Sherry Chandler

From A MIdsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, Scene I, Titania the queen speaks:

These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer’s spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable:
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest:
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Folger Library Shakespeare, ed. Louis B. Wright & Virginia A. LaMar (Washington Square Press, 1958)

sort of.

Consider this passage from Seamus Heaney’s essay “Extending the Alphabet: On Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander,” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995):

…we have been rightly instructed about the ways native populations and indigenous cultures disappear in the course of these civilizing enterprises, and we have learnt how the values and language of the conqueror demolish and marginalize native values and institutions, rendering them barbarous, subhuman, and altogether beyond the pale of cultivated sympathy or regard. But even so, it still seems an abdication of literary responsibility to be swayed by these desperately overdue correctives to a point where imaginative literature is read simply and solely as a function of an oppressive discourse, or as a reprehensible masking. When it comes to poetic composition, one has to allow for the presence, even for the pre-eminence, of what Wordsworth called ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure,” and that pleasure comes from the doing-in-language of certain things. …Which is to say that the creative spirit remains positively recalcitrant in face of the negative evidence, reminding the indicative mood of history that it has been written in by force and written in over the good optative mood of human potential.

…for it is obvious that poetry’s answer to the world is not given only in terms of the content of its statements. It is given perhaps even more emphatically in terms of metre and syntax, of tone and musical trueness; and it is given also by its need to go emotionally and artistically “above the brim,” beyond the established norms. These things are the artistic manifestation of that affirming spiritual flame which W. H. Auden wanted the good person and the good poet to show, a manifestation which has less to do with argument or edification than with the fact of articulation itself. (pp. 24-25)

A clarification about grammar: the indicative mood says “she did,” optative mood says something like “if she had done” or perhaps “she might have done.”

As an Irish poet, Heaney is saying that it is good to know that works in the canon of English literature are based on certain empirical assumptions, and that their actions don’t always look all that noble from the point of view of the conquered “barbarians.” Same with Latin literature or Greek.

Even so, says Heaney, there is something about the literature that rises above the politics of the time and that something is found in its music, its form, its art, in the joy it brings us from its playfulness and audacity.

Some snippets from a classic on the subject of meter, Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965):

“Rhythm must have meaning,” Ezra Pound insisted in 1915. And he is right. The empirical study of poetry will convince us that meter is a prime physical and emotional constituent of poetic meaning.

…

Which is to say that regardless of the amount and quality of intellectual and emotional analysis that precedes poetic composition, in the moment of composition itself the poet is most conspicuously performing as a metrist. And the same principle holds for the reader: at the moment of his first apprehension of the poem he functions less as semanticist than as a more or less unwitting prosodist.

…

When Boswell asked Johnson, “What is poetry?” Johnson answered: “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.” In the same way, everyone knows what meter is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.

…

Civilization is an impulse toward order; but high civilizations are those which operate from a base of order without at the same time denying the claims of the unpredictable and even the irrational. The impulse toward the metrical organization of assertions seems to partake of the more inclusive human impulse toward order. Meter is what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern—which means repetition—emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance. Because it inhabits the physical form of the words themselves, meter is the most fundamental technique of order available to the poet. The other poetic techniques of order—rhyme, line division, stanzaic form, and over-all structure—are all projections and magnifications of the kind of formalizing repetition which meter embodies. They are meter writ large. (pp. 3-5)

The mark of a great poem is not just how it establishes its rules of order but in how it breaks those established rules. Too much order, an order too strongly imposed, is the mark of doggerel. Great poems, like great civilizations, strike a balance between order and the chaos from which creativity springs.

And just as an aside, because all roads lead to politics, democracy is like poetry in that it requires order — people must be safe to go about their daily lives — and also a certain amount of chaos. A people overprotected are not free. So Congress may think in passing this latest totally unnecessary FISA bill, they are protecting us from the dangers of external attack. That is I suppose the most generous interpretation. More cynical is the thought that it’s the telecoms they’re protecting. Be that as it may, what they actually seem to be doing is creating a daddy state and imposing order, thus destroying the essence of our democracy from within.

Well, it broke yesterday anyway. That’s good enough for this blog. Always up to the minute.

A correspondent has sent me this item from WLEX-TV news in Lexington:

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - A Kentucky grand jury has indicted an Ohio historian who led efforts to pull an 8-ton boulder from the Ohio River.

Greenup County Commonwealth’s Attorney Cliff Duvall says a local grand jury indicted Steve Shaffer of Ironton, Ohio, on Thursday for allegedly breaking Kentucky law by removing a protected archaeological object from the river. The charge is a Class D felony, punishable by one to five years in prison.

If you’ve been reading here, you know that we’ve been following the story of Indian Head Rock for over a year now.

Things is getting serious.

The Confession

Once, only once, beloved and gentle lady,
          Upon my arm you leaned your arm of snow.
And on my spirit’s background, dim and shady,
          That memory flashes now.

The hour was late, and like a medal gleaming
          The full moon showed her face,
And the night’s splendour over Paris streaming,
          Filled every silent place.

Along the houses, in the doorways hiding,
          Cats passed with stealthy tread
And listening ear, or followed, slowly gliding,
          Like ghosts of dear ones dead.

Sudden, amid our frank and free relation,
          Born of that limpid light,
From you, rich instrument, whose sole vibration
          Was radiancy and light —

From you, joyous as bugle-call resounding
          Across the woods at morn,
With sharp and faltering accent, strangely sounding,
          Escaped one note forlorn.

Like some misshapen infant, dark, neglected,
          Its kindred blush to own,
And long have hidden, by no eye detected,
          In some dim cave unknown.

Your clashing note cried clear, poor, prisoned spirit,
          That nothing in the world is sure or fast,
And that man’s selfishness, though decked as merit,
          Betrays itself at last.

That hard the lot to be a queen of beauty,
          And all is fruitless, like the treadmill toil
Of some paid dancer, fainting at her duty,
          Still with her vacant smile.

That if one build on hearts, ill shall befall it,
          That all things crack, and love and beauty flee,
Until oblivion flings them in his wallet,
          Spoil of eternity.

Oft have I called to mind that night enchanted,
          The silence and the languor over all,
And that wild confidence, thus harshly chanted,
          At the heart’s confessional.

— Charles Baudelaire, translated by Lois Saunders, from Flowers of Evil, A Selection (New Directions, 1955)

The original:

Confession

Une fois, une seule, aimable et douce femme,
À mon bras votre bras poli
S’appuya (sur le fond ténébreux de mon âme
Ce souvenir n’est point pâli);

II était tard; ainsi qu’une médaille neuve
La pleine lune s’étalait,
Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuve,
Sur Paris dormant ruisselait.

Et le long des maisons, sous les portes cochères,
Des chats passaient furtivement
L’oreille au guet, ou bien, comme des ombres chères,
Nous accompagnaient lentement.

Tout à coup, au milieu de l’intimité libre
Eclose à la pâle clarté
De vous, riche et sonore instrument où ne vibre
Que la radieuse gaieté,

De vous, claire et joyeuse ainsi qu’une fanfare
Dans le matin étincelant
Une note plaintive, une note bizarre
S’échappa, tout en chancelant

Comme une enfant chétive, horrible, sombre, immonde,
Dont sa famille rougirait,
Et qu’elle aurait longtemps, pour la cacher au monde,
Dans un caveau mise au secret.

Pauvre ange, elle chantait, votre note criarde:
«Que rien ici-bas n’est certain,
Et que toujours, avec quelque soin qu’il se farde,
Se trahit l’égoïsme humain;

Que c’est un dur métier que d’être belle femme,
Et que c’est le travail banal
De la danseuse folle et froide qui se pâme
Dans son sourire machinal;

Que bâtir sur les coeurs est une chose sotte;
Que tout craque, amour et beauté,
Jusqu’à ce que l’Oubli les jette dans sa hotte
Pour les rendre à l’Eternité!»

J’ai souvent évoqué cette lune enchantée,
Ce silence et cette langueur,
Et cette confidence horrible chuchotée
Au confessionnal du coeur.

— Charles Baudelaire

A passage from Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995) that seems to me somewhat relevant to my post earlier to day about Woodrow Wilson’s CPI:

[Political activists] will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise in leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.

So, if you are an English poet at the Front during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Viet Nam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification.

Such countervailing gestures frustrate the common expectation of solidarity, but they do have political force. (pp. 2-3)

I’ve meandered my way back to the story of Eugene V. Debs as told by Ernest Freeberg in Democracy’s Prisoner (Harvard, 2008). I see certain irony in the way the same domestic policies failed in the early 20^th that are failing in the early 21^st. For example:

In the face of [opposition to the war], the Wilson administration developed a two-pronged strategy to impose unity where there was none. A week after declaring war, the government created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), headed by the energetic progressive journalist George Creel. Mobilizing powerful tools of mass persuasion, Creel hired thousands of writers, scholars, artists, and filmmakers to make the government’s case for war. As Creel later put it, the CPI embarked on a grand experiment in “advertising America,” at home and around the world. This publicity bureau churned out pamphlets, press releases, films, and talking points for a volunteer arum of “Four Minute Men,” cataloging the atrocities of the German army and extolling Wilson’s war crusade. Though Creel insisted that his agency fought foreign propaganda with the power of truth, many of his employees conceded that much of the CPI’s work was badly biased, and in some cases entirely fabricated. Whatever the committee’s value as a source of information about the causes and prosecution of the war, Creel turned the CPI into a megaphone that for the next eighteen months gave the government the loudest voice in the marketplace of ideas. (pp. 45-45)

The other prong of this strategy was repression of dissent. More on that later. Right now, I’ll observe only that unity may be harder than politicians would have us believe, especially when the policies of the government don’t match the desires of the governed.

This photo is three or four weeks old but I think it’s pretty neat and I’ve been wanting to share it with you.

We planted this white pine as a live Christmas tree the year we moved to the farm, 1982. Our twin sons were rising 4 years old, and white pine was about as far as our budget would stretch. It was just about my height, 5 feet 6 inches.

We had several drought years after we moved onto the farm and the tree just sort of sat there for a while. When the rains came back, it began to grow and now tops 25 feet, about a foot a year, but it has always had that drought-stunted ugly spot in the low branches. Still, we’ve never considered cutting it. We’re sentimental about trees.

I’m telling you this now, not only because I took this neat photo but also because my son, who has been living with us for the last several years while he went to graduate school, moved out today to live in West Palm Beach. He’s on the road as I write this.

So the nest is empty a second time. And it is sad. But this time we know we can survive.

_____
In other news, my friend Georgia Green Stamper will be talking to Nick Lawrence tonight on Curtains @ Eight, WUKY, 91.3 on your FM dial, or streaming at http://www.wuky.org/index.html.

Georgia also has a segment of WUKY’s tonic in the can. tonic, the arts and music magazine with a twist, is only available online. Georgia’s segment is a conversation with Mike Graves, Leatha Kendrick, and me. More information when I have it.

The subject of both shows is, of course, Georgia’s new book You Can Go Anywhere from the Crossroads of the World (Wind, 2008).

Georgia will also be reading from the book at Joseph-Beth Booksellers on Sunday, June 22 at 2:00 p.m.

Photograph by T. R. Williams.

Mr. Eliot got that right. These guys sound like the dry grass singing, though we have water enough around here. Not quite too much, like in other places. (See Via Negativa for more on actual cicadas.)

Here are the lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland:”

                        If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

— T. S. Eliot, from “The Wasteland V. What the Thunder Said,” The Complete Poems and Plays (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1934)

Though we have rain in excess and our grass is green, there is something dry and droughty in the song of the locust. Here is “The Raincrow” from Kentucky’s own Madison Cawein (Cawein’s poem “Waste Land” is thought by some to have influenced Eliot’s “The Wasteland” so appropriate enough to pair them here, though their tone and their purpose differs mightily):

The Raincrow

CAN freckled August,—drowsing warm and blonde
   Beside a wheat-shock in the white-topped mead,
In her hot hair the oxeyed daisies wound,—
   O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed
   To thee? when no plumed weed, no feather’d seed
Blows by her; and no ripple breaks the pond,
   That gleams like flint between its rim of grasses,
   Through which the dragonfly forever passes
      Like splintered diamond.

Drouth weights the trees, and from the farmhouse eaves
   The locust, pulse-beat of the summer day,
Throbs; and the lane, that shambles under leaves
   Limp with the heat—a league of rutty way—
   Is lost in dust; and sultry scents of hay
Breathe from the panting meadows heaped with sheaves.
   Now, now, O bird, what hint is there of rain,
   In thirsty heaven or on burning plain,
      That thy keen eye perceives?

But thou art right. Thou prophesiest true.
   For hardly hast thou ceased thy forecasting,
When, up the western fierceness of scorched blue,
   Great water-carrier winds their buckets bring
   Brimming with freshness. How their dippers ring
And flash and rumble! lavishing dark dew
   On corn and forestland, that, streaming wet,
   Their hilly backs against the downpour set,
      Like giants vague in view.

The butterfly, safe under leaf and flower,
   Has found a roof, knowing how true thou art;
The bumble-bee, within the last half-hour,
   Has ceased to hug the honey to its heart;
   While in the barnyard, under shed and cart,
Brood-hens have housed.—But I, who scorned thy power,
   Barometer of the birds,—like August there,—
   Beneath a beech, dripping from foot to hair,
       Like some drenched truant, cower.

— Madison Cawein, from Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. An American Anthology, 1787–1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900; Bartleby.com, 2001.

From UC Television.