Hello everyone,
    Thanks Keston for the Marlowe quote which makes my simple identification
of that line with Dickens' Miss H unsustainable. It's important because so
few of the quotations one senses in this poem are verbatim; for all I can
see, perhaps this & the Dowland may be the only 'watertight' points of
reference. For example the phrase I looked at earlier 'another fire and
pragma cape/ upon them both 'sounds like' "a plague on both your houses" a
reading which might suggest a political stance of disgusted neutrality and
in terms of modern weapons a literal plague or at least an unexplained
'syndrome' resistant to financial compensation. But it's interpretation.
    I think I would still want to argue, having regard to the four lines on
the back cover of "Poems" most likely to have been composed by the author,--
'enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language'-- that the
impression given by Marlowe's line, (whether or not there's a textual crux
for scholars here would be totally irrelevant) is one of 'slippage', in the
sense of "an instance of not reaching a norm, target, etc.". In this case
since the matrix is standard modern english, however contorted the syntax
and and unstable- even so soon- the register, we feel a violation of 'For
even as I spoke/ was speaking to her...' in "For even I speak to her the sun
was.." which is not significantly disturbed by that  mental counterrhythm
'even I, who shouldn't,etc. speak to her'... It's also reminiscent of that
textual feature Reeve & Kerridge discuss re 'The Oval Window',  associated
with computer editing; "elsewhere the skippings and adjustments produce more
or less disruptive mishearings of the familiar or the expected" (p.156).
    The poem begins: "At leisure for losing outward in a glazed toplight/
bringing milk in,..." I think the last phrase signals the distinctive
British perspective of this poem from the beginning since I don't know any
other country (Ireland?? yes surely) where that phrase signals home delivery
and doorsteps. Where I live it would mean, recently, dioxine-free imports
(we should be so lucky!). Wild/ domesticated pets like cats bring
embarrassing kills home & plonk them down right there: "Parts of Bristol are
still rich", parts of Brussels too. There is that sense of outward and
return, although sometimes apparently a circle or turbine:a financial aspect
inseparable from the most sublime lyricism: "And now let all the ships come
in/ pity and love the Return the Flower/ the Gift and the Alligator
catches/ -and the mind go forth to the end of the world". But there is
another sense of outward which the opening may hint we shouldn't lose.
Olson's 'The Maximus Poems' is dedicated 'To Robert Creeley, The Figure of
Outward' and I quote from George F. Butterick's 'A Guide to the Maximus
Poems of Charles Olson' in order to explain 'losing outward in a glazed
toplight':
The -epithet here offered Creeley occurred to Olson in a dream at Black
Mountain. In a notepad among Olson's papers appears the following from May
1969:

the Figure of Outward means way out way out/ 'there' the
'World', I'm sure, otherwise/ why 'was' the pt. then to like write to
Creeley/ daily? to make the whole thing/ double, to/objectify the existence
of an/ 'Outward'? a{n} opposite to a/ personality which so completely does
(did)/ stay at home? And so to a 'forward' a/ motion I / make him- or in a
dream 'heard' this/ 'name' of him (waking up & writing / it on the white
wall of South Lodge? in/ the night? And it is probably still there under/
new coats of paint like new coats..

Glazed toplight... the light on the topcoat but also, I seem to remember,
the actual Figure, the design printed at the beginning of Maximus, was the
outline of a flattened piece of tin, or tinfoil, found in a ghost town house
in Arizona. Is it too fanciful to suggest a connection between the light
reflected off a milk bottle top, with its place in British political
iconography, its emotional potency (the memory of those third-pint bottles)
and this lost fragment that caught someone's eye. Like the meaning of this
poem, and like the recurrent sense of drowned meaning rising, in Pound's
Cantos, the figure is under a glaze, a 'semitransparent coating applied to a
painting {{or a poem we might add}} to modify the tones'.

" The phrase first was used by Olson in a poem  entitled "For R.C." ...:the
figure of outward...all things stand by him, and all the others/ are the
better known". In his letter to Creeley containing the poem, Olson  reports
how "the first senses of it got written in the dark on the white, and
scratched-on wall!"

Have we a figure of outward in this poem? Does Dowland point the way? Have
we lost outward? the world? Are we "at leisure for losing", free to lose &
on the way to losing..? Whatever the answers, Olson's methodology suggests
something tighter for "she" than the Eliotic 'familiar, compound ghost' of
my first hunch.


Best regards to all,
John



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