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.

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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.

November and Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad"

left: earth's first modest swan




La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad by John Keats : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Every November, two lines from Keats find their way into my consciousness: “The sedge has withered from the lake/And no birds sing.”

Like “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (“The Beautiful Lady without Pity”) is probably easy to mock in our time. On one level, it’s surely a silly soap opera that leans on overly familiar medieval tropes and plot, and some of the variations in meter sound simply awkward.

However, I give Keats credit for replacing the vision of the lady with images of pale warriors; I find genuine mystery there, mostly concerning the blurred boundary between the sleeping or visionary world and the waking one. I hear a larger question: “Where am I, and how did I get here? How many of my choices had anything to do with rational, conscious decision-making?”

As for music or meter, I hope someone else hears and loves as I do the shift from traditional ballad meter (alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines, plus a rhyme scheme of abxb). Most of Keats' stanzas here have final lines with two stresses rather than the traditional three. And when we do get three, they arrive as a trio of beats on a bass drum—consecutive hard stresses in “cold hill’s side” and even more so in “no birds sing.”

I’m tempted to say the whole poem is embodied in those final three words and the stresses upon them. Wherever he is, and we are, it’s hard, it’s cold, it’s bare. So is November; so are some—or many—of the loveliest humans. And so is the visionary world when it vanishes and returns to cold consciousness, awake and rational, but dazed, chilled, and alone.

Now hie thee thither into yon pearly weekend, and may'st thou never again feel mid-November in thy bones without hearing, "The sedge has withered from the lake/And no birds sing."

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Mockingbird

Mockingbirds can get so noisy that I guess I'm glad there are none in my neighborhood. This guy in Florida charmed me, however, and vice versa.

I got the shots when I managed to sweet-talk him (her?) into holding still. We had a conversation of several minutes, an affair of mutual respect and intellectual interest. He said he was a nightingale and therefore favored Keats. I didn't have the heart to correct him--what's in a name? Instead, I listened intently to his point of view, which was more interesting than the right answer on the test would have been.

I plan for those remarks to be preparation for the next post in a day or two. We'll see. Mocking-bird. Listening. Patience. Respect. Longing for death and, through it, immortality.

Here is "Ode to a Nightingale," perhaps a bridge to the confessional poets. If you haven't read it for a long time, get comfortable--and think of something happy to do afterward.

Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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MOVIE REVIEW: BRIGHT STAR

BRIGHT STAR GPA: 3.4


Left: "To Autumn"

With a weekend approaching, I hope you'll consider seeing Bright Star, a movie I liked for at least an hour. It’s the story of the tragic British Romantic poet, John Keats, that small, frail man who died of consumption at 25, far from home, with no clue of his place in the literary history of the world.

Be warned, however, this film centers almost entirely on his tumultuous love affair with Fanny Brawne. Of course, you have to love a love affair in which two passionate 20-somethings address each other as Mr. Keats and Miss Brawne. Bright Star is very much a period piece, and it seemed authentic.

I stayed away from, or fell asleep in, some other Masterpiece Theater movies that many people liked: Room with a View, Howard’s End, and such. I found Bright Star better fare, though that might be the result of my knowing a little, and at times caring a lot, about Keats the poet and Keats the human.

So imagine my disappointment to find the movie becoming only a partial look at the life and poetry of Keats, focusing instead on the most marketable feature—trustworthy, fickle old eros. To be fair, we do see a version of his friendship with Charles Brown, along with the reason Brown did not accompany Keats to Italy. But we see precious little of Keats as under-appreciated young poet, loyal son and brother, medical student, and victim of vicious reviews. Where is the condescending Wordsworth? Where are Byron and Shelley? Where is the guy who called the diminutive hero "little Johnny Keats" as part of a literary review. (And we think the banter is rough in our time and place . . . ).

I was also surprised to see Fanny Brawne portrayed so favorably. I haven’t kept up with Keatsian scholarship, but in the days when I did, I had the strong impression that she’d done him wrong. Here, she’s heroic. Of course, I don’t mind that rendering if it's reasonably accurate, and it’s an interesting take on their relationship. But after that first hour, I stopped learning things and might as well have been viewing Titanic or West Side Story.

Well, maybe that’s hyperbolic grumpiness. Some revisiting of a star like Keats is better than none, and to be fair, many of the well-known aspects of Keats’s life are given at least a passing nod. Also, of course, this film will sell better than the one I’d have made. On the other hand, I doubt it will sell as much as it should, so please go see it. If you don't love poetry or Keats, this still serves as a useful foil to our times, an aid to perspective on how pretty or graceful or tough things are or are not these days.

Above all, Bright Star is visually stunning—foggy old, sunny old, flowery old England at its best and worst. It feels like a series of one still photograph after another, a reminder of just how many powerful images movies can offer in a couple of hours.

Stay for the final credits to hear a fine reading of “Ode to a Nightingale.” And maybe read "To Autumn" along with "La Belle Dame sans Merci" when you get home.

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