The Sheila Variations

National Poetry Day

I didn't realize it was National Poetry Day, but apparently it is. (I found about it from Norm Geras.)

I'm greedy, I've got a couple of things I would like to post.

1. "The More Loving One", by Mr. Auden
2. "In Blackwater Woods", by Mary Oliver
3. A great excerpt from Michael Schmidt's terrific book Lives of the Poets. The book is a sweeping look at English poets from the very beginning of the language. In the excerpt I'm posting, Schmidt compares (realizing that it is unfair) Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. Great stuff!

Competing for my "favorite poem", in a constant tug of war, are probably the two I post below. My criteria is, as usual, what I call soul-growth. These poems have been WITH me, in times of trouble, they have taught me things, they are always changing ... I always learn from them. So - here they are:

The More Loving One by Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now i see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

And then this one:

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

And here is the excerpt from Lives of the Poets, on the poetry of Jonson and Shakespeare - it's filled with juicy good stuff:

Ben Jonson -- another man described as "the first poet laureate" -- compares with any poet of his age and the next. He can almost out-Campion Campion and he fathers Robert Herrick's lyrics and those of other "Sons of Ben," Jonson's followers, who climb nearly to Campion's heights:

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's Nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honoring thee
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon did'st only breathe,
And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.

He can set himself on a par with the satirists of the generations that followed his own, with a greater fluidity in his use of the couplet:

At court I met it, in clothes brave enough,
To be a courtier; and looks grave enough,
To seem a statesman; as I near it came,
It made me a great face, I asked its name,
A lord, it cried, buried in flesh and blood,
And such from whom let no man hope least good,
For I will do none: and as little ill,
For I will dare none. Good Lord, walk dead still.

Or he writes "On English Monsieur":

Would you believe, when you this Monsieur see,
That his whole body should speak French, not he?
That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather,
And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hither,
And land on one, whose face durst never be
Toward the sea, farther than half-way tree?
That he, untravelled, should be French so much,
As French-men in his company should seem Dutch?
Or had his father, when he did him get,
The French disease, with which he labours yet?
Or hung some monsieur's picture on the wall,
By which his dam conceived him, clothes and all?

The common elements in these poems and the epistles, elegies and plays are balance, construction and proportion (except in flattery). Even at his most intemperate, his art brings disparate elements into tight control. The fireworks hang suspended in the air, a promise, a pleasure even at their harshest.

And since our dainty age
Cannot endure reproof,
Make not thyself a Page,
To that strumpet the Stage,
But sing high and aloof
Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull
Ass's hoof.

His epitaph in Westminster Abbey reads: "O rare Benn Johnson." Cutting the stone, Aubrey tells us, cost 18d., paid by Jack Young, later Sir Jack. He also tells us that the living poet had a certain peculiarity of face: "Ben Jonson had one eie lower than t'other, and bigger, like Clun the Player; perhaps he begott Clun." If there is dirt to be dished, and even if there isn't, we can trust Aubrey to dish it.

Jonson suffers one irremediable disability: Shakespeare. Alexander Pope underlines the point in his Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1725): "It is ever the nature of parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Jonson had much the more learning, it was said on the other hand that Shakespeare had none at all; and because Shakespeare had much the most wit and fancy, it was retorted on the other, that Jonson wanted both. Because Shakespeare borrowed nothing, it was said that Ben Jonson borrowed everything."

In the plays the proximity of Shakespeare does Jonson the most harm, though he writes plays so different from his friend's that they seem distinct in kind and period. Part of that difference is Jonson's poetic balance, deliberate artistry: he knows what he wants to say and has the means of saying it, no more or less. He speaks for his age, while Shakespeare speaks for himself. Jonson's art is normative, Shakespeare's radical and exploratory. In Jonson there's structure and gauged variegation, in Shakespeare movement and warmth. Coleridge disliked the "rankness" of Jonson's realism and found no "goodness of heart". He condemned the "absurd rant and ventriloquism" in the tragedy Sejanus,staged by Shakespeare's company at the Globe. At times Jonson's words, unlike Shakespeare's, tend to separate out and stand single, rather than coalesce, as though he had attended to every single word. His mind is busy near the surface. He is thirsty at the lip, not at the throat.

It's true, but it is not the whole truth.

Jonson's attitude to the very sound of language can seem casual. Except in songs from the plays ("Queen, and huntress, chaste and fair," for instance) and a few lyrics, words are chosen first for their sense and accent, second for their sound value: meaning is what Jonson is about -- not nuance but sense. So there are clumps of consonnts and a sometimes indiscriminate collocation of vowels. Swinburne called him "one of the singers who could not sing." Dryden pilloried him as "not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all others; you track him everywhere in their snow."

It is the kind of poetry Jonson writes that irritates his critics: they disapprove of what he's doing. When he isn't singing, he speaks, an art Swinburne never learned. If his poetry is "of the surface", he has made his surfaces with a special kind of care, and to effect. If he borrowed from classical literature, he was no different from his contemporaries, except that he had a deeper knowledge of what he was quarrying than many did (and did not always acknowledge the debt --though this was not yet the custom). He translated Horace's Ars Poetica. He is of a stature with Martial and Juvenal: collaboration, not plagiarism, is the term for what he doese. Eliot concedes that Jonson and Chapman "incorporated their erudition into their sensibility". So, too, did Eliot.

Dryden's criticism is telling at one point: Jonson "weaved" the language "too closely and laboriously" and he "did a little too much Romanise our tongue, leaving the words he translated almost as much Latin as he found them." Dryden ends with the inevitable verdict: "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare."

Posted by sheila