by Harold Bloom
Ever singing “die, oh! die.”
This morbid little splendor has a grisly charm and admits us to a curious kind of comedy. Here is a personal favorite, “Song of the Stygian Naiades”:
PROSERPINE may pull her flowers,
Wet with dew or wet with tears,
Red with anger, pale with fears,
Is it any fault of ours,
If Pluto be an amorous king,
And comes home nightly, laden,
Underneath his broad bat-wing,
With a gentle, mortal maiden?
Is it so, Wind, is it so?
All that you and I do know
Is, that we saw fly and fix
’Mongst the reeds and flowers of Styx,
Yesterday,
Where the Furies made their hay
For a bed of tiger cubs,
A great fly of Beelzebub’s,
The bee of hearts, whom mortals name
Cupid, Love, and Fie for shame.
Proserpine may weep in rage,
But, ere I and you have done
Kissing, bathing in the sun,
What I have in yonder cage,
Bird or serpent, wild or tame,
She shall guess, and ask in vain;
But, if Pluto does’t again,
It shall sing out loud his shame.
What hast caught then? What hast caught?
Nothing but a poet’s thought,
Which so light did fall and fix
’Mongst the reeds and flowers of Styx,
Yesterday,
Where the Furies made their hay
For a bed of tiger cubs,—
A great fly of Beelzebub’s,
The bee of hearts, whom mortals name
Cupid, Love, and Fie for shame.
The lilt of these mermaids of the Styx is uncanny and memorable. Beddoes creates an alternative cosmos in which Shelley’s hopes for human liberation have vanished forever. The son of a distinguished physician, Beddoes himself turned to medical study and pursued it in Germany and Switzerland. He became an expert anatomist, but his Shelleyan politics resulted in his expulsion, first from Bavaria and seven years later from Zürich. A wandering homosexual questing for some evidence of the spirit’s survival, his bourgeoning eccentricities became extravagant and culminated in his suicide by poison at the age of forty-five.
The white elephant of his poetic career was an amazing Jacobean verse tragedy, Death’s Jest Book, which he never quite completed. I have read it many times with gusto, but I grant it may be a special taste. Chanting his lyrics at their most exuberant seems to me an authentic aesthetic experience:
Old Adam, the carrion crow,
The old crow of Cairo;
He sat in the shower, and let it flow
Under his tail and over his crest;
And through every feather
Leak’d the wet weather;
And the bough swung under his nest;
For his beak it was heavy with marrow.
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It’s only two devils, that blow
Through a murderer’s bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts’ moonshine.
Ho! Eve, my grey carrion wife,
When we have supped on kings’ marrow,
Where shall we drink and make merry our life?
Our nest it is queen Cleopatra’s skull,
’Tis cloven and crack’d,
And batter’d and hack’d,
But with tears of blue eyes it is full:
Let us drink then, my raven of Cairo.
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It’s only two devils, that blow
Through a murderer’s bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts’ moonshine.
The alternative title for this work is The Fool’s Tragedy, as the avenger takes the disguise of a Fool. The rollicking tempo is fiercely upbeat and contrasts with the discords and hilarities that vitalize the bounce and sorrows of the Egyptian queen. Hamlet holding up Yorick’s skull is evoked and extended by “cloven and crack’d, / and batter’d and hack’d, / but with tears of blue eyes it is full.” I recall reciting it again and again to my two little boys when they were four and seven and their delighted response.
I slept badly last night, as I almost always do. At dawn, a dirge by Beddoes returned to me:
We do lie beneath the grass
In the moonlight, in the shade
Of the yew-tree. They that pass
Hear us not. We are afraid
They would envy our delight,
In our graves by glow-worm night.
Come follow us, and smile as we;
We sail to the rock in the ancient waves,
Where the snow falls by thousands into the sea,
And the drown’d and the shipwreck’d have happy graves.
This invitation to a fatal voyage could be one of the songs the Sirens sang, and is a puzzling matter, but not beyond all conjecture. Beddoes appeals to our craving and nostalgia for the original Abyss, our Foremother and Forefather. He sought the Spirit in his anatomies yet found only a release into death.
Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses”
ALFRED TENNYSON composed his “Ulysses” in 1833, when he was twenty-four. His closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, had died in Vienna of a sudden stroke at the age of just twenty-two. The shock for Tennyson was all but permanent. He did not marry until he was forty-one, after an endless betrothal. To a remarkable extent, his greatest poems are all elegies for Hallam: In Memoriam, “Morte d’Arthur,” ultimately Idylls of the King, but also my two favorites, “Ulysses” and “Tithonus.”
In Dante’s Inferno, canto 26, Virgil and Dante enter the eighth bolge of the eighth circle and confront Ulysses and Diomedes, held together in a single flame. Ulysses speaks from the fire and gives an account of his final voyage beyond the known limits of the world; this voyage concludes by drowning all the mariners and, after many previous escapes, the lord of Ithaca himself. Dante, uniquely, is silent as he listens, perhaps because of the clear affinity between his epic voyage in the Commedia and the self-destructive drive of Ulysses.
Tennyson’s blank-verse monologue starts with an extraordinary pitch of verbal harmony informed by assonance and gives the impression of Virgilian measures, as though English verse could resort to quantity and not to accent:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name….
Hallam had urged his friend to emulate Keats and Shelley, rather than Wordsworth, and certainly the intricate tones of Keats inform this tensely eloquent blazon of the wiliest of the Greeks. Penelope is merely old, and the Ithacans “know not me,” which is death to Ulysses. What matters to him, be it pleasure or pain, is greatness. His mariners “loved me,” and he loved only himself. His pride magnificently asserts, “I am become a name”:
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
> And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
His heart hungers for fame and honor. To keep moving consumes life piled on life, and yet always he yearns to know a newness that transcends human mortality: “As tho’ to breathe were life!” Thus he abandons Penelope and Ithaca to his dutiful son:
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
We can doubt “Well-loved of me” and believe instead “He works his work, I mine.” With that dismissal of family and hearth, the dark voyage commences:
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Who are those phantom mariners? The Odyssey clearly depicts that Ulysses survives but all his companions perish, most by drowning and some more horribly. You would not want to be in one boat with this Ulysses. And yet we are moved by the marvelous roll, rise, carol, and creation of this egocentric glory. Those final six lines surge in your soul, particularly if you are very old. One of my closest friends, a great scholarly critic, died early this morning. I sorrow; this departure was long expected, but we were companions for some sixty-five years. Much is taken, and I trust that much abides. I too am not that strength which in old days moved little enough, yet it sufficed. It comforts me to think, “That which we are, we are.” Heroism is not an attribute of teachers, and I am made weak by time and fate. Tennyson may have been unaware he echoed Milton’s Satan, who cried out: “And courage never to submit or yield / And what is else not to be overcome.” Strength of will can lessen, and still one wants to emulate this Satanic Ulysses in his quest: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Alfred Tennyson, “Tithonus”
IN 1833, TENNYSON WROTE a shorter version of what became “Tithonus” as a kind of coda to “Ulysses.” A surpassingly beautiful Virgilian vignette, “Tithonus,” like the song “Tears, Idle Tears,” is another lament for Hallam. Its intricate harmonies, so much at variance with the poem’s despair, are extraordinarily exquisite and show the Laureate’s powers of suggestion at their height:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
Eos, Greek goddess of the dawn, known to the Latins as Aurora, took Ganymede and Tithonus as her consorts. Zeus stole Ganymede from her, and in exchange, at her request, granted Tithonus immortality. Alas, the goddess forgot to ask that he enjoy eternal youth, and so he withers in her arms and longs only for death. I cannot recall any other place in literature where immortality is called cruel. This desperate dramatic monologue enters upon a vertigo of bereftness:
Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man—
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem’d
To his great heart none other than a God!
I ask’d thee, ‘Give me immortality.’
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men, who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love,
Thy beauty, make amends, tho’ even now,
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?
Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, the wretched Tithonus is incapable of loving anyone except himself. The dawn goddess weeps for him, and he weeps for himself. His aesthetic apprehension of Eos kindles ever anew, and that is all:
A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renew’d.
Thy cheek begins to redden thro’ the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosen’d manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
The lyricism of Keats and of Shelley achieves a later apotheosis in this high passage, but neither of them shared this selfish iciness. There is something unique in the dramatic monologue of this miserable shadow, since what gladdens the ear is undone by the wholly negative affect of the speaker:
Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
‘The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.’
Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch—if I be he that watch’d—
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson’d all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss’d
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
Ilion, or Troy, was created by a song of Apollo’s; recalling that miracle, Tithonus comes near the apex of his anguish and values the memories of the dawn goddess’s kisses only as sensations of the departed. And so he sighs out what he knows cannot be his farewell:
Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam