Red Roses
If someone was to write a book on the use of the rose as a symbol in literature, especially poetry - it would be a very substantial, multivolume affair, much conerned with romantic love, and perhaps some esoteric spiritual overtones too. Do you have a favourite rose-centred (sorry for that awful almost-pun) text? Or would you just advise: get real. A rose is a rose is a rose. Gertrude Stein then.
But I've been reading today - I'm trying to do reading, although pretty swamped with academic admin, just to refresh myself with some of the wealth of course material I'm due to start delivering in less than three weeks time. I get a bit done at the gym and try to do the rest in my office over a coffee, instead of checking my emails and the latest headlines too many times to be productive. I've been revisiting Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets this week, in an attempt to get up to speed for my modern British poetry module. Such a readable tome, well-informed, richly laced with quotations and just the right amount of biographical summary too.
I revised my Hardy, thanks to Schmidt's succinct presentation of Hardy as a widely influential but still apt to be misclassified, misunderstood, poet. Describing himself somewhere as an 'evolutionary meliorist', Hardy was undoubtedly of a bleak turn of mind. His notion of irony was all-pervasive, a 'cosmic irony' seeing life and the universe itself as redolent with excruciating reversals and near-misses. Protesting that this facing of the at best mordant indifference of the universe is the only way to fare better in the future, is there in fact any hope or redemption in his poetry, no matter how tempered? We are offered 'Transformations' which, though set in a graveyard, offers a kind of ecological afterlife for a dead young woman:
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.
Rather dubiously erotic though, as well as morbid? Well it was about as positive as poor faith-divested Hardy went, and a wierdly resonant triplet for all that
I was so struck also, this time around, by the section on Charlotte Mew. I've known of Mew's life and work - particularly the much anthologised 'Farmer's Bride' for ages; in fact I'm sure I remember being told she once chased contemporary woman writer May Sinclair round her bedroom wielding a pair of scissors! Perhaps apocryphal, and perhaps even constructed in retrospect by my own faulty memory, as I know both women were purported to be lesbian and were certainly unmarried and thought and wrote about the situation of the unmarried woman at the beginning of the twentieth century (very different these days of course).
Mew wrote short stories as well as poems - I've already commented on one of hers in a previous blog. It's in her poems that the writing really comes to life - the hypnotically, painfully intense use of imagery - always slightly strange and wilful, often charged with an unspoken eroticism that is as full of loss and pain as of pleasure. Witness the lines in 'The Farmer's Bride' that concentrate on the woman's hair - ' Oh! My God! the down,' The soft young down of her, the brown,/ THe brown of her - her eyes, her hair, her hair!' The volume is turned up that much more than in TS Eliot's repressed Prufrock who fixates, in one line, on a similar attribute to his unattainable love. Mew's Bride is equally unattainable - in the poem, because she has refused sexual access to her husband, who is the speaking persona in the poem. Perhaps in her life because she felt she could not fulfil the orientation of her own erotic drive. Perhaps she was trying to take a lock of Sinclair's, or I conjured that incident up as a symbol for an unfulfilled sense of kinship on Mew's part
But for images unfulfilled desire, of unfulfilled life in fact, take this stanza from the poignant 'Madeleine in Chuch' - the whole poem is spoken in the voice of a Mary Magdelenesque figure who, after a life of sensuality cannot make the leap of faith she so longs to. It was rejected as blasphemous by a printer the first time it was due for publication.
Red is the strangest pain to bear;
In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
In Summer the roses are worse than these,
More terrible than they are sweet;
A rose can stab you across the street
Deeper than any knife:
And the crimson haunts you everywhere -
Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair
As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.
I thought this was extraordinary - perhaps because of the alarmingly proactive nature of this rose; a feminine symbol which here does much more than subtly scratch you. In fact if a poem, rose-centred or not, could do that much to catch in your heart, then it should bloom with unstoppable satisfaction: and that stabbing is exactly what Mew's poem does.
But I've been reading today - I'm trying to do reading, although pretty swamped with academic admin, just to refresh myself with some of the wealth of course material I'm due to start delivering in less than three weeks time. I get a bit done at the gym and try to do the rest in my office over a coffee, instead of checking my emails and the latest headlines too many times to be productive. I've been revisiting Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets this week, in an attempt to get up to speed for my modern British poetry module. Such a readable tome, well-informed, richly laced with quotations and just the right amount of biographical summary too.
I revised my Hardy, thanks to Schmidt's succinct presentation of Hardy as a widely influential but still apt to be misclassified, misunderstood, poet. Describing himself somewhere as an 'evolutionary meliorist', Hardy was undoubtedly of a bleak turn of mind. His notion of irony was all-pervasive, a 'cosmic irony' seeing life and the universe itself as redolent with excruciating reversals and near-misses. Protesting that this facing of the at best mordant indifference of the universe is the only way to fare better in the future, is there in fact any hope or redemption in his poetry, no matter how tempered? We are offered 'Transformations' which, though set in a graveyard, offers a kind of ecological afterlife for a dead young woman:
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.
Rather dubiously erotic though, as well as morbid? Well it was about as positive as poor faith-divested Hardy went, and a wierdly resonant triplet for all that
I was so struck also, this time around, by the section on Charlotte Mew. I've known of Mew's life and work - particularly the much anthologised 'Farmer's Bride' for ages; in fact I'm sure I remember being told she once chased contemporary woman writer May Sinclair round her bedroom wielding a pair of scissors! Perhaps apocryphal, and perhaps even constructed in retrospect by my own faulty memory, as I know both women were purported to be lesbian and were certainly unmarried and thought and wrote about the situation of the unmarried woman at the beginning of the twentieth century (very different these days of course).
Mew wrote short stories as well as poems - I've already commented on one of hers in a previous blog. It's in her poems that the writing really comes to life - the hypnotically, painfully intense use of imagery - always slightly strange and wilful, often charged with an unspoken eroticism that is as full of loss and pain as of pleasure. Witness the lines in 'The Farmer's Bride' that concentrate on the woman's hair - ' Oh! My God! the down,' The soft young down of her, the brown,/ THe brown of her - her eyes, her hair, her hair!' The volume is turned up that much more than in TS Eliot's repressed Prufrock who fixates, in one line, on a similar attribute to his unattainable love. Mew's Bride is equally unattainable - in the poem, because she has refused sexual access to her husband, who is the speaking persona in the poem. Perhaps in her life because she felt she could not fulfil the orientation of her own erotic drive. Perhaps she was trying to take a lock of Sinclair's, or I conjured that incident up as a symbol for an unfulfilled sense of kinship on Mew's part
But for images unfulfilled desire, of unfulfilled life in fact, take this stanza from the poignant 'Madeleine in Chuch' - the whole poem is spoken in the voice of a Mary Magdelenesque figure who, after a life of sensuality cannot make the leap of faith she so longs to. It was rejected as blasphemous by a printer the first time it was due for publication.
Red is the strangest pain to bear;
In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
In Summer the roses are worse than these,
More terrible than they are sweet;
A rose can stab you across the street
Deeper than any knife:
And the crimson haunts you everywhere -
Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair
As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.
I thought this was extraordinary - perhaps because of the alarmingly proactive nature of this rose; a feminine symbol which here does much more than subtly scratch you. In fact if a poem, rose-centred or not, could do that much to catch in your heart, then it should bloom with unstoppable satisfaction: and that stabbing is exactly what Mew's poem does.
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