Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight" : Solitude and Creativity

In the spirit of yesterday’s talk about poetry and art as more selfless, solitary activities than they seem to be in these days of bountiful M.F.A. programs and writers’ conferences, here is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s major poems, “The Frost at Midnight.”

Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


I’d intended to post Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” in which the central metaphor is a stringed instrument that sits in a window, inviting the breeze to play upon its strings. So an Eolian harp poses a literal and a symbolic question central to Romanticism: who or what is making the music? The human who designed the harp and placed it there? The harp itself, unmanned? Or the wind?—which of course can be one of the gentlest or mightiest forces in the nature the Romantics so wholly revered.

In re-reading “The Eolian Harp,” however, I found it just too full of itself. Hamlet's line came to mind: "Words, words, words." I think “The Frost at Midnight” is a far more beautiful, elegant, and simply better poem. And like “The Eolian Harp,” it celebrates quiet observation, sitting back, noticing an infant, noticing the midnight hour and the world outside, letting the mind drift beyond rationality and consciousness into free association and the sleeping or waking dream states the Romantics valued so much. I've heard some of today's poets say that Witnessing means paying attention, really, really paying attention." The intent of the comment is to honor the act of witnessing. I like that, all of it.

A central concern of the English Romantics (1798 – 1830, give or take) was the extent to which the poet, or simply the human, could and should lie back in passiveness, give up the awareness of and attachment to Self, let Nature wash dreamily over him and fully experience the comingling of the human with the “one soul within us and abroad,” as Wordsworth called it.

That's somewhat similar to witnessing, and it raises a question from yesterday’s post: How important is the human? I remember one professor’s position: the first, older generation of Romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge—could not part with, surrender themselves and their self-awareness the way their younger followers, Keats, Shelley, and Byron did. Keats, for example, seems entirely ready to leave his earthly self to join the eternal life he sees on the Grecian Urn or hears in the song of the nightingale; however, he cannot sustain the required act of imagination.

More tomorrow or soon. In case I end up changing it for some reason, here is the concluding sentence I plan for that post:

When wine, cheese, clatter and flattery enter the room, good thinking, talking, and writing run the other way.

Talk about self-indulgence and self-importance! But aren't I just smelling the roses? And I am a rose. Aren't you?

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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, "CARRION COMFORT"

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND DEAN YOUNG: STRANGE BEDFELLOWS?





“Carrion Comfort” is one of the “Terrible Sonnets,” poems of religious questioning, doubt and anguish by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest in Victorian England and Ireland. The poem also illustrates some points I was trying to make in response to the visitor comments on March 15 and 16, concerning Dean Young’s poem, as well as poetry in general.

Some grim, sad, and depressing poems are also difficult, perhaps never completely understood by Reader X. Yet he might love such a poem or at least some of it if it offers gifts along the way, probably images, lines, passages and music to feel connected to, but also thoughts and emotions, conveying something of what Reader X had thought or felt himself, but would never have considered uttering in this way.

A Victorian poet (1844-1889), Hopkins’ language can be, or seem at first, self-conscious, jerky, grandiose. His experiments with language can be so dramatic, so bold that many scholars say he is (along with Emily Dickinson and Robert Browning) more modern than Victorian in manner and maybe thought as well. I take that as high praise, but I also worry that some readers will find these experiments excessive, or even an unintended self-parody. So let’s keep in mind how bizarrely unconventional Hopkins’ style is for its era. Let’s cut him some slack, for it’s in these very excesses that we’re likely to find the “wow factor” as he blazes new trails in poetry.

Carrion Comfort by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Hopkins doesn’t strike me as all that different, conceptually, from the Romantics. In nature, he finds not only the variety, beauty, and awe of the physical details, but also a revelation of God. I see a blend of Christianity and Pantheism (though for honesty’s sake, I must add that I don’t know enough about either of those schools to make such a statement).

With Hopkins, I allow myself another privilege: violating the New Criticism’s "Biographical Fallacy" (and you thought I was timid!). I find it unusually important to remember that Hopkins was a Catholic by conversion—that is, he presumably knew something about the faith before committing to it. He believed in it so completely that he became a Jesuit priest. So, while I don’t usually like reading much of an author’s life into his work, in this case I’m moved by the fact that this writer is not just you, me, or Joe Schmoe having a crisis of faith, but a man who lived his religion as completely as Hopkins did.

Maybe I need to add that, if someone hasn’t had a few crises of faith, I don’t put much stock in that person’s faith (including atheism). So I can only try to imagine how agonizing it must have been for the devout Hopkins when he had these times of wondering, fear, intense doubt.

Back to context: I was not planning to post Hopkins any time soon, but I think he illustrates what I was trying to say one and two days ago about poets who leave plenty of gems along the way to a poem's closure and wholeness. We might not like, agree with, or understand the entire poem, but we can be bowled over by individual images, lines, passages, or the work’s overall music, atmosphere, texture. In turn, those gifts might keep us coming back until we feel comfortable with more and more of its parts, or even its entirety.

Carrion Comfort by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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BACH, POETRY: BANALITIES FROM THE PROVINCES

I don’t know enough about classical music to declare much about it, but the power of all music intrigues me. So from my cultural outpost in the Midwest, I wonder: if Bach were composing today, would he be considered a wildly experimental guy—and at the same time a subtle, complicated genius? He feels remarkably modern to me.

I’ve heard that his method lies partly in the fact of his being confined to the harpsichord, before the booming pianoforte and its sustaining pedals were developed. Therefore, more notes are required, and variety arises from unexpected movements among the notes, rather than the big changes in volume and passion we know in Beethoven and the Romantics.

Whatever the case, I feel as if I’m hearing things from Bach that are as unpredictable as I would expect from Prokofiev or some avant-garde, starving composer who was writing just yesterday in Greenwich Village. But I like Bach better. I don’t enjoy him as much as some others—for example, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, or the rollicking Johann Strauss. I suppose that means I prefer Romantic boom-boom; I need a bigger spoon to stir my soup.

My limitations concerning classical music (and the visual arts) remind me that a lot of people feel the same kind of unease about contemporary poetry. Usually lacking rhyme and regular meter, and with leaps of thought that might be more demanding than, say, nineteenth century poetry, contemporary verse causes many readers to feel adrift, baffled, bamboozled, alienated. (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, and Emily Dickinson are often considered more modern than nineteenth-century because of the complexities of their perceptions and language, but getting into that now might lead to an eternal digression).

But I think what I’m hearing in Bach, without being alienated by it, is an understated complexity of the unexpected. To my unschooled ear and soul, it's rarely or never emotionally stirring, but it makes my brain shift around in my skull. I cannot listen to Bach, or any classical music, as a soporific or as background—it’s too interesting; it keeps me awake. But the written word, spoken aloud? Puts me right to sleep.