4 notes on recent postings:

New wine in old bottles:
The notion that prior content freights a given, regularized phonological
contour with an allusion to the past (or conventional past usage) seems
useful in explaining what Spenser is doing when describing Redcrosse's
shield, "Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remain" (FQ I.i.3). The
initial stanza has four "did"s in it, along with "dismayde" and the d's in
the rime worlds shielde, fielde, wield, and yield. Redcrosse hasn't used
the shield himself, but it is nonetheless battle-tried&true and battle-worn.
 The red-cross shield's dents are not only the history of Christian combat,
but the ghostly dolorous voice and remains of the earlier phonology. The
effect gets repeated in the knight's first stroke in confronting Error --
his glancing blow leaves the monster a bit stunned: "Much daunted with that
dint, her sence was dazed." I.e., Redcrosse has proven he can dish it out,
as well as possessing a shield that can take it. It could be argued that
Spenser has a mind to remind us of older, four-stress alliterative verse,
which remains beneath lots of iambic pentameter, and also to remind us of
previous heroic uses to which that verse was put, re his own subject-matter:

On crosse vpon Caluarye . Cryst toke the bataille,
Ageines deth and the deuel . destruyed her botheres mygtes,
Deyde, and deth fordid . and day of nygte made
      (Langland, Piers Plowman, B Passsus XVI, 164-68)

But on his brest a bloudie cross he bore
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord (FQ I.i.2)

I fel eftsones a-slepe . and sodenly me mette,
That Pieres the Plowman . was paynted al blody,
And come in with a crosse . bifor the comune peple,
And rigte lyke in ale lymes . to owre lorde Iesu (B Passus XIX, 5-8)

Pastoral in epic:
Petrarch not only self-laureatized himeslf in the Africa (the invocation and
principio to which Milton has not ignored), he wrote bucolic songs where the
same scenario is found, in conjunction with Laura; and Spenser, it is argued
sub Acidale in SpEncy., recreated nos. 3 and 10 for the climax of his poem,
in a reinvocation of the scene of poet vocation, including the vocation to
celebrate the poet's poetical mistress. "The inaugural scene of Petrarch's
calling provides the valedictory for Spenser's: the poet who wins his
laurels from others at the outset must nonetheless award them to himself in
the dénouement." The same episode centrally reincarnates Colin's Rosalind,
the poet being eternally "vassal unto one" as per CCCHA -- the beloved's
relation to the triune or three-in-one Belphoebe-Florimell-Amoret is placed
at the center of that concentrized poem ("The beame of beauties sparkled
from aboue, / The floure of vertue, and pure chastitie, / The blossome of
sweet ioy and perfect loue, / The pearle of peerlesse grace and modestie:
... I hers euer onely, euer one: / One euer I all vowed hers to bee, / One
euer I, and other neue none.").

Pastoral in scripture:
"The Scripture also affords us a divine pastoral drama in the Song of
Solomon, consisting of two persosn and a double chorus, as Orign rightly
judges." --Milton, Reason of Church Government, intro. to Bk. II.

E.g., ...thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Gilead.
Thy teeth are a flock of sheep which go up from the washing, whereof every
one beareth twins, and there not one barren among them. (KJV Song 6:5f.)

With:

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples (Song 2:5)

Compare:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs ...
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
(Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill)

Old wine in new bottles:
It seems that once a poet has written or heard something (such as pastoral)
memorably, he is condemned to write in its established traces again,
recycling it, as it were, recapitulatively: once, once more, yet once more.
 See above example, and the following, for clinical evidence:

In amnesias of the first type, which are nearly always the result of a
violent shock, I incline to think that the memories which are apparently
destroyed are really present, and not only present but acting. To take an
example frequently borrowed from Forbes Winslow, that of a patient who had
forgotten the letter F, and the letter F only, I wonder how it is possible
to subtract a given letter wherever met with,—to detach it, that is, from
the spoken or written words in which it occurs,—if it were not first
implicitly recognized. In another case cited by the same author, the
patient had forgotten languages he had learnt and poems he had written.
 Having begun to write again, he reproduced nearly the same lines.
—Henri Bergson,
Matter and Memory

Thus Lycidas:

Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore

with Paradise Lost:

Down the great River to the op'ning Gulf XI.833

The singer is ahead of the original conveyance of Eden by the Flood.
   --Jim N.



  





On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:30:50 +0900
  "Steven J. Willett" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> On Jun 11, 2008, at 4:09 PM, J.B. Lethbridge wrote:
>>
>> The second point, is that if we say that all talk, reading, writing,
>> criticism and what not is political (or all experience is pastoral,
>> all
>> literature is pastoral ...), we run the risk of so broadening the
>> use of
>> the term `political' that is has no meaning and no use. An old saw.
>>
>> But if our use of `political' is very broad, it is not difficult to
>> say
>> that even metrical studies are political -- that is they rely on
>> and reveal
>> a certain preference in a writer, and of course on certain
>> assumptions --
>> just as much as a study of the role of minorities and so on. This
>> is easy,
>> and hard to escape, for all discourse relies on assumptions and
>> preferences
>> of some sort. But whether it is useful?
>
> I keep hoping that someone will take my suggestion and provide us with a
>concrete demonstration, using say "The Shepherd's Calendar," to prove that
>versification is in itself political as opposed to the content expressed
>in the versification. Instead we are still in the realm of highly
>abstract analysis where critics can, like Humpty Dumpty, makes words mean
>whatever they want. In the absence of any takers, which hardly surprises
>me, let me play the devil's advocate for a moment and then go on the
>offensive.
>
> 1. If a poet working in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century
>should cast a poem on a military theme in heroic couplets, the meter might
>be called a 'political' choice based on the tradition of using the verse
>form for similar martial themes. It was no accident that Pope chose this
>meter for his versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. A similar case is
>Eliot's suggestion of terza rima for the second section of Part II in
>"Little Gidding." He specifically wanted to summon up Dantean echoes and,
>taking Julian's broad extension of politics to 'assumptions,' one can find
>quite a few cultural, moral and historical resonances in the meter.
> Auden's decision to use ballad meter for "Miss Gee" complete with trite
> rhymes and crude insouciant tone draws the sharpest possible contrast
> between the romance of the ballad tradition and Miss Gee's lonely,
> sterile and cancer-termed life. The same applies to "James Honeyman" and
>"Victor." If we turn to "January" in "The Shepherd's Calendar," the heavy
>dose of alliterations in the rather rough iambic pentameter ababcc stanzas
>suggests something of the earlier alliterative tradition, which was still
>close to Spenser, and underscores the clownish gifts of Colin and his
>earlier avatar in Skelton. But all these are cases where the meter
>carries overtones of an earlier content. It is certainly true, then, that
>a tradition in which certain meters are deployed for certain themes can
>over time invest the meters with an aura that makes them seem natural
>choices for newer poems of similar content. That might be called the
>meter's political content. Marina Tarlinskaja has shown that there are
> distinct semantic overtones associated with iambic and trochaic
> tetrameter quatrains rhymed abab and asbb in the eighteenth and
> nineteenth centuries. The two meters, in her study "Strict Stress- Meter
>in English Poetry Compared with German and Russian" (U of Calgary P,
>1993), exhibit thematic preferences and stylistic particulars in
>elaborating the same themes (see pp. 125-28). She only looked at 'god'
>and 'love,' but the study could be extended to many other themes. What
>causes this difference between iambic and trochaic poems in their
>treatment of the same themes? The answer lies in the different origins of
>the iambic and trochaic meters. The trochaic meter is associated with
>folk poetry, songs and ballads. The iambic meter developed long after it
>and was generally linked with literary and bookish associations. These
>associations were then transferred to the thematic repertoire.
>
> But these contrasting thematic associations only hold for the contrasting
>meters and their differing historical origins. For the main
>accentual-syllabic tradition, essentially just iambic pentameter,
>tetrameter and trimeter, the meter is neutral. If you look at the history
>of the 'heroic' couplet, you will quickly see that it has been used far
>more frequently for almost anything other than heroic or military
>subjects. Keats used it for "Endymion" and "Lamia," Pope for his Horatian
>satires, thousands of poets over centuries for an enormous mass of
>romantic drivel, Johnson for "The Vanity of Human Wishes," Goldsmith for
>"The Deserted Village," Donne for his satires among many other poems,
>Dryden for translations and satires and on and on covering an infinitely
>wide spectrum of thematic content. The very capaciousness of the form
>shows that it contributes only flexible possibilities for rhythmical,
>structural and rhetorical organization that the poet exploits to say
>whatever he wants to say.
>
> 2. It is entirely wrong to call meter a 'discourse.' Meter is a
> technique for organizing a language's phonology to achieve rhythmical
> effects. The techniques vary depending on the phonology. The Indo-
>European tradition down to Greece and Rome exploited syllabic quantity;
>the Chinese tradition uses syllabic count, rhyme, tone patterns and
>contrastive patterns in various combinations (see James J. Y. Liu's "The
>Art of Chinese Poetry" (U Chicago P1962)); the Japanese tradition uses
>syllabic count organized into a quantitative-- that is temporal--matrix
>that can be heard quite clearly if you know Japanese; the Italian
>tradition uses syllabic count and rhyme, having just missed the
>development of accentual-syllabic meters; the German tradition uses
>substantially the same meters as English, but its greater percentage of
>polysyllabic words makes it ideal for accentual template imitations of
>classical meters; and the modern Russian tradition uses accentual-syllabic
>meters, but once again, the very large incidence of polysyllabic words
>usually means that the rhythms have fewer ictuses per line than equivalent
>English meters and thus much less drive or forward thrust than English
>poetry, though its inflectional system blesses Russian poets with rich
>rhyme possibilities. That should be enough to show that meter is not and
> has never been a 'discourse' in any sense that makes rational sense. For
>those who want to explore the European tradition in detail, I would
>recommend learning Greek and Latin (followed by Sanskrit), but in default
>of that, try M. L. Gasparov's magisterial "A History of European
>Versification" (OUP, 1996). It is essential.
>
> 3. Up to this point, then, we can say that it is not entirely absurd to
>regard some meters as carrying thematic overtones. Those overtones can
>then induce a poet to use the same meter for the same thematic topic. But
>the meter itself, as a linguistic structure, is devoid of 'political'
>content with the possible exception of the iambic-trochaic binary
>opposition. The political connection is a posteriori, a consequence of
>the slow accretion of poetry with similar content and similar or identical
>meter. If a poet has a political agenda in choosing a meter, the agenda
>is historical, not linguistic. I am now going to review some metrical
>forms that disprove the claim that meter is either political or a
>discourse.
>
> 4. Let's step back to Horace. He will clinch my argument. Horace wanted
>to create a Latin lyric poetic tradition that could stand with the Greek,
>but felt that the metrical resources of Latin outside the dactylic
>hexameter--a nonlyric form--were too thin. His method was to adopt Aeolic
>metrical systems, the systems used most famously by the Lesbian poets
>Alcaeus and Sappho, along with a few other Greek forms. He was most proud
>of his accomplishment as "princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos deduxisse
>modos" (CIII.30). The most common stanzaic forms in the Carmina are in
>order the Alcaic and the Sapphic. He used both forms without the
>slightest regard for content. The Roman Odes (C.III.1-6) are in the
>Alcaic stanza, but he can use the same form for any number of other
>genres, including the most trivial sympotic or erotic poems, just as the
>Aeolic poets did. The Alcaic stanza dominates all other forms. It has no
>political presupposition. We find the same metrical indifference to
>content in the Sapphic stanza. While he uses it in some of his more
>acidic erotic poems, he also uses it for the "Carmen Saeculare," the hymn
> commissioned by Augustus and performed by a chorus of 27 boys and 27
> girls, all freeborn with living parents, on June 3 as the climax to the
>Centennial Games of 17BCE. At no point in his poetic career as a metrical
>transposer did Horace think he was resuscitating the themes, joys and
>sufferings of the Aeolic poets. He only wanted their formal structures to
>lend Lain the sense of inevitability, of a rhythmical natura naturans, of
>an irony that suddenly surprises its seriousness when the meter least
>suggests it.
>
> 5. The most common meter in surviving Greco-Roman poetry is the elegiac
>distich. If any meter has the right to be called perfect, the elegiac
>distich is that meter. The meter seems to have come into existence as a
>flute song, possibly invented by Archilochus, but it proved a form that
>could embrace absolutely any content over the nearly two thousand years of
>its history. Aside from the astonishing directness, strength and
>scurrility of Archilochus we have Callinus' call to war, Mimnermus' eulogy
>to love and the beginning of the carpe diem motif, Tyrtaeus, Solon,
>Xenophanes, Theognis and Simonides at the start of the tradition--all as
>different as can be. The elegiac couplet is the form of choice for the
>Roman poets of love, Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid. The long
>history of the form had nothing to do with the subject. The couplet
>consists of a dactylic hexameter followed by the misnamed pentameter:
>
> - u u | - u u | - || - u u | - u u | -
>
> The hexameter rolls out to its dignified, spacious end and then permits
>the poet to fill the pentameter with pithy conclusions, summaries and
>pointed expressions. The dactylic meter is just slightly modified in the
>so-called pentameter, which is really two separate metrical units
> (- uu - uu -) separated by the caesura (II above). The couplet had the
>expansiveness of the regular hexameter for scope and the pentameter for
>melody and rhetorical punch. There was nothing the elegiac couplet could
>not accommodate. I recommend some of the list spend a few hours with "The
>Greek Anthology" to see what the elegiac couplet could do in every
>possible thematic environment.
>
> 6. Syllabic poetry and radical free verse both undercut the notion that
>metrical forms are a kind of political discourse however one might want to
>define 'political.' Syllabic poetry of the sort that Marianne Moore or
>Auden wrote has no thematic accretions to prioritize a meter. All that
>matters is the syllable count. I recommend Auden's stanzaic syllabic
>poetry and his couplets in 9:11 or 11:13 syllables to see how their clean,
>transparent, ahistorical rhythm permits him to explore such a wealth of
>themes. Extreme free verse or riga verso has a different problem. The
> most successful free verse is that which has the ghost of
>some simple meter lurking behind the arras as Eliot said, the feeling that
>a familiar rhythm lies just below the threshold of our consciousness.
> Profligate free verse destroys that and thus any sense of being
> connected with a rhythmical tradition. Riga verso and line-length or
> line-breath prosody do the same by sundering us from thematic and
> prosodic traditions. The worst excesses of free verse are usually
> defended by the claim that modern poets must create their own unique
> organic rhythms for what they want to say. This is organicism. It
> divides poets into cells consisting of an adept priest surrounded by
> followers (many of whom want to become priests). The organic rhythms of
>each cell are nontransferrable and idiosyncratic, living under their own
>special laws. No content can be put into the form of another cell. Every
>cell is isolated in its gloriously sterile originality. Naturally, the
>great advantage of organic rhythms is that no objective rules can be
>applied to judge their success. If someone tries to write blank verse, I
>can within a few lines determine if the poet knows the tradition or not.
> With organic verse, one must accept it at face value.
>
> 7. I return on our retracing course back to Michael Saenger's bare
> assertion, never argued with any concrete examples, that "The structure
>of poetry is itself often apolitical, but there is no way to analyze it
>without participating in political structures." I have just analyzed
>several metrical structures and shown that they are not political and
>cannot be in any way I can see be called political. We can formalize
>Prof. Saenger's assertion as "The structure of poetry is only explicable
>by political structures." This is one of those empty tautologies that
>seem to say something but on analysis lack any verification test. OK, I
>am going to give Prof. Saenger an example he can use to prove his case.
> Here is Basho's famous haiku, ?? ????????? (furuike-ya kawazu tobi-komu
>mizu-no-oto), or in English,
>
> Old pond,
> a frog jumps in
> the sound of water.
>
> Haiku, like the elegiac distich, can accept any content. You surely know
>this haiku and can consult your Japanese colleagues if you need linguistic
>help, but I doubt that will be necessary. All I want is a clear
>demonstration that the haiku's metrical form is, by itself, a political
>statement. If you don't like my example, choose your own. I have already
>suggested "The Shepherd's Calendar," but any renaissance poem is fine.
> Alternatively, something from Greek, Latin, German, Italian, French,
>Russian, Japanese or Chinese should fit the bill. Take your choice and
>cite in the original language.
>
> I have put all my cards on the table. I am thoroughly tired of hearing
>critics spout grandiose, abstract, all-encompassing, exception-free
>assertions that emanate from the more refined airs of Marxism, a
>thoroughly dead and defunct economic philosophy, with around a hundred
>million dead to its credit, which only lives in US academia to the great
> amusement of Europe.
>
> I call.
>
>
> Steven J. Willett
> [log in to unmask]
> [log in to unmask]
> US phone/fax: (503) 390-1070
> Japan phone: (053) 475-4714
>
>
>
>

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James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121