A 15th-Century Storke Carol

"The Storke" is as far as I know not well known in Canada, the United States, or indeed in the United Kingdom where it was written in the 15th century.

But it was set to music by the Canadian conductor Ernest MacMillan around 1927. I heard it in a recording from the late 1990s, by the Canadian choral group Elmer Iseler Singers in their album Noël: Early Canadian Christmas Music / Music canadienne d'antan pour Noël.

MacMillan had been captured in Germany during World War I, as he was visiting Bayreuth when the war broke out, and interned in Ruhleben. He would only return home in 1919.

"De arte venandi cum avibus"
13th cent. Creator unknown.
via Wikimedia Commons

According to Clifford Ford's liner notes for the album, MacMillan's interest in an old poem reflected a general "revival of English folk songs" during the first half of the 20th century. (The earliest edition of "The Storke" as a poem I found on Google Books was from ~1914.) Ford adds, referring also to a song "I Sing of a Maiden,"

The original tunes for these carols have not survived, but MacMillan's vocal lines, sensitive accompaniments, and metrical shifts to accommodate textual accents, produce two charming settings reminiscent of Vaughan Williams.

In the UK, Donald Swann, who himself had an adventurous life, picked up the poem a generation later and set it to music in Sing Round the Year (1968).

Both settings can be found on YouTube.

***

The Storke

1. The storke shee rose on Christmas-eve,
And sayed unto her brood,
I nowe must fare to Bethleem
To view the Sonne of God.

2. Shee gave to ache his dole of mete,
She stowed them fayrlie in,
And farre shee flew And fast she flew,
And came to Bethleem.

3. Nowe where is He of David, line?
She askd at house and halle.
He is not here, They spake hardlye,
But in the Maungier stalle.

4. Shee found hym in the maungier stalle.
With that most Holye Babye,
The gentyle storke shee wept to see
The Lord so rudelye layde.

5. Then from her pauntynge brest shee pluckd
The fethers whyte and warm;
Shee strawed them in the Maungier bed
To kepe the Lord from harm.

6. Nowe blessed bee the gentle storke
For evermore, Quothe Hee,
For that shee saw my sadde estate
And showed such Pytye.

(7. Full welkum shall shee ever bee
In hamlet and in halle,
And hight henceforth The blessed Byrd,
And friend of Babyes alle.)

"Stork (detail of a tapestry)." 1550s.
Artist unknown - City of Brussels.
via Wikimedia Commons

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)

An Epigraph from Pope

Alexander Pope (1668-1745)

'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

(from "An Essay on Criticism"
in The Major Works, Pat Rogers, ed.
Oxford University Press, 2008
p. 19)

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"

Aesop's Fables: Odo of Cheriton's "De Lupo, Vulpe et Asino"

Since I am not well informed, this precis on Aesop is a bit of an 'Aesop for Dummies' case:

AESOP was, according to Herodotus and by way of a certain online encyclopaedia, a slave who lived in Greece in the fifth century before Christ. It is also possible that the fables are cribbed from the lore of Mesopotamia or even more easterly lands, or that Aesop himself did not exist at all. Divers Latin translations already existed six hundred years afterwards, by Phaedrus, Ennius and Aphthonius of Antioch and others.

To A Daffodil

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850
English poet

I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

1804.

*

In honour of the arrival of spring, much belated this year but obviously welcome.

*

From: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, William Michael Rossetti, Ed. (London: Ward, Lock & Co.)

Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil

by John Keats
Written: 1818
The Burial of Phocion, Nicolas Poussin (1648) [Wikimedia Commons]

[Considering the extreme length of this blog post I have foregone the typical fact-checking and appending of numerous links. Please forgive the omission.]

Against the background of the Plague, one of Giovanni Boccaccio's narrators in his Decameron chooses to impart to an audience of lords and fellow ladies the following cheerful tale :

LISABETTA'S brothers slay her lover, who appeareth to her in a dream and showeth her where he is buried, whereupon she privily disinterreth his head and setteth it in a pot of basil. Thereover making moan a great while every day, her brothers take it from her and she for grief dieth a little thereafterward

Even when expanded beyond the synopsis as Filomena tells it, the story is (in my opinion) irritatingly slight in spite of its tragedy. If the driving force behind the brothers' actions were a Greek god on an arbitrary rampage the tale would be far more sensible, and instead they appear to be merely a random act of psychotic violence which in the recounting appeals only to the commonest greed for sensation.

Admittedly one can nevertheless think of possible purposes to the tale. For instance, it might reflect the patriarchal excesses of medieval and Renaissance society, in which family means not protective affection but possessive tyranny. Or it can be a lament for the cruelty of the world toward star-crossed lovers in the Romeo and Juliet tradition. Or it could be an unsympathetic cautionary tale as to what happens when a young maiden has an affair outside the bonds of marriage and thereby thumbs her nose at the gods of expediency, i.e. the idols at whose altar society worships.

Either way, grave doubts as to its romanticness arise at the point where Lisabetta disinters Lorenzo and employs her knife to saw off the man's head for safekeeping. But it wavers back from time to time during the subsequent dubious step-by-step guide to tending a beloved gentleman's cranium:

taking a great and goodly pot, of those wherein they plant marjoram or sweet basil, she set the head therein, folded in a fair linen cloth, and covered it with earth, in which she planted sundry heads of right fair basil of Salerno; nor did she ever water these with other water than that of her tears or rose or orange-flower water. Moreover she took wont to sit still near the pot and to gaze amorously upon it with all her desire, as upon that which held her Lorenzo hid; and after she had a great while looked thereon, she would bend over it and fall to weeping so sore and so long that her tears bathed all the basil, which, by dint of long and assiduous tending, as well as by reason of the fatness of the earth, proceeding from the rotting head that was therein, waxed passing fair and very sweet of savour.

It isn't different in principle from Cinderella (Aschenputtel) watering her mother's grave with her tears in the Grimm fairy tale, but infinitely more disturbing. Which, considering that even over a century after Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, Leonardo da Vinci haunted cemeteries to dig up corpses for anatomical studies, and the peculiar ideas of criminal justice prevalent in those days, and altogether the pervasive mingling of death and life (vide the plague, which Boccaccio describes so pithily in the Decameron's introduction), probably fits into the times.

***
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, William Holman Hunt, 1868 [Wikimedia Commons]

Whatever the merits of the plot may be, it captured the imaginations of John Keats in the first quarter of the 19th century, and of Hans Christian Andersen and (in the painterly realm) the Pre-Raphaelites in the second and third quarters.

Keats's take on the matter is unapologetically soppy, a paean to the dewy-eyed love of youth. [Disclaimer: I skim the poem whenever reading it, so this treatment of it may lack depth.]

Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love's eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
But to each other dream, and nightly weep.

The second verse is fortunately improved by little touching details:

With every morn their love grew tenderer,
With every eve deeper and tenderer still;
He might not in house, field, or garden stir,
But her full shape would all his seeing fill;
And his continual voice was pleasanter
To her, than noise of trees or hidden rill;
Her lute-string gave an echo of his name,
She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same.

Though the unkind mind might suggest that Isabella must be as big as a whale to fill all her beloved's seeing. A picture of bucolic bliss, as exists only in the minds of those who read Christopher Marlowe idylls of shepherds and shepherdesses unironically, is drawn at length. After the early hesitancy is surmounted the two of them become lovers and

his erewhile timid lips grew bold,
And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme.

(At which point the reader may have difficulties keeping a straight face.) But then the maiden's brothers destroy their lover's paradise, in what a description of their trade might suggest is an allegory to the destruction of nature and rural harmony by the Industrial Revolution.

With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quiver'd loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip;—with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.

This and the next verses could certainly be considered as a point on a line that leads from William Wilberforce and the Luddites through socialism and Charles Dickens to, let's say, Emile Zola's Germinal. In the disdain of filthy lucre and trade these verses are very suggestive, too, of the impecunious artist (and of snobbery).

In Keats's version of events the brothers' pride of caste leads them to abhor the thought that their subordinate should be their sister's beloved, and besides Lorenzo is an impediment to marrying her off to a rich aristocrat.

So the two brothers and their murder'd man
Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream
Gurgles through straiten'd banks, and still doth fan
Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan
The brothers' faces in the ford did seem,
Lorenzo's flush with love.—They pass'd the water
Into a forest quiet for the slaughter.

After the deed is done, they considerately tell Isabella that her soulmate has sailed away to foreign lands.

In the mid days of autumn, on their eves
The breath of Winter comes from far away,
And the sick west continually bereaves
Of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay
Of death among the bushes and the leaves,
To make all bare before he dares to stray
From his north cavern. So sweet Isabel
By gradual decay from beauty fell,

pining. Her brothers feel twinges of conscience as she becomes pathetically ill, but they go on lying to her. But the truth is revealed to her by Lorenzo's spirit through a dream. Among other things he remarks,

thy paleness makes me glad;
Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel
A greater love through all my essence steal.

It may satisfy someone's artistic vision, but if a beloved wanted me to waste away and die amid great mental suffering, the first thing I would do once I've crossed the Styx is sock him in the chin.

There are lines here and there which tend to support the timid suspicion that Keats's verse is at times exceedingly feeble. Witness this fine specimen of rhyme, which describes Isabella's visit to the forest where Lorenzo was killed after she had seen the vision:

she took with her an aged nurse,
And went into that dismal forest-hearse.

Or, when the visit proves sadly successful,

At last they felt the kernel of the grave,
And Isabella did not stamp and rave.

Which is about as climactic (in my view) as "The Star-Spangled Banner" when the lyrics go "and the flag was . . . still there!" Keats then follows in Boccaccio's footsteps in elucidating proper grooming procedures for the skull of a defunct lover:

She calm'd its wild hair with a golden comb,
And all around each eye's sepulchral cell
Pointed each fringed lash; the smeared loam
With tears, as chilly as a dripping well,
She drench'd away:—and still she comb'd, and kept
Sighing all day—and still she kiss'd, and wept.

Whereupon she

withers, like a palm
Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm.

But the basil plant is doing well. The brothers, intent on ruining this questionable idyll too, kidnap it for further examination, and though "the thing was vile with green and livid spot" recognize in the skull the beneficiary of their homicidal activities, and decide privily to go into everlasting banishment.

And so she [Isabella] pined, and so she died forlorn,
Imploring for her Basil to the last.
No heart was there in Florence but did mourn
In pity of her love, so overcast.
And a sad ditty of this story born
From mouth to mouth through all the country pass'd:
Still is the burthen sung—"O cruelty,
To steal my Basil-pot away from me!"

* * *

Though Oscar Wilde or Edgar Allan Poe might appear to be fine candidates to give the story their own twist, given their macabre streaks and appreciation for Italy in bygone and undercivilized times, it was Hans Christian Andersen who took up the lance. Fittingly he sentimentalized it a great deal, and wrote it from the comparatively cuddly perspective of a rose-elf, in the eponymous tale "Elf of the Rose."

This elf wanders along the leaves of the roses, of which the veins serve as roads, so minuscule is his stature, and lives and flits between the flower buds. But once he is weary from his travels and the roses are shut against him before the impending night, so he turns to a honeysuckle arbour and sees a young pair of lovers who are bidding each other farewell. The lady gives the gentleman a rose and after a spot of kissing they part. The latter is pleased with his present, but the brother of the lady is not pleased with his dalliance, so

he drew out a sharp knife, and while the other was kissing the rose, the wicked man stabbed him to death; then he cut off his head, and buried it with the body in the soft earth under the linden-tree.

(On the plus side, the knife wasn't blunt or serrated, and the lady doesn't have to do the decapitating of the corpse later. I wonder, though, if linden trees have knobbly, shallow roots or a tap root, because if the former it would have been a major pain in the neck to bury a body right under one.) Meanwhile the elf has fallen onto a dead linden leaf which fell onto the assassin's head, and hitches a ride home in an understandably disconsolate frame of mind.

The brother visits his sister's bedroom to cackle evilly, the leaf falls out of his head, and during the night the elf serenades the unlucky woman with a recounting of her beloved's demise. As promised, she also finds the crumpled leaf on her bed to prove that the story was no dream. During the day the elf hangs out in a rosebush in her room, and the next night the lady sneaks out and finds the corpse. She takes home the skull and a little jasmine plant that has bloomed nearby, and plants them both in a generously proportioned flowerpot.

Her grief makes the elf too miserable, so he lives out of doors again and pays her regular visits. As in Keats's poem, the lady wilts away as the flora thrives, and as not in Keats's poem the homicidal brother grumbles at her. At long last,

one day she sat and leaned her head against the flower-pot, and the little elf of the rose found her asleep. Then he seated himself by her ear, talked to her of that evening in the arbor, of the sweet perfume of the rose, and the loves of the elves. Sweetly she dreamed, and while she dreamt, her life passed away calmly and gently, and her spirit was with him whom she loved, in heaven.

(At which point I will admit that despite the smothering sentimentality of the words a certain teariness threatens.) Her surviving relative is happy to inherit the jasmine and brings it to his room. The elf follows it and whispers the story of the man's misdeeds to the flower-spirits, who say that it's old news considering whose skull they're growing out of, so the tiny avenger discontentedly goes on to see the bees, who promise to kill the killer. As it turns out the jasmine had appointed itself as the horticultural hangman anyway, and that night the sentence is executed as the spirits give the murderer nightmares and poison him with their infinitesimal spears. The bees and the elf rush in the next morning to find their prey dead.

But the punishment is not complete enough. As people come into the room to gawk, the insects flock around the jasmine pot, and sting a man who lifts it in the hand, so that it crashes to the floor and reveals the skull.

And the queen bee hummed in the air, and sang of the revenge of the flowers, and of the elf of the rose and said that behind the smallest leaf dwells One, who can discover evil deeds, and punish them also.

[Cf. the similarly uplifting Grimm tale of murder inevitably revealed, "Die klare Sonne bringt's an den Tag."]

And, if all goes as intended, a young and overly literate child will go to bed trembling in his little boots, resolving never to stab people and cut off their heads and hide them under linden trees because otherwise our benevolent God (through his self-appointed earthly minions) will hound him to the gates of Hades.
From the Botanical Magazine (1787), Vol. I [Wikimedia Commons]
The End.

(To be fair, I first read the story at the age of nine or ten and wasn't too affected by it, theologically or otherwise, except in finding it gloomily fascinating.)

* * *

The Decamerone of Giovanni Boccacio [Gutenberg.org]
An e-text of John Payne's translation, which had originally been published in 1886.

Keats: Poems Published in 1820 [Gutenberg.org]
A volume of verse with a handy hyperlink to "The Pot of Basil" in the table of contents.

Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen [Gutenberg.org]
A translation of many of Andersen's tales by an unknown person.

Beowulf

By Unknown
First recorded: Late 10th/early 11th century

One of the problems of this blog is that I am "reviewing" works that are mostly so established in the literary canon, and whose worth is so entirely evident, that the praise seems presumption. But it's one thing to recognize the merits of a work and another to enjoy them, and it is the latter with which I am principally concerned.

Whether the old English epic "Beowulf" is well-known enough outside of literature courses to be in no need of trumpeting may, however, be questionable, despite the recent films and Seamus Heaney's fine translation. Its origins are obscure, reaching back to 1000 AD or even earlier, and though the consensus appears to be that the manuscript that remains to us was written by two monks, it is unknown whether it may not be rooted in an even hoarier tale that was passed on by Anglo-Saxon storytellers for centuries before it was finally transcribed and infused with Christian propaganda.

When we read excerpts of Beowulf in my high school English Literature class, my excellent teacher devoted a lot of time to giving us a conception of what life was like for the Anglo-Saxons. It was not a pleasant life, "nasty, short and brutish" as Thomas Hobbes put it, and overshadowed by the savagery and inexorable tedium of war, indigence, and hostile nature. The society was organized into clans which were led by cynnings, or ring-lords, and which formed alliances or enmities against each other as they saw fit. They lived in dark houses in a gloomy climate, and the untamed bogs and long winters as well as the uncertain seas made attempts at travelling into a fearsome ordeal. Beowulf itself testifies to the extent to which they mystified their environment; the bogs and the seas are peopled by all manner of outlandish monsters, and the whole is governed by the intangible and incalculable whims of wyrd, or fate.

Beowulf is in its way deeply preoccupied with fighting against the misery of the Anglo-Saxon world. It is too earthy and narrow in scope to be a convincing religious tract, in my point of view, but much like the Bible it records the history of a region's peoples and aims to distract its audience from the trials and imperfections of sublunary existence. Despite the loneliness that pervades the poem, it is obsessed with a sense of community. The kings and queens are set on pedestals as hazily perfect beings; the loyalty of the armed men to each other and to their leaders is implicitly extolled; the names and exploits of ancestors and distant acquaintances are summoned; and the dining-hall Heorot, a central setting of the tale, is a meeting-place not only for the Danes but also for visitors like the Geats [N.B.: pronounced "yats" according to my second-year English professor] under Beowulf. My high school teacher emphasized the exiled status of the first villain of the tale (the monster Grendel), his misery, and his resentment against "civilized" mankind. To be cast out from society was worse than death; the wild melancholy of that situation is also captured in the old poem "The Wanderer."

At any rate, the tale begins when the Danish king Hrothgar builds a mighty feasting-hall, named Heorot. At first all goes well, but then Grendel catches wind of its existence and, driven by his hatred of mankind, he prowls around at night and kills the men who frequent it, a couple at a time. Months pass, and from a place of rejoicing the hall has turned into a horrible abode of death. The news of these depredations eventually reaches the distant shores of Geatland (present-day Sweden, I think) and as a result Beowulf, a man of great courage and prowess, sails over with a company of men to provide assistance. The warrior is gratefully received and soon afterward fights singly with Grendel, who is immune to swords. With his bare hands Beowulf tears off the monster's arm and the monster betakes himself, bleeding copiously, to die pathetically in the depths of the swamp whence he came.

Grendel's mother is not pleased with these developments and comes marauding not long afterwards. But Beowulf, who evidently has the lung capacity of a zeppelin, dives down into the swamp and kills her with a magic sword he just happens to find there. Despite its implausibility, the mental images I have of this battle — the murky and mysterious and morbid waters, sunken treasures, hideous plants and monsters, and finally the fierce wrath of the ghastly and vengeful female — are deeply impressive. The third battle in the tale transpires when Beowulf has become king of Geatland, and he must fight a dragon that is laying waste to the countryside. He takes his followers with him, but, pursuant to the philosophy that "when the going gets tough, the tough get going," they run like the wind, with the sole exception of the comically nomered Wiglaf. The dragon and Beowulf both die and the tale ends with the grand obsequies of the defunct king.

The tale is told in typical Anglo-Saxon verse. Each line has four beats, which means that there are four syllables that are naturally emphasized, and this practice conveys a drumlike rhythm. There is no rhyming, but there is a lot of alliteration. The language is in my view rather pretentious and pompous, windbaggish to be precise, but I do like the kennings, which are essentially compound nouns that poetically describe objects, like "roof-tree" and "swan-road." I think it would be darnedly difficult to remember the whole poem, which is a couple thousand lines long and not precisely streamlined where the narrative is concerned, but it seems as if the ancient bards, or scops, managed it. Its tone is relaxed and rambling, as if the storyteller couldn't bear to end it and to leave the world in it. That world doesn't appeal to me and I find Beowulf a priggish ass, but it is undeniable that the tale is still weirdly compelling and likable.

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Resources for the Study of Beowulf [Greenehamlet.com]
An introduction and links to all sorts of online Beowulf texts and background reading.

Beowulf [Georgetown.edu]
A transcription of the original Anglo-Saxon text.

New York Times Film Reviews:
Beowulf & Grendel (2005), Beowulf (2007)

"Beowulf and Fate Meet in a Modern Poet's Lens" [New York Times]
A nice review of Seamus Heaney's translation by Richard Eder, from February 2000.

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.

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë
First published: 1847

[Note: I have updated this blog post in 2022, although I tried to make clear what was originally written, because living in Europe longer has made me convinced that it is important to refer to Roma and Sinti with care. Nobody has complained and I do not feel forced to do this. Instead: Germany is the country where Roma and Sinti were murdered in the Holocaust. Europe is also a continent where, contrary to the more benign idea I had from reading books in Canada, there is strong feeling against Roma and provable discrimination at all levels: education system, culture, law enforcement, etc. I want to respect this community and the hardships it faces in a small way: taking care to use basic etiquette, and taking care to point out where stereotypes may hugely diverge from real life and undermine a fair understanding.]

I first encountered Jane Eyre when I was thirteen years old. The story fascinated me so much that I stayed up late into the night to finish it, despite the dense language. In the following years, it and Shirley became my companions, not only because they are so richly written that they bear repeated readings, but also because they provided sympathy and understanding in dreary times. To address the question whether books can help people — they do. They taught me that others have been in similar situations (which is hard to realize; the tendency of misery is solipsist) and vicariously analyzed my difficulties (i.e. being an ugly duckling and feeling powerless to determine my life) while diverting my mind from them. In Jane Eyre I also found the heroine's refusal to succumb to self-pity, her emphasis on independent-mindedness and self-reliance, and her common sense, bracing to the spirits.

At any rate, Jane Eyre is an impressively good yarn. The curtain rises on Gateshead Manor, the seat of the rich Mrs. Reed, a widow with three spoiled children and an unwanted outsider of an orphaned niece. The scenes of Jane's childhood of which we read there are equally authentic and vivid. After clashing with her aunt, she is sent to Lowood School, where she is subjected to a Dickensian experience of poverty and illness and cruelty disguised as charity. There is even an improbably saintly girl: not Agnes or Dorrit, but Helen. It is peculiar what an appeal tales of ragged orphanhood have. It may be that, due to a deep and pervasive fear of being bereft of our parents, we find it comforting to read stories of orphans who can and do find their way in the world alone; or it may be that we find it comforting to contrast our lot to theirs, as it can be enjoyable to read about the Arctic in the middle of summer. Sadly, the bad school experience is no melodramatic fiction, but an episode out of Charlotte Brontë's life. At any rate, the school is reformed after an outbreak of typhus, and Jane stays on as a pupil and, eventually, a teacher, under the benevolent aegis of the superintendent, Miss Temple.

At last, however, Miss Temple marries. After she leaves, Jane finds that it would be intolerable to live out her life at the school, so she advertises in the newspaper for a position as a governess. (If she had read the other books written by the Brontë sisters, she would probably have hesitated to do so, as Agnes Grey and Shirley are thoroughly and convincingly discouraging on that score. But she had not read them.) Her optimism is justified as she receives a response from a Mrs. Fairfax, Thornfield Manor, Yorkshire; Mrs. Fairfax and her pupil Adèle prove to be reasonably agreeable.

Jane describes them in an amusing but coolly matter-of-fact passage:

Mrs. Fairfax turned out to be what she appeared, a placid-tempered, kind-natured woman, of competent education and average intelligence. My pupil was a lively child, who had been spoilt and indulged, and therefore was sometimes wayward; but as she was committed entirely to my care, and no injudicious interference from any quarter ever thwarted my plans for her improvement, she soon forgot her little freaks, and became obedient and teachable.

Admittedly this sounds a trifle snobby and authoritarian, but it is doubtless a reflection of the times, when it was believed that human nature could and should be firmly shaped, like hair with curling-rags. But, in deed though not in word, she is really less inflexible. Still, she goes on to describe Adèle as being completely unremarkable, superficial but nice enough. Being French (Brontë has a very 19th-century weakness for assigning character on the basis of nationality), I suppose, Adèle "entertained for me a vivacious, though perhaps not very profound, affection; and by her simplicity, gay prattle, and efforts to please, inspired me, in return, with a degree of attachment sufficient to make us both content in each other's society." Then Jane offers this general comment (which would, I suspect, be highly enjoyable if I were a teacher):

This, par parenthèse, will be thought cool language by persons who entertain solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children, and the duty of those charged with their education to conceive for them an idolatrous devotion: but I am not writing to flatter paternal egotism, to echo cant, or prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth.

Altogether Jane is reasonably content, though at times she does wonder if there is not more to life than this. Here comes the long soliloquy that so greatly interested Virginia Woolf:

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. [Vide Thoreau's "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.]

(What Brontë describes here and later has perfectly resonated with me since Grade 10; I've wanted to do things and experience things, and go out and have adventures, but it has often been thwarted.) Anyway, then she turns specifically and rather daringly to the lot of women (and this particularly interested Virginia Woolf):

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

She then briefly defends bluestockings, and other women who do more than is commonly expected of their sex. Then comes the abrupt change of subject that unsettled Woolf so much; the following paragraph begins, "When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh [. . .]". I've never minded it, and I think it's perfectly normal to end a train of thought suddenly as reality intrudes. The point has been made, so why dilute it by protracting it?

Then comes an interlude: a walk to the village of Hay, on an afternoon in January, along a lane that was

noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. [Brontë's taste in nature appears to be a trifle funereal.] If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop.

That, and the brief, picturesque time before sunset, is the calm before the storm. Then there appears on the small stage of Jane's world the chief actor, the stirringly dramatic character to outdo all the other stirringly dramatic characters in the cast.< br />

A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so far away and so clear [. . . .] as, in a picture, the solid mass of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the foreground, efface the aërial distance of azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds, where tint melts into tint.

The din was on the causeway: a horse was coming; the windings of the lane yet hid it, but it approached. I was just leaving the stile; yet, as the path was narrow, I sat still to let it go by. [. . .]

It was very near, but not yet in sight; when, in addition to the tramp, tramp, I heard a rush under the hedge, and close down by the hazel stems glided a great dog, whose black and white colour made him a distinct object against the trees. It was exactly one mask of Bessie's [Mrs. Reed's servant, who was fond of telling ghost stories] Gytrash,—a lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head: it passed me, however, quietly enough; not staying to look up, with strange pretercanine [a specimen of Brontë's broad vocabulary] eyes, in my face, as I half expected it would.

Then comes the horse, and its rider, who at once "broke the spell" as "nothing ever rode the Gytrash: it was always alone." This rider is Edward Fairfax Rochester, the lord of Thornfield Manor, and the hero of the story. What is refreshing about him, even if he is not precisely a realistic character, is that he is the antithesis of what I like to call the "palimpsest hero," the blank ideal who is mainly defined by the readers' projections of their own imperfectly matured conceptions. Even Jane Austen tends to present her heroes as slenderly articulated figures who possess a handful of fine traits that inspire respect and admiration, but whose personality is an unknown quantity beyond that. I don't know if there are any readers who are repelled by Mr. Rochester — certainly Jane Eyre faithfully points out his deficiencies, and at times it definitely seems he'd be difficult to live with — but he largely defies the appropriation of his self as the vague object of self-indulgent daydreams. He has an own life and aims and needs. Nor is he devoid of inwardly-directed sarcasm.

So the true story begins, with its conflict of sense and sensibility, religion and inclination, nurture and nature. I don't think, despite the aforementioned melodrama, that it is at all trashy, because there is so much truth to it, in feeling if not in the events. As far as the romance goes, of course I like that he and Jane are so much interested in and drawn to each other on the score of character and mind, not of appearances, and that they see each other for who they are pretty clearly. Their chemistry — the mingled attraction and friction between them — is also enjoyably changeful and diverse. Is that realistic? — I don't know.

As far as the social setting goes (to pick another aspect of the book quite at random), Brontë's highly coloured picture of the well-to-do circles is particularly unconvincing, which does not detract from its entertaining quality in the least. On the day when the ladies of the countryside society descend upon Thornfield, Jane writes that they emerge from their rooms, en route to dinner, "gaily and airily."

For a moment they stood grouped together at the other extremity of the gallery, conversing in a key of sweet subdued vivacity: they then descended the staircase almost as noiselessly as a bright mist rolls down a hill. Their collective appearance had left on my an impression of high-born elegance, such as I had never before received.

Blanche Ingram is a flamboyant specimen of the upper crust: superlatively lovely and accomplished and well-dressed, she speaks to her mother in French and generally puts on immense airs. A man-hunter, or rather title-hunter, she gives enthusiastic chase to Mr. Rochester; and, as he is not especially good-looking, but the possessor of a "taille d'athlète," she delivers herself of the following ode to male plainness:

Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day! [. . .] Poor, puny things not fit to stir a step beyond papa's park-gates: nor to go even so far without mama's permission and guardianship! [. . .] As if loveliness were not the special prerogative of woman—her legitimate appanage and heritage! I grant an ugly woman is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the gentlemen, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour: let their motto be:—Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a fillip. Such should be my device, were I a man.

(It reminds one of Lady Catherine de Bourgh's words to Lizzy in Pride and Prejudice: "Upon my word, you give your opinion very decidedly for so young a person.") It is also Blanche who addresses a servant in this magnificent apostrophe: "Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding."

In any case, to return to the novel's fine dramatic potential, there is a very good scene, which comes after that apostrophe, where a mysterious gypsy [Roma woman] tells Jane Eyre her fortune in cryptic language that is simple to decipher once one has the key. In my favourite film adaptation*, which was released in 1983 and stars Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton (who is quite aware of the novel's histrionic scope and who happily avoids the tendency to take it too seriously), it is really pulled off beautifully. The cockney accent and the croak are hilarious [edited to add: if one takes it as a parody of outsiders' stereotypes of 19th century Romany women]. In the book I also enjoy the way in which the gypsy [Roma woman] demands that the ladies of the house go to see her one by one in the library; as the servant reports, "She says it's not her mission to appear before the 'vulgar herd' (them's her words)." [*Despite the middling acting in the beginning.]

Unfortunately, no film does justice to the figure of St. John Rivers, the Greek statue come alive who devotes himself to a stern God, mind, body, and soul, and expects Jane to do likewise, later on in the book. The films also tend to misunderstand or even completely misportray Jane's reluctance to let Mr. Rochester lavish fine clothing, jewellery, etc., on her. The principal reason is, I think, that these fine feathers are entirely out of keeping with her looks and her personality, which are not at all stunning or showy; so she is uncomfortable in them and fears that he sees in her a person whom she is not. Secondly, she is too proud to wish to be deluged with presents which she has not earned, or to appear rich when she is in herself penniless; thirdly, given her past poverty, any splurge is a bit obscene. Lastly, I think that she is steeped in the more ascetic Protestant tradition in which the enjoyment of material things is an execrable manifestation of the Seven Deadlies (greed, gluttony, and pride — sloth if you count the invariable(?) idleness of the wealthy). It is this tradition that also leads Brontë to implicitly depict society as a manifestation of not only those sins but also of lust, envy, and wrath. At least she does so with a greater moderation and nuance than many other Christian writers a century afterward — or even now.

So, in the end, though the mushy portions of the dialogue still make me squirm, I firmly believe that the book has so much to offer besides the ripping quality of its yarn and smashing quality of its romance, that it is indubitably worthwhile to read it early and often. But, as in all things, what one gets out of it principally depends on one's experience and, ultimately, on one's self. Jane Austen cannot be forced upon people; she must be appreciated voluntarily. It is the same with Charlotte Brontë.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
New York: Pocket Books, 1958

Jane Eyre (Links to full texts at Project Gutenberg)
Charlotte Brontë: An Overview (Jane Eyre in the context of the times)
A Room of One's Own: Chapter Four (Virginia Woolf discusses Brontë)