Category Archives: notes on poems

My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On

This is the last of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets” (terrible in the sense that they seem to describe deep depression):

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
 
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.
 
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, lét be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
 
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
'S not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

This poem begins with a clear problem–the narrator feels tormented–and a solution: he should be kinder to himself. This outcome is expressed as a wish (“Let me live. …:”), not as an explicit direction or decision. We might call the first stanza a “forgiveness meditation.” The syntax is straightforward and the words are familiar. The lines represent grammatical units and conclude with monosyllabic words that neatly rhyme, ABBA.

In contrast, the second stanza is an elaborate simile with challenging syntax, where adjectives function as nouns and nouns turn into verbs. The narrator gropes around his “comfortless.” He fails to find comfort there, just as blind eyes cannot “day.” He also resembles a thirsty person who finds no relief (“thirst’s all-in-all”) even though everything is wet. Perhaps he is alone at sea where there is ne’er a drop to drink.

These are tropes for being unable to obey one’s commands to oneself. If you are blind, you cannot order yourself to see light. If you are in Hopkins’ condition, your “sad self” will not comply with your entreaty to be “hereafter kind” to yourself. A person cannot decide to “day.”

In the third stanza, the narrator tries to grab his own attention, calling to his soul, then to his self, and then to his “poor Jackself,” where “Jack” means a regular guy, a common man. (You could get a stranger’s attention with, “Hey, Jack!). “Lét be” bears a stress mark, which is common in Hopkins; here it represents an interrupting cry.

The poem has moved from a hortatory subjunctive (“let me more pity”) to an insistent imperative. The neat line breaks of the first stanza have broken down as most lines are now enjambed. (This trend continues to the point that a later line begins with an apostrophe-S.)

The strategy has changed, too. At the start, the narrator had wished that his self would be kinder to itself. Taken as an instruction, this failed, just as you can’t tell a blind person to try harder to see. Now the narrator “advises” not trying to change. “Call off thoughts awhile,” and maybe comfort will begin to grow like a root left alone with room. (Also, a root-room sounds like a place of comfort, a quiet cellar in which to borrow.)

The final stanza begins, “At God knows when to God knows what.” This sounds like an idiom for ignorance–“God knows what” can mean “I have no idea.” I think the phrase is meant to land like that, representing the mental state of a despondent person. But we gradually realize that Hopkins is serious about God. The divine smile is not “wrung.” We can’t squeeze grace out of damp material after a rain. Instead, it just breaks out as sunshine between mountains, dappled like a cow.

Here the grammatical mood is indicative. In the phrase, “skies betweenpie mountains,” “betweenpie” is a verb of Hopkins’ invention. The subject of this verb is “the skies,” but behind them is the divine subject that makes them look pied, or dappled, or stippled.

The mile ahead is lovely, not because we have made ourselves happy but by sheer grace.

Caedmon’s Hymn and modern responses

Leave a reply

According to Edward Hirsh, “English poetry began with a vision.” He’s referring to “Caedmon’s Hymn,” probably the earliest surviving verse in Old English. It’s embedded in a story that Bede wrote around the year 730 CE. Seamus Heaney calls this story “the myth of the beginning of English sacred poetry.”

Bede tells of an exemplary monk of Whitby Abbey during the time when St. Hilda was its abbess. This monk’s poetry turned many toward God. Bede explains that Caedmon never learned from human beings to make poetry. In fact, during banquets, when “it was decreed that all should sing,” and the harp was about to be passed to him to take his turn, he would rise from the middle of the company and go to his own house.

One night, he fled the singing and went to the village stables to tend the cattle he was responsible for. He completed his chores, fell asleep, and dreamt of a figure who said, “Caedmon, sing me something.” He replied that he couldn’t sing; that’s why he had come home from the banquet. The dream-figure insisted that he sing about the “beginning of creatures.” Caedmon found himself singing a poem that he had never heard before in praise of the Creator.

Bede includes this poem in Latin, acknowledging that it loses its “beauty and dignity” in translation. However, thanks to medieval scribes who added the original to the margins of many Bede manuscripts, we have the Old English text.

When Caedmon awoke, he remembered the words, added “many more,” and sang them to the local reeve (a magistrate), who took him to see St. Hilda. She and the learned men of her abbey were impressed and began explaining various biblical narratives to Caedmon. He became a monk and turned Bible stories into the “best songs,” instructing and inspiring people to shun lives of crime and to love truth and good deeds.

Caedmon’s poem, ostensibly the oldest in English, is also an invitation to think about the origins and purposes of poetry in general and its connection to other kinds of work, other kinds of knowledge, and other creatures. Several modern poets have responded to these questions.

Denise Levertov writes as Caedmon, beginning:

All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.

She imagines that Caedmon takes his inspiration from the physical beauty of the stable where he is most at home:

I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure.

Jean Beal focuses on Caedmon’s fear when the harp comes his way. She writes alliterative verse that hints at the Old English form, beginning: “Hearing the harp, like hearing my enemy’s horn ….”

Some critics have seen W.H. Auden’s “Anthem” as an echo of Caedmon’s song.

Seamus Heaney entitles his Caedmon poem “Whitby-sur-Moyola.” This place sounds like an English village, but the Moyola is a river in Ulster near where Heaney grew up. I think Caedmon reminds Heaney of his ancestors. In “Digging,” he writes of his father, “By God, the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man.” Working the soil becomes Heaney’s model for poetry: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”

In “Whitby-sur-Moyola,” Heaney adopts the perspective of someone who can recall Brother Caedmon, now deceased. This narrator admires Caedmon as an agricultural laborer: “the perfect yardman, / Unabsorbed in what he had to do / But doing it perfectly, and watching you.” Caedmon had finished learning poetry: “He had worked his angel stint. He was hard as nails.” Although the monk had mastered this learned art, his inspiration always came from the stable:

His real gift was the big ignorant roar
He could still let out of him, just bogging in
As if the sacred subjects were a herd
That had broken out and needed rounding up.
I never saw him once with his hands joined
Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven
And the quick sniff and test of fingertips
After he’d passed them through a sick beast’s water.
Oh, Caedmon was the real thing all right.

I’ll take a turn:

Caedmon

How do you tell people where it comes from,
This stuff you produce professionally,
These words that the young are told they must heed?
You know that somehow it started with work,
With loneliness, with silence and with fear.
First, you stood at a slight angle to life.
When it was your turn, you could only be
Like the warm silent beasts with steaming breath.
Then you found your voice, and the credit came.
They even began to give you the first turn.
Since you can't explain it, you make up a tale:
A dream in a stable when words just flowed. 
It’s no less true than other things you say.

“Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt

Leave a reply

Hannah Arendt wrote the poem “Klage” (“Lament” or “Complaint”) in the winter of 1925-6, the season when she turned 20 and broke off a passionate relationship with her teacher, Martin Heidegger. It appears in What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024), translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill.

Hill’s translations are eloquent as well as learned. She aims for reliability and does not attempt to replicate Arendt’s sing-song rhythms and rhymes. I have given myself a little more license in translating “Klage” as follows:

Complaint

Oh, the days they pass by uselessly
Like a never settled game,
The hours pressing ruthlessly,
Each play of pain the same. 

Time, it slides over me, and then it slides away. 
And I sing the old songs’ first lines—
Not whatever else they say. 

And no child in a dream could move
In a more predetermined way. 
No old one could more surely prove
That a life is long and gray. 

But never will sorrow soothe away
Old dreams, nor the insight of youth. 
Never will it make me give away 
The bliss of lovely truth.

 -- Hannah Arendt, 1925-6 (trans. Peter Levine)

This is a young person’s poem about a broken heart, concluding with an expression of indomitable spirit. The author was just a kid (and her teacher certainly shouldn’t have slept with her). The result could have been a cliché, a torch song, but Arendt’s tropes were original, and her craft was impeccable.

For instance, we read about a little girl dreaming that she is trudging along, and an old man knowing that life is gray, and then we encounter the phrase Alte Träume, junge Weisheit (old dreams and young wisdom). This is a surprising, chiastic twist.

Heidegger would soon give lectures that included an extended treatment of boredom. Perhaps he and Arendt had already discussed this topic before she wrote her poem (assuming that he didn’t get the idea from her verse). In short, for Heidegger, our experience of boredom discloses truths about time that are otherwise concealed. When we shift into or away from moods like boredom (or angst), we learn that what we imagine to be a self and a world are actually a single complex that unfolds in time (Levine 2023). Heidegger is all about acknowledging the vorgeschrieben Gang (predetermined way) of life but still claiming one’s own Glückes schöne Reinheit (beautiful purity of happiness). Even as Arendt felt depressed about breaking up with Heidegger, she explored and applied such ideas.

Later, the distinguished political theorist Hannah Arendt defended a distinction between the public and private spheres and guarded her private life, as she had every right to do. But her dignity should not mislead us that her private emotions were ever tame. Hill quotes a letter from Arendt to her husband: “And about the love of others who branded me as cold hearted, I always thought: If only you knew how dangerous love would be for me.” As someone who has read Arendt for nearly 40 years–but who only encountered her poetry recently (thanks to Hill)–I would say: I always knew this about her.

Source: P. Levine, “Boredom at the Border of Philosophy: Conceptual and Ethical Issues.” Frontiers in Sociology, July 2023 See also: Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; on the moral dangers of cliché (partly about Arendt); Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; homage to Hannah Arendt at The New School; Philip, Hannah, and Heinrich: a Play; don’t confuse bias and judgment; etc.

Rilke, The Grownup

Leave a reply

The Grownup

All this stood on her and was the world
And stood on her with everything, fear and grace,
As trees stand, growing and straight,
All image and imageless like the Ark. 
And solemnly, as if placed on a people.

And she endured it, bore it--
The flying, escaping, distant,
The immense, not yet learned--
Calm as a woman bearing water
In a full jug. Right in the midst of the game,
Transforming and preparing for something else,
The first white veil, gently gliding,

Fell over her open face
Almost opaque and never lifting again
And somehow to all your questions
Only vaguely offering an answer:
In you, you who has been a child, in you. 

        — Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Peter Levine)

The original poem, “Die Erwachsene” from New Poems (1907), is here. The title is the ordinary German word for “adult,” but etymologically, it means “one who has accomplished growth.” Rilke invents a word in his final line, “Kindgewesene,” which I translate here as “one who has been a child.” All of us (even the youngest) are both things at once.

The first lines describe a female person in the past tense. Every reading that I have seen presumes that she is a child, but that is not explicit, and the poem’s title names an adult.

She is with something. The phrase “all this” or “this all” (das alles) suggests that the narrator is referring to everything we perceive, the world. It exceeds representative language–being immense and fleeting–yet it has a heavy weight, which she bears calmly. It is likened to a tree and to the Ark of the Covenant. Trees do not intend anything; they simply grow. The Biblical Ark incorporated golden images of cherubim (Ex. 25:18), but it also contained the written prohibition against graven images, so that it was ganz Bild und bildlos–“all image and imageless.” A tree, the Ark, and perhaps a child are alike in that they have meanings for us but do not intend meanings.

At a specific moment, in the middle of an absorbing activity (a Spiel or game), a second object enters, a veil that descends permanently over this person’s face. Until now, she has seemed oblivious or absorbed in her context, but now there are things that are concealed from her, and vice-versa.

This veil–not the girl or woman–responds unclearly to “your” questions. With this evocation of “you,” there is another person in the poem: presumably, Rilke’s adult reader. The poem advises “you” to look for answers not through a veil but within yourself as someone who has been a child.

We might think of time as a series of instants, of which the present is merely one. That is how the time of clocks and calendars works: a system with which we analyze and control aspects of nature. One year we are children; another, we are grown. But consciousness is not simply located in the present. What we experience at any given moment is a set of meaningful objects that have various durations and histories, often extending into the future as well back into the remembered past. Like the objects that we experience, our selves have histories and hopes. Sometimes we are aware of the kind of time that clocks measure, and sometimes we are absorbed in an activity (bis mitten unterm Spiel) when a sudden change occurs.

Put another way: I am not merely an organism located at a time and a place but also a person who has been a child, who has grown, and who feels the weight of things “not yet learned.” The good and bad things that matter–both fear and grace–extend in time and carry me backward and ahead.

Kant deduced from the fact that we experience objects with duration that there must be a lasting self, but his deduction yielded an “I” that was invisible, simple, and identical for all who reason. As Merleau-Ponty writes, Kant’s argument “rids the world of its opacity and its transcendence. … There is nothing hidden behind … faces and gestures, no domain to which I have no access, merely a little shadow [the self] which owes its very existence to the light” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, xiii).

Looking inward, we should instead find a self that is complicated, dynamic, elusive, and situated. Rilke explores opacity and transcendence in this poem, which is about having both a past and a present.

Quotation from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (Routledge, 2002). The Rilke translation is mine and misses the tight rhythm and rhyme-scheme of the original. See also: Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall“; phenomenology of nostalgia; Kieran Setiya on midlife; three great paintings in dialogue (addressing Rilke’s 5th Duino Elegy); and the sublime is social–with notes on Wordsworth’s “Lines Above Tintern Abbey“.

Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

Leave a reply

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-- Wallace Stevens (1921)

After the first stanza, it’s reasonable to think: I should have a wintry mind so that I can regard this winter landscape appreciatively. I should be appropriately attuned to what I observe, especially if it is nature. I should be worthy of what I experience.

We are used to people who admonish us: “Little we see in Nature that is ours” (Wordworth). Before we can have “glimpses that would make [us] less forlorn,” we must change ourselves. Legions of religious thinkers have also urged us to make ourselves worthy of glimpses of the divine. As the Psalmist says, “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?”

This theory of the poem can survive the second stanza, where being “cold a long time” plays the role of having “a mind of winter,” and the objects are junipers with ice instead of pines with snow. It seems as if we should be cold like the trees. We may even feel a tinge of regret if we are too comfortable to regard nature’s austere beauty.

But this theory collapses in the third stanza, with the word “not.” It seems that we can regard a snowy landscape with or without a mind that resembles it. Only if the mind is not wintry and cold can we perceive misery. If we hear misery in the winter wind, we do not have a wintry mind.

Wintry mind + junipers shagged with ice = no sensation of misery
Non-wintry mind + junipers shagged with ice = sensation of misery

I, for one, assume that I ought to be able to feel suffering in nature. That would be an indication of my sensitivity, a virtue that poems often recommend.

Now I am beginning to wonder if I should avoid having a wintry mind and being cold for a long time. After all, the dead are the ones who are coldest for the longest. They are the ones without compassion.

Reading on (through the single sentence of this poem), we learn that the sound that could make us think of misery is a wind that blows “for the listener.” Does it have a purpose, an intention? Does it want to instruct us about misery–or about something else?

Before it concludes, the poem’s single sentence refutes such anthropomorphism. The land can’t think or talk. The poem instructs us that the listener (a “he”) is nothing; he only sees what the objective world offers, and he perceives nothing that actually is.

There isn’t misery in “the sound of a few leaves,” nor is there misery in the beholder (a listener and viewer), but there is misery–as well as “distant glitter”–in the experience, unless one is dead. The poem is a representation of the relationship between the mind and object (which, together, make a “snow man”).

One must have the wintry mind of an abstract modernist not to hear sadness in this.

[After I wrote this, I searched my own blog and found a response to the same poem that I’d written in 2012: the tree and the rock. See also: Wallace Stevens’ idea of order; and the fetter; Cuttings.]