Equivocal Richness and Evensongs

Writes Harold Bloom in The Art of Reading Poetry:

Language, to a considerable extent, is concealed figuration: ironies and synecdoches, metonymies and metaphors that we recognize only when our awareness increases. Real poetry is aware of and exploits these ruined tropes, though it is both a burden and a resource, for later poets in a tradition, that language ages into this wealth of figuration. The major poets of the twentieth century, in Britain and America, were those who could best exploit this equivocal richness: Thomas Hardy, W. B. Keats, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane among them. [1]

For some reason this afternoon the word evening suddenly struck me. It's a great word. The word afternoon is so exact and straightforward that it lacks any mystery. There is something businesslike about it that fits. But evening has something mysterious about it, something almost sinister (The Evening would make for a perfect name for a triller on the New York Times Bestseller list). The name suggests movement, action. Something is going on. It's a good name for a time of day whose cousin is twilight.

I've been trying to think of how evening is used in poetry and I can think of two examples, even without the aid of Google.

There is a prayer by St. Patrick that I like a lot, whose title is usually translated "The Breastplate of St. Patrick" though not always. The following lines are taken from a version, with Victorian liberties taken, by the nineteenth century Anglican hymn writer Cecil Frances Alexander:

I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun's life-giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free [2]

The line that is most memorable to me is "The whiteness of the moon at even." As the original's version is much less verbose ("étrochtai ésci" is all it takes for St. Patrick to say the same thing [3]), Oliver Davies' translation "in Moon's radiance" is more accurate [4], and I like the simplicity (how else can you describe such great and intricate things, sometimes, without simplicity). And let's face it, not many people go for the Victorian aesthetic these days. But there is something haunting about the line "the whiteness of the moon at even."

The Anglicans might have been onto something for calling Vespers Evensong, which reminds me of another hymn, an ancient beautiful hymn, from Vespers:

O Joyful Light of the holy glory of the immortal, heavenly, holy blessed Father, O Jesus Christ. Having come to the setting of the sun, having beheld the evening light, we hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God. Meet it is at all times to hymn Thee with reverend voices, O Son of God, Giver of Life, wherefore the whole world doth glorify Thee. [5]

Chesterton wrote once that "Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because he has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight." [6] And somehow the evening with its mystery and its sanity, which is so important for those of us who during the day do the world's work the best we can with keyboards and coffee and office cubes and copiers, is wrapped up in and evoked by its name, which is kind of neat.

Good night.

[1] Bloom, Harold. The Art of Reading. Perennial. New York, NY: 2005. And great little book, which as has the advantage of being little. You don't have to buy it; you can just read it in the coffee shop of your local corporate bookstore.

[2] http://wikisource.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_Breastplate

[3] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/St._Patrick's_Breastplate

[4] translated by Oliver Davies in Celtic Spirituality (The Classics of Western Spirituality). Paulist Press. Mahwah, NJ: 1999.

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phos_Hilaron

[7] chapter 2 of Orthodoxy

Marriage and Poetry

An interesting coincidence: I received two wedding invitations in the mail yesterday, (inaugurating the beginning of wedding season, I suppose), and that made me think about poetry, and, since I am neither married nor much of a poet, I am entitled to strong opinions about both.

My one big idea about literature, and poetry in particular, and art in general, is that it always exists within a set of boundaries, and therefore these boundaries should be well understood and intentional (and preferably intended as part of a tradition). [1]

Walt Whitman, with his trademark exuberance, sung about breaking open doors (implying, I imagine, that all doors are in some sense prison doors):

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs![2]

And this can be thought of as a rallying cry to poets who wish to dispense with form altogether, which actually amounts to replacing an old form with a new one, a screen door with a storm door, which really is often a shame. Although it is possible to create great poems without traditional forms (William Carlos Williams and Whitman himself come to mind), yet freedom in poetry usually has an unhappy result, as my own little offerings over the past couple weeks have likely made perfectly apparent. Shigalyov, a radical in Dostoevsky's Demons, says:

I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea I start from. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.[3]

The poet must give up his freedom to say whatever he wants in order to say something worthwhile, and forms help us do this. X. J. Kennedy wrote:

People say, "I dislike rhyme. It won't let me say what I want to say." I answer, "Yes! You've got it! That's what's great about it!"[4]

That's what great about marriage, too (well, that's one of the great things about marriage).

Mr. G. K. Chesterton has said everything I have just said, but with significantly more wit:

Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles"; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.[5]

He even makes the same connection to marriage:

To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which [will-worshippers] used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses.[6]

But when you marry one woman, you should not only give up the possibility of being married to all other women, you also give up the possibility of having your own way. And this is a good thing, but I imagine it is rather difficult. Anyway in these and other ways marriage is like art. "Truly, this is a great mystery, as says the apostle."[7]

At any rate the two invitations arriving on the same day is not such an amazing coincidence because both weddings will take place on the same weekend, and the invitation senders were bound by the same laudable sense of etiquette. I'm planning to go to the one here in Pittsburgh. It is a bit of a shame, though, because Massachusetts is lovely in June.

[1] Although I can't pretend to know the first thing about literature, I am told that this has to do with Representation Theory. But I owe the beginnings of my own ideas on the subject, probably, to Neil Postman and also my own misunderstanding of Marshall Mcluhan's maxim "the medium is the message." (But, who knows? Perhaps his whole fallacy is wrong).

[2] From "Song of Myself."

[3] I am quoting here from Richard Pevear's introduction to Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics Edition. September 1994) but really if you get a chance you should read Demons.

[4] The only place I can find a reference to this is on the Alsop Review website where its quoted without a citation.

[5] From Chapter 3 of Orthodoxy. It's in the public domain. You can read it here:
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/ortho14.txt

[6] Ibid.

[7] Father Ambrose of St. Barlaam monastery, Meteora, as quoted in Peter Hammond's The Waters of Marah

What makes a song good? (Opening Remarks)

I've been formulating a response to the question 'What makes a song good?' and thought I'd vet some ideas here before I respond. I thought I'd start with another question: what makes a sentence good?

The key quotes for me are:

1. T. S. Eliot in The Little Gidding:

...And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together).
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning...

2. Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

3. I once formulated a General Theorem of Poetry:

(Sound > Sight > Trope > Metaphor > Subject)
AND
(Sound = Sight = Trope = Metaphor = Subject)