BROWNING’S “MY LAST DUCHESS” (with “JANET WAKING”)

At the risk of obsessing about John Crowe Ransom’s “Janet Waking” (11/20/11), I still wonder if I'm hearing the poem accurately. While I sense some compassion in the speaker, his dismissiveness overrides it, at least for me.  The poem seems to have gotten away from Ransom; I don't think he hears himself as well as he needs to.

Speaking of dismissiveness and other sins . . . many of you have been with family for Thanksgiving and thus subjected to a panorama of human flaws and grievous affronts, perhaps including dismissiveness.

So, in the context of your families and John Crowe Ransom’s “Janet Waking,” today I offer a classic poem, Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” in which the author is clearly not the speaker, and it’s hard to imagine a speaker who is better controlled by his author, his creator.

This might take a little more effort than the typical Banjo52 poem and commentary, but I hope you’ll take your time, explore slowly, and find it enjoyable, as you encounter one of the most intriguing situations and most interesting villains in the history of human interaction.

My Last Duchess

by Robert Browning in 1842

FERRARA

    That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

    Looking as if she were alive. I call

    That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

    Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

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

    “Fra 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

    Fra 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 favour 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 made 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!

  

       *                              *                       *

            Was this guy at your Thanksgiving table?  Forgive me if I doubt it.  Few people are this interesting, and I suspect few of us do justice to the importance of being interesting as we size up people we know.

Browning’s speaker is probably Italy’s fifth Duke of Ferrara (1533–1598), and he has had his last wife (My Last Duchess) murdered:  “This grew. I gave commands./And all smiles stopped together.”

Why did he do this? Because she shared her happy disposition with everyone and everything, from servants to sunsets and white mules. Our duke saw her behavior as a kind of betrayal, or even a kind of promiscuity:

                                                                 . . . 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 favour at her breast,

                The dropping of the daylight in the West,

                The bough of cherries some officious fool

            Broke in the orchard for her . . . .

 

 Now, how might such a speaker be charming? How might the poem cause us to withhold our moral judgment of the duke, at least for a moment, and even—horrors!—find him appealing? 

One answer is that he's intelligent, bold, decisive, shrewd, and menacing. He is simply too fascinating to be dismissed with simplistic moral judgment. He is Jesse James and Al Capone, but much brighter, much more articulate, cunning—and in some ways enviable. Somebody piss you off? Have ‘em killed. (Don’t dirty your hands by doing it yourself, of course; that’s for common rogues and peasants).

We all want to be the duke, but we’re townsfolk in an old western. So we want the next best thing:  to be on the duke’s team. It sounds like a much bigger adventure than the grocer's team, the plumber's team, the farmer's team. Our secret selves wish we could speak one of the greatest lines in all of literature, with the absolute confidence (and honesty!) of our duke: “I choose/Never to stoop.”  But we’re all talk; we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—and unpleasant dinner guests. We suffer fools gladly, while the duke simply has them killed.

We beg for work and call it dignity. We seek social standing and call it prestige, or even honor.  But this duke is dignity, is prestige. And as for honor, why, that’s just a serf’s notion of virtue and importance.

The only thing the duke fakes is a democratic oneness with his companion. Up on a grand stairway, looking at art, among which the last and dead duchess is one painting, one of several art objects, the count’s emissary has probably made some obligatory, empty gesture, like, “After You, My Lord,”—to which our duke replies:  “Nay, we’ll go/Together down, sir.” 

Can’t you see the duke smirking? When your favorite nasty athlete talks smack about his opponent, you don’t give a damn about your idol’s honor or morality. You can’t wait till Sunday when he buries his opponent’s face in the mud.  (Yes, Casper, once upon a time, football was played in mud). And you like it because you’re unable to do that to your own opponents.

Remember, the listener in the poem is an emissary from a count who is considering an offer of his daughter in marriage to our duke. Arrangements must be made, dowries negotiated, all things need to be understood, cards on the table. 

  

In this context, our duke wants his prospective father-in-law to know the score:  when folks don’t please him, he has them killed. To the poem’s listener, the duke is saying, “Be sure to tell your boss that my last wife was an air-headed cheerleader, apple-cheeked and well-liked, but in the end a happy bumpkin, not a woman who appreciated the nine-hundred-years-old name who was buttering her bread and therefore deserved and required all her attention. Tell your boss to tell his daughter what is meant by loyalty here in Ferrara.”

A common reading of the poem says that we are drawn to this, in spite of ourselves, in spite of all our moral abhorrence. Maybe it’s what we call swag these days. And cojones. Muchos cajones. The duke has put a new spin on honesty: “You want honesty? I’ll give you honesty.” I hear Nicolson in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth.”  But maybe the duke says it better: “I choose/Never to stoop.”

So I ask again, was there a Duke of Ferrara at your holiday table? Or was it a crowd of obedient clucking sheep, hissing about this and that offense by every so-and-so in their lives? You heard me, clucking sheep. They hiss.

In addition to what you like or hate about the poem, it might be fun to hear about the dukes and duchesses from your own experience (maybe with the roles reversed?).  

(For some basic historical info related to the poem, I suggest starting with good ol’ Wikipedia: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Last_Duchess )

*

Hopkins' "Spring and Fall" with Ransom's "Janet Waking": Children, Mortality, Wisdom

G.M. Hopkins’  deservedly famous autumn poem, “Spring and Fall to a Young Child,” raises a question for me:  how critically may an adult speak of the limitations in a child’s awareness of life’s largest issues and crises, especially mortality?  I’ve posted it before, but here it is again:

Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation

 John Crowe Ransom’s “Janet Waking” takes that question to another, higher (or lower?), questionable level. Doesn’t it? 
Janet Waking by John Crowe Ransom

In what might be seen as an anti-Thanksgiving poem (I know, I know, it’s a chicken, not a turkey), Ransom seems engaged in a competition with himself:  whom shall I mock more, a bee-wounded, dead hen, or the little girl who named her Chucky and loved her?  To whom do I feel more superior, dead chicken or grieving child?

In the first six stanzas, I hear avuncular amusement from the speaker as he portrays little Janet in her distress. If there’s been any doubt about the presence of humor, surely “transmogrifying bee” decides the matter. And that’s soon followed by:

            purply did the knot
            Swell with the venom and communicate
            Its rigour! Now the poor comb stood up straight
            But Chucky did not.

Maybe the speaker doesn’t want us to think he is taking the whole scene too seriously, so he uses preposterous, pompous diction for humor and emotional distance. 

But I hear it as snotty. And if I weren’t sure, the ever so scholarly, condescending conclusion clinches it for me. Little Janet "would not be instructed in how deep/Was the forgetful kingdom of death."

I'll go this far with the speaker:  little Janet will probably grow up about death someday, become a little hardened,  philosophical, religious. But now? At her age? Minutes after she’s discovered her dead pet? In what way is it right or reasonable to mock her grief?  Can we like or respect a mature man who speaks this way about childhood trauma?

Yes, I might feel as he does toward a hysterical child, but aren’t there things you don’t say, even as one adult to another? How important is honesty?  In each and every situation? If he showed more empathy and respect for Janet, would we find him foolish? 

Moreover, if those last two, didactic lines are all he has to offer in the ways of Solomon, about death, just how wise is he? 

If we could feel that the author had invited us to criticize the speaker’s bombast, the ironic disparity between writer and speaker could be a major portion of the poem’s purpose:  look how insensitive and supercilious an adult can be in responding to a child’s hysteria. In that case, we'd sense a wise, compassionate author presenting a speaker who shows no effort at empathy, at remembering how limited his own understanding of death was when he was a child.

However, I don’t feel any of this from Ransom.  I don’t feel him critiquing the speaker’s condescension; I only hear a speaker looking down at the child, and he sounds cold and mean. 

Is that what you hear? If so, is it a problem with the poem?

Janet Waking by John Crowe Ransom

Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation 

"Love Song" by William Carlos Williams

Nov. 1, 2011

Amy Lowell, here’s another view of the color yellow, and it’s not entirely different from your take, posted here the other day.  There’s too much of yellow; it eats things.

Ladies, damsels, women, broads, chicklets, has your beloved recently called you a stain? An excess? A smear? A saffron spoiler of all the colors of the world?  If your rake and rambling man, your very own hunkadoobie did call you such things—accused you—did you dig it? Would this poem work for you?  On you?  

Nov. 16, 201

Wannabe poets, have you tried writing a three line poem interrupted by a 14-line parenthesis of emphasis, a bracket of great force, vigor, torque?  Did it work?

William Carlos Williams, how does one decided when a fairly ordinary word, like “heavily,” deserves to be its own line? 

Love Song by William Carlos Williams : The Poetry Foundation

Nov. 16, 2011

Nov. 16, 2011

Nov. 16, 2011

Love Song by William Carlos Williams : The Poetry Foundation

"In November" by Lisel Mueller

Willow, Mid-November

 Here is a quiet and positive poem, which suits the season.


In November by Lisel Mueller : The Poetry Foundation

AMY LOWELL, SOME FOLLOW UP

"Autumn" remains my favorite of the dozen or so Amy Lowell poems I've read in the last few days, but here is another with merit: 

The Garden by Moonlight by Amy Lowell : The Poetry Foundation
 

I’ve also found some information about Amy Lowell. Most of it is at this website, along with a selection of her poems, including “Autumn,” which we discussed a little here November 9.

Isle of Lesbos: Poetry of Anna Seward

For those who don't read the article, I must mention two points of information I came across. First, Amy Lowell was such an admirer of Keats that she wrote a long, unfinished biography of him. So my placing the two writers side by side last post, based only their autumn poems, was a stroke of luck.

Secondly, Amy Lowell suffered from a glandular problem that caused her to grow more and more overweight as she aged (she died at 51). When she tried to learn more about Imagism from Ezra Pound, generally considered brilliant as a critic and insane as a human, he thought she was trying to preempt his exalted status as Lord of Imagism and attacked her verbally, including the epithet “hippo-poetess.”

For those who like to read biographical backgrounds into poems, Lowell’s lesbianism might be, or seem, a clarification of the puzzling  “They” and “You,” who have “taken . . . / All I once possessed” in the closing of “Autumn.”  As always, however, I resist reading biography into literature any more than is absolutely necessary, and I don’t think we are required to see this poem’s “They” as friends or relatives who betrayed her because of her sexual orientation (Of course, I’m betting such things did happen; they happen still, a hundred years later).

So the identity of the person(s) giving her the dahlia is relatively, or completely, unimportant. Nor do I think “They” or “You” must be an offending lover.  “You” could be, but it's the season of autumn that the poem is trying to see as the offender, a bright, bold flower whose vitality betrays, wounds and offends the “barren” speaker.  

   

The poem centers instead on the emotional effects of the flower in its unlikely, startling embodiment of the colorful fall season; the folks who brought it are secondary.  Granted, the undisclosed identity and motives of those people might amount to a tease, an elephant in the room; but if so, I suggest it's a problem in the design, completeness, and artistry of the poem, rather than a biographical puzzle that readers should spend time trying to solve.

Isle of Lesbos: Poetry of Anna Seward

The Garden by Moonlight by Amy Lowell : The Poetry Foundation

John Keats and Amy Lowell, Day Two: Yellow, Yellow, Yellow

To keep the comparison in mind, here again are both poems from yesterday:

To Autumn

by John Keats (1795-1821)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,   

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless   

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,   

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;     

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells   

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease,    

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?   

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,   

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,   

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook    

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep   

Steady thy laden head across a brook;   

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,    

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.  

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?   

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,   

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn   

Among the river sallows, borne aloft    

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; 

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;   

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft  

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,     

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

   

Autumn  

by Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925)

They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia, Opulent, flaunting.

Round gold

Flung out of a pale green stalk.

Round, ripe gold

Of maturity,

Meticulously frilled and flaming,

A fire-ball of proclamation:

Fecundity decked in staring yellow

For all the world to see.

They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia,

To me who am barren

Shall I send it to you,

You who have taken with you

All I once possessed?

  

So Amy Lowell’s “Autumn” is at the other end of the spectrum from Keats. I’ll begin by mentioning that I don’t know who Lowell's “They” might be, and I wonder briefly if the poem should make that clear. But by then, the scene has made me understand that the “round gold/ Flung out of a pale green stalk”--“frilled,” “flaming” and fecund--brings hurt and rage to a woman who sees herself as the empty opposite of female fertility and beauty. 

Surely we have all known autumn days, or entire seasons, that seemed offensive, an intrusion of golden glory,

when our day or season was grey, full of sterile, hollow routine, or was downright sad, as in actual grieving. And just as we were deciding we could cope with all that, some rosy-cheeked, Halloween-loving, cheerleader type comes along, sticks a pom-pom in our face, and demands we say rah-rah for the pretty leaves.

So, with Amy Lowell, we say to the amber season and to Them That Brought It Whoever They Are, take your yellow ball and go down the road. How dare you plop that thing on my table, you with your calm  guarantee of death just around the bend.

Can a season be an affront, feel like a personal insult, a mockery of who and what we are? There’s not a doubt in my mind.

I hear you, Amy Lowell. I still hear Keats, but for me there’s a new kid on the block. Her story isn’t gorgeous like young Keats’; after all, he was gorgeous about most things. In fact, Lowell presents The Boldly Anti-Gorgeous. It hates all that luxuriating, in love with itself and everything, converting earth to a sumptuous woman, the breeze in her hair, sitting in hippie contemplation over there on the granary floor. 

Lowell’s flinty argument is as plausible as Keats’ adoration, and I’m listening to both.  

Again, I hope visitors will talk about which poem, or which parts of poems, they like more, as opposed to what they admire more in terms of poetic achievement. The experiment is skewed by the different times and circumstances of the two poets. But we're not going for world peace here; we're just saying what we like and what we admire, recognizing that there might be a difference.  Sometimes I think of the incredible skill I see in some musicians, yet the actual music they produce can be, to me, little more than a frantic tangle of notes.

*

John Keats, "To Autumn," and Amy Lowell "Autumn," Part One

To Autumn

by John Keats (1795-1821)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,   

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless   

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,   

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;     

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells   

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease,    

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?   

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,   

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,   

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook    

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep   

Steady thy laden head across a brook;   

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,    

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. 

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?   

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,   

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn   

Among the river sallows, borne aloft    

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; 

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;   

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft  

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,     

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

 

Keats’ “To Autumn” is about as famous as a poem can get, and deservedly so, especially for the sumptuousness of its imagery and the way it reiterates Shakespeare’s theme in the sonnet last week:  “To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Like everything, however, perfect language is only a virgin once.  No matter how much I enjoy and admire the poem’s focus on sensuous details, fleeting fullness in autumn’s plants and animals as they’re about to leave us, no matter how often that poem and I have gone warmly to bed together, no matter how gracefully it has declined to preach tidy morals, even as closure, the fact is, we’ve been there many times. 
  
So as I browsed for additional autumn poems, look what jumped out at me.  Amy Lowell’s “Autumn” isn’t necessarily a better poem than Keats’ “To Autumn,” but the force of its bold, boastful yellow, its “fire-ball” of a dahlia and the insult of that fertility as it’s presented to a “barren” and now furious, hurt woman—all that creates another, legitimate image of what autumn can mean.  Compared to the familiar beauty of Keats’ season, Lowell’s portrait of autumn as a wound has a fierce vigor that slaps me awake.

Autumn   by Amy Lowell

They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia, Opulent, flaunting.

Round gold

Flung out of a pale green stalk.

Round, ripe gold

Of maturity,

Meticulously frilled and flaming,

A fire-ball of proclamation:

Fecundity decked in staring yellow

For all the world to see.

They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia,

To me who am barren

Shall I send it to you,

You who have taken with you

All I once possessed?

Keats’ speaker regards autumn as a filling of things that promises the passing of things; he bestows upon it dignity, elegance and admiration. He doesn’t find autumn cute or cause for a sappy greeting card, the way so many of us do. But as I hear Keats’ ode, he’s much more observant of the luxuriant plenty of what's gorgeous, the climax and afterglow, than the darker fact of its mortality.

That’s more than enough for one day. Part Two will come in a day or two, with more emphasis on Amy Lowell’s poem.

Responding to Readers Responding to Ted Kooser

Reader visits on the October 31 Shakespeare-Ted Kooser comparison here have probably offered the best, most thoughtful, conversational, perceptive comments and interchange among visitors in the three-year life of this blog. Thank you!  The majority of you prefer Kooser to Shakespeare, which was the opposite of my leaning. So I’ve sent myself back for an additional experience with “A Letter in October,” and that’s been enlightening and rewarding. Thank you!

Before I go on, let me quickly mention that I like the poem’s title. In what way and to whom might this be a letter? I can’t answer that, but I think the possibilities enrich the poem.

Now, here again is “A Letter in October”:    

A Letter in October by Ted Kooser : The Poetry Foundation

Ted Kooser is often so quiet it’s easy to write him off, and until this morning, I wrongly did.

By the way, his (apparent) plainspokenness might connect—tenuously—to an issue I’ve brought up before regarding American (or all?) poets:  Are you in the Walt Whitman or the Emily Dickinson tradition?  Yes, that oversimplifies; yes, there’s a vast middle ground. But I still think there’s significant, if incomplete truth in those two columns of tradition, of psyche and style—the loose, casual, and rambling vs. the muscular, tight, and careful.

At first, the Kooser poem was flat for me, but upon a couple of re-readings, I’ve come to like it, starting with the personification of dawn as he watches the light “walk down the hill,” and continues with the light’s placing “a doe there” and stepping upon the pond, which “sows” a “garden” of “reflections.”

That goes well beyond a literal, prosaic way of seeing things. Yet it’s not just decorative; it really imagines, re-creates, and maybe transforms the scene, giving it a new way of being, more interesting and exotic than its prosaic existence, yet a character that’s entirely plausible and appealing.

The continued personification of “Night in its thick winter jacket” doesn’t strike me as charmingly, but maybe that’s just my problem. Communication in metaphorical thinking is subjective like that; it’s rarely a true-false test.

I’m also not sure I like turning the water garden under, though it should work. It extends the metaphor logically, as the poem moves from lightness, delight, strangeness, fantasy, and mystery to less pleasant, more onerous activities involving labor, darkness, and eventually the challenge of introspection.

The “bridle” of leaves on the doe as well as night’s black horse and creaky harness make me feel that Kooser is straining too hard at those figures, forcing them, whereas the earlier images of light felt natural as well as accurate, even necessary and inevitable. I feel I should have seen light creating a deer, and so on; it was there and needed only Ted Kooser to discover it. But I don’t feel that way about the turned garden, or the deer bridle, or the horse; I feel as if I can hear Kooser searching for extended metaphors.

Once I’m clear that the darkness in the poem’s conclusion is early morning and not a continuation of the night, I like what happens. Wanting to look outward at the world’s marvels is a virtue, as well as a pleasure, and it ought to be permitted, given freely as a blessing. And looking inward ought to be a virtue; I’m often wishing people would do more of that. But it’s a burden. Inward lies trickery.  Darkness. Complexity. Fear. All of this, I think, makes an extremely good complication and turn on which to end the poem and deepen the ballet of its opening. 

The language of the speaker’s sighting of himself as “Pale and odd,” wouldn’t seem to be especially surprising or effective, yet to me that description is aptly haunting. Thinkers who see the world as he does—or see in the world what he does—probably tend to be “pale and odd” indeed, as they enlarge the world for the rest of us.

How did I miss some of this in my first couple of readings?  Shame on me. Thanks, visitors.