THE ‘THOUGHT-FOX’ HAS often been acknowledged as one of the most completely realised and artistically satisfying of the poems in Ted Hughes’s first collection, The Hawk in the Rain. At the same time it is one of the most frequently anthologised of all Hughes’s poems. In this essay I have set out to use what might be regarded as a very ordinary analysis of this familiar poem in order to focus attention on an aspect of Hughes’s poetry which is sometimes neglected. My particular interest is in the underlying puritanism of Hughes’s poetic vision and in the conflict between violence and tenderness which seems to be directly engendered by this puritanism.
‘The thought-fox’ is a poem about writing a poem. Its external action takes place in a room late at night where the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is starless, silent, and totally black. But the poet senses a presence which disturbs him:
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness.
The disturbance is not in the external darkness of the night, for the night is itself a metaphor for the deeper and more intimate darkness of the poet’s imagination in whose depths an idea is mysteriously stirring. At first the idea has no clear outlines; it is not seen but felt – frail and intensely vulnerable. The poet’s task is to coax it out of formlessness and into fuller consciousness by the sensitivity of his language. The remote stirrings of the poem are compared to the stirrings of an animal – a fox, whose body is invisible, but which feels its way forward nervously through the dark undergrowth:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
The half-hidden image which is contained within these lines is of soft snow brushing against the trees as it falls in dark flakes to the ground. The idea of the delicate dark snow evokes the physical reality of the fox’s nose which is itself cold, dark and damp, twitching moistly and gently against twig and leaf. In this way the first feature of the fox is mysteriously defined and its wet black nose is nervously alive in the darkness, feeling its way towards us. But by inverting the natural order of the simile, and withholding the subject of the sentence, the poet succeeds in blurring its distinctness so that the fox emerges only slowly out of the formlessness of the snow. Gradually the fox’s eyes appear out of the same formlessness, leading the shadowy movement of its body as it comes closer:
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow. ..
In the first two lines of this passage the rhythm of the verse is broken by the punctuation and the line-endings, while at the same time what seemed the predictable course of the rhyme-scheme is deliberately departed from. Both rhythmically and phonetically the verse thus mimes the nervous, unpredictable movement of the fox as it delicately steps forward, then stops suddenly to check the terrain before it runs on only to stop again. The tracks which the fox leaves in the snow are themselves duplicated by the sounds and rhythm of the line ‘Sets neat prints into the snow’. The first three short words of this line are internal half-rhymes, as neat, as identical and as sharply outlined as the fox’s paw-marks, and these words press down gently but distinctly into the soft open vowel of ‘snow’. The fox’s body remains indistinct, a silhouette against the snow. But the phrase ‘lame shadow’ itself evokes a more precise image of the fox, as it freezes alertly in its tracks, holding one front-paw in mid-air, and then moves off again like a limping animal. At the end of the stanza the words ‘bold to come’ are left suspended – as though the fox is pausing at the outer edge of some trees. The gap between the stanzas is itself the clearing which the fox, after hesitating warily, suddenly shoots across: ‘Of a body that is bold to come / Across clearings. ..’
At this point in the poem the hesitant rhythm of that single sentence which is prolonged over five stanzas breaks into a final and deliberate run. The fox has scented safety. After its dash across the clearing of the stanza-break, it has come suddenly closer, bearing down upon the poet and upon the reader:
an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business. ..
It is so close now that its two eyes have merged into a single green glare which grows wider and wider as the fox comes nearer, its eyes heading directly towards ours: ‘Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox / It enters the dark hole of the head’. If we follow the ‘visual logic’ of the poem we are compelled to imagine the fox actually jumping through the eyes of the poet – with whom the reader of the poem is inevitably drawn into identification. The fox enters the lair of the head as it would enter its own lair, bringing with it the hot, sensual, animal reek of its body and all the excitement and power of the achieved vision.
The fox is no longer a formless stirring somewhere in the dark depths of the bodily imagination; it has been coaxed out of the darkness and into full consciousness. It is no longer nervous and vulnerable, but at home in the lair of the head, safe from extinction, perfectly created, its being caught for ever on the page. And all this has been done purely by the imagination. For in reality there is no fox at all, and outside, in the external darkness, nothing has changed: ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed.’ The fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox. ‘And I suppose,’ Ted Hughes has written, ‘that long after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them.’[1]
After discussing ‘The thought-fox’ in his book The Art of Ted Hughes, Keith Sagar writes: ‘Suddenly, out of the unknown, there it is, with all the characteristics of a living thing – “a sudden sharp hot stink of fox”. A simple trick like pulling a kicking rabbit from a hat, but only a true poet can do it’.[2] In this particular instance it seems to me that the simile Sagar uses betrays him into an inappropriate critical response His comparison may be apt in one respect, for it is certainly true that there is a powerful element of magic in the poem. But this magic has little to do with party-conjurors who pull rabbits out of top-hats. It is more like the sublime and awesome magic which is contained in the myth of creation, where God creates living beings out of nothingness by the mere fiat of his imagination.
The very sublimity and God-like nature of Hughes’s vision can engender uneasiness. For Hughes’s fox has none of the freedom of an animal. It cannot get up from the page and walk off to nuzzle its young cubs or do foxy things behind the poet’s back. It cannot even die in its own mortal, animal way. For it is the poet’s creature, wholly owned and possessed by him, fashioned almost egotistically in order to proclaim not its own reality but that of its imaginatively omnipotent creator. (I originally wrote these words before coming across Hughes’s own discussion of the poem in Poetry in the Making: ‘So, you see, in some ways my fox is better than an ordinary fox. It will live for ever, it will never suffer from hunger or hounds. I have it with me wherever I go. And I made it. And all through imagining it clearly enough and finding the living words’ (p. 21).)
This feeling of uneasiness is heightened by the last stanza of the poem. For although this stanza clearly communicates the excitement of poetic creation, it seems at the same time to express an almost predatory thrill; it is as though the fox has successfully been lured into a hunter’s trap. The bleak matter-of-factness of the final line – ’The page is printed’ – only reinforces the curious deadness of the thought-fox. If, at the end of the poem, there is one sense in which the fox is vividly and immediately alive, it is only because it has been pinned so artfully upon the page. The very accuracy of the evocation of the fox seems at times almost fussily obsessive. The studied and beautifully ‘final’ nature of the poem indicates that we are not in the presence of any untrained spontaneity, any primitive or naive vision. It might be suggested that the sensibility behind Hughes’s poem is more that of an intellectual – an intellectual who, in rebellion against his own ascetic rationalism, feels himself driven to hunt down and capture an element of his own sensual and intuitive identity which he does not securely possess.
In this respect Hughes’s vision is perhaps most nearly akin to that of D. H. Lawrence, who was also an intellectual in rebellion against his own rationalism, a puritan who never ceased to quarrel with his own puritanism. But Lawrence’s animal poems, as some critics have observed, are very different from those of Hughes. Lawrence has a much greater respect for the integrity and independence of the animals he writes about. In ‘Snake’ he expresses remorse for the rationalistic, ‘educated’ violence which he inflicts on the animal. And at the end of the poem he is able, as it were, retrospectively to allow his dark sexual, sensual, animal alter ego to crawl off into the bowels of the earth, there to reign alone and supreme in a kingdom where Lawrence recognises he can have no part. Hughes, in ‘The thought-fox’ at least, cannot do this. It would seem that, possessing his own sensual identity even less securely than Lawrence, he needs the ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’ to pump up the attenuated sense he has of the reality of his own body and his own feelings. And so he pins the fox upon the page with the cruel purity of artistic form and locates its lair inside his own head. And the fox lives triumphantly as an idea – as a part of the poet’s own identity – but dies as a fox.
If there is a difference between ‘The thought-fox’ and the animal poems of Lawrence there is also, of course, a difference between Hughes’s poetic vision and that kind of extreme scientific rationalism which both Lawrence and Hughes attack throughout their work. For in the mind of the orthodox rationalist the fox is dead even as an idea. So it is doubly dead and the orthodox rationalist, who is always a secret puritan, is more than happy about this. For he doesn’t want the hot sensual reek of fox clinging to his pure rational spirit, reminding him that he once possessed such an obscene thing as a body.
This difference may appear absolute. But it seems to me that it would be wrong to regard it as such, and that there is a much closer relationship between the sensibility which is expressed in Hughes’s poem and the sensibility of ‘puritanical rationalism’ than would generally be acknowledged. The orthodox rationalist, it might be said, inflicts the violence of reason on animal sensuality in an obsessive attempt to eliminate it entirely. Hughes in ‘The thought-fox’ unconsciously inflicts the violence of an art upon animal sensuality in a passionate but conflict-ridden attempt to incorporate it into his own rationalist identity.
The conflict of sensibility which Hughes unconsciously dramatises in ‘The thought-fox’ runs through all his poetry. On the one hand there is in his work an extraordinary sensuous and sensual generosity which coexists with a sense of abundance and a capacity for expressing tenderness which are unusual in contemporary poetry .These qualities are particularly in evidence in some of the most mysteriously powerful of all his poems – poems such as ‘Crow’s undersong’, ‘Littleblood’, ‘Full moon and little Frieda’ and ‘Bride and groom lie hidden for three days’ .On the other hand his poetry – and above all his poetry in Crow – is notorious for the raging intensity of its violence, a violence which, by some critics at least, has been seen as destructive of all artistic and human values. Hughes himself seems consistently to see his own poetic sensitivity as ‘feminine’ and his poetry frequently gives the impression that he can allow himself to indulge this sensitivity only within a protective shell of hard, steely ‘masculine’ violence.
In ‘The thought-fox’ itself this conflict of sensibility appears in such an attenuated or suppressed form that it is by no means the most striking feature of the poem. But, as I have tried to show, the conflict may still be discerned. It is present above all in the tension between the extraordinary sensuous delicacy of the image which Hughes uses to describe the fox’s nose and the predatory, impulse which seems to underlie the poem – an impulse to which Hughes has himself drawn attention by repeatedly comparing the act of poetic creation to the process of capturing or killing small animals.[3] Indeed it might be suggested that the last stanza of the poem records what is, in effect, a ritual of tough ‘manly’ posturing. For in it the poet might be seen as playing a kind of imaginative game in which he attempts to outstare the fox – looking straight into its eyes as it comes closer and closer and refusing to move, refusing to flinch, refusing to show any sign of ‘feminine’ weakness. The fox itself does not flinch or deviate from its course. It is almost as though, in doing this, it has successfully come through an initiation-ritual to which the poet has unconsciously submitted it; the fox which is initially nervous, circumspect, and as soft and delicate as the dark snow, has proved that it is not ‘feminine’ after all but tough, manly and steely willed ‘brilliantly, concentratedly, coming about its own business’. It is on these conditions alone, perhaps, that its sensuality can be accepted by the poet without anxiety.
Whether or not the last tentative part of my analysis is accepted, it will perhaps be allowed that the underlying pattern of the poem is one of sensitivity-within- toughness; it is one in which a sensuality or sensuousness which might sometimes be characterised as ‘feminine’ can be incorporated into the identity only to the extent that it has been purified by, or subordinated to, a tough, rational, artistic will.
The same conflict of sensibility which is unconsciously dramatised in ‘The thought-fox’ also appears, in an implicit form, in one of the finest and most powerful poems in Lupercal, ‘Snowdrop’:
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.
The poem begins by evoking, from the still and tiny perspective of the hibernating mouse, a vast intimacy with the tightening body of the earth. But the numbness of ‘wintering heart’ undermines the emotional security which might be conveyed by the initial image. The next lines introduce a harsh predatory derangement into nature through which two conventionally threatening animals, the weasel and the crow, move ‘as if moulded in brass’ .It is only at this point, after a sense of petrified and frozen vitality has been established, that the snowdrop is, as it were, ‘noticed’ by the poem. What might be described as a conventional and sentimental personification of the snowdrop is actually intensified by the fact that ‘she’ can be identified only from the title. This lends to the pronoun a mysterious power through which the poem gestures towards an affirmation of ‘feminine’ frailty and its ability to survive even the cruel rigour of winter. But before this gesture can even be completed it is overlaid by an evocation of violent striving:
She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.
The last line is finely balanced between the fragility of ‘pale’ and the steeliness of ‘metal’ – a word whose sound softens and moderates its sense .The line serves to evoke a precise visual image of the snowdrop, the relative heaviness of whose flower cannot be entirely supported by its frail stem. But at the same time the phrase ‘her pale head’ minimally continues the personification which is first established by the pronoun ‘she’. In this way the feminine snowdrop – a little incarnation, almost, of the White Goddess – is located within that world of frozen and sleeping vitality which is created by the poem, a vitality which can only be preserved, it would seem, if it is encased within a hard, metallic, evolutionary will.
The beauty of this poem resides precisely in the way that a complex emotional ambivalence is reflected through language. But if we can withdraw ourselves from the influence of the spell which the poem undoubtedly casts, the vision of the snowdrop cannot but seem an alien one. What seems strange about the poem is the lack of any recognition that the snowdrop survives not because of any hidden reserves of massive evolutionary strength or will, but precisely because of its frailty – its evolutionary vitality is owed directly to the very delicacy, softness and flexibility of its structure. In Hughes’s poem the purposeless and consciousless snowdrop comes very near to being a little Schopenhauer philosophising in the rose-garden, a little Stalin striving to disguise an unmanly and maidenly blush behind a hard coat of assumed steel. We might well be reminded of Hughes’s own account of the intentions which lay behind his poem ‘Hawk roosting’. ‘Actually what I had in mind’, Hughes has said, ‘was that in this hawk Nature is thinking … I intended some creator like the Jehovah in Job but more feminine.’ But, as Hughes himself is obliged to confess, ‘He doesn’t sound like Isis, mother of the gods, which he is. He sounds like Hitler’s familiar spirit.’ In an attempt to account for the gap between intention and performance Hughes invokes cultural history: ‘When Christianity kicked the devil out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature. ..and nature became the devil.’[4] This piece of rationalisation, however, seems all too like an attempt to externalise a conflict of sensibility which is profoundly internal. The conflict in question is the same as that which may be divined both in ‘The thought-fox’ and in ‘Snowdrop’ , in which a frail sensuousness which might be characterised as , ‘feminine’ can be accepted only after it has been subordinated to a tough and rational will.
The conflict between violence and tenderness which is present in an oblique form throughout Hughes’ early poetry is one that is in no sense healed or resolved in his later work. Indeed it might be suggested that much of the poetic and emotional charge of this later work comes directly from an intensification of this conflict and an increasingly explicit polarisation of its terms. The repressed tenderness of ‘Snowdrop’ or the tough steely sensibility which is expressed in ‘Thrushes’, with its idealisation of the ‘bullet and automatic / Purpose’ of instinctual life, is seemingly very different to the all but unprotected sensuous delicacy of ‘Littleblood’, the poem with which Hughes ends Crow:
O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
Ploughing with a linnet’s carcase
Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.
. . . .
Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.
But this poem must ultimately be located within the larger context which is provided by the Crow poems. This context is one of a massive unleashing of sadistic violence -a violence which is never endorsed by Hughes but which, nevertheless, seems to provide a kind of necessary psychological armour within which alone tenderness can be liberated without anxiety.
In pointing to the role which is played by a particular conflict of sensibility in Hughes’s poetry I am not in any way seeking to undermine the case which can – and should – be made for what would conventionally be called Hughes’s poetic ‘greatness’. Indeed, my intention is almost the reverse of this. For it seems to me that one of the factors which moderates or diminishes the imaginative power of some of Hughes’s early poetry is precisely the way in which an acute conflict which is central to his own poetic sensibility tends to be disguised or, suppressed. In Crow, which I take to be Hughes’s most extraordinary poetic achievement to date, Hughes, almost for the first time, assumes imaginative responsibility for the puritanical violence which is present in his poetry from the very beginnings. In doing so he seems to take full possession of his own poetic powers. It is as though a conflict which had, until that point, led a shadowy and underworld existence, is suddenly cracked open in order to disgorge not only its own violence but also all that imaginative wealth and vitality which had been half locked up within it.
The most obvious precedent for such a violent eruption of imaginative powers is that which is provided by Shakespeare, and perhaps above all by King Lear. Lear is a play of extraordinary violence whose persistent image, as Caroline Spurgeon has observed, is that ‘of a human body in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured, and finally broken on the rack’.[5] But at the same time it is a play about a man who struggles to repossess his own tenderness and emotional vitality and to weep those tears which, at the beginning of the play, he contemptuously dismisses as soft, weak and womanly. The same conflict reappears throughout Shakespeare’s poetry. We have only to recall Lady Macbeth’s renunciation of her own ‘soft’ maternal impulses in order to appreciate the fluency of Shakespeare’s own imaginative access to this conflict and the disturbing cruelty of its terms:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (I. vii)
The intense conflict between violence and tenderness which is expressed in these lines is, of course, in no sense one which will be found only in the poetic vision of Hughes and Shakespeare. It is present in poetry from the Old Testament onwards and indeed it might reasonably be regarded as a universal conflict, within which are contained and expressed some of the most fundamental characteristics of the human identity.
Any full investigation of the conflict and of its cultural significance would inevitably need to take account both of what Mark Spilka has called ‘Lawrence’s quarrel with tenderness’ and of Ian Suttie’s discussion of the extent and rigour of the ‘taboo on tenderness’ in our own culture.[6] But such an investigation would also need to take into consideration a much larger cultural context, and perhaps above all to examine the way in which the Christian ideal of love has itself traditionally been expressed within the medium of violent apocalyptic fantasies.
The investigation which I describe is clearly beyond the scope of this essay. My more modest aim here has been to draw attention to the role which is played by this conflict in two of the most hauntingly powerful of Ted Hughes’s early poems and to suggest that Hughes’s poetic powers are fully realised not when this conflict is resolved but when it is unleashed in its most violent form.
In taking this approach I am motivated in part by the feeling that the discussion of Hughes’s poetry has sometimes been too much in thrall to a powerful cultural image of Hughes’s poetic personality – one which he himself has tended to project. In this image Hughes is above all an isolated and embattled figure who has set himself against the entire course both of modern poetry and of modern history .He is rather like the hero in one of his most powerful poems ‘Stealing trout on a May morning’, resolutely and stubbornly wading upstream, his feet rooted in the primeval strength of the river’s bed as the whole course of modern history and modern puritanical rationalism floods violently past him in the opposite direction, bearing with it what Hughes himself has called ‘mental disintegration … under the super-ego of Moses … and the self-anaesthetising schizophrenia of St Paul’, and leaving him in secure possession of that ancient and archaic imaginative energy which he invokes in his poetry.
The alternative to this Romantic view of Hughes’s poetic personality is to see Hughes’s poetry as essentially the poetry of an intellectual, an intellectual who is subject to the rigours of ‘puritanical rationalism’ just as much as any other intellectual but who, instead of submitting to those rigours, fights against them with that stubborn and intransigent resolution which belongs only to the puritan soul.
In reality perhaps neither of these views is wholly appropriate, and the truth comes somewhere between the two. But what does seem clear is that when Hughes talks of modern civilisation as consisting in ‘mental disintegration. ..under the super-ego of Moses … and the self-anaesthetising schizophrenia of St Paul’ he is once again engaging in that characteristic strategy of externalising a conflict of sensibility which is profoundly internal. For it must be suggested that Paul’s own ‘schizophrenia’ consisted in an acute conflict between the impulse towards tenderness, abundance and generosity and the impulse towards puritanical violence – the violence of chastity. It is precisely this conflict which seems to be buried in Hughes’s early poetry and which, as I have suggested, eventually erupts in the poetry of Crow. If, in Crow, Hughes is able to explore and express the internalised violence of the rationalist sensibility with more imaginative power than any other modern poet, it is perhaps because he does so from within a poetic sensibility which is itself profoundly intellectual, and deeply marked by that very puritanical rationalism which he so frequently – and I believe justifiably – attacks.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Forster's Writing Technique
Forster's narrative style is straightforward; events follow one another in logical order. Structurally, his sentence style also is relatively uncomplicated, and he reproduces accurately the tones of human conversation; his handling of the idiom of the English-speaking Indian is especially remarkable.
However, Forster's rhetorical style is far from unsubtle. His descriptions of the landscape, however unattractive it may be, frequently have a poetic rhythm. He makes lavish use of both satire and irony, and the satire is especially biting in his treatment of the English colonials, particularly in the events before the trial in the "Caves" section. But he is also capable of gentle humor, notably in his depiction of the high-spirited and volatile Aziz.
As has been noted earlier, there are numerous themes and symbols — such as the wasp, the echo, the "Come come" of Godbole's song — which recur throughout the novel; these are not introduced in an obvious fashion, and it is not until the end of the book that their full significance is apparent.
Some of the statements in the book are in the form of questions to which answers are obvious; but for many of them no answers are suggested or even implied — an indication of the philosophical nature of the novel. Forster is not the man with all the answers, and perhaps he is implying that he himself is not certain whether life is (in the terms he frequently uses) "mystery or muddle" — or both.
On Finding A Small Fly Crushed in a Book
Charles Tennyson Turner is somewhat unfairly regarded as a lesser poet than his more famous brother, the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Although he was a vicar by profession and not known as a poet in his own lifetime, he wrote over 340 sonnets and, as “On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book” shows, was an accomplished writer in his own right.
The poem is a sonnet, but an adapted one that has a rhyme scheme that does not exactly fit any of the traditional sonnet forms: Petrarchan, Spenserian or Shakespearian. This variation (the “break” in meaning, that usually occurs after the octet, actually comes in the middle of the eighth line) allows Turner to express himself more freely, and at a casual glance the poem remains a typical sonnet. This is also evident in its seemingly generic title: the construction “On…” was extremely common among reflective poems of the 17th to 19th centuries. Yet “On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book” cannot be considered a generic or typical poem.
It is unusual rather in its rather daring choice of subject and its subtly radical message. As Turner was a clergyman in a very conservative era where the Church of England was one of the most powerful forces in British life, it is somewhat surprising that he should choose death as a subject, as opposed to his rough contemporary, the Jesuit Geard Manley Hopkins, who devoted the bulk of his work to the praise of God and all his creations (although this was also a highly radical theme in its own way). Turner lacks Hopkins’ linguistic inventiveness, but his poem is finely crafted and certainly decidedly unchurchlike in its approach.
The poem’s beginning belies its deeper character. “Some hand that never meant to do thee hurt” has killed the fly, begins Turner, and it seems like the beginning of a slight, modest poem about finding a fly. The third line, however, hints at Turner’s concern for the nature of man and his relation to life, as well as his abiding compassion for all things. “But thou hast left thine own fair monument”, he writes, and while simply stated is touching to see such honest and unironic feeling shown towards something commonly considered so petty and insignificant that the hand that killed it did so unknowingly.
The rest of the poem consists of Turner’s reflections on life and death and the similarities and differences between himself and the fly. He contrasts the fly’s more elegant death, that has left a beautiful (to him, although not necessarily to all readers) “lustre” on the page that he has opened, with the end of human life. The sight of the fly awakens Turner to the fact that his death rapidly approaches: “Our doom is ever near:/The peril is besides us day by day”, he writes, and one can clearly hear the echo of Marvell’s lines, “But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near;”* although this is not a humorous poem even if it lightly written. Turner uses the metaphor of the closing book to refer to the death of both fly and human, and in this way equates the two as equal. Yet while they are equal, to him they are so rather different.
He sees no beauty or warmth in the remembrance of a human life that once was. Whereas the fly has left a lovely testament to its own beauty and spark, in Turner’s views memories, perhaps his own, are a poor equivalent to the fly’s legacy. In part, he sees this as because the fly has lived a “blameless life”, while he, even though he was a man of God by profession, clearly believes that he hasn’t. To see a fly as more blameless than a human is a view that is little short of revoulutionary in an era where Darwin’s theories were condemned not only because they repudiated Christianity but because, in Thomas Carlyle’s famous phrase, they were seen as “gorilla damnifications of humanity”.
“On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book” is a short poem that says little directly, but is also a poem that is rich with compassion, humility and an ability to appreciate beauty. These are great qualities not only of poetry but also of a human, and it is therefore a testament to the beauty not only of Turner’s writing but also of his thought. The enduring message, that death is a great and invincible leveller for both human and fly, reminded me strongly of an old Italian proverb that links the game of chess with death: “at the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back into the same box”.
The poem is a sonnet, but an adapted one that has a rhyme scheme that does not exactly fit any of the traditional sonnet forms: Petrarchan, Spenserian or Shakespearian. This variation (the “break” in meaning, that usually occurs after the octet, actually comes in the middle of the eighth line) allows Turner to express himself more freely, and at a casual glance the poem remains a typical sonnet. This is also evident in its seemingly generic title: the construction “On…” was extremely common among reflective poems of the 17th to 19th centuries. Yet “On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book” cannot be considered a generic or typical poem.
It is unusual rather in its rather daring choice of subject and its subtly radical message. As Turner was a clergyman in a very conservative era where the Church of England was one of the most powerful forces in British life, it is somewhat surprising that he should choose death as a subject, as opposed to his rough contemporary, the Jesuit Geard Manley Hopkins, who devoted the bulk of his work to the praise of God and all his creations (although this was also a highly radical theme in its own way). Turner lacks Hopkins’ linguistic inventiveness, but his poem is finely crafted and certainly decidedly unchurchlike in its approach.
The poem’s beginning belies its deeper character. “Some hand that never meant to do thee hurt” has killed the fly, begins Turner, and it seems like the beginning of a slight, modest poem about finding a fly. The third line, however, hints at Turner’s concern for the nature of man and his relation to life, as well as his abiding compassion for all things. “But thou hast left thine own fair monument”, he writes, and while simply stated is touching to see such honest and unironic feeling shown towards something commonly considered so petty and insignificant that the hand that killed it did so unknowingly.
The rest of the poem consists of Turner’s reflections on life and death and the similarities and differences between himself and the fly. He contrasts the fly’s more elegant death, that has left a beautiful (to him, although not necessarily to all readers) “lustre” on the page that he has opened, with the end of human life. The sight of the fly awakens Turner to the fact that his death rapidly approaches: “Our doom is ever near:/The peril is besides us day by day”, he writes, and one can clearly hear the echo of Marvell’s lines, “But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near;”* although this is not a humorous poem even if it lightly written. Turner uses the metaphor of the closing book to refer to the death of both fly and human, and in this way equates the two as equal. Yet while they are equal, to him they are so rather different.
He sees no beauty or warmth in the remembrance of a human life that once was. Whereas the fly has left a lovely testament to its own beauty and spark, in Turner’s views memories, perhaps his own, are a poor equivalent to the fly’s legacy. In part, he sees this as because the fly has lived a “blameless life”, while he, even though he was a man of God by profession, clearly believes that he hasn’t. To see a fly as more blameless than a human is a view that is little short of revoulutionary in an era where Darwin’s theories were condemned not only because they repudiated Christianity but because, in Thomas Carlyle’s famous phrase, they were seen as “gorilla damnifications of humanity”.
“On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book” is a short poem that says little directly, but is also a poem that is rich with compassion, humility and an ability to appreciate beauty. These are great qualities not only of poetry but also of a human, and it is therefore a testament to the beauty not only of Turner’s writing but also of his thought. The enduring message, that death is a great and invincible leveller for both human and fly, reminded me strongly of an old Italian proverb that links the game of chess with death: “at the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back into the same box”.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Shelley's "Ozymandias"
Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias" is undoubtedly one of his most popular poems. Since the mid-nineteenth century, it has been anthologized countless times. Today, most educated people will have come across the poem. Its length and directness lend it to study in schools. Surprisingly, however, it has gotten little attention critically. This is probably due to the same factors which make it so popular: its simplicity and its shortness might make it seem unworthy of critical investigation. Indeed, its publication history suggests the poem, although true to Shelley's beliefs, originated more out of the author's public and social life and was not written with the intent of canonization.
Ozymandias was first published in Leigh Hunt's Examiner of January 11, 1818.(Everest 34) Hunt was a close friend of Shelley's. There was no difficulty for Shelley in getting this work published. The men were among the same literary and social circle and shared the same anti-authoritarian views. The sonnet was published over the name Glirastes, which was a name derived from an inside joke which started while the Shelleys were living at Marlow in 1817. The word means 'doormouse-lover'. 'Doormouse' was a petname Percy had for Mary during this period.(Everest 34)
Recently, the couples' social life had rapidly increased upon their moving in with the Hunts in February and subsequently making the acquaintances of Keats, Reynolds, Lamb, Hazlitt, the Cowden Clarkes, and others.(Bradley 36) 'Ozymandias' can be seen as a clever bid by Shelley to impress his newfound friends. Shelley's notorious intellectual conversations had apparently yielded a friendly competition on the topic between him and Horace Smith. The poem was written between December 26 and 28 1817, during which time Smith was a guest at Marlow with the Shelleys. Horace has a poem on a very similar subject published in the Examiner on February 1 1818.(Everest 35)
In its initial publication, it is evident through its editing first of all that Shelley was not much involved and also that the poem was carelessly printed. The quotation marks opened on the second line are never closed! Furthermore, the two lines attributed directly to the tyrant Ozymandias read, "'My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.'/ Look on my words, ye Mighty, and despair!"(Hunt 24) Of the two lines printed on the pedestal, only one is put into quotation marks. The overcapitalization of this version, most notable in the "visually mannered" spelling of 'OZYMANDIAS', is not present in Shelley's rough drafts found in his journals. This suggests Hunt's editorial domination over this first printed version. Hunt himself was very prone to plentiful capitalization.
It is probable that Hunt, the editor himself was involved in or at least aware of the competition which fathered the sonnet. He later accidentally sent 'Ozymandias' to Keats' editor as the sonnet 'To the Nile', which is known definitively to have been written by Shelley in competition with Keats and Hunt in 1818.(Rollins 182) These competitions were commonplace among Shelley's circle and yielded much of the participants' shorter works. 'Ozymandias' is unique in that it has gained so much recognition for what was, essentially, a knock-off poem.
Ozymandias's second publication was in Shelley's Rosalind and Helen volume of 1819, where it is included as one of a "few scattered poems I left in England." In his 'Advertisement', Shelley points out that the poem was selected for the book by his 'bookseller' and not by himself. By his reference to the poem in such nonchalant terms as "scattered" and by his rejection of responsibility for its presence in his new volume of long, heavy poetry, it is obvious that Shelley is not particularly proud of this piece. Speech marks have in this edition been repaired to properly match Shelley's intent as seen in his journals, and "OZYMANDIAS" has been brought back down notch to "Ozymandias". There is nothing to suggest that the Rosalind and Helen text was treated with a corrected manuscript supplied by Shelley, but critics agree that it is truer to Shelley because it more resembles the forms of presentation in the poems which he did personally guide through the press. Still, this version, not controlled by Shelley in its printing, diverges from the version of Shelley's journals in major ways. Most notable is its change of "dessert" to "desart". This spelling gives the word a more archaic feel, giving a different impression of the story-teller and making his story itself seem more fanciful and less ironically objective than in other versions. Whether Shelley favored this mutation and its consequences remains uncertain, but the effect was probably not so strong on the reader of his time. Today it has been changed back to "desert". When the poem was again published by Mary Shelley in 1839 after Percy Shelley's death, it was based on the version from Rosalind and Helen. Almost all subsequent editions of the nineteenth century come from Mary Shelley's version.(Everest 37)
The main intellectual inspiration for this poem was, of course, Shelley's strong distaste for tyranny. Given his natural rebellious nature, it is likely the poem alludes to the modern rule of England. In March of the same year, habeas corpus had been suspended for government fear of pressures to reform.(Bradley 37) Later, in November, three men were hanged and mutilated for leading the Pentridge Revolution (a workers' uprising) which occurred in June. This prompted Shelley's An Address to the People which cannot be found in print today but which points out the injustices of the government.(Bradley 38)
The structure of the poem itself is a sign of Shelley's rebelliousness. Shelley wrote few sonnets. Not surprisingly, when he does write one with Ozymandias, it goes against the grain of accepted sonnet format. Ozymandias experiments with the sonnet form. Its rhyme scheme is odd and hard to follow: ababacdcedefef. Also, it makes notable use of disorienting half-rhymes like "stone"/"frown" and "appear"/"bare".
It is utterly ironic that what was written as a vitriol against the arrogance of man exemplified by the surviving yet unfounded pride of a long-dethroned tyrant can be seen in retrospect as a confession of the author's own pride above all else. Not to say that Percy Shelley was a 'tyrant' in his own field, but it is true that the poet did yield tremendous influence during his time in the literary realm and today is one of the least-studied Romantic poets. It was just as easy for Shelley to get his friend to publish Ozymandias in the Examiner as it presumably was for his character Ozymandias to commission his sculptor to immortalize him in stone. Likewise, just as it was possible for the artist to mock Ozymandias, as some analyses argue, "whose frown,/ And wrinkled lips, & sneer of cold command,/ Tell that its sculptor well those passions read", so did the actual distributors of Ozymandias take poetic license with Shelley's poem, changing its meaning, slightly as they did, in the process.
Bibliography
Bradley, J.L. A Shelley Chronology. London: The Macmillon Press, 1993.
Everest, Kelvin, Ed. Essays and Studies 1992: Percy Bysshe Shelley. 'Ozymandias: The Text in Time, Kelvin Everest. Cambridge: Brewer, 1992.
Examiner No. 524 11 January 1818. Ed. Hunt
Rollins, Hyder Edward. The Keatz Circle, 2 volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge, 1965.
Ozymandias was first published in Leigh Hunt's Examiner of January 11, 1818.(Everest 34) Hunt was a close friend of Shelley's. There was no difficulty for Shelley in getting this work published. The men were among the same literary and social circle and shared the same anti-authoritarian views. The sonnet was published over the name Glirastes, which was a name derived from an inside joke which started while the Shelleys were living at Marlow in 1817. The word means 'doormouse-lover'. 'Doormouse' was a petname Percy had for Mary during this period.(Everest 34)
Recently, the couples' social life had rapidly increased upon their moving in with the Hunts in February and subsequently making the acquaintances of Keats, Reynolds, Lamb, Hazlitt, the Cowden Clarkes, and others.(Bradley 36) 'Ozymandias' can be seen as a clever bid by Shelley to impress his newfound friends. Shelley's notorious intellectual conversations had apparently yielded a friendly competition on the topic between him and Horace Smith. The poem was written between December 26 and 28 1817, during which time Smith was a guest at Marlow with the Shelleys. Horace has a poem on a very similar subject published in the Examiner on February 1 1818.(Everest 35)
In its initial publication, it is evident through its editing first of all that Shelley was not much involved and also that the poem was carelessly printed. The quotation marks opened on the second line are never closed! Furthermore, the two lines attributed directly to the tyrant Ozymandias read, "'My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.'/ Look on my words, ye Mighty, and despair!"(Hunt 24) Of the two lines printed on the pedestal, only one is put into quotation marks. The overcapitalization of this version, most notable in the "visually mannered" spelling of 'OZYMANDIAS', is not present in Shelley's rough drafts found in his journals. This suggests Hunt's editorial domination over this first printed version. Hunt himself was very prone to plentiful capitalization.
It is probable that Hunt, the editor himself was involved in or at least aware of the competition which fathered the sonnet. He later accidentally sent 'Ozymandias' to Keats' editor as the sonnet 'To the Nile', which is known definitively to have been written by Shelley in competition with Keats and Hunt in 1818.(Rollins 182) These competitions were commonplace among Shelley's circle and yielded much of the participants' shorter works. 'Ozymandias' is unique in that it has gained so much recognition for what was, essentially, a knock-off poem.
Ozymandias's second publication was in Shelley's Rosalind and Helen volume of 1819, where it is included as one of a "few scattered poems I left in England." In his 'Advertisement', Shelley points out that the poem was selected for the book by his 'bookseller' and not by himself. By his reference to the poem in such nonchalant terms as "scattered" and by his rejection of responsibility for its presence in his new volume of long, heavy poetry, it is obvious that Shelley is not particularly proud of this piece. Speech marks have in this edition been repaired to properly match Shelley's intent as seen in his journals, and "OZYMANDIAS" has been brought back down notch to "Ozymandias". There is nothing to suggest that the Rosalind and Helen text was treated with a corrected manuscript supplied by Shelley, but critics agree that it is truer to Shelley because it more resembles the forms of presentation in the poems which he did personally guide through the press. Still, this version, not controlled by Shelley in its printing, diverges from the version of Shelley's journals in major ways. Most notable is its change of "dessert" to "desart". This spelling gives the word a more archaic feel, giving a different impression of the story-teller and making his story itself seem more fanciful and less ironically objective than in other versions. Whether Shelley favored this mutation and its consequences remains uncertain, but the effect was probably not so strong on the reader of his time. Today it has been changed back to "desert". When the poem was again published by Mary Shelley in 1839 after Percy Shelley's death, it was based on the version from Rosalind and Helen. Almost all subsequent editions of the nineteenth century come from Mary Shelley's version.(Everest 37)
The main intellectual inspiration for this poem was, of course, Shelley's strong distaste for tyranny. Given his natural rebellious nature, it is likely the poem alludes to the modern rule of England. In March of the same year, habeas corpus had been suspended for government fear of pressures to reform.(Bradley 37) Later, in November, three men were hanged and mutilated for leading the Pentridge Revolution (a workers' uprising) which occurred in June. This prompted Shelley's An Address to the People which cannot be found in print today but which points out the injustices of the government.(Bradley 38)
The structure of the poem itself is a sign of Shelley's rebelliousness. Shelley wrote few sonnets. Not surprisingly, when he does write one with Ozymandias, it goes against the grain of accepted sonnet format. Ozymandias experiments with the sonnet form. Its rhyme scheme is odd and hard to follow: ababacdcedefef. Also, it makes notable use of disorienting half-rhymes like "stone"/"frown" and "appear"/"bare".
It is utterly ironic that what was written as a vitriol against the arrogance of man exemplified by the surviving yet unfounded pride of a long-dethroned tyrant can be seen in retrospect as a confession of the author's own pride above all else. Not to say that Percy Shelley was a 'tyrant' in his own field, but it is true that the poet did yield tremendous influence during his time in the literary realm and today is one of the least-studied Romantic poets. It was just as easy for Shelley to get his friend to publish Ozymandias in the Examiner as it presumably was for his character Ozymandias to commission his sculptor to immortalize him in stone. Likewise, just as it was possible for the artist to mock Ozymandias, as some analyses argue, "whose frown,/ And wrinkled lips, & sneer of cold command,/ Tell that its sculptor well those passions read", so did the actual distributors of Ozymandias take poetic license with Shelley's poem, changing its meaning, slightly as they did, in the process.
Bibliography
Bradley, J.L. A Shelley Chronology. London: The Macmillon Press, 1993.
Everest, Kelvin, Ed. Essays and Studies 1992: Percy Bysshe Shelley. 'Ozymandias: The Text in Time, Kelvin Everest. Cambridge: Brewer, 1992.
Examiner No. 524 11 January 1818. Ed. Hunt
Rollins, Hyder Edward. The Keatz Circle, 2 volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge, 1965.
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