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. 

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

Edition: Villette (Oxford World's Classics)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Villette was published in 1853 (three volumes), following the success of Jane Eyre in 1847, and to a lesser extent, Shirley in 1849. During the writing of Villette, Charlotte Bronte was going through an extremely trying period in her life: her brother and two sisters all died in the short period of time from 1848-1849. These tragedies were accompanied by Bronte's simultaneous exposure to the public's limelight: prior to this, she and her sisters had hidden behind their male pseudonyms (Currer Bell, for Charlotte) but the acclaim following Jane Eyre forced her into the open. While this had its advantages--for example, making new friends in London including Thackeray, Martineau, and Gaskell--Charlotte was also deeply anxious about her reception by the public as a woman. Some of these anxieties are very present in Villette: Dr. John is the best example of a man who cannot see women as people independently of their sex. 

SUMMARY:

Volume 1:

Villette is narrated by the outwardly-reserved Lucy Snowe, whose psychological portrait is at the center of this novel. Her (retrospective) account begins with her experiences at her well-to-do godmother's, Mrs. Bretton's, in the town of Bretton, where Lucy would visit twice a year. During one particular visit, Lucy makes the acquaintance of a young, precocious child named Paulina, who develops a close relationship to Graham Bretton, Mrs. Bretton's son. Polly's stay is temporary, however, and she is soon taken away by her father.

Lucy too leaves Bretton. Eight years pass, and looking for a new situation, Lucy ends up assisting an old woman named Miss Marchmont who has resigned her life ever since her lover died thirty-years-ago. Miss Marchmont dies soon after Lucy's arrival, and Lucy decides to go to London to seek other fortunes. For a moment, Lucy enjoys the freedom of being in the hustle and bustle of the city, but decides to go on to Boue-Marine. On her passage there, she meets Ginevra Fanshawe, a young and vain girl who attends Madame Beck's school in Villette, a (fictional) town in Belgium. Having no other idea where to go, Lucy decides to go to Villette, and finds herself at the doorstep of Madame Beck's school. Madame Beck takes a leap of faith and engages Lucy, and soon she becomes an English teacher there, having proved her mettle before a classroom of rebellious, "Labassecourienne" girls.

A young doctor, Dr. John (later revealed to be Graham Bretton, but Lucy's narrative oddly withholds this revelation until the moment of Dr. John's recognition) arrives in Villette, and attends to patients at Madame Beck's school. Being rather handsome, he causes a bit of a stir, but the calmly authoritative Madame Beck keeps him around despite parental concerns. One night, Lucy accidentally chances upon a small box which contains a love letter, which among other things, contains an unflattering portrait of herself. Lucy is drawn into trying to figure out who the lovers are; Dr. John is clearly distraught over the matter and reveals to Lucy that he is interested in someone but before he reveals this, Madame Beck interrupts their conversation. The mystery of who wrote the love letter and to whom it was addressed continues. At an annual fete, in which Lucy is convinced by M. Paul to play a fop in a vaudeville, she finds out that Dr. John's love interest is Ginevra, and that she had been playing him off with Alfred de Hamal, a colonel that she ultimately prefers over Dr. John. Lucy is harsh in her judgment of Ginevra before Dr. John, who thinks her an innocent, graceful being. Meanwhile, Lucy plays her part well, and M. Paul notes that he has read a certain passion in her; Lucy, of course, denies this. The examination period follows, and then vacation, during which, left alone, Lucy experiences some nightmarish visions and in order to calm herself, even goes so far as to speak with a Catholic priest though she is a staunch Protestant. The priest tells her that perhaps her Protestantism is too cold and dry for such a one as herself. 

Volume 2:

Lucy falls so ill that unbeknownst to her, she is transported by the priest, one Pere Silas, to a nearby chateau where Mrs. Bretton now lives. Lucy awakes here and is disoriented by her recognition of the Bretton furniture in an unfamiliar place. It is during her recuperation at the chateau that Mrs. Bretton and Graham realize that she is Lucy Snowe; this is also the moment that Lucy reveals Dr. John's identity to the reader. Dr. John takes Lucy around Villette, and she enjoys a relatively happy time, though it is clear that she rages at Dr. John's blindness about Ginevra's emptiness. As if to represent her frustration with the idealization of vapid females more generally, Lucy finds herself pausing before a warm and voluptuous painting of a well-fed Cleopatra. M. Paul happens to be at this gallery, and steers her away from the image. Disappointingly, when Lucy asks Dr. John if he likes the Cleopatra, he says that he would prefer a Ginevra. One night, however, when Lucy accompanies Mrs. Bretton and John to a concert, Ginevra bestows a sneer upon Mrs. Bretton and John suddenly realizes that Ginevra is nothing more than a "feather-brained schoolgirl." Soon after, it is time for Lucy to return to the pensionnat. She is lonely, and fights down her own feelings of expectation when Dr. John says that he will write to her. When she does receive a letter from him, she fawns over it and desires to consume it in secret up in a garret. In the garret, Lucy sees a terrifying apparition: a nun (there has been a legend of a nun buried alive on the grounds of the school). Dr. John insensitively consigns this to Lucy's imagination and enjoins her to "cultivate happiness," a phrase Lucy takes to task for being rather difficult for one for whom so little has been allowed by Providence. 

On a night soon after Lucy sees this vision, John takes her to the theater to see an actress whom Lucy refers to as Vashti, a king's wife (Book of Esther) who refused to show off her beauty at his command. Lucy is riveted by this heroine's struggle and passion, but when she asked Dr. John what he thought, he only saw the woman and not the artist (commenting on the actress). While narrating this section, Lucy tells of her realization that there was no "chord of enthusiasm" in Dr. John: the "cool Briton" would not be able to perceive what she could perceive in Vashti. The performance is interrupted by a small fire in the theater; as everyone rushes out, a young woman is nearly trampled but John rescues her and takes her back to her hotel. This young woman turns out to be none other than Polly. Lucy and Polly (now the Countess de Bassompierre) reconnect, and spend much time together in pursuits such as learning German together. Lucy declines Polly's father's offer to pay her to be Polly's companion because of her need to be independent; if she were overshadowed, Lucy confesses, she wanted it to be voluntary. Polly invites Lucy to a dinner that her father was giving where M. Paul gave an impassioned "discours." At the dinner, Graham increasingly becomes interested in Polly and callously asks Lucy (whom he has called an "inoffensive shadow") to help him engage her attentions. Lucy refuses. Meanwhile, M. Paul seems to become more and more interested in Lucy, exchanging some charged, flirtatious moments with her. 

Volume 3:

Lucy and M. Paul become closer and closer throughout this section. At first, M. Paul's attentions are rather jealous--during a fete honoring him, he feels snubbed that Lucy, unlike everyone else, has not brought him bouquet (as is required by custom). He soon realizes that he is wrong, for Lucy has made for him a special present, a watchguard. Another point of difference between them is M. Paul's staunch Catholicism and Lucy's staunch Protestantism. Time and again, M. Paul tries to draw passion out of Lucy, in order to prove that she is not suited to a religion as cold as what he views Protestantism to be. Meanwhile, Paulina and Graham reveal their mutual feelings for one another, and with a bit of resistance from Paulina's protective father, the two are engaged. Lucy unravels the story of the rest of their lives as an example of God allowing some good people to live out their lives with little suffering and mostly peace and bliss. Ginevra's fate is also sealed in this final section: one evening, when Madame Beck and others were out celebrating a local festival, Ginevra ran away with her lover, Alfred de Hamal. The epilogue which Lucy gives of Ginevra and Alfred is one which might be expected from her: she is very melodramatic about her child, at one time magnifying the dangers of its sickness for effect. Predictably, Ginevra's love decays, unlike the constant Paulina's. 

As for Lucy and M. Paul: it turns out that Madame Beck and Pere Silas have been scheming to separate the two of them, both for selfish reasons and because they feel that the Catholic M. Paul must not associate with a heretic. Madame Beck sends Lucy on an errand to bear a gift basket to one Madame Walravens's, a hunchbacked old woman. There, Lucy finds out that Madame Walravens was actually the grandmother of the deceased Justine Marie, M. Paul's beloved, whom he never married because he did not have enough money to do so. Justine had become a nun but died shortly after joining the convent. Though Madame Walravens had been unjust to M. Paul, he continued to send her money for her keep and make sure that she (and also his tutor, Pere Silas, who lived with Madame Walravens) would be taken care of. Instead of scaring Lucy away, this story softens Lucy's impression of the sometimes selfish and caustic-seeming M. Paul. In face of their increasing affection for one another, the two decide to think of each other as brother and sister. Suddenly, M. Paul must depart for Basseterre, in Guadaloupe because Madame Walravens needs someone to help her obtain a large fortune which has only recently become available to her through her long deceased husband. Before setting sail for Antigua, however, M. Paul has thoughtfully set up a school for Lucy to manage all on her own. This is a surprise which he doesn't reveal to her until right before he leaves, however, largely because Madame Beck has tried to keep him from saying goodbye to Lucy. When he reveals the surprise to Lucy, she confesses her own doubts and her moments of jealousy, and the two finally admit their true affections for one another. M. Paul will be gone for three years, and Lucy will attend to her school in the meantime. Lucy says that the three years were the happiest in her life, because she was working for their future, and perfecting on her own, her affection for the man who was abroad. Bronte's ending is famous: it is strongly suggested (though apparently up to the reader to decide) that M. Paul is shipwrecked on his way home and drowned. 

  

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:

Freedom and Withholding:

Bronte develops interest in Lucy through devices of first-person narration wherein there is so much to be "read" in Lucy that isn't necessarily intended. Yet, while her narration compels readers to discover her, at the same time, "discovery" is exactly what a character such as Lucy resists because to be "known" is to suffer some kind of violation of freedom. This is precisely why any "reading" of Lucy seems doomed from the start--one feels that Bronte's message is that the preservation of a radical kind of independence for someone such as Lucy requires us to simply leave her alone. This is, of course, exactly what others fail to do in the book. For Dr. John, she is "quiet" and "inoffensive," for Ginevra, Lucy is a prude and a grandma, and even for M. Paul, her lover, she is a passionate soul who needs to be coaxed out of her shell. 

Lucy tells us, importantly, that it isn't the misapprehension of herself that bothers her. She writes, in reference to Dr. John: "There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we cannot be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored." In other words, Lucy takes pleasure in withholding knowledge of herself because in this secret, there is something all her own. She also enjoys a sense of pleasure or power which she comes back to time and again wherein she likes to know others better than they know her: "I liked entering his presence covered with a loud he had not seen through, while he stood before me under a ray of special illumination, which shone all partial over his head, trembled about his feet, and cast light no farther." In practice, this kind of belief means Lucy withholds Dr. John and Polly's identities from them until they realize her identity. She does a similar thing to the reader, withholding Dr. John and Polly's identities from the reader until the moment that these characters themselves recognize Lucy. Lucy doesn't give any reason why she has withheld from the reader; after all, she promises to tell as faithfully as possible the subjective views which she had at the time, but really she doesn't let the reader in very much if she consigns him/her to the same position as Dr. John or Polly.

Even if M. Paul comes the closest to "discovering" Lucy, their inability to unite on any level--religiously, socially (as in marriage), or physically in earthly life at all--might not be such a tragedy, but an assertion of Lucy's Snowe's radical independence. After all, as Lucy herself admits, she was very happy during the three years that he was away. Had he returned, it isn't at all certain that they would have lived happily ever after because it wasn't as if M. Paul and Lucy could realize the kind of domestically blissful rapprochement that (lesser) characters like Paulina and Dr. John could realize. Though Lucy could accept Catholicism in M. Paul, and M. Paul could accept Protestantism in Lucy, neither was in the least satisfied with the beliefs that the other held. Both of them are fiercely independent, and Bronte certainly leaves open the question as to whether two such spirits might actually come together on earth.  

Constraints on Freedom: Society, Fate

Villette, like other Victorian novels with strong female characters like Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks or Eliot's Dorothea Brooke, imagines what happens when social constraints of class and gender act upon a woman of unusual talents, whether in the realm of intellect, passion, or both. Lucy isn't the only woman whose life possibilities are severely reduced because of gender; of Madame Beck, Lucy writes: "That school offered for her powers too limited a sphere; she ought to have swayed a nation..." The situation, of course, is worse for her, having been left without money, without kinship ties, and without beauty. For all social intents and purposes, as Ginevra so pithily put it, she was "a nobody." This is why, she explains, she ends up caring so much for such little things as Dr. John's letters to her. Rather bitterly, she writes, "I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always upon the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter." Characters like M. Paul are able to see beyond the constraints of class and gender, and this offers a slight sense of reprieve. 

Constraints of fate or Providence, however, are more problematic, and Lucy struggles with this. Of Ginevra and Dr. John, she charitably says: "I do believe there are some human beings so born, so reared, so guided from a soft cradle to a calm and late grave, that no excessive suffering penetrates their lot..." However, the next chapter follows on the heels of this faith with doubt: "But it is not so for all. What then?" The arbitrariness of Fate in assigning so much more suffering to some and so much less to others is something which remains unresolved for Lucy, and in the novel more broadly. Though Lucy might at moments accept that the will of God might simply be incomprehensible, at other moments it seems like the acceptance of suffering proves too absurd, or too much.  

Birds, Beasts, and Flowers by D.H. Lawrence

Edition: Birds, beasts and flowers; poems

BACKGROUNDS/CONTEXTS:
D.H. Lawrence wrote most of the poems that ended up collected in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers while alone in Florence in 1920. The overall collection contains various scenes during his travels from 1919-1923 (including to America, and Australia) after WWI. Birds, Beasts, and Flowers was published in 1923, though some of the poems had appeared previously in Poetry, The Dial, The New Republic, and The Bookman. Both Lawrence and his critics have agreed that the collection contains some of his best poetry. The title is for the collection is taken from a Victorian hymn.

SUMMARY/THEMES/ANALYSIS:
Marjorie Perloff notes that one of the most distinctive aspects of this collection is Lawrence's performative rhetoric which makes a "pathetic argument" in order to win the reader's empathy. Perloff quotes W.H. Auden on Lawrence's poems: "Whenever he...describes the anonymous life of stones, waters, forests, animals, flowers, chance traveling companions or passers-by, his bad temper and his dogmatism immediately vanish and he becomes the most enchanting companion imaginable, tender, intelligent, funny, and above all, happy." In my own reading of the poems in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, I certainly noted a conversational honesty and grittiness that perhaps relates to the some of the above observations from Perloff and Auden above. The reader feels that the poetic voice is "down-to-earth," close-to and wrestling with objects of nature in a way that is significantly more terrestrial than the Romantic poets' engagement with nature, wherein nature leads the poet up towards diviner considerations beyond himself. In a case of form mirroring such concerns, Lawrence's rhythms in these poems carry an energy and assertiveness that is sometimes reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sprung rhythm.

Male/Female Struggle: In the first section of the collection, the poet's objects are fruits: "Pomegranate" confrontationally foregrounds the "fissure" in the fruit, challenging the prudish reader that would rather ignore it: "Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure? / Do you prefer to look on the plain side?" In "Peach," he is similarly obsessive over the "ripple down the sphere," explicitly gendering this ripple feminine by opposing the rippled peach to the peach that a man would have made, "round and finished like a / billiard ball." The poet's wrestling with the "Fig" similarly presents the fruit as a bearer of female mystery. In the current age, the mystery is revealing itself (contemporary feminism?) and the poet feels great anxiety over this, cautioning that "the bursten fig" is a ripe fig, and that "Ripe figs won't keep." Here, the poet seems resist attitudes which destroy female mystery, believing the preservation of mystery to be worthwhile. All of these poems embody a direct, confrontational rhetoric (both towards the object and the reader) which nakedly questions why these fruits are the way they are, and whether they might carry in them inaccessible truths about the nature of the sexes.

Return to the Primordial: The rejection of high aspirations to the heavens is repeatedly rejected in Lawrence's collection; it is better to roll around in the primordial mud and darkness, so to speak. "The Revolutionary" is one of the first poems (following the fruit poems) to voice this presence. The poet says that he is the "blind Samson," who cannot see the "heavens above" that the "pale face authority / Caryatids" aspire too. This revolutionary's way is to instead seek the "palpable, invisible nearnesses in the / dark." The "pale face authorities" are rigid, cold, and sterile, whereas the "nearnesses in the dark" are tangible, enveloping, and fertile. The section called "The Evangelistic Beasts" redirects the gospels away from man's aspirations towards Jesus and God to focus on his terrestrial, bestial manhood. In "St. Matthew," Matthew says boldly to Jesus: "But even Thou, Son of Man, canst not quaff out the / dregs of terrestrial manhood!" This gospel of Matthew ends acceptingly with the essential difference between man and the Son of Man: "Son of Man has / climbed to the Whitsun zenith, / But I, Matthew, being a man, / Am a traveller back and forth. / So be it." "St. Mark" is imagined as a lion, who was at first a bloodthirsty (pagan) character, and then called by God to guard the flock. What he becomes isn't particularly desirable or holy: now, the lion is a "faithful sheep-dog of the Shepherd, / thinking of his voluptuous pleasures of chas- / ing the sheep to the fold / And increasing the flock, and perhaps giving a real nip / here and there, a real pinch, but always well / meant." The voice of the poet comically mocks what the lion has become, a slavish and meek tool whose sole pleasure is in the inglorious task of accumulation for someone else. "St. Luke" is imagined as a powerful bull whose great energy and fire is constrained by the purposes availed to him ("so small a vent"). At the end of the poem, the poet links the bull to class struggle, warning that "[t]he bull of the proletariat has got his head down," about to charge with his horns--the violence may be subdued but remains latent and ready to burst. "St. John," finally, is an eagle, cerebral and with a "[p]roud intellect," and "high-soaring Mind," but today, he "[i]s looking rather shabby and island-bound these days." For "island-bound" England, diminished in strength, Lawrence desires a Phoenix from the burnt ashes of the eagle, but sadly (and bitterly) the poet admits to the phoenix that "[y]ou are only known to us now as the badge of an / insurance Company." These re-written gospels insist upon a turn away from the fetters of civilization--whether religion, or capitalism--towards an energy more elemental, violent, and natural.

America: The collection expresses a highly vexed relationship to America, at once ascribing to America an attractive primordial violence and also a hateful civilized machinery, which includes Whitmanian doctrines of equality.  "The Evening Land"is about the poet feeling drawn to yet critical of America. The poet hates and is afraid of the heights of civilization that America has reached, "the winged skeleton of your bleached ideal," and even more afraid of "that clean smooth / Automaton of your uprisen self, / Machine America." Against Whitman the poet rallies: "Does no one realise that love should be particular, / individual, / Not boundless. / This boundless love is like the bad smell / Of something gone wrong in the middle." Yet in this rottenness is a kind of primordial "uncanniness...lurking among the deeps of [the] industrial thicket" which the poet cannot help but to love and identify with. In a later section on birds, the "Turkey-Cock" is associated with "[a] raw American will, that has never been tempered / by life," (an association Lawrence frequently attaches also to the disappeared "primordial Indian"). Like H.D. in Sea Garden, Lawrence ascribes a kind of violent, raw individualism to America. The final poem in the entire collection is "American Eagle" in which the poet basically imagines the American eagle in some kind of identity crisis. He's an eagle, so he can't "sit everlastingly / With an olive-sprig in his mouth. / It's not his nature," yet he was nested by the dove. Again, this particular "identity crisis" points to the dual attributes of peaceful, idealized civilization and the violent, messy, primordial soul.


"Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers" critiques doctrines of equality more generally, directing indignance against socialists for taking on these fiery, individualistic flowers as their symbols. The poet spews, "Come now, speaking of rights, what right have you / to this flower?" The Bolshevists embody principles of mindless, drone-like equality that is so hateful to the poet that he wants the world's "chock-full crowdedness / And glutted squirming populousness on fire / Like a field of filthy weeds / Burnt back to ash, / And then to see the new, real souls sprout up." And in an angry outburst in the name of individuality and difference, the poet says: "What rot, to see the cabbage and hibiscus tree / As equals!" I

Secret, other lives: The majority of these poems concern themselves with the secret "otherness" of birds, beasts, or flowers and more specifically the human encounter with this otherness. In the "Trees" section, "Cypresses" have an "undeliverable secret," "Bare Fig Trees" "ha[ve] been laughing through so many ages / At man and his uncomfortableness." In "Bare Almond Trees" the poet fancies that they have "a strange electric sensitiveness in [their] steel / tips" but even this is a characterization in humanly recognizable terms. Connected to "Bare Almond Trees," the "Flowers" section begins with "Almond Blossom," in which unexpectedly, "[e]ven iron can put forth, / Even iron" the kind of blossoms that come out of the "Strange storming up from the dense under-earth." This "strange storming" links the secret, unknown life again to a primordial force deep inside of the earth. Though this force is strange to us, the poet does suggest that some men might be closer to it--the laboring, working-class images which follow suggest that they are the closest: "Sweating his drops of blood through the long-nighted / Gethsemane / Into blossom, into pride, into honey-triumph, into / most exquisite blossom."

In the "Creatures" section, the poet is able to imagine more of a struggle (although frequently, it is only the human that feels the struggle) in the encounter between human and creature. "Mosquito"and "Fish" begin with the poet's wonder at their secret, inaccessible lives and consciousnesses and ends with a violent encounter: in the former, he squashes the mosquito, and in the latter, he fishes out a fish. In both violent encounters, the poet admits that he knows no more about the creature as a result despite the power that he has enacted on the body of the creatures. In "Fish," the poet is especially caught up by the creature's extreme individualism: "Himself all silvery himself / In the element / No more. / Nothing more...They exchange no word, no spasm, not even anger. / Not one touch...Each one alone with the waters, upon one wave with / the rest." The most the poet can do is to cause these creatures's death, but they ultimately remain unknown to him. "Man and Bat" highlights not only the personified insanity of the bat going round and round the room, but also the man's unreasonable expectation for the bat to go out and his rather insane determination to never let the bat rest. In the end, the bat falls and the man picks him up in a flannel jacket, and releases him. The poem ends imagining a mocking consciousness on the part of the bat: "There he sits, the long loud one! / But I am greater than he... / I escaped him."


There are, however, different degrees to which creatures seem alien to humans. The "Blue Jay," for example, mocks both the poet and his dog. When the poet sees the dog looking at him for an explanation, they are equal in being the blue jay's object of mockery: "It's the blue jay laughing at us. / It's the blue jay jeering at us, Bibs." The section on "Animals" contains living things that seem much closer to man, though the poems make clear that they still each contain inaccessible consciousnesses. The two poems, "He Goat" and "She Goat" become occasions for the poet's further probing into his own notions of sexuality. He identifies with the he-goat's libidinous energy and also potential for violence and sympathizes with his plight in which no outlets are unavailable for the "poor, domesticated beast." On the other hand, he regards the she-goat less sympathetically. She's more "other" and he hates her for it: "She turns her head away with an obtuse, female sort / of deafness..." "She Goat" ends with lines on how the minute after she has kids, in a month it seems like she has never had them. The poet is fearful of her freedom from a maternal instinct. An address to "Bibbles" his (female) dog is similarly vexed: Bibbles, like America, loves everybody indiscriminately, and the poet has a big problem with this. He accuses: "You love 'em all. / Believe in the One Identity, don't you / You little Walt-Whitmanesque bitch?" The poet continues to rant against his dog to the point where the poet reveals his own hatred to be rather strange and even comical.

Miss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant

Edition: Miss Marjoribanks

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Margaret Oliphant, already a well-known writer at the time, published Miss Marjoribanks in 1866. Oliphant's series for Blackwood's, "The Chronicles of Carlingford," had been in progress and Miss Marjoribanks was the fifth novel in the series. Though Oliphant was a well-known literary figure of her time, she has only recently received critical attention from modern scholarship.

SUMMARY:

After the death of Mrs. Marjoribanks, her daughter Lucilla, away at school, imagines for herself a heroic role as comforting daughter to her dear, widowed father. Full with the dramatic intention of fainting into her father's arms, it turns out that the stoic Dr. Marjoribanks doesn’t really need emotional comfort. She is sent back to school, and she resolves that after finishing with school that she will go on the Grand Tour in order to prepare herself to come back and "revolutionize" the middle-class town of Carlingford. Back from the Grand Tour, Lucilla gets to work, dismissing her visiting cousin Tom's confession of love to her and repeating to all that she wishes only to be "a comfort to [her] papa" and that she will likely not marry for ten years. Lucilla's "work" involves re-doing the drawing room, and creating society around an event which came to be known as Thursday "evenings" (not parties, she insists). At one of these so-called evenings, Lucilla brings out Barbara Lake, a drawing-master's daughter, with whom Lucilla sings a duet. Meanwhile, a wealthy and respectable gentleman (likely in line to be M.P. of Carlingford upon the death of the old member, Chiltern) shows some interest in Lucilla and she begins to think this might be a useful match for her since she was so interested in "political economy" (at least in the sphere of social gatherings). Barbara too, is interested in Cavendish. For Lucilla, however, marrying Cavendish is just a passing idea, and while Barbara resents Lucilla and tries to inspire her jealousy, Lucilla remains calm and concerned only with the social management at Grange Lane. At one of her Thursday evenings, an Archdeacon from out of town shows up (he is a guest of Mr. and Mrs. Chiley, an older couple) and mysteriously, Cavendish runs out before the Archdeacon sees him.

Mr. Cavendish is missing for a long while, and Barbara falls ill with Cavendish's departure. Rose, sister to Barbara and a young artist, called the "pre-Raphaelite" in the narrative, goes to Lucilla to talk about Barbara, but Lucilla thwarts her by talking of the Archdeacon and inviting Rose to the upcoming Thursday evening. Lucilla imagines that Rose will be able to talk to the Archdeacon about art, and that this would provide a good pretense for mixing the sexes at the party; with the exit of the great flirt Cavendish, Lucilla has had much trouble with integrating the sexes. Rose, idealistic about artists as occupying a kind of "classless" position in society, is suddenly faced with the prospect/anxiety of making this theory work in practice. On Thursday evening, the Archdeacon is about to reveal something about one "Mr. Kavan's" falsehoods but Lucilla effectively silences him, realizing that he might be talking of "Cavendish." Lucilla diverts everyone's attention by bringing out a sketch which she presumed to be Rose's (it's actually her brother Willie's) and the Archdeacon praises it, drowning out Rose's protests that it isn't hers. Rose learns that what's important to society is not the art but the person talking about the art, and the narrative cruelly ends the chapter with comments that Lucilla is actually the supreme artist: "the young Preraphaelite was at this moment no better than a graphic little pencil in the greater artist's hand." Soon after this episode, Mr. Cavendish returns, going to see Lucilla when the Archdeacon was out of town for a few days, and nearly proposes to her but for Mrs. Chiley accidentally interrupting. Mrs. Woodburn, Cavendish's sister, scolds him for being cowardly and encourages him to propose again, in order to make good connections and to be done with his spotty past (the details of this past are not revealed, at this point, to the reader). Wandering around, Cavendish finds himself at the Lakes' house, meeting with a rather emotional Barbara.

One day when Lucilla took the Archdeacon into a school where she had set up one Mrs. Mortimer to manage (a widow, first recommended to her by the rector Mr. Bury as a chaperone to her). It turns out that the two know each other. Lucilla gracefully exits the scene, but later learns from interviews with Mrs. Mortimer and the Archdeacon that the Archdeacon has for years been trying to convince Mrs. Mortimer (a distant cousin of his) to take up a lawsuit against an unnamed impostor who took Mrs. Mortimer's inheritance. Lucilla clearly suspects the impostor was Mr. Cavendish, but the narrative doesn't reveal this suspicion openly. Meanwhile, Rose Lake asks Lucilla for help because Barbara has been secretly going out evenings with Mr. Cavendish. Lucilla tries to track down Cavendish. Lucilla tracks down Cavendish while he was on a walk with Barbara, stealing him from under her nose and dismissing her as less important than the matters that she had to discuss with him. Lucilla effectively tells Cavendish that she knows all about his past but that he must trust her to fix everything. Reluctantly, Cavendish attends the next Thursday get together, where Lucilla successfully manages the situation between the Archdeacon, Mrs. Mortimer, and Cavendish without the rest of Carlingford even knowing what happened. Lucilla's management renders the Archdeacon's accusations less salient. After the ordeal, the Archdeacon and Mrs. Mortimer realize their love for one another, and become engaged. Lucilla then pushes Cavendish to marry Barbara (since he will no longer quite occupy the high opinion that he had before) hoping to bring about two marriages, but instead, Cavendish goes off to the Continent, not to return for ten years. Barbara also leaves, to Rose's horror, to become a governess.

The narrative shifts to ten years later, the "second part" of Lucilla's "career." Lucilla sets up one Ashburton for M.P. of Carlingford after the death of Chiltern. Her strategy is to profess repeatedly that she didn't understand politics, but in doing so, effectively rendering political positions moot. Ashburton successfully runs on a platform of being a "good man" who would serve Carlingford's interest. During the election season, Cavendish suddenly returns, and gets mad at Lucilla for having turned the town against his candidacy. As all of this is happening, Aunt Jemima, Tom's mother and Dr. Marjoribanks's sister-in-law comes to town, and behind the scenes, has fantasies that Lucilla and Tom will eventually get together. All of these proceedings are interrupted by Dr. Marjoribanks's sudden death. Unfortunately, it turns out that he has squandered his money in bad investments and hasn't left Lucilla with much at all. Against the advice of all of her friends in Carlingford, Lucilla decides to stay at the house, instead of moving out where a single woman could better support herself. The election goes on, and at first it seems that Cavendish was gaining an advantage (having secured the Rector Bury's support by saying that he was a penitent). Cavendish lost some face because he had gone over to the Lakes's house when Barbara had returned, and was seen having spent some time on a Saturday evening with her. During this meeting, Cavendish feels tender towards her, because she, like him, had grown stout ("gone off") and she, unlike Lucilla, doesn't judge him for his changed appearance. Perhaps because of this episode, Ashburton ends up winning, and thinking himself victor in this area, he fancies winning Lucilla as well. Just as Ashburton is about to propose to her, Tom comes to town, and Lucilla decides to accept him (though in a sort of passive way--Tom asks her to choose "him or me," referring to Ashburton or himself, and Lucilla says simply that it is not to be Ashburton). Her passivity, however, is only for a moment: she tells Tom that he is to buy Marchbank, a more humble estate in a neighboring area, and that they are to move there. There, Lucilla might have something to do: namely, to work to make the lives of the poor people of the village better, and perhaps eventually to make Tom the M.P. of the county. In a word, Lucilla Marjoribanks needs things to do, and this is something that Tom would offer her and not Ashburton.  The narrative concludes with Lucilla scanning Marchbank before her: "[T]here rose up before her vision of a parish saved, a village reformed, a county reorganised, and a triumphant election at the end..."

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
The narrative voice of Miss Marjoribanks throughout adopts a position of ironic distance from Lucilla's manifold activities, rendering the tone of the work overall to be rather comic. Though the narrator is ostensibly a "biographer" or "historian" for Lucilla Marjoribanks, this narrator's claims to seriously admire Lucilla's equanimity and her "career" are clearly tongue-in-cheek. Even when the narrator explicitly defends Lucilla against potentially unjust feelings from the reader, it is tongue-in-cheek: in short, we aren't meant to take Lucilla's projects seriously and the ironic distance always make her seem self-important.

And yet, Miss Marjoribanks is also a clear critique of the constraints placed upon women by Victorian society. Lucilla is the portrait of a talented and smart woman who has no other outlet for her need to manage things and do things than the social politics of Carlingford. Because the social politics of Carlingford are so trivial, we are meant to laugh at Lucilla, but her pathetically comic situation is very much the fault of the society. For example, she doesn't have a vote, and isn't allowed to be interested in political issues, so all that is left to her is the comical (but successful!) management the election by setting up and helping Ashburton to win a popularity contest. In the end, she can't marry Ashburton, because if she did, she would have no outlet for her energies. Marrying Tom means that she can be the boss of him, and through him, she will be able to exert her organizational skills on the population at Marchbank.

Lucilla constantly counters feminine stereotypes throughout the novel. Lucilla's reactions to socially difficult or charged moments are always calmer than those of everyone else around her. Frequently, the narrative asserts this in a negative sort of way, for example, saying that the reader might expect Lucilla to be staying up all night thinking about awkward social situations, but that she in fact slept well. Lucilla has many "masculine" personality traits as well, not the least of which was "curiosity"--in moments where she might have a little bit of social anxiety, her curiosity ends up trumping anxiety and her decisions to meddle are more often than not a consequence of her intense curiosity.

Finally, it might be worth mentioning that even the less impressive women in Oliphant's narrative, like Barbara Lake, counter feminine stereotypes. Though horridly sentimental in her attachment to Cavendish, it turns out that she doesn't really care all that much for Cavendish at all, the narrative reveals. Indeed, Barbara's attachment to Cavendish comes out of her sense of rivalry with Lucilla: Barbara from the start resents Lucilla's "helping" her, and Lucilla's patronizing attitudes. The narrative gives: "For to tell the truth, if Miss Marjoribanks was not jealous, the victory was but half a victory after all." Barbara doesn't get that much satisfaction when Cavendish is interested in her if Lucilla wasn't jealous.

Sea Garden by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

BACKGROUND/CONTEXTS:
H.D. was born in 1886 in Pennsylvania, but moved to London in 1911, where she came to be associated with the Imagist movement* and fellow American poet Ezra Pound. H.D. became deeply involved with the English literary scene, marrying poet Richard Aldington, becoming the editor of the avant-garde Egoist magazine, and publishing in venues like the English Review. H.D. was open about her bisexuality, and thus she has been viewed as an important figure in the breaking down of gender constructions. Sea Garden was her first book of poems, published in 1916 during her tenure at the Egoist. 


*according to an influential 1913 essay on imagism by F.S. Flint, imagism seeks to directly treat a subject or object at a particular instant in time, seeks to be as concise as possible, and rejects traditional poetic meters in favor of more musical rhythms.

SUMMARY/THEMES/APPROACHES:
A Radical preference for the sea over the land:  The first three poems offer some of the strongest expressions of this. "Sea Rose" contrasts the "sea rose" with the "spice rose," radically redefining the image of what is beautiful as the "harsh" "marred" "meagre flower" (the sea rose). As with many of H.D.'s poems in this collection, the poet directly addresses something's being and forcefully asserts its existence: "Stunned, with small leaf, / you are flung on the sand, / you are lifted / in the crisp sand / that drive in the wind." "The Helmsman," narrated in first person plural, tells of the movement of people inland, but in the end, changes their movement out to the sea: "But now, our boat climbs--hesitates--drops--/climbs--hesitates--crawls back--/climbs--hesitates--/O be swift--/we have always known you wanted us." Finally, "The Shrine" dismantles the image of land as safe: "Nay, you are great, fierce, evil--/you are the land--blight--/you have tempted men but they perish on your cliffs." Celena Kusch offers a succinct reading for H.D.'s move towards imagery of the seas and the coasts over and above images of land: Sea Garden implicitly "rewrites the landscape, and by extension the culture, of the modern United States" which requires "transcending the US/Anglo-Europe dichotomy...Sea Garden's poetic representation of coasts and borders allows her to do just this." (Source: H.D.'s American Sea Garden: Drowning the Idyll Threat to US Modernism." Twentieth Century LIterature 56:1, 2010)

Freedom, movement, and violence: Relatedly, Sea Garden repeats that images of movement and violence are desirable, and that images of shelter often mean a kind of terrible stagnancy. "Sheltered Garden" gives one of the best examples; it begins with images of a "sheltered garden" in which "Every way ends, every road, / every foot-path leads a tlast / to the hill-crest--/then you retrace your steps." The poet bursts out, wishing for some movement, any movement: "O for some sharp swish of a branch--there is no scent of resin/in this place..." The poet complains that this kind of static beauty without movement is "beauty without strength." The call for a new kind of beauty "in some terrible / wind-tortured place" ends the final stanza, signaling that this kind of movement is accompanied by violence as well. "Loss" is addressed to someone who has drowned in the tide as opposed to his/her comrades, who were either dragged back to the marshes or swept under the cliff during some epic battle involving spears and lances. The "beloved" who was taken out to sea has "escaped," while the "heavy sea-mist stifles" the poet left behind. Again, the land proves a trap, and the sea, freedom. The "Huntress" surges with the energy and violence of movement, of a group sprinting quickly over the land: "We climbed the ploughed land, / dragged the seed from the clefts / broke the clods with our heels, / whirled with a parched cry / into the woods." The final stanza signals to the addressee of the poem that s/he must keep up at all costs: "Spring up--sway forward--/follow the quickest one, / aye, though you leave the trail / and drop exhausted at our feet." The "huntress" signals that this desirable violence isn't the directed masculine violence of battle, but it's own sort of indirect violence which comes of individuals breaking free or breaking loose. "The Garden" again imagines the violent wind as a desired force: "O wind, rend open the heat, / cut apart the heat, / rend it to tatters...Cut the heat--/plough through it, / turning it on either side of your path." In "Sea Gods," the poet remarks of the gods, "[t]hey say you are twisted by the sea, / you are cut apart / by wave-break upon wave-break / that you are misshapen by the sharp rocks, / broken by rasp and after-rasp." But, this violent destruction of their corporeality proves a boon in the third section of the poem, which affirmatively says what these sea gods will do, having been freed from their bodies: "For you will come, / you will yet haunt men in ships, / you will trail across the fringe of strait / and circle the jagged rocks...For you will come, / you will come, / you will answer our taut hearts, / you will break the lie of men's thoughts, / and cherish and shelter us." Having been broken themselves, the sea gods will then break men's taut (stubborn?) hearts and the lies (conventions?), thus enabling to them also a new kind of freedom.
---
Overall, H.D.'s imagistic formal innovations parallel the subject matter's concern with energy that breaks and frees as a radical expression of beauty. The form has broken free of traditional metric considerations, as well as linguistic fetters such as of high poetic diction, or twisted syntax. On the level of culture and nation, I agree with Celena Kutsch that H.D. channels the violence of broken boundaries that are so central to her images to suggest a radical vision for American literature which isn't insular, but bold and unafraid of transgressing the borders of both time and space. These traits--boldness, transgression, violent freedom--themselves become what is individual and American; paradoxically, she claims an identity that is simultaneously non-national and national.

The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner

Edition: The Story of an African Farm (World's Classics)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Olive Schreiner was born in South Africa in 1855. Her father was a German missionary, so she spent most of her early life abroad. Between the years of 1874-1881, Schreiner was making money as governess on various Cape farms, simultaneously writing so that when she decided to go to London in 1881, she already had almost 3 completed novel manuscripts. In London, Chapman Hall accepted The Story of an African Farm and published it in 1883. The work was published under the pseudonym Ralph Iron. The novel was in a large part Schreiner's ticket into London intellectual circles: there, she developed relationships with Eleanor Marx, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and Karl Pearson, among others. Schreiner's circle during this time inculcated her to scientific inquiry, and radical politics of movements like the New Woman movement.

SUMMARY:

Part I: 

The novel begins with episodes from the childhood of Waldo, the son of the widowed German owner of the farm. When all the others were asleep, Waldo anxiously listens to the ticking of the clock, imagining all those who die in the march of time. Terrified of God, the young child makes a sacrifice of his lamb chop to God, expecting Him to send the fire of heaven. Waldo is disappointed, of course, and this first chapter closes with his "confession": that he hates God (though still loves Jesus). Some years later in 1862 (the year of a drought), an Englishman named Bonaparte Blenkins stumbles onto the farm. Otto offers his hospitality, while the overweight Tant' Sannie loudly wines that she is afraid she'll be violated. Lyndall, the more intellectual companion of Em, Tant' Sannie's step-daughter, also doesn't trust Bonaparte. Bonaparte further takes Otto in, and manages later to win over Tant' Sannie as well. Otto hires Bonaparte as a schoolmaster to the children, and soon turns against Otto, twisting his words so that Tant' Sannie thought that Otto had been taking advantage of her). Otto is thrown out, but the night before he must leave, he dies peacefully in his sleep. Bonaparte becomes the overseer for the farm and behaves horribly to Waldo, crushing a model for a sheep-shearing machine that the boy had built, burning a book he had been reading (J.S. Mill's Political Economy), and whipping him. When Tant' Sannie was up in the loft rummaging through the old stockpiles of food belonging to Em's father (who had married her late in life in hopes to have Em provided for), her Hottentot servant takes away the ladder and she is trapped. Bonaparte, thinking her absent, courts Tant' Sannie's niece, Trana. Furious, Tant' Sannie throws him out, and Bonaparte is gone from their lives.

Part II:
Part II opens with a section called "Times and Seasons," which trace, in first-person-plural. the stages of life and belief. Though speculative, the passage yet strongly suggests that these stages are universally applicable. The following chapter tells about a stranger that comes to the farm (a French gentleman) who gets into a lengthy conversation with Waldo. Looking at Waldo's carving, the stranger relates to Waldo a full allegory of life experience and belief, leaving Waldo starry-eyed. The allegory is of a hunter who catches some beautiful birds, but he finds that these birds are beautiful lies to live by--including, pointedly, the bird called Immortality. The hunter gives up these birds, and then follows an arduous path to truth-seeking, climbing a seemingly endless mountain. Worn out, the hunter dies, dreaming that although he has forsaken everyone below, he has perhaps pioneered the way for future generations. As he dies, he receives one feather from the land of truth. After telling this allegory, the stranger leaves Waldo with a book (Schreiner told Havelock Ellis this book was Spencer's First Principles). At this stage we are introduced to Gregory Rose, who has been hired to help manage the farm. Gregory falls in love with Em, offering her an overly emotional proposal, which she dutifully accepts. Lyndall, in the meantime, has gone off to school, but comes for a return visit. She seems changed, impatient with Em's notions of marriage, and also gives Waldo a long speech on the position of women in society, espousing familiarly J.S. Millian concepts. She critiques the narrow scope of women's education, reveals the unfortunate effect of petty, domestic tyrannies which frustrated women enact over their spouses, and asserts that better love/marriage is possible when the partners are equal. As this is all happening, Tant' Sannie manages to engage herself to a 19-year-old. Gregory writes a letter to his sister betraying his interest in Lyndall even as he complains about her unladylike, improper tendencies. Em decides to break off her engagement to Gregory, having a sense of his attraction to Lyndall. Waldo leaves to travel out in the world, to the diamond fields. Meanwhile, Gregory hunts down Lyndall and he's clearly out of his depth, intellectually. Lyndall says, however, that she would marry him if he were willing to take her name. In the next chapter, Lyndall meets secretly with a lover who has come to the farm who also pleads with her to marry him. She refuses to marry him because, she says, he will try to master her and that though she loves him, she cannot accept that this what he desires. She does agree, however, to go away with him as long as they don't marry. Meanwhile, Gregory discovers some old clothes from Em's mother and has the strange idea of putting her mother's clothes on--the significance of this is revealed later, when Lyndall's going away with her lover doesn't work out. It turns out that she has fallen very ill after the death of her newborn. Gregory finds her, dresses up as a female nurse, and takes care of her until her death. This is all revealed to Waldo too late; on his return from the diamond fields he has composed a long letter telling Lyndall of his trying times working as a clerk, a transport rider, and finally box carrier/mover. The novel ends with Waldo's death; sitting in the sunshine, unaware and peaceful.    

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:

In a Preface to a later edition, Olive Schreiner makes explicit that she is working against a more traditional form of the novel. She writes: "Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method" in which "we know with an immutable certainty that at the right crises each one will reappear and act his part..." and there is "another method--the method of the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes the man who would fit in does not return. When the curtain falls no one is ready." Indeed, her novel feels like the latter description--characters like Bonaparte stumble out of the narrative never to return, even the most central characters (Lyndall, and Waldo) disappear from the middle of the narrative making way for surprising new characters like Gregory Rose. And, as Joseph Bristow notes in his introduction to the work, there is a "marked imbalance of justice" in that "[t]he characters with the greatest moral strengths are the ones who enjoy the least material gain."

Schreiner's formal experimentation goes further, with the dream like first-person plural account in "Time and Seasons," with the embedded letters of Gregory and Waldo, with Lyndall's polemical speeches, and with the stranger's allegory. Each of these passages might stand apart independently from the novel and cohere, yet they hang together much in the same way that life hangs together: we select and collate arbitrarily amongst the experiences and circumstances that we know about.

What might Schreiner's departures from convention reveal as far as the content of her beliefs in this novel? As Bristow and also Schreiner's own contemporaries note, her work seemed not only to register but push forward important political and cultural changes that would come to a head during the Victorian fin de siecle. Lyndall prefigures the "New Woman" movement, which espoused the values of a free union (not marriage), and freedom from stilting conventions of female education. Waldo, having successively rejected the various frames of thoughts available on earth, dreams of a greater understanding premised on a growing agnoticism (more generalizable to the late Victorian era as a whole, with the rise of Darwinism, and also Higher Criticism) which acknowledges the limits of human understanding. In consideration of the Spencerian social Darwinism which informs Schreiner's work, it seems the likes of Lyndall and Waldo (sort of like Hallam in In Memoriam, too) are so "new" in their radical dreams that the world isn't quite ready for them yet.   

Poetry Selections from Thomas Hardy

Edition: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)

BACKGROUND/CONTEXTS:
Hardy's poems, since the author was famous primarily for his novels, have faced a rather unforgiving critical history. Both Hardy's contemporaries and more recent critics have disparaged Hardy's craft as well as his subjects. A recurring claim was that Hardy's poetry was gloomy and pessimistic: Lytton Strachey said, "the gloom is not even relieved by a little elegance of diction." Still, as poet Robert Mezey in his introduction to the Penguin edition of selected poems has pointed out, Hardy remains a favorite amongst a number of important poets including Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, and Philip Larkin. Hardy's biography bears out poetry's personal importance to him--though he eventually became successful as a result of his fiction, he had tried first to market his poetry.

SUMMARY/THEMES:
I have chosen to divide Hardy's poems thematically and not by collections to indicate some of the larger patterns/occupations that I noticed across all of his work.
Human materiality and natural landscape: Hardy's poems frequently explore the continuity between human bodies and nature, especially through imagining what happens after death. "Drummer Hodge" will forever be part of an "unknown plain" and will "Grow to some Southern tree." In a sonnet written to Leslie Stephen, "The Schreckhorn," Hardy links Stephens's personality to the mountain he climbed - they're kind of  fused, both physically in Hardy's imagination and in their both being "aloof" in their personalities: "Upon my nearing vision, less it seems / A looming Alp-height than a guise of him / Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb, / Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe, / Of semblance to his personality / In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim." In "Rain on a Grave" Hardy imagines that daisies will be showing on Emma's grave soon, and that she will "form part of them--/Ay--the sweet heart of them." Finally, one of the most explicit examples of people growing into natural landscapes is "Transformations": "Portions of this yew / Is a man my grandsire knew, / Bosomed here at its foot: / This branch may be his wife." Despite Hardy's doubts about consciousness after death, the dead rarely stay completely underground in his poetry.
Ghosts, afterlives, and traces: Many of Hardy's poems imagine ghosts, obsess over afterlives--especially in imagining events that have taken place in some now changed or deserted place, and look for traces after people have departed the scenes of life. "Friends Beyond" imagines friends who have died speaking their freedom in death, expressing that they were now free from the desires and concerns which detained them in life. Each goes over some possession or circumstance in life which no longer matters to them, and all end by saying together, "We've no wish to hear the tidings, how the people's / fortunes shift..." "After the Last Breath" is a moving memorial to his mother, Jemima Hardy, which expresses a similar sentiment (though rather unexpectedly because of the enjambment): "Our well-beloved is prisoner in the cell / Of Time no more." The "cell" turns out not to be her coffin, but Time. In "His Immortality" the poet sees "a dead man's finer part, / Shining within each faithful heart / Of those bereft." At first he thinks these memories that remain on earth are immortality, but then as time passes, he notices that this "immortality" shrinks, and eventually, it may merely be "a feeble spark / Dying amid the dark." This poem's view of memory tends to be more pessimistic than others; usually, memory in Hardy's poems is charged with a kind of mystical and magical power akin to Wordsworthian "spots of time." "The House of Hospitalities," for example, describes the house where they spent many Christmases, and the memory remaining: "I see forms of old time talking, / Who smile on me." "Old Furniture" operates similarly, in which the poet describes how relics seem to bear the traces of "the hands of the generations" through his imaginings: "On the clock's dull dial a foggy finger, / Moving to set the minutes right / With tentative touches that lift and linger / In the wont of a moth on a summer night, / Creeps to my sight." At the end of this poem, however, is a rejection of this kind of reminiscing in modern-day life, though coming after the lyrical excess given to memory, this seems unconvincing. "Logs on the Hearth" sweetly imagines the tree which the log comes from and how he and his sister used to climb it. "The Shadow on the Stone" offers an interesting solution to the problem of belief: the poet imagines on a Druid stone a shadow of a "well-known head and shoulders" and instead of doubting or believing, he charts a middle course in deliberately deciding not to turn around (because if he does so, he knows it won't be there): "Nay I'll not unvision / A shape which, somehow, there may be." **Hardy's 1912-1913 Elegies to Emma deserve special mention. "The Going" and "Without Ceremony" focus on how quickly she has gone from him, something that Hardy finds very difficult to come to terms with. "The Haunter" imagines her ghostly consciousness, she would speak to him with love if she could, but is "Always lacking the power to call to him / Near as I reach thereto!" In "After a Journey" the poet follows her ghost to their old haunts, "I see what you are doing: you are leading me on / To the spots we knew when we haunted here together." "The Walk" signals his guilt of how he used to go on a particular walk alone, "and I did not mind / Not thinking of you as left behind" but that now he very much minded. 
Consciousness: Related to Hardy's obsession with ghosts, afterlives, and traces is his fascination with what happens to consciousness after death. Does consciousness of their still-living loved ones matter if the dead are no longer conscious? Hardy's poem seem to go back and forth on this. "Lament" imagines all of the parties, dinners, that Emma would have loved, "But / She is shut, she is shut / From the cheer of them, dead / To all done and said / In her yew-arched bed." "The Photograph" gives a more open answer, when pondering whether the subject of a burning photograph, either dead or alive, would feel the burning: "Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive, / And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead; Yet--yet--if on earth alive, / Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive? / If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head?" In "Choirmaster's Burial," a Choirmaster asked that "Mount Ephraim" be sung at his memorial. The vicar says that they need a quicker service because of the weather, "But 'twas said that, when / At the dead of next night / The vicar looked out, / There struck on his ken / Thronged roundabout" saints singing the psalm by the choirmaster's grave. This last poem exemplifies Hardy's frequent harking back to folkloric, village settings as locales for spiritual connection and the possibility of consciousnesses beyond earthly, human consciousness.
Secret lives of things (objects, animals): Again, relatedly, Hardy seems obsessed with the otherness (and more specifically, the potential other-consciousness) of things--objects, particularly in nature, and animals, frequently. "Nature's Questioning" imagines "field, flock, and lonely tree" thinking human thoughts, wondering at their place in an industrializing landscape; in a reversal of what usually happens, where nature doesn't answer the poet, the poet says, "No answerer I." This is, however, a fantastic projection from the mind of the poet, and poems like "An August Midnight," which imagines a longlegs, a moth, a dumbledore, and a fly in the room where he writes, concludes with wonder at the inaccessible lives of these seemingly humble creatures: "They know Earth-secrets that know not I." "The Last Chrysanthemum" dramatizes the poet's curiosity as to why this flower continues budding soon after the rest have folded, ascribing to it person-like traits like reason, taking no heed, and loneliness. At the end he realizes this as folly: "I talk as if the thing were born / With sense to work its mind; / Yet it is but one mask of many worn / By the Great Face behind." The same notion is expressed in "The Darkling Thrush" who had sung out against frosty gloom "Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware." Despite the gap between human knowing and other-knowing, the fascination remains, and itself becomes the subject of many of Hardy's poems. In "The Convergence of the Twain," the poet imagines the iceberg as a "sinister mate" for Titanic, linking them in some mystical realm that isn't accessible to human knowledge: "And as the smart ship grew / In stature, grace, and hue, / In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too." Often, the poet imagines nature in an outright rejection of the human world. In "Ah Are You Digging on My Grave" the dog isn't thinking of being faithful to his mistress when he digs on her grave but has merely happened to bury a bone there. "To the Moon" is a poet's imagined interview with the moon, asking questions like: "What have you looked at, Moon, / In your time, / Now long past your prime?" The final reply of moon is kind of rude, in regards to human life: "O, I think of it, often think of it / As a show / God ought surely to shut up soon, / As I go." Indeed, "things" are sometimes downright sinister-seeming (though still fascinating), as in "Near Lanivet, 1872," in which the poet and Emma share a haunting vision of her being crucified as she leaned against a handpole. Though the "secret lives of things" remains inaccessible to the poet, very rarely does Hardy express that the secret lives simply do not exist. A possible exception is "My Father's Violin" in which the poet tells of how the violin's glory days are over and that it is nothing without its human player: "here alone I sadly con / Your present dumbness, shape your olden story."
Time and aging: The ravages of time are a subject of repeated anxiety for Hardy. In "I Look into My Glass," the poet's expresses his inability to reconcile this physical aging with the continuing fullness of his heart. Aging is particularly problematic in marriages for Hardy. In "In the Night She Came," the male speaker tells of his fault in breaking his vow to his older wife when he recoiled at her aging face as she came to him in the night. He tries to make amends but fails: "And when next day I paid / My due caress, we seemed to be / Divided by some shade." Memory might help against the ravages of time, as suggested in "Former Beauties" which talks about "market dames, mid-aged, with lips thin-drawn / And tissues sere," whom the poets conclude would still be beautiful if they themselves had not forgotten that they had been former beauties: "They cannot know / What once they were, / Or memory would transfigure them, and show / Them always fair." Memory helps Hardy's mother in "Church Romance," in which he describes how in "long years thence, when Age had scared Romance" she would recall "[a]t some old attitude of his or glance / That gallery-scene would break upon her mind."
The futility of war: Hardy's engagement with the subject of war is almost always to critique its warping of human values. "Souls of the Slain" imagines those dead from war returning to ask if their loved ones dwell on their heroic deeds; instead, they learn the lesson that "it seems that our glory / Weighs less in their thought / Than our old homely acts, / And the long-ago commonplace facts / Of our lives." In "The Man He Killed," the speaker describes how if he had met his enemy "[b]y some old ancient inn" they would have stopped to drink together. But the theater of war warps things in such a way that he must kill the man. "Channel Firing" is an eery description of ghosts rising out of the thinking that World War I was judgment day.
Social conduct, women, and marriage: Writing at the end of the Victorian era, Hardy's views on social conduct, women, and marriage often express discontent with conventions. His many poems on the subject (and Tess, of course) testify to his antagonism to conventions. In "The Ruined Maid," the speaker meets a formerly poor maid and berates her for her ascent to wealth and not attending to her former peers. In response, she keeps replying that she is "ruined" by her wealth but the speaker doesn't listen, he associates "ruin" only with poverty-stricken women. In "After the Club-Dance," a young woman leaving the dance asks herself, "Why do I sink with shame/ When the birds a-perch there eye me? / They, too, have done the same," a logic (conventions are unnatural) which Tess herself frequently returns to. Hardy ventriloquizes oppressive male voices as well, but in doing so revealing their oppressiveness and wrong: "The Homecoming" is a chilling account of man in dialogue with new young wife, who would like to go back to her "daddee" because he could have provided better for her. In this dialogue, nature (violent and windy) interrupts intermittently in italicized text while the woman is spoken to patronizingly and pretty much forced into the marriage: "So don't ye tap your shoe so pettish-like; but smile at me, / And ye'll soon forget to sock and sigh for dear daddee!" "One Ralph Blossom Soliloquizes" is a dramatic monologue which reveals a caddish man who gives an account of most of his women basically saying they wanted him (that they want him even in heaven while he's in hell).
Folkloric, lighter poems: The poems I have thus discussed above are fairly serious in tone and tenor. There are, however, in Hardy's repertoire a number of lighter poems. "The Respectable Burgher" playfully satirizes Higher Criticism's erudite rejections and also the bourgeois speaker who reads "that moderate man Voltaire" (the reader knows, Voltaire was no moderate). Many of Hardy's lighter poems are in folkloric modes. In "The Trampwoman's Tragedy," in a ballad-like song, the "trampwoman" tells of how she teases her lover, of how he kills his competition, and her remorse: "From Wynard's Gap the livelong day, / The livelong day, / We beat afoot the northward way / We had travelled times before." Other poems in this category rival Chaucerian bawdiness: for example, note these lines from "Timing Her," apparently referring to a fifteen-year-old daughter of a curator in Dorset: "Lalage's coming: / Where is she now, O? / Turning to bow, O, / And smile, is she, / Just at parting, / Parting, parting, / As she is starting / To come to me?"