Perfect Lyrics (2)
Perfect Lyrics (2)
“Go, Lovely Rose” – Edmund Waller
Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me
That now she knows
When I resemble her to thee
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide
Thou must have uncommended died.
Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired
And not blush so to be admired.
Then die! That she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee
How small a part in time they share,
That are so wondrous sweet and fair
This lyric, that never fails to delight, was written in 1645 – that is, it’s
only twenty years short of 400 years since it first came into being; and I
am fairly sure that no matter when it is heard or read it generates an
unchanging response – this is one of the central tenets of what used to be
known as “Practical Criticism”, that is that the better the text, the more it
harnesses conscious and unconscious effects (yes, I am aware of the
paradox here in talking about harnessing an unconscious effect, so
maybe it would be better to talk about intuitive effects – that is, those that
come about by an intuitive understanding of the language you are using, a
deep connexion with its sounds, its innate rhythms, the way the mind -or
if you like the poetic/linguistic imagination – will always react to effects
that exist apart from the stated meaning of the words used, but that are,
nevertheless Integral to that meaning. And one of the KEY notions of
Practical Criticism is that the better the work, the more it will generate
meaning in such a way that it will create a universal impression, one
mostly shared by most readers, a consensus, a universality.
One such example might be the general reaction, the universal
response to these lines that open John Donne’s poem, “Loves Growth:”
I scarce believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grasse;
Speak it aloud, now, some four hundred years after it was written; allow the
pauses and balances brought about by the rhythmic hesitations and the
subtlety with which rhyme is used (one rhyme is perfect – pure/ endure, and
one is what is known as imperfect rhyme was/ grasse) in harness with the
alterations in line length to suggest the movement of the speaker’s thinking
and feeling as he considers the hardy nature, after all, of this feeling and the
paradox that it is all the more wonderful for being closer to ordinariness
than he used to think.
Consider, too, the choice of the word vicissitude, its combination of a
marvellous sounding quality and an equally marvellous meaning; and finally,
in the same way, consider the phrase ‘as the grasse’ that leads us to the end
of the line and simultaneously out from the poem, out into the world of time
and season and change, that great open prospect. Hard to imagine an alert
reader who would not take all this away from even the first reading, such is
Donne’s control of all the effects of language in order to create a universal
Reading. (Donne was born in 1571 or 1572; Nicholas Hillyarde, whose
miniature of a young man heads up this essay probably went off to London
from Exeter to take up his artistic apprenticeship in 1558.Not exact
contemporaries, but close.)
***
Now, to return to the Waller and the point about lyric control, that
is the creating, in language of such fine effects as these.(it could be argued
that language is a much heavier medium than music, and far less graphic than paint).
Here, in the tenth line, is perhaps one of the finest single lines in the great
canon of English poetry, this outcrop of our language which boasts an
enormous range of mighty poets – Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and
Wordsworth, Yeats, Hopkins, TS Eliot – all masters of cadence, of the singing Line. (For starters here you could just look at the opening part of Act I, Scene 6 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth on which I will be writing in some detail soon….)
But to return to the Waller: speak lines 8 to 10 aloud – or for even happier
effect, think them Aloud, so that your own voice doesn’t get in the way, paying particular attention to the 10th line
That hadst thou sprung,
In deserts, where no men abide
Thou must have uncommended died.
And as you do this take note of the pause ( sometimes called a caesura)
that falls on either side of the key word (not just in the line but perhaps in the entire poem). It occurs so inevitably – there is no way that you can rush upon it or rush on from it - everything, sound, rhythm and meaning – bring you to a halt in which space, or depth (however you experience it), the full weight of that destiny that the speaker is warning the “her that’s young” takes over your whole imagination, that is, to die - Uncommended: never truly seen, never recognised because never shown. Loss, waste,dissolution : ‘in desarts where no men abide.’
There is a comparison to be made here with a poem called
‘Heaven-Haven’
A Nun Takes the Veil
Written some two hundred years later, in 1864, by Gerard Manley
Hopkins,it is a vision of what it is for a woman to take the veil and withdraw from the world (see Perfect Lyrics 1.)
That is almost all I want to say about this Lyric of Waller’s. Just a few closing
observations: first, you might have noticed – I am sure that you have – that something goes from the poem as soon as the poet approaches the more commonplace social world of his time and class in the third, fourth and fifth lines of verse iii. The first and second lines of verse iii are graced by the same almost unworldly beauty of the first two verses:
Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired
That concept : beauty from the light retired has about it something beyond ordinary human living, beyond the usual visual spaces of daily life – it occurs in the mind in almost the way that a vision might ( well, that’s what I think anyway), only to be overtaken by the much more ordinary or conventional, or perhaps even banal images of place and time and human motive/action/behaviour and sexual convention
(Suffer herself to be desired/ And not blush so to be admired)
So one more quotation of the second verse (say it yourself) and now
it’s time to leave the poem alone, having shared its beauty in the desarts of
today’s often sad and unlovely world.
PART TWO
Scenes from “Complacency”.
“Complacency” is a short story written recently by a New Zealand writer. It is set in Christchurch, New Zealand, a few years after the devastating earthquakesof 2010 and 2011. These linked earthquakes, (for the later one on 22nd February 2011 is considered an after-shock of the one that occurred 4th September 2010 ,) are very much on the mind of the central character, a young woman of 25 who is trying to find a path through the world. She is what is called an E-type or mature age student at University ( being at least six years older than the kids who just rock up after they leave School, possibly because they can’t think of anything else to do at this point) or, as she points out to her brother, who is a year younger, ‘E-type, as in Jaguar…’. He says nothing.
So on this hot, windy summer day she is riding her bike across one of the huge, parched parks on a track that will take her to some of the old campus buildings. This is one of those days when the whole city, and the Plains beyond it that stretch to the Southern Alps seem to be back in what feels like earthquake weather. There is this myth, you see, amongst New Zealanders, that there are ways we can tell if a major earthquake is about to happen. It gives us some sense of control, I guess, thinking that you know what’s coming, though of course there’s nothing you can do about it when you wake up into one of those mornings where there’s no sound – no birds, often not much wind - there’s no prevention possible, though you could just get under the kitchen table straight away and wait from there. Earthquake weather, we say. And it’s not just the birds that are silent. There is something deeper, a silence in the earth, the vastness underground, where the myriads of insects that traverse the darkness, whose endless chorus hangs just beyond the edge of hearing, subliminal, myriad, tunnelling, are now all still, all silent,
waiting…
Up at the University, though, it hasn’t been quiet enough to hear this silence (so to speak) because the 3rd year Shakespeare seminar, a weekly event that hardly anyone except a pious few ever come to, ( including our heroine) is today packed and noisy and contentious, full of people fighting, claiming their own version of – of course – MACBETH, the scariest play in an actor’s repertoire, ‘the Scottish play’ actors call it because it is apparently bad luck to speak its name, and every one is mad about it, every one goes to see all the films every one wants to be in it, writhing in the corners of its nameless horrors, it’s a great success, and down here too, today, down here in earthquake weather, in the stolen south it’s the same.
The main topic so far has been Duncan, the King, the one about to be murdered (at the instigation of the witches??- more shouting, more argument, ) the ruling man, the King who completely fails to see Macbeth as a threat thereby bringing his own assassination upon himself( more argument) though how that is possible is a matter for some disbelief and more contention and faction that this class has seen all semester.
Then just after the seminar has come not to conclusion but to a noisy end (with a sequel coming next week) the earthquake happens,- quite a hefty shock, and prolonged - luckily when the building has been almost completely emptied.But before we get ahead of ourselves and start describing the next sequence of events – the earthquake itself, the various recovery parties, the fights between the various student Factions at the various recovery parties, Featuring amongst other things an extremely hostile girl wearing a knitted pink hat, a drunken dawn through which survivors creep home, and a general sense that the world is more hostile nd dangerous than it was the day before, let’s listen in to some of these earlier fights in the seminar.
And then we’ll end with the final scene a few days later where the main character ( the sister, the E-type, the girl who can’t find a place for herself anywhere in her home town, this English- built city on the stolen Canterbury Plains, talks to her best friend about this very thing, about living lonely and unacknowledged, you might say uncommended…mightn’t you. Which brings us back to where we started from, with a ‘she’, that’s young
Tell her that’s young…That hadst thou sprung
In desarts where no men abide
Thou must have uncommended died…
*
And now let’s retrace out steps to the beginning of the Macbeth seminar and the earthquake afternoon (Tiptoe…tiptoe, sneak… sneak…sneak.). And by the way if anyone wants to read the whole of Complacency I can publish it here, on the ravenletters
Complacency: Part 11 : The Macbeth Seminar
Ross: How goes the world, sir, now?
Macduff: Why, see you not?
As she looked for a place in the bike stands, she thought about the ships and their mostly Protestant, mostly Anglican, settlers, the ones who built Christchurch to look like ‘Home’ with its ‘Gothic’ Cathedral, the King Edward Barracks, the buildings of the University with its cloisters. Nearly all gone now, mostly in the earthquakes four years ago, as if God were telling them something about their crimes. But you couldn’t say that, though you thought it, about writing an anonymous pamphlet called Madmen and Their Crimes, detailing, of course, pakeha crimes. But you couldn’t say it now, not since the earthquakes. Only to yourself, under your breath, thinking about God’s punishment for what had, after all, been sins. Sins of murder and deception against the Maori, and of straight out open robbery, and hidden crimes of stealth. But as she went round the back of the main building, looking for a place to leave her bike under the trees, she did say it, now that she was round the back, but quietly, pretty much under her breath, like the way Hotspur challenges Henry IV, waiting till this Usurper and Royal Thief is pretty much off the stage and out of earshot.
She said it again, a bit louder:
“They were God’s Punishment, the Earthquakes.”
As if in reply a whisper dry as dust came sidling out from under the trees, and moving past her eddied away over the lawns.
The bike stands were almost completely full. She couldn’t work it out. Usually on a Friday afternoon there was hardly anyone else here. Maybe there was something on in Engineering, keeping them all inside for once. Usually they were out, down in town, whistling and hooting, making plans for the banned Haka party, slinging insults and the odd beer can. But today everything was quiet, breathless, silent. It made the whole place seem lonelier, not just the campus, everything. From where she stood now at the edge of the sunstruck grass that lay between her and the Arts Building she could see the line of the Southern Alps scrawled across the distance, like a cutout on an ice cream packet, blueberries and vanilla, dark blue mountains and a tiny cap of snow. She sighed and stepped out, God’s avenger on her way to class.
“Serves them all right,” she said.
The first thing she noticed was the noise, and people’s things everywhere – on the hooks and along the benches, even a full sized suitcase stranded outside the first door, and all the other doors to the lecture hall wide open and everywhere inside full - all the seats, all the steps down to the stage where the table, where she usually sat with the tutor, was set up, people standing along the walls - there must have been at least forty of them, some she’d never seen before even in lectures, and behind her a lot more coming in. There hadn’t been anyone extra for Comedy in first week, or for the Problem Play, Measure for Measure. Now they were up to Tragedy, and everybody was here. After next week’s break anyone who’d survived the Haka Party’s obscure idea of campus fun would do the English Histories and the Roman plays before ending with The Tempest, it was all mapped out.
It had to be because of the film - of course! Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard - that now there weren’t enough seats, and because of movies anyway, and particularly because Macbeth is so susceptible to film being so much bigger and wilder and wickeder than any of the other plays. Everyone wanted to be part of it, no matter how small a part.
She made her way down to the front row where there were still a few places. More people kept coming in, and stood lining the room, like extras. Ten minutes later the tutor herself came in and stopped at the top of the stairs, looking surprised. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, as she made her way to the front, ‘so many of you… it’s the heat, you know, it’s drained my car battery, I had to get the bus.’
‘So, with so many of you here ’ she said, ‘we’ll have to make it a kind of lecture format, with anyone who wants to say something doing just that. Can I see a show of hands?’
Two crowded hours stretched ahead. She wondered aloud why they were there in such numbers; she wondered silently if any of them had come prepared. It seemed to pull them in, this play, being so anarchic, and it seemed to work them up. After the first five minutes it was clear there was a lot of tension, maybe even aggression about.
She remarked on this.
‘It’s a transgressive play,’ one of them snapped.
‘Can we start with Duncan?’ someone else, more placably, said. ‘Isn’t he the real puzzle – that he doesn’t seem to have any suspicions at all about Macbeth? I mean how is that possible? Nothing, zilch, zero. I mean what about the opening speech?’
‘Well, what about it?’ a girl wearing a pink woollen hat like a helmet immediately said, glaring about.
‘Well, obviously, the description of what he is like on the battlefield would alert most leaders. And all of the audience too – it makes you question how come Duncan can’t see him for what he is. WE all can, everything is given to us, it’s so visual - no room for doubt,
‘For brave Macbeth,’ one of the boys said, gesturing and rolling his eyes, exactly like a man doing the haka, ‘Disdaining fortune, with his brandish’d steel
Which smoked with bloody execution…,’ he intoned.
‘That’s right,’ the first one said, ‘all this stuff about Macbeth as a killer - why doesn’t Duncan act more cautiously around him once the wars are over? Most leaders in a non-democratic state would be keeping him under wraps, maybe eliminating him once he’s done his job in the battle – if it were Syria, or Iraq, he’d be seen to have leadership ambitions…’
‘But that’s silly,’ said one of the girls, ‘I mean, is Duncan even at the scene of battle?’
‘Nooo, dumbo,’ someone else said, ‘he’s listening to this speech, it’s a report. He doesn’t see it for himself, he doesn’t have to, he’s the King.’
‘And he doesn’t see the witches either,’ said another of the girls, the tall one with the big shoes who was standing against the wall.
‘Lucky old him,’ said someone else, ‘every production I’ve ever see you can’t get away from them, I’ve even seen one where the witches were there nearly all the time, writhing in the corner.’
‘They’re great in the film,’ someone else said; ‘that baby witch! Is she meant to be the one they’ve just buried up on the hill, has she already been recruited into the afterlife?’
It took a while and a hefty effort to wrest the discussion away from supernatural, dark forces and the Undead, but they managed it, like piloting around Cape Horn, Master-and-Commander style they made it and now the talk began to cruise a bit more tranquilly along. But the factions were still out for blood.
‘I mean it’s so obvious,’ the handsome third year boy said, ‘to anyone with half a brain. There’s everyone else who can see Macbeth for what he is – and that includes us, I mean look at Toshiro Mifune, snorting with greed, smoking with murderous intent – so everyone, including the dumbest people in the audience, (and here he turned and glared at the group of girls) can see what Duncan can’t.’
Everyone agreed except for the ones who didn’t know who the fuck Toshiro Mifune was. ‘Who the fuck is Toshiro Mifune?’ they said.
*******
It left them, though, with more questions than answers, even at the end of the two hours. And that was a good thing, they thought, pushing their bicycles into the hot Nor-wester, puffing for breath with every piston-like downward stroke made with their legs, as they struggled into the burning wind, that they’d opened up the big questions, and that nothing had been resolved.
Complacency three days after the Macbeth seminar
Part 5 (final section) The Inner Nun
‘I’ve internalized a nun,’ she said to her girlfriend Sadie. ‘And I’ve never even met one.’
They were sitting outside at what was left of Sumner Rock after the big quake in 2011. No one these days ran through the Cave Rock passages at low tide.
‘They simply don’t seem to exist any more – at least not out here,’ she said. She meant New Zealand, the Antipodes. But Rome, for instance, was full of them.
The Rock, which once looked like a crazy Edwardian sun palace with a flag on top was now a shattered heap, no going in, no getting out, a Tomb.
‘that spot,’ she said, ‘which no vicissitude can find.’
‘What?’ said Sadie. ‘Really? Are you quoting something again? You’ve got to stop doing that all the time. I don’t think all this reading is good for you – get a life – get a Man, you haven’t had a boyfriend since Gavan pissed off with Maxine, have you, I know you haven’t, stop burying yourself in books, they won’t help you get rid of your inner nun.’
The sun was shining; the ghost of a flag flapped over the little summit of air where once the Rock was.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, trying not to feel anxious, ‘having a man might just drive her further in.’ And tried to laugh.
And the sand dusting over the beach in the dry little wind, went about its business, raising itself up here in towers and minarets, there in the long slope of dunes that sometimes ribbed, sometimes smooth as glass, make up the deserts of the world, that the old poets used to call desarts, ‘in desarts where no men abide,’ which makes them seem both bleaker and more beautiful. And she felt lonely for the deserts, for the rising of winds, for the silences that fall at noon day, where through rocks and mountains the voice of God speaks in that dry keen whisper, that Islam hears, that whisper that makes the soul keen, and sets a life of martyrdom to bloom in the desert places.