The Reader Online

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

with Jane Davis, Director of The Reader Organisation

25th August, Liverpool

19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool, L69 7ZG

What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope?  

 

If Wordsworth were to be reborn as a twentieth century American, Gilead is the book he would write. Human, humane, real, devout, and connecting the inner spiritual with the outer public life, this moving novel was mentioned by Barack Obama as a favourite.

While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been.

 

Jane Davis is Founder and Director of The Reader Organisation, a charity on a mission to bring about a reading revolution, making the content of great books available to all. Jane’s talent, energy, and belief in the value of reading are an inspiration to all who meet her: don’t miss this chance to experience the power of the reading revolution for yourself!

For more information please contact Casi Dylan, Training Manager, on casidylan@thereader.org.uk or 0151 794 2830.

You can download a booking form here: PDF/ Word.

Following on from last week’s discussion of Browning’s Two in the Campagna, My Last Duchess is this week’s featured poem. Robert Browning (1812-1889) is renowned for his creation of dramatic monologues like this one, where the character of the Duke examines a painting of his ‘last duchess […] looking as if she were alive’, whilst revealing his own jealousy over her behaviour towards other men: ‘She liked whate’er / she looked on, and her looks went everywhere’, which results in her death: ‘I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together’. Though Browning never presents us with the full context of the poem, it appears that the Duke is conversing with a servant whose ‘master’ is in the process of securing the ‘dowry’ for his daughter’s marriage to the Duke. The effectiveness of the poem lies in the fact that we are only aware of the other character’s reaction through the Duke’s speech. After the chilling revelations throughout the poem, Browning indicates that the servant to whom the monologue is addressed may not be too keen to let his ‘master’ proceed with the marriage of his daughter to the Duke, yet is forced to remain by his side and therefore prevented from revealing this insight into the Duke’s character: ‘Nay, we’ll go / Together down, sir’.

At the poem’s end Browning warns that, like the Duke’s painting of his ‘last Duchess’, his new bride is already his ‘object’: a source of admiration and praise, who will no doubt meet the same untimely end as the Duke’s previous wife. The Duke’s preoccupation with how the painting of his Duchess stands ‘as if alive’ suggests that he is only able to appreciate her beauty once it has become lifeless and no longer threatening, emphasised by the Duke’s boasting of ‘Neptune […] taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity / Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!’, and showing that the painting of the Duchess no longer represents her life, but is merely another work of art that the Duke can claim ownership and control over.

My Last Duchess

That’s my last duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Frà Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps

Frà Pandolf chanced to say “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat”: such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart how shall I say? too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favor at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men good! but thanked

Somehow I know not how as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech which I have not to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark” and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and make excuse,

E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Robert Browning, 1842

The Aga Saga – a bit like The Forsyte Saga, only with fewer characters and more carbon monoxide. In this episode, Mr Nellist gets all Sooty and requires a Sweep. All we need now is Syoo…

(Disclaimer: The Reader Organisation in no way advocates or condones the dropping of chickens down chimneys. So stop it.)

War and Peace: an Anthology of Somali Literature is a unique and rare collection of classic Somali poems and stories exploring matters of conflict and its mediation. The work has been collected by Ismaaciil Aw Aadan and Axmed Aw Geeddi: poets who have an enormous understanding of Somali classical poets, their poetry, and the historical context of their literature which spans over 200 years.

The collection explains how pastoral nomadic communities were brought into conflict, and explores the role which literature can play in matters of peace-keeping: providing both Somali and non-Somali readers with a fascinating insight into the history of a creative community which may have otherwise been lost.

The anthology will be launched at the Mooge Festival and Hargeysa International Book Fair, and can now be ordered from Red Sea Online.

Trafford Council is currently hosting a four-week celebration of literature, Trafford Wordfest, which began last Monday. All events are literature-related, and range from informative sessions on how to get your work noticed by publishers, to interactive poetry performance workshops, and a Chicken Licken puppet show for 3-6 year olds!

Events are being held at Sale Waterside Arts Centre and surrounding libraries, as well as many other venues across the borough. Although many events are free, booking is essential.

You can find specific details of events, plus information on how to get tickets, by following this link to the festival homepage.

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) composed over 600 poems during her lifetime, and her poetic style was heavily influenced by the Imagist movement led by Ezra Pound. Though born into a prominent New England family, Lowell was unable to attend college and instead was largely responsible for educating herself, accumulating a huge collection of books over the years. Her poetry was not all well-received at its time of publication, and many critics seem to have been somewhat offended by her sexuality. Lowell lived with actress Ada Dwyer Russell from the early 1900s until her death in 1925, though the nature of their relationship remains unclear after all correspondence between them was burned by Russell upon Lowell’s death. However, the unknown presence in this poem is believed to be Russell, of whom Lowell considered Madonna of the Evening Flowers to present ‘so exact a portrait’.

Lowell won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1926 for her volume entitled What’s O’clock? (1925).

The most striking aspect of this poem is the emphasis on the visual: the precise descriptions of the sun shining on the ‘books’, ‘scissors’ and ‘thimble’ lying exactly where they were left, contrasted with the unexplained absence of the ‘you’ to whom the poem is addressed. Though Lowell does not present us with the person’s physical description, their absence is very keenly felt throughout the poem, mainly due to the effect they have on the speaker themselves: ‘Suddenly I am lonely’. The swiftness with which this mysterious, absent person is able to impact upon the speaker makes the relationship between the two an extremely compelling one to encounter: the urgency of the speaker’s desire to be reunited with the absent person is resolved by the second stanza, and we are able to see just how profoundly the poem’s speaker is affected by the presence of the so-far absent ‘you’: ‘I look at you, heart of silver [...] And I long to kneel instantly at your feet’. The poem’s movement from the domestic into religious vision is another effective technique of Lowell’s: the poem’s title, as well as images of the ‘Canterbury bells’, emphasises the extent to which both the absence and physical presence of ‘you’ stirs the emotions and reactions of the narrator.

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

All day long I have been working
Now I am tired.
I call: “Where are you?”
But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.
 
Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes,
You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet Te Deums of the Canterbury bells.

Amy Lowell, 1919.

If you liked this, here’s a link back to another of Amy Lowell’s poems: The Pike

Mr Nellist shares his thoughts on the work of Willa Cather (1873 – 1947), an American author and Pulitzer Prize winner, known for her depictions of frontier life on the Great Plains (between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River) in novels such as O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918).

Plus, inevitably, a short digression on the English and Flemish rabbit.

Hope you like it – and decide to read some Willa Cather! And if you already have, do please post a reply and tell us what you think. Who knows, a conversation may result…

Today we introduce a new feature to The Reader Online. For the last twelve years The Reader magazine has published new fiction, new poetry, thought pieces, book news, reviews and reader recommendations. The Reader wants to remind its readers of all the great existing poetry and prose worth reading in the belief that classic literature belongs in ordinary daily life and should not be confined to the classroom or lecture hall. Over the years we have featured new work by prestigious writers including A. S. Byatt, Seamus Heaney, Doris Lessing, Andrew Motion to name but a few, and their work has appeared alongside poets and authors who are much less well known or perhaps have never been published before, for we are dedicated to finding new voices, new ideas, new life. Now we would like to republish some of this work on our blog. It is too good to confine to the back issue shelf and therefore, starting from today, The Reader Online will feature fortnightly articles selected from past issues of The Reader. We begin with an essay from issue 12 by the deputy editor Sarah Coley, called ‘Reading a Difficult Poem’.

(You can find more information, plus how to subscribe to the magazine here.)

READING A DIFFICULT POEM
Robert Browning’s ‘Two in the Campagna’

Sarah Coley

It’s inevitable that at some point you will be faced by a poem that scares you with its remoteness and difficulty. There’s no predicting what kind of poem it will be since all readers are different, but that feeling of a mind that simply won’t grasp hold of the words should be familiar to everyone. What can you do? How can you make your mind start to work in the poem? Here’s a difficult poem to be going on with, in which the poet himself seems to be pursuing a thought or sensation that is eluding him:

Two in the Campagna

I
I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt, since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?

II
For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalised me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.

III
Help me to hold it: first it left
The yellowing fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft,
Some old tomb’s ruin: yonder weed
Took up the floating weft,

IV
Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles, – blind and green they grope
Among the honey-meal, – and last
Everywhere on the grassy slope
I traced it. Hold it fast!

V
The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air –
Rome’s ghost since her decease.

VI
Such life there, through such length of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting Nature have her way
While Heaven looks from its towers.

VII
How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above.
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?

VIII
I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more –
Nor yours, nor mine, – nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? what the core
Of the wound, since wound must be?

IX
I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul’s springs, – your part, my part
In life, for good and ill.

X
No. I yearn upward – touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth, – I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak –
Then the good minute goes.

XI
Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

XII
Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern –
Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

When a poem or a book fills your head with numbing fear, it’s the whole sense that is lost – the underground impact or the precisely urgent feeling that the poem was a bid to convey. The details on the other hand stick around and look confusing. So you’re left struggling with scraps of alliteration, or rhyme, or the tense in which the poem’s written, while your more honest mind is saying that you do not know how to begin.

But there has to be a beginning. If the poem is in stanza form, it may help to give each stanza a kind of ‘chapter heading’ by taking a phrase from each verse that impulsively seems central. ‘Two in the Campagna’ could go into these headings: I. ‘Do you feel?’; II. ‘I touched a thought’; III. ‘Help me to hold it’; IV. ‘Everywhere… I traced it’, and so on. Settle quickly on the phrase and write it down, or underline it on your copy. There has to be a way to make the tangled experience manageable and direct, and to isolate patterns of thought and feeling. Look at how words that are related to one another develop. So it’s interesting here how ‘Two in the Campagna’ splits into the separate threads of ‘you’, ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘it’. There’s something dynamic or at least unequal in the relationship that the poet is trying to use to get his own mind working.

There are other things you can do, but at this stage, it’s important to say that you must trust your impulse, even if it’s an angry rejection of the poem. Your impulse came in response to the poem and it doesn’t matter if that response was conscious or instinctive, you have to take it seriously.

You might well think, ‘I don’t like this poem, it’s got too many words in it… He’s too much in his own head.’ He is thinking restlessly throughout the poem and that is striking in a poem about a love relationship. So he writes about spontaneity in a way that makes it seem not quite simple feeling: ‘How is it under our control / To love or not to love?’ Though at the same time, it does appear that it’s the simple feeling he wants. On the other hand you might react against the poet’s almost too-full responses, his ‘primal naked forms of flowers’ and his ‘Silence and passion, joy and peace, / An everlasting wash of air’. Why can’t he just say plainly what he means? That actually would be a terrific question to ask of this poem.

So let’s ask it. Why can’t he be plain? Something seems to be preventing him from saying simply what he wants to say. It’s a rare and fleetingly private thought and yet it’s as if he needs the other person to see and feel it too in order to be sure of it. ‘I wonder do you feel to-day… For me, I touched a thought, I know, / Has tantalised me many times…’ It is exactly that appeal to be understood, but contradictorily, the phrase itself evades sense. He uses the physical word ‘touched’ to show direct contact with mental stuff, and only recovers the language of mind, ‘I know’, when he’s talking about the earlier remembered encounters with the thought. It’s as if the sense of the idea were too fresh to sustain knowledge. It’s only when it belongs in the past that he can talk securely about it. He can’t be plain because the idea is too young or too full of its own energy to settle into words, and his language – for all its zest – comes helplessly after the event.

That’s better isn’t it? He’s not being willfully obscure but struggling to entice the experience into words. In many ways, it feels as if the outward relationship between ‘you’ and ‘I’ is really a secret way to tangle with that inward relationship between the poet and the tantalising sense. It’s a tremendously active poem, in which the ‘I’ is trying to get the spider-thread sense into open present tense.

Just as with the chapter heading idea, try tracing the ways in which the poet attempts to capture the thought: ‘Help me to hold it’, ‘Hold it fast!’ The first attempts are grasping, and it’s a wonderfully physical picture, a kind of butterfly-netting expedition in which the lady is asked to assist: ‘it left / The yellowing fennel, run to seed / There…’. Then later in the poem, almost as soon as he’s said ‘Hold it fast!’, two things happen that over-turn those terms. She gets equal billing (‘us’ now rather than ‘you’ and ‘I’), and the attempt becomes a matter of alignment to the colossal pattern of the universe rather than that tableau of nineteenth-century playfulness: ‘Let us; O my dove, / Let us be unashamed of soul, / As earth lies bare to heaven above. / How is it under our control / To love or not to love’.

It’s grand language. I’m not altogether sure what it means, but it’s fine in its expression. It feels as though he has got something clear – though from this position, perhaps it is really a poem of seduction rather than a poem about that fleeting thread of feeling. Whichever it is, it’s a big arrival to understand that the desired element comes where the mind stops trying, as something beyond ‘our control’. It’s true about reading poetry too. It’s when you read without distance, unashamed of soul, hearing in the poem your own immediate worries and wants, that the poem really is getting read. Then the difficulty is not that of hard language only, but the more serious difficulty of life-size attention. Being scared, in that context, makes perfect sense.

Tickets for the Sefton Celebrates Writing Festival are now on sale! The event will be launched by new Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy in October, then will run from Monday 9th to Sunday 15th November.

This announcement follows the publication of Duffy’s first official poem as Laureate: ‘Politics’, which sees her join the government expenses row. You can view the poem here, or for more information on reactions to ‘Politics’ follow this link to the Guardian article.

The Festival brochure will be distributed across Merseyside and Lancashire from Monday 22nd June. More details will be available shortly, but for now visit the official website for more information.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) was born in Hull in 1621 where his father, Reverend Andrew Marvell, was a lecturer at Holy Trinity College. After completing his degree at Trinity College Cambridge, Marvell’s father died and he abandoned his plans for further study. Instead, Marvell travelled Europe during the 1640’s, acquiring the languages of Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian in addition to Latin and Greek. He worked as a tutor, and held office in Cromwell’s government; using his political status to free John Milton who was jailed during the restoration. His close proximity to government life presented him with a wealth of material inspiring him to write poetry and prose critiquing and satirising both court and parliament.

Marvell presents A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body in an unusual form, although this ‘dialogue’ technique is incorporated into many of his other poems. In the poem, the soul is ‘tyrannic’, whilst the body is a ‘dungeon’, both forcing the other to endure unnecessary suffering that they would otherwise be unaware of had it not been for the existence of the other: ‘But Physic yet could never reach / The maladies thou me dost teach’. Marvell presents them both as being imprisoned and ‘possessed’ by the other: the body is only conscious of sin because of the soul; ‘what but a soul could have the wit / to build me up for sin so fit?’, who must in turn endure physical pain because of the body; ‘who made me live to let me die’. The closing argument of the poem is given to the body, perplexed by the feelings of ‘hope’, ‘fear’, ‘love’, ‘hatred’ which ‘Knowledge forces me to know / And memory will not forego’. The final couplet: ‘So architects do square and hew / Green trees that in the forest grew’ perfectly emphasise the main message of the poem: though both soul and body find it impossible to live with their confinement, it is also inevitable that they must realise and accept their fate.

A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body

Soul.

O, WHO shall from this dungeon raise
A soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear;
A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart?

Body.
O, who shall me deliver whole,
From bonds of this tyrannic soul?
Which, stretched upright, impales me so
That mine own precipice I go;
And warms and moves this needless frame,
(A fever could but do the same),
And, wanting where its spite to try,
Has made me live to let me die
A body that could never rest,
Since this ill spirit it possessed.

Soul.
What magic could me thus confine
Within another’s grief to pine ?
Where, whatsoever it complain,
I feel, that cannot feel, the pain ;
And all my care itself employs,
That to preserve which me destroys ;
Constrained not only to endure
Diseases, but, what’s worse, the cure ;
And, ready oft the port to gain,
Am shipwrecked into health again.

Body.
But Physic yet could never reach
The maladies thou me dost teach ;
Whom first the cramp of hope does tear,
And then the palsy shakes of fear ;
The pestilence of love does heat,
Or hatred’s hidden ulcer eat ;
Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex,
Or sorrow’s other madness vex ;
Which knowledge forces me to know,
And memory will not forego ;
What but a soul could have the wit
To build me up for sin so fit ?
So architects do square and hew
Green trees that in the forest grew.

Andrew Marvell: 1681