As You Like It

For anyone interested in Shakespeare's comedies, As You Like It (1599) is a good place to begin; and the best way to begin is by reading Anne Barton's first-rate Introduction in the Riverside Edition of 1997, (most of which I shall shamelessly reproduce here) just before—or, better— after you read the play.

"In Love's Labor's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare had experimented with the reduction of plot entanglement, actual story line, to a minimum. AsYou Like It too is a play which stresses words above action, matter above words. There is a flurry of events at the beginning—Oliver's various attempts to rid himself of his virtuous younger brother, the banishment of Rosalind and then of Oliver himself—but these are transparently devices for getting all the major characters away from the familiar world and into the forest of Arden, rather than incidents exploited for their own sake. Near the end another little explosion of events precipitates four marriages and releases all the exiles from their pastoral life. In between, Shakespeare seems to go out of his way to avoid generating suspense. Celia and Oliver, Audrey and Touchstone have agreed to marry almost before we what is happening. Rosalind has only to abandon her disguise as Ganymede —and there is no reason on the level of plot why she should not do this as soon as she is safe in Arden—for Orlando to declare himself and Phebe to recognize that she must be content with her faithful Silvius after all.

"As You Like It replaces a developing intrigue, of the kind exemplified by Much Ado About Nothing or Twelfth Night, with a structure of cunningly juxtaposed characters and attitudes which Shakespeare has elaborated until it becomes a substitute for plot. As the days go by in Arden, two or more characters meet, converse and part, to be succeeded on the stage by another group of people concerned to explore a different, but related, point of view. Without being in the least undramatic, As You Like It is singularly still at the center in a way that focusses attention upon ideas and thematic material. Unlike Ben Jonson, refuses to legislate or even to take sides in the various rivalries the comedy sets up: between court and country, nature and fortune, youth and age, realism and romanticism, inherent nobility and the virtue that is acquired, the active and the contemplative life, laughter and melancholy. These polarities, the subject of ceaseless debate and meditation, tend to be identified with particular characters, but the comedy as a whole is far more interested in doing justice to the complexity of the argument than in prescribing correct choices.

"No society, if it is honest with itself, can pretend that these antinomies do not exist. Equally, no society can have any true cohesion of or self-respect if it does not try to accommodate them all, fairly, within its total structure. Rosalind is extraordinarily important in As You Like It, as central and dominating a figure in her fashion as Hamlet is in his own, very different play, because in her these warring opposites are reconciled and live and peace without for an instant losing their force and individuality. Like Jacques, Rosalind knows that human beings die and worms eat them. Like old Corin, she is aware that even the most passionate love diminishes with time, and like Touchstone, that lovers are objectively ridiculous and their airiest flights grounded in the senses. She knows these things immediately and emotionally, not merely in the abstract, and yet they do not sour her gaiety or trivialize the essential seriousness of her commitment to Orlando. Speculative and thoughtful, she is nonetheless able to give a positive shape to her own existence and to that of several other people as well. Detached but involved, she laughs at herself as much as she does at Phebe, Silvius, or Jacques, yet manages to be gentle and generous to them and perceptive in her own affairs. Life is at best imperfect, even in Arden, but Rosalind suggests that there are ways of living it well and to some purpose, despite the pessimism of Jacques.

"By 1599, Shakespeare  had already written at least seven comedies, most of them built on the idea of two localities, one heightened and more remarkable than the other. Like Belmont [in The Merchant of Venice], Navarre [Love's Labor's Lost], the wood in Two Gentlemen of Verona or A Midsummer's Night's Dream, Arden is a place set apart from the ordinary world. It is emphatically not a paradise. Winter, cold winds and rain, the penalty incurred by the Old Testament Adam, come to it. Some of its native inhabitants are churlish and stupid. Yet the forest is essentially a good place, not because it possesses limitless wealth or supernatural power, but because in Arden fortune does not oppress and stifle nature. People are free here, as they are not in the nervous court of Duke Frederick, to realize their own potentialities. Worldly assets and success cease to matter. In the forest, judgements are made only in  terms of what people really are. Some people, like Orlando and Rosalind, gain from the opportunity. Others do not.

"The idea that sophisticated people, suddenly made part of a rustic life of which previously they had the most distant and imperfect knowledge may discover  truths obscured or undisclosed in the court is a very old one. Pastoral is a complex and enduring [literary] form, not because it is escapist but because it is basically tough: it is a way of testing both the self and the assumptions of ordinary urban society. As You Like It is a pastoral in this sense. It begins with a disordered society, a corrupt court in which violence and broken ribs are considered entertaining and men like Le Beau have to hide their own intuitive sense of justice under a foppish mask; where Oliver, simply because he is an elder son can treat his servants and younger brother like animals. It moves from this nightmare world into Arden, an exile which is really a liberation, where ideas and relationships can be honestly examined. Long after such masculine impersonation is necessary, Rosalind clings to the part of Ganymede because of the freedom it allows her. In her boy's disguise, she escapes (for a time) the limitations of being a woman, Duke Senior's daughter, the conscious object of Orlando's love. She learns a great deal about herself, about Orlando, and about love itself which she could not have done within the normal conventions of society. This knowledge is, in a sense, the gift of the forest but it can only come to full fruition in the world outside. Sooner or later, Rosalind must stop play-acting, must reveal herself Orlando in her own person, and recognize the fact that Hymen, the god of marriage, presides not over the fields and woods but over the town. (V.4.141-46)

"There is some truth in Jacques' accusation that Duke Senior and his companions in exile are as much usurpers in a world whose natural balance they have disturbed as Duke Frederick himself. Arden is not a place where people who are not really farmers or goat-herds can live permanently, however useful it may be as a temporary refuge. At the end, most of the characters return joyously to an urban world, which thanks to what they have learned during their banishment, they will transform. The pattern here is one that is standard in pastoral literature, and one of the sources of its enduring fascination. Shakespeare must have known Spenser's particularly haunting version of it in Book VI of The Faerie Queene. He returned to it himself in Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. As You Like It, however, stands out among the other plays of Shakespeare's which might be described, at least in part, as pastorals by its essential optimism and by its insistence upon the tolerance and inclusiveness of the new society epitomized in the final dance.

"It is true that there are some ungainly participants in this concluding ritual. The elephantine caperings of Audrey are no more "seemly" than they ever were. More important, the relativism, the sceptical attitude of Touchstone remains unchanged. Like all Shakespeare's fools, Touchstone is a corrupter of words. Language itself is one of his main preoccupations, and he likes to bewilder simple souls like Corin by demonstrating the superiority of words over facts. It is entirely characteristic of Touchstone that he does not care on which side of a question he argues. In fact he reverses himself twice in the course of his court-versus-country dispute with Corin. What matters to him is a denial of the single, objective nature of reality: the reality believed in by men like Corin who earn what they eat, get what they wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness, and never question either the values implied by these attitudes or the words used to express them. Corin is finally silenced by Touchstone's "courtly" wit. He is not, however, exactly defeated. He and the fool simply represent antithetical ways of looking at the world. Neither perspective is advanced as a model. Corin's simplicity is obviously limited, but then so is the willful complication of Touchstone's verbal kingdom.

"Shakespeare's fools are usually solitaries, men who can comment on society in the way they do partly
because they themselves are set apart, free of domestic entanglement or even of a personal past. Touchstone is unusual in that he does not merely talk about getting married: he actually does it . . . The bride of this man for whom words are all important is a girl unable to comprehend or make effective use of even the simplest verbal constructs . . . her mistakings are comic, but her relationship with Touchstone gives them a special significance. Audrey cannot find meanings for words; Touchstone can find too many. Both, however, are "sure together, / As winter to foul weather" (V.4.135-36) because when it comes to the point of choice, of action, they fall back on appetite, non-verbal sense experience of the kind that man shares with the brute creation. Both characters make us laugh, Audrey unwittingly, Touchstone because it is his profession, but there is in both cases a fundamental misadjustment between language and fact. Certainly Touchstone does not represent a point of view to be trusted in this play, as Feste and Lear's fool do in theirs. Although the scepticism of Touchstone does distinguish gold from dross in a wholes series of different encounters—with Le Beau, with Jacques, with Corin, Rosalind and Orlando —the agent is in no sense to  be confused either in nature or quality with what it is there to verify or expose. A touchstone identifies gold: it is not in itself a precious substance. The man totally without illusions is ultimately as much a fool as his romantic opposite, Silvius. Even the most skilfull use of words, the most intelligent awareness of the multiple nature of reality, if it is without commitment or generosity, leads in the end to a rigid and reductive kind of behavior, imprisoning man within the skin of the animal.

"There are two important absentees from the final dance, as well as two erratic performers. Orlando's faithful servant Adam is simply too old to help initiate the new social order. Silently, he has vanished from the play. As for Jacques, although he is present in the final scene, he is adamant in his refusal to join in the dance.  It is one of the few absolutely just and perceptive decisions he announces in the course of the comedy. A man unbalanced in his pessimism, delighting in his own melancholy and unsociability, Jacques has hitherto dealt in judgments that were somehow incomplete or askew. Oliver confounded men with beasts but Jacques, in his reported soliloquy on the herd-abandoned deer, makes the opposite mistake interpreting animal behavior as though it were human. Throughout Act II he clings perversely to prose and discordant sounds while all around him the play is lifting into verse and song. As the comedy progresses, he continues to fare badly. Only Jacques fails to recognize that, in their encounter in the forest, Touchstone has cleverly parodied his own style:

And then he drew a dial from his poke [says Jacques],
And looking on it, with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, "It is ten a' clock.
Thus we may see, " quoth he, "how the world wags.
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven,
And so from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale."                          (II.7.20-28)

These melancholy certainties which Jacques so much admires are platitudes of the most obvious kind. Even without the Duke's barbed reminder that Jacques own libertine past scarcely qualifies him to scourge vice in others, it would be hard to see what value a satirist could have who relied upon moralizings so dusty.

"Jacques famous account of the seven ages of man, for all its verbal poise and inventiveness, is also a set piece which, for Elizabethans, must have verged on the banal.  Moreover, it is generalized and demonstrably untrue. Orlando, Touchstone is quick to point out, may be absurd when he hangs love sonnets on trees. There is still far more value in his relationship with Rosalind than Jacques accounts for in his dismissal of man as lover. Again, Jacques reduces old age to 'second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything' (II.7.165-66). The words are no sooner spoken than Orlando enters bearing old Adam: a man enfeebled by his years, dependent now on a younger life, but also a living image of all that Jacques left out of his type picture: loyal, honset and discriminating. His age has its own kind of value, 'frosty but kindly', and the tenderness of Orlando, as well as the respect of paid Adam by Duke Senior, ridicules Jacques' despair. With Orlando and Rosalind, Jacques makes even less headway. Orlando flatly declines the satirists invitation to join him in a verbal assault on the world 'and all our misery': 'I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults.' (III.2.278-81) Rosalind, even more crushingly point out that Jacques' ideal of silent unresponsiveness is one realized by the average fence-post (IV.1.8-9).

"Throughout As You Like It Jacques has functioned less as the representative of a valid point of view than as a measure of the essential sanity and balance of those characters who stand closer than to the center of the play. He too is a kind of touchstone testing the strength of that optimism and faith in the future characteristic of Rosalind, Orlando, Celia and Duke Senior with his continual reminders of death and decay. None of them attempt to deny the facts of death and time, but all reject the hopelessness of Jacques: the notion that life is without purpose or meaning because it finishes in the grave. The new society forged in Arden is not flawless. Nevertheless, the final dance is a triumph, an image of harmony, and its movements disciplined and artful though they are, are flexible enough to accommodate the awkwardness of the goat-girl and the fool. Jacques is respectful of what has been achieved, yet he insists at the end that there is a world elsewhere, beyond the scope of comedy. This why he casts in his lot with the penitent Duke Frederick, a man who is still asking questions, as opposed to celebrating a resolution. Jacques's response, here is, for once, justifiable. He right to remind us that the comic dance, for all its generosity, its vigor and grace, cannot hope to contain all aspects of human experience."

Modernism: discrediting the object in a picture by Jeanne Taylor (1937)

Jeanne Taylor, an accomplished artist totally unknown to fame, was about 22 when she made this playfully cubist picture of a farm near Scandia, Mn. in the summer of 1937, and gave it to her dear friend, my mother, who was then 37. It looks a little childish, as if she had been thinking of me and my sister when she painted it (I was six and my sister was not yet three) and perhaps she was.  I like to think so: "Here," she seems to be saying, "is how you can take ordinary things and make them interesting and beautiful using, simple lines and colors, and almost no perspective at all. You don't have to make them look true to life (whatever that means)." She didn't really expect us to take all this in; it would be years before we were able to understand what she was looking for in her art and life: liberation—from cliches, artificial codes, official conventions about what is or is not art in the representation of reality: a condition of complete simplicity.

That was the message of modernist art—as it was the message of Whitman's and, later, Rimbaud's poetry, and as we now know it comes with a price: that condition of complete simplicity costs not less than everything. For once you start simplifying your art or your life or your politics, where do you stop? Some conventions are deep and powerful, like manners, honesty, integrity, the making and keeping of promises. It really means something to be a person whose word can be trusted. Consider the structure of constitutional government and the rule of law, so basic to modernity: these are high on the list of the conventions we live by, and were achieved, in England, America, the Scandinavian countries after heroic struggles against despotic kings and against the odds. The 20th century, the century of total war and unspeakable abominations came very close to obliterating all of this.  A century of rapid climate change could easily finish the job that Fascism and Marxism nearly accomplished.

Constitutional Government And The Rule Of Law: Macaulay's History of England

Constitutional government and the rule of law is the keystone of the great arch that supports all the free  political, social and intellectual institutions of modernity that we now take for granted. It took a hundred years to put that keystone in place. It was an epic struggle. Like the French Revolution, a hundred years later, it could easily have taken a bad turn and gone the wrong way. Anyone interested in modernity should read the story of the English revolution that Thomas Macaulay tells with verve, brilliance and intellectual power in his history of England in the 17th century (published in 1848) which ends with the virtual abdication, in 1688, of the last of the Stuart kings, and his replacement by William, Prince of Orange and his wife Mary, the daughter of James II. It is a riveting and thrilling story, like a great historical novel except that it is not fiction but truth told by one of the finest masters of English prose.

Macaulay's History of England has been dismissed by some as merely a smug Whiggish interpretation of history. I have yet to see a Tory interpretation that bears comparison with Macaulay's work, which is always honest and never simple minded. I quote briefly from the first chapter:

I shall recount the errors which, in a few months, alienated a loyal gentry and priesthood from the House of Stuart. I shall trace the course of that revolution which terminated the long struggle between our sovereigns and their parliaments, and bound up together the rights of the people and the title of [a new] reigning dynasty. . . how under that settlement the authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known . . . . Nor will it be less my duty faithfully to record disasters mingled with triumphs, and great national crimes and follies far more humiliating than any disaster. It will be seen that the system which effectually secured our liberties against the encroachments of kingly power gave birth to a new class of abuses from which absolute monarchies are exempt. It will be seen that in consequence partly of unwise interference, and partly of unwise neglect, the increase of wealth and the extension of trade produced, together with immense good, some evils from which poor and rude societies are free. It will be seen how, in two important dependencies of the crown, wrong was followed by just retribution; how imprudence and obstinacy broke the ties that bound the North American colonies to the parent state; how Ireland, cursed by the domination of race over race, and of religion over religion, remained indeed a member of the empire, but a withered and distorted member, adding no strength to the body politic, and reproachfully pointed at by all who feared and envied the greatness of England.

Poe's Raven and Keats' Nightingale

Two birds. One sings, the other speaks—a single word. Two poems, one of which has a deep subject, deeply meditated, while the other is, by design, about nothing much at all, though pretending otherwise. Two poets, one serious, the other melodramatic, frivolous. Here is Poe's "Raven":

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

'Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door -

Only this, and nothing more.'

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -

Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating

`'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door -

Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; -

This it is, and nothing more,'

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,

`Sir,' said I, `or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;

But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you' - here I opened wide the door; -

Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!'

Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,

Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.

`Surely,' said I, `surely that is something at my window lattice;

Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -

'Tis the wind and nothing more!'

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.

Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -

Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,

`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.

Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'

Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore;

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door -

Bird or beast above the sculptured bust above his chamber door,

With such name as `Nevermore.'

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only,

That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.

Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered -

Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before -

On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'

Then the bird said, `Nevermore.'

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,

`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,

Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster

Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -

Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore

Of "Never-nevermore."'

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,

Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;

Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking

Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -

What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore

Meant in croaking `Nevermore.'

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing

To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;

This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining

On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,

But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,

She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer

Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.

`Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee

Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!'

Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -

Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -

On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -

Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'

Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?'

Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -

`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!

Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'

Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted - nevermore!

Poe's poem consists of 18 six line stanzas each with an identical rhyme scheme: abcbbb, in which each of the 'b' rhymes end with the same syllable, '-ore'. Into this rhyming machine stumbles a raven who, as the poet recognizes, has somehow or other picked up a single word, 'nevermore' which, as the poet also understands,the bird says meaninglessly; but he managesto say it—not accidentally— just when the poet's rhyming machine requires it.  (A parrot could have said 'nevermore' just aswell as a raven but that would have made it a very different poem: not a soulful melodrama but a comic farce.) We learn nothing of Lenore aside from the fact that the poet has lost her, nor do learn anything about the "shadow" that has settled on thepoet's soul never to be lifted, or what this 'demonic' raven has to do it. It is after all just a bird and the poet knows that as well as we do.

What's it all about? Does this poem have a subject, does it go anywhere, does it mean anything? No. Poe is our first theorist of pure poetry; anticipating Archibald MacLeish, he thought poems should not mean but be. That's not what Poe actually says in his essay,"The Poetic Principle," but it's what he means as he argues thatmoral concepts and ideas do not belong in self-respecting poems; the object of poetry is beauty, not making its readers better people. That he calls the "didactic heresy" but Poe is the real heretic: no one, before Poe, had ever claimed that poetryor any other art form should aim at beauty regardless of any effect that art might have on any other truth or on any other claim about the way people should live and behave. For at least two thousand years, most poets and philosophers would have agreed with Sir Philip Sydney in his great Defense Of Poetry (1581, pub. 1595) when he says the poet "not only show[s] the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into it. . . He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness. But he cometh to you with words setin delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, thewell-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh

to you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from

the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning

of the mind from wickedness to virtue. . . .

 It's easy to see why such talk might some of us uneasy, today or indeed

at any time in during the last hundred years. (The above passage

from Sidney's Defense is but a small part of a much larger and

complicated argument.) But, surely, no one will argue that poetry

or any other art is or ought to be irrelevant to the way we live our lives,

which is what Poe wants to claim: that truth in art (whatever that means)

has nothing to do with beauty or virtue; and vice-versa.  But if poetry

has no moral content whatsoever, how can it be 'about' anything?

Poe's Raven merely gives us the illusion that it is about something

important.

Poe admired the pure poetry of Keats and cited him in support of his theories, having failed to notice that Keats' poetry is full of subject matter; all of his poems are about something; and where's there's subject matter in a poem there's likely to be moral content. Consider Keats' "Ode To A Nightingale":

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

 One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

  But being too happy in thine happiness,

 That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,

 In some melodious plot

 Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

 Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

  O for a draught of vintage! that hath been

 Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,

 Tasting of Flora and the country-green,

 Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

 O for a beaker full of the warm South!

 Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

 And purple-stainèd mouth;

 That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

 And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

 Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

 What thou among the leaves hast never known,

 The weariness, the fever, and the fret

 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

 Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

  Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

 And leaden-eyed despairs;

 Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

  

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

 Already with thee! tender is the night,

 And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

 Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays

 But here there is no light,

 Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

 Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

  I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

 Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

 But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet

 Wherewith the seasonable month endows

 The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

 Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

 And mid-May's eldest child,

 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

  

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

 Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,

 To take into the air my quiet breath;

 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

 In such an ecstasy!

 Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

 To thy high requiem become a sod.

  

 Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

 In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

 She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

 The same that ofttimes hath

 Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

  

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

 As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

 Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

 Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

 Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

 In the next valley-glades:

 Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

 Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

Keat's nightingale is outside of time and history, immortal, timeless

like her song; it has been heard by clowns (peasants) as well as

emperors down through the ages, perhaps even by Ruth as she

"stood in tears amid the alien corn." The poet too would like to

escape time and history "though the dull brain perplexes and

retards." And then suddenly he finds the trick of it and enters

the bird's strange and heart-breakingly beautiful world 

"on the wings of poesy" and imagination:

 Already with thee! tender is the night,

 And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

 Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays

 But here there is no light,

 Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

 Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

  I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

 Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

 But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet

 Wherewith the seasonable month endows

 The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

 Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

 And mid-May's eldest child,

 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

  

 But this can't last—how could it?— and he knows it, 

just as he knows that the timelessness of the nightingale

herself is a literary myth, a story, like the story of Ruth, and those

magic casements, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, 

in faery lands forlorn . . . That last word, 'forlorn' does not

sad or miserable as in modern usage,  but abandoned, deserted, 

lost. It's not just that no one believes in faery lands any more;

no one takes those old stories or myths seriously. And so the vision 

fades.  The realism that that word 'forlorn' brings into the poem breaks

the spell that the poet has momentarily cast over himself and drags him

back to his "sole self."  And so the poem ends on a slightly sour note, 

as the poet bitterly denigrates imagination as 'fancy', merely, and 

apologizes glumly to the rapidly receding nightingale--"that

deceiving elf"— with its now merely plaintive song:

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well/ As she is famed to do, 

deceiving elf.

The last lines are unnecessary:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

 Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

The poet always knows where he is and what he is doing in this poem. 

He is never confused. This is a poem about the imagination and its limits, 

and about the impossibility of escaping from history except during those 

few moments of ecstasy when one knows that one is writing a great poem 

which will be read as long there are people who can read English and who 

know the difference between great poems and trivial ones, great stories 

and trivial stories.

That is a distinction that Poe couldn't afford to make as a poverty-stricken

writer of short stories, most of which tell tales of unintelligible horror or 

motiveless malignity, like "The Fall of The House of Usher" or 

"The Black Cat." You read one and you've just about read them all. (The 

mysterious,  inexplicable thrills and terrors of "The Raven" closely resemble

the atmospherics that Poe loves to cultivate in his stories.) Yet he was perfectly 

capable of writing brilliant stories of rational inquiry:  "The Murders In The 

Rue Morgue", "The Purloined Letter" and "The Gold Bug," for example. 

It's been said that he invented the detetective story and maybe 

he did. He also wrote a few other stories in which rational inquiry and 

disinterested curiosity are all important: "The Descent Into The Maëlstrom"

 and "The Pit and The Pendulum." But he must have decided, since he wrote 

so many of them, that stories of meaningless cruelty and horror would sell 

in the ante-bellum South (which, like the rest of the U. S., he regarded as a 

sort of bourgeois police-state), but not the other kind, and he was probably 

right; which tells you a lot about the slave states in those days: rational 

inquiry and disinterested curiosity were definitely unfashionable, 

for obvious reasons.

Delacroix and Romanticism

"Delacroix's art speaks of extravagance, passion, violence, excess; yet his life was that of a self-defended man who feared passion and valued above all tranquillity, hoping and believing that man was 'destined one day to find out that calm stands above all else.' He qualified as a dandy, not by outer garb but by inner superiority of spirit . . . He was the most glamorous artistic personality since Rubens but he was also of a fastidious and somewhat miserly temperament, and recluse and an ascetic in everything but his pictorial imagination. . . . He also disliked the way those took his side 'enlisted me, whether I would or no, in the romantic coterie'. . .  He judged man an 'ignoble and horrible animal,' whose natural condition was mediocrity. He thought truth existed only among superior individuals, not among the masses." (From Julian Barnes, "Cold Courtesies," TLS, May 7, 2010)

The huge popularity of the Raft of Medusa (1819) by his friend Gericault, showed him, Delacroix, which way the cultural wind was blowing: what the monied classes of the upper bourgeoisie wanted was passion, action, color, flesh, nudity, in exotic settings if possible, death and sex. And that's what he, Delacroix, and others, would give them.

It may be useful to think of romanticism as a product deliberately served up to satisfy the appetites and longings of a new bourgeois audience, sufficiently well educated and well-to-do, to buy books and pictures, or copies of pictures, and attend exhibitions. The artists, as they always have, more or less despised their patrons. And so it became fashionable, in literary and intellectual circles to despise the bourgeoisie who tended to be politically reactionary and religiously conservative. And there was a lot to fight about: the political feuds and vendettas inspired or released by the Revolution, and Bonaparte, and defeat, kept the political pot boiling not only in France but the rest of Europe, throughout the 19th century.

Works of pure (and impure) art have a way leaking into the attitudes, expectations and feelings that people have about life—their own and those of others. Romantic attitudes and expectations are almost by definition unrealistic, fantasies. That's what the medieval romances were all about. (Whatever happened to the wretched survivors of the Medusa, clinging to their raft, they didn't look like the people in Gericault's fantasy.) Don Quixote is the first novel about a man who confuses fiction and reality; Madame Bovary is the second. Don Quixote's fantasies ennoble him, raising him above the gross realities of ordinary life, for the books he reads so avidly contain and impose on him a high, chivalrous calling; the trashy novels that Emma Bovary secretly devours at the convent where she is supposedly being educated almost literally demoralize her. She is the first casualty, perhaps, of the modern mass media: poisoned by clichés.

How to read a poem

Here are two poems about people who inhabit or prefer the solitude of "untrodden" ways but differ in so many other ways as to be virtually incomparable—yet both poems are undeniably 'romantic' in some sense yet to be determined. I am not going to tell you who wrote these poems because that's information that you don't need to know; the biographies of these poets—and of most poets if they are any good—is irrelevant to their poems.  Everything you need to know in order to read poems such as these intelligently is contained in the poetry—words, meter, rhyme, grammar, syntax. But of course you have to know what the words mean and how they are being used.


                        1
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove.
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love;

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!              
                                    
Let us begin with the first of these, #1, about a young woman, or "maid," who leads a life of nearly absolute seclusion without family or neighbors (or even a house for all we know), praised by none, loved by few—and is not even given a name, 'Lucy,' until she dies—or rather ceases "to be," as if the verb 'die' were almost too active for such a passive existence as hers: so passive indeed, so secluded or cut off from human contact that the poem compares her to a violet by a mossy stone or a single star implying that she'd be lost or indistinguishable in any group whatsoever. Strangest of all, in this very strange poem, is the vague, muted anguish of the poet at the thought of Lucy in her grave: "But Lucy is in her grave, and, oh, the difference to me." That "but" is intended, with but partial success, to enforce the contrast between the indifference of those who have nothing good to say about Lucy—and the few who love her—and the anguish of the poet who not only knew her but knows of her death: well, what difference has the death of Lucy made in the life of the poet? Not much, it would seem, despite his best efforts. Neither the life nor the death of Lucy, of whom we know so little, is of much consequence in this world—and that, it seems to me, is the point, or even the sting in the tail, of this poem. For most of the people in this world—and here I step outside the poem—lead lives not so very different in their anonymity from Lucy's. Whether this is a point that the poet intended to make is uncertain.                      

                         2

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence;

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.  

This second poem plays a trick on the reader at the same time that the poet is making fun of himself, and most of Frost's readers are taken in.

Two identical roads diverged in a yellow wood. The poem insists more than once that these roads were really about the same. The fact that one is chosen instead of the other is an accident, pure chance.

But the poet knows himself pretty well and he knows something about human nature: he knows that people will always try to find meaning in their lives even if they have to make it up.  We all need to think well of ourselves and we will. The poet knows how he will tell this story in the future, that he will romanticize himself, as a loner who goes his own way, takes chances, lives life on his own terms. That's how autobiographies are written. "I shall be telling this with a sigh," he says knowing that he will do so with melodramatic intent—you can hear it in that repetition of "I", which, not irrelevantly, rhymes with "lie," which is not what he is doing exactly; it's just that he is not quite telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth which is that there was absolutely nothing to distinguish the one road from the other.

Most lives are lived almost randomly, especially when we are young. We don't know what we're doing most of the time; it is only later, looking back on our lives, that we lay claims to wisdom. See, it all made sense we say, though of course none of it did at the time.

Romantic Solitude

 

Consider this well-known poem by William Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee;

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company;

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.                     1813

The poet is alone but no more lonely than a cloud and no less aimless. He is not looking for anyone or anything nor is he trying get anywhere or do anything. He's got nothing on his mind, including poetry, and no expectations. The daffodils, when he first sees them, "all at once," are just that, daffodils, lots of them, crowds of them. But then, as memory quickens, he elaborates: there are thousands of these flowers, in a continuous band, like the stars "on" the milky way; he begins to think of them as a crowd of people, dancing. (Though, if he had actually come upon a bunch of people there, along the shore of the lake, he'd have been mightily displeased.)

Throughout the poem—or at least until the last line—the poet gives the appearance of being entirely passive, even in his gaiety—which he seems to catch from the daffodils as if it were an infection: avoiding the more active first-person pronoun, he concedes dourly that "a poet could not but be gay" in such company. And, though his mind is actively taking notes on this "show," he is unaware of what it is doing: "I gazed—and gazed—but little thought what wealth the show to me had brought: for . . ." That "for" tells us, though, that unlike the first two stanzas, each of which comes to a full stop, the third will continue on into the fourth with what will turn out to be a very deep thought indeed. 

This is a poem about solitude, which does not just mean 'alone' simply but absolutely alone, a possibility which no one had ever, or rarely, considered before; heretofore, one had always known that he or she was in the presence of God, if no one else. [Foot Note: When, in 1829, the Quakers of Pennsylvania began experimenting with enforced solitude—solitary confinement—as a method of spiritual reformation, it soon became clear, to some observers at least, that instead of forcing the inmates of those penitentiaries, so called, to become closer to God, they were driving them mad.] 

It is also a poem about imagination which, as the poem makes clear, also works in mysterious ways; this power or faculty is not subject to the control of the rational mind. One can lament the absence or loss of this creative power [so called: notice that one can also 'create' a nuisance or a disaster] as Coleridge does in his "Dejection" Ode, but that's all. And that is Wordsworth's point: he gives as little thought to the memories that "flash upon" his inward eye as he does to the act of remembering them in the first place: he does not consciously try to summon them, but when they come unbidden, they are fully engaging and he becomes fully engaged in the experience: "And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.").  Such, for a romantic poet, when everything falls into place, is the bliss of solitude.

I should note, in passing, that no one much before 1800 had had anything good to say about the imagination (or, indeed much to say about it in any case) as anything but a source of illusions, delusions or madness.

Two years before Wordsworth wrote his first draft of this poem, his sister, Dorothy, had written the following description of [these same?] daffodils in her journal of April 15, 1802:

"When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close the water-side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony has so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and about them; some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that flew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the Lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers a few yards higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway."

Should we conclude that when Wordsworth wrote this poem, he was not describing things in themselves—daffodils in the wild— but an already fully-formed work of art? Does it matter? Why? Or, if not, why not?