Category Archives: notes on poems

public intellectuals and the fickle food of fame

This weekend, at Amherst, I enjoyed a rich conversation about the purposes of liberal arts colleges. One proposal (not mine, but I appreciated it) was for liberal arts colleges to nurture public intellectuals.

The colleges represented at the meeting use basically the same criteria and standards for hiring and promotion that research-intensive universities use. Should their faculty be distinctive in any way? Universities tend to reward work produced for experts within fields. Liberal arts colleges could favor work that is meant for the public. Because they can be very selective, they could attract public intellectuals without compromising quality.

Sometimes, writing or speaking for the public is defined as reaching a large audience–in a word, as fame. But the most famous person who ever lived in Amherst refused to share her work with the public and wrote several trenchant poems about fame.

For instance, these four lines constitute Emily Dickinson’s poem #1788:

Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.

The “song” is the attraction of fame, but the the “wing” refers to its tendency to fly away after causing pain. The ancient personification of Fame was winged, but I think she was envisioned arriving by air to announce someone’s success, rather than flying away unpredictably. Dickinson suggests a similar idea in the poem (#1659) that begins “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate.” There is also: “Fame is the one that does not stay” (#1507).

Dickinson carefully designed her own funeral, a public event that launched her career posthumously. It seems that she wanted to reach an audience (hence becoming famous) but did not want fame to affect her work. She carefully timed her fame until after she could experience it (Crumbly 2017).

That sequence is clear in #1427:

To earn it by disdaining it
Is Fame’s consummate Fee—
He loves what spurns him—
Look behind—He is pursuing thee.

So let us gather—every Day—
The Aggregate of
Life’s Bouquet
Be Honor and not shame—

The addressee of the poem (Dickinson herself?) is moving toward an unnamed goal. That goal is not fame, which is behind her. Fame pursues her because she does not seek him. Perhaps an author or thinker who disdains to pursue fame is more likely to become famous because the quality of her work will be higher.

There is an air here of lovers, like Keats’ figures on the Grecian Urn (“What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”). And there is something a bit creepy about Fame sneaking up from behind. You would think that turning around to see him would be a mistake, like Orpheus’ tragic error in looking behind him for Eurydice. But Dickinson’s narrator advises, “Look behind–he is pursuing thee.” Perhaps you should look back to remember the temptation that shadows you and then press forward to stay out of his clutches. Play hard to get.

The second stanza instructs us to attend to what life provides and to make art from it, not caring about the “shame” of becoming famous. We should be concerned with what we can gather, not with what people will think of us.

Nevertheless, Dickinson is a consummate rhetorician in the sense that she addresses strangers and tries to influence them, carefully considering what they may know, care about, and want to hear. Even though she eschews a contemporaneous audience, she writes for a public. Most readers feel that she is talking to them, and we certainly don’t have to be professional poets.

The kind of academic or intellectual work that I most appreciate (and try to support through the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts, the Institute for Civically Engaged Research, and other efforts) involves collaborations between scholarly experts and concrete groups, organizations, movements, or communities. The experts must talk in useful ways. It is exciting when their collaborative work expands to large scales and affects many people, but sometimes large scale is inappropriate or impossible. Aiming for big numbers can undermine integrity and quality. The goal is to share what Hannah Arendt calls a “world” with people who are independent and different from oneself.

If Amherst’s most famous resident is a model, the lesson would be to make things that have value for strangers, not just for colleagues and specialists. But treat fame as a threat to quality. Run away from it.

Source: Crumbley, Paul. “Emily Dickinson’s Funeral and the Paradox of Literary Fame.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 26 no. 2, 2017, p. 51-69. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/edj.2017.0014. See also: anxieties of influence; love of the world

Wendell Berry, September 2

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On September 2, I posted Wendell Berry’s poem with that title on social media, moved that he had just missed the anniversary of the day when, according to the poem, he accepted “decline” and recognized that he would dissolve into “sleep.” The original appeared in Poetry magazine, May 1970. Berry died on August 31 of this year.

I have since spend a bit more time with the poem, and I will offer a few notes in the hope that they may encourage you to give it additional attention. (Berry always invited us to attend.)

It is written in iambic pentameter. There are rhymes: “hawks” and “stalks” get the poem going, and later, “knew” rhymes with “grew”; “as in” with “garden”; and–more loosely–“darkening” with “fading.” I hear the last word of the poem, “flight,” as a rhyme of “light,” although that word came at a caesura in line 10.

Neither the rhythm nor the rhyme scheme is perfectly regular. Nor are rows of sunflowers. But the regularity is sufficient to connect this poem to the tradition of rhymed English iambic pentameter that Chaucer began in the 14th Century. Running to twelve lines, it can be read as variant of a sonnet.

Early September would likely be hot in a place like Kentucky. The poem is set in the evening, when nighthawks hunt for insects, and the “landscapes of the sky” are fading at dusk. These features connect “September 2” to a long tradition of rustic elegy. As one of countless examples, Virgil’s second “Eclogue”:

The shadows lengthen as the sun goes low;
Cool breezes now the raging heats remove;
Ah! cruel heaven, that made no cure for love!
I wish for balmy sleep, but wish in vain ...
           (translated by John Dryden, 1697)

The nighthawks, sunflowers, and garden pull powerfully upward, as suggested by the words “rose,” “tall,” and “straining to the light.” The nighthawks are even “summoned” up. But the final two lines work like the “turn” or concluding couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet. They suddenly describe the narrator’s downward motion.

Berry was, famously, an actual farmer. But the garden in this poem is in his mind. Acceptance grows in his garden, not planned or planted there but naturally arising. He has worked in his mental garden; now he is ready to sleep.

Like most poems, this one should be read as fiction. But it is hard to ignore the fact that Berry had 56 years ahead of him to describe restraint and acceptance after he wrote these lines.

The last phrase is hard: “my leaves all dissolved in flight.” It echoes the sentence that likens the nighthawks to rags tossed in the sky. The birds rise into sight, while the narrator’s leaves dissolve, flying, out of view. But what are they–him? Are they about to fly from their stems when autumn comes?

If his leaves are his writings, I do not think they will soon dissolve.

My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On

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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

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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

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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.