Apple or Pear tree in Calderstones Park, looking ‘lazy with neglected plenty’
I’m continuing my reading of Silas Marner today. You’ll find a full text here. Search previous posts looking for the tag ‘Silas Marner’.
What’s happened so far (in under thirty words): Silas – a hand-loom weaver – has been unfairly accused and cast out by his city community, now lives in country village Raveloe, where he is an object of suspicion.
Chapter Two
Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas– where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished.
I think one of the reasons many people find George Eliot hard to read is that there isn’t much padding, every sentence is generally doing something important. You have to keep concentrating. It’s like highwire walking – every step is important and you must keep your confidence up. Here at the opening of Chapter Two the first sentence asks us to do a lot of imagining. I’m going to take it slowly, bit by bit.
‘Even people whose lives have been made various by learning…’ In Chapter One I had noticed that education was a key part of the thinking about how human minds work, why sometimes people seek magical or superstitious explanations and what a hard thin life does to the imagination. Now comes this sentence which seems to pick up that thought and continue a conversation the author has been having. Beginning the sentence with ‘even’ places it in full flow, as it were, as if responding to something that has already been said. What is that which is already understood? It is that Silas – while full of feeling and with a gift for herbal medicine – has no formal learning, doesn’t know anything beyond his own experience, can’t think widely, is narrow. People ‘whose lives have been made various by learning’ have expanded their horizons and their imagining selves. But even such people
sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land
I thought immediately of refugees, because of our current world problem, because of ‘suddenly transported to a new land’. I also thought of what George Eliot would have been imagining as she wrote those words. Of course, there were refugees in 1860 (and her great last novel, Daniel Deronda, is about European Jewish settlers in London and the founding of the Jewish state.) I thought more personally of Marian Evans ( as the author was called in her non-writing life) falling in love with a married man, and deciding to throw everything over in living with him, and escaping to the Continent in order to avoid gossip and opprobrium. She was cast out by a wider society and by her own family. suddenly, after days of hectic couch travel you are in Switerzerland, and no longer have anything or anyone you previously knew. A person finding themselves in that position, might well find it ‘hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience.’ Of course, for arian, there was even so, the joy of loving and being loved by her life partner, George Henry Lewes.
The implied comparison is coming. If an educated person, with lots of experience to draw on, can feel so badly dislocated, how much harder must it be for Silas?
And what could be more unlike that Lantern Yard world than the world in Raveloe?–orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; the large church in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging at their own doors in service-time; the purple-faced farmers jogging along the lanes or turning in at the Rainbow; homesteads, where men supped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth, and where women seemed to be laying up a stock of linen for the life to come.
Raveloe is another world compared to the hard northern town from Silas has had to escape. It seems another time, earlier, pastoral, pre-industrial revolution, almost in the paradisal golden age. There is ‘church’ here, but like everything else it seems pretty laid-back (men lounge at their doors rather than go there), an there’s plenty of eating and drinking, and a profound love of linen! and then this demanding sentence:
There were no lips in Raveloe from which a word could fall that would stir Silas Marner’s benumbed faith to a sense of pain.
No one here believes as he believed? No one here is a person whose speech can affect him? He is cut off from his past, from the people who made his world and his faith real. He is not feeling anything. He’s gone into something like a state of suspended animation.
I’m drawing on my own experience for imagination here. I remember when I lost faith with the feminist commune I lived in during my early twenties. That losing of faith seemed a massive jarring wrench from one kind of life and set of beliefs to another. It had been – or my involvement in it had been – sect-like. Then I changed my mind. If I was in my new world, it didn’t jar or hurt but if I met one of my erstwhile sisters on the street, or saw her approaching in the supermarket, then great pain, agitation, sense of the brokenness. Of course you don’t want that painful ripped apart feeling. I avoided seeing those women for a very long time. In Raveloe, Silas doesn’t have to remember, doesn’t have to think doesn’t have to feel.
I am also remembering the Gillian Clarke poem ‘Miracle on St David’s Day’ which I wrote about here.
a woman
sits not listening, not seeing, not feeling.
In her neat clothes, the woman is absent
This is Silas. He has mechanical work to do, inside the safe space of his loom. Nothing reminds him of the past. And why would you want the numbness to wear off? Why not go on, numb to pain? The people here don’t seem to need God in the same way the town people did, their country lives are more generously filled, ‘orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty’. And the women’s desire for stocks of linen means that Silas can stay at his loom for ever if he wants.
I’m thinking back yesterday to The Winter’s Tale, and Hermione in a similar state of suspended animation. A human who has entered such a state of lock-down perhaps needs an external power to break it open, because if you’ve closed down because of great pain, and close down is mechanism that saves you feeling great hurt, how would you ever get out of it by yourself?
I think if I had to decide one big question for my life it would be: ‘how do people change?’ What needs to happen to bring change about? All this lies ahead.
A family of Beech trees in Calderstones Park 10 May
Not reading Silas Marner today – you’ll find all Silas postings if you search under the tag ‘Silas Marner’. But today, it’s about telly, then a bit of Shakespeare.
Came home and had my tea in the back garden, the day still warm and sunny, did a little pottering, admired my new plant ( Paeonia, Bowl of Beauty – photos to come) . Had to make a few phone calls. Lay on sofa talking to my old mum. Went to find husband watching TV. Some programme about the Royals was just starting. Watched for a few moments out of sheer nosy interest (I go to bed early – sometimes at 8.30pm) and was surprised to find myself thinking the music was rather good, not what I would have predicted for a TV mini series. But it wasn’t a TV mini series – it was play. It was a play ! On telly! This was like living in 1967 when people still thought you could put culture on the box. And even more weirdly, it was a play written in iambic pentameter.
Don’t swipe away! That meter’s good for stuff! (That’s an iambic-ish pentameter)
If you didn’t catch King Charles III, written by Mike Bartlett, on BBC 2 last night, I recommend it. Inventive, moving, well-pitched, and with lively intelligence at play all the way through, it kept me up until 10.30pm, and not much does that. Iambic pentameter! Fancy that, though. It made the play seem related to Shakespeare, and there were echoes of Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, but it wasn’t pastiche. It was something new, its self, made of bits of old stuff and bits of modern stuff. It was creative and witty. There was a great (iambic) line from Kate to the Duchess of Cornwall (sorry I can’t remember it) about the need for ‘column inches’ but there was also another that drew on Lear’s ‘nothing comes of nothing…’ There were also echoes of ‘say this was a mini series’ and echoes of ‘say you were reading this in the Daily Mail’ which made the play feel incredibly up to date. Lots to think about. I might even watch it again.
But mainly it made me think about blank verse, which is verse without rhyme and verse often (usually?) written the meter known as iambic pentameter. I love it! I’ve been wanting to read a little Shakespeare, so that is today’s poem for the day. It’s a little portion from the end of The Winter’s Tale. Perhaps a little connected to Silas Marner, in that Queen Hermione, falsely accused by her husband of infidelity and treason, and who has lost two children to her husband’s rage, has been ‘gone’ (presumed dead) for sixteen years. As we join the court at the culmination of the play, a great reunion is about to happen, Hermione is not dead but has been absent, turned to stone (lots of ways you might understand it: e.g. in a state of psychotic splitting, severely depressed, so deeply traumatised as to be locked in, etc.) Paulina, her friend, a great lady of the court, is about to bring her back to life and her daughter, Perdita, also presumed dead, is found. Here Paulina calls on Perdita to come forward and help bring her mother back to life:
PAULINA
That she is living,
Were it but told you, should be hooted at
Like an old tale: but it appears she lives,
Though yet she speak not. Mark a little while.
Please you to interpose, fair madam: kneel
And pray your mother’s blessing. Turn, good lady;
Our Perdita is found.
HERMIONE
You gods, look down
And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon my daughter’s head! Tell me, mine own.
Where hast thou been preserved? where lived? how found
Thy father’s court? for thou shalt hear that I,
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserved
Myself to see the issue.
The great iamb, the two syllable sound pattern that underlies our normal English speech (say te-tum and you are sounding out an iamb, short unstressed syllable followed by longer stressed syllable) is set in groups of five to make the classic line-rythym of blank verse (te-tum, te-tum, te-tum, te-tum, te-tum).
Where hast/ thou been/ preserved?/ where lived?/ how found
Why does this matter, I can hear someone shouting, for goodness sake, Jane, I thought you were against formal teaching of English Lit?
I am against bad teaching. I’m against things being turned into dead stuff! But I’m for good teaching! And I love playing with iambs! If someone had playfully taught me about these at school I might have liked it.
Reading literature is partly a process of noticing a lot of tiny things. You have to notice as much as you can. there’s an awful lot to notice and most of it goes by us. Noticing a lot of tiny things and caring about them must go into good practice of anything – cooking, gardening, sub-atomic physics, accounting, dog-training.
The meter of a poem is one of the things you can train yourself to notice. Noticing this kind of stuff began to matter to me early on in my life as a teacher because it does something in the poetry. I thought that last night while watching King Charles III. Now what does it do?
It formalises ordinary speech into general patterns, which means you can play with rhythms, with emphasis. Look at this
Please you to interpose, fair madam: kneel
And pray your mother’s blessing. Turn, good lady;
Our Perdita is found.
Paulina is talking to the lost, now found child, Perdita. Hermione is standing like a statue frozen in her sixteen year loss. The iamb (te-tum) is like a gentle, rhythmic heartbeat under the lines. Read the lines aloud very slowly. Feel the rhythms. Shakespeare can leave a word like ‘kneel’ pulling against the rhythm at the end of the that line because it is a single syllable word in a two-based pattern, so we get different rhythms playing over each other. These rhythms affect the meaning, add to the emotional charge: speak it, th command ‘kneel’: you have to wait there despite the fact that the sense rushes on. And here’s another, where (I think) the underlying rhythm changes a little, a slight variation. Though this line has ten syllables and therefore might be an iambic pentameter, the stresses fall in other places. (There are other names for other types of stressed and unstressed syllables but I have no time for that today, look here).
As when tones or keys change or resolve in music, our mind is looking out for the pattern and the change of pattern alerts us to something or moves us in some way. The stresses are on the first parts of mothers and blessing and the last three words are all stressed; ‘Turn, good lady.’ Perhaps ‘good’ is slightly less stressed ( you have to keep saying, reading the words, to feel it), so that the big message is ‘turn lady’.
Rose and Clematis almost overpowering a support at Calderstones 8 May
Continuing my slow read of Silas Marner …we’re in Chapter 1. If you want to join this Shared Reading from the beginning search for the tag ‘Silas Marner’. You’ll find an online version here. We pick up at this point, where George Eliot is explaining Silas’ back story:
Among the members of his church there was one young man, a little
older than himself, with whom he had long lived in such close
friendship that it was the custom of their Lantern Yard brethren to
call them David and Jonathan. The real name of the friend was
William Dane, and he, too, was regarded as a shining instance of
youthful piety, though somewhat given to over-severity towards
weaker brethren, and to be so dazzled by his own light as to hold
himself wiser than his teachers. But whatever blemishes others
might discern in William, to his friend’s mind he was faultless; for
Marner had one of those impressible self-doubting natures which, at
an inexperienced age, admire imperativeness and lean on
contradiction. The expression of trusting simplicity in Marner’s
face, heightened by that absence of special observation, that
defenceless, deer-like gaze which belongs to large prominent eyes,
was strongly contrasted by the self-complacent suppression of inward
triumph that lurked in the narrow slanting eyes and compressed lips
of William Dane. One of the most frequent topics of conversation
between the two friends was Assurance of salvation: Silas confessed
that he could never arrive at anything higher than hope mingled with
fear, and listened with longing wonder when William declared that he
had possessed unshaken assurance ever since, in the period of his
conversion, he had dreamed that he saw the words “calling and
election sure” standing by themselves on a white page in the open
Bible. Such colloquies have occupied many a pair of pale-faced
weavers, whose unnurtured souls have been like young winged things,
fluttering forsaken in the twilight.
Two members of an extreme sect, uneducated but committed to their faith, one more extreme in his views than the other, certain of his place in paradise because of his dream, and his belief in that dream. Silas essentially a ‘self-doubting’ man, William ‘self-complacent’. I feel worried! There’s something particularly worrying about this relationship being mixed up in the sectarian belief, as if emotions from different parts/modes/arenas of life are bleeding into one another. I read on. The next paragraph is a very long one, so I am going to break up into chunks:
It had seemed to the unsuspecting Silas that the friendship had
suffered no chill even from his formation of another attachment of a
closer kind. For some months he had been engaged to a young
servant-woman, waiting only for a little increase to their mutual
savings in order to their marriage; and it was a great delight to
him that Sarah did not object to William’s occasional presence in
their Sunday interviews.
Of course I am nervous because of the opening words – Silas is ‘unsuspecting’ – but of what? That his friendship had suffered ‘no chill’ despite him forming a greater attachment. If William Dane is secretly made cold to Silas because Silas has a lover then a serious problem is brewing, and it is:
It was at this point in their history that
Silas’s cataleptic fit occurred during the prayer-meeting; and
amidst the various queries and expressions of interest addressed to
him by his fellow-members, William’s suggestion alone jarred with
the general sympathy towards a brother thus singled out for special
dealings. He observed that, to him, this trance looked more like a
visitation of Satan than a proof of divine favour, and exhorted his
friend to see that he hid no accursed thing within his soul. Silas,
feeling bound to accept rebuke and admonition as a brotherly office,
felt no resentment, but only pain, at his friend’s doubts concerning
him; and to this was soon added some anxiety at the perception that
Sarah’s manner towards him began to exhibit a strange fluctuation
between an effort at an increased manifestation of regard and
involuntary signs of shrinking and dislike. He asked her if she
wished to break off their engagement; but she denied this: their
engagement was known to the church, and had been recognized in the
prayer-meetings; it could not be broken off without strict
investigation, and Sarah could render no reason that would be
sanctioned by the feeling of the community.
William, who is ‘self-complacent’ is the only member of the sect who believes Silas’ trance the work of the devil. This has got to be connected to the threat to their friendship from Silas’s engagement. but this isn’t just about loss of friendship. It’s about William, who had previously been the recipient of ‘divine favour’ in the vision of the Bible, being shifted from the centre of attention – Silas’ attention, or the community’s attention.
At this time the senior
deacon was taken dangerously ill, and, being a childless widower, he
was tended night and day by some of the younger brethren or sisters.
Silas frequently took his turn in the night-watching with William,
the one relieving the other at two in the morning. The old man,
contrary to expectation, seemed to be on the way to recovery, when
one night Silas, sitting up by his bedside, observed that his usual
audible breathing had ceased. The candle was burning low, and he
had to lift it to see the patient’s face distinctly. Examination
convinced him that the deacon was dead–had been dead some time,
for the limbs were rigid. Silas asked himself if he had been
asleep, and looked at the clock: it was already four in the morning.
How was it that William had not come? In much anxiety he went to
seek for help, and soon there were several friends assembled in the
house, the minister among them, while Silas went away to his work,
wishing he could have met William to know the reason of his
non-appearance. But at six o’clock, as he was thinking of going to
seek his friend, William came, and with him the minister. They came
to summon him to Lantern Yard, to meet the church members there; and
to his inquiry concerning the cause of the summons the only reply
was, “You will hear.” Nothing further was said until Silas was
seated in the vestry, in front of the minister, with the eyes of
those who to him represented God’s people fixed solemnly upon him.
Then the minister, taking out a pocket-knife, showed it to Silas,
and asked him if he knew where he had left that knife? Silas said,
he did not know that he had left it anywhere out of his own pocket–
but he was trembling at this strange interrogation. He was then
exhorted not to hide his sin, but to confess and repent. The knife
had been found in the bureau by the departed deacon’s bedside–
found in the place where the little bag of church money had lain,
which the minister himself had seen the day before. Some hand had
removed that bag; and whose hand could it be, if not that of the man
to whom the knife belonged? For some time Silas was mute with
astonishment: then he said, “God will clear me: I know nothing
about the knife being there, or the money being gone. Search me and
my dwelling; you will find nothing but three pound five of my own
savings, which William Dane knows I have had these six months.” At
this William groaned, but the minister said, “The proof is heavy
against you, brother Marner. The money was taken in the night last
past, and no man was with our departed brother but you, for William
Dane declares to us that he was hindered by sudden sickness from
going to take his place as usual, and you yourself said that he had
not come; and, moreover, you neglected the dead body.”
I’m reading the story fast here, noticing as much as I can, but this mainly plot, and easy to follow, so I am speeding up.
“I must have slept,” said Silas. Then, after a pause, he added,
“Or I must have had another visitation like that which you have all
seen me under, so that the thief must have come and gone while I was
not in the body, but out of the body. But, I say again, search me
and my dwelling, for I have been nowhere else.”
The search was made, and it ended–in William Dane’s finding the
well-known bag, empty, tucked behind the chest of drawers in Silas’s
chamber! On this William exhorted his friend to confess, and not to
hide his sin any longer. Silas turned a look of keen reproach on
him, and said, “William, for nine years that we have gone in and
out together, have you ever known me tell a lie? But God will clear
me.”
“Brother,” said William, “how do I know what you may have done in
the secret chambers of your heart, to give Satan an advantage over
you?”
Silas was still looking at his friend. Suddenly a deep flush came
over his face, and he was about to speak impetuously, when he seemed
checked again by some inward shock, that sent the flush back and
made him tremble. But at last he spoke feebly, looking at William.
“I remember now–the knife wasn’t in my pocket.”
William said, “I know nothing of what you mean.” The other
persons present, however, began to inquire where Silas meant to say
that the knife was, but he would give no further explanation: he
only said, “I am sore stricken; I can say nothing. God will clear
me.”
On their return to the vestry there was further deliberation. Any
resort to legal measures for ascertaining the culprit was contrary
to the principles of the church in Lantern Yard, according to which
prosecution was forbidden to Christians, even had the case held less
scandal to the community. But the members were bound to take other
measures for finding out the truth, and they resolved on praying and
drawing lots. This resolution can be a ground of surprise only to
those who are unacquainted with that obscure religious life which
has gone on in the alleys of our towns. Silas knelt with his
brethren, relying on his own innocence being certified by immediate
divine interference, but feeling that there was sorrow and mourning
behind for him even then–that his trust in man had been cruelly
bruised. _The lots declared that Silas Marner was guilty._ He was
solemnly suspended from church-membership, and called upon to render
up the stolen money: only on confession, as the sign of repentance,
could he be received once more within the folds of the church.
Marner listened in silence. At last, when everyone rose to depart,
he went towards William Dane and said, in a voice shaken by agitation–
“The last time I remember using my knife, was when I took it out to
cut a strap for you. I don’t remember putting it in my pocket
again. _You_ stole the money, and you have woven a plot to lay the
sin at my door. But you may prosper, for all that: there is no just
God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that
bears witness against the innocent.”
There was a general shudder at this blasphemy.
William said meekly, “I leave our brethren to judge whether this is
the voice of Satan or not. I can do nothing but pray for you, Silas.”
Poor Marner went out with that despair in his soul–that shaken
trust in God and man, which is little short of madness to a loving
nature. In the bitterness of his wounded spirit, he said to
himself, “_She_ will cast me off too.” And he reflected that, if
she did not believe the testimony against him, her whole faith must
be upset as his was. To people accustomed to reason about the forms
in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is
difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which
the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of
reflection. We are apt to think it inevitable that a man in
Marner’s position should have begun to question the validity of an
appeal to the divine judgment by drawing lots; but to him this would
have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never
known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his
energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith. If
there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their
sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from
false ideas for which no man is culpable.
Poor Silas! And how serious it is , ‘little short of madness’. I said yesterday that I was going to make myself concentrate on the most difficult sentences – and there is one in the section above that needs some time:
To people accustomed to reason about the forms
in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is
difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which
the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of
reflection.
We, George Eliot’s readers, are assumed to be people ‘accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself’.
If I was reading this a room with an actual group of people, I’d definitely be stopping here to open a conversation about what part reason plays in our religious feeling – whether that be absolute atheism or devout religious belief. Whatever our state of belief, it is likely that most of us have thought about it. But Silas and other members of the Lantern Yard sect have not applied rational thought to their beliefs. They live in a ‘simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection’. Can we, as modern, educated people, imagine that?
Where would such an act of reflection even begin? It is hard enough to think outside of your normal box when you know there are boxes. But in Silas’s world, there is only the belief of the Lantern Yard church. If you go outside – what will there be? Nothing. Yet something does begin to make Silas think.
Earlier, when he was awaiting judgement by the drawing of lots, he had begun to apply rationality to his situation, and that rationality arises in feeling:
Silas knelt with his brethren, relying on his own innocence being certified by immediate divine interference, but feeling that there was sorrow and mourning
behind for him even then–that his trust in man had been cruelly
bruised.
Key words here are ‘relying’ and ‘feeling’. The relying is to do with his belief, crumbling even as he kneels, that God takes an active part in the doings of men and in particular of men in Lantern Yard. But as he kneels there, he has no faith in that belief: his feeling is one of mis-trust. He is ‘feeling that there was sorrow and mourning behind for him even then’. His trust is, quite rightly, located in his own direct experience. He knows he is innocent. Now his belief in the church of Lantern Yard must go. And with it, everything he holds dear.
And now we come to the hardest part of today’s reading:
We are apt to think it inevitable that a man in
Marner’s position should have begun to question the validity of an
appeal to the divine judgment by drawing lots; but to him this would
have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never
known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his
energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith. If
there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their
sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from
false ideas for which no man is culpable.
Marner doesn’t ‘question’, he ‘feels’.
I think this is one of the key contributions George Eliot makes to human understanding- that feeling is the genesis of potential consciousness. (Nearly ten years later, in Middlemarch, George Eliot will write, ‘if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’)
It starts here with feeling, but it can take a long time to work its way up into consciousness and perhaps never does. For Silas there is only the feeling (the feeling is: this is not good and is hurting me) possible thoughts about that feeling are too painful. He cannot reconcile them because he can’t bear the thought. It is too much to ask, too suddenly, and at point where he is broken: ‘to him this would have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith.’
I’m thinking of instances where I have felt broken, and how difficult, perhaps impossible rational thought is at such times. I suffer the feelings I am feeling, and only later will I have the thoughts. Perhaps those thoughts will come from someone else in the first instance. someone may talk to me. Am I even able to hear what they are saying? Not in the thick of painful feeling. I may be incapable of hearing, thinking, understanding because of the brokenness.
I believe this often happens to people in ordinary real life, and that one of the reasons we have so much in the way of poor mental health (as a general population) is that we are not good at connecting the reality of feeling with the emergence of consciousness or the process of thought. We have our feelings but we can’t match them up with what we believe about reality. This leads me to think of a very useful bit of thinking from the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, but I’ll write about that tomorrow.
Time’s up.
I’m conscious that by including Silas Marner text in these postings, the length of the blog post becomes huge. I’d be glad of feedback as to whether this is working. Let me know.
Forget-Me-Nots remind me of my maternal Grandfather, Syd Smith
Today I’m continuing to read Silas Marner very slowly…we’re in Chapter 1. If you want to read from the beginning search for the tag ‘Silas Marner’.
Yesterday we’d just been thinking about the boys pestering Marner and their fear that he might be able to put some kind of spell on them.
They had, perhaps, heard their fathers and mothers hint
that Silas Marner could cure folks’ rheumatism if he had a mind, and
add, still more darkly, that if you could only speak the devil fair
enough, he might save you the cost of the doctor. Such strange
lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be
caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for
the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and
benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion
can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most
easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who
have always been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a
life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic
religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range
of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is
almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all
overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.
“Is there anything you can fancy that you would like to eat?” I
once said to an old labouring man, who was in his last illness, and
who had refused all the food his wife had offered him. “No,” he
answered, “I’ve never been used to nothing but common victual, and
I can’t eat that.” Experience had bred no fancies in him that
could raise the phantasm of appetite.
Lots of things could go wrong here and I’ve had experiences in Shared Reading groups where they have. Sometimes readers think the writer is snob. But we’ve come a long way since George Eliot wrote the book in 1861. Then, the class of people known for hundreds of years as the ‘peasantry’ still existed, uneducated country people whose lives were often of intense drudgery and hardship. I think we’d have to go to an undeveloped third world country to find such people now, though lots of us, educated to a greater or lesser degree extent here in the first world, still share some of the superstitions George Eliot is talking about here. Thinking also about a general red-top sense of paranoia about world conspiracies, the popularity of The Da Vinci Code and a lingering popular interest in horoscopes. But this is more serious than that, isn’t it? This is about the restrictions caused by true hardship on the growth of the imagination:
To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.
This is one of those moments of human understanding I love finding in George Eliot, and why it is necessary to go so slowly.
My first job is to make the translation into something I can picture and which will make the writing live for me. I try to think about such minds… where have I met them?
This sentence might have been written about some of the children in Care of Local Authority that I’ve met over the years. The experience of such children, especially children who have been in many foster-placements, and with whom adults have failed to make bonds, is one of ‘pain and mishap’ ; that is the very material from which their lives seem to have been made. How should such children imagine other types of experience?
Their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope.
What are ‘the images’ that feed desire and hope?
If I think back to my own childhood, the images often centre about my grandparents. Moments of love or pleasure, say, travelling with my grandmother on the bus round Wirral as she took me with her to her cleaning jobs in posh ladies houses (I am such a person now myself, she might come here to clean), stopping off at various country pubs for a half of bitter for her, packet of crisps and a bottle of pop for me. The names of those pubs: The Seven Stars, The Fish, The Malt Shovel, The Shrew. Her love shown in the food she bought for me, sausages, a custard slice, mixed broken biscuits. The time she spent with me as we cleanedthe brasses on a Saturday morning. My grandfather, Syd, showing me how much he enjoyed a pear and so I loved pears too, and Forget-Me-Knots, and Blackbirds. the images then – things put into my mind by experience – are people, time, love and language.
One of The Reader’s Patrons, Frank Cottrell Boyce, told me that when making the film ‘Welcome to Sarajevo’, he had met a woman who had been in a child in the terrible orphanages of Ceaisescu’s Romania. She had grown up to be a lovely, and loving woman, working to rescue children from the war zone. ‘How did you learn to love?’ he asked her. ‘Growing up in those conditions?’. ‘I had Heidi,’ the woman replied. ‘In the orphanage there was a copy of Heidi, so I knew that adults could be loving and kind, that children could be loved.’
But of course to read Heidi, or any book, you need to be literate: you need a basic education. I’m going back to Silas in a moment but before I do, I want to mention The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class by Jonathan Rose. If you don’t know this terrific book, go and get hold of a copy right away. There are some amazingly moving accounts of what education meant to the poorest people – people like my grandparents, and their parents, (factory-hands, labourers, domestic servants). Learning to read, says one man, was ‘like coming up from the bottom of the ocean and seeing the universe for the first time.’
I go back to the text and reread that sentence and notice this time that George Eliot is using a metaphor of growth.
their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.
‘Barren,’ ‘overgrown’ and ‘pasture’ all point to an implied potential cycle of growth in the human mind. It isn’t that the peasantry are fixed as ‘rude'( basic, rough) minds: that’s how experience has grown them. Experience, as in the life of the old man who had only eaten ‘common victual’, determines our appetites.
Just going to read the next paragraph before closing the book for today; it’s really a quick sketch of the village: a bit cut-off from the world, old-fashioned and middle-of-the-road:
And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered,
undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren
parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization–inhabited by
meagre sheep and thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay
in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry
England, and held farms which, speaking from a spiritual point of
view, paid highly-desirable tithes. But it was nestled in a snug
well-wooded hollow, quite an hour’s journey on horseback from any
turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the
coach-horn, or of public opinion. It was an important-looking
village, with a fine old church and large churchyard in the heart of
it, and two or three large brick-and-stone homesteads, with
well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks, standing close
upon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the rectory,
which peeped from among the trees on the other side of the
churchyard:–a village which showed at once the summits of its
social life, and told the practised eye that there was no great park
and manor-house in the vicinity, but that there were several chiefs
in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough
money from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a
rollicking fashion, and keep a jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter
tide.
The irritation at bad farming by the ‘several chiefs’ who lived in ‘a rollicking fashion’ comes direct from George Eliot’s own experience. As herself, as Mary Ann Evans, she was the daughter of a very competent and hard-working Estate Manager in just such a part of the Midlands. She’s describing something like the very place she grew up. Imagination comes from real experience.
Two Paths Diverging in Calderstones Park 2 May 2017
Yesterday, you left me with my fingers in my ears and my heels dug in, shouting, ‘I don’t believe in any sort of afterlife!’ Not an edifying sight. I wish I could amend that to, ‘I don’t know if I believe in any sort of afterlife.’ I feel that would be a more reasonable, even more logical, place to be. But reasonable, logical, as it may be, I’m not there. I’m here, in this Mayfly experience of being a human living on planet earth. It’s short and I’ve no sense of anything for me before or after. That ‘for me’ really matters.
To the universe I may look like a goldfish, swimming round and round in my bowl, forgetting I’ve been here before, not realising I’ll be coming round again. (Though they say that scientists now believe goldfish do have memory and consciousness: they are not as simple as we once thought. All of which is not a fact, but possibly fake news I probably read on the internet. I’ve no idea if it is true. But I believe it. Why?). To visit this area of thinking, reasons to consider the possibility of an afterlife and many other oddities, read the much derided Rupert Sheldrake – is he crazy, bad or just outside the box?).
I’ve been reading George Herbert’s poem, Affliction III. Here it is, don’t forget to read it aloud to get back into it. Nice and slowly, please.
MY heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God !”
By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a sceptre of the rod :
Hadst Thou not had Thy part, 5
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape, 10
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still
Constant unto it, making it to be
A point of honour, now to grieve in me, 15
And in Thy members suffer ill.
They who lament one cross,
Thou dying daily, praise Thee to Thy loss.
My heels got dug in at the point where Herbert calls death ‘my bliss.’ That’s all very well for a Christian, I was shouting. For me it’s just game over!
I can’t get out of that state of mind. I’m stuck at some distance from the poem. Though this is a difficult place to find myself in, I’m glad that this has happened because I think this is a common experience for many readers and that we thus lose lots of good stuff because it doesn’t match our mindset. I love George Herbert, and I’ve known him long enough, and in some very hard circumstances, to know that I can rely on him. I trust him. Therefore, as a responsible person, I need to do something to fix this breakage in our relationship.
So now I have to do that thing that literature exists to make happen.
Just as I would have to do in a real-time relationship, I have to lend myself to him by allowing my imagination to draw on my own experience to help me understand his. I have to enter George Herbert’s heart and mind, his being.
I’m going to transfer over. I’m going to be him. I read again, this time, reading as if I was George Herbert, not myself;
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape, 10
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still
Constant unto it, making it to be
A point of honour, now to grieve in me, 15
And in Thy members suffer ill.
They who lament one cross,
Thou dying daily, praise Thee to Thy loss.
The mortal agony of his broken state of mind, his ‘sighs’ seeming to bring him towards death (my modern self noting, like a doctor, ‘an almost life-ending depression’. This takes places even as I am trying to read as GH). As Herbert, I have to rest some time at ‘bliss’. (As Jane I rush away from it). I imagine the ‘bliss’ of escape from this pain, and of a greater bliss, the being one with ‘Thou’, who despite the pain of this poem, is yet loving and kind. There are only two good words (by good I mean perhaps not pain-filled) words in the whole poem: they are ‘relief’ and ‘bliss’. They both point to something, someone, ‘Thou’, outside of Herbert’s pain-filled experience. That you might reach the bliss through being blown about by a gale is still frightening. The main thing I have, as GH, is trouble, pain, fear, hurt, but I do believe there is an end to it. I do believe there is ‘bliss’ – somewhere.
As a reader, I note the full stop after that word. (The poem is five sentences long. It is worth reading each of them, as a sentence, as a thought in its own right). As Herbert rests for a little while with this thought of bliss the storm of his thoughts seems to die down a little. Another thought arises. Still being GH, I read on:
Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still
Constant unto it, making it to be
A point of honour, now to grieve in me, 15
Now GH is feeling himself connected to ‘Thou’ through the pain, the grief, he suffers. God is constant to the nature of the life he lived as Christ, a man of sorrows. I wonder (as myself) if there is a third ‘good’ word in this poem: ‘constant’. and a fourth: ‘honour’. The pain does not abate, but this sentence offers a meaning for it. A paraphrase: God suffered as man on earth and that experience remains constant. Where Christ is in GH so pain also is, must be. And this is deliberate, necessary, right ‘a point of honour’. The grief is God. This is an amplification of the feeling I had at the beginning that God ‘was in’ the grief. At that point GH could hardly see God. Now he sees God’s suffering in his own suffering and is in fact at one with God in it. That’s a kind of relief. It brings a meaning to a place where there was no meaning.
I’ve lent myself to GH to try to understand his experience as he tells me about it in the poem. I’ve no longer got my fingers in my ears, and given the level of his suffering and sorrow, I’m glad of that.
I’m going to leave the last two lines til tomorrow.
I’ve been reading George Herbert’s poem, ‘Affliction III’, and I’ve been reading it very slowly. No apology for that – why need we rush? One line of meditative meaning is as good as twenty skim-overs. Here’s the poem again. Read it aloud to get back in:
MY heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God !”
By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a sceptre of the rod :
Hadst Thou not had Thy part, 5
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape, 10
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still
Constant unto it, making it to be
A point of honour, now to grieve in me, 15
And in Thy members suffer ill.
They who lament one cross,
Thou dying daily, praise Thee to Thy loss.
I’m going to pick up at line 7 and go on a little way from there:
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape, 10
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
Herbert is in a grim state of (what we would now call) depression. It’s not hyperbole in line six, when he says he thinks the ‘sigh’ might have broken his heart. It’s good that although it feels killingly bad to him at the moment, the sighed words ‘Oh God’ have changed what might otherwise have been the tenor of his mind. In the opening lines he’s concentrating on what good he can sense in his situation, not the utter misery he feels. I’m trying now to understand these lines:
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
I feel stuck, as if I can’t understand this, so I try a paraphrase to get my head round as much of it as I can.
‘But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape’ = God your spirit gave me both spirit and form. (Therefore) ‘Thou know’st my tallies’ = you know what I’m made up of, or owe you, or you know what is the relationship between us. Perhaps also something about cost? A tally is the stick notched to mark what’s owed. So perhaps I can read that line as – ‘you know what I owe you’.
The owing here seems connected to the very creation, and shape and being of the man; God knows what’s owed because ‘Thy breath gave me both life and shape’. This is one of those places where a contemporary non-believer like me gets stuck. I don’t like the idea of owing anybody anything. I didn’t ask to be born! If something (apart from biological parents) birthed me – not just my body, my form, but also my life, my spirit – what would that be? What’s the translation here for a non-believer? I’ll try letting x mark the spot as a holding ground for now.
But since X gave me both life and shape,
X know’st my tallies ;
I owe something by being here – whether I asked to be born or not. For a moment I’m going to assume there is (to use the AA phrase) a power greater than myself at work in the universe; that somehow ‘I’ come out of that, am created by it, and owe it. And when I think of all the possible non-existence (most of the universe is nothing! there’s vastly more nothing than anything else…) then it does some an extraordinary – could I say – miracle – that I, or yesterday’s blackbird, or even couchgrasss have come to be at all.
Need to reread the whole poem now, to get back into its mind, as I’ve been going off on one in my attempt to understand. I reread it and concentrate again on the next bit of this thought:
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
I start at the end here – wonder what he means by ‘behind’. Think it has a specific kind of meaning, which I’ve read before in other poems by George Herbert, though I can’t quite remember it. Does it mean – what is left? To paraphrase – you created me, you know what I owe, and when so much breath is assigned to a sigh, whats going to be left?
The paraphrase makes me concentrate on ‘assigned’ and on the difference between ‘breath’ and ‘sigh’. The word ‘assign somehow connects to ‘tallies’. It’s an old, legal word. I look it up. The ‘sigh’ is an expression of sadness, misery, even despair but it is full of ‘breath’ – life. If we put the gift we’ve been given (thing owed, the thing signified by the tally) into ‘a sigh’, what is going to happen? Not quite sure about this as I read and think – maybe I haven’t understood it well. But I do think I’ve made some headway. I leave this bit for now and move on in case what is coming next will cast a light back for me.
The next bit does seem to develop that thought. Let’s read it all through to that point:
MY heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God !”
By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a sceptre of the rod :
Hadst Thou not had Thy part, 5
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape, 10
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
I’m not sure of the function and tenor of ‘Or if’ I don’t think line ten on is an alternative to what came before. Perhaps more a development of the logic. These sighs cost actual life. This wind blows me towards death (‘my bliss’) Herbert is a Christian and believes in life with God after death.
But I don’t. I’m not coming with you in this thought, George.
Time is up for today. And me with my heels dug in.
I am going to continue my reading of George Herbert’s ‘Affliction III’. Anyone here yesterday will have seen that I spent nearly an hour on the first line, a record of slowness, even for me. Today I’ll try to do line two!
MY heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God !” By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief, To guide and govern it to my relief, Making a sceptre of the rod : Hadst Thou not had Thy part, Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart. But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape, Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind? Or if some years with it escape, The sigh then only is A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss. Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still Constant unto it, making it to be A point of honour, now to grieve in me, And in Thy members suffer ill. They who lament one cross, Thou dying daily, praise Thee to Thy loss.
I’m struck by Herbert’s idea of God being ‘in’ the grief. As if grief were a complex mixture of compounded elements that only seems, at first glance, to be one solid thing. When you look more carefully, or in more dimensions, ‘grief’ contains lots of different elements, time-zones, experiences, meanings.
An example: yesterday and the day before I was complaining about my battle with couchgrass, an interminable struggle which I know I can’t win. It’s grief all right. But if I only see it as grief (which I’m afraid is oftentimes the case) then I can feel overcome. It’s a one-dimensional experience, which is all sadness. Yesterday when I was working at it, a young male blackbird started visiting the patch I’d cleared, picking out worms and grubs to take back to his demanding family in the big Hebe at the side of the garden. We spent a companionable hour or more together, working alongside each other. I’ve never seen a blackbird so close. He came with inches of my boot and then of my hand.
I love blackbirds, the sharpness of their outline and eye, the determination of their songs flung from the high gable, the top branch, the telegraph pole. They are usually rather distant birds. So I was moved by his presence and as he worked right beside me, I thought this wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for the battle against couchgrass.
But I don’t want to give the couchgrass too much credit, that’s to say it could have been any pernicious weed: it was my struggle, not the enemy, that contained the potential for the lovely experience. But there is no denying my struggle was provoked by the enemy. Thus evil has a place in creation? I always find I baulk against that – in the end I’d like no evil, only good. I want a garden without couchgrass!
But a yin and yang view of the universe and all that’s in it is certainly part of George Herbert’s experience. For me, the blackbird experience was ‘in’ the couchgrass experience. Other things, too. The comforting smell of the spring earth was ‘in’ it, the close-up contemplation of the ornamental strawberry plant root-system, the finding my favourite geranium in flower, hidden there amongst choking weed. (Read a good post about Geranium Pyrenaicum ‘Bill Wallis’ here.)
If you translate Herbert’s word ‘God’ into ‘good’ (as I do) then you have a helpful thought. If ‘good’ is ‘in’ any bad experience, then bad does not have such great, such overpowering, dominion. I am resolved to weed out the couch, but in a more accepting frame of mind. I’ll be looking for (and finding) good while I am doing it.
When Herbert sighs ‘Oh God’ and realises God is ‘in’ the situation, it presages relief. Something beyond him and his pain is in control of (guiding) what is happening. From ‘guide’ Herbert’s mind leaps to the word ‘govern’. It’s almost as if he feels now someone else (‘Thou’) has the management of the situation, will handle it. For us it’s a hard leap to King (ultimate leader) but for George Herbert, with the word ‘govern’ comes the idea of King. Thus in line 4, the punishing ‘rod’ of a bullying schoolteacher, donkey-beater, becomes the symbol of power, not the violent use of it.
To guide and govern it to my relief, Making a sceptre of the rod :
If you feel something awful is being done to you by someone with power over you, it will feel like ‘rod’, a big stick to beat you with. If you feel you are being led, guided, even (hard word/thought for a modern person?) ‘ruled’ by someone who has no need to beat you, someone who has natural authority, symbolised by ‘sceptre’… might you feel someone else is in control, and might that help?
I waver back and forth here. I want to be in control of my self and my life, and grown-up enough to take responsibility for situations in which I find myself, but I can think of situations in life where I was glad to know there was someone else who was in control – for example the midwife, when I was giving birth. When we are pushed to the limit, and are breaking, it is good to know someone else is going to care for us and help hold it together. For George Herbert, fearing the ‘unruly’ elements inside himself, the presence of ‘Thou’ is a lifesaver.
Hadst Thou not had Thy part, 5 Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.
The next three lines seem difficult.
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape, Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
I’ll leave it there for today and get back to the garden.
Before the memory of Tennyson’s eagle interrupted, I had been making a start on reading Spenser’ Prothalamion. Carrying on with that today. Read the whole poem here, Get yourself back into it by reading it aloud but I’m picking up at this point;
CALM was the day, and through the trembling air
Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play—
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
Hot Titan’s beams, which then did glister fair;
When I, (whom sullen care, 5
Through discontent of my long fruitless stay
In princes’ court, and expectation vain
Of idle hopes, which still do fly away
Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,)
Walk’d forth to ease my pain 10
Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames,
Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,
Was painted all with variable flowers,
And all the meads adorn’d with dainty gems
Fit to deck maidens’ bowers, 15
And crown their paramours
Against the bridal day, which is not long:
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
The other day I’d got to ‘walk’d forth to ease my pain’ and will pick up again there.
Walk’d forth to ease my pain 10
Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames,
Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,
Was painted all with variable flowers,
And all the meads adorn’d with dainty gems
Fit to deck maidens’ bowers, 15
And crown their paramours
Against the bridal day, which is not long:
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
I see now (didn’t really notice before) that the lovely day bookends Spenser’s description of his own unhappy mental state, with ‘Sweet-breathing Zephyrus’ and calmness at one side, and the delightful flowery banks of the river of the other. On a quick first reading I had nearly missed his frustrated misery. The final line, which becomes a refrain for the whole poem, is a plea for continued calm, suggesting there’s still more trouble to come perhaps. But he wants to make his song in peace.
I try now to make the situation Spenser describes real to myself, I need to translate it into my own experience. I imagine this: there’s a wedding coming but you are in the middle of loads of difficulty at work – what happens? You put the difficulty aside, mentally, as best you can , and get on with celebrating the marriage. That’s what’s happening here.
The way he sees the river bank is very much in terms of wedding day – flowers, gems, maidens and their paramours and then the actual mention of a ‘bridal day’. Thinking of all these images and feelings of pleasure and sweetness crowding out his work worries. But the work worries are still there. I note them and move on.
Back to the poem, stanza two, read it aloud again:
There in a meadow by the river’s side
A flock of nymphs I chancèd to espy, 20
All lovely daughters of the flood thereby,
With goodly greenish locks all loose untied
As each had been a bride;
And each one had a little wicker basket
Made of fine twigs, entrailèd curiously. 25
In which they gather’d flowers to fill their flasket,
And with fine fingers cropt full feateously
The tender stalks on high.
Of every sort which in that meadow grew
They gather’d some—the violet, pallid blue, 30
The little daisy that at evening closes,
The virgin lily and the primrose true,
With store of vermeil roses,
To deck their bridegrooms’ posies
Against the bridal day, which was not long: 35
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
Now I am a little perplexed. We’ve gone into fantasy or into seeing the world through the mode of classical Greece. We saw that Grecian stuff in the opening stanza but there they seems straightforward images of god-like powers – Zephyrus and Titan. What we have here are creatures, a ‘flock of nymphs’ with ‘goodly greenish locks’. I’m going to look up nymphs. (Despite what I said about the footnote killeth). Looked it up, and I go on knowing that – as I thought, a nymph is a sort of minor deity, often associated with water or specific places. My question is: are these real nymphs, with real ‘greenish’ hair, or are they figments of Spenser’s imagination – have we entered a fiction? Are they real people dressed in his imagination as nymphs? The Thames, sweet as it is, is a real river. I don’t know the answer to my question – never mind. I read on.
Each of these figures ( how many is a flock?) remind him brides:
With goodly greenish locks all loose untied
As each had been a bride;
And each one had a little wicker basket
Made of fine twigs, entrailèd curiously. 25
In which they gather’d flowers to fill their flasket,
And with fine fingers cropt full feateously
The tender stalks on high.
I’ve decided I’m treating it as a fiction. I’m in a story.
A few weeks ago here on this blog I started to think about different types of poem – direct, personal, thinking, story etc. I’m assuming this is story and so the part of me that loves narrative – what’s going to happen – is firing up now. I still have some language to untangle as lots of words seem unfamiliar and I have to keep looking up some of the Greek stuff, but I’ve stopped feeling worried. This is not beyond me. The nymphs are picking flowers for vases back at home. (Looked up flasket, nice old word). They gathered flowers
Of every sort which in that meadow grew
They gather’d some—the violet, pallid blue, 30
The little daisy that at evening closes,
The virgin lily and the primrose true,
With store of vermeil roses,
To deck their bridegrooms’ posies
Against the bridal day, which was not long: 35
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
Had to look up ‘vermeil’ but shouldn’t have bothered ,should have just guessed. It’s vermillion! It’s a red, red rose. Which makes me think of a love poem. These girls are getting ready for a wedding – but why are ‘nymphs’ they turning into girls in my mind? They are fictions, and unreal, but they are also real. Why? Partly, the flowers, like the Thames, are real, here and now flowers, not parts of Greek mythology, partly perhaps the mention of their bridegrooms, and the bridal day – ‘which was not long’.
At the end, the stanza closes with the invocation to the Thames to ‘run softly’. Is this asking for a moment of peace? After all the Thames runs through London, where the court (his workplace?) Spenser was so frustrated in (stanza 1) is based. Let’s have this interlude, perhaps he is saying, let’s enjoy this.
I’m racing through it now.
With that I saw two swans of goodly hue
Come softly swimming down along the Lee:
Two fairer birds I yet did never see;
The snow which doth the top of Pindus strow 40
Did never whiter show,
Nor Jove himself, when he a swan would be
For love of Leda, whiter did appear;
Yet Leda was (they say) as white as he,
Yet not so white as these, nor nothing near; 45
So purely white they were
That even the gentle stream, the which them bare?
Seem’d foul to them, and bade his billows spare
To wet their silken feathers, lest they might
Soil their fair plumes with water not so fair, 50
And mar their beauties bright
That shone as Heaven’s light
Against their bridal day, which was not long:
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
But that third stanza takes me over the days word limit. And introduces the myth of Leda and the Swan, of which I’ll remind myself before tomorrow.
Yesterday I was thinking about what a novice reader in Shared Reading needs to know, and made a list of 9 things to do, most of which were, read the poem aloud. Heather commented on the importance of No. 3, ‘Check how you are feeling’.
Heather writes, ‘This is the key that can begin to unlock a scary-looking poem. I have seen people being astonished by feelings that have emerged after initially having said things like ‘I don’t get this’.’
Yes. It is important that we feel able to stay in that creative place of uncertainty. At that place, ‘I don’t get this…’ we are on the very cusp of new thought, new understanding. The reader and the text are trying to find each other. The reader stands face to face with the words, an equal. As when we meet a new person, we try to find out who they are – not by references, but in their own terms. A man (new to his Shared Reading group) said to me yesterday, ‘It’s just us, and the words, and something… happens…’
The model of brave uncertainty characterised by, ‘I don’t get this… but I’m beginning to feel…’ may be a one of the contributing factors to one of the key outcomes shared Reading Group members report – feeling more confident.
Often, in more experienced, or more educated, literary worlds (I’ve seen it in literature courses, in talks at Lit Fests, in lectures, at Book Clubs ) there is a reaching after fact to put-off or smooth over those feelings uncertainty, of not-knowing, as if fact could do it for us and save us those worries. But it doesn’t. It might sometimes add to something we are experiencing in the reading but, very often, it intrudes, and the experience becomes something else, almost corrupted.
If I said to you, I’ve looked up ‘The Eagle’, and Tennyson wrote it to celebrate the adoption of the american eagle at the end of the American Civil War (I’ve just made that up, but say it was historically true). Your relation to the poem is now a historical one. It’s no longer just you and poem, the words on the page. It’s art, Jim, but with footnotes. And, particularly at the beginning of an experience, of a relationship with a work of literature (perhaps any art?) , the footnote killeth. It certainly affects the democracy of reading.
I spent years reading and teaching and sharing my readings of three of the greatest poems ever written – The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost and The Prelude. I like to have an edition with good footnotes, and I like the footnotes to be at the bottom of the page, so you don’t have to flip backwards and forwards. Alastair Fowler’s edition of Paradise Lost is excellent for this. I read the footnotes quite often. But what I’ve found over thirty years is that they don’t help. Not when you are really struggling. That real struggle is the struggle to enter the mind of the author, to follow, through language, form, syntax, the experience of the author’s thoughts.
In this respect reading is like eating or dancing. No one can do it for you. There are things to learn about dance and food and what other people like or believe, and learning that extra stuff might well add to your experience. But you don’t start there. You start by doing it yourself. And no one, however expert, can do your eating or dancing.
Back the The Eagle. Yesterday I’d read some of the first stanza, now I’m going to read the second and try to understand why it makes me afraid.
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The first thing in the second stanza that frightens me is ‘the wrinkled sea.’ That sea is very far down: I feel vertigo as I read. Height changes time on cliff tops. Tennyson uses the verb ‘crawls’ to get at that feeling. If you were walking on the shore, the waves would be crashing, the tide moving at a speed. From very high above, (I’m remembering cliff tops on a Greek Island, the Aegean seeming miles below) the sea seems to move a very slow speed. The eagle ‘watches’ and I’m seeing something alert, intelligent, deliberate and very very far above everything else – as in the first stanza, when he seemed god-like. the giving way implied in ‘falls’ is what frightens me most. It is absolute abandonment. It is power too, because this is not an uncontrolled fall. This is the power, and self-control of the high diver. The diver, the faller, becomes an object – cannonball- submitting to gravity in this way, terrifyingly making of their own body a weapon.
The ‘thunderbolt’ connects me back to the sense of him as out-of-this-world, godlike, ‘ring’d with the azure world.’
Do you see a film of this unfolding moment in your mind as you read?
I’m asking myself Do you see anything human? The long distance of a very far-off encompassing gaze, the seeing of things in a large pattern, the ability to move with great certainty and very fast…it’s the difference between the long far off gaze and fast,’ terrifying action, the ‘thunderbolt’ that unsettles me.
I’ve noticed the way each stanza has three rhymes. That makes the rhythm of the poem act strangely, I think. I read it aloud to myself a couple of times. You sort of expect a fourth line, that’s what it is. The lines themselves are very regular, four beat lines:
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
And you’d expect each stanza to be a four line stanza, to match , as it were. But you don’t get the fourth line. When you don’t get it, it’s like the great down-swoop of the bird. Something is suddenly not there.
This poem is a sketch, a small one, in pencil. Its full of a moment of life and it shows Tennyson’s skill. But I want something bigger. I move on the next picture. Tell me more about humans.
Agnes playing with leaves, Calderstones, September 2016
How do you read a poem?
Many of us, readers and non-readers, seem to believe that knowledge, expertise, years of practice are needed to understand those human artefacts we call poems. A world industry has evolved to promote that view.
Attentive readers will have noted how I have slipped from ‘read’ to ‘understand’.
‘Bah,’ as D.H. Lawrence may well have said (don’t have time to check this morning) ‘the mind understands and there’s an end to it.’
Is reading poetry an art? Is it a skill? It is certainly true that, as in almost all human actions, practice helps. We can talk about that another time. But for today, because the question arose for me yesterday, I ask myself what does a novice need? Look at the picture of Agnes playing with leaves. That’s what we’re aiming for today. Get the feel of poems. Gaze at them a lot. Chuck ’em about.
Here are 9 tips for reading a poem:
1. Enter the room
If you said to a snake-fearer, ‘Enter this room with a snakes in it…’ your snake-fearer would probably say, ‘No thanks.’
That’s what most people say to reading poetry.
But you are reading this. You are over your fear enough to have looked in this place for help. You are in the room with a live poem!
And here it is, chosen because it was the first or second grown up poem I ever read, and it came to mind in conversation yesterday. I was ten when I found it in Palgraves Golden Treasury, which I’d been given for my birthday. Almost every poem in the book seemed incomprehensible, though I wasn’t yet old enough to be afraid of them. I simply couldn’t get into them at all, and despite its lovely name, the Treasury seemed to me like reading an engineering manual, or Chinese. But I could read this one, I thought, and it was about something I could picture. And it was short;
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(Note to self – need to write a separate post on how to choose a poem)
2. Read it aloud
Poems are songs and it is good when they pass through your body and out of your mouth. You want to feel the rhythm, not by counting syllables, but by tapping your feet or fingers. Often, in poems, the rhythm does something, I mean, it makes something happen, and you want eventually to know what that is, so you need to get into the habit of feeling it.
Read the poem aloud, as slowly as you can. Where there is punctuation, take a pause. In this poem that is easy because the commas and semicolons come at the line endings. That means you only have to think in one dimension, which is helpful for a beginner. Later we’ll come to poems where the line-endings and punctuation work together in a different way.
3. Check how you are feeling
Poems are messages, communications, from other people’s hearts and minds. As with any human communication, you need to be aware of how you feel as it unfolds. In this poem, as I read it aloud, now, as I write, I feel exhilarated at the end of the first three lines, ‘Ring’d with the azure world he stands’, but I feel afraid at the end of the poem ‘And like a thunderbolt he falls.’ I thought he might be a very dangerous creature. And he felt quite close. ‘Thunderbolt’= Aiieee.
One of the things that has been so wonderful about running Shared Reading groups, or listening to other people telling me about their Shared Reading groups, has been seeing how often people who are new to poetry are astonished and delighted by the strong feelings they feel when they recognise themselves in a poem.
But I didn’t see myself in this poem when I was ten. I only felt something like (and it was a feeling, not words) ‘I get it!’ then I felt the feelings of the poem, which are: wow, and then, agh. Which may be something close to what Tennyson may have wanted his readers to feel.
Don’t get stuck on, or too attached to, these opening feelings: reading is a dynamic exchange, a live unfolding. You want to be free to go with whatever the flow of this day’s reading turns out to be.
4. Read it aloud again
Check in, see if anything has changed, see if you see more as the mental film of the poem unfolds. Try to notice something you didn’t notice before. I notice ‘hands’, because eagles don’t have hands, they have claws. Humans have hands. When you’ve noticed something, have a pause and think about it.
5. Believe the poet did what s/he did on purpose
You might say, ‘Ah, it only says ‘hands’ because he’s got to find a rhyme for ‘lands’…’
And if you said that, I’d say, ‘Well-noticed! they do rhyme, don’t they?’ But I’d try to persuade you that even a half decent poet could either find another rhyme for ‘lands’ or have put the word ‘claws’ and found word to rhyme with that. This poet chose ‘hands’, on purpose, because he wanted to put the word ‘hands’ (with all their associated human powers of action perhaps) in our minds. Why? Perhaps because this poem is not simply about The Eagle?
6. Read it aloud again.
Reading the poem is the reality of it. Go back to it as often as you can. In this respect reading a poem is a meditation. You wander, which is natural, and then you say to yourself, now go back to the poem.
7. Notice things
You started by noticing a word, (‘hands’) so now notice another in line two.
Poems work in 3-D, up and down, back and forward, as well as in a linear, narrative fashion. Having seen the human word in line one, you’ll have noticed the human word in two: yep, it’s ‘lonely’.
This adjective, ‘lonely’ (yes, it’s good to know some technical words such as ‘noun’ ‘verb’ ‘adjective’ and ‘enjambement’. You don’t need them. But they can be useful, just as a Guide to Snake Markings could be useful in the Snake Room. More of this another day)…
This adjective, ‘lonely’ is a human word. Yet it’s used to describe an inhuman landscape. The eagle is about as far from human settlement as it is possible to be, in fact, he seems almost a god, ‘ring’d with the azure world, he stands.’
(I’ve suddenly thought of the American Eagle and have no idea if there is any connection and don’t have time to look it up, but if I was reading this poem with more than minutes at my command I would now Google the American eagle, its dates, whether Tennyson was interested in the USA etc. But these things are merely facts. I don’t need them to read the poem. If it was just me and the poem, locked in the room, I’d simply note the god-like loneliness of the eagle with his head ringed by ‘the azure world’.
Why world? When azure refers to the blue of the sky?
8. Let the questions proliferate
Reading a poem is like entering a room full of snakes and like meditating. (Also, sometimes, a bit like a more or less controlled bomb-explosion. But we are not exploding today. As far as I know.)
9. Aim for flexible stretch, poetry as pilates
As you read you are moving between modes: sometimes being afraid, not knowing, not understanding. Sometimes you are saying to yourself, ‘Back to the poem’, and breathing and reading and feeling rhythm and feeling unnamed feelings. Sometimes you are asking lots of questions: questions which arise from your core, like bubbles in water or sparks from a fire. They don’t necessarily need answers. They need dwell time, space. They need to be asked. ‘Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.’ Think about your core. How are you feeling now?
Time and word count are up for today – finish this one tomorrow. Then back to Spenser.
readerjanedavis 