The Symbol

Here are two of my favourite Yeats poems, dreamy romantic ones. They show that the imaginative world Tolkien evokes, of castles, swords, knights and a host of other ‘archaic’ things are not archaic at all but still speak to us down the ages perhaps more strongly than what we know as modern. This is because they are not so much ‘old’ as ageless, and this is an important distinction. There is a quality about the cup, the stone, the sword, the throne, the tree, the sky, the unicorn, the lion, the eagle, the plough, which touches us in some fundamental place. It’s not ‘old fashioned’ or reactionary. And does not, of course, exclude references to things of the modern world; yet these images-become-symbols are the DNA of the imagination. They were there before we were, and have always been.

This is what Kathleen Raine says in her essay On the Symbol: 

“We should do wrong if we think of symbols as single poetic images, used to obtain some literary effect; rather symbol is a language in each of whose parts a whole is implied, and each symbol in some measure makes known to us that whole, as a whole, and in its wholeness...”(...) “none of these, surely, were deliberately chosen by the poets, but, rather, chose them; they come, not as allegory in which the poet searches for an apt symbol for some abstract idea – the sword of justice or the scales of equity – but rather as epiphanies, awe-inspiring glimpses that move us deeply and inexplicably. These images seem put into our hands like clues which we are invited to follow back and back, for they draw us irresistibly as by magic; and this is no less so when we encounter them in nature than in dreams of vision. By their numinous nature we recognise them; and not with academic curiosity do we pursue them to their mysterious source, but as we follow the beloved person, unable to keep away, or watch all night before a closed door hoping for a glimpse or a sign. We live under the power of their compulsion: for they do not present themselves, like academic problems, from outside, as tasks to be taken up by will-power, to which we must drive ourselves. They arise, rather, as living impulses, urges of our own being and therefore compelling. We cannot rest until we have followed them to their source, or as far as our understanding allows.”

What a beautiful and meaningful comparison between the compelling symbol and the beloved. The beloved’s face doesn’t “equal” anything, it isn’t a conundrum to get your head around. It draws us ever onward, opening up ineffable, immeasurable vistas.

 

The Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light;
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

WHEN my arms wrap you round I press

My heart upon the loveliness

That has long faded from the world;

The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled

In shadowy pools, when armies fled;

The love-tales wrought with silken thread

By dreaming ladies upon cloth

That has made fat the murderous moth;

The roses that of old time were

Woven by ladies in their hair,

The dew-cold lilies ladies bore

Through many a sacred corridor

Where such grey clouds of incense rose

That only God's eyes did not close:

For that pale breast and lingering hand

Come from a more dream-heavy land,

A more dream-heavy hour than this;

And when you sigh from kiss to kiss

I hear white Beauty sighing, too,

For hours when all must fade like dew,

But flame on flame, and deep on deep,

Throne over throne where in half sleep,

Their swords upon their iron knees,

Brood her high lonely mysteries.

Tolkien and Fantasy

  Many people love the world of Fantasy, of impossible, 'unreal' things, beings, happenings. A childhood without magical stories is surely a childhood bereft of some of its greatest treasures. Those ogres, beanstalks, forests and wolves, the alluring cottage made of gingerbread, cakes and candy in Hansel and Gretel, shiny poisoned apples...Never trust appearances...The adult who 'grows out of it' needs perhaps more to think about growing back in. These great characters, events and places seem always to have been there, as we connect, or reconnect, with a lost sense of wonder. They work too as grand archetypes whose meaning is at once immediate and yet ungraspable by the rational mind.

Charles Williams

Most people have heard of J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. They were part of a larger group in Oxford called The Inklings, and they all used to meet in one of their houses and discuss literature, and read out loud from their own writings. Exciting times indeed. Tolkien, Lewis, and an unfortunately lesser known member Charles Williams, decided each to invent a strange world of their own. Tolkien of course invented Middle Earth, Lewis Narnia, and Williams our world but with strange dimensions and odd happenings. He wrote seven remarkable novels, and in them you find adventure in ordinary tranquil English towns and villages where supernatural occurrences cause disturbance, even havoc. Here is the unusual opening paragraph of The Place of the Lion (1933), which takes place in the then sleepy southern pre-Brexit English county of Hertfordshire. It made me want to read on:

Ralph Vaughan Williams

I’ve noticed that in France British composers remain relatively unplayed. One of my favourites is Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). This is one of my best-loved pieces, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, composed in 1910. It is inspired by Thomas Tallis’s original melody, Williams often drawn to the music of the Elizabethan era. Tallis was an English Renaissance composer (c. 1505-1585). The theme recurs three times over the course of the piece, lasting around 17 minutes in this Proms festival concert version. Williams’ music here and elsewhere expresses real depth of emotion, perfectly contained:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FppYjt6wZJI

Here is another remarkable, moving pastoral piece, The Lark Ascending, played here by the violinist Hilary Hahn at the George Enescu Festival. This version was premiered in 1921, inpired by George Meredith’s 122 line poem about the skylark. Williams imitates the particular flight of the bird, with the sudden bursts of energy in its stages of ascent. It is refreshing to reconnect to this kind of delicacy of feeling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOWN5fQnzGk

Romanticism

I would like to share some of the English philosopher Roger Scruton's thoughts on Romanticism (click on the link below), a rich and complex movement in the arts. Feel free to add reflections of your own, this being a community. In relation to what was said in the post below, it is interesting to read the observation that the Romantics, unlike the Greeks being open and at home in the natural world, express inwardness, severance, sehnsucht - that longing we all know on some level for a lost home. It is the birth of a new subjectivity, and a new freedom with all its burdens. We still feel severed from the natural world and ancient custom, and search for it in art, in forms of sublime love; we are the great grandchildren of the Romantics.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mdQOENAnqxemy4KycjYvGcV9E3ivlFN-/view?usp=sharing



Théodore Géricault, Evening Landscape with an Aqueduct (1818)
Stormy sky, turbulent mood, overgrown ruins, human figures dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape: all elements of Romanticism.

Aspens

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees

William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793)

The Romantics arose much earlier in England than in France, in response to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, and their legacy has been immense for later, even modern artists. We still very much have a Romantic turn of mind when it comes to Nature. A century on from them, Edward Thomas wrote this beautiful poem called “Aspens”, a tree whose small bright green leaves give the impression of shimmering, or trembling, in a gentle breeze (hence its French name, le tremble). An Old English name for it was cwicbeam, literally "quick-tree". Thomas, like many of his generation, and those before like John Clare, and Thomas Hardy, found Mankind’s insensitivity towards our natural world, and the rapid disappearance of age-old communities, difficult to bear. The poet sees the trees as living, participating in the local community of inn and smithy, and as a natural embodiment of his own grieving for its loss, grief over “lightless pane”, “footless road”, “silent smithy”, “silent inn”. Both tree and poet “unreasonably grieve[s]” in the eyes of the world. But “we cannot other than an aspen be...”. The poets have a duty to speak, whether the world listens or not, because they see metaphorically the deeper dimensions to reality. Thomas’s poem expresses the universal feeling of loss with great delicacy. In this respect too it is “Romantic”, as the Romantics hearkened back to an idyll, but in another it is twentieth century, Modernist, in its broken rhythms. 

All day and night, save winter, every weather,

Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,

The aspens at the cross-roads talk together

Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

Out of the blacksmith's cavern comes the ringing

Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn

The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing—

The sounds that for these fifty years have been.

The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,

And over lightless pane and footless road,

Empty as sky, with every other sound

Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,

A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails

In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,

In tempest or the night of nightingales,

To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.

And it would be the same were no house near.

Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,

Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear

But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves

We cannot other than an aspen be

That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,

Or so men think who like a different tree.

 

"When nations grow old, the arts grow cold,

And commerce settles on every tree..."

William Blake (1757-1827)

Here are some slightly edited thoughts from the Temenos Academy Review by John Carey, published in 2017.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1guXsWFdWli6lxximrUp3dFdDSh96iNsI/view?usp=sharing

He inquires into the nature of "the politics of time" and "the politics of eternity", expressions coined by the Irishman AE (George Russell), poet, painter and activist, and friend of W. B. Yeats. Kathleen Raine would quote them, in reference to the work of artists in relation to modern politics, and the world situation. Carey articulates some interesting thoughts, because there is an obvious tension between the artist and politics, or what some might see, even, as complete disconnection. Is art just for entertainment, or the sugar coating on a harsh reality? Do artists work in an ivory tower, in a world of disconnected fantasy? Perhaps many do. But some of the greatest amongst them have been politically involved, or made strong political statements. Yeats was an Irish Senator. And the Romantics like Shelley felt close to many of the revolutionary ideas of their time in France, although some, like Blake, became quickly disillusioned. Blake also took up arms in his poetry against social injustice. However, it is more than this; what if, and many artists have believed this, the Imagination itself (a sphere outside time) can be an active principle in the world, in our consciousness, and in due course influence our minds and hearts, thereby bringing about renewal within society? What is the connection? Traditionally, the poets and the philosophers had their place within the City, and it was of the highest order. For Blake, the artist labours for the advent of a new age. If not, when art declines, society declines. In his Prophetic Book Jerusalem, he envisions the mythical Giant Albion's inner history as that of the sleeping, and awakening, nation of Britain. From its inner awakening, he shows, outer changes will follow, whereas our society is for ever thinking only in terms of changing outer circumstances.

W. B. Yeats

Difficult to resist. I just have to publish a Yeats poem.

A slight one for starters, but perhaps not so slight. It is very beautiful, and typical of Yeats' later writing. It was written in 1938, and is one of his last. An irreverence, a sort of "mask", beneath which you can feel the true reverence of the heart. To begin with, it is deliberately unlyrical, as suits title and subject matter, but in the last four lines in come alternating, lilting tetrametre and trimetre, as the poet expresses his true longing, for beauty. Although a Senator at one point in his life, Yeats preferred to avoid directly mentioning politics in most of his poetry, in favour of what his friend the artist AE (George Russell) would call "the politics of eternity" as opposed to "the politics of time". Here, what more worthy subject in our age of conflict? Love, nostalgia and tenderness, at seeing a girl standing there:

Modern Times & Hard Times

In Western democracies, heavy labour has been continually on the decline, factories have been closing, heavy industry outsourced. So isn’t Dickens’ criticism in Hard Times of the industrial northern city Coketown (based on Preston in Lancashire) simply from another irrelevant age?: “...inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow.” Boring long-gone world of factory workers! Or just an historical curiosity, lucky we’ve escaped from that. Not entirely, perhaps. What might this still mean to us? 

Although fewer people are caught in the repetitive mechanisation of heavy industry, the mechanisation of work has continued apace. It is commonplace to see a workday task as repetitive and disconnected from its final outcome in the process of production. So we are left in a vacuum working at a fragment, which has no real meaning to us, and can feel useless and dispossessed. Like in a production line we screw on the bolts and don’t see the thing that rolls out at the end. Perhaps what rolls out is useless anyway. Yet we need creative outcomes. Such mechanical tasks can just as easily turn us into the “the piston of the steam-engine," in the Coketown factories, "[which] worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness".

The Circumlocution Office - extract from Little Dorrit

"The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

Little Dorrit

Like many of Dickens' novels, Little Dorrit was published in serial form. It consisted of 19 installments, illustrated by 'Phiz'. Dickens loved this form of publishing because it gave him a sense of intensity, and a closeness to his readership; in fact, he was writing only a few chapters ahead of the people reading it! The novel features the young Amy Dorrit who was born and brought up in the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison, a place close to the author's heart because his own father was imprisoned there for non-payment of debts


The Circumlocution Office

We might associate Dickens only with descriptions and situations of industrialisation and deep-set poverty. Yet Dickens is much more than this. He looks to causes, and the social structures, institutions and ideas which work in the background and sustain and propagate injustice. Returning to Dickens, it seems to me so obvious he is bright, fresh and incredibly relevant to today’s world. His world is ripe for our picking. Put it beside ours, and things light up.

Here is one area then: institutions. We can think of how he satirises the complex apparatus of the judiciary system in his great work Bleak House, but what about the “Office”...in particular government offices? I have been thinking about this for some time, having worked in offices myself in student holidays. And we all contact them on the phone (if we can get through). They are strange places indeed. Obviously, you can’t make too many generalisations, offices appear necessary, for one thing, for the functioning of society. And some people like working in them, or dealing with them. But many don’t... They can become places of tyranny, of boredom, disconnection, and alienation for the worker, a cog in a vast system; and for the outsider, an impregnable fortress, or machine, working at an infuriatingly slow pace, full of rules and regulations you can do nothing against.

One of the “best” offices in Dickens is to be found in Little Dorrit (1855-1857). It is called The Circumlocution Office. Now what is this? It is a government department, run purely for the benefit of its obstructive officials (sounds familiar?). It is of no social benefit. In fact, it is toxic. The character Arthur Clennam visits the office trying to find out about a man called William Dorrit, and he is passed from official to official. It is a satire of that well-known phenomenon, bureaucracy.

And as is only right, its name is long-winded, self-important and pompous, but if you take the trouble to look at its meaning, all is there: circumlocution means speaking in a roudabout way, using an unnecessary number of words to express an idea (which is perhaps not even worth expressing). It is, in fact, the process of evasion: “It being one of the principles of the Circumlocution Office never, on any account whatever, to give a straightforward answer.” (Little Dorrit, Book 1, chapter 10). Typically Dickensian, this use of a long-winded word. He loves to make fun and prick the bubble of self-importance. There is much to say about Dickens and language itself. More of that later.

Sir Philip Sidney sonnet

Here is a poem by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), a leading poet of the English Renaissance, a long-gone time when composing a sonnet was a gauge of the authentic, accomplished individual, a real person. He combines elegance, wit and feeling. 'Wit' in these instances is not being clever, but a faculty of the mind which finds its true place, in service of the heart. This comes from a long sequence of 108 sonnets and 11 songs, called Astrophil and Stella - Astrophil the star lover, Stella his star:

Because I oft, in dark abstracted guise,

Seem most alone in greatest company,

With dearth of words, or answers quite awry,

To them that would make speech of speech arise,

They deem, and of that doom the rumour flies,

That poison foul of bubbling pride doth lie

So in my swelling breast, that only I

Fawn on myself, and others do dispise.

Yet pride, I think, doth not my soul possess,

Which looks too oft in his unflatt'ring glass;

But one worse fault, ambition, I confess,

That makes me oft my best friends overpass;

Unseen, unheard, while thought to highest place

Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace.

fæst

We tend to skim over most words and only register the immediate meaning, if at all. This is part of our surface culture and surface way of living. Scratch a little, though, and whole vistas open up, and you start to travel through the layers of the past our ancestors left buried there. It’s a wonderful process, because it slows us down, allows us to dwell on meaning, and connect with its deeper sources, bringing the mind to rest in origins. Every word is precious and special.

Looking at a Philip Sidney poem this week, we came across the uncommon use of the word ‘fast’, in the line ‘take fast hold...’. It is not about speed.

Charles Dickens' world

We are looking at some Victorian literature in class at the moment, Jane Eyre to begin with. And it has taken me back to an early and enduring love of mine, Charles Dickens. In fact, I can’t remember a time when there was no Dickens, his prolific imagination so fills a young impressionable mind, it’s the sort of big furniture of the English Imagination. So big it jumps out of the page at you. An old faithful friend and companion to many a quiet evening.

More leisure

Following on from yesterday's post on Leisure; as we return from the summer holidays, we hope, refreshed, we can still ask whether our "time out" has always been really leisure, as the Ancients understood it. How often we find ourselves restless, even fretful, in our leisure time. Even in holiday activities we often strain for something not before us, feel a lack as our minds wander and hanker in dissatisfaction.

Interestingly, the Greek word for leisure is the origin of Latin scola, German Schule, English school. The name for the institutions of education and learning means "leisure". That surely gives food for thought.

Here are a couple of quotations from Joseph Pieper's work Leisure, The Basis of Culture, mentioned in the BBC recording posted yesterday:

Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go, and "go under", almost as someone who falls asleep must let himself go (you cannot sleep unless you do so). And in fact, mutually related, just so the man at leisure is related to someone sleeping; as Heraclitus said of those who sleep, that they are "active and cooperative in the business of the world". The surge of new life that flows out to us when we give ourselves to the contemplation of a blossoming rose, a sleeping child, or of a divine mystery - is this not like the surge of life that comes from deep, dreamless sleep? 

And finally:

...against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as effort, leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. This inner joyfulness of the person who is celebrating [Der Feiernde] belongs to the very core of what we mean by leisure [as does that incomparable German word for "quitting time" or "festival-evening", Feierabend]. Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself [whereas idleness is rooted in the denial of this harmony], but also that he is in agreement with the world and its meaning. Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their onenness.

Bonne rentrée!