The Best Books of 1863 - how very few of these / Poor little busy poet bees / Can we expect again to hum

Ow, my eyes.  You can see the 1863 “Birth of Venus” by Alexandre Cabanel in the flesh – or in the marzipan (see the Zola quotation at the following link) –  at the Musée d’Orsay, although I do not know why you would, since that museum has so many good paintings.

The Best Books of 1863 were better than this painting.  But it was the year of the second-rate.

I would pick The Cossacks, Leo Tolstoy’s clear-eyed look at the desire to romanticize other cultures, as the best book of the year, but it is not quite first-rate Tolstoy.  Now that is an absurd standard, but the fact is that The Cossacks is dragged along behind Tolstoy’s great masterpieces.  It is read as much as it is, and will continue to be read, because of other books.

My list of surviving English novels for 1863 looks like this:

Romola, George Eliot
The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley
Salem Chapel, Margaret Oliphant
Rachel Ray, Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington, Trollope, in the middle of its serialization.

Boy, there is always plenty of Trollope in the 1860s.  I have only read two of the five.  We see  some of the same phenomenon here, I think, certainly with Romola, possibly with the Trollope novels.  The exercise is to imagine that Romola were the only George Eliot novel.  Would anyone still read it?  The exercise is preposterous, so I will move on.  The English class of 1863 seems a little weak, is all I am saying.  Go to those links, though, the ones not to Wuthering Expectations.  A good case is made for every one of those books.

No idea what was going on in French literature this year (or Spanish, or Italian, or German).  American literature was almost put on hold by the Civil War.  Without a doubt, the great American work of the year is a speech, the Gettysburg Address, elegant, forceful, rhetorically brilliant, and now, in its way, one of the key  texts  of the United States.

Louisa May Alcott’s charming Hospital Sketches and Henry Longfellow’s Tales from a Wayside Inn can hardly stand that kind of competition, although both are enjoyable books.  The Longfellow book contains “The Birds of Killingworth,” a bizarre and superb poem of ecological apocalypse.

One more novel was not even second-rate artistically, but was all too significant, Nikolai Chernyshevksy’s What Is to Be Done?, a radical Utopia, written in prison, smuggled out, published illegally, eventually becoming a founding text of the Russian Revolution.  So if not such a great year for novels, 1863 was unusually well equipped with important political literature.

I wrote a bit about the Chernyshevsky novel while discussing Fathers and Sons, where I was startled to see a number of people declare that they wanted to read What Is to Be Done?  Are you all nuts?  But I will suffer along with the rest of you.  I should organize a readalong – it would be the least popular book blog event since the readalong of Herman Melville’s Clarel a few years ago.  And if it turned out a fifth  as well, that would be something.

I wonder what I am missing?  I never mean these posts to be completely comprehensive, and how could they be, but I do hope that any additional suggestions sound a bit desperate and little-read  – Walter Savage Landor’s last book of poems, how about that one?

Come to think of it, I have read that book.  Landor, eighty-eight years old in 1863, was a fine poet; it is a fine book.  But that is hardly my point here, as Landor knows:

The Poet Bees
There are a hundred now alive
Who buz about the summer hive,
Alas! how very few of these
Poor little busy poet bees
Can we expect again to hum
When the next summer shall have come.

One hundred and fifty years is a long lifespan for a book.  Seven novels, the Alcott book, the Longfellow poems, one of the greatest funeral orations, not bad, really.

A thousand leaves, since he hath stricken thee down, \ Speak of thee - Longfellow's Michelangelo

Longfellow translated eight Michelangelo Buonarroti poems – I do not know when – which are among my favorite Longfellow poems.  Longfellow’s achievement is not exactly unique since a number of poets have made good English poems out of Michelangelo.  Perhaps Michelangelo is easy to translate.  I doubt that.

This is what Longfellow’s Michelangelo sounds like.  Perhaps it is worth noting that the poems Longfellow worked on are (I think) all from late in the artist’s life, when he is in his sixties or older.

TO VITTORIA COLONNA

Lady, how can it chance – yet this we see
  In long experience – that will longer last
  A living image carved from quarries vast
  Than its own maker, who dies presently?

Cause yieldeth to effect if this so be,
  And even Nature is by Art surpassed;
  This know I, who to Art have given the past,
  But see that Time is breaking faith with me.

Perhaps on both of us long life can I
  Either in color or in stone bestow,
  By now portraying each in look and mien;
So that a thousand years after we die,
  How fair thou wast, and I how full of woe,
  And wherefore I so loved thee, may be seen.

Already by the sixteenth century the conceit that art can overcome mortality is an antique.  How much extra juice it gets when expressed by 1) an actual artist, who may at the moment of the poem’s composition be sculpting the woman’s form, and 2) an actual artist of the stature of Michelangelo who in fact can grant a sort of eternal fame to his subjects, I will leave to the individual reader.  The biggest jolts for me come in poems like the one about painting the Sistine Chapel (“I’ve already grown a goiter at this drudgery”*) and a few others that seem to refer to well-known sculptures.  Why deny the biographical pleasures of seeing the behind-the-scenes glimpses the artist chooses to represent?

More commonly Michelangelo uses his profession as a source of metaphors and images and themes.   Thus the old sculptor compares the fire he uses to “mould \ The iron of his preconceived design” to the “fortunate fire that burns \ Within me still” (“Fire”), or worries that art (“an idol and a king to me”) has lost its meaning (“Painting and sculpture satisfy no more”) as his death nears (“Old Age”).

That lament is universal, it seems.  Even Michelangelo feels that he has frittered away his life:

Ah me! ah me! when thinking of the years,
The vanished years, alas, I do not find
Among them all one day that was my own!  (“Canzone”)

I find this reassuring for some reason.

All right.  That’s Longfellow’s Michelangelo:

A thousand leaves, since he hath stricken thee down,
  Speak of thee, nor to thee could Heaven convey,
  Except through death, a refuge and a crown.  (“To Vittoria Colonna,” but a different poem than the one above)

*  Translation by James M. Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo (Yale UP, 1991), brilliant, essential.

Longfellow's translations - We shall have to pass through the dewy grass

Henry Longfellow was one of the greatest American translators of poetry.  I am browsing through a 1902 edition of his Complete Poems in order to see what I have missed, and the answer is a lot, obviously, but I have read enough to make a judgment.  He had a staggering gift with languages matched or exceeded his skill with versification, and the beauty of translation is that the poetic conceptions, the ideas, are mostly the other guy’s problem.

The great limit on Longfellow’s translations is that he did not do enough of the poets I wanted him to do.  He only seems to have translated two Goethe poems, for instance, the “Wanderer’s Night Song” and this one from 1780:

Night Song                                                   Ein Gleiches

O’er all the hill-tops                                      Über allen Gipfeln
    Is quiet now,                                               Ist Ruh,
In all the tree-tops                                        In allen Wipfeln
    Hearest thou                                               Spürest du
Hardly a breath;                                            Kaum einem Hauch;
    The birds are asleep in the trees:       Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde,
    Wait, soon like these                                Warte nur, balde
      Thou, too, shalt rest.                             Ruhest du auch.

Longfellow  finds a solution for every essential element, including the sentiment, the rhymes, and the rhythm, including the power of the short but variable line lengths.  I suppose he cannot completely  match the strange effect of the two syllable “Ist Ruh,” although he catches the way the stillness and pace are communicated to the reader.  Shhh, slow down.  Look at the way Goethe suggests his reader (the vocal reader) pause for breath on the word “breath.”  Showoff.

When I look at more of Longfellow’s German poems, I find Simon Dach and Gustav Ofizer and Johan Ludwig Uhland where I wish I could find Theodor Storm and Eduard Mörike, but unfortunately Longfellow had little interest in translating his contemporaries.  He was always drawn to medieval and early modern traditions, and to the side of the Romantic tradition that aped the Middle Ages, that wrote ballads to lyrics.  So his Dante is still, in a crowded field of Dante translations, still readable, and his version of the 15th century Las Coplas by Jorge Manrique, an elegy for his heroic father that is also a humanistic exploration of what makes a meaningful life, is an unsurpassed masterpiece.  I wrote about that one almost five years ago, and will just point the curious there for some samples.

And then there is Longfellow’s Michelangelo, but I want to save that for tomorrow.

The 1902 collection contains a single Portuguese poem, a good one by Gil Vicente, so from the late 16th or early 17th century.  I’ll end with it, eight lines that suggest a longer story.

Song

If thou art sleeping, maiden,
    Awake, and open thy door.
‘T is the break of day, and we must away
    O’er meadow, and mount, and moor.

Wait not to find thy slippers
    But come with thy naked feet:
We shall have to pass through the dewy grass,
    And waters wide and fleet.

There is a dark shape whispering in her ear - Henry Longfellow's fine Salem witch trial verse play

In 1868 Henry Longfellow published a pair of blank verse plays on Puritan subjects, “John Endicott” and “Giles Corey of the Salem Farms,” together The New England Tragedies, that may not be the best works of Longfellow I have encountered but come close.  Scholar Lawrence Buell has championed the plays, presenting them intact in the Penguin Classics Selected Poems, where they take up 40 percent of the pages.  Buell had to sacrifice a lot of other poems to keep them, but they are worth it.

“John Endicott” is about Puritan persecution of Quakers, while “Giles Corey” is of course about the Salem witch trials.  I think I will just write about the latter, since the story is more familiar and more shocking.  For example (Martha Corey is on trial for witchcraft, Hathorne is the prosecutor, Mary the crazed accuser):

Mary:  There is a dark shape whispering in her ear.
Hathorne:  What does it say to you?
Martha:                                                      I see no shape.
Hathorne:  Did you not hear it whisper?
Martha:                                                        I heard nothing.
Mary:  What torture!  Ah, what agony I suffer.  (Falls into swoon)  (IV.1)

The blanks are there to help see the blank verse lines.  You can see that this is not exactly Shakespeare, but the monosyllables and broken lines are certainly tense and dramatic enough.  “Giles Corey” is easily the most exciting Longfellow I have read, although the witch trial material is so sure-fire that it may be cheating.

Maybe I should mention that I have not read Arthur Miller’s Crucible, although I have seen the 1996 film adaptation which I assume was quite different.  Many of the elements of the film could have been lifted directly from Longfellow, although I doubt they were.  As drama, Longfellow’s conflicts were similarly interesting to those in the film; as language Longfellow takes the prize.

Because, after all, sometimes he does sidle up to Shakespeare:

Tituba:  Here's monk's-hood, that breeds fever in the blood;
And deadly nightshade, that makes men see ghosts;
And henbane, that will shake them with convulsions;
And meadow-saffron and black hellebore,
That rack the nerves, and puff the skin with dropsy;
And bitter-sweet, and briony, and eye-bright,
That cause eruptions, nosebleed, rheumatisms;
I know them, and the places where they hide
In field and meadow; and I know their secrets,
And gather them because they give me power
Over all men and women.  (I.1)

As much as I like this, though, re-reading it I can see the limits.  The rhythm is deft, the syllables juicy and fun to read aloud, but where is the surprise – where is the word that is out of place yet exactly right?  Something like “Witch's mummy, maw and gulf / Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark.”  Now I am whining that this expertly assembled and surprisingly entertaining Longfellow play is not Macbeth.  No, it is altogether plainer and saner, in both language and conception, and is merely Longfellow at his best, or close to it.

Longfellow and the poetics of bird defense in America - the ceaseless fusillade of terror

It’s always the same story when I return to boring, stuffy, old-fashioned, simple-minded Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:  “This is a lot better than I expected.”  You think I would learn sometime, although some of the fault might lie with Longfellow.

In the plus column, Longfellow is among the deftest versifiers to ever write in English; the biggest minus is that he had no ideas of any originality so expended much of his talent on well-made versions of banalities.  But in the end it is the exceptions that survive.  So I will celebrate Book Blogger Appreciation Week by writing about some of Longfellow’s exceptions.  Since no one wants to read about Longfellow, the posts will be eminently skippable and skimmable, thus allowing my valued readers to get off the dang internet earlier than usual.  No, no, thank you!

In “The Birds of Killingworth,” a New England town decides it has had enough with their thievery and racket and votes to kill all the birds in town.  I see that two of the poems eight pages are devoted to a defense of the birds, not all that interesting.  No, it is the massacre that is interesting:

And so the dreadful massacre began;
    O’er fields and orchards, and o’er woodland crests,
The ceaseless fusillade of terror ran.
    Dead fell the birds, with blood-stains on their breasts,
Or wounded crept away from sight of man,
    While the young died of famine in their nests;
A slaughter to be told in groans, not words,
The very Saint Bartholomew of Birds!

As much as I enjoy singing along with Longfellow, he also spurs me to argue with him, and what is the point of that, so I will just say that the best lines are more in the middle of the stanza than at the beginning or end, the Fs and Ds and Ss (“ceaseless fusillade”), and the horrible image of the crawling wounded birds.

Anyway, the best part is what happens without the birds, a Dantean hell on earth, some of it ecologically plausible, some more fanciful:

The Summer came, and all the birds were dead;
    The days were like hot coals; the very ground
Was burned to ashes; in the orchards fed
    Myriads of caterpillars, and around
The cultivated fields and garden-beds
    Hosts of devouring insects crawled, and found
No foe to check their march, till they had made
The land a desert without leaf or shade.

Actually, this is the best part of the best part:

From the trees spun down
    The canker-worms upon the passers-by,
Upon each woman’s bonnet, shawl and gown,
    Who shook them off with just a little cry;

Longfellow does not have a satisfactory ending to the tale, so I will just spend a minute enjoying the Song of the Canker-worms.  As the narrator said in that Jacques Poulin novel, “we must embrace the author’s style.”  I assume that the current cohort of eco-critics have made great use of this surprising environmental parable in verse.

Actually, I could look that up in the MLA International Bibliography.  Hmm, one article, “The Poetics of Bird Defense in America, 1860-1918” (in Poetry After Cultural Studies, 2011), Angela Sorby.  One article since 1947.  Listen, eco-critics, you’re missing a sure thing here.  Sheesh.

Nothing is better than simplicity - Longfellow vs Whitman, again

From the aggravating Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass:

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity.  Nothing is better than simplicity . . . nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness.

The ellipses are Whitman’s, an annoying orthographical tic that he thankfully suppresses later in his career.  It’s just a comma.  Never mind that.  Not what I want to say.

I want to end the week with two Longfellow vs. Whitman comparisons.  First, the two poets, however different, share some goals, share them precisely.  Both profoundly believe in the necessity of the creation of something called American poetry, something that is not European, that is not whatever is going on in English poetry.

Longfellow solves the problem by writing on American subjects:  Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish.  “America” here includes French Canadians, pre-contact Native Americans, and, in other poems, slaves and sailors and anyone else Longfellow can think of.  The founding of America – the Plymouth colony, the American Revolution - becomes a source of legends.

Longfellow was not merely a deft and supple poet, but an innovator.  I’ve both mocked and enjoyed his attempt to bring hexameter into English prosody, and now have to admit that his use of it in The Courtship of Miles Standish is an improvement on Evangeline.  He wanted to expand what poetry could do, and how it was done, and he succeeded.

Unless the comparison is relative, because he did not tear poetry down and build it up again.  He did not push the language to the extremes of its resources like Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson were doing at the same time.  Nor did he extend the subject matter into forbidden and outrageous territory or new frontiers of obscurity like his peers Charles Baudelaire and Gérard de Nerval.  Later poets and critics ranked poets according to the magnitude or importance of their innovations, so Longfellow falls behind.  He does not vanish, but he lags.

Second: Simplicity, complexity.  Leaves of Grass is inexhaustibly complex.  I know I’ll come back to it again and again.  Whitman’s praise of simplicity is pure misdirection.  In the 1855 Preface, Whitman describes, at length, the characteristics of “the great poet”: “The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor,” for example.  My working assumption at this point is that Whitman is describing himself, a great poet, without too much irony.  Still, the idea that Leaves of Grass, even in this short, early version, lacks excess, or is perfectly definite, or is simple in any significant way, is absurd.  Whitman reminds me of William Blake or Friedrich Hölderlin, world-creating poets so complex that readers scour fragments and drafts looking for clues to the meaning of specific words.  Well, maybe it was all simple for Walt Whitman.  Not for me.

“The poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away,” Whitman writes near the end of the Preface.  He might have been thinking of Longfellow, who was often criticized for being too European in his poetics (that he merely grafted American subjects onto European forms).  The Song of Hiawatha is, I think, too simple to be a great poem.  Its limits are reached too easily, its imagery is insufficiently rich, its ideas too easily grasped.  The fact that I think this makes Leaves of Grass a greater poem says less about the poems than about my own aesthetic standards, which are received and very much of my time.

More Whitman, later, after a break.  More Longfellow, too.  He’s no Walt Whitman, but he’s pretty good.

Fretting about The Song of Hiawatha -what is an "Indian epic"?

Frederic Remington illustrated the 1891 edition of The Song of Hiawatha (1855).  That’s the one I have been using, reprinted by David R. Godine in 2004.  Remington’s illustrations of the story itself, one per canto, are pedestrian.  More unusual, better, are the drawings on the right margin of every page: tools, clothing, animals, faces, picture writing, sometimes relevant to the text, but as often not.

The objects are from Remington’s own collection, or from museums, and as a result are primarily modern Plains Indian artifacts.  I think they add immeasurably to the attractiveness of the book itself, but they also highlight a problem with Longfellow’s poem.  Longfellow wanted to write an “Indian epic.”  What is an Indian epic?

The first Canto is titled “The Peace Pipe.” The poem begins:

On the Mountains of the Prairie,
On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry,
Gitche Manito, the mighty,
He the Master of Life, descending,
On the red crags of the quarry
Stood erect, and called the nations,
Called the tribes of men together.

The Red Pipe-stone Quarry is a specific place, now a National Monument in Minnesota, that I hope to visit some day.  Longfellow, like Remington, is describing a specific, existing object.  But the quarry is also generalized, made part of a broader story, an “Indian” story.  “Came the Mandans and Dacotahs, \ Came the Hurons and Ojibways” and so on.  Longfellow’s Indian epic is constructed out of bits and pieces of the legends of many peoples, Iroquois and Ojibwa, primarily, all filtered through the writings of early proto-anthropologists.

Is The Song of Hiawatha a diluted Ojibwa story, or a hodgepodge of many stories, or a genuine synthesis?  The Red Pipe-stone Quarry really did have special significance for a widespread group of people, so it’s a great place to start.  I’m not so sure that Longfellow succeeds as well everywhere else.  The fact that his up-to-the-minute anthropological research has now been largely replaced just reminds me of the dangers of up-to-the-minuteness.

The poem ends with the appearance of a Jesuit priest, perhaps Père Marquette himself.  The peaceful Hiawatha greets the priest, listens respectfully, and then, like King Arthur or Frodo, crosses the waters “To the Land of the Hereafter!”  The Indian culture hero recognizes the approaching death of his world, and withdraws.  As an ending to the poem Longfellow wrote, this is about perfect.  As an idea with some relationship to actual Native American culture, I see a few problems.  Have any later poets, Native American or otherwise, tried to reclaim Hiawatha from Longfellow?  They must have.  I can imagine several approaches, not all of which use the word “resistance.”

I have no problem with any writer appropriating, as they say, the culture, language, beliefs, or religion of anyone else, nor do I put much value on respect.  I love a good travesty.  Take your shot, Mr. Poet, and let’s see how you do.  The Song of Hiawatha was, politically, progressive, to introduce another anachronism.  Sincere.  Longfellow took Native American culture seriously, as did Frederic Remington.  And that genuine interest was artistically transformed into – into what?  In 1855, American readers were prepared to feel nobly interested in Native American culture and deeply moved by its eclipse, now that the conflict had moved a thousand miles west.  In 1891, what reader doubted that Hiawatha really was gone, and could never return?  In 2010 – I’m still thinking about it.

The Song of Hiawatha vs. Leaves of Grass - an idea that didn't work, which didn't stop me

So for some reason I thought it might be instructive to read Walt Whitman and Henry Longfellow together, specifically the first edition of Leaves of Grass and The Song of Hiawatha.  Both were published in 1855.  The latter became, possibly, the most popular long poem in the English language, for as long as long poems were popular.  The former revolutionized American, Spanish, and Portuguese poetry – eventually.  Genius versus talent.  Freedom versus constraint.  Future versus past.  Art versus kitsch.  What fun.

Well, now I’m not so sure.  I mean, I assumed that Hiawatha, Longfellow’s attempt at an authentic Native American epic, was better than its reputation, and it is.  How much better – later, later.  Let me set Whitman aside, too, and relate a story from my literary education.

I can’t remember actually reading The Song of Hiawatha, or any little chip of it, in tenth grade, but I remember the instructor using it to teach us about meter:

ON the SHORES of GITCHe GUmee
OF the SHINing BIG-Sea-WATer (Canto IX)

And so on, each foot given the same length, each stressed syllable pounded like a drum.  Like a tom tom drum, you know, like Indians play.  I think the real lesson was simply that meter exists, so a level of exaggeration was understandable.

But some damage was done.  The reader does not have to – and should not – read the poem this way.  The trochaic tetrameter is in fact quite natural, even conversational, while allowing for a more ritualistic, repetitive mode when useful.  Hiawatha does not sound weird or artificial.  Even the above lines, read naturally, closer to anapests (“On the SHORES of Gitche GUmee”) don’t sound so bad.  More typically, Hiawatha sounds no more artificial to me than blank verse:

And whenever Hiawatha
Came from fishing or from hunting,
When the evening meal was ready,
And the food had been divided,
Gliding from their darksome corner,
Came the pallid guests, the strangers,
Seized upon the choicest portions
Set aside for Laughing Water,
And without rebuke or question
Flitted back among the shadows. (Canto XIX)

Those pallid guests are ghosts; this is from one of the weirdest and to me most interesting parts of the story.  If this were prose, it would sound odd, but how odd?  “And whenever Hiawatha came from fishing or from hunting, when the evening meal was ready, and the food had been divided” and so on.  As prose, the filler becomes more visible to me – “from fishing or hunting” would be better – and maybe the clauses should be rearranged a little, but the rhythm is not particularly insistent.

Whatever problems The Song of Hiawatha has, it is not kitsch.  The subject matter is treated respectfully, the meter complements the subject, and the versification is expert.  It was a pleasure to read.  I read Leaves of Grass with furrowed brow; with Hiawatha I am calm and relaxed.  Ah - perhaps that’s the problem.

A Longfellow jug and a Carlyle vase - literary bric-a-brac at the Peabody Essex Museum

I saw such odd things in the Decorative Arts section of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. Just below the Hawthorne portrait, and a bit to the right, are a couple of Wedgwood memorial pieces, a Thomas Carlyle vase from 1882 and a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - what is it? a milk jug? - from 1883, both produced a year after the death of each author. * (See correction below)

The Longfellow whatsit is on the left. I can't find, and didn't take, a picture of the Carlyle vase. For some reason, the Longfellow souvenir does not seem nearly as ridiculous as the Carlyle knickknack, which featured the scowling author and a thistle motif, presumably because Carlyle was himself a sort of human thistle. I wish I had a picture of it.

The back of the Longfellow piece features a chunk of his long poem "Keramos" (1878):

Turn, turn, my wheel? Turn round and round
Without a pause, without a sound:
So spins the flying world away!
This clay, well mixed with marl and sand,
Follows the motion of my hand;
Far some must follow, and some command,
Though all are made of clay!

It's a poem about ceramics, printed on a piece of ceramics! How about that. And it's about death. Everything in one package. No idea why that question mark is there.

If the jug is not kitschy enough, take a look at this thing, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John," (1892) a plaster rendering of a scene from "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Big devil, maybe a foot high, more. I don't know what to make of these objects. They're a glimpse of a lost world, that's for certain. I do not regret that we no longer appreciate our authors in this manner.

The Peabody Essex Museum is not a conventional art museum. It is founded on the collections of early 19th century Salem merchants and ship captains, many of whom specialized in trade with China, Polynesia, and, eventually, Japan, and who did not necessarily have what would now be considered the best possible taste. Although many of the museum's pieces are of high aesthetic interest, many others are more like specimens. The museum does not attempt to hide this either. Their key collection is labeled "Asian Export Art."

And this is aside from objects like the first stuffed penguin ever exhibited in North America. Ratty thing. I'd love to spend more time in the museum, piecing together the story of who collected what and why.

* I misread the date somewhere. The Longfellow jug, as a friendly commenter points out, was produced in 1880, while Longfellow was alive. For more information, see Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning by Regina Lee Blaszczyk, 2002, John Hopkins University Press.

Everything's great - a George Sand idyll

Everywhere I look, in everything I read, things are going great. Or they go great for a while, but then something bad happens. Or they're going great now, except that things are a little weird, because something bad happened a long time ago. For some reason, I have been reading a lot of idylls.*

Herman Melville, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, Longfellow in Evangeline, Eliot in Adam Bede - they all build their stories around some sort of idealized rural setting, always with some sort of threat (even in Arcadia, am I, says Death) hidden somewhere. In Evangeline and Adam Bede, a tragedy disturbs the idyll, while in Stifter and Storm the sorrows lie in the past.

George Sand's The Devil's Pool (1846)** is an especially idyllic idyll. A young farmer, a widower, is going to visit a nearby village to meet an eligible widow. By chance, he is accompanied by a poor, pretty shepherdess; his adorable seven year-old son comes along as well. They all get lost in the woods. The sheperdess is really pretty. And good with children. And she secretly gathers chestnuts while they walk, and has an exta bottle of wine, all of which turns out to be kind of handy when lost in the woods. That widow does not have a prayer.

Sand begins the short novel by invoking a Holbein print, from The Dance of Death. See left. That's Death striking the horses. She describes the image only to reject it:

"So it was that I had before my eyes a picture the reverse of Holbein, although the scene was similar. Instead of a wretched old man, a young and active one; instead of a team of weary and emaciated horses, four yoke of robust and fiery oxen; instead of death, a beautiful child; instead of despair and destruction, energy and the possibility of happiness." (Ch. I)

That young man's story is the one Sand chooses to write. "I might write his story, though that story were as simple, as straightforward, and unadorned as the furrow he was tracing." Curious that she feels she has to justify it like this. I don't understand French Romanticism.

More, the best part of The Devil's Pool, tomorrow.

* Well, not anymore, now that I'm reading Cousin Bette, a vulgar and chaotic anti-idyll.

** La Mare au Diable. I've also seen it translated as The Haunted Pool, and as The Devil's Pond.

Poems as arrows and axes - It fell to earth, I knew not where - (plus, one arrow, found)

A Longfellow poem contemporary with Evangeline:

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

This poem-and-arrow business reminded me of the 10th/ 11th century Indian poem by Nannecoda I put up back here:

An arrow shot by an archer
or a poem made by a poet
should cut through your heart,
jolting the head.
If it doesn’t, it’s no arrow,
it’s no poem.

If Longfellow's poems are like arrows, they must have suction cup tips. I like Longfellow well enough, but I have yet to find one that jolted my head. The Nannecoda cut a little bit.

Meine Frau, upon reading the Nannecoda poem, was reminded of this statement of Franz Kafka's, from Max Brod's biography:

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. "

A blow on the head? An arrow through the heart? And isn't Longfellow's bow safety appalling? He should take a class. Where was I? I was just sitting there reading Kafka, and the next thing I knew I was in the emergency room. Ow, my head!

I can see that one might miss the violence inherent in Longfellow's poem. The other examples sort of bring it to the front. Even setting that aside, these are incredibly strong demands to make of a book or poem. How many poems or stories have this effect on even one person? How many have this effect on me? Very few. A select, treasured few.

My first Clay Sanskrit Library post, linked above, turns out to have been an arrow that landed I knew not where. On Wednesday I received the CSL Autumn newsletter email and was delighted, and shocked, to see "Wuthering Expectations" right up there on top. Look, here I am on their press page, along with Library Journal and the Asian edition of Time.* The email also included a link to my Life of the Buddha post, which was only two days old - fast work.

* And a couple of interesting blogs. languagehat is a Professional Reader, a linguist, who writes about novels and poems as well as linguistics. The Proust posts are excellent. rpollack is a grad student in the East Asian program at St. Johns's. This post on how to pick a fight with a book is full of first-rate advice.

Hawthorne's ideas - a man to swallow a small snake

Hawthorne's Evangeline, not quite the same as Longfellow's:

"H. L. Conolly heard from a French Canadian a story of a young couple in Acadie. On their marriage day, all the men of the Province were summoned to assemble in the church to hear a proclamation. When assembled, they were all seized and shipped off to be distributed through New England, - among them the new bridegroom. His bride set out in search of him, - wandered about New England all her lifetime, and at last, when she was old, she found her bridegroom on his death-bed. The shock was so great that it killed her likewise."

This is from the American Notebooks, Centenary Edition, p. 182. Hawthorne apparently thought it was not quite his kind of story and passed it on to Longfellow, who got his first bestseller from it.

Hawthorne's notebooks are filled with pages of story ideas. Most of them sound terrible to me. How about this one:

"A very fanciful person, when dead, to have his burial in a cloud." p. 183

Ugh. Or this one:

"Meditations about the main gas-pipe of a great city, - if the supply were to be stopped, what would happen? How many different scenes it sheds light on? It might be made emblematical of something." p. 166

Or it might not. Let's try:

"A man to swallow a small snake - and it to be a symbol of a cherished sin." p. 228

Can this possibly be the way to write a good story, by starting with the symbol? All right, one more:

"The life of a woman, who, by the old colony law, was condemned always to wear the letter A, sewed on her garment, in token of her having committed adultery." p. 254

Yes, just another hopeless idea from Nathaniel Hawthorne's notebooks.

My favorite Dr. Johnson poem, and more dactylic hexameter

The Wikipedia entry for dactylic hexameter includes two English examples. One is from - hey, look at that - Evangeline, the (sort of) famous first line:

"This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks"

The encyclopedist actually breaks up the line into its six feet, which is very handy, since it has 17 syllables divided into six parts. But I don't care about that. What I really liked was the second, unsourced, example:

"Down in a deep dark hole sat an old pig munching a bean stalk"

Could the wikipedist have made this up herself? She has the nerve to say that the line has an "absurd meaning." I understood it perfectly. Also, I kind of like it.

It reminds me of one of my favorite Dr. Johnson poems, said to be an impromptu composition:

I put my hat upon my head,
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.

Johnson meant this, can you believe it, as an example of bad poetry. It rhymes, it scans, yet it is bad. Johnson wanted to differentiate bewteen simple and simple-minded. I dunno. With a diet of Lear's nonsense, children's poems, and William Carlos Williams's delicious plums, I may have developed a taste for the simple-minded.

You can treat this is like a statement of disclosure. Don't take my opinions about poetry too seriously. I like "I put my hat upon my head."

Longfellow's Evangeline - is this poetry?

"Thatched were the roofs, with dormer-windows; and gables projecting
Over the basement below protected and shaded the doorway."

That there is some poetry, courtesy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), Part I, Canto 1. Some people say that you really have to read poetry aloud to appreciate it. Give that a shot. Any better? No?

The meter is the problem, I guess. Evangeline is in dactylic hexameter, an epic meter, used by Homer and Virgil. In English, it's just prose. Rhythmic prose, but still. Suggestions of exceptions are most welcome.

Longfellow could do a lot better than that dormer and gable stuff. Here's a blacksmith:

"There at the door they stood, with wondering eyes to behold him
Take in his leathern lap the hoof of the horse as a plaything,
Nailing the shoe in its place; while near him the tire of the cart-wheel
Lay like a fiery snake, coiled round in a circle of cinders." (I.1.)

The fiery snake is nice, as is the little flash of characterization of the blacksmith. I even hear a hint of poetry at the end. This is good rhythmic prose. Or how about this description of a Louisiana swamp:

"Lovely the moonlight was as it glanced and gleamed on the water,
Gleamed on the columns of cypress and cedar sustaining the arches,
Down through whose broken vaults it fell as through chinks in a ruin." (II.1.)

Actually, the whole section from which I took that passage is pretty good.

Evangeline ia a long (60 pages or so) narrative poem, based on a terrible event in Canadian history, when the British forcibly evicted the French settlers from part of Nova Scotia. Today, we call this ethnic cleansing. In Longfellow's poem a young woman is separated from her husband and devotes her life to searching for him. Late in the poem, her search takes on a mythic quality that effectively deepens the meaning of the story.

It's a good story. It's easy to see why it was so popular for so long. I have trouble seeing how it would have been much different in prose.

Sorrows neither few nor brief – Jorge Manrique

The logical place to end my tour of poetry in translation is in Spain, but I don’t know much about 19th century Spanish poetry. Just some names – Becquer, Ruben Dario – subjects for future research. So here’s a 19th century translation of a 15th century Spanish poet.

Jorge Manrique (1440-79) is remembered for one great poem, “Las Coplas a la muerte de su padre”, “Couplets on the death of his father.” Manrique’s father was a knight who died in combat against the Moors (this is before 1492 – still the age of chivalry and crusading in Spain). The son’s poem is an elegy, but also a way to ask what makes life meaningful. Here’s how it begins:

O let the soul her slumbers break,
Let thought be quickened, and awake;
Awake to see
How soon this life is past and gone,
And death comes softly stealing on,
How silently!

Swiftly our pleasures glide away,
Our hearts recall the distant day
With many sighs;
The moments that are speeding fast
We heed not, but the past,—the past,
More highly prize.

Onward its course the present keeps,
Onward the constant current sweeps,
Till life is done;
And, did we judge of time aright,
The past and future in their flight
Would be as one.

There is some relationship here with humanist ideas that I do not usually associate with Spain. The last stanza contains a sophisticated idea about the difference between the future and the past – why do we think of them so differently?

O World! so few the years we live,
Would that the life which thou dost give
Were life indeed!
Alas! thy sorrows fall so fast,
Our happiest hour is when at last
The soul is freed.

Our days are covered o'er with grief,
And sorrows neither few nor brief
Veil all in gloom;
Left desolate of real good,
Within this cheerless solitude
No pleasures bloom.

Thy pilgrimage begins in tears,
And ends in bitter doubts and fears,
Or dark despair;
Midway so many toils appear,
That he who lingers longest here
Knows most of care.

Manrique presents this dark view of life to argue with it, providing a list of examples from Spanish history of heores who lived and died in meaningful ways. He ends the list with his father:

He left no well-filled treasury,
He heaped no pile of riches high,
Nor massive plate;
He fought the Moors, and, in their fall,C
ity and tower and castled wall
Were his estate.

Here’s his end, and the end of the poem:

As thus the dying warrior prayed,
Without one gathering mist or shade
Upon his mind;
Encircled by his family,
Watched by affection's gentle eye
So soft and kind;

His soul to Him, who gave it, rose;
God lead it to its long repose,
Its glorious rest!
And, though the warrior's sun has set,
Its light shall linger round us yet,
Bright, radiant, blest.

The last line is perfect. This translation was done by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, young Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, in 1833, before he had published his own poems. The reputation of Longfellow, once one of the most popular poets of the 19th century, is not very high now. I don’t know his poems well enough to know why. But he was a superb translator of poetry, one of the best.

Manrique’s Coplas are one of the few works of any sort that I’ve read in two languages. Longfellow keeps the same form and meter. He changes the rhyme scheme a little (he uses AAB/CCB, while the original is ABC/ABC). He poeticizes some prosaic bits, and rearranges the order of sentences. He omits three stanzas. To me, the mood, the feel is just like the original.

Longfellow’s version is a masterpiece. I don’t know why it shouldn’t be as famous as Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat”. Too late for that now, I suppose. Longfellow also made marvelous translations of poems of Dante, Michelangelo, Goethe. I think they are models of poetic translation. Maybe a Longfellow revival is due.