A Love Song

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry magazine in 1915 to great acclaim. The American poet Ezra Pound called it “the best poem I have had or seen from an American” and became Eliot’s friend, mentor, and champion. In the same year, Eliot, who had been born in St. Louis and educated at Harvard, relocated to England, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1922, he published the long poem “The Waste Land”; the poem had enormous, wide-reaching impact and made Eliot’s reputation as the most influential poet of the twentieth century. Literary critic Alfred Kazin called him “the model poet of our time, the most cited poet and incarnation of literary correctness in the English- speaking world,” while Northrup Frye wrote, “A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read.”

One of the reasons Eliot’s work received so much attention is that he was at the forefront of Modernism, an artistic movement that reacted against the excesses of nineteenth century art, which Modernists found overly emotional and sentimental. Modern art is characterized by:
- the desire to create art that is experimental and challenging. James Joyce is reported to have said that it took him twenty years to write his novel Finnegan’s Wake, and he expected it to take the reader twenty years to read it. Art that is easily understandable is popular art, produced on a mass scale for people who don’t want to have to work to appreciate it. True art, high art, requires thought and concentration and sophistication—it challenges the audience and may even outrage and offend;

- a feeling of being in a spiritual wasteland. Many artists saw World War I as an indication that the modern world had irreparably lost its connection to the great Western traditions. Europe, the home to the highest achievements in art, science, philosophy, architecture, literature, had produced a war of unimaginable brutality, wiping out an entire generation of men. Many people felt they had nothing to believe in any more;

- fragmentation and discontinuity. Many artists express their feeling that life has little sense of order or connectedness by producing art that reflects that disconnectedness and disorder. Narratives present experience in a fragmentary way because life itself is fragmented and hard to follow. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, for example, is told by four different narrators, who tell the story from remarkably different perspectives, remembering the same event in different ways. The novel’s first narrator, Benjy, is mentally challenged, making his story difficult to follow.

It’s not hard to see the way “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” expresses some of these values. In the first place, the title contradicts the reader’s expectations: “J. Alfred Prufrock” doesn’t seem like a very romantic name. It’s hard to think of a romantic heroine murmuring the words, “Oh, J. Alfred Prufrock, you magnificent brute, sweep me into your arms.” The name comes across as a little prim, probably not the name of a person whose love song you’d find fascinating. So even the title has a little bit of an edge to it—it’s not what a reader would expect from a sentimental, emotional poem.

The epigraph adds to the confusion. For one thing, it’s in Italian, and when it was originally published, no one provided a handy translation in the footnotes. Secondly, if you get past the language problem, it’s from Dante’s Inferno, which, again, sends mixed signals—a love song that starts out with a reference to a journey through Hell? And then consider the content of the lines: Guido da Montefeltro, one of the people being punished in Hell, tells Dante that he’s only telling him his story because he’s heard that no one in Hell can return to the world of the living—if he thought Dante could return to the world, he wouldn’t say another word.

Again, the references to Hell and the sense of shame over saying anything that might be overheard—not what we tend to think of when we think of a love song.

The poem starts out promisingly enough:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky

This seems like a lovely beginning, the reader thinks, an invitation from the poet to go with him, and some description. And then we get to the third line, which compares the sky to “a patient etherised upon a table.” Again, it’s an unexpected—what kind of love song contains the image of somebody under anesthesia, about to be operated on? What sort of impression is this poem trying to convey, anyway?

The lines that follow add to that impression, with images of cheap hotels and “half-deserted streets” and restaurants with sawdust and oysters on the floor and streets “like a tedious argument.” It all seems tawdry and unappealing . . . and, again, the reader is left to wonder what sort of love song this could be.

The opening stanza is followed by a two line stanza:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

Unfortunately for the reader, the stanza raises more questions than it answers. Where is this room? Is it the place the speaker is referring to when he says “Let us go and make our visit”? Why are the women talking of Michelangelo? Why are they coming and going? What does this have to do with the overwhelming question the speaker mentioned in the first stanza?

When we move on to the third stanza, we find not an explanation of what’s going on with the room and the speaker but a description that compares the yellow fog to a cat. The fourth stanza mentions the fog, but mainly talks about having time to do a number of things, to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,” to “murder and create,” to experience “a hundred indecisions” and “and a hundred visions and revisions.” This tells us something about the speaker’s attitudes toward life, but it doesn’t really answer the questions that have been raised in the poem. And then in the fifth stanza, we’re back to the room with the women talking of Michelangelo. Who are these women? Why do they keep talking about Michelangelo? Why bring this up again?

Obviously, Eliot is using fragmentation and discontinuity in the poem, playing with the reader’s expectations that the poem will tell a story that’s easy to follow. The poem purposely refuses to tell a clear story—it gives us bits and pieces here and there, but it doesn’t tell how these fragments are connected.

One of ways critics have responded to the poem is by trying to recreate the story the poem tells, putting the fragments together to make a coherent narrative. The story that many of them tell is that Prufrock is struggling with the thought of going through the city to the room where the women come and go because he wants to propose marriage to a certain woman, and yet he’s haunted by self-doubt and fear.

Another approach is to say that what the fragments add up to isn’t so much a story as a character study. What we get out of the poem is a sense of who J. Alfred Prufrock is—saying there’s a story about a marriage proposal is trying to read more order into the poem than is really there. In addition, the poem tells us something about the society that produced J. Alfred Prufrock—Western civilization is obviously in decline if it produces these sorts of men who sing this sort of love song.

If we look at “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as a character study, we find a character who is filled with hesitation and self-doubt. He wonders “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”—the repetition makes him seem even less bold—and he’s afraid that people see him as ridiculous, with thinning hair and spindly arms and legs. He seems to be haunted by the idea that his life is trivial and meaningless: he says “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons” and “I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;/I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,” and “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,” and “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./I do not think that they will sing to me.”

He’s also convinced that he’s experienced everything there is to experience. There are a number of points in the poem that remind readers of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes: like Ecclesiastes, “Prufrock” conveys the idea that there’s nothing new under the sun, that human life is vanity and mist. The repetition of the line “I have known them all already, known them all,” conveys the sense that the speaker finds life predictable and tedious—there’s nothing for him to look forward to.

Prufrock is also frightened of making connections with other people. The line that speaks of preparing “a face to meet the faces that you meet” conveys a sense of disconnection—putting on a front with other people rather than being open and honest and sincere. He’s afraid of encounters with people with “eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,” leaving him “pinned and wriggling on a wall,” like a butterfly that’s been caught by a collector. When he thinks about saying the things that are truly important to him to someone he knows, he’s terrified that they won’t understand him: he pictures himself as squeezing “the universe into a ball/To roll it toward some overwhelming question,/To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all,’” only to have the woman he’s talking to respond “That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all.” In other words, if he made a major revelation of what he thinks is most important in the world, he fears the person with whom he shared this intimate moment would completely misunderstand, would be unable to relate to what he had to say. He even repeats the scene in the next stanza, this time using the image of projecting his nerves, his emotions, onto the screen in front of her, only to have her say, carelessly, “That is not it at all,/That is not what I meant at all.”

It’s not the happiest poem to end our class on, but it is hugely significant. Thanks for all your good efforts in this class—I apologize for any problems I’ve caused by being out of town and off campus so often and by being kind of naive about how to teach a class online. Have a great spring semester!

For discussion:

- What does “Prufrock” tell us about the culture that the speaker lives in? What does the speaker think of the world he lives in and the people around him?

- What do you think of the Modernist idea that art should challenge and provoke its audience? Can you think of any contemporary art or music or literature that seems designed to frustrate or anger the audience?

Our next-to-last poet

Like Franz Kafka, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) worked for an insurance company; by day, Stevens was an executive with the Hartford Accident and Insurance Company, and at night and on weekends he wrote poetry.

I’m not going to say that Stevens’s poetry makes us long for the clarity of the Romantic poets, but it can be a little difficult to understand at times. It’s helpful to know a little bit about Stevens’s ideas about poetry and the imagination. He was influenced by his studies at Harvard with the philosopher George Santayana, who planted the seeds for Stevens’s ideas that in an age of skepticism, poetry can fulfill the function of religion. Critics say that Stevens’s poetry explores “the role of the imagination in relation to reality, or the reality of poetry in relation to the reality outside it.” Frank Lentricchia states Stevens sees imagination as giving order to a meaningless, disordered reality: “Reality, as alien being, is a ‘violence’ which ever pressures us . . . and the imagination is the response of our subjective violence which pushes back against inhuman chaos. Imagination makes space between us and chaos and thereby grants momentary release from sure engulfment, madness, and death.”

One example of this idea can be found in “Anecdote of the Jar” (Norton 1904). The speaker in the poem says he placed a jar on a hill in Tennessee. The jar isn’t special—it’s “gray and bare,” but it’s a product of human imagination, and it transforms the landscape. The lines “It made the slovenly wilderness/Surround the hill” conveys the idea that the jar becomes a center of interest in a wilderness that previously had no center at all—it gives the wilderness focus. And Stevens goes even farther than that in the next few lines, saying, “The wilderness rose up to it/And sprawled around, no longer wild.” The mere presence of a work of art, even a simple one like a bare jar, tames the wilderness, makes it something that human beings can live with and in. Reality is alien, wild, until art changes it into something human.

The same sort of idea can be found in the poem “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In this poem, the speaker is watching a woman on a beach. The woman is singing a song, and, according to one critic, through her song, the singer transforms meaningless and menacing reality (the sea) into a meaningful construction. Stevens calls the sound of the ocean “inhuman” and says the ocean is “like a body wholly body”: it has no mind, no meaning. It’s completely physical. We can also see him reject Romantic pantheism (the belief that God’s spirit inhabits everything) when he says “The sea was not a mask”—he’s implying that God is not concealed behind the appearance of the sea, as some Romantic thinkers might have claimed.

He goes on to say that the woman’s song is distinctive from the sound of the sea, “even if what she sang was what she heard.” The singer may be trying to imitate the sound of the sea, but what she sings is a human song, art instead of reality. A couple of stanzas later, Stevens makes the claim that the song creates the sea, or at least transforms the way we see the sea, giving it a human reality:

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Art, in a sense, creates the world. The material, chaotic, inhuman world is basically unknowable, but art creates the world on knowable, human terms. The sea becomes what the singer says it is—there’s no other way for human beings to understand it.

The two final stanzas of the poem present the speaker, having heard the singer’s song, seeing the sea in a fresh way, observing the lights on the fishing boats “Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,/Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.”

This whole notion may remind you of Shelley’s statement that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world; Stevens’s version would be something like “Poets are the unacknowledged creators of the world!”

“Sunday Morning” sets a scene in the poems first lines: a woman is lounging with coffee and oranges on a lazy, sunny Sunday morning when she begins to think about the traditional associations of Sunday, such as Palestine and Jesus’ death. The poem works as a kind of argument between the speaker of the poem and the woman: the speaker feels that transcendent, traditional religion should be abandoned for an appreciation of the beauty of the physical world, while the woman feels drawn to thoughts of heaven and eternal life.

Section II provides examples of the beauties of the physical world: “Shall she not find in comforts of the sun . . . /Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?” In Section III, the speaker traces the conception of divinity from Jove (the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Zeus), who was transcendent and remote from human beings, to Jesus, who was a mixture, in Stevens’s presentation, of humanity and the heavenly. The speaker suggests that the next step should be an understanding of divinity as entirely human, saying the result will be that earth shall “seem all of paradise that we shall know.”

In Sections IV through VI, the speaker and the woman discuss her need for permanence: she says she understands that the earth is beautiful, but earthly beauties don’t last. Paradise needs to be imperishable. The speaker gives two basic arguments: 1) because there isn’t a real heavenly paradise, any earthly paradise will be more permanent than something that doesn’t exist; and 2) there wouldn’t be any beauty without impermanence: we get tired of anything that’s permanent, and we’re only really aware of the beauties of experiences and items that are rare, fleeting, and impermanent. A permanent state of anything wouldn’t be paradise at all: we’d find it dull and oppressive.

Sections VII and VIII are a call for an abandonment of traditional religions that focus on non-earthly paradises and the establishment of a kind of material religion built upon an appreciation of the beauties of the earth. The poem’s final lines are beautifully written, an attempt to create in the reader a sense of religious wonder and awe at the loveliness of the natural world:

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink.
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

It’s beautiful, even lush poetry, but it never strikes me as an adequate religion. Apparently, at the end of his life Wallace Stevens felt the same way: according to the nuns at the hospital where he died, Stevens had a deathbed conversion, becoming a Christian before he passed away. You never can tell what people are going to do.

For discussion:

- I’ve suggested that Stevens’s ideas reflect some of Shelley’s thoughts. Does his poetry remind you of anything else we’ve read in this class?

- One of the characteristics of the Modernist movement is that works are meant to be difficult to understand. According to a literary dictionary, “Many modern productions in prose or verse are presented without overt solicitation of the reader’s interest, emotions, or understanding and are difficult to apprehend because they are designed to have the vividness of a well-made artifact, the reality of an object.” Do you feel that Stevens is working this way, trying to make his poems vivid and beautiful rather than understandable?

And when he woke up he was a bug!

In his will, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) stated he wished all of his writings to be burned. After Kafka’s death from tuberculosis, his literary executor, Max Brod, ignored his friend’s wishes and had his novels and stories published. This presents a sort of ethical quandary for readers of Kafka’s work: on the one hand, we’re glad we can read the fiction, but on the other hand we have to feel a little uncomfortable knowing that the author didn’t want the fiction to be published and the only reason we’re reading it is that somebody violated the author’s last requests.

On the other hand, having his last wishes ignored is consistent with Kafka’s life. His father forced him to attend German schools in Prague (the family was Czech, not German) because the Germans were the elite of the city; when Kafka was older, he was forced to go to law school and work at an insurance firm, where he stayed until 1922, when complications from tuberculosis forced him to resign and seek treatment.

One critic’s evaluation of Kafka’s work is as follows:

“In his works, Kafka presents a grotesque vision of the world in which alienated, angst-ridden individuals vainly seek to transcend their condition or pursue some unattainable goal. His fiction derives its power from his use of precise, dispassionate prose and realistic detail to relate bizarre, often absurd events, and from his probing treatment of moral and spiritual problems.”

In the novel The Trial, for example, the hero is accused of a crime and required to defend himself in court, but he isn’t told what crime he’s supposedly committed. The novel describes his struggles with bureaucracy and the legal profession, trying to keep himself from being punished and fighting to learn what he’s being accused of.

Many readers are frustrated by The Metamorphosis because it doesn’t play out in the way we expect. We never find out, for example, why Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as an enormous insect: we anticipate that when something this outrageous happens in a story, the author will provide us with some kind of explanation. Yet Kafka never even addresses the question. Furthermore, Gregor’s reaction to being transformed into an enormous insect is unusual, to say the least: instead of screaming hysterically or even becoming agitated, his reaction is to think about how stressful his job is:

“Oh, God,” he thought, “what a strenuous profession I’ve picked. Day in, day out on the road. It’s a lot more stressful than the work in the home office, and along with everything else I also have to put up with the agonies of traveling—worrying about making trains, having bad, irregular meals, meeting new people all the time but never forming any lasting friendships that mellow into anything intimate” (Norton 2000).

You probably haven’t spent much time speculating about how you would react if you were transformed into a giant insect . . . but you probably wouldn’t start thinking about how much you hated your job.

At the same time, however, Kafka presents the details of Gregor’s transformation in a very realistic way, making this situation seem vivid and at least somewhat believable:
“He lay on his hard, armorlike back, and when lifting his head slightly, he could view his brown vaulted belly partitioned by arching ridges, while on top of it, the blanket, about to slide off altogether, could barely hold. His many legs, wretchedly thin compared with his overall girth, danced helplessly before his eyes” (1999).

The two parts don’t really seem to go together—Kafka presents the physical transformation in a realistic way, but Gregor reacts to the transformation by trying to get up and go to work and reassuring his family that everything is all right.

A number of other elements in the story are strange but seem significant. Notice that Gregor seems to enjoy being a bug: when he falls onto his legs after several paragraphs of trying to walk upright, Kafka writes, “The instant this happened, he felt a physical ease and comfort for the first time that morning” (2008). Similarly, when his sister brings a variety of foods into his room to see which ones he likes, he’s drawn to the rancid foods and disgusted by the fresh foods (2011), and he develops the habit of walking on the walls and ceiling of his room: “He particularly liked hanging from the ceiling. It was quite different from lying on the floor: he could breathe more freely and a faint tingle quivered through his body” (2015).

His sister undertakes the project of moving the furniture out of his room so it will be easier for him to climb on the walls, but in the middle of that effort his mother objects, saying, “If we remove the furniture, isn’t that like showing him that we’ve given up all hope of his improvement and that we’re callously leaving him to his own devices?” (2016). Gregor, who had at first been pleased at the thought of having the furniture moved out, is moved by his mother’s words: “Did he really want the warm room, so cozily appointed with heirlooms, transformed into a lair, where he might, of course, be able to creep, unimpeded, in any direction, though forgetting his human past swiftly and totally? By now, he was already on the verge of forgetting, and had been brought up sharply only by the mother’s voice after not hearing it for a long time” (2016).

Ironically, when he rushes out to keep his mother and sister from carrying away his furniture, he frightens his mother and eventually ends up involving his father, who attacks him with apples, causing a lingering wound that may contribute to Gregor’s death.

It’s interesting, too, to note the transformation that takes place in the family’s attitude toward Gregor. Late in the story, the sister, who had been so supportive of Gregor when he first became an insect, tells the parents she thinks their problem is believing the insect is really Gregor: “Just how can that possibly be Gregor? If that were Gregor, he would have realized long ago that human beings can’t possibly live with such an animal and he would have left of his own accord. We might have no brother then, but we could go on living and honor his memory” (2027). And, after hearing her speech, Gregor retreats to his room and seems to will himself to die.

Not surprisingly, many critics have offered many interpretations of The Metamorphosis. One interpretation is that Gregor’s transformation works as a metaphor for the various ways a family member can go from being one of Us to being an Other. A person who falls in love with the wrong sort of person or undergoes a conversion to the wrong sort of religion can be viewed by his or her family as some kind of monster. In the past, students have said Gregor is being treated as someone who has come out of the closet as homosexual might be treated by his or her family. And a number of people like the explanation that Gregor’s transformation might be a metaphor for some kind of disease—Gregor is analogous to a patient with a long-term illness who experiences so much physical degeneration that it’s easy to see him as being less than human.

Since Kafka was a contemporary with Sigmund Freud, a number of interpretations involve Freudian concepts. One such interpretation relies on Freud’s idea of the Oedipal impulse, the theory that young boys have the impulse to kill their fathers and have sexual relations with their mothers (Yes, Freud is kind of icky.). According to this interpretation, Gregor has become the breadwinner of his family, taking his father’s traditional place. As a result of this symbolic murder of the father, Gregor experiences guilt and inner turmoil, which manifests itself as a transformation into a monstrous vermin.

Another Freudian interpretation relies on Freud’s structure of the self as ego, superego, and id. The id is the part of the self that is impulsive and unconcerned about consequences; the superego is the part of the self that is concerned about following ethical guidelines and traditions; the ego is the part of the self that attempts to mediate between the demands of the id and the superego. According to this interpretation, Gregor’s transformation is symbolic of the unleashing of his long-repressed id. He’s spent so much time trying to be the dutiful son, working at a job he hates in order to provide for his family, that he’s denied the existence of his personal impulses and desires, and they finally burst out of him, manifested in his transformation into an insect. (Some critics would say that he dies because he continues to listen to what his family wants from him rather than following his own desires)

Another interpretation would focus on connections with Kafka’s own life, taking into account his employment in a job he disliked, his relationship with his domineering father, and other issues from his life. This interpretation would point to remarks Kafka made while he was depressed about his writing ability, saying something to the effect that he was only worthy to be swept up with the household rubbish—which is what happens to Gregor at the end of the story. This reading would also look at Kafka’s reaction to his father’s characterization of one of Kafka’s actor friends as a flea-ridden dog and a vermin: Kafka took those remarks as applying to himself as well.

Finally, another approach to the story would be to see it as what’s known as “a literalization of a metaphor.” We’d all understand if somebody said that work or family life made him or her feel like an insect; this interpretation would see Kafka as taking that metaphor and making it literal: instead of just feeling like an insect, Gregor actually becomes an insect. This helps explain why Gregor barely reacts when he wakes up in the morning and finds himself an insect: people have been treating him that way for a long time, and all that’s happened now is that it’s visible from the outside.

For discussion:

- What portions of The Metamorphosis strike you as interesting, strange, mysterious, unusual? Which passages or details make you wonder what Kafka is up to?

- What interpretations of the story seem most believable to you?

A female, American poet

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) wrote nearly 1,800 poems—only seven were published during her lifetime.

She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Amherst Academy and one year of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary—then she seems to have retreated into her home, interacting only with her family and a small circle of friends.

Dickinson’s family was devoutly religious, but she never made the public profession of faith necessary for joining the church—nevertheless, many of her poems are about religious subjects. One critic refers to her “hymnal meters, her biblical references, clipped Calvinist idiom, and enduring preoccupation with God, Jesus, suffering, death, and (her "Flood subject") immortality.”

“Hymnal meters” means that many of Dickinson’s poems seem to be based on the rhythm of hymns and other songs. This means that you can sing “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” for example, to the tune of “Amazing Grace.”

Other critics have pointed out that her poems contain many paradoxes and riddles, including lines like “it might be lonelier/ Without the loneliness”; and “Water is taught by thirst.” The question of what she really believes about religion or other subjects is a difficult one: one critic points out “The problem with saying where Dickinson stands (say, on the question of a Protestant God) is that she can be found in two or five places at once. Her concerns manifest themselves as continuing self-debates, as varied and often conflicting dramatizations rather than as static position-papers.”

Some of her poems contain sentiments that don’t seem that different from those found in Whitman’s poems. In poem 435, “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” for example, she states that what the majority understands to be sensible and reasonable may actually be madness to someone who has a “discerning Eye.” This seems very much in line with Whitman’s position of radical individualism—it’s best not to follow authorities or traditions or the crowd, because they might be completely wrong. What Dickinson emphasizes, however, is the impact that differing from society might have. “Demur” means to object, but gently: it conveys the idea of saying “I’d rather not” as opposed to a violent rejection of something. Yet Dickinson states that the reaction to that sort of gentle objection is rather extreme: “you’re straightway dangerous—/And handled with a Chain.” Oppose society, even in the mildest way, and, Dickinson says, you’ll provoke a violent reaction.

It’s also interesting to note poem 632, “The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” because it touches on a subject dear to the hearts of both European and American Romantics: perception. In the first two stanzas of the poem, Dickinson celebrates the power of the mind to conceive of vast immensities like the sky and the sea. Her language celebrates the human capacity to understand, to metaphorically contain the sky or absorb the sea. The final stanza is more paradoxical and seems to present a limit. While the first two stanzas present the brain as easily taking in the sky and the sea, in the third stanza it’s presented as being equal in weight to God. When it came to the question of which was more significant, the human mind or God, Walt Whitman clearly came down on the side of the mind—his conception of the religions of the world is that they’ve prepared humanity to stand on their own, and now we have no need for the religions of the past. Dickinson can’t dismiss God nearly as easily. The first two stanzas of the poem present the brain as easily absorbing the sky and sea and having room for more, but that’s not the case here. The brain is the exact weight of God, not heavier than God. Dickinson could be saying that God is the one subject that stretches the capacity of the mind; she could be saying that all we can know of God is limited by the capacity of our frail human minds. She may be saying we should be suspicious of people who try to tell us about God, because their vision of God is tainted by their own personal perspectives; she may even be commenting that God might be a creation of the human mind.

This is one of the reasons readers find Dickinson so fascinating—her poetry is so condensed and cryptic and layered with multiple meanings that we have to keep puzzling over it.

Critic Roger Lundin points out that even though some of Dickinson’s ideas resemble those of her Romantic contemporaries, that “there was perhaps something of Dickinson's Puritan inheritance that led her to perceive the limits of Romantic optimism found in the work of her contemporaries Emerson and Whitman, yet, like them, she refused to accept the notion of Original Sin.”

Dickinson and Whitman share similar ideas on some subjects, but they differ strongly on other topics. One major difference lies in their poetic styles: Whitman’s rambling, expansive poems versus Dickinson’s precise, concise, rhyming lines. Dickinson also seems more aware of life’s limitations than Whitman. It’s hard to imagine Whitman writing poem 341, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” This poems seems to be about the numbness that comes after a great loss—it reminds me a bit of Tennyson’s poem 78 from In Memoriam: “with long use her tears are dry.”

The language of Dickinson’s poem emphasizes the absence of feeling: the nerves “sit ceremonious,” the heart is “stiff,” the feet are “mechanical” and go around in a “Wooden way”; Dickinson’s overall comment seems to be that this is a “Quartz contentment, like a stone”—the pain isn’t as sharp, but the mourner feels the contentment of a mineral, a quartz contentment, not something that’s alive.

It’s hard to imagine the Whitman of “Song of Myself” writing anything similar—Whitman’s pattern is to break through barriers and limitations, not dwell on them. Dickinson seems more far more keenly aware that some problems can’t be solved by a positive mental attitude or sheer force of individual personality. Whitman probably couldn’t have written the lines “This is the Hour of Lead—/Remembered, if outlived.” He doesn’t seem to recognize that there are some sorrows that people just have to live through, without a quick and easy solution, or that some pain can’t be overcome at all—you’ll live with it for the rest of your life. In this case, as in many others, Dickinson’s vision of life seems more complete than Whitman’s

For discussion:

- Based on the poems in the anthology, what does Dickinson think about death? About nature? About relationships?

- The introduction to the section on Dickinson says Poem 754, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” “refers to the way a woman’s life is defined in relation to a man’s” (Norton 1050). Do you see the poem as talking about the relationships between women and men? Why or why not?

The Innocent Sailor

Billy Budd, Sailor wasn’t published until 1924, more than thirty years after Herman Melville’s death. Melville had achieved success with his first two novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), which had been based on his adventures as a sailor in the South Seas. By his death in 1891, however, he was all but forgotten—the work he had thought was his highest literary achievement, Moby Dick (1851), had not sold well or received good reviews, and even though he kept writing stories, novels, and poems throughout the rest of his life, nobody seems to have noticed.

His reputation underwent a revival in the 1920s, when scholars began to recognize that someone who had previously been considered a minor figure who wrote sea stories was instead a major literary talent. Today, he’s considered one of the most important figures in American literary history, and Billy Budd, Sailor is considered one of his most significant works.

Melville sets his novel in 1797, in the years after the French Revolution, when the British are at war with the French and revolutionary fervor seems to be everywhere. One of the practices of the British Navy during this time was impressment—naval vessels had the authority to board any British ship and impress any sailor aboard that ship into service in the Navy. As you might imagine, the sailors who were impressed into the Navy weren’t particularly thrilled about the situation—if you had signed up to be a sailor on a merchant ship and then were forced to serve aboard a military vessel, sailing into naval battles where ships were shooting cannonballs at you, focusing all their efforts into making your ship sink, you might not be especially enthusiastic about your enforced career choice. At the beginning of the novel, Billy Budd, a sailor aboard the merchant ship Rights of Man, is impressed aboard the naval vessel the Bellipotent. Melville stresses that this action take place in an atmosphere in which naval officers are afraid of mutiny—there’s been a mutiny recently at the Nore, and Melville writes

“Reasonable discontent growing out of practical grievances in the fleet had been ignited into irrational combustion as by live cinders blown across the Channel from France in flames” (1002),

The officers of the ship are on alert for signs of mutiny:

“At sea, precautionary vigilance was strained against relapse. At short notice an engagement might come on. When it did, the lieutenants assigned to the batteries felt it incumbent on them, in some instances, to stand with drawn swords behind the men working the guns” (1005).

In other words, the officers are so worried about mutiny that the watch the sailors during battles, afraid that the sailors will use the guns to take over their ships. This atmosphere of worry and paranoia affects everything that follows in the story; fear of an uprising is essential to the plot and probably even the themes, of Billy Budd, Sailor.

There are three main characters in the novel. Billy, the title character, is good-hearted and hard-working, a cheerful person whom virtually everyone on the ship appreciates. Melville describes him as knowing little about his ancestry—he was a foundling, a child abandoned at birth. He’s also very innocent—Melville describes him this way:

“with little or no sharpness of faculty or any trace of the wisdom of the serpent, not quite yet a dove, he possessed that kind and degree of intelligence going along with the unconventional rectitude of a sound human creature, one to whom not yet has been proffered the questionable apple of knowledge” (1000),

and a few sentences later goes on to say:

“Billy in many respects was little more than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company” (1000).

It’s interesting, and probably important, that in the space of just a few sentences, Melville throws in two references to serpents, Adam, and the apple of knowledge—in the very next paragraph, he goes on to mention “the doctrine of man’s Fall, a doctrine now popularly ignored” (1001). If this seems like a lot of talk of the Genesis account of the fall of humanity to you, you’re probably on to something. You might also be interested in noting that for all Melville’s comparisons to Billy being like Adam before the fall, he doesn’t seem to be overly impressed by him: he writes, “Of self-consciousness he seemed to have little or none, or a bout as much as we may reasonably impute to a dog of Saint Bernard’s breed” (1000). An author like Walt Whitman might have been impressed by Billy's freedom from history, his innocence, his openness to experience—Melville, by contrast, says he has the self-consciousness of a Saint Bernard.

John Claggart, the ship’s master-at-arms, the person who administers discipline to the ship’s crew, is rather different from Billy: Melville describes him as displaying intelligence on a number of occasions, and when Melville raises the question of why Claggart dislikes Billy, he eventually begins to talk about natural depravity, saying, “Now something such a one was Claggart, in whom was the mania of an evil nature, no engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short ‘a depravity according to nature’” (1015). One reason Claggart hates Billy, Melville writes, is that he sees Billy’s ignorance, understands that Billy’s spirit “had in its simplicity never willed malice or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent” (1016). Ultimately Melville seems to say that Claggart undertakes his plan to frame Billy Budd for mutiny because he is naturally depraved and hates Billy’s innocence.

The third character of the story, Captain Vere, is unusual in that he’s not merely a naval officer but also a sort of intellectual. He’s well read, with a number of well-developed political opinions. Melville presents him as the sort of person who believes in settled institutions—he resists the fashion for revolutionary thinking that’s common in his time. “While other members of that aristocracy to which by birth he belonged were incensed at the innovators mainly because their theories were inimical to the privileged classes Captain Vere disinterestedly opposed them not alone because they seemed to him insusceptible of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind” (1007). From these sorts of descriptions, the character comes across as practical, interested in stability, and objective, the sort of person who wants what’s best for the majority of people, whether it benefits him personally or not.

The story is fairly simple—after setting some groundwork framing Billy, Claggart goes to Captain Vere and accuses Billy Budd of plotting a mutiny. When confronted with the charge in Captain Vere’s cabin, Billy struggles to speak and then, as was foreshadowed early in the narrative, lashes out with his arm, striking Claggart in the forehead, probably unintentionally, and killing him.

Many readers and critics of Billy Budd, Sailor make a case for interpreting Billy as a Christ figure. Like Billy, Jesus was innocent of sin; like Billy, Jesus was accused of a crime he didn’t commit. In Chapter 25, as Billy is about to be executed, his last words are, “God bless Captain Vere” (1043), a message of forgiveness for the person responsible for his death, just as Jesus asked his father to forgive the people who put him to death out of ignorance. As Billy is hanged from one of the arms of the ship, his execution is accompanied by what seem to be signs and wonders: “At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and ascending, took the full rose of the dawn” (1043-44). Not only is Billy’s death described in Biblical terms, but it turns out that the sailors make Billy a kind of religious figure after his death, keeping track of the spar from which he was hanged and making it into a kind of relic: “To them a chip of it was a piece of the Cross” (1048). In this reading, Claggart can be seen as the devil, because his death recalls God’s warning to the serpent in Genesis that Adam’s seed (Christ) would crush his head. And Captain Vere is sometimes seen as a kind of God the Father figure, having kindly feelings for Billy but sacrificing him in order to fulfill the demands of the law.

Another possibility that many critics offer, however, is that Melville is criticizing what I brought up a few days ago as the idea of the American Adam, the thought that Americans are like Adam before the fall, free from history. Melville criticizes this view, according to this theory, by presenting Billy Budd as ignorant and illiterate, someone who is about as self-conscious as a Saint Bernard. Billy Budd, Sailor presents a picture of what innocence looks like in a world in which natural depravity exists—despite his innocence, Billy is no match for Claggart, and even though he is able to defeat his enemy, he can claim no victory. Captain Vere argues before the other officers of the ship that even though Billy is innocent of plotting mutiny and premeditating Claggart’s murder, he still must be put to death. Captain Vere acknowledges that Billy will be found innocent at the last judgment in heaven, but he says the purpose of martial law is to keep order. He argues that the sailors know the penalty for killing an officer, and if they see Billy acquitted, they will be more likely to mutiny. “They would think that we flinch, that we are afraid of them—afraid of practicing a lawful rigor singularly demanded at this juncture. lest it should provoke new troubles. What shame to us such a conjecture on their part, and how deadly to discipline” (1037). Billy Budd may be innocent in the eyes of heaven, but the purpose of earthly law is to keep order on earth, and focusing on Billy’s innocence will ultimately prevent the law from doing the good that it’s intended to do.

Melville may not actually be attacking Whitman’s ideas in this short novel, but at a number of points in the story he does seem to be saying that it’s foolish to forget about such notions as original sin and natural depravity. Failure to believe in such things can have tragic consequences—it can make us easy prey to people like Claggart, and it cause us to overlook the necessary functions of our earthly laws.

For discussion:

- Billy Budd, Sailor presents many parallels with Biblical stories and characters. What are some that you can find, and what meaning do they give to Melville’s story?

"The African-American Ben Franklin"

Frederick Douglass (c. 1818 – 95) wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), in order to correct false impressions. Prior to its publication, he had worked for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society for four years, giving lectures about his experience as a slave and speaking against the evils of slavery. One of the criticisms leveled against him was that he was too well-spoken—people doubted he had ever really been a slave. He writes Narrative, then, at least in part, in order to give his background, to demonstrate that he knew the atrocities he spoke of first hand.

After Narrative was published, unfortunately, Douglass’s owners became aware that heir escaped slave was living in the North, and Douglass’s friends and supporters began to worry that he would be kidnapped and taken back to Maryland to resume his life of slavery. To prevent this, Douglass spent two years touring Great Britain, giving anti-slavery lectures there, until his friends were able to raise the money to purchase his freedom from his owners.

Douglass’s Narrative is the best known and most highly regarded of hundreds of slave narratives that were published in the nineteenth century. The purpose of writing a slave narrative is to expose readers to the abuses of slavery—most detail the suffering the author has gone through: physical abuse, sexual abuse, having parents or children or spouses taken away when they’re sold to distant owners. Most end with the author’s escape from slavery to the freedom of the North.

One of Douglass’s purposes in writing the Narrative was certainly to convince his readers that slavery was evil and to counter the arguments that defenders of slavery had made. The second sentence of the Narrative presents slave owners as pettily refusing to let slaves know their ages (Norton 923); Douglass points out the ridiculousness of this practice and uses it as a symbol of one of his main points in the book, that slave owners want to keep their slaves ignorant, even if there’s no practical reason for them not to have that knowledge.

A couple of paragraphs later, Douglass begins to talk about the sexual abuse that pervades the slave experience, revealing that his master was his father; he goes on to consider the consequences of that fact, speaking of the perversity of fathers standing by while their white sons beat their black sons (924), and raising the question of whether or not this mingling of the white and black races will have any effect on the arguments of people who claim that black people are slaves as a result of a curse Noah placed on his son Ham in Genesis—how much white ancestry does a person need for that curse to no longer apply?

Many of the passages in the Narrative take a similar approach: Douglass counters the argument that many slaves tell people who ask that they’re very happy in slavery by telling the story of a young man who’s sold away from his family because he didn’t realize the white man to whom he was complaining about his master was in reality his master (931). And when he mentions Mrs. Auld, the mistress who was kind to him, he makes a comment on the corrupting influence of the institution of slavery:

But, alas! this kind heart had but a short tie to remain such. The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon (937).

Another aspect of the Narrative, one that sets it apart from other slave narratives, is that it traces the development of Douglass’s mind and spirit. The Narrative’s structure is that of a bildungsroman, a story of the education of a young person, showing how the protagonist grows and struggles as she or he prepares to become a productive member of society. We see Douglass, denied an education because he is a slave, take it upon himself to steal an education, trading food with little white boys for reading lessons (940), learning how to write through observation and trickery (942).

These accomplishments are consistent with what many people consider the central American story: the story of the self-made man, the person who starts out with nothing and through hard work and determination is able to become an accomplished, influential figure. One example would be Benjamin Franklin, a man who starts his life as the youngest son in an impoverished family but is dedicated to improving himself, getting up early in the morning to practice his composition skills, moving to Philadelphia with virtually no money in his pocket and, because of his dedication to hard work, becoming one of the most respected figures in his adopted city.

In the discussion of Whitman, I mentioned the concept of the American Adam, the idea that Americans are unaffected by the forces of history, that Americans have the ability to overcome whatever circumstances they’re born into, that they can create themselves. Douglass is sometimes referred to as “the African-American Benjamin Franklin,” because he starts out with even less than Franklin and because of his hard work and creativity and personal drive is able to become the most influential African American in the nineteenth century. He’s an example of what critics mean when they talk about the American Adam: he can cast off even the powerful forces of slavery and make himself into what he wants to be.

Other critics, of course, would point out that Douglass’s experience contradicts the concept of the American Adam: his achievements are remarkable, but it would be ridiculous to say that he isn’t affected by the forces of history. His life is shaped by the fact that European settlers in America decided to import African slaves for agricultural labor. These critics would argue that Douglass’s experience is evidence that no one escapes from history. This, too, is a significant point. The conversation about whether Americans should have more faith in the past or the future continues to be controversial.

As I’ve already said, one of the qualities that sets Douglass’s Narrative apart from other slave narratives is its presentation of Douglass’s inner development. Douglass’s story of escaping from slavery focuses not just on his outer location but his inner perception. The turning point in his story comes not when he escapes from slavery but when he stands up for himself against the oppression of Mr. Covey, the slave breaker. In introducing the story, Douglass writes, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (952). As Mr. Covey is attempting to punish him, Douglass decides to resist and is able to keep Covey from hurting him. He presents this as the most significant achievement of his life:

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood . . . . I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact (955).

Even though Douglass remains physically in slavery, he no longer thinks like a slave—slavery is not longer his inner reality. One of the consequences of this inner change is that he becomes dedicated to improving the conditions of his fellow slaves: he establishes a school and teaches his fellow slaves how to read. He writes, “I look back to those Sundays with an amount of pleasure not to be expressed. They were great days to my soul. The work of instructing my fellow slaves was the sweetest engagement with which I was ever blessed” (959). Again, this is consistent with a bildungsroman: the process of Douglass’s education involves not just reading and writing but how to be a free man and what he’s going to do with his freedom. Freedom, for Douglass, doesn’t just mean escaping from physical slavery: it involves thinking like a free person and using his freedom to benefit others.

One of the interesting aspects of Douglass’s Narrative is that he presents himself as losing his last vestiges of slavery long after he’s arrived in the North. In the last paragraph of the book, Douglass describes himself as feeling inadequate to address a crowd at an anti-slavery convention:

The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease. From that time until now, I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren—with what success, and with what devotion, I leave those acquainted with my labors to decide (975-76).

Notice the way all of these ideas come together. Douglass’s last feelings of being a slave leave as he begins his profession of speaking for his enslaved people. His education has led him up to this point—he has now become what he has been trained to be—and the narrative comes to an end.

For discussion:

- What pro-slavery arguments does Douglass argue against in the Narrative?
- What observations that Douglass makes about slavery strike you as surprising or unexpected?

An American Poet

Walt Whitman (1819-92), our first American author in this class, was born on Long Island, New York, in a rural community. He had only a handful of years of formal education; his employment record was eclectic: he worked as a printer, a journalist, an editor, and he wrote a temperance novel preaching against the evils of alcohol. He was also, in many people’s opinion, the first great American poet.

In 1855, Whitman published Leaves of Grass, a collection of poetry that included “Song of Myself.” Critical reaction was . . . mixed. Some critics called it “gross yet elevated,” and “simple yet profound”; critics who didn’t like it called it “noxious weeds,” “spasmodic idiocy,” and “a mass of stupid filth.” Poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson called it “extraordinary poetry”; poet John Greenleaf Whittier threw it into the fire.

Whitman continued to publish Leaves of Grass every few years, adding more material and revising some of the poems. His purpose in writing was not simply to create beautiful poetry—he wanted to be the bard of democracy, to write poetry that communicated the vast scope and diversity of life in the United States. In his Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855 edition), he writes

“The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer . . . he is individual . . . he is complete in himself . . . the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not. He is not one of the chorus . . . he does not stop for any regulation . . . he is the president of regulation. What the eyesight does to the rest he does to the rest.”

Like Shelley, Whitman believes that poetry and poets have a kind of prophetic function. Poetry helps people to see what they couldn’t see before—art helps people to focus on and understand what’s going on around them. Notice that Whitman emphasizes that the only thing special about the poet is that he realizes he’s special, and other people haven’t yet realized how special they are.

Whitman has a democratic vision for poetry:

“A great poem is for ages and ages in common and for all degrees and complexions and all departments and sects and for a woman as much as a man and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning. Has anyone fancied he could sit at last under some due authority and rest satisfied with explanations and realize and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring . . . he brings neither cessation or sheltered fatness and ease. The touch of him tells in action.”

Not only does Whitman believe that poetry is for everybody, but he thinks that reading a poem should move people to action. What makes poetry great is that it empowers people to think for themselves, to make their own discoveries

In many ways, Whitman resembles the English Romantics. Like them, he believes in the importance of the emotions and the individual. When he writes “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” he’s not just celebrating Walt Whitman—he’s celebrating the very idea of individuality. Part of what he wants to do by celebrating his individuality is to encourage people to recognize and celebrate their own individuality.

Part of celebrating individuality involves rejecting the tradition, the old, the inherited. Notice that Whitman isn’t writing in iambic pentameter—his lines are irregular and inconsistent. Some lines are fairly short, and others are very long; notice how the second line of section four reaches all the way to the right margin of the page and then continues into the next line. The line is so long that it breaks past the margin of the page—it isn’t contained by iambic pentameter rhythm or even by the dimensions of the page it’s written on.

Again, this is consistent with the attitudes of the English Romantics, who wanted to break away from the traditions of the past, who distrusted institutions, who believed in newness and freshness and intuition and inspiration. Whitman is in fact classified among the American Romantics.

As R.W.B. Lewis points out in his book The American Adam, however, there are clear differences between the Romanticism of the British and that of Whitman:

“While European romanticism continued to resent the effect of time, Whitman was announcing that time had only just begun. He was able to think so because of the facts of the immediate history in America during the years when he was maturing: when the world was, in some literal way, being created before his eyes. It was this that Whitman had the opportunity to dramatize; and it was this that gave Leaves of Grass its special quality of a Yankee Genesis: a new account of the creation of the world—the creation, that is, of a new world; an account this time with a happy ending for Adam its hero; or better yet, with no ending at all; and with this important emendation, that now the creature has taken on the role of creator.”

You’ll probably recall that Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley tended to have a moment in their poems where they mourned the passage of time, where they thought back on a lost time when the earth was “appareled in celestial light” (“Ode on Intimations of Immortality”). Whitman doesn’t feel that same loss, in part because America from its very beginning has been about renewal. For many writers and thinkers, America is more than just a continent—it’s a second chance for humanity, a place to begin again, a new Eden. According to this way of thinking, Europe has suffered the effects of the Fall of Humanity—it has become old and corrupt. But America is a New World, and Americans are like Adam in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Americans have the opportunity to avoid the mistakes of the past—they can do things the right way this time; they aren’t bound by the past. This view is immensely appealing for somebody like Whitman, who has watched the United States grow and develop over the course of his lifetime, who has watched cities grow out of the wilderness and knows that his government is only a few decades older than he is. He’s witnessed a civilization being created out of virtually nothing—no wonder he believes that the past is unimportant and the individual can make any dream she or he has become a reality.

Obviously, this point of view contradicts orthodox theology. According to the Bible, everyone is affected by history: Adam and Eve sinned and all of humanity has been altered by that sin. There’s no way for human beings to start over again from scratch—we must be redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice.

Even though not all nineteenth-century Americans would agree with the idea that America is a new beginning, that the American is a new Adam, all nineteenth century Americans would have been aware of the idea. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that America was split between “the Party of the Past and the Party of the Future . . . the parties of Memory and Hope.” Emerson and Whitman obviously associated themselves with the future and hope—other Americans were not quite so convinced that the past, memory, and history could be that easily dismissed. What’s unique about America, however, is that it’s the only nation in the world in which it’s possible to believe more in the future than in the past.

What “Song of Myself” conveys in most lines is that Whitman believes in the future more than he does in the past, in his ability to create himself and not be affected by other forces. In section 4, Whitman recounts the questions people ask him about influences on his life:

People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life of my early life or the ward or city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues

Following a much longer list of possible influences, Whitman writes, “These come to me days and nights and go from me again,/But they are not the Me myself.” According to Whitman, his self is independent of his personal history and environment—he can be whatever he wants to be, not matter what.

Whitman makes a similar point in section 51:

The past and present wilt—I have filled them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

He has no use for either the past or the present—he’s not bound by the past because the past is used up, and the present seems equally meaningless to him. The only time Whitman has use for is the future.

Another example of Whitman’s attitude toward history and authority is found in section 46:

I tramp a perpetual journey (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, not church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

Here, Whitman seems to be saying that he doesn’t want to be an authority—he doesn’t want to be an influence on anyone. He doesn’t want anyone to sit down and learn from him; he doesn’t want to establish a library or any other kind of institution. His ideal is to be constantly moving, to always be creating, to never be held back by any kind of precedent. He wants the same thing for other people, too. He doesn’t want anyone to imitate him or follow him—he doesn’t want to be copied. Instead, he says that all he can show people is how to head off by themselves—all he can do is encourage people to go their own way and create themselves by themselves.

In section 52, Whitman presents an image of his radical sense of independence and freedom:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Like the hawk, Whitman presents himself as free, as someone who transcends the rules and expectations of society. It’s important to remember that he’s not just talking about himself—every American has the potential to be that free.

Another of the repeated motifs in “Song of Myself” has to do with the vastness and diversity of the American experience. One of the reasons, perhaps, that Whitman presents himself as so free and unaffected by history is a poet who wants to write a poem that captures the whole of American life has to be able to identify with the staggering expanse of American life. “Song of Myself” is filled with passages where Whitman tries to convey just how amazingly big and complex American life is: in section 16, he writes he is

A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
A Yankee bound by my own was ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,
A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,
A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;

The descriptions go on for line after line, as Whitman tries to fit all of America into his poem. One can argue over whether or not he’s successful, but I have to say that I always come away from the poem impressed that he’s made that attempt.

For discussion:

- Is Whitman celebrating individuality, or is he just conceited?

- Does Whitman remind you of anyone we’ve read earlier for this class?

- In section 51, Whitman has written the famous lines, “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself./I am large, I contain multitudes.)” What’s your opinion of these lines? Is Whitman promoting such radical freedom that we don’t even have to be consistent with ourselves? Is he just careless?

What happened to the duchess?

Robert Browning (1812-1889) married Elizabeth Barrett in 1846. She was by far the more popular poet in their time; Browning’s contemporaries felt that he was not a very skillful poet. His poems were grotesque, and they didn’t conform to ideals of beautiful poetry. Take the lines

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands. (lines 1-4)

Notice how the poem fails to use closed heroic couplets. Instead of the sentence stopping at the end of the second line, it stops early, two words before the end of the line. And then a new sentence begins at the end of line two, spilling over into line three after just a couple of words. A more talented poet wouldn’t be that sloppy.

If Browning’s contemporaries didn’t consider him a talented poet, his later readers were much more appreciative. He’s known now as an innovator in poetry, a master of the “dramatic monologue,” a form of poetry that couldn’t be more different from the conception of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions. In a dramatic monologue, the poet creates a character who speaks throughout the poem, often revealing more than the character really intends. In the typical Romantic or Victorian poem, one reads the words of the poem to discover how the poet really feels about an event or subject, but in a dramatic monologue, the words come from the character, and we often have to read the character’s words carefully to discover what the author is trying to communicate to us.

According to the Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Browning is not the first poet to make use of the dramatic monologue, but he made significant contributions to the form, particularly “subtlety of characterization and complexity of the dramatic situation, which the reader gradually pieces together from the casual remarks or digressions of the speaker. The subject discussed is usually far less interesting than what is inadvertently revealed about the speaker himself.”

Again, it’s possible that one of the reasons Browning wasn’t appreciated during his own time is that he’s not writing lyric poetry—dramatic monologues are at the opposite extreme of spontaneous, emotional poetry.

Today, it’s not hard to recognize Browning’s skill. We start reading “My Last Duchess” wondering about the situation we find ourselves in. Who is the speaker? Why does he call the woman in the picture “my last Duchess?” In the second line we learn she’s no longer alive, but then we may start to wonder why he speaks about her in the way that he does. He doesn’t seem broken up with grief about her death—he’s more interested in showing the painting to whoever it is he’s talking to than in an emotional response to her death. What’s going on here?

As the poem continues, we start putting the pieces together: the speaker is the late Duchess’s husband, the Duke, and he keeps talking about the look of joy on her face, first in reference to the painting and then in reference to her person. We’d expect a husband to be happy that his wife has a joyful look on her face, but it seems to have bothered the Duke. He complains, “She had/A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,/Too easily impressed” (lines 21-23), and soon he’s making a list of things that made her glad but apparently shouldn’t have, including sunsets and a white mule. Again, the revelation makes us wonder: what kind of husband feels upset that his wife is made happy by a sunset?

As the poem continues, the Duke’s objections to his wife’s actions seem more and more strange: he dislikes her thanking other men for things because he feels it seems “as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name/With anybody’s gift” (32-34), and when he speaks hypothetically of talking with her about his feelings, he says, “Just this/Or that in you disgusts me” (37-38)—strong language for what seems to be such an inoffensive action.

Ultimately, he reveals what happened to her: “This grew; I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands/As if alive” (45-47). What he’s communicating, in his off-hand way, is that he had her put to death, and what’s most appalling about the revelation is that he’s so off-hand about it. “I gave commands.” He had a woman killed because she wasn’t sufficiently happier to see him than anybody else.

The rest of the poem is just as appalling, in its own way. The person the Duke is speaking to turns out to be the representative of a Count who is offering the Duke his daughter’s hand in marriage. Learning this gives the poem new context and a different meaning. The Duke has been telling the story with a purpose in mind—he seems to be communicating that he wants the Count to know that if his daughter doesn’t behave as he wants her to, his next Duchess may soon be hanging on the wall as well, looking as if she were alive.

The content of the poem helps us understand why the poem takes the form it does as well. Browning is writing in heroic couplets—he’s not far off from Pope in that regard. But he starts and stops the lines at unexpected places, making the reader stop in the middle of the line and rush through the end of one line to get to the next, so we can often read an entire Browning poem without realizing that it was written in couplets. I’d argue that this is appropriate to his subject—he’s writing about characters who are anything but smooth and metrical and regular and beautiful. The way the poem is written reflects who they are.


For discussion:
- The Duke obviously has an agenda—his portrayal of the Duchess gives only his point of view. If we try to see past his point of view, what was the Duchess really like?

- The poem could have just involved the Duke telling the story of the Duchess—instead, we begin with a discussion of her portrait and end with a reference to a bronze statue by Clause of Innsbruck. We have to assume Browning put these elements in the poem for a reason—what do they contribute to the poem’s overall meaning?

Faith and loss

The next two authors we’ll be looking at are considered Victorian rather than Romantic. The Victorian period lasts from 1830 to1901: in other words, the reign of Queen Victoria. It’s separated from the Romantic period for a number of reasons—for one thing, England goes through a number of social changes, one of which is the social and economic consequences of industrialization. We’ve had a little discussion of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on Romanticism; during the reign of Queen Victoria, England becomes an industrial and economic power. Industrialization brings about enormous changes in the way people live and work and travel; it also brings an enormous increase in wealth. Historian David Thomson calls the period “one of strenuous activity and dynamic change, of ferment of ideas and recurrent social unrest, of great inventiveness and expansion.”

The first couple of decades of Victoria’s reign are marked by fears of social revolution: there are masses of workers living in crowded, unsanitary conditions, working long hours in dangerous environments for very low wages. There’s widespread anxiety that the workers will simply rebel and by their sheer number take over the wealth of society. One of the solutions to the problem is implemented in 1846, when Parliament repeals the Corn Laws, tariffs against imported grain which kept prices high for English farmers. This causes the price of food to fall, resulting in significant improvements in the lives of English factory workers. Another improvement comes in the form of the Factory Acts passed in 1848, which place restrictions on child labor and the number of hours laborers can be required to work.

Another crisis of the time involves the challenge that scientific discoveries pose to religious faith. Geological and astronomical discoveries suggest the world is much older, and much smaller, than Christians had assumed; humanity may be nothing more than a speck in a vast universe, a brief moment in an unimaginably long panorama of time. The essayist John Ruskin wrote in 1851, “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the cadence of the Bible verses.” Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) adds to the anxiety: it makes a strong argument in the case that science has been making for years, namely that the account of origin of life in Genesis is contradicted by scientific evidence and there is no inherent distinction between humanity and animals. At the same time, scholars have begun to study the Bible using what they believe to be scientific methods; the “Higher Criticism” treats the Bible not as the sacred, infallible Word of God but as a historical document created by human beings.

Some of these anxieties are reflected in the literature of the time. To get a good sense of the character and scope of Victorian literature, it would be helpful to read novels by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackery, the Brontes, and others, but I imagine you’re just as glad not to be reading three or four hundred extra pages this semester. Hurray for poetry!!

Victorian poetry differs from Romantic poetry in subtle ways. There isn’t the enormous break that we find between Neoclassicism and Romanticism—poetry is still generally lyric, which means it’s a personal, emotional statement by an individual. Tennyson writes in the tradition of Keats, and Browning was influenced by Shelley early in his career. One difference is that the Victorian poets led less scandalous lives than their Romantic predecessors: both Browning and Tennyson managed to make it to the end of their lives without abandoning the mother of their children, for example. Also, Victorian poets tend to be a bit less experimental when it comes to poetic forms—they don’t come across as thought they’re trying to reinvent poetry from the ground up, as Shelley does at times.

Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam was published in 1850, but it centers around an event that took place in 1833. Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson’s friend/mentor and his sister’s fiancé, dies at the age of 22. This loss shakes Tennyson’s faith and causes him to question humanity’s role in the universe. In Memoriam is a series of poems that focus on Hallam’s memory and Tennyson’s grief—they were written separately and can be read as individual poems, but taken together they give a picture of Tennyson’s recovery from a sense of despair to a feeling of hope. The introduction, which was written after the rest of the poems were completed, gives us a sense of Tennyson’s recovery. The lines “Forgive my grief for one removed,/Thy creature, whom I found so fair./I trust he lives in thee, and there/I find him worthier to be loved” (Norton 889) show Tennyson has returned to faith, but much of In Memoriam is concerned with his struggles with belief. T.S. Eliot wrote that In Memoriam was remarkable not “because of the quality of its faith but because of the quality of its doubt.”

A number of themes are repeated throughout the sequence. One of the themes, religious doubt, shows up in poem 3, where Tennyson pictures sorrow as a priestess tempting her hearer that life has no purpose: “’The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run;/A web is woven across the sky/ . . .And all the phantom, Nature, stands—/With all the music in her tone,/A hollow echo of my own,—/A hollow form with empty hands’” (891). His grief leads him to question whether there is any order to the universe, to doubt that there’s any meaning to the world other than sorrow, and to believe there’s a barrier between humanity and God. The same ideas come up again and again in the sequence.

Another repeated theme addresses questions of why Tennyson is writing these poems. In poem 4, Tennyson observes that he holds it “half a sin/To put in words the grief I feel;/For words, like Nature, half reveal/And half conceal the soul within” (891). The poems give only a partial picture of his grief; however, he goes on to observe that writing them acts as a kind of drug against his sorrow: “A use in measured language lies;/The sad mechanic exercise,/Like dull narcotics, numbing pain” (891).

The same theme comes up again in poem 21, where Tennyson constructs a little dialogue from figures who overhear his poems for Hallam and feel compelled to criticize: one calls him a weakling, another says he’s pretending to be sadder than he really is so that people will notice what a good friend he is, another criticizes him for writing about a personal matter when there are so many political and scientific subjects that he really ought to be writing about instead. In this case, Tennyson’s justification is to compare himself to a songbird and say he’s writing these poems because that’s what poets do:

I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing;

And one is glad; her note is gay,
For now her little ones have ranged;
And one is sad; her note is changed,
Because her brood is stolen away. (896)

Poems 28, 78, and 106 focus on successive Christmases, giving us insights into how Tennyson’s emotions are changing year by year. Poem 28 describes the sound of Christmas bells ringing out from four surrounding towns, and then Tennyson notes they “Swell out and fail, as if a door/Were shut between me and the sound.” The imagery suggests he’s cut off from the celebration of Christmas, and the final two stanzas give us a picture of someone who’s wrapped up in nearly impenetrable grief:

This year I slept and woke with pain,
I almost wished no more to wake,
And that my hold on life would break
Before I heard those bells again;

But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controlled me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touched with joy,
The merry, merry bells of Yule.

Poem 78 begins with a description of a Christmas celebration: holly on the hearth, snow, dancing, singing, games. Slipped into the middle of the description are the lines “But over all things brooding slept/The quiet sense of something lost.” The poem concludes with a mournful observation:

Who showed a token of distress?
No single tear, no mark of pain:
O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
O grief, can grief be changed to less?

O last regret, regret can die!
No—mixed with all this mystic frame,
Her deep relations are the same,
But with long use her tears are dry.

The change is that Tennyson is not obviously in pain anymore, but it’s not because he’s recovered from his friend’s death: he’s cried so much he can’t cry anymore. It’s an interesting progression from year to year.

In Poem 106, we return to the sound of the Christmas bells, but the mood and the themes have changed: the focus of the poem is not simply on the loss of one person—it now includes a wider field of human affairs. Note the lines when Tennyson writes “The year is dying in the night;/Ring out, wild bells, and let him die” (lines 3-4) and “The year is going, let him go” (line 7). He seems to be saying, with only the barest metaphor, that he’s ready to stop mourning his friend and move on to something else. The third stanza gives that impression as well:

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Again, he saying, almost directly, that he’s finished spending all his energy grieving for Hallam and is now ready to open his mind to broader social concerns, which he addresses in the rest of the poem.

In Poems 55 and 56 introduce a scientific theme—like many people of his day, Tennyson was aware of discoveries in geology and biology, and he was concerned about their implications on religious faith. Poem 55 begins with the thought that our belief in life after death comes from something that God has placed in our soul. Then he notes that this belief seems to be refuted by what we see in Nature:

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life (lines 5-8)

When we look at the natural world, in other words, we see that it doesn’t really seem to care about individuals at all—it’s main interest is in preserving the species, not the individual. In the next stanza he provides an example: a plant may produce fifty seeds, but only one actually grows into a new plant—the other forty-nine just rot. The logical conclusion, Tennyson seems to suggest, is that Nature doesn’t care about preserving individuals, so why should we believe that God is interested in preserving the individual spirit after death?

Poem 56 picks up on the theme from the previous poem, and takes Tennyson’s despair even further:

“So careful of the type?” but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, “A thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go.”

Again, Tennyson is drawing on his knowledge of geology. Fossil evidence reveals that entire species of plants and animals no longer exist. Not only is Nature careless of the individual, it’s also careless of the species. The realization causes Tennyson to consider that all of life is simply chance, that all of our beliefs are completely mistaken.

Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravin, shrieked against his creed—

Notice the Darwinian vision of Nature that Tennyson presents, even though Origin of Species hasn’t been published. The natural world shows us a vision of the survival of the fittest, eat or be eaten—what if, Tennyson asks, all our religious commitments are simply wrong? The poem ends with the faintest hope that these questions can be answered:

O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

The answers to these questions can only be found beyond the veil of death. Again, this is faint faith—Tennyson is at one of his lowest points.

The turning point of the poem, according to most critics, is found in Poem 95. Tennyson describes an evening gathering in a country home. The rest of the guests go off to bed, and Tennyson by himself outside. He reads over Hallam’s letters, and then he seems to have a kind of mystical experience where he feels a connection with Hallam’s spirit:

So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last
The living soul was flashed on mine.

And mine in this was wound, and whirled
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world

Aeonian music measuring out
The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance—
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was canceled, stricken through with doubt.

Tennyson has this moment of contact where he feels as though he has some kind of transcendent insight—he almost immediately begins to doubt, and it’s hard for him to put into words, but the rest of the poem gives us a signal that something significant has changed. The wind rises and begins to move the leaves and the trees: it even seems to say “The dawn, the dawn,” and the sun rises.

And East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.

It’s not that Tennyson’s grief is completely removed at this point, but this does seem to mark a transition from day to night, from darkness to light, from doubt and grief to recovery and faith.

The epilogue of the poem gives a picture of a wedding: Tennyson’s sister, who had been engaged to Hallam, has fallen in love again and is marrying Edmund Lushington. The last few stanzas of this poem are a kind of prayer/blessing that this couple will know happiness and that their children will be a step forward in human development:

a closer link
Betwixt us and the crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth’s, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffered, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man that with me trod
This planet was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God (lines 55-68)

Hallam is evoked as someone who was born before his time, a foreshadowing of a future humanity that will live up to humanity’s promise, that will be wiser and less brutal. The poem ends with an affirmation of faith in God, in humanity, and even in the knowledge that Hallam’s death was not a senseless waste but a forecast of what humanity should and will someday be.

For discussion:

- What do you think of T.S. Eliot's observation that In Memoriam is more remarkable for its doubt than its faith? What sections of the poem struck you as interesting, confusing, remarkable, or troublesome?

Two more Romantic poets

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is born a member of the aristocracy; his father is a member of Parliament, and Shelley is in line to become a baron. From an early age, Shelley is opposed to injustice and oppression—he dislikes convention and orthodoxy, While attending Oxford, he publishes a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism, which argues the existence of God can’t be proven on empirical grounds. The university asks him to repudiate the document, but Shelley refuses and he is therefore expelled from Oxford in 1811.

That same year, he elopes with a woman named Harriet Westbrook and begins studying with the radical social philosopher William Godwin, who believes in, among other things, the abolition of private property. Shelley falls in love with Godwin’s daughter, Mary and, believing that cohabitation without love is immoral, leaves Harriet and goes to live with Mary in France. Before leaving, however, the two invite Harriet to come and live with them as a sister.

When Shelley returns to England, he finds that word has gotten around about his actions and most people consider him some kind of monster. Before too long, Harriet drowns herself. Shelley marries Mary and leaves England for Italy in 1818, never to return. In 1822, Shelley himself drowns while sailing his open boat in a storm.

As we might expect, given his unorthodox lifestyle, Shelley is the most politically radical of the Romantic poets. Most Romantic thinkers are influenced by the American and French revolutions, that sense that the common people can overturn centuries-old traditions and create entirely new governments. The poem “England in 1819” (Norton 821) illustrates Shelley’s political beliefs: the first twelve lines list the corruption and oppression in England, leading up to the revolutionary promise of the final two lines. All these problems “Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may/Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.” It’s ironic, too, that these radical sentiments are presented in the form of a sonnet, a highly traditional form .

Shelley’s essay, “A Defence of Poetry,” was written in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s essay “The Four Ages of Poetry,” in which Peacock claimed that in an age of science and technology, poetry is no longer relevant. Shelley claims, by contrast, that poetry has never been more necessary than it is at the present moment. The progress in science has not been accompanied by similar progress in moral understanding, and Shelley makes the case that poetry, by which he means all sorts of creativity, is essential to the moral life:

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.”

In other words, in order to live a moral life, we must empathize with the problems of other people, and this requires imagination—we have to put ourselves in another person’s place. Poetry exercises that process of imagination: reading poetry or other creative work strengthens our moral sense, making us better able to be the kind of empathetic people we ought to be. Poetry is the exercise room of the moral sense.

In the conclusion of the essay, which is found on pages 823 and following in the Norton anthology, Shelley writes that English poets have historically anticipated the political movements that lead to greater freedom.

“The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The persons in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the messengers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve the Power which is seated on the throne of their own soul” (824-25).

The example Shelley is thinking of is almost certainly John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost. Not only was Milton a great, serious English poet, but Shelley, like many Romantic thinkers, saw the portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost being kind of prophetic—he would see Satan as being a noble rebel against the tyranny of God’s reign. Milton wouldn’t have agreed with that characterization—he was a Puritan, after all—but Shelley saw him as subconsciously anticipating the revolutionary spirit that would reach full fruition during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. No matter what he thought he believed, Milton communicated the spirit of the age.

The ending of the essay is very stirring, trumpeting the prophetic role that poets play in history:

“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”

This all seems like a bit of an overstatement, but many people in our era feel the same way. Creative people control the way we view the world. Lots of people are worried about the values of the creative people in Hollywood, because their products shape the way that the rest of us view the world. Television, music, movies, video games, all sorts of entertainment is believed to have significant influence on the values of Americans, and even though most of the people who advocate we be careful about our entertainment wouldn’t use Shelley’s phrasing, they really do believe that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Moving from Shelley’s ideas about poetry to one of his actual poems. “Ode to the West Wind” is made up of five sections, each containing fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. This is the traditional sonnet form, although the rhyme scheme is not traditionally associated with sonnets. Notice that sections I through III are introductory: each of them addresses the west wind and ends with the plea, “Oh hear!” It’s only in Section IV that we actually get to hear what the speaker wants the west wind to hear.

Sections I through III present the west wind as active and powerful at various locations throughout the earth. In Section I, it scatters the dead leaves in autumn and seems to have some sort of power over life and death—it drives the seeds into their graves, but in the spring the wind will also bring new life. In Section II, our view shifts to the sky, where the west wind is blowing clouds around like leaves, brewing up a storm that the speaker associates with the end of the year:

Thou Dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain and fire and hail will burst (lines 23-28).

It’s not just any storm—it’s a dramatic, apocalyptic storm.

Section III takes us to the sea, where the wind wakes up the Mediterranean, stirring up the waves into mountains and valleys, and even reaching beneath the sea, causing “the sea blooms and the oozy woods” to tremble with its power.

In Section IV, the speaker, having finished painting his picture of the winds power, reveals what he wants the wind to hear: he wants the wind to move him—he wants the strength of the wind. Notice that there’s an admission of loss that should be familiar after reading Wordsworth and Coleridge:

If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. (47-52)

When he was a boy, the speaker had no need of the wind’s help, but now that he’s older, he doesn’t have the energy that he once had—he’s crying out to the wind in a sort of prayer (Natural Supernaturalism!) to give him the strength to do the things that he wants to do.

What does he want to do? The answer is in Section V:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! (63-69)

Obviously, the speaker wants his poetry to have an impact on the world—he wants to have a prophetic impact on his world. Yet he finds himself chained and bowed, having fallen on the thorns of life. And so he calls out to the west wind, asking to be lifted up, to be strengthened in his effort to bring this prophecy to humankind. Inspiration has traditionally been associated with breath or wind, and so we see the poet crying out for help, asking to be lifted up and inspired so that he can fulfill his mission of bringing his message to the world.

John Keats (1795-1821) came from a different background than Shelley. His father was the head stableman at a London stable who married the boss’s daughter. Keats’s father died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14. Keats should have inherited a nice sum of money, but the inheritance was tied up in the courts until after Keats’s death.

Keats’s guardian apprentices him to a surgeon so he can have a trade. A surgeon at this point in history is somebody who sets bones—it’s a trade that requires a strong back and isn’t that prestigious. Keats decides he wants to be a poet instead.

He’s not an immediate success. His second book of poetry, Endymion (1818) is attacked by the magazine Blackwoods for political reasons: Keats is referred to as “the Cockney poet” because he’s from London and working class and didn’t attend a university.

In 1818, Keats’s brother Tom contracts tuberculosis, and Keats takes care of him until he dies. In the same year, he falls in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne, and they become engaged. Marriage, however, is impossible, in part due to Keats’s financial condition, in part due to his own tuberculosis.

He writes most of the poems for which he’s remembered in 1819, including “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In 1820, his tuberculosis worsens, and he moves to Italy, where the climate might help him recuperate. He and Shelley plan to meet, but Keats dies before the meeting can take place.

One critical assessment of Keats is that his poetry is

“characterized by a sensuous surface and a presentation of all experience as a tangle of inseparable but irreconcilable opposites: melancholy in delight and pleasure in pain; the desire for a life of both indolence and thought; the attraction of the world of dreams and the actual world; aesthetic detachment and social responsibility.”

He’s also known for a concept he called “negative capability,” which he described in one of his letters as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” His poems raise questions and present paradoxes: they don’t seem to offer cut and dried solutions to life’s problems.

Some students want to connect that urn in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with a funeral urn and make this poem about death, but the Greeks don’t seem to have used urns in that way. Imagine instead a large, decorated urn, something that an English explorer found in Greece and shipped to a museum in London. Stanza I finds the speaker looking at the urn and examining the pictures painted (or perhaps sculpted) on it, in awe of the age of this centuries-old work of art, and asking questions of the scenes depicted on it. Who are these figures? What are they doing? In asking the questions, of course, Keats gives the reader a picture of what scenes are on the urn.

Stanza II begins with the paradoxical statement “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter.” It’s meant to puzzle us a bit—in one sense, it’s a reference to the urn, on which the speaker sees a piper piping a tune that nobody can hear. It’s also related, I think, to Romantic ideas about imagination and inspiration: the melody that exists in our imaginations will always be sweeter, more beautiful, than any actual melody that we can hear. We can imagine Coleridge using this line—the unfinished poem is always more beautiful than any poem you can actually read.

We also get a comment on the permanence of the scene depicted on urn: the musician will never stop playing, the trees will always be fruitful, the lovers will always stay beautiful, always on the verge of kissing, always freshly in love.

Stanza III continues in the same vein, celebrating the permanence of the scene depicted on the urn, and comparing the experience of the lovers on the urn favorably to the experience of lovers in the actual world. In real life, the speaker seems to be saying, love is always disappointing: passion “leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,/A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” Far better to be a lover on an urn, where love is always fresh and new and beautiful.

Many readers feel that the speaker protests too much in these lines—he’s trying too hard to convince us that always being on the verge of kissing somebody who will always be beautiful is far better than actually kissing that person and moving on with the relationship, and living through the joys and sorrows of real life, and growing old with someone. Many readers can’t help but make the connection with Keats’s own life: he knows, at this point, that he doesn’t have all that long to live and that he’ll never marry Fanny Brawne, and he’s projecting some of his own emotions and dreams and feelings of ambivalence into the scene on the urn.

In Stanza IV, the scene shifts abruptly—the speaker has walked to another side of the urn and is looking at a scene of celebration, a crowd of people going out with a priest and a heifer to make some kind of sacrifice. The sense we can get from this abrupt shift is that the speaker can’t face the scene with the lovers anymore—he needs to look at something else right away. And yet we can’t help but notice that what he ends up thinking about isn’t the crowd of people who are going off the to sacrifice, but the town that they’ve left behind: he pictures it as being silent and desolate, abandoned for all eternity. Again, this seems to tell us something about the speaker’s inner state—even though he’s looking at a scene that’s filled with people, he can’t stop thinking about loss and loneliness and desolation.

Stanza V takes a step back to consider the urn as a whole. The speaker calls it a “Cold Pastoral,” another kind of paradoxical statement: “pastoral” refers to pastures, with plants and animals that are living and growing, whereas “cold” offers completely different connotations of lifelessness and stillness. Which is better, to be permanently frozen and eternally beautiful, or to move and live for a brief time? I don't think Keats means for us to have an easy answer; he does say, after all, “Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As dost eternity” The line “When old age shall this generation waste” strikes me as tragically sad—he must know by now that he won’t be one of the people dying of old age. The final lines don’t answer the question the poem has raised as much as they intensify those questions: in the distant future, the urn will remain, saying “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Are truth and beauty really interchangeable? Is beauty enough? Do we want more out of life than beauty? Can art communicate anything other than beauty? Can a “Cold Pastoral” tell us what we need to know about human life; can something that is permanently frozen convey anything at all to the living? Instead of answers, we’re filled up with questions—perhaps this is what Keats meant by “negative capability.”