It’s That Time Of Year. I loathe that expression. Every time I hear it I want to shriek, “Oh My God, think of something original!” Every day is That Time Of Year. It was probably a fresher phrase–then again, who knows?– when Shakespeare used it to begin this sonnet:

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or few, or none do hang
Upon the boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang:

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

There. I wrote that from memory except for the commas. I set myself a little project last May to memorize four of Shakespeare’s sonnets and this is the last, coinciding with the actual time of year when yellow leaves, or few, or none do hang upon the boughs which shake against the cold; bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. The warm, dry summer that we in Seattle enjoyed this year made an about face right at the Equinox, almost at the moment that I emerged, naked, from my ritual baptism in the Pacific Ocean last week.

I don’t memorize easily any more—too old—but making myself labor at it has its rewards, one of which is that I’ve gotten better at it. As in singing, I don’t know a song until I can cut loose from the written page. That’s when I get inside the music and the text, and start to mine it for all its nuance and delight.

A Shakespeare sonnet looks like an impossible pile of words, many of them archaic, with syntax that would get you flunked from an English class. When I attempt to memorize, the hardest part is getting the correct linking words: as, that, and which. If I get one of those little words out of place, I lose the whole line. Memorizing makes me grasp for any structure, image, rhyme, or syllable count that guides me into the next line or quatrain. It gives me a reason to think about structure, image, rhyme, and syllable count in a way that would make an English teacher’s heart soar. Free of charge, I’ll tip you off to pronounce ruined as one syllable or the line doesn’t scan.

I already knew the first quatrain by heart from years ago when memorizing was easy. I actually think I learned it from the “News from Lake Woebegone” when Garrison Keillor says: “That time of year in Minnesota thou may’st behold when yellow leaves or few, or none, do hang upon the boughs that shake against the cold; bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” I had it on an old cassette tape I listened to so many times I could quote whole hunks of the “news.”

Eventually I noticed that the next two quatrains of the sonnet began with the same opening: “In me thou see’st. . .” Then it was a matter of finding mental images. The first one was easy. I finished memorizing the poem while spending four days at the ocean where I sat on the deck at twilight and watched first the sun set, and then black night take away the day. The image I needed for the third quatrain organized itself around the word glowing: a glowing coal on a death-bed of ashes, soon to be consumed by what was its own blazing fire.

Clearly Shakespeare wrote the sonnet when he considered himself to be in the autumn of his life, which is where I place myself. I have said many times that I love being middle-aged. This is the richest and most alive time of my life. My life glows in me in a way it didn’t when presumably there was a bigger fire. I have a sense of possibility that isn’t less exciting because it’s tempered with experience. In fact it’s preferable to being inflated with the ignorance of my young adulthood.

Still I look at the world with a sweet sadness. I sometimes wonder how much longer I will be here. I am comfortable with not knowing if I will know anything on the other side of death. To me, that is the essence of faith: to surrender to not knowing. It’s what allows me to feel my glow now. And on this end of life, I am finding new ways to love well what I must leave ere long.

I’m back at The Sandpiper. When I was here with Nina in April, I wished I had brought my winter clothes. This week I could use a sundress and some shorts. There are ways around that when one is at a quiet resort mid-week on the off season. I’ll get to them later. For now I am thrilled to be here with my painting friend Susan, although I am doing precious little painting. I am in the upstairs bedroom of the A-frame at a wide open window looking toward the ocean which rolls toward me forever and ever, amen. I am working on a book about teaching and learning. A little later I’ll get out my paints and join Susan who is perfecting her wave technique. In the evening we’ll talk and knit.

Every few hours the waves pull me out for a walk. First time out I wore a pair of shoes, which I immediately took off so I could wade. Then I wore a pair of clogs which also came off as soon as I got past the dunes. Now I leave the cabin barefoot. I can’t walk with Susan. She’s a strider, out for exercise, whereas I want to kick at the water and let the waves overtake me. When I’m in the water, the roar fills my head and I lose track of time. I could be out there for five minutes or two hours and not know the difference.

It’s been years since I’ve seen actual sandpipers on this beach, but there are flocks of them now. Sandpipers with their round bodies and long, skinny legs running down the beach in high heels make me think of my Aunt Frances who had long skinny legs and as she got older, an increasingly round body. We saw flocks of pelicans, something I’ve never seen until now. Last night a black rabbit with huge eyes came onto our beach path and nibbled green things. He let me get within a few yards before he leaped into the brambles.

The moon is in its full phase. I gasped when I saw it last night, glowing over the tops of the trees, yellow-warm as though the sun had zipped under the earth and came up the other side just to mess with me. This morning at 6, it was shining where the sun had shone twelve hours earlier. I speak pidgin earth science so the behavior of the sun and moon are magical to me.

I have The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 1 with me. My friend, another Susan and the wittiest woman I know, suggested I give Donne’s love poems a look because I said I couldn’t bear his (so called) holy sonnets. In fact Donne’s (so called) holy sonnets were the biggest impediment to my cracking open the Norton Anthology of English Poetry Vol I. (Ugh, I’m not reading that book. It’s just Donne’s –so called– holy sonnets. And thus I dispensed with 1200 years of English literature.) Susan, being the wittiest woman I know, at age 18 was captivated with the conceits in Donne’s love poetry. At age 18 I was stopped in my tracks and stumped at why the complex images in his poems were called conceits. I’m afraid I didn’t get much farther than that but was still surprised when Dr. Tyson suggested to me that I just didn’t care for 17th century literature. (Why would he say that? Never mind, just tell me why they are called conceits.)

So I looked at Donne last night. OK, I do like “The Sun Rising.” In fact since 1974, whenever the sun becomes annoying, I have spoken to it: “Busy old fool, unruly sun.”

And I like “A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day.” The St Lucy poem originally insinuated itself into my imagination by it being what Miss Temple was reading

. . . And I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

when the bust of Shakespeare was dropped on her head in the Joan Hickson production of Agatha Christie’s Nemesis.

I started to read the poems Susan suggested but felt pulled back to earlier centuries which have always appealed me. I started in on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Norton folk have tinkered with it to make it easier to read. It’s slow going but after a while I recognize certain words and spellings and it flows.

Now back to ways around the shortage of summer attire at a resort at mid-week and on the off season. There wasn’t a soul on the beach in the early afternoon. I put on my sleeping shirt which I have worn for so many years it’s threadbare, grabbed a towel and worked my way through the baking sand to the edge of the surf. I dropped my towel and my shirt and strode (I can stride when I have to) into the water until it was up to my chest. I exulted in the waves, naked and free and all alone (or so I believe) under the busy old fool, the unruly sun.

During my childhood, at regular intervals, somewhere in our house a book slammed shut and the call rang out, “Finished the book!” My father, my brother and I all participated in this ritual. My mother mostly read the Bible and of course, there’s never an end to that. This morning I quietly closed the 2533 pages of The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2 and informed the cat that I had finished the book and the summer was now over. My copy was a fourth edition that came out in 1979 after my years in college; but before the women’s movement and multi-culturalism had made a dent in the canon, and before the explosion of literary theories that has changed English departments everywhere. So it was, in a way, an Edwardian summer.

I don’t know exactly what possessed me to declare The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2 a summer reading project other than a curiosity about writers whose writings were a mystery to me. But I didn’t want to forego the pleasure of reading writers I remembered enjoying in college so I ended up finishing the whole book. What surprised me over and over was how much I had changed since college. The only writer who has made it through all those years with me is John Keats. All my other old favorites didn’t appeal to me as much this time: Wordsworth, Byron, Housman, Eliot, and Auden.

I met up with new friends: Burns, Coleridge, de Quincey, Mills, Tennyson, Browning, Huxley, Kipling, and Hopkins. I wrote about many of them in my previous 15 posts and I laid the infrastructure to read more of Browning and Hopkins. I also want to read more of who were, in 1979, considered new and upcoming poets: Molly Holden, Elaine Feinstein, and Seamus Heaney. Molly Holden died in 1981, Seamus Heaney died just last month (August, 2013) and Elaine Feinstein is still going strong.

A lot of writers and artists experience depression and it was the recognition of a shared experience that made reading Coleridge, de Quincey, and Hopkins poignant. Especially Hopkins who also had the religion thing going on: that struggle to make sense of what it means to be alive while thinking—or trying to not to– under the constraints of a Judeo-Christian paradigm. Kipling was comic relief to the intensity of the depressed poets. He had a calming Nanny Knows Bestness about him. Browning was wickedly funny. His pokes at religion made him a nice bookend to Hopkins and kept the two of them far enough apart that they couldn’t get into fist fights. Robert Burns spoke to me with the sweetness of a singer.

I certainly never meant to open The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 1, but I was trying to find a poem that I thought was by John Donne. When I couldn’t locate it –or even remember the title—I started scanning the table of contents: The Canterbury Tales. Hmm. I want to read those sometime. Ooh, ooh: The Duchess of Malfi. I remember liking that. “You always were a bloodthirsty little wretch,” my father used to say. The Graveyard Poets. I never gave them enough of a look. Now that I live with a gate opening into a cemetery, I should be more familiar with them. And it’s getting on toward Halloween.

I am so tempted, but I think I’ll wait a bit. Read some New Yorkers and a stack of Funny Times first. Watch a few Vicar of Dibley episodes.

It’s a good idea to know the definition of dapple (cloudy and rounded spots or patches of a color or shade different from their background) before you read Gerard Manley Hopkins because it’s a word he uses a lot and nobody else does. Not ever. I have a dappled relationship with him. Music, painting, and spirituality suffuse his sensibilities but he has religious spots that don’t appeal to me.

He was influenced by the Oxford movement which emphasized a dogmatic side of Christianity and by John Henry Newman whose writing I found unimaginative. He became a Jesuit priest at which point he burned all the poems he had thus far written. In his work as what the British call a God Botherer, his aesthetic interests and his poetic genius fought with his sense of religious duty. I could have written the next sentence in the Norton bio: he became depressed. He struggled with his faith, his art, and his depression all his life.

Completely unlike anything else written during the Victorian period, Hopkins’ poetry is unusual for any literary age. It didn’t catch on immediately even when it was first published twenty years after his death. I read all the poems in the Norton Anthology and because I felt pulled in, I went looking for more. Two things that I learned from my excursion: Hopkins’ writing is transcendent of the Christian language he uses, and the poems must be read aloud.

In this line from “Binsey Poplars” the words themselves recreate the activity the poem describes. I didn’t notice this until I heard the poem read aloud. Here are the trees being cut down:

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled.

And here is the winding waterway where the trees grew:

Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank

In these lines from “The Wreck of the Deutschland,”the “Ws” make the wind:

Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding, unfathering deeps.

At the second line of “God’s Grandeur” and the words “flame out,” I want to throw my arms up and on the word “shook foil,” make jazz hands. By the time I have heard
“have trod, have trod, have trod” and “seared,” “bleared,” and “smeared,” I feel generations of humanity using and abusing the earth.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

“Flame out” and “shook foil” are examples of what Hopkins called “sprung rhythm:” words that operate like a hemiola in music. They temporarily take you out of the meter, and then throw you back in again. The sprung rhythms, the alliterations and the juxtaposition of vivid nouns and adjectives minus a lot of little words that usually link a sentence together make the poems a great read-aloud experience, even when meaning eludes someone like me who has just entered the Hopkins novitiate.

Hopkins’ religious spots bothered me less as I got used to the “inscape,” the “thisness” (Hopkins’ words) of his language and rhythms and melodies. The “inscape” opens to the transcendence. When Hopkins says the Holy Ghost broods over the world, he is using the language of his religion to refer to something ineffable, yet available to everyone, no matter what word they use. Near the end of a poem called “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” is the line,

Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

The idea that Christ plays in ten thousand places suggests that Christ is himself a symbol of something that can’t be contained in the language of any religion or in language at all. Like Teilhard de Chardin’s “Christ Consciousness.” Teilhard was a Jesuit priest as well. You gotta watch those Jesuits.

“The Wreck of the Deutschland” made me a little nauseated. Its subtitle is “To the happy memory of five Franciscan nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec 7, 1875.” The beginning seems to be the expression of what went on in the mind of one of the nuns as she was drowning and I found it hard to read. But one early line kept coming back: “Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.”

If I may be so reductive and if I may mix up all the metaphors and horrify Hopkins scholars, here is the Thisness that resonates with me:

The Christ Mind plays in ten thousand places.

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

Love over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Rudyard Kipling. The few of his poems featured in the Norton reminded me that I had an old copy (1899) of Plain Tales from the Hill that has a swastika embossed on the front. In India in 1899, the swastika was a revered symbol, however between the swastika on the book and what we today would call the racism of Kipling’s language I at first I felt guilty that I enjoyed him. In fact I could not put down Plain Tales from the Hills. I found the stories wise, readable and funny, and was fascinated by the way the narrator quietly inserts himself into the pieces as though he has been there observing and listening.

Then I read the novel The Light That Failed and had a flash of memory of a scene from an old movie with James Mason that as a girl I saw on TV. It’s the story of a talented painter who has become wealthy by squandering his talent painting simplistic pictures that would sell to an unsophisticated public. He sets out to compete with another painter to paint a portrait of melancholia. As he works on the face, he is unable to find melancholy in the facial expression until he begins to experience his own rapid onset of blindness.

Kipling (1865-1936) was phenomenally popular in his time. After reading half a dozen poems and plain tales from the hills, I can see why. He’s a kind of Garrison Keillor of the late Victorian period. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He declined knighthood (several times) and the poet laureateship.

Here’s the second stanza from a poem that got me thinking about racism and patriarchy and what I believe is thought of as post-colonial literary criticism. It’s called “The Ladies:”

Now I aren’t no ‘and with the ladies,
For, takin’ ’em all along,
You never can say till you’ve tried ’em,
An’ then you are like to be wrong.
There’s times when you’ll think that you mightn’t,
There’s times when you’ll know that you might;
But the things you will learn from the Yellow an’ Brown,
They’ll ‘elp you a lot with the White!

Now that’s quite candid. It’s certainly the statement of a man who has gone native all over the world. Did I mention that Kipling lived for five years in Brattleboro, Vermont?
Then there’s the water-carrier “Gunga Din:”

An’ for all his dirty ‘ide
‘E was white, clear white, inside
When ‘e went to tend the wounded under fire.

I find that more offensive than the idea that Kipling apparently slept –apparently cavalierly–with women all over the world, including in Brattleboro, Vermont. But when I examine my unreflected opinions about life, and my own racism and prudishness, I think that my only objection to Kipling sleeping with yellow, brown and white women all over the world is that women of that period had not the freedom to do the same. Or maybe they did, but they weren’t going to write about it and then be chased by officials flapping the poet laureateship.

I’m much touchier about negative stereotypes of women than any other kind of misanthropy, but someone else might take huge offense from the language of “Gunga Din” and from the political and social structure that produced the situation.  I can understand someone’s visceral repulsion when I remember what happened to me when I tried to read Montaigne’s Essays. First paragraph of “It is Folly to Measure the True and False by Our Own Capacity:”

“The more a mind is empty and without counterpoise, the more easily it gives beneath the weight of the first persuasive argument. That is why children, common people, women, and sick people are most subject to being led by the ears.”

This enraged me. I put the book in the recycle bin. I don’t care how great or seminal Montaigne is, I can’t read him. Literature is full of both implicit and explicit digs at women and I have learned to filter them. Some writers are worth reading in spite of their cultural misogyny. Others go too far and rip open the filter.

I get the feeling that Kipling loved humanity: Male and female loved he them, and all the colors of the rainbow. But he was a man writing at a time when The Male sat atop the glorious British Empire. He wrote the world he knew. It’s ironic that his own candidness makes his literary reputation unsettled.

The following are bits from Plain Tales from the Hills that made me smile as well as some of the many famous lines from other works:

*Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool. (“Three and an Extra”)

*Good work does not matter, because a man is judged by his worst output and another man takes all the credit of his best as a rule. (“Thrown Away”)

*One of these days, Strickland is going to write a little book on his experiences. That book will be worth buying; and even more worth suppressing. (“Miss Youghal’s Kiss”)

*Miss Hauksbee was sometimes nice to her own sex. Here is a story to prove this; and you can believe just as much as ever you please.

There was nothing good about Mrs. Reiver, unless it was her dress. She was bad from her hair—which started life on a Brittany girl’s head—to her boot-heels, which were two and three quarter inches high. She was not honestly mischievous like Mrs. Hauksbee; she was wicked in a business-like way. . . There was never any scandal—she had not generous impulses enough for that.

He had not many ideas at the best of times, and the few he possessed made him conceited. (“The Rescue of Pluffles”)

*Many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem—for purely religious reasons, of course—to know more about inequity than the unregenerate. (”Watches of the Night”)

*. . .Dick delivered himself of the saga of his own doings, with all the arrogance of a young man speaking to a woman. From the beginning the he told the tale, the I—I—I’s flashing through the record as telegraph poles fly past the traveler.

Bite on the bullet, old man, and don’t let them think you’re afraid.

. . .he lodged himself in one room where the sheets on the bed were almost audibly marked in case of theft. . . (The Light that Failed)

*Oh, East is East, and West is West,
And never the two shall meet. . . (“The Ballad of East and West”)

*They’ve taken of his buttons off and
An’ cut his stripes away;
And they’re hanging Danny Deever in the morning.’ (“Danny Deever”)

*Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,
By the living Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am,
Gunga Din. (“Gunga Din”)

*On the road to Mandalay
Where the flyin’ fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder
Outer China crost the Bay! (“Mandalay”)

*Steady the Buffs. (“Soldier’s Three”)

*To the legion of the lost ones to the cohort of the damned.

We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way,
Baa! baa! baa!
We’re little black sheep who have gone astray,
Baa-aa-aa!
Gentlemen rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha’ mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Baa! (“Gentleman Rankers”)

*The female of the species is more deadly than the male. (“The Female of the Species”)

“A deep sense of religion (is) compatible with the entire absence of theology.” So is Thomas Henry Huxley quoted in the Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 2, and all over the Internet but no one seems to have any source other than “a letter.” A great statement like that is, in my opinion, free for the co-opting. It was my first intimation that I was going to like Huxley who was ranked by my mother with infidels and immorals like Darwin, Freud, and Jackie Kennedy.

Huxley coined the word “agnostic.” In his essay Agnosticism and Christianity he says, “I do not very much care to speak of anything as ‘unknowable.’ What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing; and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these things are knowable by anyone else is exactly one of these matters which is beyond my knowledge. . . I am quite sure that the region of uncertainty—the nebulous country in which words play the part of realities—is far more extensive than I could wish. . .the doctrine of the soul and its mortality or immortality—appear in the history of philosophy like the shades of Scandinavian heroes, eternally slaying one another and eternally coming to life again. . .”

Huxley calls Theology a science, I suppose because theologians set out a case for their conclusions. Ecclesiasticism/Clericalism he calls the “championship of a foregone conclusion.” Since we don’t use the latter words much today I will take the liberty putting their ideas—as propounded by Huxley– in the mouths of the Fundamentalists. The Fundamentalist asserts “it is morally wrong not to believe certain propositions. . .for him, the attainment of faith, not the ascertainment of truth, is the highest aim of mental life.” Huxley found that the nature of the Fundamentalist faith is too often found to be “not the mystic process of unity with the Divine. . .but that which the candid simplicity of a Sunday scholar once defined it to be.”

Really, this could have been written today. With misspellings, poor grammar and a smattering of “fucks,” it could be half of a Facebook conversation. Here’s an exchange I got into beginning with a macho character announcing that “Jesus only called men to the priest hood, women will never be priests. . . get over that.” I opined that Jesus didn’t call men or women to the priesthood in the sense that the commentator was using the term, get over that:

“Do you really think Jesus called men to dress in stupid costumes, parade around wealthy palaces, ignoring the concerns of everyone who wasn’t one of them? Jesus would be appalled at what is now called Christianity. He was a mystic. Mystics do not found religions or call anyone to anything. They live their vision. It’s the idiots who come later and who don’t understand anything except what is in concrete. They take the spiritual and make cement out of it.”

That’s me talking in case you don’t recognize the voice. My friend Chris, the unclassifiable says I am not political. My Aunt Frances used to just call me blunt. Thomas Henry Huxley was so elegant. Sigh. He came into his own politically when he decimated an opponent at a debate of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860. Sixty five years before the Scopes trial, the subject was Darwin’s theories.

Back to Facebook: Someone else– I’ll call him the Admiral– came into the conversation. “Jesus said He will build His church. Jesus is God the Son,” he said with the candid simplicity of a Sunday School teacher.

I replied, “The kinds of arguments I am hearing take a simplistic, unimaginative view of what it means to “build” something that is essentially spiritual. It is entirely possible that Jesus “called” men because they needed to be called. The women were already right there in tune with him. Jesus’ mind was essentially a feminine mind.” (This is my new favorite idea, that Jesus was a woman in a male body)

The Admiral turned out to be a more reflective than many: “I’m not sure what makes you think He has a feminine mind. . . I really don’t know why you think what you do. Jesus performed miracles, spoke with authority. . .”

It was the beginning of a decent conversation and I would have liked to understand the origins of his beliefs because I think that’s the only civilized thing to do: try to understand our different subjectivities. Sadly the Admiral appears to have tired of me. I don’t have the sense that the he would say “it is morally wrong not to believe certain propositions.” But he gives indications that “for him, the attainment of faith, not the ascertainment of truth, is the highest aim of mental life.”

I split the difference between truth and faith. I’m not fond of religious labels from that “nebulous country in which words play the part of realities.” I have spiritual experiences. I have a relationship with the Divine. I live my life according to thoughts and images that resonate within me no matter where I find them. And this brings me full circle to the quotation of Huxley’s: “A deep sense of religion (is) compatible with the entire absence of theology.”

Disclosure statement: I used Grammarly.com to grammar check this post because I wanted to see what it thought of Robert Browning’s 19th century English usage: not much. Actually I took the bait of using Grammarly to enter a contest. So here we go:

In Victorian Lit class I was told that Robert Browning was set apart from his contemporaries because he wrote “dramatic monologues.” There I sat, in a confused fog of being 20 years old, hungry because I was always on a diet, unsure of my worth as a human being, scared because my parents were divorcing, depressed and dutifully writing in my notes, “dramatic monologue.” What did I care? It comes back to me now as I am reading the Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 2 just for fun, because now I think, “Oh how interesting!” Such is one person’s on-going experience with a Liberal Arts education.

In his dramatic monologues Browning communicated what he thought through the words of the characters he created, often using historical figures as a starting point. More than just historical fiction in verse, Browning was satirical. Nothing endears me to him more than his wicked, irreverent sense of humor, especially when he gets going on religion. Exhibit A is a poem called “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed Church.” Here we have a dying bishop who is apparently lying on the tomb where he will be buried once he kicks off. He is “in this state chamber, dying by degrees.” Around him stand a group of young men who he calls his nephews but then lets it slip that they are his sons, his favorite being named Anselm. (For those Protestants among us who might have forgotten, all Catholic bishops are celibate and single. All of them.) We learn that “Old Gandolf,” the bishop’s predecessor envied him because his paramour, the mother of all these young men, was beautiful (“fair.”)

So here is the Man of God in his last hours: He ruminates about the placement of his tomb in relation to that of Old Gandolf’s. Saint Praxed was “ever the church for peace” yet the bishop “fought with tooth and nail to save my niche” but “Old Gandolf cozened me” and snatched the spot the bishop wanted in the south corner. As the bishop describes the once coveted spot in the south corner where Old Gandolf now lies, he makes it sound less and less desirable. He describes his own tomb placement as he actually lies there, surrounded by his sons, that is to say nephews, who are standing in his line of sight:

. . . neath my tabernacle take my rest,
With those nine columns round me, two and two,
The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands. . .

Then he starts in on the relative quality of the actual tombs. Old Gandolf’s tomb is of an inferior marble that peels– “paltry onion stone”– whereas the bishop has ordered “peach blossom marble” for his own tomb. As he mutters aloud, reviewing his grudges against Old Gandolf, he upps the quality of stone he wants for his tomb:

Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black—
‘Twas ever antique black. . .
The bas relief in bronze ye promised me. . .

As the poem proceeds and his dudgeon increases he declares “all of jasper,” and finally “all lapis, all” for his tomb. Similarly he goes on about the tomb’s inscription: “Choice Latin, picked phrase, no gaudy ware like Gandolf. . .

Finally he lapses into self-pity as his sons appear to have had enough of his ramblings:

There, leave me, there!
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude. . .
Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through—
And no more lapis to delight the world!”

The Man of God is left alone with his final thoughts:

And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers—
Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,
As still he envied me, so fair was she!

Robert Browning is one of the many surprises I have found in my perusal of the Norton Anthology. A gregarious and very loud social creature, he guarded his private self. Similarly the characters in his dramatic monologues are colorful and outspoken. Between the lines are the characters’ unconscious motivations. Further back, beyond the characters and their secrets, is Browning himself, his boisterous opinions distilled into drops that intoxicate the readers who love him.

“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

I thought that was Shakespeare’s line.  He’s usually my first guess when I’m unsure. But, surprise, it’s Tennyson.  I was surprised over and over at the many familiar passages in his long poem, “In Memoriam A.H.H.” A.H.H. is Arthur Hallam, a friend who died when he and Tennyson were in their 20’s.  Shaken by his friend’s death, Tennyson spent 16 years writing this poem, which expresses the process of grief that doesn’t move in a straight trajectory but in

.  .  .  Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.

The poem has 130 sections plus an epilogue, not itself exactly a short swallow-flight of song.  I started reading:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;

That sounded familiar.  It’s that hymn I always thought was strange because the last word doesn’t rhyme even though it looks like it should. I’m not wild about the hymn but I do like this verse:

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Tennyson records his feelings as several Christmases roll around and I found these especially poignant. Some years he was at peace, other years bitter, confused, or sad.  At the 2nd Christmas after Hallam’s death:

The Yule log sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.

Another Christmas produced the stanzas that have become a song:

“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

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

The fifth autumn after Hallam’s death, Tennyson visited a place where the two of them had once walked.  In his re-visitation, Tennyson thinks about his own death:

But where the path we walked began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
As we descended following Hope,
There sat the Shadow feared of man;

Who broke our fair companionship,
And spread his mantle dark and cold,
And wrapped thee formless in thy fold,
And dulled the murmur on thy lip,

And bore thee where I could not see
Nor follow though I walk in haste,
And think that somewhere in the waste
The Shadow sits and waits for me.

*****************************************************
Another section I read as a prayer to a loved one who has died, a way of keeping her or him alive in my mind:

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
An weave their petty cells and die.

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

Though Tennyson was a Christian, I, personally, believe the minds of great poets are pan-spiritual.  I found these stanzas to be a Buddhist teaser combine with human longing:

That each, who seems separate whole,
Should move his rounds, and fusing all
The skirts of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul,

Is faith as vague as all unsweet.
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside:
And I shall know him when we meet.

*******************************************************
Tennyson is, I hope, pleased –wherever he is –to know that his is not a “long-forgotten mind” and his poem is a place for grieving people to find a companion.

These mortal lullabies of pain
May bind a book, may line a box,
May serve to curl a maiden’s locks;
Or when a thousand moons shall wane

A man upon a stall may find,
And, passing, turn the page that tells
A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

**************************************************
Here are other famous lines from Tennyson:

*“And was the day of my delight as pure and perfect as I say?”

*Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be…(In Memoriam A.H.H.)
***************************************************
*She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side:
“The curse is come upon me,”
Cried The Lady of Shalott.     (The “Lady of Shalott”)

*****************************************************************
Almost the entire “Charge of the Light Brigade” has become a Famous Quotation.  I first heard it quoted in an episode of F Troop when I was 11 years old:

*Someone had blundered.  .  .
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward
All in the valley of death
Rode the six hundred.

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.

Cannon to the right of them,
Cannon to the left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d
Into the jaws of death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred (“The Charge of the Light Brigade”)
***********************************************************************
*In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon

(“The Lotos-Eaters” and by the way I strongly recommend reading “The Lotos-Eaters” on a hot afternoon under a tree in my back-yard)

************************************************************************
 
*Oh Death in Life, the days that are no more. (“Tears, Idle Tears)

(This quotation shows up in a Cheers episode.  Dr. Crane, sitting at the bar, has this conversation with Woody:

Dr. Crane: “Oh Death in Life, the days that are no more.”  Who said that?
Woody: Who said what?
Dr. Crane: “Oh Death in Life, the days that are no more.”
Woody: You did, Dr. Crane
Dr. Crane: But who said it first?
Woody: You said it both times.)

*****************************************************************
And thus is great literature perpetuated. Continuing in this vein, if you are a fan of Lord Peter Wimsey, you might remember him—or can certainly imagine him—quoting Tennyson:

*She is coming, my own, my sweet:
Were it ever so airy a tread.  .  .

Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone. (“Maud”)

********************************************************************
And finally, here is the poem that Tennyson wished to have at the end of his collection:

*Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar
When I put out to sea.  .  .

I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar (“Crossing the Bar”)

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

Tennyson’s is certainly not a long-forgotten mind.

I have now left behind the Romantics and entered the age of Victorian Literature (1832-1901.)  What immediately strikes me is the similarity of the Victorian age to our own.  The anxiety, the social problems, the wide scope of attitudes towards sex, the arguments about religion, and the struggle of women all feel familiar.  After hacking my way through the scolding verbiage of Thomas Carlyle and the unimaginative ideas of John Henry Newman, both of whom I had expected to enjoy and didn’t, John Stuart Mill was like coming home.

The introduction describes him as having had a “nervous breakdown” while in his early 20’s, and he himself, enlarges on his “Crisis in My Mental History” in chapter five of his autobiography.  His description of the onset amused me: “I was in a dull state of nerves.  .  .  unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement, one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first “conviction of sin.” (I substitute evangelical Christianity for Methodism.  In any case, I’ve experienced it all.) But this “dull state of nerves” developed into what sounds to me like a major depression that went on for years.

The depression lifted with a small piece of insight:  Mill realized he had grown up feeling he ought to “be everything” to his family, particularly his father who had educated him at home.  He realized that his internal world did not match the image expected of him.  Coming out of depression, he learned to pay attention to his inward experiences and discovered that desire and feelings were the sails of his boat.  Though he wrote prose essays, I think he was a poet in his soul.

If his experience with major depression wasn’t enough to make him my cosmic comrade, he loved and married a strong woman named Harriet Taylor and allowed her to influence him.  His essay “On the Subjection of Woman” helped change public opinion and laws in England.  The essay begins with the clear statement: “The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.  .  .  it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.”  Take out the word legal and we have a fairly accurate description of possibly a majority of hearts and minds in this country—150 years later.

Mill makes the comparison to slavery but notes that many women are consenting parties to their enslavement. “The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to that purpose.”  He puts together three factors: 1) the attraction between opposite sexes 2) a wife’s financial dependence on her husband and 3) all social and educational pursuits obtainable only through a man.

“It would have been a miracle,” Mill writes, “if the object of being attracted to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character” and if “resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man” did not become “an essential part of sexual attractiveness.”  He goes on to say that “this relic of the past is discordant with the future and must necessarily disappear.”

“Think what it is to be a boy, to grow to manhood in the belief that without any merit or exertion of his own, though he may be the most frivolous and empty or the most ignorant.  .  .  by the mere fact of being born male, he is by right the superior of all.” When this male comes into contact with an intelligent and accomplished woman, “he sees that she is superior to him and believes that notwithstanding her superiority, he is entitled to command and she is bound to obey. What must be the effect on his character of this lesson?” (Italics mine.)

Just after this description, Mill says, “Men of the cultivated classes are often not aware how deeply it sinks into the immense majority of male minds.”  And here, ladies and gentlemen is where we are today, although I would put it this way: People are not aware of how deeply it is sunk in our culture. Even women are slow to catch on, even in this century, or we wouldn’t have the Congress or state legislatures that we do.

My mind ties these two essays together.  I don’t understand how any thinking female in the United States couldn’t have some degree of depression.  Some of us get hit with it harder than others for a confluence of reasons, but this is still a world where being female means your worth as a human being is in arrears at birth.  The way out involves what John Stuart Mill discovered: paying attention to and making choices according to our desires and feelings, and not to meet the expectation of someone—anyone—outside of us.

Rumi puts it so beautifully:  “Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.  It will not lead you astray.”

I got a little exercised about Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, after I watched, in 2013, women being dragged out of the North Carolina and Texas legislatures and arrested for peaceful protest on their Capitol steps. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write about it because I found it utterly depressing.  She was writing in the 18^th century, but she could have been describing the home in which I grew up in the 1960s as well as attitudes still on display today.  But in thinking about two remarkable women, Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, I decided to give it a go and hope this doesn’t devolve into a feminist tirade.  When men do it, it’s called rhetoric; but when women do it, it’s called being emotional/on the rag and is automatically discounted, even though Emotion and Menstruation are how any of us happen to be alive at all.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft does a very canny thing: she draws a parallel between the socialization of women with that of the aristocracy and the military. In all three cases, values, behaviors, and perceptions are distorted to the point that members are not allowed to be fully human.  “Women, in general, as well as the rich of both sexes, have acquired all the follies and vices of civilization, and missed the useful fruit.”  I like to think this comparison roped in many more sympathetic readers and opened the minds of others, both men and women.

Here are some of her astonishingly contemporary observations:

She refers to books for and about women “written by men who considering females rather as woman than human.  .  .have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers.  .  .treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not part of the human species,” and men have “found it convenient” to believe “the whole creation was only created for his convenience or pleasure.”   This convenience creates a regal and “specious homage,” a false refinement that can be intoxicating, but is ultimately degrading.  Today, unfortunately, these kinds of books are written mostly by women.

Mary W. addresses something that women today are still defensive about: the typical way women have found power: “Women are so degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence.  .  . produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of (physical)strength.”    She locates “feminine wiles” in a context informed by both sexes.  If a relationship is not egalitarian, the alternative is sadism and passive aggression as a means of survival, not as consensual play.

In an advice book of the day, a Dr. Gregory asserts that a fondness for dress is “natural” to women.  Mary W’s response gave me a full smile for 10 minutes after I read it: “I am unable to comprehend what either he or Rousseau mean when they frequently use this indefinite term.  If they told us that in a pre-existent state the soul was found of dress, and brought this inclination with it into a new body, I should listen to them with a half smile, as I often do when I hear a rant about innate elegance.   .   .It is not natural; but arises, like false ambition in men, from a love of power.”

She discusses how passion and romance give way to friendship and love but that wives, however,  are not considered friend material: “She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever.  .  .he chooses to be amused.”   

She asks, “Do passive, indolent women make the best wives?.  .  . However convenient it may be found in a companion—that companion will ever be considered an inferior, and only inspire a vapid tenderness which easily degenerates into contempt.”

Here’s something that many “feminists” today still do not understand, but that Mary W. articulated beautifully over 200 years ago. First she cites Rousseau: “Educate women like men, and the more they resemble our sex the less power they will have over us.”  Rousseau means well, but his is still a male-centric point of view.  Mary W. skewers his comment, “I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”  I might add that men have as much to learn from women as the other way around.  Take that, Rousseau.

After reading Mary W’s impassioned and clearly articulated essay, it’s interesting to see how her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley turned out: “I am not a person of opinions.  .  .Some have a passion for reforming the world. That my parents and Shelley were of the former class makes me respect it.  .  .If I have never written to vindicate the rights of women, I have ever defended women when oppressed.  .  .” Rattling the cages of  19^th century norms may have skipped a generation in the Wollstonecraft family, but Mary Shelley wrote with the genius, grace, and insight that would have catapulted a man into the canon immediately. 

It’s telling that Mary Shelley wrote about doppelgängers and split personalities.  She must have felt both split and doubled within herself.  She wrote Frankenstein when she was just 20 years old, and created a myth which entered the Zeitgeist and has not exited yet.  One of her short stories, “Transformation,” is included in the Norton.  It was an astonishing read.  Astonishing because I think she’s a writer equal to her contemporaries in the male canon; and she is only getting the respect due her 200 years after her death.

The Marys are not anomalies.  Dorothy Wordsworth was a writer and thinker equal to her famous brother William and their good friend Coleridge. How many more intelligent, articulate and provocative women there must be! The edition of the Norton anthology we used when I was in college, had admitted, as I re-call, three women into their canon: Virginia Woolf, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  The 4th edition of Volume Two, which I am reading this summer, presents 14 different women writers. The 9^th Edition presents 35.  It’s nowhere near an equal percentage but definitely a good trend.

And incidentally, Wollstonecraft: what a great name!