The Poets' Corner
Page 15
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing will come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!
The brief and lovely “Fear no more” is spoken as a dirge by the brothers Guiderius and Arviragus in Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s last plays. Cymbeline is known as a romance, a play in which tragedy looms all around but in the end is kept at bay. Lovers are reconciled, brothers and sisters reunited, and for all but the villains there’s a happy ending. Of course! In act 4, scene 2, Guiderius and Arviragus come upon their friend, Fidele, in the forest and suppose him dead. They chant over the body, not realizing that Fidele is actually their sister, Imogen, in disguise, and that she is not really dead but sleeping, having drunk a magic potion.
In the play, the first stanza is spoken by Guiderius, the second by Arviragus. The brothers agree to speak the lines of the song rather than “sing him to the ground” because “notes of sorrow out of tune are worse / Than priests and fanes that lie.” Guiderius and Arviragus alternate lines in the third and fourth stanzas, speaking together the couplets at the end of each. While the poem is not religious, its recital in the scene evokes tenderness and a ritualistic feeling. The brothers’ performance of the song is comforting, even though the audience is in on the joke that this eulogy is being spoken for naught.
Still, the eulogy is beautiful and wrenching. I have spoken it myself at several memorial services, including that of my own father, who loved Shakespeare, and my father-in-law, who was a Montana farmer. I thought this was the perfect poem for a farmer, because the first two lines refer to the weather, which is all a farmer thinks about! And though we all must “come to dust,” it is possible still to rest in this deeply comforting poem, even just for a moment.
An actorly aside: I once saw Cymbeline performed in a contemporary interpretation that featured the characters in this scene as ranch hands in the American West, and this eulogy performed as a country-and-western song. As I watched the play, I began to dread how they would treat my favorite moment. But it was beautiful and moving and took me happily by surprise.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft’ is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Radical
(1792–1822)
Although Percy Shelley and Lord Byron were great friends and among the most notable poets of their time, Byron enjoyed the status of a literary idol, while Shelley was perceived as a dangerous renegade. It wasn’t until long after his death that he came into his rightful reputation as an important Romantic poet. As he cared more about his political passions than his popularity in his lifetime, this probably would have been fine by Shelley.
Born into an aristocratic English family, Shelley was educated at Eton and Oxford and began writing poetry as a teenager. He also wrote gothic novels and pamphlets of verse that reflected his atheism and radical politics, which promptly got him tossed out of Oxford. His refusal to renounce his atheism caused a permanent rift between himself and his father, which left him with no financial resources. This did not deter the nineteen-year-old Shelley from scandalously running off to Scotland to marry a sixteen-year-old girl, after which he settled in the Lake District of England to study and write, with intervals of travel to Ireland to participate in political protests.
In 1813, Shelley’s first important poem, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem, was published by his friend, the editor and poet Leigh Hunt. This was the public’s first introduction to Shelley’s unique personal philosophy, a freethinking mix of atheism, socialism, and the advocacy of open relationships and vegetarianism. Throughout his life he was fearless about expressing these beliefs in his poetry, his associations, and his behavior. While the public romanticized Byron’s persona and lifestyle, Shelley’s radical beliefs only caused people to spurn him.
Shelley ran off to Europe with Mary Godwin in 1814, abandoning his young wife back in England. They eventually settled in Italy, where he enjoyed the most productive and creative years of his short life, creating masterworks including “Mont Blanc,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” and Adonais, which he wrote to memorialize his late friend and fellow poet John Keats.
Shelley spent time in Italy with Byron and Leigh Hunt, discussing poetry and politics and making plans to launch a journal called the Liberal. Shortly after the first edition of the magazine was published, Percy Shelley drowned when his sailboat ran into an unexpected storm; his body was discovered several days later with a volume of Keats’s poetry in his pocket.
Shelley, Keats, and Byron were the eternally youthful poster boys of the Romantic movement in poetry. They explored many of the same themes in their work, such as beauty, nature, creativity, and the imagination. It was Shelley, though, who believed that beauty, as expressed in art and poetry, could actually improve society. This was Shelley the passionate idealist—he believed that beauty was as necessary a component of human happiness as justice. This is the point where his radical politics and his poetry met.
Favorite Poems
Adonais “Ode to the West Wind”
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” “Ozymandias”
“When the Lamp Is Shattered”
To a Skylark
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun
O’er which clouds are bright’ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see—we feel that it is there.
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With mus
ic sweet as love, which overflows her bower:
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view!
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-wingéd thieves;
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass:
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest—but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then—as I am listening now.
This poem may be Shelley’s—or any Romantic poet’s—finest, pure poetic expression. The song of the skylark is not just a metaphor—it is that pure poetic expression, that “harmonious madness,” of this world but heavenly too, and unspoiled by human encumbrances. The poem is a challenge to any artist to cast aside rational thought and earthly concerns and soar and swoop and sing in a voice as perfect and true as the skylark’s. This is a wonderful notion, but it’s not easy to do. All art, even great art, is fraught with some self-consciousness and weighed down by its context in the world.
One of Shelley’s most gorgeous lyric poems, its words are vivid and evocative of birdsong, a simple tune that is almost maddeningly repetitive. The structure of the poem is a bit like the skylark itself, darting out of sight, coming back into view, rising, darting, and rising again. The many stanzas with the same verse structure are aspiring to the skylark’s purity of sound, its “shrill delight.” By the end of the poem, we share the poet’s urgent, delirious inspiration and the momentary freedom he shares with the skylark.
Shelley does not neglect his deeply held belief that poetry—his “song”—can improve our lot. The bird is “like the poet hidden / In the light of thought / Singing hymns unbidden / Till the world is wrought / To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.” If only his song is pure, he can offer hope.
For all his rabble-rousing and unconventional ways, Percy Bysshe Shelley was an endearingly hopeful, morally optimistic man, more so than many of his contemporaries. He genuinely believed in the possibility of human happiness and used his imagination and his poetry to inspire himself and others to attain it.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mutability
I.
The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies
What is this world’s delight?
Lightning that mocks the night
Brief even as bright.
II.
Virtue, how frail it is!
Friendship how rare!
Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair!
But we, though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call.
III.
Whilst skies are blue and bright,
Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Poet
(1552–1599)
A monument erected to Edmund Spenser in Westminster Abbey is inscribed, “The Prince of Poets in His Tyme.” Spenser would have relished this honor, as he was entranced by princes and legends, and King Arthur was his lifelong hero.
Edmund Spenser was born in London and went to Cambridge as a “poore scholler,” where he studied rhetoric, logic, astronomy, Greek, mathematics, and philosophy. A fiercely ambitious man, both as a poet and a politician, he was appointed secretary to the lord deputy of Ireland, where he lived for most of his life.
Edmund Spenser was an influential poet whose style defined an entire period of English poetry. His epic poem The Faerie Queene was devoured by readers, both for its literary prowess and its political riddles. He showed it to Queen Elizabeth, who liked it and granted him a pension of fifty pounds (almost a hundred dollars). The Faerie Queene, an epic rife with heroes and villains, derring-do and wickedness, showed the Tudor dynasty as the continuation of King Arthur’s line. Spenser slipped his own friends and enemies into the poem as faintly disguised characters.
The Faerie Queene has held up for hundreds of years, especially influencing the Romantic movement with Spenser’s magic and melody. Milton described him as “our sage and serious Spenser, a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.” Edmund Spenser was buried near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey and poets tossed elegies into his grave.
Favorite Poems
The Faerie Queen The Shepheardes Calendar Epithalamion Colin Clouts Come Home Againe Muipotmos: Or, The Fate of the Butterflie
Sonnet LXXV
(One day I wrote her name upon the strand)
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eek my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so (quoth I), let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Where when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
This sonnet was published in a collection titled Amoretti, or “little cupids.” They were all dedicated to Elizabeth Boyle, and describe the pair’s courtship and marria
ge. The poem tells of a time when Spenser and his young bride visited the seaside and is evocative of Shakespearean sonnets, touching on a familiar theme lamenting our short time on earth. It doesn’t deny that our lives are but a microscopic speck on the time line of the universe, and our love—so important to us when we’re in its grip—even less lasting. But in a rhyme that is effortless, and language that is unhurried and clean, Spenser cleverly offers a way to think about it that is consoling.
The poets’ scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
—Edmund Spenser
This is a smart dialogue poem that is simple but profound. His love’s name written in the sand represents all the passion and pain that goes into such a relationship, only to be washed away again and again, as if it never happened. But Spenser has a sturdier medium than sand—his “verse.” By memorializing his love in this poem, he ensures that it will last forever. We are, after all, reading it now, more than four hundred years after it was written, and it’s as fresh and as resonant as ever.
Sonnet VIII
(from Amoretti)
More then most faire, full of the liuing fire,
Kindled aboue vnto the maker neere:
no eies buy ioyes, in which al powers conspire,
that to the world naught else be counted deare.
Thrugh your bright beams doth not ye blinded guest,
shoot out his darts to base affections wound:
but Angels come to lead fraile mindes to rest
in chast desires on heauenly beauty bound.
You frame my thoughts and fashion me within,
you stop my toung, and teach my hart to speake,
you calme the storme that passion did begin,
stro[n]g thrugh your cause, but by your vertue weak.
Dark is the world, where your light shined neuer;
well is he borne, that may behold you euer.
Gertrude Stein
The Salon Poet
(1874–1946)
Gertrude Stein was a force to be reckoned with. In her Geographical History of America in 1935, she declared that she was doing the most important literary thinking of the era. Indeed, her intelligence, confidence, and imperious demeanor demanded attention—and fans and critics alike obliged. She bewildered readers with her experiments with form and language, but she was no one-trick shock artist. People may not have understood what she was saying, but they were stunned by the new and unexpected ways she was saying it.