Valentine's Day: Do Poets' and Novelists' Arrows Hit, or Miss?

[Disclaimer: As a Valentine's Day skeptic, I am also purposely publishing this blog post two days early in sign of protest.]

In my Canadian high school, an English teacher asked us to bring in and discuss a poem that expressed to us what love is. I failed in that attempt because it was hard to find anything that did, even though in the end a Shakespeare sonnet was what came closest. As a teenager, to me there were three pieces of literature that came to mind:

War and Peace. For some reason the later scenes with [spoiler alert: please drag your cursor over the white spaces if you don't mind the spoiler] Pierre and Natasha represented to me what true love was all about. Everyday, boring happiness where you're a little starry-eyed about each other even in your forties; a type of relationship whose harmony makes it livable and comfortable for others (children, friends, relatives) to be around you.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

⁠If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
⁠I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

The Scarlet Pimpernel. Even as a teenager I knew that the book was soap opera in its depictions of relationships and human psychology. But this scene was still moving and while it felt over-the-top as a scenario, held a kernel of possible emotional truth:

Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless. He was but a man madly, blindly, passionately in love, and as soon as her light footsteps had died away within the house, he knelt down upon the terrace steps, and in the very madness of his love he kissed one by one the places where her small foot had trodden, and the stone balustrade there, where her tiny hand had rested last.

***

In the intervening years, I've read other poems that were felt to be romantic classics — amongst others — by the Victorians. For example:

Wordsworth's She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.

A Violet by a mossy stone
⁠Half-hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
⁠Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her Grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

I think a poem that idealizes a woman's life being largely unappreciated and ending in early death, is a strange choice as a love poem. Wordsworth's other poems are also infantilizing (Note: which is not to say that I don't appreciate Wordsworth in general):

A Creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles

*

As a 36-year-old, here's my latest take:

In the end, the Corinthians in the Bible give perhaps the best nudge toward how to love when you have the chance, platonic or romantic:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

"1 Corinthians" in: The King James Bible. Oxford: 1769 (Wikisource)

As a teenager I'd probably think this idea of 'love' is to be soft-spoken and ingratiating, and find it vomitous. But now I think I understand. It's encouragement to keep fighting the battle not to make ourselves feel better by depreciating others, or by getting hung up on silly arguments.

And, to drop Shakespeare's idea of a constant love that had convinced me as a teenager, I think love needs to keep changing, adapting, growing, stretching and improving the older we grow and the more challenges we find.

*

Lastly Charles Baudelaire's "L'Harmonie du soir" comes to mind, especially the elegiac but heartwarming final line "Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!" ('Your memory, in me, glows like a church monstrance.')

***

Sources:

"Sonnet 116" in: Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Edward Bliss Reed, ed. Yale University Press: 1923. (Wikisource)

Orczy, Baroness Emmuska. The Scarlet Pimpernel. Ch. XVI. (Wikisource)
[Edited to add - Feb. 13th: As a strange historical footnote, apparently The Scarlet Pimpernel's central narrative, adopted into a 1940s anti-fascist propaganda film, inspired Raoul Wallenberg.]

Wordsworth, William. Poems, Vol. I. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown (1815) (Wikisource) and "She was a Phantom of delight"

(I hate when people do this self-referential thing, but will do it anyway: For Baudelaire's poem, please see my blog post)

The Bach Motet: Jesu, meine Freude

A colleague sent me a new recording of a Bach motet. Aside from the anti-coronavirus masks worn by all the singers, as they stand and perform in a church in Prague for the Spring Festival, on May 18th this year; and aside from the quality of the singing of music, which had been unknown to me before; what struck me was the lyrics.

J.S.Bach - Motet: Jesu, meine Freude BWV 227 - Collegium 1704
[YouTube: Bachology,
May 22, 2020]

While Baroque-era Christianity had its fanatic aspects, and the wars of religion were terrible, I find hymns like the ones that were incorporated in the motet touching and sympathetic. They attempt to come to terms with the worst of humanity and the best of existence, all in one. To me they seem like an example of the massive efforts that men made in the 17th century, perhaps more than we do today.

Written by Johann Franck, the hymns in the motet were written in the middle of the 1600s. They are simple in construction: an aab ccb dee rhyme scheme, for example, mostly emphasized in trochees.

I tend to like the first two or three lines of each hymn best. For example, at the beginning of the motet:

Jesu, meine Freude,
Meines Herzens Weide,

The 'pasture of the heart' is tranquil and idyllic, insofar as it makes me think of a landscape painting with a grazing cow shaded by tall, old-growth trees. Why the thought of a cow should feel poetic, rather than reminiscent of milk and steak, I don't know.

Unter deinem Schirmen
Bin ich vor den Stürmen
Aller Feinde frei.

is also pleasant. (To translate roughly: 'Beneath your shelters, I am free of the storming of all foes.' The Bachology YouTube video presents a more elegant translation: "Beneath your protection/I am free from the attacks/of all my enemies.")

February 2020 in Books: What (I'll) Be Reading Next

While reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs went swimmingly despite its length and I'm currently just browsing the index at the end of the book as well as any other back matter, I am struggling with Solito, Solita and Their Eyes Were Watching God. They are not cheerful and lately I've needed a pick-me-up after not disagreeable but long hours at work.

Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir by Ngugi wa Thiong'o I'd like to read later, as well as Hidden Figures, which describes the role of African American women in the Space Age. I think that Wrestling with the Devil is on my list after watching a review of literature from the African continent from 'books by leynes.' She is a fellow Berliner who reviews books and talks about learning Russian and travelling during semester breaks and other things, in the self-possessed way of a typical opinionated young German, on YouTube.

In the 'BookTube' genre of YouTube users who make videos about literature, I am still trying to find more commentators whose style I like.

So far I also enjoy Lucythereader's videos — she is likely in her early twenties at most, obsessed with Victorian literature from Britain and the US as well as some Edwardian. And I like Booksandquills, by a young woman who used to work for Penguin, studied translation with a focus on Young Adult literature, and now freelances as a Dutch expatriate in the UK.

I have been reading more physics in Teilchendetektoren, more poems from Cavafy (who has mercifully left his peak phase of erotic poetry about younger men and is now foreshadowing the Turco-Greek upheaval of the early 1920s in Anatolia), and the rest of Racine's 17th-century play Bajazet.

***
Bajazet borrows its plot from real political assassinations in 17th-century Turkish history, as retold to Racine by French diplomats and filtered through Racine's own artistic impulses. The sultan Amurat (Murad IV), from the battlefield at Baghdad, sends orders that his brother be murdered. (There is also another brother, Orhan, who has been dropped from Racine's narrative as far as I recall.)

"Sultan Murat IV dining with his court.
A golden cup,
a tablet with fresh flowers and fresh fruits
and porcelain plates are in front of him.
Ottoman miniature painting.
Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, Istanbul."
In the Badisches Landesmuseum.
First half, 17th century
via Wikimedia Commons

The endangered brother — Bajazet (Bayezid) — has already been deprived of his liberty, trapped in the palace. There he and the fictional princess Atalide bypass the barriers of imprisonment and the harem to declare their mutual affection.

Amurat's favourite Roxane falls in love with Bajazet, too. The court vizier, Acomat, tries to manipulate the infatuation for political gain, entirely ignorant of Atalide's claims. With a misplaced confidence in his own acumen, he precipitates tragedy, when he really wants to raise Bajazet to the throne.

I guess that the moral conflict arises because it is hard for the hero Bajazet and heroine Atalide to remain honest, upright, and self-determined in the hothouse environment of the palace. There the powers of life and death are in the hands of brutal, impulsive people who are ready and willing to wield them; and virtue, enterprise and courage are relatively powerless. Because this is a theme of most or all classical literature and 17th-century reinterpretations thereof, however — especially of Racine's — it feels trite to re-state it.

It is, I agree, not Racine's best play. My personal favourite is still Andromaque. It is also strange when he credits Atalide with Bajazet's downfall when I think that Amurat, Roxane and the slave Orcan are likelier candidates, and Racine has stressed that Bajazet is exercising self-determination. But it explores his usual setting and conflict of the seclusion of a palace and the powerlessness of those in powerful circles against love, against a chaotic mingling of events that happen because of uncoordinated actions, and against each other.

The Orderly God in Leibniz's Vision

Discourse on Metaphysics
by Gottfried Leibniz, translated by George Redington Montgomery
Discours de métaphysique (1686) GP iv 427-463
via Wikisource

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote this treatise in 1686 during a letter exchange with a French fellow philosopher, Antoine Arnauld. It wasn't published until over a century later. So I surmise it didn't play a role in founding Leibniz's reputation as a philosopher who rather heartlessly argued that the world is perfection and that, by implication, anyone who suffers or rebels against it is too thick to understand God's machinery. Leibniz was 40 at the time of writing; his influential work Monadologie was produced about 30 years later, and Candide, Voltaire's riposte, was published in 1759.

Turning to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, I see that Leibniz's chapter begins on a firm note: firstly, the German philosopher was apparently "not admirable" as a person. Also, part of Leibniz's work was meant to appeal to his royal patrons and not to 'rock the boat,' which mined its worth from a philosophical point of view.

It was the popular Leibniz who invented the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds

***

Here Leibniz sets out his Logical God, and a Connect The Dot metaphor:

VI. That God does nothing which is not orderly, and that it is not even possible to conceive of events which are not regular.The activities or the acts of will of God are commonly divided into ordinary and extraordinary. But it is well to bear in mind that God does nothing out of order. Therefore, that which passes for extraordinary is so only with regard to a particular order established among the created things, for as regards the universal order, everything conforms to it. This is so true that not only does nothing occur in this world which is absolutely irregular, but it is even impossible to conceive of such an occurrence. Because, let us suppose for example that some one jots down a quantity of points upon a sheet of paper helter skelter, as do those who exercise the ridiculous art of Geomancy; now I say that it is possible to find a geometrical line whose concept shall be uniform and constant, that is, in accordance with a certain formula, and which line at the same time shall pass through all of those points, and in the same order in which the hand jotted them down; also if a continuous line be traced, which is now straight, now circular, and now of any other description, it is possible to find a mental equivalent, a formula or an equation common to all the points of this line by virtue of which formula the changes in the direction of the line must occur. There is no instance of a face whose contour does not form part of a geometric line and which can not be traced entire by a certain mathematical motion. But when the formula is very complex, that which conforms to it passes for irregular. Thus we may  say that in whatever manner God might have created the world, it would always have been regular and in a certain order. God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena, as might be the case with a geometric line, whose construction was easy, but whose properties and effects were extremely remarkable and of great significance.

***

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, c. 1700
Portrait by Johann Friedrich Wentzel (1670–1729)
via Wikimedia Commons

***

Russell argues against using God as a logical solution to philosophical problems.

The God of the Old Testament is a God of power, the God of the New Testament is also a God of love; but the God of the theologians, from Aristotle to Calvin, is one whose appeal is intellectual: His existence solves certain puzzles which otherwise would create argumentative difficulties in the understanding of the universe. This Deity who appears at the end of a piece of reasoning, like the proof of a proposition in geometry, did not satisfy Rousseau, who reverted to a conception of God more akin to that of the Gospels.

Leibniz, I gather, runs the risk of not loving his fellow man enough to consider God's purpose in light of man's welfare, and of seeing God in the bloodless way Russell describes.

Furthermore, the British philosopher counters the 'best of all worlds' argument as efficiently as Voltaire. First he recapitulates the Leibnizian reasoning: God made a world that has evil too, rather than all good, he writes; and

That is because some great goods are logically bound up with certain evils.

He further explains Leibniz's point with this example: a drink of water would not be appreciated as a great good if one were not thirsty.

In short:

The world that resulted [from God's decision] [...] has a greater surplus of good over evil than any other possible world; it is therefore the best of all possible worlds, and the evil that it contains affords no argument against the goodness of God.

But Russell then argues that this line of reasoning is self-interested. It might appeal to Leibniz himself and to Leibniz's patrons, but not to much of the rest of the world:

This argument apparently satisfied the Queen of Prussia. Her serfs continued to suffer the evil, while she continued to enjoy the good,* and it was comforting to be assured by a great philosopher that this was just and right.

My father and I once talked about a different metaphor for an organized/disorganized world: If we inspect a carpet from beneath, as human beings do when we look at the world, we see the frayed ends of yarn, the unfinished appearance, etc. Whereas a being who is looking at the carpet from the top, like God, is seeing and understanding the pattern. Not that I remember Papa presenting this belief as his own; he was discussing it as an illustration.

I like the Connect the Dot metaphor, too. But I think I'd substitute the modern metaphor of 'not seeing the forest for the trees.' When the world is composed of many elements, it can be hard to see patterns and organization that may exist.

***

"Bertrand Russell Smoking A Pipe"
"The Welsh philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell smoking the pipe while sitting on an armchair. 1954 (Photo by Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)"
via Wikimedia Commons

***

My two cents: I'm not entirely opposed to the idea that "What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter" — that it is possible to believe in a God whose reasoning is not always understandable but might be explained to us in the afterlife. That said, I object very much to human beings explaining away the hardships of others, by attempting to intuit God's reasoning themselves. I think that it's nicer to have the sense to see that this is a tricky endeavour, and have the compassion to see that it should not be undertaken if it makes people feel even worse.**

Sources:
"Discourse on Metaphysics" [Wikipedia]
"Monadology" [Wikipedia]
"Leibniz" in The History of Western Philosophy, 2nd ed., by Bertrand Russell (London: George Allen + Unwin, 1979), pp. 563-576
John 13.7, King James Bible [Kingjamesbibleonline.org]

* (His premise that Queen of Prussia was happier than her subjects because she was richer is not watertight. But I agree that the world might make far greater sense to her, because it feels materially fulfilling, than it would to a peasant to whom it feels materially precarious.)
** I should state that I am not thinking of specific examples of this behaviour! — this is not a passive-aggressive allusion or 'subtweet.'

A Toast To Winter: Part II, Shakespeare's Winter Sonnet

For years I have wanted to write about this poem, but it has come so freshly to mind every year and the different lines have had such different meanings — and have faded in and out of focus in relation to each other, some sometimes more distinct in my mind than others — that it seemed important to wait until the right moment. Or, perhaps, to write about it repeatedly from various perspectives.

First I encountered it in school; and in university when walking past the trees on campus when they had lost their leaf, looked blackened like the embers in the poem, and a wintry sun was sinking behind the buildings, I would think of it often. It also presented, retrospectively, a metaphor for the wasteland I felt I had passed through before I reached university.

But then it also had half a sacred aspect to me, with its choirs and the thought of eternity, and I pictured a ruined abbey or a church in the background of the scenery — even though I generally don't read Shakespeare for descriptions of scenery.

At any rate I felt that it is a poem that will likely reveal its meaning even more to me the older I am — even if the arc of Shakespeare's sonnets still seems to me to be a rather whiny paean to ego, adorned undeservedly with some beautiful verses, and more obsessed with (the narrator's own, and vicariously the narrator's through those of his love objects) youth and beauty, and by the grovelling fear of death, than ennobled by true love of another. That said, I am clearly forming a very harsh judgment and I haven't read any proper critics who have presented the sonnet cycle in a similar light.

***

'Ruins of the Oybin (Dreamer)'
Caspar David Friedrich, ca. 1835
Oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum
Via Wikimedia Commons

***

SONNET LXXIII
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d 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,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
  This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
  To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

*******

Source:
Wikipedia: "Sonnet 73"

To the Now-Arrived, Cold Wintertide

A poem by Johannes Rist (with translations interlarded):

Auf die nunmehr angekommene kalte Winterszeit

Der Winter hat sich angefangen,
Der Schnee bedeckt das ganze Land,
Der Sommer ist hinweggegangen,
Der Wald hat sich in Reif verwandt.

Winter has itself begun, the snow bedecks the land entire; the summer has traversed away, the woods turned over into rime.

Die Wiesen sind von Frost versehret
Die Felder glänzen wie Metall,
Die Blumen sind in Eis verkehret,
Die Flüsse stehn wie harter Stahl.

The pastures are by frost consumed, the fields are glistening as if metal; the flow'rs into ice apostate, the rivers stand like hardy

Cleopatra's Nose

This blog has not precisely been a beehive of activity in any case, but to fill the vacancy of Fridays I have decided to devote them to quotations. Since the plump tome of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations resides in the low shelf which is, helpfully, literally in arm's reach, most of the quotations will presumably originate in its pages. (If this is in contravention of copyright laws, I'd be grateful if said contingency is pointed out. The translation from the French, below, is scarcely any different from the dictionary's; but I quickly did my own without peeking at the other, just because.)

***

Blaise Pascal, 1623-62
"French mathematician, physicist, and moralist"


Le nez de Cleopatra: s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé.

As for the nose of Cleopatra, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.

*

Pedantry, and the lasting effects of a middle school essay about the Egyptian/Macedonian queen, compel me to point out that Cleopatra's influence did not, in fact, derive from her beauty. It was her charms of manner and of mind that compensated for an ordinary, "matronly" appearance, revealed among other things by an unflatteringly incisive coin-portrait. So her nose had little to no geopolitical significance.

On the other hand, Pascal's observation, whimsical and endearing in its unpretentiously elegant formulation, does touch on the reality that appearance plays a confusingly major role in politics ancient and modern. There is always an Alcibiades or a Helen of Troy, and even if it seems ridiculous that we care if someone happened to have been born with a nicely aligned mug, thousands of years after that individual has croaked, we do.

(I wonder what would happen if Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ever gave up on plastic surgery and cosmetic aids, "abdicated" in the French lady-of-a-certain-age sense, and settled down into being a man who, eschewing the trappings of the celebrity persona, does serious work and wishes to be taken seriously for it. At the risk of being cynical, I presume the leftists would come to power. Or there would be a rash of bizarre and super-creepy developments in the style of The Portrait of Dorian Grey.)

*

The quotation is originally from Pascal's Pensées (1670) and I'm taking it from [N.B.: Please excuse the unorthodox citation; after all, I've been out of university for years.]
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (4th revised edition), Angela Partington, Ed. (Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1996)

Donne's Meditation XVII

[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

John Donne is a staple of English Literature classes, as I know from personal experience. In my Lit class during the last year of high school we devoted a good day or three to the works of this so-called "metaphysical poet." The reign of Elizabeth I had ended, and Shakespeare was on the point of dying, when Donne flourished. But the "New Learning," the late English incarnation of the Renaissance, was unfolding a new leaf of learning and science, and a peculiar but fruitful intermingling of religion (vide George Herbert) and a fascination for science and exploration ensued in the arts. There was likewise already a strain of the earthiness and weighty seriousness which were, in my view, to distinguish the 17th century at its height.

The tale goes that John Donne was, when a young man, very fond of women and a trifle wild, and his breathlessly animated poetry of that period duly reflects it. What is indubitable is that he was also very fond of metaphysical "conceits." Maps and compasses, astronomy and metallurgy, and so on and so forth, furnish the metaphors which he, like his contemporaries, employed elaborately and lavishly in his verse to illustrate, almost as abstractly as possible, the felt and seen realities of life. Peculiarly enough he was no armchair traveller, but did in truth go on seafaring expeditions, and even whilst in England go to Oxford, study law at Lincoln's Inn, earn his bread as a secretary and diplomat, and otherwise lead a diverse and interesting life. Then he married. This was initially awkward, given the hearty un-consent on the part of the bride's father and a resultant stint in the clink, but the couple was happy and their children numerous.

Later, his wife having died and he being left alone, he became a minister of the church, and the passionate intensity with which he once celebrated love was redirected into the worship of God. Fortunately his sense of religion appears to have been a large-minded and open one, so that he did not figure among those who

Compound for sins they are inclin'd to,
By damning those they have no mind to.

The "holy sonnets" that he wrote after this conversion are interesting especially due to this intensity, which in some cases appears to be inspired as much by the old passion as the new. There is the very famous one, "Death be not proud," and then this one:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

[Poetry Foundation: John Donne]

Which sounds not a little masochistic; still, de gustibus non est disputandum, after all.

So far, at least, my favourite work is Meditation 17, which is famous in its own right as well as in its capacity as Ernest Hemingway's (last-minute) source for the book title, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the bells of a church, phrases of this sermon have the effect of echoing in one's memory long after one has encountered it, or at least that has been my experience. The thesis of the sermon is that we, as humans, are connected to each other, and that the good or bad that befalls one of us in a way befalls us all. So we cannot remain unmoved by the lives of others, and nor should we, and nor is it in our moral interest to do so. Donne is also of the opinion that "tribulation is treasure," i.e. that suffering improves us. [N.B.: This is not an opinion that I share; to me it's how we react to our suffering or happiness that improves us.]

At any rate, I should like to post the meditation in its entirety, but it is quite long, so here is an excerpt:

[A]ll mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

This is probably the most famous passage:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

* * *

Meditation XVII [Online-literature.com]
An e-text of the Meditation.

John Donne [Poetry Foundation]
An overview of Donne's life and writings, and links to much of his verse.

* * *

N.B.: To add a trivial note about Holbein's Ambassadors at the top of this post, it was one of the paintings in London's National Gallery that I already knew; so when my sister and I went there, I paid special attention to it and was shocked by the vivid, electric green of the curtains in the background. It was one instance where it may have been preferable if the painting were left in its natural, unrestored state. At any rate, I've included it for the sake of its concise illustration of the intellectual pursuits and scientific devices which fascinated Donne's contemporaries, and because my Lit 12 textbook employed it on the same grounds.
[The portrait of John Donne is likewise available at Wikimedia Commons.]

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

"Milton Dictates Paradise Lost to His Daughters," Eugène Delacroix (ca. 1826)

Despite the articles on John Milton that appeared throughout the year, in the Guardian and the New Yorker, I managed to miss his 400th birthday on the 9th of the past December. In my English classes at school and university, I never managed to finish Paradise Lost, though phrases of it do engrave themselves upon one's memory, but did also read (and, for the sake of the English Literature exam, memorize) his sonnet, "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent." Its language is enigmatic, and it was years later, looking at it afresh, that I understood it better.

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

Source: Poets.org

This sonnet is, of course, Milton's reflection on the loss of his eyesight, or, in his words, light.

The "talent which is death to hide" is a reference to a Biblical passage, Matthew 25: 14-30. The passage tells the allegorical tale of three servants who receive money (a "talent" is a very valuable coin, in this context) from their master; two of the servants invest the coins and make a profit, whereas the third buries his coin. When the master comes back he happily receives the old and new coins from his servants, but when the third servant presents the single coin, he vituperates and then banishes the unlucky man from his service. Anyway, it isn't the most sympathetic or logical story, but the intended point of it is that God gives us gifts and wants us to do something with them. In Milton's case, the metaphorical God-given talent to which he refers is, most likely, his literary skill.

Since Milton cannot read or write when he is blind (though, of course, he later compensates for this incapacity by employing his daughters as scribes and readers, as is depicted in the painting at the top of this post), he despairs of being able to continue with his self-appointed task, which is, if the opening lines of Paradise Lost are a fair indication, to "assert the Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to man." But then the thought occurs to him that God is so mighty as to be wholly independent of the actions of the individual; his work can be carried out by many divers emissaries.

To give my two cents, I don't particularly like Milton's world view. In my conception God (if he exists) created the world not as an exercise of his will, but because he wanted to have beings around whom he would make happy. Of course we are not always happy, but we grow, and even unhappy experience has a worth above superficial gaiety, if it ennobles and strengthens us. So we serve God by being happy and becoming better human beings, and by helping others to do the same, not by preaching about Christ or demanding punctilious observance of rituals. Since God is omnipotent anyway, there isn't much of a point to asserting his power the whole time.

At any rate, I do very much like the language of the poem, though considering the poet's future Roundhead sympathies his use of the adjective "kingly" is a little amusing. Especially the line "They also serve who only stand and wait" has often come to mind reassuringly in this indeterminate stage of my life.