sopranos). We see them “service” Mr Swallow and how he despises them, and enjoys the experience all the more for the triumph over them.

From another production which did emphasize the connection with Crabbe (older costumes, at the Royal Opera House, London)

How does this opera relate to Crabbe’s Borough, especially the two poems most central: “The Poor of the Borough: Peter Grimes” and “Ellen Orford.” Crabbe’s The Borough is a narrow-minded repressive culture which makes an already hard-scrabble life much harder to endure. In Britten’s play Grimes has not deliberately murdered the boys; he didn’t take care of them properly but the final deaths are accidental (if clearly being slowly engendered). Crabbe’s central figure hated his father who hated him. Old Peter Grimes was a religious hypocrite who made his wife and son pray while he also made their lives a misery and when he dies, they are at least free of his tyrannies. The son, Peter however has been taught to be violent and longs to hurt others as he has been hurt; he is gleeful when he gets his first boy and really enjoys subjecting the boys to his blows. Britten’s Grimes wants to make the boy work harder. Crabbe’s central Peter despises the second boy who becomes lame under the terrible treatment; the town sneaks him fire, food, and comfort, but he drowns after beatings with a knotted rope because he can’t hold on during a storm. The town then will not allow Grimes another boy, and we see him living alone, struggling to keep up his fishing trade. He is haunted by his father’s ghost and the ghost of the two boys, left in isolation and slowly goes mad. One of the epigraphs to Crabbe’s poem comes from Macbeth: “The times have been,/That when the brains were out, the man would die …” The poem ends with a long soliloquy from Grimes begging his father’s ghost for mercy, imagining demons (the boys?) around his bed.

There is no Ellen Orford in the original tale. Instead she is the focus of a tale just as hard and grim. She is also one of the poor of the borough. Crabbe opens by bitterly regaling the reader with typical sentimental romances and then says he will show you what real life is like, real tragedy. Ellen was the daughter of a woman who when widowed remarried a violent angry husband who mistreated her and her children; a young upper class man took advantage of her need for affection and friendship and when she became pregnant deserted her; her baby-daughter was born an idiot. After many years of isolation and menial work, a tradesman takes pity on her, marries her, but their hard life sours the husband, and all her children but two die, her one son is corrupted away from her (like the son in Wordsworth’s poignant “Michael”), another son a seaman drowns. Her retarded daughter had the same fate as she, worse, she dies too. Now Ellen is blind and lives alone, and is imagined telling this tale to show how she survives still, loving mankind and thankful to God (“my friend”).

These are typical tales for Crabbe. My friend, Nick and I have mused over their ambivalent meanings. The director did not indicate why Britten turned to this kind of material, nor did anyone else in the intermission of the opera (where there were interviews played as in the Met broadcasts). Britten did spend the last part of his life in East Anglia (Aldeburgh, Suffolk) where Crabbe was born and lived. It is a place which has fishing communities, probably narrow-minded villages where people live out a hard life. Crabbe would have been a well-known local poet-hero. The sea is central to the opera: a dangerous realm where people have to wrest a living and where they can die doing it.

You might say this is a homosexual take on Crabbe’s original story. He shows no desire for Ellen Orford. It’s a social bargain. The conductor, Robin Ticciati, mentioned this and from the production it’s clear this was in Ticciati and Jones’s perspective. the costume designer suggested the way she designed the nieces’ clothing took this perspective in mind too.

Ticciati said the play and music were written by Britten in the 1950s (correction: actually 1942-45) when he and his partner, tenor Peter Pears, returned from the US where they had waited out WW2 as conscientious objectors. Britten was an outsider at risk from overt hatred as someone who was a pacificist, an open homosexual, regarded as something of a traitor. He is in danger from the small town people. At some level especially in the last scenes when Grimes shows intense remorse and fear as well as frantic anger and a sense of alienation and loss, Britten is identifying with this man, the lowest of the low. He deserves punishment; he ought to be controlled, but he is nonetheless not a monster; he cries, deranged. The one person who shows some disinterested concern for him is Captain Balstrode (Christopher Purves) and at the play’s close, Balstrode tells him there is nothing left but to sink himself in his boat into the sea. Grimes leaves the stage quietly and a messenger reports drowned himself. Meanwhile the citizens have reconstituted the court the opera opened with and Ellen is about to swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The opera was sung and acted beautifully. There were only some 17 people watching it on Thursday afternoon, but just about all looked very moved. We were taught some lessons about life. Were we any of those people or Ellen Orford? did we recognize aspects of our own experience as we watched and listened to Grimes going through his. My only qualification or objection to the show was at the end the young boy who had played the apprentice was not singled out for special applause. He looked around 14 at most and he was directed to be depressed, frightened, attempting to get out of a beating, accept hitting, lay down and cry, and finally slip over a cliff to his death. Not easy for any youngster to enact. The company’s nonchalance towards him during the bowing time (except for one man who seemed to encourage the boy to smile) paralleled the way the community in the play had not looked out for Grimes’s apprentice.

The Crabbe poems are are not poems we might expect Austen to feel deep congeniality with, though since she loved Samuel Johnson’s dark work and he promoted and thought very well of Crabbe’s early poems, we can see a direct line or connection or parallel here. She also loved the tragic book, Richardson’s Clarissa. Fanny Price, her character, has a direct parallel character in one of Crabbe’s poems, “The Parish Register” (see Selwyn, JA and Leisure, pp 204-7). I’ve discovered parallels with Anne Elliot’s story where characters are pressured to wait until a seaman makes good and the lives of both are ruined (see Sarah Raff’s “‘Procrastination, Melancholia, and the Prehistory of Persuasion, Persuasions, 29 (2007):174-180). Crabbe’s milieu was her own: clergymen, well-educated, connected to richer relatives, but themselves fringe people. Austen spent a few years in Southampton, her brothers were sailors, and she experienced a meager genteel poverty existence from 1805, the time of her father’s death, moving about on a precarious income until her brother took her and her mother and sister, and the beloved friend, Martha Lloyd in permanently in 1809 in Chawton. Frank had tried to provide in 1807 at Southampton but the arrangement did not work out: he was away a lot and his first wife, Mary, uncomfortable, fled the Austens to nearby friends, and would not return. Austen had eyes for what she saw around her, even if she did not put it too often into her book. The most consistent treatment is The Watsons

Emma Watson … “I would rather be a teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.” Elizabeth, her sister, “I would rather do anything than be a teacher at a school … I have been at aschool,and I know what a life they lead …” — The Watsons

But Jane Fairfax similarly dreads becoming a governess, a form of slavery she calls it.

Jane Fairfax (Ania Marston) in a bad moment, the anxious Miss Bates (Constance Chapman) standing helplessly by (1972 BBC Emma)

Perhaps it’s well to end on Crabbe’s compassion for his characters, for he does have that. These lines by Crabbe bring very vividly to life the world of the dependent woman in the later 18th, early 19th century: they are from Tale 16 (Tales, 1812) “The Confidant”….

Now Anna’s station frequent terrors wrought,
In one whose looks were with such meaning fraught,
For on a Lady, as an humble friend,
It was her painful office to attend.
Her duties here were of the usual kind -
And some the body harass’d, some the mind:
Billets she wrote, and tender stories read,
To make the Lady sleepy in her bed;
She play’d at whist, but with inferior skill,
And heard the summons as a call to drill;
Music was ever pleasant till she play’d
At a request that no request convey’d;
The Lady’s tales with anxious looks she heard,
For she must witness what her Friend averr’d;
The Lady’s taste she must in all approve,
Hate whom she hated, whom she lov’d must love;
These, with the various duties of her place,
With care she studied, and perform’d with grace:
She veil’d her troubles in a mask of ease,
And show’d her pleasure was a power to please.
Such were the damsel’s duties: she was poor -
Above a servant, but with service more:
Men on her face with careless freedom gaz’d,
Nor thought how painful was the glow they raised.
A wealthy few to gain her favour tried,
But not the favour of a grateful bride;
They spoke their purpose with an easy air,
That shamed and frighten’d the dependent fair;
Past time she view’d, the passing time to cheat,
But nothing found to make the present sweet:
With pensive soul she read life’s future page,
And saw dependent, poor, repining age.

Let us recall what Austen and many another woman of this era who remained unmarried and threatened by her inability to get a decent job of what is written of governesses etc. – are these lines not brilliant descriptions of the horrors of a woman dependent? But also the lines about the male gaze – quite extraordinarily modern really? the very use of the verb. And those great last 4 lines – nothing to console in past, present or future …

****************

Miss Austen Regrets: Jane Austen (Olivia Williams) meets a Member of Parliament who quotes lines from Crabbe at her, and she acknowledges she often carries Crabbe in her pocket (probably ironic).

The lines: With awe, around these silent walks I tread
These are the lasting mansions of the dead … The Library

In Austen, Crabbe and now Britten we can see how in a particular group we are led to feel ourselves an outsider and alien when we don’t share the views of all and are often silenced and depressed by the experience … (Marianne Dashwood anyone?). We see also the theme of the outrages of social life so pervasive in Crabbe. A central motif of the opportunity once lost never gotten again swirls around this: the person doesn’t take the opportunity because they are persuaded out of it … (in all the novels, but especially S&S, P&P, MP). All three can empathize and recognize that crass, stupid, narrow, mean, bigoted people have inner lives too, suffer too.

I recommend Terence Bareham’s Twayne George Crabbe. He opens with a fair and concise resume of Crabbe’s life and then prints a long letter someone wrote after the person visited Crabbe late in life. Much of what’s known of Crabbe’s inner life emerges from this letter as well as what an
innately cordial man (when given the rare opportunity of a like-minded
intelligent person to talk to) he was, someone (not uncommon) who in
effect lived in and upon himself.

Ellen

P.S. For discussions of other operas, HD and live, see Opera archive at Ellen and Jim Have a Blog Two and further operas in Austen Reveries.

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Foremother poets: Anne Francis Bransly (d. 1800) and Hester Salusbury Thrale Piozzi (1741-1821)

Hester Thrale Piozzi (1793) by Charles Dance

Remedios Varo (1908-63), A Paradise for Cats

Dear friends and readers

Ann Francis, whom nobody has ever heard of (she’s not in Paul Backscheider’s anthology, nor Joyce Fullard’s, nor Paula Feldman, nor any of them but one: Lonsdale), so just about totally unknown; and Hester Piozzi (as I’ll call her), if not a household word, a familiar name well outside 18th century studies and for more than as Dr Johnson’s favorite woman, whom everyone thihks they know and many like to castigate and dismiss. Both writing verse where the depth of emotion is controlled and checked by the comic and poetic diction idiom. I chose one for her grief for her loss of her cat, the other for her depth of feeling for her second husband and her anger at her society’s rejection of her for marrying him.

From Roger Lonsdale’s Oxford book of 18th century women poets:

An Elegy on a Favorite Cat

WHEN cats like him submit to fate,
      And seek the Stygian strand,
In silent woe and mimic state
      Should mourn the feline band.

For me — full oft at eventide,
      Enrapt in thought profound,
I hear his solemn footsteps glide,
      And startle at the sound!

Oft as the murmuring gale draws near
      (To fancy’s rule consigned),
His tuneful purr salutes my ear,
      Soft-floating on the wind.

Among the aerial train, perchance,
      My Bully now resides,
Or with the nymphs leads up the dance­
      Or skims the argent tides.

Ye rapid Muses, haste away,
      His wandering shade attend,
Hunt him through bush and fallow grey,
      And up the hill ascend;

O’er russet heath extend your view,
      And through th’ embrowning wood;
On the brisk gale his form pursue,
      Or trace him o’er the flood:

If he a lucid Sylph should fly,
      With various hues bedight,
The Muse’s keen pervading eye
      Shall catch the streaming light. …

I like the line about how she hears his quiet paws.

Thomas Gainsborough, a Suffolk Landscape

Ann Francis was a highly educated woman. Her father was the Revd Daniel Gittins (d. 1760), Rector of South Stoke (near Sussex), and Vicar of Leominster, who taught her Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, in which she became a ‘great proficient’. She married the Revd Robert Bransly Francis, Rector of Edgefield (near Norfolk), and through him corresponded with educated men (e.g., John Parkhouse, author of a Hebrew lexicon). She did write erotic poetry under the guise of her learning: A Poetical Translation of the Song of Solomon, From the Original Hebrew (1780), a drama, dedicated to Parkhouse: in her preface she defends herself against the assumption that “a woman would lack the learning for such a translation,” and such erotic mater was unfit “for a female pen’. Melancholy poetry emerged as The Obsequies of Demetrius Poliorcetes: A Poem (1785) and gothic too: A Poetical Epistle from Clarlotte to Werther (1788, a responses to Goethe’s novel). Less ambitious and more domestic subjects are found in her: Miscellaneous Poems, By a Lady (Norwich, 1790), which includes some by are mostly on less ambitious and more domestic subjects. She was conservative politically: A Plain Address to My Neighbours (1798), is a stern warning of the consequences of a French invasion to liberate the British working classes. She died at Edgefield Parsonage on 7 November 1800, praised for ‘mental acquirements’ and as a daughter, wife, and mother.

*************************

Streatham Park, the Thrale residence, 1863 (prior to demolition)

My favorite poem by Hester Piozzi

To Gabriel Piozzi on their twentieth wedding anniversary:

Accept my Love this honest Lay
Upon your Twentieth Wedding Day:
I little hop’d our Lives would stay
To hail the Twentieth Wedding Day.
If you’re grown Gouty-I grown Gray
Upon our Twentieth Wedding Day
­Tis no great Wonder;-Friends must say
“Why tis their Twentieth Wedding Day.”
Perhaps there’s few feel less Decay
Upon a Twentieth Wedding day:
And many of those who used to pay
Their Court upon our Wedding Day,
Have melted off, and died away
Before our Twentieth Wedding Day.
Those Places too, which once so gay,
Bore Witness to our Wedding Day;
Florence and Milan blythe as May
Marauding French have made their Prey.
The World itself’s in no good Way,
On this our Twentieth Wedding Day.
If then-of Gratitude one Ray
Illuminates our Wedding Day,
Think midst the Wars and wild Affray
That rage around this Wedding day,
What Mercy ’tis-we are spar’d to say
We have seen our Twentieth Wedding-day

They remind me of Johnson’s lines to Hester herself (she never lost his influence) when she reached 35, which my husband wrote out for me when I reached 35 too:

‘To Mrs Thrale on her Thirty-Fifth Birthday

Oft in Danger yet alive
We are come to Thirty-five;
Long may better Years arrive,
Better Years than Thirty-five;
Could Philosophers contrive
Life to stop at Thirty-five,
Time his Hours should never drive
O’er the Bounds of Thirty-five:
High to soar and deep to dive
Nature gives at Thirty-five;
Ladies — stock and tend your Hive,
Trifle not at Thirty-five;
For howe’er we boast and strive,
Life declines from Thirty-five;
He that ever hopes to thrive
Must begin by Thirty-five:
And those who wisely wish to wive,
Must look on Thrale at Thirty-five.

Companionate marriage, deep tender affection in comic stunts of ringing changes on a single rhyme.

While she’s probably best known to the public through her relationship to Samuel Johnson, and after that Fanny Burney; Hester Thrale Piozzi was a remarkable writer in her own right. She certainly was learned (if not in the high style so sheerly of Ann Francis — she loved the circulating library in Bath), but was not inclined to idealize or sentimentalize at all, and especially society. Good reason: after enduring many years of a early-on coerced marriage with a wealthy brewer (open about his liaisons) and having had many pregnancies inflicted on her and dead children, he died and there was yet time for her to live. She had fallen in love with a musician and tutor: Gabriel Piozzi and wanted to marry him. For this she experienced ostracism at high throttle, with not only supposed loyal friends (Burney, Johnson who loved her himself), but her daughters (who in character favored the father) issuing philippics which they made good. She married anyway and had a happy life with Piozzi (see above, traveled, and began to write and publish. This is written in Italy in 1785 shortly after she had left England to live with her new husband:

An Ode to Society

[Written at the Bagni di Pita, in the Appenines]

Society, gregarious dame!
Who knows thy favoured haunts to name?
Whether at Paris you prepare
The supper and the chat to share;
Where, fixed in artificial row,
Laughter displays his teeth of snow;
Grimace with raillery rejoices,
And song of many-mingled voices;
Till young Coquetry’s artful wile
Some foreign novice shall beguile,
Who, home returned, still prates of thee,
Light, flippant, French Society.

Or whether, with your zone unbound,
You ramble gaudy Venice round,
Resolved th’inviting sweets to prove
Of wanton mirth and willing love,
Where gently roll th’obedient seas,
Sacred to luxury and ease.
In coffee-house or casino gay,
Till the too quick return of day,
Th’ enchanted votary who sighs
For sentiments without disguise,
Clear, unaffected, fond and free,
In Venice finds Society.

Or if, to wiser Britain led,
Your vagrant feet desire to tread,
With measured step and anxious care,
The precincts pure of Portman Square;
While wit with elegance combined,
And polished manners, there you’ll find,
The taste correct and fertile mind;
Remember Vigilance lurks near,
And Silence with unnoticed sneer,
Who watches but to tell again
Your foibles with tomorrow’s pen,
Till tittering Malice smiles to see
Your wonder — grave Society!

Far from your busy, crowded court,
Tranquillity makes her resort,
Where, mid cold Staffa’s columns rude,
Resides majestic Solitude;
Or where, in some sad Brachman’s cell,
Meek Innocence delights to dwell,
Weeping with inexperienced eye
The fate of a departed fly;
Or in Hetruria’s heights sublime,
Where Science’ self might fear to climb,
But that she seeks a smile from thee,
And wooes thy praise, Society.

Thence let me view the plains below,
From rough St. Julian’s rugged brow;
Hear the loud torrents swift descending,
Or watch the beauteous rainbow bending,
Till heaven regains its favourite hue,
Aether divine! celestial blue!
Then bosomed high in myrtle bower,
View lettered Pisa’s pendent tower;
The sea’s wide scene, the port’s loud throng
Of rude and gentle, right and wrong –
A motley group! which yet agree
To call themselves Society.

Oh thou! still sought by Wealth and Fame,
Dispenser of applause or blame!
While Slander, ever at thy side,
With Flattery can thy smiles divide:
Far from thy haunts oh! let me stray,
But grant one friend to cheer my way,
Whose converse bland, whose music’s art,
May soothe my soul-and heal my heart;
Let soft Content our steps pursue,
And bliss eternal bound our view
Power I’ll resign, and pomp, and glee,
Thy best-loved sweets-Society.

(Written 1785; pub. 1789)

In those books I’ve come across that reprint her poems, the choice is her didactic (and possibly worst) poem, a sort of Aesop fable about death: The Three Warnings. This is much more in character:

On a Sundial:

Mark how the Weeping Willow stands
     Near the recording Stone;
It seems to blame our Idle Hands
     And Mourn the Moments flown.

Thus Conscience holds the fancy fast,
     With Fears too oft affected;
Pretending to lament the past,
     The present still neglected.

Yet shall this swift-improving Plant
     With spring her Leaves resume;
Nor let the Example She can grant
     Depend on Winter’s Gloom:

Loiter no more then near the Tree,
     Nor on the Dial gaze;
If but an Hour is given to thee
     Act right while yet it stays.

As with Virginia Woolf, publications of new biographies of Piozzi are often occasions for castigating her. She seems to be resented for not knowing her place. Marilyn Francus suggests Piozzi represented someone unusual because she really commanded respect the way men who set standards do: Wm MacCarthy (Hester Thrale: Portrait of a Literary Woman) says she invented new genres, her Thraliana is an autobiography; she re-makers what constitutes a dictionary. She thinks well of herself. She judges her male companions and friends. It’s instructive to read these two opposing reviews of the latest book on Piozzi: Hester Thrale by Ian McIntyre (Hester: The Remarkable Life of Dr Johnson’s ‘Dear Mistress’). The subtitle tells how the editor wants her framed, if only to attract attention? Compare these short reviews, one by Anne Sebba where the life is retold from the woman’s point of view with real sympathy:

It begins:

Hester Thrale was a political wife before the term was invented, a landowner at a time when wives could not own land in their own name and, above all, a diarist and author. Her ambitious final book, Retrospection, was the first attempt by an Englishwoman to write a history of the world.

And this by Frances Wilson where we find a bad mother who we are to sit in judgement on:

The first paragraph ends:

For Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, who remained immune to Hester’s charms, she was “a little artful impudent malignant devil”. Johnson would eventually agree with him

But what is in McIntrye’s book? Hard to say. A recent well-written interesting potted biography on Johnson himself in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik mentions McIntrye in passing, but only to bring out his take (decent, reasonable) on Hester Thrale Piozzi in passing. He is interested in her sexual relationship with Johnson.

If you’re like me and first met her through her delightful travel book, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany 1789), and then her casual life of Johnson and through her letters to and from Fanny Burney, your perspective will be quite different from Gopnik’s. To New Yorker readers she appears as the lady who kept the fetters and perhaps beat Johnson. To Austen she was the delightful woman who wrote the verses I’ve cited and a lively original travel book. Austen quotes the travel book apparently from memory and at one point in one of her letters imitates Piozzi. She did not hold the woman’s marriage against her.

She was also a poet in prose, an original spirit. Some online selections of Thraliana. Books I know are good: James Clifford’s biography of Hester: much of the second half is about her writing. Mary Hyde Eccles, The Impossible Friendship (about Thrale and Boswell, he became a deadly enemy) and The Thrales of Streatem Park, finally a good charter in Shari Benstock’s The Private Self (about autobiographies) on Thrale Piozzi’s journals.

For the sake of Ann’s favorite cat, and Hester’s comedy which “hovers” (as MacCarthy puts it), on the edge of poignancy and justifiable wry alienation.

Gabriel Piozzi, also by George Dance (also drawin in 1793)

I have no photo of Ann’s cat so Elsa Morante (a 20th century great Italian novelist and poet too) and her cat must replace them:

Contemporary foremothers (see other archive).

Ellen

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Foremother poets: Charlotte (1816-55) and Anne (1820-49) Bronte

“I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure, born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld; or offered only at a price I cannot afford to pay” —-Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

‘An you’ll be a bit o’company for me too, miss … I like as I feel lonesome without my cat … [there was] Mr Weston, with the identical cat in his arms. I now saw that he could smile, and very pleasantly too … not twelve months ago I lost the last and dearest of my early friends; and yet, not only I live, but I am not wholly destitute of hope and comfort, even for this life … —-Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey

Charlotte Bronte by George Richmond

Anne Bronte by Charlotte Bronte

Dear friends and readers,

As a follow-up and continuation of my discussion of Mary Brunton’s Self-Control, I thought a brief foremother poet blog presenting some of the poetry of Charlotte and Anne Bronte would be fitting. Emily’s (1818-48) poetry is well-known and done justice to; her sisters’ verse not as much. I begin with Anne as her work is often not reprinted except with her novels.

**********************

John Constable (1776-1837), Autumn Sunset

Anne Bronte lived but 29 years. She seems to me a poet of autumn. In her novels (Agnes Grey and Tenant of Wildfell Hall), her tone is bleak, she often feels hopeless when confronted with the inhumanity of her employers and allowed brutality of their children; in her poetry there is much sweetness, and

Consolation

Though bleak these woods and damp the ground
With fallen leaves so thickly strewn,
And cold the wind that wanders round
With wild and melancholy moan,
There is a friendly roof I know
Might shield me from the wintry blast;
There is a fire whose ruddy glow
Will cheer me for my wanderings past.

And so, though still where’er I roam
Cold stranger glances meet my eye,
Though when my spirit sinks in woe
Unheeded swells the unbidden sigh,

Though solitude endured too long
Bids youthful joys too soon decay,
Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue
And overclouds my noon of day,

When kindly thoughts that would have way
Flow back discouraged to my breast
I know there is, though far away
A home where heart and soul may rest.

Warm hands are there that clasped in mine
The warmer heart will not belie,
While mirth and truth and friendship shine
In smiling lip and earnest eye.

The ice that gathers round my heart
May there be thawed; and sweetly then
The joys of youth that now depart
Will come to cheer my soul again.

Though far I roam, this thought shall be
My hope, my comfort everywhere;
While such a home remains to me
My heart shall never know despair.

[My feeling is this is autobiographical and refers to those times she was sent away to school and to the period of governessing which she was not alone in hating as an occupation; paid companion was just as bad.]

Lines composed in a wood on a windy day

MY soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.

The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,
The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;
The dead leaves, beneath them, are merrily dancing,
The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky.

I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing
The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;
I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,
And hear the wild roar of their thunder today!

[It's tempting to compare it to her sister Emily's acerbic and grim lines, but that usually ends in seeing Anne as weaker. It's rather she has a different more open voice. This last occurs in Agnes Grey within a moment of hope in the book:]

The Bluebell

A fine and subtle spirit dwells
In every little flower,
Each one its own sweet feeling breathes
With more or less of power.
There is a silent eloquence
In every wild bluebell
That fills my softened heart with bliss
That words could never tell.

Yet I recall not long ago
A bright and sunny day,
‘Twas when I led a toilsome life
So many leagues away;

That day along a sunny road
All carelessly I strayed,
Between two banks where smiling flowers
Their varied hues displayed.

Before me rose a lofty hill,
Behind me lay the sea,
My heart was not so heavy then
As it was wont to be.

Less harassed than at other times
I saw the scene was fair,
And spoke and laughed to those around,
As if I knew no care.

But when I looked upon the bank
My wandering glances fell
Upon a little trembling flower,
A single sweet bluebell.

Whence came that rising in my throat,
That dimness in my eye?
Why did those burning drops distil -
Those bitter feelings rise?

O, that lone flower recalled to me
My happy childhood’s hours
When bluebells seemed like fairy gifts
A prize among the flowers,

Those sunny days of merriment
When heart and soul were free,
And when I dwelt with kindred hearts
That loved and cared for me.

I had not then mid heartless crowds
To spend a thankless life
In seeking after others’ weal
With anxious toil and strife.

‘Sad wanderer, weep those blissful times
That never may return!’
The lovely floweret seemed to say,
And thus it made me mourn.

A fine selection may be found in Anne Bronte: Agnes Grey and Poems, introd. Anne Smith (Everyman, 1985).

************************

William Turner (1789-1862), Drachenfels (1817)

By contrast, Charlotte’s poems are far more visionary, passionate; they have complicated ethical statements.

Sigh no more-it is a dream
So vivid that it looks like life.

Fast, fast as snow-flakes, fled the legions,
And the heart throbs, the blood runs fast
As gathering in from many regions
Returns the scattered, faded Past.

Under the rubric, “O that word never, December 23rd:”

NOT many years, but long enough to see
No foe can deal such deadly misery
As the dear friend untimely called away
And still the more beloved, the greater still
Must be the aching void, the withering chill
Of each dark night and dim beclouded day.

THE Nurse believed the sick man slept,
     For motionless he lay.
She rose and from the bedside crept
     With cautious step away.

HOW far is night advanced? Oh, when will day
Reveal the vanished outline of my room?
I fear not yet — for not a glimmer grey
Steals through the familiar blank and solid gloom
Which shuts me in — would I could sleep away
The hours — till, skies all flushed with morning’s
     bloom
Shall open clear and red and cheer with light

Like wolf — and black bull or goblin hound,
     Or come in guise of spirit
With wings and long wet waving hair
And at the fire its locks will dry,
     Which will be certain sign
That one beneath the roof must die
     Before the year’s decline.

Forget not now what I have said,
     Sit there till we return.
The hearth is hot-watch well the bread
     Lest haply it may burn.

At first I did attention give,
Observance-deep esteem;
His frown I failed not to forgive,
His smile — a boon to deem.

Attention rose to interest soon,
Respect to homage changed;
The smile became a relived [?] boon,
The frown like grief estranged.

The interest ceased not with his voice,
The homage tracked [?] him near.
Obedience was my heart’s free choice
Whate’ er his mood severe [?].

His praise infrequent — favours rare,
Unruly deceivers [?] grew.
1And too much power a haunting fear
Around his anger threw.

His coming was my hope each day,
His parting was my pain.
The chance that did his steps delay
Was ice in every vein.

I gave entire affection now,
I gave devotion sure
And strong took root and fast did grow
One mighty feeling more.

The truest love that ever heart
Felt at its kindled core
     Through my veins with quickened start
     A tide of life did pour.

[A] halo played about the brows
Of life as seen by me,
     And trailing [?] bliss within me rose,
     And anxious ecstacy.

     I dreamed it would be nameless bliss
     As I loved loved to be,
And to this object did I press
     As blind as eagerly.

But wild and pathless was the space
     That lay our lives between,
     And dangerous as the foaming race
Of ocean’s surges green,

     And haunted as a robber path
     Through wilderness or wood,
     For might and right, woe and wrath
     Between our spirits stood.

I dangers dared, I hindrance scorned
     I omens did defy;
     Whatever menaced, harassed, warned
     I passed impetuous by.

On sped my rainbow fast as light,
I flew as in a dream,
     For glorious rose upon my sight
     That child of shower and gleam,

And bright on clouds of suffering dim
     Shone that soft solemn joy.
     I care not then how dense and grim
     Disasters gather nigh.

I care not in this moment sweet,
     Though all I have rushed o’er
Should come on pinion strong and fleet
     Proclaiming vengeance sore.

Hate struck me in his presence down,
     Love barred approach to me,
     My rival’s joy with jealous frown
     Declared hostility.

Wrath leagued with calumny transfused
     Strong poison in his veins
     And I stood at his feet accused
     Of false [ -] strains

Cold as a statue’s grew his eye,
Hard as a rock his brow,
     Cold hard to me-but tenderly
     He kissed my rival now.

She seemed my rainbow to have seized,
     Around her form it closed,
And soft its iris splendour blazed
     Where love and she reposed.

This, The Teacher’s Monologue, shows a working out of painful thought:

The room is quiet, thoughts alone
     People its mute tranquillity;
The yoke put off, the long task done,—
     I am, as it is bliss to be,
Still and untroubled. Now, I see,
     For the first time, how soft the day
O’er waveless water, stirless tree,
    &nbps; Silent and sunny, wings its way.
Now, as I watch that distant hill,
     So faint, so blue, so far removed,
Sweet dreams of home my heart may fill,
     That home where I am known and loved:
It lies beyond; yon azure brow
     Parts me from all Earth holds for me;
And, morn and eve, my yearnings flow
     Thitherward tending, changelessly.
My happiest hours, ay! all the time,
     I love to keep in memory,
Lapsed among moors, ere life’s first prime
     Decayed to dark anxiety.

Sometimes, I think a narrow heart
     Makes me thus mourn those far away,
And keeps my love so far apart
     From friends and friendships of to-day;
Sometimes, I think ’tis but a dream
     I treasure up so jealously,
All the sweet thoughts I live on seem
     To vanish into vacancy:
And then, this strange, coarse world around
     Seems all that’s palpable and true;
And every sight and every sound
     Combines my spirit to subdue
To aching grief; so void and lone
     Is Life and Earth—so worse than vain,
The hopes that, in my own heart sown,
     And cherished by such sun and rain
As Joy and transient Sorrow shed,
     Have ripened to a harvest there:
Alas! methinks I hear it said,
     ’Thy golden sheaves are empty air.’
All fades away; my very home
     I think will soon be desolate;
I hear, at times, a warning come
     Of bitter partings at its gate;
And, if I should return and see
     The hearth-fire quenched, the vacant chair;
And hear it whispered mournfully,
    &npsp; That farewells have been spoken there,
What shall I do, and whither turn?
Where look for peace? When cease to mourn?

‘Tis not the air I wished to play,
     The strain I wished to sing;
My wilful spirit slipped away
     And struck another string.
I neither wanted smile nor tear,
     Bright joy nor bitter woe,
But just a song that sweet and clear,
     Though haply sad, might flow.

A quiet song, to solace me
     When sleep refused to come;
A strain to chase despondency
     When sorrowful for home.
In vain I try; I cannot sing;
     All feels so cold and dead;
No wild distress, no gushing spring
     Of tears in anguish shed;

But all the impatient gloom of one
     Who waits a distant day,
When, some great task of suffering done,
     Repose shall toil repay.
For youth departs, and pleasure flies,
     And life consumes away,
And youth’s rejoicing ardour dies
     Beneath this drear delay;

And Patience, weary with her yoke,
     Is yielding to despair,
And Health’s elastic spring is broke
     Beneath the strain of care.
Life will be gone ere I have lived;
     Where now is Life’s first prime?
I’ve worked and studied, longed and grieved,
     Through all that rosy time.

To toil, to think, to long, to grieve,—
     Is such my future fate?
The morn was dreary, must the eve
     Be also desolate?
Well, such a life at least makes Death
     A welcome, wished-for friend;
Then, aid me, Reason, Patience, Faith,
      To suffer to the end!

[It's a poem by Charlotte Bronte expressing her real feelings in finding herself among deeply uncongenial people as a teacher in a school of the era, most of them then dedicated to teaching conformity in outward life and "accomplishments" and rote learning to impress others. I like the long opening especially. It falls off in the last two stanzas. I remember how more than ambivalent were the feelings of Jane Eyre about her students in the last part of the famous book, and also the power of the bitterness of Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey. I've been watching Jane Eyre films the past couple of weeks or so (1973 mini-series and again the 1983 one, the 2006 one -- superb that last one too, by a team of women), also Kathryn Hughes's Victorian Governess (how the job search then is like many today, and the experience afterwards too).

I was interested to see that in Chadwyck-Healey, a note told the reader as a matter of course, this is not good poetry. The assumption seemed to be that it's bad because it tells the truth about the very real negative aspects of teaching and social life and depression, loneliness. Maybe too it's not liked because it's what Annie Finch calls "poetess" poetry, a poetry showing dwelling in sensitivity.]

Regret
by Charlotte Brontë

Long ago I wished to leave
“The house where I was born; “
Long ago I used to grieve,
My home seemed so forlorn.
In other years, its silent rooms
Were filled with haunting fears;
Now, their very memory comes
O’ercharged with tender tears.

Life and marriage I have known,
Things once deemed so bright;
Now, how utterly is flown
Every ray of light !
‘Mid the unknown sea of life
I no blest isle have found;
At last, through all its wild wave’s strife,
My bark is homeward bound.

Farewell, dark and rolling deep !
Farewell, foreign shore !
Open, in unclouded sweep,
Thou glorious realm before !
Yet, though I had safely pass’d
That weary, vexed main,
One loved voice, through surge and blast,
Could call me back again.

Though the soul’s bright morning rose
O’er Paradise for me,
William ! even from Heaven’s repose
I’d turn, invoked by thee !
Storm nor surge should e’er arrest
My soul, exulting then:
All my heaven was once thy breast,
Would it were mine again!

[The sadness and isolation from others recall Bronte's Villette. And the longing to be with those who have passed on, so poignant.]

*********

Emily Bronte by Branwell Bronte (the brother who also died young)

This one is said to be by both Emily and Charlotte:

The Visionary

Silent is the house; all are laid asleep:
One alone looks out o’er the snow-wreaths deep;
Wathing every cloud, dreading every breeze
That whirls the wildering drift, and bends the groaning trees.

Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor;
Nor one shivering gust creeps through pane or door;
The little lamp burns straight, its rays shoot strong and far:
I trim it well, to be the wanderer’s guiding-star.

Frown, my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame;
Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame:
But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know,
What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow.

What I love shall come like visitant of air,
Safe in secret power from lurking human snare;
What loves me, no word of mine shall e’er betray,
Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay.

Burn, then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear –
Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air:
He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me;
Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy.

      (Written 1845, published 1850).

See Selected Bronte Poems, ed. Edward Chitham (Blackwell, 1985).

*******************

The 1983 Jane Eyre with Timothy Dalton as Rochester and Zelah Clarke as Jane is very good (see The Latest Jane Eyre)

Of course I love their novels too as well as most of the film adaptations thus far. I can’t think of one I don’t like.

There are so many sites, so many books and essays, so much is known that I won’t repeat a potted life once more, but shall confine myself to referring the reader to the Victorian Web for Charlotte; and University of Pennyslvia and the Literary Gothic for Anne. One of the finest biographies is still Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte; Maria Frawley’s Anne Bronte is a gem. A good book which treats Anne as her sisters’ equal: Julie Nash & Barbara A. Suess’s New Approaches to the Art of Anne Bronte. It’s telling to know that George Moore admired Anne Bronte. And don’t miss Daphne DuMaurier’s on The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte.

Landscape from Sandy Welch’s 2005 Jane Eyre (On Never Tiring)

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Ada Dwyer Russell (1863-1952)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been sitting here trying to decide which of the many women poets I’ve written postings on to listservs and decided I should go with Amy Lowell for the power of her arresting opening and whirlingly plangent, knife edge closing lines and because I find she describes intense moods that keep coming back to me:

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

All day long I have been working,
Now I am tired.
I call: “Where are you?”
But there is only the oak-tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.

Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes.

You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and
     rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet Te Deums of the
nbsp;    Canterbury bells.

[I do work all day and late at night I do feel so desperately tired and look about me for someone, something, a book, feel the silence, long for music -- and then I don't manage to put on my itunes]

The Taxi

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

[And why should I ever go away from him, ravage myself on those knives however hidden]

I also like her for the large image she conjures up into which she pours just the right detail:

The Broken Fountain

Oblong, its jutted ends rounding into circles,
The old sunken basin lies with its flat, marble lip
An inch below the terrace tiles.
Over the stagnant water
Slide reflections:
Th blue-green of coned yews;
The purple and red of trailing fuchsias
Dripping out of marble urns;
Bright squares of sky
Ribbed by the wake of a swimming beetle.
Through the blue-bronze water
Wavers the pale uncertainty of a shadow.
An arm flashes through the reflections,
A breast is outlined with leaves.
Outstretched in the quiet water
The statue of a Goddess slumbers.
But when Autumn comes
The beech leaves cover her with a golden counter-pane.

[This is like some film adaptation where dreams of what never was are conjured up in these stone places]

L. Luisa Vidal (1876-1918), Untitled (1890)

I like her use of color, stark, simple, and light, flashing, in phases, against water:

Afternoon Rain in State Street

Cross-hatchings of rain against grey walls,
Slant lines of black rain
In front of the up and down, wet stone sides of buildings.
Below,
Greasy, shiny, black, horizontal,
The street.
And over it, umbrellas,
Black polished dots
Struck to white
An instant,
Stream in two flat lines
Slipping past each other with the smoothness of oil.
Like a four-sided wedge
The Custom House Tower
Pokes at the low, flat sky,
Pushing it farther and farther up,
Lifting it away from the house-tops,
Lifting it in one piece as though it were a sheet of tin,
With the lever of its apex.
The cross-hatchings of rain cut the Tower obliquely,
Scratching lines of black wire across it,
Mutilating its perpendicular grey surface
With the sharp precision of tools.
The city is rigid with straight lines and angles,
A chequered table of blacks and greys.
Oblong blocks of flatness
Crawl by with low-geared engines,
And pass to short upright squares
Shrinking with distance.
A steamer in the basin blows its whistle,
And the sound shoots across the rain hatchings,
A narrow, level bar of steel.
Hard cubes of lemon
Superimpose themselves upon the fronts of buildings
As the windows light up.
But the lemon cubes are edged with angles
Upon which they cannot impinge.
Up, straight, down, straight — square.
Crumpled grey-white papers
Blow along the side-walks,
Contorted, horrible,
Without curves.
A horse steps in a puddle,
And white, glaring water spurts up
In stiff, outflaring lines,
Like the rattling stems of reeds.
The city is heraldic with angles,
A sombre escutcheon of argent and sable
And counter-coloured bends of rain
Hung over a four-square civilization.
When a street lamp comes out,
I gaze at it for fully thirty seconds
To rest my brain with the suffusing, round brilliance of its globe.

[Does it make you remember a city scene?]

H. Turner (1858-1958), Morning News (1915)

**************************

Sevenels and surrounding garden

A brief life and work, and bibliography. All the above poems come from an uncorrected proof (people should get into this kind of book, it comes dirt cheap and is often just missing pictures or has xeroxed hand-corrections which add to its value, not detract): Amy Lowell: selected poems, ed. Honor Moore. American Poets Project. The Library of America. 2004 reprint of an 1984 collection.

As many will know (her poems are reprinted), Amy Lowell belonged to the prestigious New England Lowells. While she was when living a major figure of the early 20th century and imagist movement, she has been swept aside because of the ridicule of
Pound and his male cohort, harassed, accused, even hounded (for “hijacking” his movement). Perhaps he did not like that she was a lesbian. She wrote in free verse but was an adept at sonnets, and her free verse feels like it rhymes, so perfectly musical are its sounds, assonance, half-rhymes. Her poetry is said to be “in the American grain.” Why I can’t say? Perhaps the appearance of optimism in the sheer love of being alive, despite life’s electrifying despair; perhaps this turning to European imagistic aristocratic pasts. She traveled with her beloved friend and companion, once an actress, Ada Dwyer Russell (she admired Eleanor Duse), was a socialite, in her mid-twenties purchased a family home, Sevenels, from which she was an active volunteer type. Having not been allowed to attend college, she collected books (I know the feeling of feeling oneself cut off), and wrote essays, edited anthologies, wrote defenses of friends like D. H. Lawrence, delivered lectured to the Poetry Society of America, and collaborated on translations from the Chinese.

This from Pictures of a Floating World:

Vernal Equinox

The scene of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies between me
   &nbspand my book;
And the South Win, washing through the room,
makes the candles quiver.
My nerves sting at a spatter of rain on the shutter,
And I am uneasy with the thrusting of green shoots
Outside, in the night.

Why are you not here to overpower me with your tense
   &nbspand urgent love?

The Letter

Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncurtained window and the bare floor
Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of lovelim
Beneath my hand.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.

Mise en Scene

When I think of you, Beloved,
I see a smooth and stately garden
With parterres of gold and crimson tulips
And bursting lilac leaves.
There is a low-lipped basin in the midst,
Where a statue of veined cream marble
Perpetually pours water over her shoulder
  From a rounded urn.
When the wind blows,
The water-stream blows before it
And spatters into the basin with a light tinkling,
And your shawl—the colour of red violets—
out behind you in great curves
Like the swirling draperies of a painted Madonna.

Bright Sunlight

The wind has blown a corner of your shawl
Into the fountain,
Where it floats and drifts
Among the lily-pads
Like a tissue of sapphires.
But you do not heed it,
Your fingers pick at the lichens
On the stone edge of the basin,
And your eyes follow the tall clouds
As they sail over the ilex-trees.

[Women's erotic poetry to other women that's what those are]

Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes (1859-1912), Medieval Woodland Scene (1895)

She found she could not write the biography of Keats she wanted to: she could not obtain copies of his letters to Fanny Brawne. She seems to have offended men because she was very heavy. How dare she? I see Shelley in her imagery, and if she was not a feminist, where is feminism to be found? Perhaps she was put off by the types of women who were first phase feminists (suffragettes, women working for leftist causes, prohibition). She had a mind and style of her own. One of her most reprinted poems is said to be anti-war: Patterns, only it takes such a long time before war is even brought up. This poems is so curious with its artifice. Patterns. It does seem appropriate that art deco was the way people with money furnished their houses.

She died at 51. Eight years before she had been in a painful accident (in a wagon) and seriously injured her umbilical muscles, and surgeries did not mend the damage.

This poem is to Ada imagining herself dead:

The old house will guard you
As I have done.
Its walls and rooms will hold you
And I shall whisper my thoughts and fancies
As always
From the pages of my books.

Eva Bonnier (1855-1909), At Studio Door

See: S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); Jean Gould, Amy: The World of Amy Lowell and The Imagist Movement (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975); Claire Healey, “Amy Lowell Visits London,” New England Quarterly, 46 (September 1973): 439-453. Siane Ellen Hamer, “Amy wasn’t writing about flowers,” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. 11.4 (July-August 2004). Amy wrote on Remy de Gourmont, Émile Verhaeren,

Ellen

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