Grog-blossomed

Robert Graves -- whose work I hadn't thought about in years, and never, except for Goodbye to All That, took seriously -- has been forcing himself on my attention from all sides. (I wonder, is a Graves revival in the works?) Snippets follow:

1. A marvelous piece by Graves on L'Allegro (Verdict: "[with Shakespeare] the probing cold-chisel of criticism rings against the true rock of poetry. With L’Allegro, the plaster flakes away and the rubble tumbles out." Elsewhere, he speaks of "jolly old father Zeus himself, with a thunderbolt in his fist and a grog-blossom on his nose.") I have never liked these poems, which must have something to do why I enjoyed the Graves piece so much.

(It occurs to me that I haven't made full use of the newly-free TNR archive.)

2. Geoffrey Hill, in a lecture (nominally on war poetry) that Calista sent me, has much to say about Graves. The glib summary of the first 10-15 mins of the talk is that Seven Types, and its interest in verbal tensions and ambiguities, was ultimately the fruit of Graves's interest in psychology after WW1. (I'd known, of course, about Empson picking up the idea from the Graves/Riding analysis of "the expense of spirit(s)", but Hill pushes the chronology back a decade. I'm not sure this has more than bibliographical interest, though.) Later in the lecture, Hill quotes a short and really very good Graves poem that I hadn't prev. seen:

On Portents

If strange things happen where she is,
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,
Such portents are not to be wondered at,
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.

It is almost free of Graves's signature tweeness, except possibly for "tourbillions" which I can't make up my mind on; Hill, to his credit(?), treats the word as a serious literary choice rather than a symptom. (Obviously he is really drawn to the poem by that "ever-reluctant element"; recalcitrance of any kind seems always to have had an irresistible romance for him -- his first book begins with the line, "Against the burly air I strode" -- but this is all a story for another time.)

(As a note to self, if one ever finds the elementary excitation responsible for turbulence, "tourbillion" is a good name as it sounds international and has the "-on" ending.)

3. Speaking of Graves's style, Richard Wilbur on Graves, in the relevant PR interview:

Still, it can be useful and safe to read someone like Robert Graves who, as John Holmes said, is a great starter. You read Graves and he reminds you how delightful poetry can be at its best, and what a fine game it is—and it makes you want to write a poem. Not, however, a poem by Robert Graves, but one of your own.

Symptomatic, perhaps, of his own not-unrelated tweeness, that he should say this? Elsewhere, Randall Jarrell remarks about some of the Auden poems in Nones, 'If you see such a poem, what can you say except, "Ah, Graves, poor dear Robert Graves! Inimitable, isn't he?" But how extraordinary that Auden [should have written it].' I must also confess that few things set my teeth on edge as effectively as hearing Graves read his poems.

4. And, before burying this topic, I should recall that marvelous bit in Goodbye to All That where he meets Thomas Hardy:

[Hardy] said that he regarded professional critics as parasites no less noxious than autograph hunters, and wished the world rid of them. He also wished that he had not listened to them when he was a young man; on their advice he had cut out dialect-words from his early poems, though they had no exact synonyms to fit the context. And still the critics were plaguing him. One of them recently complained of a poem of his where he had written `his shape smalled in the distance'. Now what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed a little and said that once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and had found it there right enough — only to read on and find that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of early literary influences, and said that he had none at all, for he did not come of literary stock. Then he corrected himself and said that a friend, a fellow-apprentice in the architect's office where he worked as a young man, used to lend him books. (His taste in literature was certainly most unexpected. Once when Lawrence had ventured to say something disparaging against Homer's Iliad, he protested: `Oh, but I admire the Iliad greatly. Why, it's in the Marmion class!' Lawrence could not at first believe that Hardy was not making a little joke.)

Wardrop, snowdrop, raindrop

John Holbo's post about Walter Ong made me think of "Lycidas":

But O the heavy change, now thou art gon,
Now thou art gon, and never must return!
Thee Shepherd, thee the Woods, and desert Caves,
With wilde Thyme and the gadding Vine o'regrown, [ 40 ]
And all their echoes mourn.
The Willows, and the Hazle Copses green,
Shall now no more be seen,
Fanning their joyous Leaves to thy soft layes.
As killing as the Canker to the Rose, [ 45 ]
Or Taint-worm to the weanling Herds that graze,
Or Frost to Flowers, that their gay wardrop wear,
When first the White thorn blows;
Such, Lycidas, thy loss to Shepherds ear. 

I find these lines, and others in the poem, thoroughly magical, and the conventional explanation has to do with sound, but I have never heard the lines read aloud in a way that brings out their beauty. (I don't know if "Lycidas" has been set to music with any success, not too well-informed re lieder...) Perhaps this is just because we have lost the habit of reading out loud; one allows oneself much more of a lilt in the privacy of one's head; nevertheless, it is curious that Milton and Tennyson, the greatest pure musicians in English verse, were both unusually bookish. Verbal beauty is always influenced by meaning, one might even say that verbal beauty is always the iridescence of an impression that is perceived as hybrid. So when Ong says:

A literate person, asked to think of the word ‘nevertheless’, will normally (and I strongly suspect always) have some image, at least vague, of the spelled-out word and be quite unable ever to think of the word ‘nevertheless’ for, let us say, 60 seconds without adverting to any lettering but only to the sound.

This seems like a profoundly irrelevant thought experiment; it is difficult to think of the word "Nevertheless" -- or "What are Years" -- without plunging into one's hoard of associations and coming up with the Marianne Moore poem for instance -- and if one achieved the difficult meditative feat of imagining the word in isolation for a minute this feat would be so far from one's normal mental processes as to divulge no useful information.

But in the end I am less interested in what Ong has to say than in the word "wardrop," a variant spelling of "wardrobe" that was probably substituted for the 1638 edition's "wardrobe" to shorten the last syllable, to drag in (not too fancifully) in an association with "snowdrop," and (a little more fancifully) to prompt the metanalysis of the word as "war-drop" rather than "ward-robe." It is such a dramatic improvement of the line, and given the screwiness of spelling at the time I wonder if Milton first came upon the possibility of "wardrop" after he'd written the poem...

And I'm free-associating at this point, but "war-drop" made me think of other "-drops" in the arsenal of implausible weaponry, e.g., Ted Hughes's "Snowdrop":

Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.

(one of those poems there isn't a whole lot to say about) and of Hardy's raindrop in "During Wind and Rain" -- one of the few Hardy poems I like, perhaps because it has none of his vile compound verbs; you should follow the link and read the rest of it; the last line, though memorable, is in my view an overdone special effect, but the stanza form is very effective, and I think the first stanza might be my very favorite thing in Hardy:

They sing their dearest songs—
He, she, all of them—yea,
Treble and tenor and bass.
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face...
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

[...] 

 
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them—aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs...
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.

"Rhombs, and wedges, and half-moons, and wings"

The line is from Paradise Regained; I found it because I was looking for pentameter lists of nouns. The first search result for "rhombs and wedges," however, is the Tilings Encyclopedia, a repository of Penrose tilings and other aperiodic (mostly substitution) tilings of the plane, such as the (new-to-me) pinwheel patterns of Radin and Conway and others, and their relatives, like this kite-domino tiling:

(The pinwheel tilings have the property that every tile appears at least once in every possible orientation.)

[PS a topic I've been paying some attention to lately is the existence of quasicrystalline, i.e., Penrose-tiling-ish, solutions to certain packing problems, which are interesting as statistical physics. For prev. coverage of this see here and here.]