Poetry and Paul Valery

"Did Racine know where that inimitable voice of his came from, that delicate tracery of the inflection, that transparency of the dialogue, all the things that make him Racine, and without which he would be reduced to that not very considerable personage about whom the biographies tell us a great many things which he had in common with ten thousand other Frenchmen? The so-called lessons of literary history have little bearing on the arcana of the making of poems. Everything happens in the artist's inner sanctuary, as though the visible events of his life his life had only a superficial influence on his work. The thing that is most important—the very act of the muses—is independent of adventures, the poet's way of life, incidents, and everything that might figure in a biography. Everything that history is able to observe is insignificant.

"What is essential to the work is all the indefinable circumstances, the occult encounters, the facts that are apparent to one person alone, or so familiar to that one person that he is not even aware of them. One knows from one's own experience that these incessant and impalpable events are the solid matter of one's personality.

"All these people who create, half certain, half uncertain of their powers, feel two beings in them, one known and the other unknown, whose incessant intercourse and unexpected exchanges give birth in the end to a certain product. I do not know what I am going to do; yet my mind believes it knows itself; and I build on that knowledge, I count on it, it is what I call Myself. But I shall surprise myself; if I doubted it I should be nothing. I know that I shall be astonished by a certain thought that is going to come to me before long—and yet I ask myself for this surprise, I build on it and count on it as I count on my certainty. I hope for something unexpected which I designate. I need both my known and my unknown.

"How then are we to conceive the creator of a great work? But he is absolutely no one. How define the Self if it changes opinion and sides so often in the course of my work that the work is distorted under my hands; if each correction can bring about immense modifications; and if a thousand accidents of memory, attention, sensation that cross my mind appear, finally, in my finished work to be the essential ideas and original objects of my endeavors? And yet it is all certainly a part of me, since my weaknesses, my strength, my lazy repetitions, my manias, my darkness and my light, can aways be recognized in everything that falls from my hands.

"And so, let us give up hope of ever seeing clearly in these matters, and comfort ourselves with an image. I imagine this poet with a mind full of resource and ruse, dissembling sleep in the imaginary center of his still uncreated work, waiting to seize the moment of his power which is his prey. In the  vague depths of his eyes, all the forces of his desire and the springs of his instinct are stretched taut. There, intent on the hazards from which she chooses her nourishment, very shadowy there, in the midst of the webs and secret harps that she has made out of language—those interweaving threads, those vaguely and endlessly vibrating strings—a mysterious Arachne, huntress muse, keeps watch."

Jesus on inequality

No one seems to have known what Jesus was talking about, 2000 or some years ago, when he said, "To those who have more shall be given, but from those who have not the little they have shall be taken away." (I quote from memory.) It would be interesting to know when people began to take note. Now, at any rate, in our bright and shining plutocracy, his meaning ought to be abundantly clear.

Some more poems by Thomas Hardy

The following poems were written after the death in 1912 of Hardy's first wife, Emma Gifford. 

Without Ceremony

It was your way, my dear,

To vanish without a word

When callers, friends, or kin

Had left, and I hastened in

To rejoin you, as I inferred.

And when you'd a mind to career

Off anywhere—say to town

You were all on a sudden gone

Before I had thought thereon,

Or noticed your trunks were down.

So, now that you disappear

For ever in that swift style,

Your meaning seems to me

Just as it used to be:

"Good-bye is not worth while.

The Going

Why did you give no hint that night

That quickly, after the morrow's dawn,

And calmly, as if indifferent quite,

You would close your term here, up and be gone

      Where I could not follow

      With wing of swallow

To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!

       Never to bid good-bye

       Or lip me the softest call,

Or utter a wish for a word, while I

Saw morning harden upon the wall,

       Unmoved, unknowing

       That your great going

Had place that moment, and altered all.

Why do you make me leave the house

And think for a breath it is you I see

At the end of the alley of bending boughs

Where so often at dusk you used to be;

       Till in darkening dankness

       The yawning blankness

Of the perspective sickens me!

       You were she who abode

       By those red-veined rocks far West,

You were the swan-necked one who rode

Along the beetling Beeny Crest,

       And, reining nigh me,

       Would muse and eye me,

While Life unrolled us its very best.

Why, then, latterly, did we not speak,

Did we not think of those days long dead,

And ere your vanishing strive to seek

That time's renewal? We might have said,

       "In this bright spring weather

       We'll visit together

Those places that once we visited."

       Well, well! All's past amend,

       Unchangeable. It must go.

I seem but a dead man held on end

To sink down soon. . . . O you could not know

       That such swift fleeting

       No soul foreseeing—

Not even I—would undo me so!

[These last lines are not strictly true; Emma had been unwell for some time and he must have known it; he just hadn't been paying attention, that's all.]

After A Journey

Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;

  Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?

Up the cliff, down, till I'm lonely, lost,

 And the unseen waters ejaculations awe me.

Where you will next be there's no knowing,

  Facing round about me everywhere,

           With your nut-coloured hair,

And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;

   Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;

What have you now found to say of our past—

   Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?

Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?

   Things were not lastly as firstly well

           With us twain, you tell?

But all's closed now, despite Time's derision.

I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

   To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,

The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone

   At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,

And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow

   That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,

           When you were all aglow,

And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,

   The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily;

Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,

   For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.

Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,

   The bringing me here; nay bring me here again!

           I am just the same as when

Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

Thomas Hardy as a man and a poet who noticed things

Here is a poem that Hardy could have written at almost any time during his long life, but was probably written between 1913 and 1916: Afterwards.


When the present has latched its postern behing my tremulous stay
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new spun silk, will the neighbors say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?


If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
To him this must have been a familiar sight."


If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.


If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?


And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things.


You don't have to have read much of Hardy's poetry or fiction to know that he was indeed a man who noticed things, especially (perhaps) the plight of the innocent creatures whom we farm or hunt or catch in traps, or who just happen to share the space we occupy, like that hedgehog scurrying furtively across the lawn. Anyone who has read Jude The Obscure will remember the terrible scene in which Jude and Arabella butcher a pig and make a mess of it. That scene didn't have to be there; Hardy forces it upon our attention partly because he wants us to know the brutal world that Jude has entered by marrying Arabella, but also for its own sake: if you are going eat pork, you ought to know something about the life and death of the animal it comes from.

Hardy also had an eye for the plight of ordinary people, trapped in dead-end lives like a man he notices coming up Oxford Street one evening, with the sun in his eyes:

A city-clerk, with eyesight not of the best,
Who sees no escape to the very verge of his days
From the rut of Oxford Street into open ways;
And he goes along with head and eyes flagging forlorn,
Empty of interest in things, and wondering why he was born.


Hardy's poems are full of people asking that very same question.


There are also some things that, surprisingly, he didn't notice—or, if he did, chose to ignore: the modernist revolution in literature and the arts that was going on right under his nose. He seems never to have heard of Picasso or Cezanne or Matisse or Stravinsky. T. S. Eliot mentions him but he never mentions T. S. Eliot.

Hardy's indifference to modernism in the arts (if that's what it was) did not extend to modern science. In 1920, he bought and read Einstein's Relativity: The Special and General Theory. A Popular Exposition, and took it to confirm what he believed, "that neither chance nor purpose governs the universe, but necessity." Later, thinking further about relativity and space-time, he wrote in his notebook, "Relativity. That things and events always were, are, and will be" and that the people he loved are still living in the past. Which is just a little odd, coming from a man who did not believe in an after-life.

If there are any other modern poets (i.e., poets of the early 20th century) who took the trouble to read up on Relativity, I don't know who they are.

Thomas Hardy and The Ache of Modernism

The following lines were lifted from a conversation between Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare, the two main characters of Thomas Hardy's greatest novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)


Tess: “The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?—that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,—’Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’ And you seem to see numbers of tomorrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!’. . . But YOU, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!”


He was surprised to find this young woman—who though born a milkmaid had just that touch or rarity about her which might make her the envied of her housemates—shaping such sad imaginings. She was expressing in her own native phrases—assisted a litte later by her Sixth Standard training—feelings which might almost have been called those of the age—the ache of modernism.


Tess is working as a milkmaid because that's the best job she has been able to find; Angel Clare is a gentleman who happens to be working on this farm in order to learn how to be a gentleman-farmer— much to the disapproval of his high-toned ecclesiastical family. The word 'you' in the second line does not refer to Angel who has yet to learn, as Tess has learned, to fear the future; that 'you' is generalized: it refers to all of us, but especially to her who, having born a child out of wedlock, doesn't dare attract attention to herself by using the first-person, singular, pronoun.

Though the second paragraph begins with Angel's surprise at hearing such a talk from a milkmaid, the second sentence ("She was expressing in her own native phrases . . .") could only have come from Hardy himself. Angel Clare could not have come up with a phrase like the "ache of modernism" because he has yet to feel it; nor could he have understood Tess's "sad imaginings" as any other than her own; certainly not "those of the age." (Angel Clare considers himself a free spirit but when Tess finally finds the courage—encouraged by his own confessions—to tell him her story, he turns into a cold, hostile, self-righteous prig and abandons her to her fate, whatever it may be.)

What, in 1891, might Hardy have meant by 'modernism'? Something like a way of thinking characteristic of 'modern' times. And 'modern'? Not 'modish' or 'fashionable', which is how Rosalind uses it in As You Like It; by 1891 the word 'modern' was beginning to take on the sense of 'modernity' as a historical development without precedent: different not in degree but kind from all that had preceded it. And what is it about modernity that makes us ache? For Hardy, it was all about deep time,  of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as Tess imagines the future, "all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away"; but the past as well, with all our yesterdays growing smaller and smaller until they vanish beyond recall, so that the present moment which is all we've got becomes infinitely tiny, evanescent, and precious.

Again and again, in Hardy's novels and poems, we become aware of the absolute oblivion that swallows us up as soon as we die—obviously, Hardy had no illusions about an after-like—which makes especially poignant the beautiful poems he wrote about his estranged wife, Emma, after she died (in 1912)—as if, having more or less ignored her for years, he wanted to do all in his power to keep something of their love alive and precious for as long as possible. That was 100 years ago and we're still reading and, it may be, aching, over those poems. See, especially, "The Going," "The Voice," "After A Journey," "At Castle Boterel," "The Phantom Horsewoman."

Should you like these poems, there are a lot more: Hardy wrote almost 1000 poems during his long life (1840-1928) and many, many of these are worth reading. But working your way through this huge body of work is not easy. Claire Tomalin's excellent biography is helpful.

Here's a late poem I like—four lines long, it may be Hardy's shortest poem:


Christmas: 1924


"Peace upon earth!" was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand year of mass
We've got as far as poison gas

Reading the Koran

I have been trying and failing to read and understand the Koran. Some
would have it that it can only be understood in its original language,
but that can't be true—I can read the bible and make sense of it, so
why not the Koran? Others say, don't try to make sense of it; read it for
its poetry. Poetry always gets lost in translation—unless a poet does the
translation,and even then. So far as I know, no poet has translated the Koran.

The trouble with this book is that there is no there there, no narrative, moral
or theological logic; only the logic of the strictly local politics of
Mecca and Medina—that it to say, essentially random vicissitudes in a
struggle for power in a remote corner of the world, largely insulated
from outside influences which went on for many years. Each sura (is
that the right word?) was composed not as part of a developing strain
of thought but in response to some particular event. There is, no
doubt an overall logic of some sort in this supreme fiction, but it is
not available to ordinary readers; only to those who have committed
the whole thing to memory. Hence the enormous authority of those who,
having committed the book to memory are able to devote their lives to its
study.

For 1500 years, the catholic church wielded similar authority; but then
the bible was translated into vernacular languages and ordinary people
were able to read it for themselves, with, naturally, violent consequences.
The Church shattered into many different churches with radically
different ideas about sanctity and salvation and that, more or less,
was the beginning of modernity in the west. No similar 'reformation'
is possible for Islam because it is impossible for ordinary people to
challenge the authority of the Imams and Mullahs. So, for example,
Muhammed had very liberal ideas about the rights of woman but if the
guardians of Islamic gospel choose to ignore these teachings—and they have—
there is nothing that ordinary people can to do to force the relevant texts
out into the arena of public political discourse. Or so it seems to this
largely ignorant outsider.

Dramatic Illusion in A Midsummer Nights's Dream: The Play Within The Play

The only other play of Shakespeare's, so far as I can recollect, to have another play tucked inside it is Hamlet. As you may remember, Hamlet has the players who happen to be passing through Elsinore put on a play that mimics the circumstances of his father's death—or rather, murder. It is a test, or, as Hamlet calls it a mousetrap. When the King reacts violently to this play, Hamlet knows that his father's ghost had told him the truth. What he doesn't realize is that by exposing the King as a murderer, he has also blown his own cover. Now the King knows what Hamlet knows.

The play-within-the-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream that the tradesmen of Athens put on for the entertainment of the court—"A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus/ And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth"—is only slightly connected to the plot of the play. The cast happens to be rehearsing in the forest near the spot where the aristocratic lovers of the main plot have agreed to meet, which also happens to be the place where Oberon and Titania (King and Queen of the faeries) are trying—and failing—to settle their differences over who should possess a particular 'changeling' child'; he resorts to force i.e. magic. But magic, like force, can have unintended consequences: the aristocratic lovers become totally confused, and Bottom, the weaver, mischievously given a donkey's head by Oberon's agent, Puck, becomes the willing lover of Titania, the intended victim of Oberon's magic.

While Bottom is having the time of his life as the bestial object of Titania's sexual desires,  the upper-class lovers are madly chasing each other through the forest in abject confusion.

When the magic spells are finally lifted, everyone is happy to be able to get on with their lives: the lovers return to Athens in perfect harmony with each other—each lad has his lass and vice-versa—Titania and Oberon are reunited as if nothing untoward had happened, and Peter Quince is able to get on with his play.

Here's is where we begin to see what the play-within-the-play is all about. The lower class players are as deeply confused about dramatic illusion as the upper-class lovers had been about their real feelings, which, thanks to the magical manipulations of Oberon and Puck, they are finally able to recognize.

When the upper-class lovers are happily married and looking for some slight diversion before bed-time, they are delighted—more so than they expect— to watch a play in which the actual and imaginary, art and life, are totally confused. What's important here is that both audiences,  the lovers and the larger audience out there in the theatre, are in the same boat.

Plays are designed to draw an audience into its make-believe world so that there are moments when they forget that that they are watching a play.

Watching the clumsy efforts of the Athenian tradesmen as they try to pull off that bit of theatrical magic, we may forget that these clumsy oafs are really professional actors drawing us into another illusion—the illusion of course being that Bottom and his friends really don't know what they are doing. We laugh, not realizing that we've been fooled again.

The fact that A Midsummer Night's Dream has so many layers of dramatic illusion—more than any other play of Shakespeare's—is what makes it so utterly charming.