White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled - the best books of 1866

The best book of 1866 is so obvious that it is barely worth disagreeing, but as Raskolnikov says himself, “The wrong form, you mean – the aesthetics aren’t right!” (VI.7, tr. Oliver Ready).  My favorite book of 1866 is not Crime and Punishment but Victor Hugo’s staggering and preposterous man-against-nature – man-against-hurricane – man-against-octopus – epic The Toilers of the Sea, illustrated above.  The steamboat pictured is about to get stuck on a strange rock formation, and the hero will spend most of the novel fighting everything Hugo can throw at him to get it moving again.  “Then, taking up in the hollow of his hand a little water from a pool of rainwater, he drank it and cried to the clouds: ‘Fooled you!’”  That’s right, he is insulting the clouds, defying the cosmos, as one does in a Victor Hugo book.

Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler this year, too, alongside Crime and Punishment, under contractual conditions that would have crushed most writers.  Now there is some kind of heroism.  I would like to read a Victor Hugo novel about Dostoevsky writing Crime and Punishment and The Gambler.

Henrik Ibsen’s Brand is from 1866, as well, about another defier of the cosmos.  Brand, Raskolnikov, and Hugo’s hero – big characters in big stories.

I do not believe I have read any English-language novels from the year.  Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, George Eliot’s Felix Holt, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, just barely unfinished, would be likely candidates for the Booker Prize, if there had been such a thing.  Gaskell had never won the prize, beat by Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope, so I think she picks this one up posthumously.  I am just making this up.  Like I care about prizes.

It was a broadly interesting year for poetry.  Paul Verlaine published his first book, Poèmes saturniens, which I have only read in part, and of course in English.  The French looks like this, from “Chansons d’automne,” one of Verlaine’s best-known poems:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
     De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
     Monotone.

Lip-smacking French verse.  Those first three lines, those vowels, those nasalizations.  Maybe the poem also means something.

Algernon Swinburne’s first books of lyrics, Poems and Ballads, appeared, ruining English poetry for decades until austere, brutal Modernists dynamited and carted off his lush, sweet gibberish:

from Hymn to Proserpine

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

It is like The Toilers of the Sea turned into English verse.  Swinburne was Hugo’s greatest English champion.

Christina Rossetti’s second book, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems seemed like a paler version of her brilliant first book, but I’ll note it, at least.

In the United States, Herman Melville published Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, his debut as a poet and his first book in a decade, the first of all too few volumes of poetry.  Even more surprising somehow is James Greenleaf Whittier’s nostalgic, ironic “Snow-Bound,” surprising because Whittier was generally such a bad poet, but one who occasionally wrote a great poem.  Whether the torments inflicted by the poem on several generations of schoolchildren are to the demerit of Whittier I leave to the conscience of the individual reader.  Those days are long past.

There shall be no more sea - Christina Rossetti writes poems about the sea

Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
    Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
    One sonnet more…

The book has so many sonnets.  Christina Rossetti tells the truth.  The book is A Pageant and Other Poems (1881, the same year as her brother’s Ballads and Sonnets – so many sonnets), her third book of poems not counting devotional works and books for children and so on, and the least of them for reasons which include the large number of sonnets.

Christina Rossetti was facing the same problems as her brother, the same problems as every English-language poet.  There was a mismatch between the available forms and language of post-Romantic poetry and what poets were trying to express about themselves or their world.  Even as strong a poet as Christina Rossetti was affected.

I suppose I ought to defend this idea at some point. Reading a cluster of poets from the period it seems blatant, analogous to the exactly contemporary “crisis of Impressionism.”

Rossetti responded in two ways.  One was a reconnection with form, thus all of the sonnets, including many sonnet sequences, but also “The Months: A Pageant,” an allegorical poetic calendar that is the most conventional, kitschy Rossetti I have ever read.  It does have this marvelous stage direction:

[July retires into a shrubbery.]

The other response was Rossetti’s turn to devotional poetry and other devotional works, so that half of A Pageant is religious poetry.  Her next, and last, book of poems, Verses (1893) consists entirely of devotional poems.  I am not such a good reader of these poems, and I do not plan to read all of Verses, although I have paged through it. There are wonders, lines like “Steeped in this rotten world I fear to rot” (l.8 of “I, Lord, Thy foolish sinner low and small”) and poems like the sequence of three sea poems beginning with “Was Thy Wrath against the Sea?”

The sea laments with unappeasable
    Hankering wail of loss,
       Lifting its hands on high and passing by
           Out of the lovely light:

No foambow any more may crest that swell
    Of clamorous waves which toss;
        Lifting in hands on high it passes by
           From light into the night.  (ll. 1-8)

The poet tells the sea to reconcile itself with God’s purpose (“God doeth right”), yet the next poem is “And there was no more Sea,” and the third repeats the phrase:

Be stilled, my passionate heart;
    Old earth shall end, new earth shall be:
Be still, and earn they part
    Where shall be no more sea.  (ll. 9-12)

My difficulty with the devotional poems is that they are intentionally functional, meant to provide solace and aid worship, with imagery drawn from the (large, rich) pool of Christian tradition.  Yet, these sea poems – unconventional, personally expressive.

I read A Pageant but have barely mentioned it, and did not read Verses but am quoting from it.  I will say that the non-devotional poems from the earlier book, setting aside the longer allegorical stuff, are as good as the usual Christina Rossetti, which at this point meant better than anyone publishing poems in English.  This sea poem – not devotional, something else – was added to the 1888 edition of the book:

Birchington Churchyard

A lowly hill which overlooks a flat,
  Half sea, half country side;
  A flat-shored sea of low-voiced creeping tide
Over a chalky weedy mat.

A hill of hillocks, flowery and kept green
  Round crosses raised for hope,
  With many-tinted sunsets where the slope
Faces the lingering western sheen.

A lowly hope, a height that is but low,
  While Time sets solemnly,
  While the tide rises of Eternity,
Silent and neither swift nor slow.

This poem is followed by one titled “One Sea-side Grave.”  The grave is that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

What are brief? What are deep? - Christina Rossetti's nursery rhymes

This week at Wuthering Expectations:  educational literature.  Or literature about education.  Whatever.  I don’t care.

First up, the former, Christina Rossetti’s Sing-song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872).  I read this copy, housed at Indiana University.  I wanted an edition with the original illustrations by pre-Raphaelite painter Arthur Hughes.

Sing-song is not a great book, as a collection of Rossetti poetry or as something of interest to the youngsters of today, but it still has some interest to me.  Sometimes the Rossetti quality seeps through the poems.

Like here, p. 10:

I have no trouble hearing that this is the author of “In the bleak midwinter.”  Aside from the music of the poem, the specificity of the basket and the plant is appealing.  The “tombstone of snow” is almost too symbolically meaningful.

The snowberry bush, and the thrush, too, are part of the educational content of Sing-song.  Poems educate the littl’uns about flowers and birds, colors, sums, months, currency, time, and kindness to animals – again and again, kindness to animals.

I know that the point of the illustration is that the little boy – note his grisly snare in the background –  should leave the mole alone as well as the other critters, but given the mole’s central placement, and given that he is not mentioned in the poem, it is almost as if the poet is urging the mole to leave the worms and bugs alone, even taunting him by calling the beetle “fat.”  At least she omitted “juicy.”  Poor hungry mole.

Another sad example:

Hear what the mournful linnets say:
   “We built our nest compact and warm,
But cruel boys came round our way
   And took our summerhouse by storm.

“They crushed the eggs so neatly laid;
   So now we sit with drooping wing,
And watch the ruin they have made,
   Too late to build, too sad to sing.”  (14)

Poems like this one complement those about dead or dying children, of which there are at least eight.  The poems also have some value for mothers:

Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?
  Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder:
I must tramp on through the winter night dreary,
  While the snow falls on me colder and colder.  (19)

Meanwhile the baby sleeps and dreams “of pretty things…  of pleasure.”

Rossetti also includes riddles and nonsense.  My favorite example of the latter, when a bit of nightmarish Carrollian surrealism intrudes:

The riddles can have their own beauty.  This example has obvious rhymes and sentiments, but is pleasingly sonorous:

What are heavy?  sea-sand and sorrow:
What are brief?  to-day and tomorrow:
What are frail?  spring blossoms and youth:
What are deep?  the ocean and truth.  (34)

I am perhaps making the book sound better than it really is.  Most of the poems are trivial, merely cute, no different than in a hundred other similar books.  The Poetry Foundation singles out this one for some reason:

Mix a pancake,
Stir a pancake,
    Pop it in the pan;
Fry the pancake,
Toss the pancake, –
    Catch it if you can.

Not that I am against pancakes – what a terrible thing to even suggest – but I do not think it required the genius of Christina Rossetti to come up with that poem.

Still, I went looking for Rossetti and found her.

Woolf on Rossetti - "I Am Christina Rossetti"

One-ninth of the way through Algernon Swinburne’s six-volumes of collected letters, in 1866, he has not even mentioned Christina Rossetti.  She had published two outstanding books at this point, and Swinburne was an obsessive reader of poetry as well as close friends with her brothers.

In Swinburne’s defense, 1) many letters are lost, 2) at the point I have reached he is amply occupied with the horrified critical reaction to his own blasphemous and obscene book, and also his prodigious alcoholism, and 3), later, although I do not know when, he wrote about Rossetti that “I have always thought that nothing more glorious in poetry has ever been written” and that a particular poem, one I have not read, “was touched as with the fire and bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.”

Swinburne is as bad as the folks who write blurbs for novels today.  I found this bee-yoo-tee in Virginia Woolf’s 1930 essay “’I Am Christina Rossetti.’”  Woolf singles out that quote, I am afraid, to mock Swinburne, along with two lesser critics.  “Very little of value has been said about poetry since the world began,” writes Woolf, as if she were familiar with Wuthering Expectations.

Woolf proceeds to follow her own advice and say little, devoting four of her seven pages to a fragmented biography of Rossetti.  At what is this novelist better than fragmented biography?

… in reality she dwelt in some curious region where the spirit strives towards an unseen God – in her case, a dark God, a harsh God – a God who decreed that all the pleasures of the world were hateful to Him.  The theatre was hateful, the opera was hateful, nakedness was hateful – when her friend Miss Thompson painted naked figures in her pictures she had to tell Christina they were fairies, but Christina saw through the imposture…  [Her belief] taught her that chess was wrong, but that whist and cribbage did not matter.

A novel about Christina Rossetti would do well to be careful about making her too sympathetic.  By “do well” I of course mean “do badly”; such a novel would likely do badly and be remaindered quickly.

Woolf also says a bit of value about Rossetti’s poetry, just a little, emphasizing her musicality and sharp eye, as when she points out these marvelous lizards:

My heath lay farther off, where lizards lived
    In strange metallic mail, just spied and gone;
Like darted lightnings here and there perceived
        But no where dwelt upon.  (“From House to Home”)

I have now quoted almost as many lines of Rossetti as Woolf did.  Her criticism method is metaphor.  “Death, oblivion, and rest lap round your songs with their dark wave,” for example.  The piece ends with an apocalyptic fantasy of an underwater London – now that was a surprise.  Rossetti will still be read, even then, that is Woolf’s point.

“’I Am Christina Rossetti’” was published a year after A Room of One’s Own.  It would make a pleasing and useful appendix to that book.

What do you do there? – what have you found? - a glance at Rossetti's aesthetics of renunciation

What I have been finding in Christina Rossetti – this is hardly unusual for Wuthering Expectations – is nothing like a new discovery.  This is her brother William:  “She was replete with the spirit of self-postponement.”  The more I read in and around Christina Rossetti and her circle, the more I understand that they all actually wrote, talked, and thought like this.  That was a digression.  I pulled the quote from the Rossetti introduction of my Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, 5th ed., p. 1502, where I also find the critics Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar saying Rossetti created “an aesthetics of renunciation.”

They are suggesting something more complicated than subject matter, but rather an approach to poetry.  The monotony of theme is countered by the variety of setting and form.

I guess this is a sort of side note since it would take too long, and be too dull, to support the argument, but Rossetti must be one of the great masters of form in the language.  She does the subtlest things with line length, for example.  Perhaps some of this is visible in my excerpts.  Rossetti wrote in what must have been a competitive period.  Everyone was working in Tennyson’s shadow, I suppose, so you had to outdo him to be noticed.

So I will drop back to the poem’s setting, which is easier.  I am thinking not of the  setting of a novel, but the setting of a diamond.  A lonely, self-denying diamond.

In “The Queen of Hearts,” the setting is domestic, even humorous.  Two women are playing cards, and the speaker spins out the metaphor that her opponent, lucky in cards and love (unlike the poet), always draws the queen of hearts:

It baffles me to puzzle out the clue,
Which must be skill, or craft, or luck in you:
      Unless, indeed, it be
      Natural affinity.

The affinity of Rossetti’s heroines lies elsewhere.  Her speakers are often ghosts:

“I go home alone to my bed,
Dug deep at the foot and deep at the head,
Roofed in with a load of lead,
Warm enough for the forgotten dead.” (“The Poor Ghost”)

Or are speaking to ghosts:

“What do you do there, underground,
    In the dark hollow?  I’m fain to follow.
What do you do there? – what have you found?” –  (“The Ghost’s Petition”)

Ballads, songs, seasons, fairy tales, dreams, nature poems – all lead to negation and sacrifice:

Then as their plumes fell fluttering to the ground,
    Their snow-white  plumage flecked with crimson drops,
        I wept, and thought I turned towards you to weep:
    But you were gone; while rustling hedgerow tops
Bent in a wind which bore to me a sound
        Of far-off piteous bleat of lambs and sheep.  (“On the Wing”)

These have all been from The Prince’s Progress.  In that book, the selection of non-devotional poems ends with a surprise, a long narrative poem about illegitimacy, “’The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children,’” told by a character who works as a servant for her well-born mother, her parentage a secret to the world.  Whatever kinship the poem might have in its novelistic detail to, say, Elizabeth Gaskell, in the end it is a Rossetti poem:

But nameless as I stand,
My hand is my own hand,
And nameless as I came
I go to the dark land.

“All equal in the grave” –
I bide my time till then:
“All equal before God” –
Today I feel His rod,
Tomorrow he may save:
                      Amen.

No future hope, no fear for evermore - Rossetti's "Prince's Progress" and more

“The Prince’s Progress,” the long narrative poem that leads off Christina Rossetti’s The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, begins (and continues, more or less) like this:

Till all sweet gums and juices flow,
Till the blossom of blossoms blow,
The long hours go and come and go,
    The bride she sleepeth, waketh, sleepeth,
Waiting for one whose coming is slow:–
        Hark! the bride weepeth.

Which is pretty good, even if I am not sure what the “blossom of blossoms” might be or why it would “blow,” aside from the alliteration.  The one who is slow is the Prince, whose Progress is not as steady as that of the Pilgrim.  He is caught up in the various distractions and sins that lay between him and his bride.  Being a Rossetti poem, the Prince is too late:

“You should have wept her yesterday,
    Wasting upon her bed:
But wherefore should you weep today
    That she is dead?”

The poem has some fine descriptions of the bizarre landscape the Prince must cross:

Some old volcanic upset must
Have rent the crust and blackened the crust;
Wrenched and ribbed it beneath its dust
    Above earth’s molten centre at seethe,
Heaved and heaped it by huge upthrust
        Of fire beneath.

Some bold word choices here, including the double “crust,” mirroring the “blossoms” of the first stanza.  The disadvantage of Rossetti’s landscape and the Prince’s quest is that it evokes Robert Browning’s strange and ambiguous “’Childe Roland to the Great Tower Came,’” one of the Greatest Poems in the Language.  Not the subject but the language evokes one of the other GpitLs, Rossetti’s own “Goblin Market,” published four years earlier:

She cried “Laura,” up the garden,
“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.”

A children’s poem, this was for decades thought of as merely a charming children’s poem.

Rossetti had written a sonnet that strips off the fairy tale but otherwise seems to contain almost everything valuable about “The Prince’s Progress,” fourteen pages compressed into fourteen lines.  The poem dates from 1854 but for some reason was only published posthumously. 

Cobwebs

It is a land with neither night nor day,
    Nor heat nor cold, nor any wind, nor rain,
    Nor hills nor valleys: but one even plain
Stretches through long unbroken miles away,
While through the sluggish air a twilight grey
    Broodeth: no moons or seasons wax and wane,
    No ebb and flow are there among the main,
No bud-time, no leaf-falling, there for aye:–
No ripple on the sea, no shifting sand,
    No beat of wings to stir the stagnant space:
No pulse of life through all the loveless land
And loveless sea; no trace of days before,
    No guarded home, no time-worn resting-place
No future hope, no fear for evermore.

I do not understand the title.  Maybe the Prince, or poet, is actually wandering around on a giant cobweb.  Rossetti might have made a fine fantasy novelist.

That lowest place too high, make one more low - Christina Rossetti in book form

I seem not to have written about poetry for a while.  I will bet I had a good reason, although I do not remember it.  Christina Rossetti’s second book, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems from 1866 will be the book of the moment.  I do not believe I wrote anything about her debut, the 1862 Goblin Market and Other Poems, so perhaps I will glance at it as well.

No, not  perhaps – necessarily.  The comparison is too clear.  Each book begins with the long title poem, each a puzzling fantasy, follows with a series of lyrics – Rossetti is a most songful poet – and ends with a group of devotional poems.  “Goblin Market” is better than “The Prince’s Progress.”  The lyric poems are not so much better poem by poem more varied in the first book as more varied.  The Prince’s Progress is monotonous.  The religious poems – I am not such a good reader of the religious poems.  They all seem good.

Let’s try one of those.

The Lowest Place

Give me the lowest place: not that I dare
    Ask for that lowest place, but Thou hast died
That I might live and share
    Thy glory by Thy side.

Give me the lowest place: or if for me
    That lowest place too high, make one more low
Where I may sit and see
    My God and love Thee so.

The anthologies I have poked around in select lots of poems from Goblin Market and between few and none from Prince’s Progress.  As usual, my judgment turns out to be tediously conventional.  The 5th Edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature skips the book completely.  Cecil Lang’s old The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle picks just one poem, this one, “The Lowest Place.”

It is almost ur-Rossetti.  Christina the Christian martyr.  In the secular poems, her characters martyr themselves to a lover, in the Christian poems to Christ.  I do not know of another poem as bald about the matter as this one.  The first stanza seems conventional, but the second, where the poet decides she has not gone far enough in her degradation, is astounding, psychologically intense and uncomfortable.  An entire book of poems of female martyrdom is in some ways unpleasant, even when composed by a genius.

Where is the poetry in “The Lowest Place”?  It seems like it is all in the rhythm of the poem, purely iambic but pleasingly varied if read conversationally.  It is almost too simple to do much else, aside from the alliteration, and parallel construction, and  - of course once I start poking at it, more falls out.  I am simultaneously reading, or at least gazing upon, the poetry of Algernon Swinburne, exactly contemporary to Christina Rossetti, and I realize that his baroque gibberish makes everyone else look simple, so I will abandon that line of thought.  There will be plenty more to see in Rossetti’s poems.

The Best Books of 1862 - And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.

Emily Dickinson was in the middle of a creative rush that had lasted several years and would last many more.  Or so it looks now – she was having doubts.  In 1862 she sent four poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson who had just published an article in The Atlantic giving advice to new writers about publishing their work.  Dickinson asked “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”  He said it was, yet Dickinson did not try to publish.

The hidden and lost works of the past, the ones that survive by chance and magic, make for such interesting stories.  But this is not the story of the Best Books of 1862.  1862 was the Year of the Best-seller.

The big bookish events in France were 1) the publication of Victor Hugo’s massive Les Misérables, his first novel in thirty years, and 2) controversial upstart Gustave Flaubert’s followup to Madame Bovary, the gory and insane Salammbô.  Flaubert was understandably nervous that he would be crushed by Hugo, but both novels were hits.  Hugo’s audience was broader, a genuine mass readership, and much more international.  Salammbô has never had much luck outside of France.

Another international hit, albeit with a much smaller audience than Hugo’s, was Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.  I believe this was the novel that really introduced Russian literature to Europe.  It also began within Russian literature a chain of attacks and responses that is unlike anything I know in any other literature, but that story has to wait until 1863.  One of the participants was Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose House of the Dead is from 1862.

Meanwhile the new craze in English fiction was the Sensation Novel: Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, No Name by Wilkie Collins, and even Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope.  The latter two could easily have been titled Lady _____’s Secret, and in the case of the Trollope should have been, since Orley Farm is a crummy title.  Trollope was only a half-hearted Sensationalist, divulging the secret about halfway through the novel, but at least he tried.

Lady Audley’s Secret was a dead book for a while, but scholars interested in women writers and so-called genre fiction resurrected it.  I just finished it and may write about it a bit after the holiday.

If the Collins and Trollope novels feel a bit second-tier compared to their best-known books, as does George Eliot’s Romola (which began serialization in 1862), English poetry was anything but.  Lucky Victorian poetry readers enjoyed, amidst the mound of poetry that now looks tediously unreadable,  George Meredith’s Modern Love, posthumous collections by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough, and the almost shockingly assured debut of Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems.  Here is one of the others, the first half of “Song”:

When I am dead my dearest,
    Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
    Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
    With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
    And if thou wilt, forget.

Édouard Manet’s 1862 “Music in the Tuileries” is in the London National Gallery.