High Windows by Philip Larkin

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
High Windows was first published by Faber and Faber in 1974 (hardback) and 1979 (paperback). The collection is Larkin's final one, second perhaps only to Whitsun Weddings (1964) as far as critical attention goes. Many of the poems in the collection were written in the 1960s, however; certainly the subjects Larkin references (the sexual revolution, disconnection from world war, declining religiosity, generational conflict, and so forth) are recognizably of the "60s." Larkin's poetry is considered as part of "The Movement," which reacted to (modernist) poetic obscurities with a characteristic clarity of language and form while also eschewing the direct social and political commitments/stances of poets like Auden (other writers of "The Movement" include Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, Robert Conquest, and Ted Hughes).

SELECTED THEMES/COMMENTARY:
Sterile environments:
Several of Larkin's poems in this collection vividly describe sterile, indoor environments which seem to stand for the emptiness and imaginative sterility of modern, urban landscapes (often in contrast with imaginatively fertile--but disappearing--pastoral landscapes). "The Building" describes a hospital, though the poem never names "the building" a hospital, in order to clear his descriptions of the building of prior associations. The result is a starkly defamiliarized image of a hospital as not a place of hope or scientific triumph over disease and death, but a "clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend / The thought of dying, for unless its powers / Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes / The coming dark, though crowds each evening try / With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers." In the sterile corridors, where people wait, not knowing if they "will be out by lunch, or four" or if they "have come to join / The unseen congregations whose white rows / Lie set apart above," nature (in the form of the flowers) seems weak and not to mention dead.  "Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel" presents a Hopper-esque loneliness inside of a deserted station hotel, where "Clusters of lights over empty chairs / That face each other, coloured differently" stand, and where "the dining-room declares / A larger loneliness of knives and glass / And silence laid like a carpet." Things typically used for sociability unused and lights wasted on nobody emphasize the sterility of these objects apart from human life. The final lines, italicized ("Now / Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages") contrasts the sterility of these objects with nature, which continues to have an existence beyond everyday human commerce.

Religious substitutions:

"The Building's" religious diction (see above, "congregation," "cathedral," "transcend") links modern hospital buildings to churches of the past. The church or the cathedral are no longer places of worship in a world no longer devout or even spiritual at all; yet, the poem suggests that the impulse for worship remains and can be seen in gestures like the "weak, propitiatory flowers." "Vers de Societe" comments on the relationship between a completely secularized world and the rejection of solitude. Nowadays, "how sternly it's instilled / All solitude is selfish. No one now / Believes the hermit with his gown and dish / Talking to God (who's gone too); the big wish / Is to have people nice to you, which means / Doing it back somehow." These lines suggest that the justification for hermitage was religious, and without religion, there is no longer a justification for solitude. "Virtue is social," the new creed proclaims. The poet asks, in the end, "Are, then, these routines / Playing at goodness, like going to church?" expressing the same sense as in "The Building" that despite the disappearance of God, there remains in a secular society an impulse towards worship and ritual. The "new" rituals replacing going to church in "Vers de Societe" are dinner parties and small talk.

The first stanza of "To the Sea" introduces images of people enjoying the seaside, "Steep beach, blue water, towels, red bathing caps" and the second stanza explains their significance by referencing how these enjoyments continue into the present: "Still going on, all of it, still going on!" The poet's outburst on these things "still going on" sounds like surprise, though it is a pleasant one--in the final stanza, the poet lingers on the value of continuing such rituals: "It may be that through habit these do best, / Coming to water clumsily undressed / Yearly; teaching their children by a sort / Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought." "Show Saturday" perhaps contains one of the strongest expressions that new, secular activities actually do maintain some kind of important value, though it might not be a religious one. After the people leave the colorfully described Bellingham Show, the fair which the poet describes, he gently adds a kind of blessing: "Let it stay hidden there like strength, below / Sale-bills and swindling; something people do, / Not noticing how time's rolling smithy-smoke / Shadows much greater gestures; something they share / That breaks ancestrally each year into / Regenerate union. Let it always be there."

Generational conflict, legacies:
As mentioned briefly above in the publication history, High Windows is laced with references to the 60s, and so one of the collection's recurring themes is the conflict between generations and relating to this, anxieties about legacies. In "High Windows" the problem of how the older generation always thinks the later one has it better is explored. The poet, watching kids sexually "free" and using birth control, thinks "I know this is paradise." But then he imagines others of the previous generation thinking about the "freedom" of his own increasingly atheistic and secular age: "No God any more, or sweating in the dark / About hell and that..." This reflection prompts a turn in the poem, and the final stanza rejects these limited and adolescent senses of freedom with a sublime thought (beyond words) of a more radical and truer freedom beyond human understanding: "Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / the sun comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless." Larkin's famed "This Be the Verse" alludes to Old Testament language of the sins of the fathers revisited on the sons to reject "mum and dad." Most of the poem is colloquial like its opening ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad") but reaches for a much more serious and graver notion of the human condition in the lines "Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf." These lines asks us to take seriously the condition of generational trauma; despite the ways in which people joke, in a post-Freudian era, of the ways in which parents "fuck up" their children, there is real pain in the misery which parents pass on to their children. "Posterity" is Larkin's poem in the imagined persona of his own biographer, Jake Balokowsky, who is an academic who doesn't much care for his subject matter: "'I'm stuck with this old fart at least a year; / I wanted to teach school in Tel Aviv, / But Myra's folks'--he makes the money sign--'Insisted I got tenure. When there's kids...'" While the poem ironically comments on the distance between how the biographer views his work (something to make a living) versus how others might idealize his work (a genuine intellectual pursuit), it isn't a poem which simply critiques the biographer's cynical attitudes. The lines clearly suggest that he does have something else he would have liked to do, but that the institutions which control modern academia and modern "living" more broadly don't allow him to pursue these alternatives. Thus, Larkin's legacy is not so much debased by Balokowsky but the institutional  conditions under which "biographies" are manufactured. "Sympathy in White Major" is another poem with a clear persona whose ironical position in toasting himself emphasizes the emptiness of common ways in which people remember each other. The speaker offers a laundry-list of his accomplishments which are all bromides: "A decent chap, a real good sort, / Straight as a die, one of the best, / A brick, a trump, a proper sport, / Head and shoulders above the rest; / How many lives would have been fuller / Had he not been here below? / Here's to the whitest man I know--" Though such praises are definitively rejected in the letdown of the speaker's final line, "Though white is not my favourite colour," the poem leaves us wondering what other legacies are possible in remembering those who have gone. "Dublinesque" offers a different kind of memorial through the image of an Irish Catholic funeral hearse being followed down the street by "a troop of streetwalkers / In wide flowered hats, / Leg-of-mutton sleeves, / And ankle-length dresses." These images are suggestive of a kind of rustic mourning which Larkin seems to find much more genuine in its remembrance: "There is an air of great friendliness, / As if they were honouring / One they were fond of...And of great sadness also. / As they wend away / A voice is heard singing / Of Kitty, or Katy, / As if the name meant once / All love, all beauty." The name doesn't even really matter, genuine affect is in the rituals of their procession, their dress, their clapping and their singing.
Death, dying, aging:
Larkin explores death, the process of dying, and the changes in consciousness in old age in poems like "The Old Fools" and "Sad Steps." The persona of the speaker in "The Old Fools" goes through various stages of wrestling with what happens in old age: In the first stanza, he adopts a tone of superiority, asking crude questions such as "Do they somehow suppose / It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools...?" The second stanza attempts to describe, from a distanced, materialist point of view, what happens in death: "At death, you break up: the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see." The "oblivion" which comes with this breaking up, the speaker muses, was also there before life. The third stanza is more speculative and imaginative, and tries to think of being old in terms of a vivid metaphor, in which being old is "having lighted rooms / inside your head, and people in them, acting," but that the people and these rooms seem more and more distant and unrecognizable. The fourth stanza ends with the futility of speculating, since, as the speaker says in a matter-of-fact way, "We shall find out." "Sad Steps" also pictures the gap in consciousness between the young and the old. The speaker, an old man "Groping back to bed after a piss," sees the moon behind the curtains, and thinks that it is a reminder of youth: "The hardness and the brightness and the plain / Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare / Is a reminder of the strength and pain / Of being young; that it can't come again, / Bur is for others undiminished somewhere." The "strength and pain" is interesting, because it prevents us from reading the poem as simply an old man wishing to be young again. What is the "pain" of youth which the old don't feel? Is it of desire, ambition, in contrast to the humbled existence of the old man's "[g]roping back to bed after a piss?"
Nature's healing/pastoral traditions:
Much of Larkin's poetry contains Hardy-esque pastoral elements, in which nature offers a kind of continuing, healing force in face of man's destructive tendencies, his suffering, and his death. In "Forget What Did," the poet wants to give up writing painful diary entries, and desires that the blank pages fill with "celestial recurrences," a phrase which vaguely suggests renewable cycles in nature ("celestial" even suggests a divine quality, rare in Larkin's poetry). "The Trees," made up of three simple stanzas of abba, explores how trees also die eventually ("Is it that they are born again / And we grown old? No they die too.") but that each year, the blossoms still insist, "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh." Nature then, is not apart from humanity in that it also "dies," and so we might tale a lesson from its blossoms to begin afresh time and time again in our own lives. "The Trees" imparts renewal and continuity which humans ignore in face of a greater preoccupation with mortality. Other aspects of nature seem timeless and eternal, like the sun in "Solar"; the poet imagines the continuous giving and bounty of the sun in these lines: "Our needs hourly / Climb and return like angels. / Unclosing like a hand, / You give for ever." Larkin's appreciation for nature and the pastoral tradition manifests itself also in less optimistic poems; "Going, going" laments the certainty of the disappearing natural landscape in England. Finally, in other poems where humans encroach on or pollute the landscape, there remains a solace expressed in nature overwhelming resilience. The grotesque habits of the "Card Players" (one of the only sonnets in the collection) in a Dutch tavern seems to go through a partial purification process at the end, by "Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!" More dramatically, in "The Explosion," when a mine explodes, nature stops for a second, in an aestheticized pause: "At noon, there came a tremor; cows / Stopped chewing for a second; sun, / Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmer." This might seem like a portrayal of an indifferent nature, but the brief, aestheticized pastoral moment ushers in a heavenly vision of the dead beheld by the miners' wives in the next stanza: "The dead go on before us, they / Are sitting in God's house in comfort / We shall see them face to face."

Selections from Seamus Heaney

Edition: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
SUMMARY/BACKGROUNDS and COMMENTARY:
Collection: Death of a Naturalist (1966) 
These early poems present local, rural images associated with Heaney's childhood--Heaney lived from his birth until his teenage years at Mossbawn, a family farmhouse. These poems, though pastoral, are not exactly peaceful ones. These poems were written before the so-called "troubles" beginning around 1968 in Northern Ireland so they don't wrestle specifically with recent political violence, but seem to nevertheless register a more abstract violence in the rhythms of natural life and farm-work which interacts with nature. The language and images of these poems are extremely physical and tactile, metrically, the poems possess a Hopkins-esque assertiveness and energy appropriate to images of rural disruption and violence. Sonically, these poems are filled with onomotapoeic effects. In his Nobel Prize speech later, Heaney would describe his early life at the farm as a kind of "creaturely existence," which I think is exactly what the tactility and physicality of these early poems convey.

Specific examples:
"Digging" links his father's digging for potatoes with his spade with his own "digging" with a pen. Tactile images like the "cool hardness in our hands" of the potatoes and the physicality of his father's work, "Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods / Over his shoulder, doing down and down" bring words close to the feeling of this kind of rural labor. This is, after all, the main subject of the poem: through the physicality of his language and the linked images of the pen and the spade, the poet is able to trace a kind of genealogy between the work of his father and his own work.
"Death of a Naturalist" describes the violence of "frogspawn" bursting; also the rot, the festering which surrounds this "frogspawn." The poet recalls filling "jampotfuls of jellied / Specks to range on window-sills at home...and wait and watch until / The fattening dots burst into nimble-/Swimming tadpoles." This "frogspawn" takes its revenge, however, on a hot day when he hears the frogs' "coarse croaking," the "slap" and "plop" of their "obscene threats." Similarly, in "Blackberry Picking," nature kind of fights back "where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots" and when the bath of blackberries inevitably rots. The poet writes, disappointingly, "I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair / That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. / Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not."
"The Diviner" describes the art of finding water with a "forked hazel stick." When it strikes water, the movement is sudden, live, and violent: "The pluck came sharp as a sting. / The rod jerked with precise convulsions / Spring water suddenly broadcasting / Through a green hazel its secret stations." Everywhere, nature seems to be bursting and rupturing, leaving in the wake of such violence a messy decay.


Collection: North (1975)
This collection was published following the breakout of intense political violence which had reached a peak in 1972 (the more violent Provisional IRA formed in this period, the infamous Bloody Sunday or Bogside Massacre also happened in 1972). In efforts to contain the violence, London issued a "direct rule" over the north of Ireland as a sort of temporary solution. North's attention to this violence is worked through images of bodies (ancient and recent) recovered from boglands; the ways in which these poems aestheticize corpses and the violence done to them has been fairly controversial. The second half of this collection moves away from these aestheticized images of violence, turning towards issues of the poet's place and responsibility towards the violence of the contemporary world.

Specific examples:
In "Funeral Rites" the poet is lifting coffins of dead relations and looking upon their corpses: "their eyelids glistening, / their dough-white hands / shackled in rosary beads." These are not merely aestheticized corpses but also Catholicized ones by the rosary beads, and later, melting candles, and "gleaming crosses" complete the picture. The lines are short (generally trimeter) and move quickly down the page grouped in an orderly fashion of four lines each to a stanza, reminding one of ritual and regular rhythms of religious ceremony. The poet seems to imagine that the religiously tinged aestheticization of the dead brings something redeeming to the violence, though it might be inadequate. This tension is expressed best in by following lines: "...Gunnar / who lay beautiful / inside his burial mound, / though dead by violence / and unavenged."

In poems like "Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces" and "Bone Dreams," words are associated with biological debris, as if words can do the work of ordering these bodily fragments, making them valuable and beautiful. The words are literally in "bits" in "Bone Dreams," fragmented but aestheticized: "White bone found / on the grazin: / the rough porous / language of touch" an "flit-find, nugget / of chalk, / I touch it again, / I wind it in / the sling of mind / to pitch it at England / and follow its drop / to strange fields." The "pitching" of these bone bits at England deliberately situates these bone bits in the history of and continual violence of English colonialism.


"Bog Queen" is a first-person imagining of the decaying matter having a sort of consciousness: she says that her body "was braille / for the creeping influences: / dawn suns groped over my head / and cooled at my feet." Later, the account talks about a memory of violence and (sexualized) trauma: "I was barbered and stripped / by a turf-cutter's spade."
Works like "Grauballe Man," "Strange Fruit," and "Punishment" seem to ask whether violence done in the past to a corpse is mitigated somehow by the absence of human physicality in the "matter" which makes up the corpse in the present. The "grain" of the Grauballe man's wrists "is like bog oak, / the ball of his heel / like a basalt egg. / His instep has shrunk / cold as a swan's foot / or a wet swamp root." The girl's head in the next poem is like an "exhumed gourd," a "strange fruit." These images suggest that neither of them are human anymore, so what does that mean for past violence? "Punishment" wrestles with this question, and even more specifically asks if calling attention to a body's state as non-human mitigates sexual trauma. In the beginning, the poet sexualizes the body, trying to imagine feeling "the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck, the wind / on her naked front." Yet she is "oak-bone, brain-firkin," so when the wind "blows her nipples / to amber beads," perhaps there isn't anything lurid about it at all. Still, the poet persists in imagining her history as a "Little adultress," but again, her current state resists these human characteristics that would make violence, sexual or otherwise, a problem. Now, she's just "darkened combs," "muscles' webbing," and "numbered bones."

The later poems in this collection move away from these more abstract wrestlings with violence, aestheticization, language, and "matter," drawing attention to the specific political contexts under which Heaney was writing. "Act of Union" are two sonnets in the first-person voice of England essentially raping Ireland: Ireland is eroticized as a female, England says, "Your back is a firm line of eastern coast / And arms and legs are thrown / Beyond your gradual hills." The moment of violence is in the second stanza, ending with England leaving Ireland ruined for all time: "No treaty / I foresee will salve completely your tracked / And stretchmarked body, the big pain / That leaves you raw, liked opened ground, again." Not particularly positive, to say the least, about the history of colonization and the continuing conflict into the late twentieth-century. "Summer 1969" describes the poet in Madrid, while hearing of violence happening on television. He retreats to the Prado, seeing paintings of violence (like Goya's "Third of May") and suggests that these images of art make violence seem more real than the journalistic accounts in newspapers and television. Both this poem and "Exposure" work through Heaney's own place, as a poet, in all of this violence and express anxiety over what poetry can do (or maybe can't do). "How did I end up like this," he asks in this latter poem, "As I sit weighing and weighing / My responsible tristia. / For what? For the ear? For the people? / For what is said behind-backs?" The tone here is self-mocking and severely ironic in using a rather "high" term like "tristia." In his Nobel lecture, Heaney explains that at the time he had moved with his family to Wicklow, south of Dublin, "Feeling puny in my predicaments as I read about the tragic logic of Osip Mandelstam's fate in the nineteen-thirties, feeling challenged yet steadfast in my non-combatant status..."
 
Collection: Station Island (1984)
This collection, highly autobiographical, works out on a very personal level Heaney's own sense of his vocation as a poet. Loosely recalling Dante's Purgatorio, the poet encounters deceased friends and literary precursors. Helen Vendler describes the eponymous long central sequence (divided into twelve parts) of this collection as a series of potential "alter-egos" of Heaney's, which he imagines he might have been instead. As a whole, the collection doesn't seem to resolve the central question of what a poet is to do amidst the reality of violence, what to do with his guilt or his responsibility.

Specific examples:
"Station Island" takes its name from a medieval place of pilgrimage which remains up to the contemporary age as such. The sections vary widely as far as form goes; many are dialogic, with the poet in conversation with different "alter egos" as Vendler argues. The sections detail available vocations, like farm, priest, or schoolmaster. The poet speaks with a missionary who has been disillusioned, failing and returning from the rain forest. The poet at first feels a "strange reversal," having come for confession, but then he is rebuked for his poetry might be the same kind of failed mission: "what are you doing here / but the same thing?" the father asks. "I at least was young and unaware." Many of these dialogues are difficult for the poet; another particularly damning one is his conversation with Colum, his cousin who died as a result of sectarian violence: Colum says, "You saw that, and you wrote that--not the fact. / You confused evation and artistic tact. / The Protestant who shot me through the head / I accuse directly, but indirectly, you / who now atone perhaps upon this bed / for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew / the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio / and saccharined my death with morning dew." The voice of Colum charges Heaney with the crime of aestheticizing death and violence, belittling its horror. Joyce is perhaps the kindest to him, telling him, essentially, to stop worrying about these issues and to just write: "Let go, let fly, forget." Joyce is belittling though, about the "pilgrimage," calling it "infantile," and a "peasant pilgrimage."


Collection: Spirit Level (1996)
Written a year after receiving the Nobel Prize, and two years after Ulster paramilitaries and the IRA signed a truce, this collection represents for many critics a break from Heaney's earlier work. Certainly the impasse which seems to characterize "Station Island" seems broken, and many of these poems lay claim to adequacy and value. In his prize speech, Heaney refers to the story of a minibus stopped on the side of a road by IRA terrorists. The passengers were directed to stand in a line, and Catholics were encouraged to step aside to acknowledge their beliefs. Assuming those who had stopped them to be Protestant militants, a Protestant squeezes the hand of the one Catholic old man in their company to signal he needn't step out. The old Catholic steps out to acknowledge his faith, and the rest of the Protestants are slaughtered. Heaney describes the work of poetry as "credit[ing] as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures." In another section of the speech, Heaney expresses his faith that there is an "adequacy" in lyric poetry for doing such work.

Specific examples:
Vendler characterizes the "value" of many poems in this collection as a kind of middle-age stoicism not particularly common to lyric (if only because so many lyric poets happened to die young). Characters in this collection, perhaps most obviously Hugh Heaney in "Keeping Going" move on with the business of everyday, seemingly mundane, everyday living in the face of the violence of man's brains being shot out against the whitewashed building: "My dear brother, you have good stamina. / You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor / Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people, / You shout and laugh above the revs, you keep / Old roads open by driving on the new ones." As if paralleling the saving grace in the performance of the ordinary after the trauma of violence, the language in this collection seems much simpler, concrete, and less abstract than in "Station Island." Poems like "Rain Stick" celebrate the simply joys of hearing the sounds of the rain stick; "Mint" calls upon the reader to look for "newness in the back yard of our life," the sprigs of mint that grow wild "beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles." These are both calls to regard the power of what might be overlooked and disregarded after so much of the horrific had happened. These sentiments are related to the poet's re-valuation of his vocation in this section: like St. Kevin in "St. Kevin and the Blackbird," the poet must strive "To labour and not seek reward," or like the "journeyman tailor" in "At Banagher," never "question[s] what it all amounts to." This steady, stoic work which the poet strives for isn't exactly the same as what Joyce suggests to him in "Station Island" which seems more revolutionary and "high," the middle-age poet doesn't seek to fly but to return to earth and work, as Caedmon sings during the time that he isn't doing yardwork ("Caedmon"). In these figurations of stoicism there is an obvious echo through allusion to the ancient world (e.g., the poet figuring himself as a lookout in "Mycenae Lookout" who is simply there to watch, with a "frozen stare" the destruction of Troy) and also to an Eastern, Buddhist sort of denial of self (again, as in St. Kevin's forgetting his own pain or self in the labor of holding his arms out for the blackbird's eggs to hatch). The poet no longer wrestles with writing to exorcise guilt or take responsibility, but chooses to write as a kind of witness to the other ordinary things of value that remain even after scenes of destruction and violence.

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

Edition: Four Quartets
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Eliot's Four Quartets grew out of a what was initially a single poem, "Burnt Norton," which ended up being the first of four poems. "Burnt Norton" was made up of discarded passages from his dramatic work from the 1930s, specifically, Murder in the Cathedral. After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, interest in the theater declined, and Eliot turned back to poetry, writing a second poem which takes the same five-part structure of "Burnt Norton" called "East Coker." During the writing of this second poem, Eliot decided on the overall sequence of the Four Quartets. The third poem, "The Dry Salvages," was completed in 1940, and the last poem, "Little Gidding," was completed in 1942. Their first publication as a set was in 1943 in New York, and 1944 in London.

SUMMARY/OVERVIEW/:
Burnt Norton
I. The poet expresses abstractions of time which privileges the notion that "time is eternally present" in reflective yet simple lines. A bird calls "us" into a rose-garden, "our first world" (alluding to Eden), where an unnamed "they" are, "dignified, invisible / Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves..." We look into an empty pool which fills "with water out of sunlight" and "they" stand behind us, reflected. The moment "they" are identified as children (our own past?) the bird tells us to leave.
II. The beginning of this second section is metrically nursery-rhyme like: "Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle tree." The lines expand with the introduction of a recurring image in this poem, "the still point of the turning world," which the poet insists, is stillness and not "fixity." This still point is this eternal present, a Buddhist-like state free from "practical desire" "release[d] from action and suffering."
III. The poet indicates "a place of disaffection," which is being stuck in "Time before and time after." To escape this temporality, one could descend, "Into a world of perpetual solitude / World not world, but that which is not world, / Internal darkness, depirvation / And destitution of all property / Dessication of the world of sense, / Evacuation of the world of fancy, / Inoperancy of the world of spirit." This begins to sound like Hell rather than Heaven, though both are empty of desire and notions of "time past and time future."
IV. This is a short stanza; it plays with the images of a bell, nature, and again, the still point of the turning world.
V. This final section admits and explores the limitations of words and music. Even though words and music don't die like people do, they aren't "still" and are subject to the burden of movement. "Form" and "pattern" perpetuate stillness, though, and might help words and music to get closer to the divine stillness  of an eternal present which the poem has been holding up throughout.

East Coker
I. The poem begins, "In my beginning is my end." Images of destruction, decay, restoration, and renewal, collapses beginnings and endings. In an "open field," archaic, rustic rituals celebrating "matrimonie" and coupling go on, alongside the time of seasons, milking, harvest. "Eating and drinking" are juxtaposed with "Dung and death."
II. Again, the first part of this section begins with clipped, nursery-rhyme like lines which mix together imagines from different seasons, again collapsing linear time. The words which he has just used to try to collapse linear time, the poet says in the next section, are inadequate to the task. The section ends bleakly with the adage that "[t]he only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."
III. "O dark dark dark" reminds us of Milton's blindness, but also his faith: the dark is not a place of despair, but it "shall be the darkness of God." Didactic negations turn out to be the way of reaching (the inexpressible state of spiritual fulfillment--but it can't really be "fulfillment" since that signals progression). This is how Eliot expresses it: "To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. / In order to arrive at what you do not know / You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance...And what you do not know is the only thing you know / And what you own is what you do not own / And where you are is where you are not."
IV. Sin is figured as a disease and sickness, and earth is "our hospital." In battling fevers here on earth, the poet says he "must freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires."
V. This section contains a direct reference to the World Wars, and the poets own "twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres / Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure..." Again, words aren't up to the task of expressing the still point of the world, the time eternal, the spiritual state which we need to realize. Yet, the fight to get there, to "recover what has been lost" is what we do. In fact, "for us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business," in other words, that's the business of Christ.

The Dry Salvages
I. The first section figures (the Mississippi?) river as a "strong brown god," who is forgotten in the building up of cities and the living in them. Yet, the divine presence of the sea remains everywhere though it may be "unhonoured, unpropitiated, / By worshippers of the machine."
II. This section revises the notion of an "end" and suggests that in time, there is only "addition" or accumulation. As one gets older, the poet says, time seems less and less like development or sequence (linear), but more like a pattern, which is another way of thinking of it as accumulation. The only true happiness is not in the things that we usually think of as "well-being," like "fruition, fulfilment, security or affection, / Or even a very good dinner" but a "sudden illumination" which can't be expressed as any kind of "meaning." This happiness is only available through Christ.
III. "I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant" links Eliot's poem to Eastern concepts of transmigration of the soul. The poet enjoins life travellers to "fare forward" and not to fare well; there is a sense of inevitability in change and to "fare forward" is to let these changes happen and to face them bravely.
IV. The poet prays to the Virgin on behalf of people living by the seaside, those who have embarked voyages, and the women who have been left behind.
V. This section condemns all sorts of life occupations to tell the future ("To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, / To report the behaviour of the sea monster, / Describe the horoscope,  haruspicate or scry, / Observe disease in signatures, evoke / Biography from the wrinkles of the palm...") as unreal--they are merely "pastimes and drugs." Instead, one ought to try to "apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / with time." This is the "occupation for the saint," although Eliot stops here and admits it isn't an "occupation." Ultimately, the closest we may get here on earth are to gain "only hints and guesses," "the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action."


Little Gidding
I. The poem begins with "midwinter spring" is a divine, eternal sort of season which feels "suspended in time, between pole and tropic." The second part of this section breaks into second-person address conditionals which essentially say that regardless what route you take, the notion of "purpose" will break apart. "You are not here to verify, / Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity / Or carry report. You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid."
II. After images of water and fire destroying the earth, a dead master speaks with the poet in terza rima, preaching purification and refinement of the soul by fire. Specifically, the master refers to the disciplined movement of "dancing" in the fire, again suggesting the importance of pattern (as in poems, music) in aiding a soul towards realizing the divine state of stillness.
III. This section explores problems of attachment (such as to country, "faces and places") and levels these kinds of loyalties in death: "We cannot revive old factions / We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum. / These men, and those who opposed them / And those whom they opposed / Accept the constitution of silence / And are folded in a single party."
IV. This is a short section on redemption by fire.
V. The poet asserts that "What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning," destroying once again the linear conception of time. A similar sentiment is expressed in "history is a pattern / Of timeless moments." He suggests a continuing exploration throughout ones life, however, but that the "end" of such exploration will be to get back to where we started "And know the place for the first time," strongly signaling a return to a state before original sin.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
The five-part structures of the poems in Four Quartets are reminiscent of The Waste Land, but late Eliot is significantly different from earlier Eliot. For one, Eliot's subject is more obviously Christian; Four Quartets primarily and explicitly works out the subject of time and mankind in relation to the divine. Stylistically, the poems feel like they are spoken by a "single consciousness" (according to critic Margaret Thormahlen, SOURCE: LitEncyc) rather than the fragmented consciousness of The Waste Land. Relatedly, Four Quartets feels much more personal in nature--indeed, autobiographical snippets further this overall sense (each poem is named after a place which was personally significant to Eliot). The invocation of a musical form of "quartets" alongside Leavis's reading of The Waste Land, however, forges an important connection between these works: both reject narrative as an archaic organizational principle and favor the abstraction of musical relationships as a substitute in modern times.  In The Waste Land this new form is less explicitly aligned with a new conception of Christianity for the modern world, and the art itself seems to hold its own kind of power, but in Four Quartets, this new conception of Christianity is the whole point which art strives towards (but inevitably fails to completely reach).

Sight and Song by Michael Field

Edition:  Sight And Song (1892)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Sight and Song was a collection of poems published by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece who were living together as lovers. Elkins Mathews and John Lane published these poems as a limited-edition volume in 1892. Each of the poems is to have been based on Renaissance paintings which Bradley and Cooper viewed together in galleries in England and on the continent.

SUMMARY/THEMES:
Each poem describes in detail the painting to which it refers, concentrating on form, color, and emotional expression, though rarely revealing much at all about the stories or allegories often attached to these paintings. In doing so, Michael Field follows the injunctions of Pater to focus on form rather than on the connotations, history, or stories that might attach to form. In the preface to these poems, Michael Field makes clear this Paterian notion: the aim is "to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves (italics are mine)." That they wish to translate what the pictures sing "in themselves" is important because this philosophy resists the pouring in of the spectator's own subjectivities into the paintings. Something similar is expressed via a quotation from Flaubert, also in the preface: "Il faut, par un effort d'esprit, se transporter dans les personnages et non les attirer a soi." For "personnages," Field says to substitute "peintures." Again, this quotation expresses the aesthetic philosophy that spectatorship is to put oneself in the place of the pictures, and not to bring too much of oneself to the pictures.

However, as critic Julia Saville suggests in her essay on Field's collection (in The Fin-de-Siecle Poem edited by Joseph Bristow), Paterian influence did not mean that they were simply applying Paterian philosophy without their own innovations. Specifically, Saville notes Michael Field's position of impersonality to suggest that if we allow the paintings to speak for themselves, it becomes apparent that they contain many "dissident" meanings, particularly in the arena of new "erotic registers."

In "The Faun's Punishment," based actually on Corregio's "Allegory of Vice," Field's descriptions of the Maenads surrounding the faun reveal female eroticism and desire grounded in malice and violence traditionally assigned to male sexuality: "One sits with fanciful eyes beside him; / Malice and wonder mix / In her glance for the victim--woe beside him, / When once her snakes transfix / His side! Ere they dart, / With backward start / She waits their rigid pause; / And with comely stoop / One maid, elate / With horror, hate / And triumph, up from his ankle draws / The kin away in a clinging loop." The description of the snakes immediately signals male erotic violence, but here the women possess this capacity to take pleasure in this kind of violence. The rhyming of "elate" and "hate" consolidate this pairing of pleasure and violence. A more chilling depiction of predation is in "Venus and Mars," where while Mars sleeps, Venus looks on: "Ironical she sees, / Without regret, the work her kiss has done / And lives a cold enchantress doomed to please / Her victims one by one." A look at the painting on which this poem is based, Botticelli's "Venus and Mars," indeed reveals a sleeping Mars and almost disturbingly awake and sharp-looking Venus. Allowing the art to speak for itself, Field contends it reveals a cold irony on the part of the woman who is "doomed to please" yet feels that whom she pleases is a victim.

Descriptions in other poems reveal that an unrestrained, powerful, and un-self-conscious sensuality is possible for female subjects. "Treading the Press" is one such description: "Maidens with white, curving napes / And coiled hair backward leap, / As they catch the fruit, mid laughter, / Cut from every silvan rafter." The maidens's movements are sure and unaware of being looked upon. They seem only aware of catching the fruit, spontaneously laughing all the while. "The Sleeping Venus," based on Giorgione's reclining Venus, boldly suggests that Venus's hand ostensibly positioned to cover herself out of modesty actually is a hand placed to pleasures herself: "She enjoys the good / of delicious womanhood."      

"A Portrait" describes Veneto's portrait (of a courtesan), and in doing so, reverses general assumptions that courtesans are passive before the male gaze. Instead, Field argues that the look of this woman signals that she has deliberately manufactured the way that she looks in this portrait, hence taking away the agency of the (male) painter: "She saw her beauty often in the glass / Sharp on the dazzling surface..." and so knowingly, she plucks the flowers which she holds in her hand, "[t]hese simple things with finest touch she gathers in her pride." The ending of this poem is even more striking, contending that "Lo, she has conquered death!" by her deliberate construction of her image and will to be painted on her own terms. "Leda" similarly exhibits her agency up against the swan, overwhelming the swan with her will: "Tis Leda, wild and free, / Drawing her gracious Swan down through the grass to see / Certain round eggs without a speck...She draws the fondled creature to her will." Here, Leda has her way with the swan, forcing him to attend to the importance of maternal duties, much more than the swan has his way with Leda. 
--
I would argue that at the same time that Field's collection multiplies the possibilities of female sensuality, it also multiplies possibilities of male erotic registers as well as emotional states. As critics of the collection have noted, Field turns the gaze unexpectedly onto male bodies. There is a sense of equality in this gaze, however, in that Field treats male subjects to the same processes of "translation" that they have treated female subjects to. Again, the process elides the allegories and histories which may have inspired the paintings, instead focusing on the visual aspects of form and color, and in doing so, bringing out new possibilities that may not have been apparent if one were too fettered by such frameworks of interpretation offered by allegory and history.  

"Venus, Mercury, and Cupid" describes a very different "cupid" than the usual feisty and mischievous one: here, cupid is a harmless and timid infant, a "little lad beside her [Venus], / Who half hides and half doth guide her." "A Shepherd-Boy" refers to Giorgione's "Boy with Flute," focusing on a description of his face which might seem more apt, traditionally, to a female object: "A radiant, oval face: the hair / About the cheeks so blond in hue...Warm eyes, sweet mouth of the softest lips..." and so forth. Yet such a description doesn't make him feel any shame or any self-consciousness of being looked upon, as might be expected if this were a Victorian depiction of a female. "His countenance reveals him one / Of those whose characters are fed / By light--the largeness o its ways, / The breadth and patience in its joy...Delight will never be slow to come / To youth that lays its finger / On the flute's stop and yet is dumb / And loves with its dumb self to linger." I think "dumb" here signals his lack of self-consciousness, countering conventional notions that one might look so "femininely" and feel comfortably and unknowingly so."St. Jerome in the Desert" tells nothing about what has made kneel before God, only describing the physicality of the moment and extrapolating from this physicality, his emotional state: "His breast of flint awaits / Much flagellation; pleasure fills / The body courage reinstates / Enduring what the spirit wills." Against conventional notions of violence and sensuality, it is a male and not female figure here who desires violence upon himself; flagellation is pleasure. "Saint Sebastian" describes the martyr "stript and fastened to the tree that has no bough" focusing on the details of his form and extrapolating from this, his great vulnerability and unwillingness to die (rather than his fortitude, which an allegorical account of the martyr might give): "For we see no blessedness / On his visage pale, / Turned in its distress / Toward the heaven, without avail." This is a suffering and protesting figure: "Massive is his mouth; the upper lip is set / In a pained, protesting curve." Even Christ, in "The Blood of the Redeemer" is treated via Field's "translation" of Bellini's painting, revealing something unconventional about this depiction as well: this Christ in his resurrection is haggard, pale, and grotesque and so for the spectator, Field boldly contends that "There is no light athwart these eastern skies / For us, no joy it is that Thou dost rise."

[To summarize all of these somewhat scattered observations: I have tried to show here the ways in which Field's application of Paterian philosophy (allowing the artwork to speak for itself) enables them to question numerous conventions, especially but not limited to gender conventions]

Preludes by Alice Meynell

Edition: Preludes (1875)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Alice Meynell (then Thompson)'s first volume of poetry, Preludes, was published in 1875 when she was twenty-seven years old. The collection is accompanied by illustrations done by her sister, Elizabeth. Meynell didn't end up embarking upon a long career as a poet, however--subsequently, she was more known for her essays. Thompson's Preludes received praise, most notably, from John Ruskin. 

SUMMARY/THEMES:

Temporality. Many of the poems in the collection counter notions of conventional temporality. Frequently, Thompson suggests the absence of temporality in the realm of eternity is always superior to the timed one which the poet inhabits; thus, any effort to "undo" conventional temporality is perhaps to get closer to its absence. In "To the Beloved Dead," the beloved has an existence outside of patterns of time:  "Thou silent song, thou ever voiceless rhyme, / Is there no pulse to move thee, / At windy dawn, with a wild heart beating time, / And falling tears above thee, / O music stifled from the ears that love thee?" This language of pulsation signals poetry's connections to the earthly human body. His being outside of time spurs the poet's desire "[f]or some more vast To be." In "A Letter from a Girl to her Own Old Age," the poet suggests that the past and present might be yoked together. One such way of yoking past and present together is through nature: "Oh, Nature brings my straying heart unto thee. / Her winds will join us, with their constant kisses / Upon the evening as the morning tresses / Her summers breathe the same unchanging blisses." Later in the poem, the poet counters the sequence of past and present by referring to herself as "filial" even though she has come before the old woman: "The one that now thy faded features guesses, / With filial fingers thy grey hair caresses, / With morning tears thy mournful twilight blesses." The sonic alignment of morning/mourning does further work in eradication distinctions between past and present. A similar yoking together of past and present is effected in "The Poet to his Childhood" in which the mature poet reflects on how the child s/he once was had been the one to determine the course of the rest of his life. Specifically, the child has chosen to climb the hills instead of walking down the "river'd meadow land," which essentially leads inevitably to the poet's endless ascent towards truth and knowledge for the remainder of life. The ascent is isolating, and so they are "hills of solitude." Nonetheless, the end of the poem reflects an acceptance of what the child has chosen, again, linking past and present: "I rebel not, child gone by, but obey you wonderingly, / For you knew not, young rash speaker, all you spoke, / and now will I, / With the life, and all the loneliness revealed that you / thought fit, / Sing the Amen, knowing it."  "Builders of Ruins" takes an expanded view of time, wherein the poet imagines the ruins that will succeed all of men's greatest edifices. That man's greatest projects will go to ruin is a cause for wonder: "Who shall allot the praise, and guess / What part is yours and what is ours? -- / O years that certainly will bless / Our flowers with fruits, out seeds with flowers, / With ruin all our perfectness." "Ruin" is a blessing because it contextualizes short-lived human creation within a much larger canvas of time. "Souer Monique," referring to a work composed by Couperin about a "silent nun" who lived years before Couperin, also boldly paints a broad canvas of time: through music and poetry, the collapse of ages might be brought about. The poet hears Couperin's melody and then wonders about the connection between this nun and Couperin, and then between herself and the nun, mediated through Couperin and her own poetry. The poet is able, finally, to make the nun her own through the bending of time: "Souer Monique, remember me. / Tis not in the past alone / I am picturing you to be; / But my little friend, my own, / In my moment, pray for me." In these lines, the temporal frames become reversed--the nun comes after the poet in the injunction, "remember me." 

Death and Silence figure repeatedly in Preludes as access points to the timeless, eternal realm of truth which it is the poet's task to seek. In "To a Poet," the greatest praise is accorded to "[s]ilence, the completest / Of thy poems, last, and sweetest." Death is the final and greatest poem, a continuation of the work done in life but more complete because it isn't subject to the limitation of human consciousness, specifically, of not being able to understand all of the "secrets" hidden behind the veil of nature. The rest of the poem sings of this limitation--to nature, the poet "[b]ear[s] the fictions of [his] sadness, / [his] humanity / For their truth (referring to nature's) is not for thee." But once the poet's consciousness has merged with the consciousness of nature in death, there will no longer be such a problem. "To the Beloved" is a poem which compares the "beloved" to silent, negative spaces, and this seems the greatest praise: "silent strays / Amongst the winds, between the voices," "[a] silent sea" that "[l]ies round all shores with long embraces," "[a] secret and a mystery / Between one footfall and the next," "Most dear pause in a mellow lay" and so forth. "To a Lost Melody" refers to Keats's poetry, rather, more specifically, the loss or absence of it. The first line of the poem, "Thou art not dead, O sweet lost melody" affirms the continuance of Keats's melody, but most of the poem actually questions where it has gone. Such unanswered questions as "what soul knows thee now?" or  "And is the June air laden with thee now, / Passing the summer-bough?" form the bulk of the poem. At the very end, the poet asks if Keats's melody then might "leave thy rainbow showers, to bear / A part in human care" and she is met with no answer. The final lines confirm that Keats's melody is "lost" insofar as it is no longer human, but it has joined with the eternal realm of truth where human consciousness isn't separate from nature's: "Ah, not for mine (referring to the poet's own voice), who sit with empty ears, / Dreaming of thee, to tears." 

Memory, nature, and the (male) Romantic tradition. Many of the poems in Preludes clearly draw on the traditional nature poems of the male Romantic poets (though, as Linda H. Peterson has pointed out, Thompson doesn't contend quite as antagonistically to the male Romantic tradition as earlier female poets like Barrett Browning). "In Early Spring" revises the romantic, Wordsworthian notion of memory as highly individual and originating from the "I" of the lyric Subject. In Thompson's conception of memory here, the memory belongs not to the "I" of the poet, but to nature: "But not a flower or song I ponder is / My own, but memory's."  Though the poet can channel the "memory," it ultimately belongs and originates in nature. Like Barrett-Browning's Aurora Leigh, the poet as imagined by Thompson channels meaning that is greater than what s/he intends to mean. In a "Sonnet" accompanied by an epigraph from Lorenzo de Medici, Thompson develops the metaphor that her heart is the addressee's garden, and that the addressee brings the seeds to the garden. However, she also says that the garden has birds which are the thoughts :which though thine eyes hold / mine, Flit to the silent world and other summers / With wings that dip beyond the silver seas." The birds in this metaphor are the meaning which the poet expresses that are greater than what she herself can possibly intend. In another "Sonnet" subtitled "to poet to nature" and with an epigraph from Dante, Thompson revises Shelley's conception, in "Ode to the West Wind" of the poet as a "lyre" through which the west wind (nature) might weave in order to produce song. In Shelley's poem, the lyre metaphor makes the poet's individual structure to be fairly important for the production of music. The poet in Thompson's poem is also a "lyre," but there is also a "lyre sublime" with which the individual "lyre" would not be able to keep up. The power of this greater lyre, a poet may only borrow: "Another bard shall tune / Thee, O my Lyre, to other songs than mine."  

Engaging the tradition of male love poems. Preludes also engages actively with a long tradition of male love poets, most notably in the sonnets, and in her inclusions of epigraphs from Dante and Petrarch. "Song" contains one of Thompson's recurring images of love, in which the lover as a tide which unknowingly fills silent, inland rivulets. This image suggests secret places that a lover cannot conquer by any conscious means, whether by force or persuasion. The "Sonnet" I mentioned above with the Lorenzo de Medici epigraph signals that love doesn't lead to the formation of a complete world that can shut itself out from nature (as many love poems claim, Shakespeare and Donne come to mind). The "birds" (nature) are as much a part of the "garden" (the poet) as the "seeds" (her lover). 

The poet's alienation from own work. Related to all of the above observations, Thompson's poet almost always feels a degree of alienation from his own work (when channeling nature, which is greater than the human, it always means there is something in excess of the poet in the poem). "Pygmalion," subtitled "The Poet to his Poetry," contends directly with this alienation: "Thou art to live; I am watching thee. / I have laid my patient chisel away, / And watch thee somewhat wearily." The poet continues: "I know not what the voice will sing. / I only made the quiet breast, / And white throat with much labouring. / I only wrought and thought my best, / And lo, a new voice shall out-ring." "Sonnet," subtitled "The Love of Narcissus" contends that seeing one's self in nature is a "strange recognition" (presumably because of the excess nature that the poet can't understand about himself/herself). In one of the most moving sonnets subtitled "At a Poet's Grave," Thompson asks us not to praise the poet, but the poet's truth beyond his individual existence. The poet is just a medium.  Finally, her "Sonnet" to a daisy wonders at the secret life of the daisy which can only be viewed from "God's side." The sweet, simple daisy is a "barrier to eternity." The alienation, as I have noted in other poems, goes away only in silence and death.