by M H Abrams
MANSION
So it came time
for me to cede myself
and I chose
the wind
5 to be delivered to
The wind was glad
and said it needed all
the body
it could get
10 to show its motions with
and wanted to know
willingly as I hoped it would
if it could do
something in return
15 to show its gratitude
When the tree of my bones
rises from the skin I said
come and whirlwinding
stroll my dust
20 around the plain
so I can see
how the ocotillo does
and how saguaro-wren is
and when you fall
25 with evening
fall with me here
where we can watch
the closing up of day
and think how morning breaks3
NOTES
1. “On This Island,” copyright © 1937 and renewed 1965 by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems of W. H. Auden by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
2. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
3. “Mansion,” copyright 1960 by A. R. Ammons, from Collected Poems 1951–1971 by A. R. Ammons. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Keats’ Poems:
The Material Dimensions*
THE CHIEF CONCERN of modern critics of Keats has been with the semantic dimension of his poems—their component meanings; their thematic structures; and what, in a well-known essay, Douglas Vincent Bush called “Keats and His Ideas.”1 This was the primary issue for the New Critics of the mid-century, who read Keats’ poems with the predisposition to find coherence, unity, and ironies; it is no less the issue for poststructural theorists, who read the poems with the predisposition to find incoherence, ruptures, and aporias. The concern with semantics is understandable, for Keats was a remarkably intelligent poet, almost without parallel in the rapidity with which he grasped, elaborated, and deployed philosophical and critical concepts. To deal with his poems exclusively on the ideational level, however, is to disembody them and so to delete what is most characteristic about them. My aim in this essay is to put first things first: What is the immediate impact of reading a passage by Keats? And by what features do we identify the passage as distinctively Keatsian?
I
Consider the following lines from Keats’ poems:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine.
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.
’Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed.2
The passages differ in what they signify, but we can say about all of them, as about hundreds of other lines, that if we were to meet them running wild in the deserts of Arabia, we would instantly cry out, “Keats!” On what features does this recognition depend?
Robert Frost used the word “sound” to describe the perceived aspect of a poem that is distinctive for each poet: “And the sound rises from the page, you know, a Wordsworthian sound, or a Keatsian sound, or a Shelleyan sound. . . . The various sounds that they make rise to you from the page.”3 The term is helpful, but it needs to be unpacked. In the current era of semiotics and Derrida’s warnings against “phonocentrism,” we commonly refer to literary works as “écriture” and to poems as “texts.” The material medium of poetry, however, is not the printed word. To think so is a fallacy—a post-Gutenberg fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Yet neither is the poetic medium a purely auditory sound as such. The material medium (in current parlance, “the material signifier”) of a poem is speech, and speech consists of enunciated words, so that the sound of a poem is constituted by speech-sounds. And we don’t—we can’t—hear speech-sounds purely as sounds. Instead what we hear (to use Derrida’s apt phrase) is “always already,” and inseparably, invested with two non-auditory features. One of these is the significance of the words, phrases, and sentences into which the speech-sounds are conjoined. The other is the physical sensation of producing the speech-sounds that we hear or read. For when we read a poem slowly and with close attention, even if we read it silently to ourselves, the act involves—often below the level of distinct awareness—the feel of enunciating the words of the poem by remembered, imagined, or incipient movements and tactile sensations in the organs of speech, that is, in the lungs, throat, mouth, tongue, and lips. Because this feature, although essential to the full experience of a poem, has been neglected in literary criticism, I want to dwell for a while on the material, articulative aspect of Keats’ language.
In taking pains, as Keats once said, to make a poem read “the more richly,”4 he characteristically manages his language in such a way as to bring up to, or over, the verge of an attentive reader’s consciousness what it is to form and enunciate the component speech-sounds. He makes us sense, for example, the changing size and shape of our mouth and the configuration of our lips as we articulate a vowel; the forceful expulsion of breath that we apprehend as syllabic stress; the vibration or stillness of our vocal cords in voiced or unvoiced consonants; the tactile difference between a continuant consonant and a stopped (or “plosive”) consonant; and in the pronunciation of the various consonants, the movements of our lips and gestures of our tongue. Keats also makes us aware, as we pronounce consonants, of the touch of our tongue to the roof of the mouth or upper gum, and the touch of our lower lip to the teeth or (in labial consonants) of our lower lip on the upper lip. It is not possible to extricate with any precision the role of enunciation from those of sound and significance in the overall experience of a poem. It is evident, however, that Keats, by using long vowels, continuant consonants, and consecutive strong stresses to slow the pace at which we read, heightens our attention to the palpability of his material signifiers, and makes their articulation, juxtaposition, repetition, and variation into a richly sensuous oral activity. Consider the beginning of “Ode to a Nightingale”:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.
In such passages, Keats enforces the realization that a poem, like other works of art, is a material as well as a significant thing; its significance is apprehended only by being bodied forth, and the poem’s body is enunciated speech, which has a complex kinetic and tactile as well as auditory physicality. Of all the forms of art, furthermore, the material base of poetry, whether spoken or sung, is the most intimately human, because it is constituted solely by our own bodily actions, and because its vehicle is the breath of our life.
When discussing poems, we tend to attribute to the sound—the purely auditory qualities—of the words what are in much greater part the effects of enunciating the words conjointly with understanding the reference of the words. For example, in the line from “The Eve of St. Agnes,”
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon,
we say that the words are euphonious—that is, they sound good. But they sound good to the ear only because, meaning what they do, they feel good in the mouth; their pleasantness, as a result, is much more oral than auditory. It is a leisurely pleasure to negotiate the sequence of consonants in “cedar’d Leban
on”: the oral move from r to d to l, concluding in the duplicated n’s, feels like honey on the tongue. And it is only because we articulate the phrase while understanding its references that we seem to hear in this line the susurrus of the silks from Samarcand.
All poets more or less consciously make use of the enunciative dimension of language, but Keats exceeds his predecessors, including his masters Spenser, Shakespeare (the Shakespeare of the sonnets), and Milton, in the degree and constancy with which he foregrounds the materiality of his phonic medium. In this aspect he also exceeds his successors, except perhaps Gerard Manley Hopkins, who stylized features he had found in Keats to stress the artifice of his coined compounds, repetitions and gradations of speech-sounds, and sequential strong stresses:
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.5
Keats’ awareness of the orality of his medium seems clearly connected to his sensitivity to the tactile and textural, as well as gustatory, qualities of what he ate or drank. For example, in a letter to his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke, he suddenly breaks off to say:
Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine—good god how fine—It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large, beatified Strawberry. I shall certainly breed. (L2:179)6
In our cultural moment of trickle-down Freudianism, Keats’ orality of course invites charges of regression to the infantile stage of psychosexual development. Such speculations, I think, in no way derogate from his poetic achievement. A thing is what it is, and not another thing to which it may be theoretically reduced. Keats’ remarkable sensible organization generated distinctive qualities of a great and original poetry, for which we need be grateful, whatever our opinion of its psychological genesis.
Keats’ exploitation of the component features of a speech-utterance (oral shape, gesture, directionality, pace, and tactile sensations) helps account for another prominent aspect of his poetic language: its iconic quality. By “iconic” I mean the impression we often get, when reading Keats’ poems, that his verbal medium is intrinsically appropriate to its referents, as though the material signifier shared an attribute with what it signifies. Alexander Pope, in a noted passage in An Essay on Criticism, said that in poetry “the sound must seem an echo to the sense.”7 As Pope’s own examples show, this echoism is by no means limited to onomatopeia. Keats’ iconicity is sometimes such a seeming mimicry of sound by sound: “The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves” (“Ode to a Nightingale”) and “The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide” (“The Eve of St. Agnes”), for example. But sound mimicry is only one of many types of utterance mimicry in Keats. Take, as an instance, his notorious description, in his early poem Endymion, of what it feels like to kiss
Those lips, O slippery blisses.
Even after Christopher Ricks’ acute and often convincing casuistry with respect to the morality and psychology of embarrassment in Keats’ poetry,8 many of us continue to find this line off-putting. This is not, I think, because Keats’ phrase, in what Ricks aptly calls his “unmisgiving” way, signifies the moist physicality of an erotic kiss, but because the act of enunciating the line is too blatantly a simulation of the act it signifies, in the lip-smacking repetitions, amid sustained sibilants, of its double-labial stops. The blatancy is magnified by the effect of morpheme symbolism, that is, frequently recurrent combinations of speech-sounds in words that overlap in what they signify. In this instance, the iconicity of the sl combinations, heightened by the internal rhyme in “those lips” and “O slippery,” is accentuated to the point of caricature by the underpresence of related sound-and-sense units such as “slither” and “slide,” even, one must admit, “slobber” and “slurp.”
But Keats is always Keatsian, and the oral gesture and sensation mimicry in his early and less successful passages remains the condition, subdued and controlled, of his later writing at its best. In the line “Singest of summer in full-throated ease” from “Ode to a Nightingale,” the unhurried ease of articulating the open back vowels and the voiced liquid r and l in the spondaic “full-throated” is sensed, fully and deeply, within the resonant cavity of the throat to which the words refer. In Keats’ description (in “Ode on Melancholy”) of one
whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine,
the plosive onset and muscular thrust of the tongue in uttering the heavily stressed “burst” duplicates the action of the tongue in crushing a grape, while, in enunciating the phrase “his palate fine,” the touch of the blade of the tongue, in forming the consonants l and n, is felt on the palate that the words designate. In the line “as though of hemlock I had drunk” from “Ode to a Nightingale,” to articulate the word “drunk” is to move with the vowel u from the frontal consonant d back and down through the mouth and throat, by way of the intermediate r and n, to close in the glottal stop k, in an act that simulates the act of swallowing that the word denotes. The effect is heightened by the anticipation of this oral gesture in the second syllable of “hemlock” and by its repetition in the following rhyme word, “sunk”: “and Lethewards had sunk.”
An instance that is subtler and more complex is Keats’ description in “Ode to Autumn” of a personified Autumn sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.
The exquisite aptness of this utterance to what it signifies is in part the effect of its changing pace and rhythm: the slow sequential stresses in “háir sóft-líftĕd” give way to fast-moving anapests—“sóft líftĕd b thĕ wínnŏwĭng wínd”—in a way that accords with the desultory movement of the wind itself, as this is described in the next stanza of the poem. But the iconicity is to a greater degree the effect of the pressure and sensation of the inner airstream, the breath, that is sensed first in the throat in the aspirated (i.e., air-produced) h in “hair,” then between the tongue and hard palate in the aspirated s, and on to the upper teeth and lower lip in the aspirated f’s of “soft-lifted,” to become most tangible when the air is expelled through the tensed lips to form the w that occurs no fewer than three times—each time initiating the puff of air that forms the syllable win—in the two words that denote the outer airstream, “winnowing wind.”
II
The conspicuous materiality of Keats’ linguistic medium accords with the dense materiality of the world that his poems typically represent. In the line about bursting Joy’s grape, for example, Keats converts an abstract psychological observation—only someone capable of the most intense joy can experience the deepest melancholy—into the specifics of eating a grape. And in this line from Ode to Psyche,
’Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed.
the references of the seven words, themselves so richly sensuous to utter, run the gamut of the senses of hearing, sight, odor, and touch (a touch involving both temperature and kinetic thrust in the spondaic compound “cool-rooted”). The materiality of Keats’ representations, however, seems to run counter to his frequent practice, when referring to poetry in his letters, of applying to the imaginative process and its products such terms as “ethereal,” “spirit,” “spiritual,” “empyreal,” and “essence.” In the traditional vocabulary of criticism, such terms have commonly been indicators of a Platonic philosophy of art, and this fact has led some commentators to claim that Keats—at least through the time when he wrote Endymion—was a Platonist in his theory about poetry, which he conceived as aspiring to transcend the material world of sense experience.
Platonic and Neoplatonic idealism is a philosophy of two worlds. One is the material world perceived by the human senses—a world of space, time, and contingency that is regarded as radically deficient because subject to change, loss, corruption, and mortality. To this the Platonist opposes a transcendent otherworld, accessible only to the spiritual
vision. The otherworld is the locus of ultimate human desire because, since it consists of immaterial essences that are outside of time and space, it is unchanging, incorruptible, and eternal.
In an enlightening discovery, Stuart Sperry, followed by other scholars, showed that Keats imported “essence,” “spirit,” “spiritual,” “ethereal,” and related terms not from Platonizing literary theorists, but from a very different linguistic domain. In Keats’ time, they were standard terms in a natural science, chemistry, in which Keats had taken two courses of lectures during his medical studies at Guy’s Hospital in the years 1815 and 1816.9 In the chemical experiments of the early nineteenth century, the terms were applied to various phenomena, and especially to the basic procedures of evaporation and distillation. When a substance was subjected to increasing degrees of heat (for which the technical term was “intensity”), it was said to be “etherealized,” or refined; in this process, it released volatile substances called “spirits” and was purified into its “essences,” or chemical components. The crucial fact, however, is that the products at the end of this process remain, no less than the substance at its beginning, entirely material things, except that they have been refined into what Keats called the “material sublime” (“To J. H. Reynolds, Esq.”). (“Sublime” and “sublimation,” as Sperry points out, were the terms for “a dry distillation.”)10 The technical vocabulary of chemistry, that is, provided for Keats’ quick intelligence unprecedented metaphors for poetry—metaphors that made it possible to represent what he called the “silent Working” (L1:185) of the poet’s imagination as a process of refining, purifying, etherealizing, spiritualizing, and essentializing the actual into the ideal without transcending the limits and conditions of the material world.