The anticlimactic linebreak

It has been exceedingly long since the last post -- instead I have been tumbling, partly because this doesn't require one to write! -- but then it's been a busy semester. I am not sure this really merits a post but I have lately been struck by the prevalence (&, to my ear, strangeness) of the following device:

We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango
Chutney.

(Stevens)

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.

(Hopkins)

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue.

(Lowell)

Princess Volupine extends
A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand
To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,
She entertains Sir Ferdinand

Klein.

(Eliot)

I think it's crucial for there to be a metrical substitution right after the linebreak. Obviously the trick of emphasizing a word by sandwiching it between an enjambment and a period can be used (and presumably is in Milton) for serious purposes, but that isn't what's going on in these examples. Yet it isn't a full-fledged comic effect either: to my ear both Eliot and Stevens are going for a degree of silliness, Lowell is trying to sound prosaic, and Hopkins as usual (and in this he is very much like Wordsworth) is unselfconscious about sounding absurd. Of course I think it always sounds silly in practice. 

There are various other things that I meant to blog about at some point, but for now I'll just link to this delightful bit from a Keats letter:

On our return from Bellfast we met a Sadan - the Duchess of Dunghill - It is no laughing matter tho - Imagine the worst dog kennel you ever saw placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old Woman squat like an ape half starved from a scarcity of Buiscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the cape, - with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head - squab and lean she sat and puff’d out the smoke while two ragged tattered Girls carried her along. What a thing would be a history of her Life and sensations.

Cf. "the woman, and her garments vexed and tossed / by the strong wind." 

Two uncles one full-dress saber

Owls in flight are strangely photogenic (see also):

Here is Uncle 1, "as looney as ever" -- i.e., Yeats, introducing a book by random eastern mystic, as described by Eliot; really you should read the whole thing but I wanted to flag this bit for poss. future reference:

it does seem a pity that he tells some of the Holy Man's best stories over in advance in his own fashion but the Holy Man himself writes much better than Yeats for this sort of thing I mean. That [sic] is a good one about his scaling a mountain about 25000 feet and tumbling into a cave on top of a still Holier Man who received him with laughter and affection.

I'm not sure if the book was originally to be called "Mount Meru" -- as in the typescript -- but you might remember the late poem "Meru" (quoted in that most Yeatsian of novels, Sabbath's Theater) in which hermits in caves on mountains appear; the spirit of the anecdote also reminds me a little of Lapis Lazuli.

And here is Uncle 2, in what is now my favorite Clive James poem, esp. for the ending (it is attributed to "Robert Lowly"; am not sure if it was originally published under James's name):

Revised Notes for a Sonnet 

On the steps of the Pentagon I tucked my skull
Well down between my knees, thinking of Cordell Hull
Cabot Lodge Van du Plessis Stuyvesant, our gardener,
Who'd stop me playing speedway in the red-and-rust
Model A Ford that got clapped out on Cape Cod
And wound up as a seed-shed. Oh my God, my God,
How this administration bleeds but will not die,
Hacking at the rib-cage of our art. You were wrong, R.P.
Blackmur. Some of the others had our insight, too,
Though I suppose I had endurance, toughness, faith,
Sensitivity, intelligence and talent. My mind's not right.
With groined, sinning eyeballs I write sonnets until dawn
Is published over London like a row of books by Faber --
Then shave myself with Uncle's full-dress sabre.

As an irrelevant postscript, there is something pleasingly symmetric about the word "toponymy," quite apart from the pony hiding in the middle of it.

Snail-nosed and glassy-eyed

It has been long enough since the last post that I've been asked whether I've given up blogging. I certainly don't mean to; I have just been a little crippled by anxiety for the past month, and in this state of mind one is more impatient than appreciative of the internet. (I suppose I could have posted about the books I've read, but I'm reluctant to do so as (a) I'd just be exposing my ignorance, (b) I have a terrible reviewing voice; I tend to PRONOUNCE on things in the worst undergraduate way, and such posts are painful to reread. I was recently skimming Lowell's critical prose and it struck me as stylistically very bad -- though clever and observant beyond anything I could aspire to -- for utterly familiar reasons. The judicial stance is dangerous for anyone who finds it appealing, and the only easy way out of this pass is never to write with primarily evaluative intent.)

(I will note, in passing, this remark by Brad Leithauser about Cheever and Lowell, which I think contains a dangerous implication:

We learn that one character’s “sense of these aspects of privacy was scrupulous and immutable” and that another’s “imagination remained resilient and fertile.” The high-flown adjective pair was for Cheever what the incongruous adjective triplet (“orange, bland, ambassadorial”) was to Robert Lowell: an opportunity to record a legible signature in an extremely confined space.

It is true that grammatical templates like this can be effective when used well; that one becomes better with practice at filling them in effectively; and that this eventual richness can compensate for the dangers of self-parody. Phrases like "flabby, bald, lobotomized" suggest that a one-track mind is not always a bad thing. But to appreciate mannerisms just for being mannerisms, to praise writers for the sameness of their special effects -- as Leithauser seems to -- is indulgent in ways that make my flesh creep; perhaps it is an error everyone falls into with favorite writers -- Auden, in my case -- but it is an error for all that.)

A few linked pairs of pictures and quotes:

Snout 1 (via Jenny Davidson):

Snout 2, an almost-ouroboros ("the great sea serpent" it seems):

Self-involved hawk 2 (see also): 

Passage 1a (from Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows):

When we reached Edinburgh I awoke, feeling warm and babyish and contented, and the pain was so much less that I could hop with joy as we went along Princes Street, because of the splendor of the castle high on its rock over the trough of the green gardens, all the majesty of the city that lives more masterfully among its hills than Rome itself. But when I said, "Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it beautiful?" Mamma made no answer. 

Passage 1b (Beckett, "The End"):

The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.

Passages 2 (via Calista):

Plath, the cadaver-room poem: "in their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow"; out-of-context Lowell [i.e., "For the Union Dead"]: "once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass"

Rheumatic dewdrops

More parallel passages (gannet picture via Calista).

1. Pasternak, "September" (trans. Lowell):

The moment the sun rises, it disappears.
Last night, the marsh by the swimming-pool shivered with fever;
the last bell-flowers waste under the rheumatic dewdrop,
a dirty lilac stain souses the birches.

Cf. Geoffrey Hill, "Damon's lament for his Clorinda, Yorkshire 1654":

No sooner has the sun   

swung clear above earth’s rim than it is gone.   

We live like gleaners of its vestiges

There are also analogies with Hill's dove that "bursts through the leaves with an untidy sound" and Stevens's "pool of pink / clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes," and with this.

2. Pasternak, "September" (a few lines further down):

The thinning birchwood has not ceased to water its color --
more and more watery, its once regal shade.

Hill, sounding oddly Audenesque, in his first book:

Though there are wild dogs 
Infesting the roads 
We have recitals, catalogues 
Of protected birds; 

And the rare pale sun
To water our days.

And, much more recently: "the watered gold that February drains / out of the overcast"

More relevantly, Charles Wright:

I remember the way the mimosa tree
                                                   buttered the shade
Outside the basement bedroom, soaked in its yellow bristles.

3. Pasternak, "For Anna Akhmatova" (again trans. Lowell): "I hear the soiled, dripping small talk of the roofs" -- and "the shallows smell like closets full of last summer's clothes." For the former, cf. Paul Muldoon's "soiled grey blanket of Irish rain"; for the latter, cf. Hollinghurst, "his own rectal smell -- a soft stench like stale flower-water."

Charging like a tusked brute, gnawing like a bear

1. Flannery O'Connor on "Living with a peacock". If, like me, you had forgotten about O'Connor somewhat, this is a useful reminder of how good she is. It is hard to know what to excerpt but here is one bit:

Frequently the cock combines the lifting of his tail with the raising of his voice. He appears to receive through his feet some shock from the center of the earth, which travels upward through him and is released: Eee-ooo-ii! Eee-­ooo-ii! To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.

Also, here is the video of the v. young O'Connor and the backward-walking chicken. (Via Sean Costello.) Here is a stunningly ugly bird that is not a peachicken but will do:

And finally, in the spirit of "parallel passages," compare Flannery O'Connor's peacock description to Geoffrey Hill's ("his fulgent cloak a gathering of the dark" &c. Oh, and also (postultimately?), there is Robert Lowell on her face, "formless at times, then very strong and young and right."

2. "Anatiferous trees" in Browne. I really should find a copy of Pseudodoxia and read it through.

3. "Deep in clear lake / The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there."

4. "Forest Service may blow up frozen cows" (via clusterflock, I suspect).

5. Amy Clampitt's poem "Thermopylae," which was new to me, and where the post title is from.

(I found the Clampitt while looking around -- unsuccessfully -- in her work for chapter epigraphs for the thesis, which was dispatched earlier today to the committee.)

Fish-volts and Skylark Houseboats

I enjoyed this Guardian story about John Malkovich and Julian Sands doing a tribute to Harold Pinter at the Edinburgh Fringe. Malkovich on Pinter:

Harold gave off an electrical charge. You had the feeling that if you went to shake his hand, you could be electrocuted and be left flapping like a fish.

The image reminded me of this Robin Robertson poem:

Strindberg in London

My new wife fills the bed, fills every room, tells me
it will all be fine. Dragged through other people’s lives,
pursued through my own. What will I remember?
Only this. Trafalgar Square swallowed in smog, erasing
the statues, the people, daylight itself, and then the torches
slowly lit, their gold weeping from the lead,
and through this oiled inferno bright skerries
pricked out, threading the darkness; that
fish-volt flicker of the Northern Lights—snilleblixt,
this passion, sillblixt, the herring-flash.

(Is a fish-volt the amount of electricity it takes to galvanize a fish?)

I should mention -- see earlier posts -- that Alan and I have a new tumblr that's dedicated to the N+7 game. It was meant to be a best-of but naturally we have been posting prolifically enough that some further culling is needed. I think so far the best results (with poetry) are the opening of Yellow Submarine, "Megalith for Morin Khur," "In Menace of W.B. Yeats," "Dulce et decorum est," and "Skylark Houseboat." (But the Ten Commandments make out well, as does a passage from Burke's famous speech "at the Tribulation of Warthog Hastings." And the close of "The Dead.")

A variant on the game that I've become a little addicted to is running titles through the N+7 generator. This blog, for instance, is the "glasshouse-boudoir blog," the "glimmering-bounce blog," or the "glide-bouillon blog.") Esp. good results are to be had when the author's name is in the dictionary, so e.g. "The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope" becomes "The Rarity of the Locomotive by Alexander Popularity" or "The Rapist of the Lockout by Alexander Poppet." (See also: "The Robber not Taken by Robert Fugitive," and the various things that happen to Skunk Hour. Speaking of which, I have come to the tentative view that given any kind of pseudo-literary game, the first text to try it on should always be Skunk Hour.)

Two versions of a trick; Lowell poem with cat

It's hard to miss the similarity between the early poems of Geoffrey Hill and Robert Lowell, partly due to the shared Allen Tate influence; their first books even had similar titles, For the Unfallen and Land of Unlikeness respectively. (Hill's first poem: "Against the burly air I strode / Crying the miracles of God." Cf. Lowell's "he grappled at the net / with the coiled hurdling muscles of his thighs." I don't like Tate and by and large don't care for early Lowell or Hill either [1].) Less obviously, much of Hill's work is quite like History and the other books in Lowell's sonnet-writing phase; the resemblance has to do with the intensely "literary" personalities of both poets and the technical problems, and opportunities, that literariness brings up. For instance I think there is an obvious parallel between the endings of these poems:

I. Hill, "Funeral Music" part 8

Not as we are but as we must appear,   

Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we   

Desire life but as they would have us live,   

Set apart in timeless colloquy.

So it is required; so we bear witness,   

Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,   

Each distant sphere of harmony forever   

Poised, unanswerable. If it is without   

Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or   

If it is not, all echoes are the same   

In such eternity. Then tell me, love,   

How that should comfort us—or anyone   

Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,

Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

II. Lowell, "Obit" (last poem in For Lizzie and Harriet)

Our love will not come back on fortune’s wheel—

in the end it gets us, though a man know what he’d have:
old cars, old money, old undebased pre-Lyndon
silver, no copper rubbing through . . . old wives;
I could live such a too long time with mine.
In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.
Before the final coming to rest, comes the rest
of all transcendence in a mode of being, hushing
all becoming. I’m for and with myself in my otherness,
in the eternal return of earth’s fairer children,
the lily, the rose, the sun on brick at dusk,
the loved, the lover, and their fear of life,
their unconquered flux, insensate oneness, painful “It was. . . .”
After loving you so much, can I forget
you for eternity, and have no other choice?

Both poems hinge on the trick of setting up a direct, personal close by attaching it to a string of generalities, expressed in less-than-immediate lines that especially in Lowell's case are verbiage; the turn, when it comes, is effective because of the flatness of the middle of the poem. The closing couplet, though famous, is not that effective on its own. (As usual, I find Hill more interesting at the verbal level, I am fond of "contractual ghosts of pity" and of the use of "vaunt.") L and H are like each other in being prone to both mustiness and cheap rhetoric; usually a good poem involves avoiding both faults, but these strike me as successful examples of indulging both and playing them off against each other.

(There is, likewise, a way of setting up one's special effects badly that I associate with Pound.)

---

This poem in Lowell's first book, which really ought to be a Lowellcat, reads like an inspired and hilarious self-parody (which I assume it wasn't, at least consciously, as Lowell never republished it):

A Suicidal Nightmare

Tonight and crouching in your jungle-bed,
O tiger of the gutless heart, you spied
The maimed man stooping with his bag;
And there was none to help. Cat, you saw red,
And like a grinning sphinx, you prophesied
Cain's nine and outcast lives are in the bag.

Watching the man, I spun my borrowed car
Into the bog. I'd left the traveled road
And crashed into a lower bog;
And that was why the catapulting fur,
A woolly lava of abstractions, flowed
Over my memory's inflated bag.

The maimed man stooped and slung me on his back:
My borrowed car flopped quacking in the flood,
It foundered in the lowest bog.
Man, why was it your rotten fabric broke?
"Brother, I fattened a caged beast on blood
And knowledge let the cat out of the bag."

Autobiographical Lowellcat

Picture via UffishL on twitter.

Lowellcat after Dice

If the volume were any higher I'd be tempted to spin these off into yet another blog. (Pic courtesy Matt P.)

Yet another Lowellcat

I don't know why I didn't think of doing this one earlier (the line is from "Reading myself"):

Lowellcat variations

WHEREAS I can never seem to leave well alone, and WHEREAS this is the best picture on the internet, and WHEREAS I can't think of the Lowell poem (maybe sth from the Lizzie/Harriet series?) that exactly matches it, I resolved to make two variants of the same lowellcat:

Lowellcats, anniversary edition

Almost mandatory, today being Lowell's 94th birthday... (see also here) I'm afraid this is primitive as I am not a talented finder, or editor, of cat pictures on the internet. #6 is via Jeremy. (Btw, if you haven't yet, do check out the Charlie Sheen cats.)

Lowellcats

In a recent IM conversation I brought up the possibility of lowellcats, i.e., lolcats with captions from Robert Lowell poems. (If absolutely necessary one is allowed to use James Russell Lowell or Amy Lowell.) Matt P. immediately generated this one (quote is from "Skunk Hour"):

The theme is one for the tumblr, where no doubt they will all get text captions involving Alan.

Addendum. cf. Lowell Katz.

Addendum 2. via Kit, Lowell Cats. I guess the name was too obvious to be original... I quite like the Lowell Cats site though.