D.H. Lawrence, "Snake"

 

 I’ve delayed posting D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake” because it’s fairly long; but the language is accessible and the subject is at least somewhat interesting, so I’m going to offer it today and see what happens.

I’m not sure how much I like or admire the poem these days; it seems obvious, wordy, didactic, and prosaic, not to mention its arbitrariness in line breaks. Back in college, however, I found it deep, exotic, erotic and mystical at the same time—and therefore revolutionary. 

As an English major, one of the questions on my senior comprehensive exam was to write an analysis of a poem I’d memorized or knew well enough to quote extensively. I chose “Snake” and actually did well for once.

Lawrence was one of the first writers I became infatuated with. In the senior apartment I shared with three guys, I hung a poster of the man, looking terminally pensive and perceptive. My roommates were majoring in Economics and Chemistry; I took some guff.

Along with Wordsworth and Cummings, Lawrence introduced me to pantheism, or something like it, which seemed a more viable way of thinking and believing than other religions or mythologies I was aware of. That might be an area in which Old Banjo still agrees with Young Banjo. The earth and the universe are pretty spectacular, worth worship if anything is. Except for a few individual passages, I can’t say that for any dogmas I’ve met along the way. 

In my college years, I was reading much more for content than I do now; I’m tempted to say I never met a sermon I didn’t like back then, as long as it was a little catchier and more original than a Methodist “Thou Shalt Not.” Except for "Impeach Earl Warren," I’m pretty sure bumper stickers had not yet been invented. My bumper was screaming for a good sticker, and I didn't know who Earl Warren was.

I think I remember a critical eye from Lawrence toward Miriam in Sons and Lovers because she needed to pick and possess a flower, not just admire its beauty and accept its otherness. Is that even in the book, or have I made it up?

Well, if you're me, that's all fascinating to ponder, but here’s the poem. What do you think? Is it a barrel of self-indulgent message and faux exoticism, or is there some authentic language and thought that are worth our while?

SNAKE

By D.H. Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness. 

* 

Cat Urine and Aristotelian Tragedy

The Fall

Slopes Can Be Slippery

Before I leave the subject of football, something just called to mind a wondrous southern ditty that captures and clarifies the essence of Aristotelian tragic theory.

In the 1988 movie Everybody’s All American, Dennis Quaid plays an LSU halfback, Jessica Lange is his girlfriend, then wife, and John Goodman plays a big ol’, good ol’ boy lineman.  At one point, Goodman delivers this gem of a lyric:

Listen, listen,

Cat’s a pissin’.

Where, where?!

Under the chair!

Run, run! Get the gun.

Too late, too late.

‘Tis already done. 

Classical tragedy?  Somebody or some group is taking, or has taken has made a mess in the putatively clean house:  “Cat’s a pissin’/. . . Under the chair!”  

Usually guns and other violence are what a society turns to in order to clean up its messes, and cats are more dispensable than dogs or humans. But by the time the civilized society of that household is aware of the scope and complexity of the problem, getting the gun is pointless:  “Too late, too late./’Tis already done.”

How is that different from the messes created in our major tragedies? To mention a few:  King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, The Great Gatsby, A Streetcar Named Desire, Fences, Equus . . . .  Those tragic heroes, heroines, and some supporting characters (under the marvelous label of Tragic Waste) didn’t have a chance. If they didn’t soil the house themselves (and most did), somebody had already done it for them, before they ever took center stage.

Sometimes the grand is also basic. Some ditties are better than others.

Color Again, Wallace Stevens' "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" Again

 

Although I’ve discussed Wallace Stevens’ (1879-1955) “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” before (Feb. 11-12, 2010),

Banjo52: More on Stevens' "Disilussionment of Ten O'Clock." Hopper, Edward: Nighthawks  

Banjo52: Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock by Wallace Stevens : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

the poem makes a nice and fairly serious follow-up to my last post about the Super Bowl and the importance of color. There are some good visitor comments too. So let’s look at it again:

         The houses are haunted

         By white night-gowns.

         None are green,

         Or purple with green rings,

         Or green with yellow rings,

         Or yellow with blue rings.

         None of them are strange,

         With socks of lace

         And beaded ceintures.

         People are not going

         To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

         Only, here and there, an old sailor,

         Drunk and asleep in his boots,

         Catches tigers

         In red weather. 

All the colors in “Disillusionment” are good because they are vibrant and not white, not non-color.

Only the “white night-gowns” have negative value, as they “haunt” the houses, presumably with a deathly pallor.

The purple, green, yellow and blue rings add up to a package of dream-vitality with socks of lace, baboons, periwinkles, a drunk old sailor, and tigers. The craving for color and for strangeness culminates in the red weather of the last line. Stevens wants us to live in this cluster of vitality, not in the monotony of pale houses defined by colorless ghosts.

So, as outrageous as I might have sounded about team colors last post, there’s an element of seriousness in my rant. If you want me to respond irrationally, from my limbic system, to your nationalistic tribe, you need to make it worth my while. Lure me with blasts of color, not some dreary navy-blue sack cloth of a uniform.

The Super Bowl, True Colors, Poetry

If the sage, Dirty Harry, is right, and opinions are like . . .  noses—everybody’s gone one, then what kind of blogger fails to comment on the Super Bowl? And you can bet your cauliflower I’m gonna connect it to poetry.


I grew up following the Browns and Steelers, and now I guess I’m a Detroiter. So last night’s great game would have been even more engrossing if I’d cared more about victory. Both teams deserved to be there. Both have Hall of Fame quarterbacks, several amazing players at other positions, no bad seeds on the character issue (as far as I know), and both coaches have more than proven themselves.

So what’s left but the uniforms? I’ve loved the Giants road unies for quite a while now. Red, white, and blue (and grey) has a tribal ring of familiarity, doesn’t it.


A couple of decades ago, the Patriots wore those colors (minus the philosophically important grey, however, and with a fairly boring white helmet). When they changed (for reasons known only in our twin galaxy), instead of stepping up to the color palate, instead of manning up in imagination, they did the unthinkable. They all but eliminated their red and regressed, out of nowhere, to one more silver helmet and britches (silver and grey are NOT the same; I’m still waiting for Ohio State to realize that).
 
Were the Patriots thinking, “Let’s see how derivative we can be, how much we can imitate the Lions?” And the Cowboys, Raiders, Panthers, until recently the Seahawks. And what’s with the Patriots’ pointy-chinned Revolutionary War soldier for a logo?


Sidebar: I congratulate Seattle for trying something original with their new-ish unies, but for heavens’ sake, sailor boys, what is that seasick anti-color you’ve worn the last few years? Should we change your nickname to the Seattle SeaWeed? 

 OK, I’m back. In the original NFL, the Detroit Lions were THE team who wore silver and blue. As a kid, I didn’t hate the faraway, Arctic Lions or their uniforms, but it seemed ho-hum and irrelevant. Honolulu blue is still blue, and blue is dull as dung, compared to the other colors in football—red, green, purple, or black, with orange or gold (hear yellow, not old gold, not faded, boring, almost invisible old gold—you hear me, Notre Dame, with your Navy and Pallor Domes?).


Football is about many things, but one item toward the top of the list is color. You don’t watch football in order to be put to sleep, and any blue other than Carolina powder blue is soporific. Medium to navy must be invigorated, infused with red or gold or orange.


This is not rocket science, and it’s not debatable. It’s plainer than the nose on your face, and the Giants get it, the Patriots don’t (at least the Giants get it on the road; their home unies are problematic . . . ).

Morever, the Patriots had something like the right idea, with their old red jerseys, then they gave it away. Well, those white helmets . . . Listen, except for the University of Tennessee’s daring orange and white, the colors Anything and White are a copout. It won’t do. Red and white is almost bright enough to carry a team, but why not add black or blue or 49er gold?
 
Look what Tampa Bay did a few years ago with red, bronze, and a little orange. It was the most daring move in the history of football, maybe the history of man, and it worked.

So last night I drifted toward the Giants, but I thank both teams for one great demonstration of talent and character, in spite of some surprising mistakes. And I thank the TV producers for putting cameras on about every other square inch of the stadium. It was so much better than being there that I don’t understand why anyone attends—especially when can’t mute or completely ignore the Madonna self-celebration.

What does all that have to do with poetry? Ask and ye shall receive, from William Carlos Williams, once again, the favorite poem of Gothpunkuncle:

             so much depends
             upon

             a red wheel
             barrow

             glazed with rain
             water

             beside the white
             chickens.

*

HOPKINS, FINALE

    Before leaving Roethke’s “In a Dark Time,” Hopkins’ “Carrion Comfort” and his other terrible sonnets, I want to say that, even with Hopkins’ marvelous imagery and diction, I have an important  reservation about these poems in the light of T.S. Eliot’s thoughts on Hamlet and the hero's need for an "objective correlative." Surely Hopkins scholars have hit upon this connection, but I’ve done no research on the matter and don’t know whom to footnote, if anyone. As far as I know, I’m coming to this on my own.  

    Eliot points out that audiences need to see objective causes for a character’s emotions. Otherwise, the literature runs the risk, at the very least, of becoming histrionic melodrama, a mere soap opera, an emotional flood far greater than any observable stimulus for it.

 

    That not only confuses an audience, but it’s also  intellectually dishonest. Some may ask why we should disapprove of soap opera? First, because we can’t follow it logically or emotionally; it’s a screaming mess of ink blots left on our doorstep, and we are not Dr. Freud.

    But secondly and just importantly, hysteria is intellectually dishonest. Its emotionality claims to have terrible causes, but the alleged victim refuses to, or at least is unable to, show us those causes in any kind of convincing detail. So our tendency toward empathy is thwarted, in which case we might ask why we are reading.

 

    As I noted before, the nineteenth-century diction along with Hopkins’ interest in linguistic and metrical experiments will be off-putting to many. Remember that my reason for posting “Carrion Comfort” is its similarity to  Roethke's "In a Dark Time," discussed here January 24.  Especially if we allow ourselves to read into "Carrion Comfort" the fact that Hopkins converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest, his struggle with faith would seem unusually powerful compared to many human struggles. 

    Isn't he seeing his God as a betraying bully? The human trusted, "kissed the rod/" the "Hand" and "heart" and wants to cheer God along with his life-altering decision to give himself entirely to that particular greater force. In turn, that force has "flung" him, "trod" upon him, and, returning to the first stanza, has once again stepped upon him with his "wring-world right foot rock," has laid His "lionlimb against me," has scanned the speaker's "bruised bones" with "darksome devouring eyes." Eagle, hawk, owl, buzzard, flesh-eater:  how's that for a new image of the Lord?

 

    But don’t we need to know what has caused this despair and sense of betrayal? It's not enough to say we've all had crises of faith, or never had faith to begin with, so we don't need to know whence the agony for this speaker, this poet. We do need to know. 

    However, it's the specificity, individuality, and originality of Hopkins’ images, the ways he perceives and describes his  anguish and betrayal, that convince me he really felt them, honestly experienced a crisis and its attendant despair. 

    It also matters that in Lines 2-4, the speaker struggles so hard to survive his pain, to stand up against Despair, to man up, as we might say these days. 

    But that's still not the same as knowing the full story. What happened to cause this speaker's year-long sense of alienation from and victimization by a predatory godhead? 

    Unless I completely misunderstand T.S. Eliot's sense of the objective correlative, that is precisely at issue in "Carrion Comfort" and some other poems among Hopkins' "terrible sonnets."  He gives us the emotional consequence of a crisis, with little or no picture or plot for the cause and development of that final turmoil. There is much more demonstration of emotion than clear stimulation for it, just as Eliot claims about Hamlet (and I agree).  

    The result in Hopkins is a sense of emotional exaggeration. A man is rolling on the floor, bemoaning something terrible that's happened to him, but he cannot tell us what. For all we know, the speaker might be more at fault than God is.

    With that in mind, here is "Carrion Comfort" once again. There is so much to admire in the poet's intensity, and the originality and muscularity of his language, that it seems a shame we cannot be fully satisfied that we know something important about the man and whether his own "cause is just." If someone called Hopkins a drama queen, I'd try to defend him; I’d say you don’t pluck this language out of thin air; he's labored at his words in order to make them feel authentic and unique. I'd also feel I was walking on stilts.

    CARRION COMFORT

    by Gerard Manley Hopkins

    Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

    Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man

    In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

    Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

    But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

    Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

    With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,

    O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

    Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

    Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,

    Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

    Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród

    Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year

    Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Poetry, Hopkins, Pitch, Honesty and Trust

High, Pretty, Alone in the Wind

    

    In Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets,” here is the short passage I find most wrenching and representative (from “No worst there is none”): 

    O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

    Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there.

However, as a whole poem, I prefer “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend.” Its final three lines are not for sissies either:

   

    Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen
justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

    Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

    With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

    Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must

    Disappointment all I endeavour end?

    Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

    How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost

    Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust

    Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

    Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes

    Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again

    With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

    Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,

    Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

    Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

The post that will follow next time got away from me in length and tone (too formal, not much fun). But to avoid being the squirrel halfway across the road, I’m going to post it later, in two parts.

    So in a more casual vein, appropriate for a blog, I want to continue the discussion about poetry (Roethke, Hopkins, and now T.S. Eliot) in a way that amounts to looking at honesty and trust in general. One reason more people should look more often at poetry is that it asks us to think more carefully about spoken experiences, our own and those of others, including how honest and trustworthy we or other speakers are being. 

How Clear Is the Focus?

When someone—lover, boss, friend, government, for example—offers excited or dire statements, how much attention has that speaker earned? How do we know how involved to become?

One answer is to respond to those people as we’d respond to a poem. We listen carefully to the language being uttered. What do the words mean, at the literal, denotative as well as the emotional, connotative levels? In what tone or mood are they offered, and is that appropriate to the situation? 

    Are we given enough specifics to make our own judgments? Is the speaker being honest and accurate in the way he presents and evaluates information? Too emotional? Or maybe not emotional enough? Too self-protected in irony, long-windedness, lame humor, and other defenses? And of course, what’s the other side of the story?

How Heavy's the Load?

Although we are often fooled, we keep on making such human decisions almost every day in response to things we hear, whether in person or through the media. Very few good responses are made in a True-False or Multiple Choice mode. We look at motive, context, tone, and a host of other variables in sizing up why our friend wants to go out with that person or make that comment to the boss or be defeated by that situation. 

    Those are the very kinds of considerations we need in approaching poetry. Hear the poet or his speaker as a friend or acquaintance who is, presumably, saying something he considers urgent, or at least important enough to be worth our time. Is it conveyed in the right kind of detail. Why is he telling me that? Is it just some hysteria or some fancy dance? How much of it do I believe, or care about, or think I should respond to?

How Loud Is the Flap?

 So when someone (like me) gets long-winded, obsessed, overblown, or tediously technical about poetry or some other subject, maybe he's just to trying to make sense of his conversation with a poet who was worked up about something.

    Next time, onward with Hopkins and Eliot.

**

Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Carrion Comfort": Unique Agonies

I think the best of Hopkins’ terrible sonnets is “Carrion Comfort.”  Its diction and imagery may be eccentric and difficult, or even off-putting, but they seem entirely unique to this particular speaker and this poet, without sacrificing universality.  

Maybe all who have felt themselves on a psychological precipice at one time or another can feel some connection to "Carrion Comfort," have known something such as Hopkins' sense of betrayal and desertion. He converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest, so it makes sense that his Important Other is his deity. Others have probably felt such abandonment and bullying by different persons or forces—a lover or parent or friend or employer or system of beliefs and values. But aren't some of us like this lonely poet in feeling abused, kicked when we are already down, thanks to someone or something we trusted?

                 CARRION COMFORT

                 by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89)

             Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

             Not untwist — slack they may be — these last     strands of man

                In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

                Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

                But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

                Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

                With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,

                O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

               Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

                Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,

                Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

                Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród

                Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year

                Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

After expressing some reservations last time about Theodore Roethke's "In a Dark Time," my main point now is that the particular details in “Carrion Comfort” feel authentic, not generic. They are specific to the quirky mind, ear, and eye of Hopkins. The imagery and phrasing reflect a soul’s chaos and feeling of abandonment by God; perhaps only Hopkins could have felt it in just this way. If that makes the poem demanding, it also makes it seem genuine, in spite of all the poetic shenanigans.

 
Hopkins' language and probably his mind are unusually idiosyncratic, even 120 years after his death, so I hesitate to ask Roethke (last post) or any other poet to match Hopkins' originality or intensity. What I was trying to say about “In a Dark Time” was that a few of Roethke’s images or utterances sounded as if they’d been bought from the poetry kiosk down the street. To the extent that they sound like something many poets would say, or have said, they lose at least a little punch and sense of an honest, unique psyche’s raw cries.

I’ll await responses before trying to clarify further.  Let me also repeat that I find “In a Dark Time” a good poem and good Roethke, though not as good as his extraordinary“The Waking”--or “I Knew a Woman” and maybe some others.