Poem of the Day: Wallace Stevens

Anecdote of the Jar 

I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
And round it was, upon a hill. 
It made the slovenly wilderness 
Surround that hill. 

The wilderness rose up to it, 
And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
The jar was round upon the ground 
And tall and of a port in air. 

It took dominion everywhere. 
The jar was gray and bare. 
It did not give of bird or bush, 
Like nothing else in Tennessee. 

--Wallace Stevens

How odd that my favorite 20th-century poet should have been a Taft Republican insurance company executive, of whom a colleague is supposed to have said, on reading his obituary in the New York Times, "I didn't know Wally wrote poems."

Stevens can be a tough nut to crack, unless you keep in mind one thing: his great theme is the transformative power of the imagination. It's what we have instead of religion ("Sunday Morning"); it's an intermediary between us and reality ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"); it is God itself and "the ultimate good" ("Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"). Everything else in Stevens' poetry is just window dressing. 

But what window dressing, what wit, what imagery, what mastery of sound! Take the first line of this one: "I placed a jar in Tennessee." Why Tennessee? Why not Arkansas, or Washington, or Delaware, or any of several other three-syllable states? Of course, he needed a state with some wilderness in it, which maybe rules out Delaware, and Washington introduces that confusion between state and city, but when it comes to "slovenly wilderness," Arkansas would do as well as Tennessee. Except that then we'd have "jar" and "Arkansas," which sounds too easy. 

And then there are those odd tricks of diction: the archaic inversion of "And round it was"; the phrase "of a port in air," which has commentators going in circles; and the mind-bending double negation "It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee," with a further conundrum in the phrase "give of." Almost every one of the poem's 12 lines has something to taunt the explicators. 

But really I think the poem is a response to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." It's not an ode, it's an anecdote (which lawyer Stevens probably knew wouldn't stand up as evidence in court). It's not a Greek vase, it's a Tennessee jar. It doesn't have a "brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought, / With forest branches and the trodden weed"; it's "gray and bare" and doesn't portray any people, or even any birds or bushes. It's as plain and commonplace an artifact as you can find. And yet when he puts it in place, it makes Nature behave. Which is what art does -- even the simplest human creation like a jar sitting on a hill. The "slovenly wilderness" still sprawls, but the imagination has put it into perspective, has tamed it. And "fictive things" (jars, poems, Grecian urns) "Wink as they will."  

Poem of the Day: Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ode to the West Wind 

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, 
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, 

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, 
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, 
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until 
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow 

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) 
With living hues and odours plain and hill: 

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; 
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear! 

II 

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion, 
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, 
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, 

Angels of rain and lightning; there are spread 
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, 
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge 
Of the horizon to the zenith's height, 
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge 

Of the dying year, to which this closing night 
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, 
Vaulted with all thy congregated might 

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere 
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear! 

III 

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams 
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 
Lulled by the coil of his crystàlline streams, 

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, 
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers 
Quivering within the wave's intenser day, 

All overgrown with azure  moss and flowers 
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou 
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers 

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below 
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear 
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, 
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear! 

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; 
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; 
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 

The impulse of thy strength, only less free 
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even 
I were as in my boyhood, and could be 

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, 
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed 
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven 

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. 
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! 
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! 

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed 
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. 

V 

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: 
What if my leaves are falling like its own! 
The tumult of thy might harmonies 

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, 
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! 
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! 
Be through my lips to unawakened earth 

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 

--Percy Bysshe Shelley 

People have trouble with Shelley. Partly it's that his revolutionary attitudes seem to us naive, partly that his verse is more rhetorical and less sharply focused in its imagery than his contemporary Keats's. But mostly, I think, it's his name. A line like "I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!" from the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" sounds like something a guy named Percy Bysshe Shelley would do. 

It's too bad about the name Percy, and woe betide the kid whose parents are so cruel as to name him that. (Not that there are many of them; the name peaked in the 1890s and now is virtually nonexistent. I actually had an uncle named Percy, who was born back when it was still popular, but the only other Percys I can think of are Percy Sutton, the former Manhattan borough president, and Percy Kilbride, who played Pa Kettle opposite Marjorie Main's Ma in B-pictures of the 1940s.) 

But Percy Shelley was no pantywaist (neither were Sutton, Kilbride and my uncle for that matter). Nor was he what Matthew Arnold called him, a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.” Arnold's attempt to emasculate Shelley probably stemmed, ironically, from that eminent Victorian's shock at Shelley's revolutionary attitudes toward things like marriage and sex. 

Anyway, the "Ode to the West Wind" is one of my half-dozen favorite lyric poems, and I think it has a sweep and power that rivals Shakespeare and Milton. So there. It's also one of those poems that, like Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," has a clear five-act structure: 

Exposition: The autumnal west wind has arrived to scatter dead leaves but also the seeds that will reawaken in the Spring.
Conflict: The destroyer role of the wind seems to predominate over that of the preserver. 
Crisis: Is it possible that only destruction will prevail? 
Struggle: The speaker recognizes that his fear of the wind's power echoes his own loss of hope in the possibility of spiritual and social change and renewal. 
Resolution: The speaker regains faith that renewal will occur, that Spring will follow Winter, and that his words and ideas will spread and take hold. 

But of course it's not just a didactic poem. It's also a brilliant use of terza rima, the meter of Dante's Divina Commedia, which is also about death and rebirth. Shelley is not a hard-edged imagist like Keats. His verse depends on the reader's ability to hold all its elements -- imagery, sound, symbolism, dramatic tension -- in the mind at once. There are few more beautiful stanzas in English than the middle section of the poem, with its evocation of an underwater world that is touched by the wind's power, but it doesn't stand alone. And while I understand the objection that "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" is a little too melodramatic, a little too much like "I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy," I argue that it works in context, that it's a dramatic turn that precipitates the reconciliation in the last stanza. 

Poem of the Day: William Shakespeare

Sonnet XXX

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, 
And with old woes new wail my dear Time's waste. 
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, 
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, 
And weep afresh love's long since canceled woe, 
And moan th' expense of many a vanished sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, 
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er 
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan, 
Which I new pay as if not paid before. 
   But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, 
   All losses are restored and sorrows end.

-- William Shakespeare

Not my favorite Shakespeare sonnet. It's one of those in which the final couplet too abruptly cancels out the rest of the poem. Still, it's full of wonderful soundplay, from the sibilants of the opening lines (sessions ... sweet silent ... summon ... remembrance ... things past) to the grieving open vowels of the later lines (moan ... foregone ... woe ... woe ... o'er ... fore-bemoanèd moan ... before). 

But I really chose this one because of remembrance of things Proust. This was the sonnet that Scott Moncrief chose to allude to when he went to translate the title À la recherche du temps perdu. Or rather, to mistranslate it. For Shakespeare is writing about what Proust called "voluntary memory" -- the effort to summon up things past -- whereas Proust is equally concerned with "involuntary memory," the way the past looms up unbidden when invoked by some sensory nexus -- a smell, a taste, a sound. True, Proust's narrator goes "in search of lost time" (the currently preferred translation of the title), but he succeeds only when conditions (most famously, the taste of a cookie crumb in a spoonful of tea) favor it. 

Still, you can see how the sonnet might have appealed to Scott Moncrief, for not only is "remembrance of things past" a classier sounding title in English than "in search of lost time," the sonnet itself is concerned with many of the things that troubled Proust's narrator: dead friends, old lovers, obliterated landmarks. But Proust's novel doesn't have a tacked-on couplet or coda to cancel out the sadness of those memories.  

O Calcutta!

The following review appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A DEAD HAND: A Crime in Calcutta

By Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 279 pp., $26

There's a house-of-mirrors moment in Paul Theroux's new novel when his narrator-protagonist, a travel writer named Jerry Delfont, meets up in Calcutta with a travel writer named Paul Theroux.

“What I knew about Theroux,” Delfont writes, “is what everyone knew about him. He was known for being intrusive, especially among the unsuspecting – strangers he met on trains, travelers who had no idea who he was, people thinking out loud in unguarded moments. I suspected that much of what he wrote was fiction, since he'd started his writing life as a novelist.” Delfont concludes from their conversation that Theroux is insincere, a phony, driven and competitive and envious. “I also knew that he was going to write about me, about meeting me, and that he'd get everything wrong.” 

So what we have here is Paul Theroux writing about Jerry Delfont writing about Paul Theroux. It's an oddly self-conscious moment, though whether it's self-deprecating or self-aggrandizing on Theroux's part is a little hard to say. It also plays only a tangential role in the plot: Theroux is there to find out what Delfont knows about a mysterious American woman named Merrill Unger, and Delfont isn't willing to let Theroux know that he knows a lot about her. 

There’s a lot Delfont doesn’t know, too, and that forms the plot of the novel. He meets Mrs. Unger (as he continues to think of her even after they’ve become intimate) when she sends a letter to him at his hotel in Calcutta. She explains that her son is an admirer of his writing and that a friend of her son’s  may be in trouble: The friend woke up in a fleabag hotel to find the body of a dead boy on the floor. She wonders if Delfont could help her son’s friend.

Delfont is afflicted with writer’s block, which he refers to as “dead hand.” (That’s not the only explanation of the title the novel provides.) So he goes to see Mrs. Unger and gets involved in more than he expected. He learns that she’s very wealthy, that she runs a kind of home for children she picks up on the Calcutta streets, that she’s a devotee of the goddess Kali, and that she gives a terrific tantric massage. He learns that she despises Mother Teresa, with whom she once worked, as a fame-seeker and celebrity hound who “believed that poverty made people better.”  He learns other things, too, which we won’t go into here, except to cite the warning of his friend Howard, who works at the American consulate: “a lot of foreign women get goddess complexes.”

As a novelist, Theroux has made a kind of specialty of stories about people who go to places where they don’t really belong and consequently get into major messes, the way Allie Fox does in The Mosquito Coast, for example. And Jerry Delfont’s problem is that he – one of the “big pink foreigners”  -- doesn’t belong in “populous Calcutta, city of deformities,” no matter how infatuated he becomes with Mrs. Unger.

In fact, Mrs. Unger herself gives him the bitterest insight: “India [is] a culture of evasions. This country is very dirty. It’s impossible to tell the truth here. The truth is forbidden, especially in writing. Anyway, a truthful book about India would be unbearable – about spite, venom, cruelty, sexual repression, incest, and meaningless crimes.” Later, Delfont would reflect, “Of all the foreigners I met in India, she was the one who was most at home.” 

Is “A Dead Hand” a truthful book about India? It certainly has all those “unbearable” things that Mrs. Unger enumerates. It also has an abundance of richly drawn characters, Mrs. Unger the most enigmatic and scariest of them. Theroux has used his travel writer’s eye and ear and his novelist’s imagination to craft a tense, disturbing, funny and horrifying book around all of them.

Poem of the Day: Arthur Rimbaud

Voyelles 

Vowels 

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles 
     A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels 
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:  
     I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes 
     A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies 
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles, 
     which buzz around cruel smells, 

Golfes d'ombre; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes, 
     gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents, 
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles; 
     lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles 
     I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes; 
     in anger or in the raptures of penitence; 

U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides, 
     U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas, 
Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des rides 
     the peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows 
Que l'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux; 
     which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads; 

O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges, 
    O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds, 
Silences traversés des Mondes et des Anges: 
     silences crossed by Angels and by Worlds      
-- O l'Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux! 
     -- O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes! 


L'étoile a pluré rose au coeur de tes oreilles, 
     The star has wept rose-color in the heart of your ears, 
L'infini roulé blanc de ta nuque à tes reins; 
     the infinite rolled white from your nape to the small of your back; 
La mer a perlé rousse à tes mammes vermeilles, 
     the sea has broken russet at your vermilion nipples, 
Et l'Homme saigné noir à ton flanc souverain. 
     and Man bled black at your royal side.

-- Arthur Rimbaud (prose translation by Oliver Bernard)

What is poetry but sounds and images? Well, there's meaning, but for Rimbaud that's often a secondary consideration. He was 18 and in the middle of his affair with Verlaine when he wrote this sonnet-plus-envoi. Aside from "Le Bateau ivre," it's probably his best-known poem. But whether it's a serious account of the author's synaesthesia is doubtful. Notice that Rimbaud has altered the usual sequence of vowels -- AEIOU -- to put O at the end, just as omega is the final letter of the Greek alphabet. And that O is the one vowel associated not only with a color but also with a shape: the circle of a trumpet's bell and of the irises of "Her Eyes." And that blue is the only color missing from the envoi. Of course there are many interpretations, some hinging on Rimbaud's interest in alchemy, others on his indulgence in absinthe (aka "the green fairy"), still others examining his attachment to his blue-eyed mother. It's probably a bit of all of these, but none of them explains it fully. Which is why he's one of the greats.

       

What I'm Reading

The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong 

Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. ... The same applies to the creation myth that was central to ancient religion and now has become controversial in the Western world because the Genesis story seems to clash with modern science. But until the early modern period, nobody read a cosmology as a literal account of the origins of life. (p. 15) 

This seems to imply that there were no conflicts over myths "until the early modern period." But of course there were. What Alfred North Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness" has always been with us. Ancient peoples believed that their gods and the records of their doings were more than just symbolic representations of "a reality that transcended language," and they were willing to go to war to prove it. The Bible vs. science controversy arises from a belief in the absolute truth of, on the one hand, Scripture, and on the other, scientific method. And each side fears that granting only symbolic status to any part of its ideology undermines the entire ideology and must therefore be fought for.  

In our own day, the God of the monotheistic tradition has often degenerated into a High God. The rites and practices that once made him a persuasive symbol of the sacred are no longer effective, and people have stopped participating in them. He has therefore become otiosus, an etiolated reality who for all intents and purposes has indeed died or "gone away." (p. 16)

Hence the fury over the magazine cover that asked:

Poem of the Day: Rainer Maria Rilke

from Sonnets to Orpheus 

O dieses ist das Tier, das es nicht giebt. 
     O this is the animal that does not exist.
Sie wußtens nicht und habens jeden Falls 
     But they didn't know that, and, in any case, 
-- sein Wandeln, seine Haltung, seinen Hals, 
     they loved it -- loved its gait, its stance, 
bis in des stillen Blickes Licht -- geliebt. 
     its neck, loved the light in its quiet gaze. 

Zwar war es nicht. Doch weil sie's liebten, ward 
    It never was. But since they loved it,  
ein reines Tier. Sie ließen immer Raum. 
     a pure animal became. They always left space. 
Und in dem Raume, klar und ausgespart, 
     And in that space, unoccupied and bright, 
erhob es leicht sein Haupt und brauchte kaum 
     it calmly raised its head and scarcely needed 

zu sein. Sie nährten es mit keinem Korn, 
     to be. They fed it not with grain, --  
nur immer mit der Möglichkeit, es sei. 
    only with the promise of its being. 
Und die gab solche Stärke an das Tier, 
    And this gave the animal such power, 

daß es aus sich ein Stirnhorn trieb. Ein Horn. 
     that a horn sprouted from its brow. One horn. 
Zu einer Jungfrau kam es weiß herbei -- 
    White, it strode up to a virgin -- and was, 
und war im Silber-Spiegel und in ihr. 
      in the mirror's silver and in her.

--Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by Edward Snow)

The Sonnets to Orpheus were written partly in response to the death of a 19-year-old young woman, a friend of his daughter's. Their central theme is the imagination's ability to bring things into being -- the power of art to create and transcend. In this case, it's an animal that never was: the unicorn. Unicorns have become so associated with kitsch, the bedroom decor of pre-teen girls, that they've lost much of their magic, and it takes a wizard-poet like Rilke to bring it back. Edward Snow's letter-perfect translation, though it loses the rhymes that knit together the original poem, has its own magic.       

What I'm Reading

The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong 

Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capabilities of mind and heart. This will be one of the major themes of this book. (p. xiii)

This makes religion sound like yoga or dieting or vowing to read ten pages of Proust every day: one of those worthwhile pastimes that one resolves to take up on New Year's Day, and not the central and most powerful guide to life. But that's okay. It's a definition that I, being something of a spiritual lazybones, rather like. 

[The] rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. (p. xv) 

And related partly because each is an alarmed reaction to the other.  

If the historians are right about the function of the Lascaux caves, religion and art were inseparable from the very beginning. Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life. As meaning-seeking creatures, men and women fall very easily into despair. They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary. (p. 8) 

Yes, and art has gained the upper hand. Sometimes religion's attempts to construct meaning only produce more "relentless pain and injustice." A recognition of this, and of the fact that humans -- not god(s) -- "have created religions," has caused many of us to turn for consolation to the arts and not to religion. 

The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic. (p. 9)

Human beings are so constituted that periodically they seek out ekstasis, a "stepping outside" of the norm. Today people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport. (p. 10) 

Which explains why religions have traditionally been hostile to most of these other outlets.     

Poem of the Day: Ezra Pound

In a Station of the Metro 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; 
Petals on a wet, black bough. 

--Ezra Pound

"What makes that a poem?" a student of mine once asked. "It's just a sentence broken up into two parts." 

Not a bad question, actually, when you learn that Pound originally had it printed like this: 

The apparition      of these faces       in the crowd

Petals      on a wet, black       bough

He wanted to emphasize the "ideogrammic" quality of the poem, the fact that it was inspired, as so much of his early verse was, by Chinese poetry. And it is sort of like a haiku by someone who can't count. 

So the next time I taught the poem, without telling the class who wrote it, I put it on the board alongside this: 

At a Subway Stop 

The specter of these visages in the throng; 
Blossoms on a damp, dark branch. 

And I asked the class which poem they liked better and why. I hoped they'd like Pound's version better, so we could talk about word choice and images and so on. And in fact most of them did. But there were some surprising votes for my paraphrase, and some interesting reasons. 

• In a Station of the Metro / At a Subway Stop -- Some of them didn't know that the Metro is the Paris subway, of course. So the chief reason for preferring my title was that it was clearer. 
• apparition / specter -- More of them knew what specter meant than apparition, which was a plus in its favor. And specter was "creepier." Those who did know what apparition meant argued that it was better because it implied something appearing suddenly, like people coming out of a subway, and there wasn't anything really creepy about flower petals on a limb. 
• faces / visages -- Those who preferred visages said it was a "fancier" (i.e., more "poetic") word, while faces was "sorta ordinary." 
• crowd / throng -- Throng was judged more poetic, too. Somebody said it gave a sense of movement, of thrusting forward, which crowd didn't.  
• Petals / Blossoms -- Someone said that blossoms were clusters of petals, which gave you more of a sense of people all crowded together. 
• wet, black / damp, dark -- The defenders of damp said that if the limb was really wet the petals would wash off. And there were those who liked the alliteration of damp and dark and the way the vowel sound of damp was echoed in branch.
• bough / branch -- Somebody said that bough was a nursery-rhyme word ("When the bough breaks") that nobody uses anymore, but they weren't sure whether that made it better than branch. 

Well, there's no accounting for tastes.    

Poem of the Day: Alexander Pope

From The Dunciad 

(Book I, lines 55-78) 
Here she beholds the Chaos dark and deep, 
Where nameless Somethings in their causes sleep, 
'Till genial Jacob, or a warm Third day, 
Call forth each mass, a Poem, or a Play: 
How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie, 
How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry, 
Maggots half-form'd in rhyme exactly meet, 
And learn to crawl upon poetic feet. 
Here one poor word an hundred clenches makes, 
And ductile dulness new meanders takes; 
There motley Images her fancy strike, 
Figures ill pair'd, and Similies unlike. 
She sees a Mob of Metaphors advance, 
Pleas'd with the madness of the mazy dance: 
How Tragedy and Comedy embrace; 
How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race; 
How Time himself stands still at her command, 
Realms shift their place, and Ocean turns to land. 
Here gay Description Ægypt glads with show'rs, 
Or gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca flow'rs; 
Glitt'ring with ice here hoary hills are seen, 
There painted vallies of eternal green, 
In cold December fragrant chaplets blow, 
And heavy harvests nod beneath the snow.

(Book IV, lines 397-457) 
Then thick as Locusts black'ning all the ground, 
A tribe, with weeds and shells fantastic crown'd, 
Each with some wond'rous gift approached the Pow'r, 
A Nest, a Toad, a Fungus, or a Flow'r, 
But far the foremost, two, with earnest zeal, 
And aspect ardent to the Throne appeal. 
   The first thus open'd: "Hear thy suppliant's call, 
Great Queen, and common Mother of us all! 
Fair from its humble bed I rear'd this Flow'r, 
Suckled, and chear'd, with air, and sun, and show'r, 
Soft on the paper ruff its leaves I spread, 
Bright with the gilded button tipt its head, 
Then thron'd in glass, and nam'd it CAROLINE: 
Each Maid cry'd, charming! and each Youth, divine! 
Did Nature's pencil ever blend such rays, 
Such vary'd light in one promiscuous blaze? 
Now prostrate! dead! behold that Caroline: 
No Maid cries, charming! and no Youth, divine! 
And lo the wretch! whose vile, whose insect lust 
Lay'd the gay daughter of the Spring in dust. 
Oh punish him, or to th' Elysian shades 
Dismiss my soul, where no Carnation fades." 
   He ceas'd, and wept. With innocence of mein, 
Th' Accus'd stood forth, and thus address'd the Queen. 
   "Of all th' enameled race, whose silv'ry wing 
Waves to the tepid Zephyrs of the spring, 
Or swims along the fluid atmosphere, 
Once brightest shin'd this child of Heat and Air. 
I saw, and started from its vernal bow'r 
The rising game, and chac'd from flow'r to flow'r. 
It fled, I follow'd; now in hope, now pain; 
It stopt, I stopt; it mov'd, I mov'd again. 
At last it fix'd, 'twas on what plant it pleas'd, 
And where it fix'd, the beauteous bird I seiz'd: 
Rose or Carnation was below my care;
I meddle, Goddess! only in my sphere. 
I tell the naked fact without disguise, 
And, to excuse it, need but shew the prize; 
Whose spoils this paper offers to your eye, 
Fair ev'n in death! this peerless Butterfly." 
   "My sons! (she answer'd) both have done your parts: 
Life happy both, and long promote our arts.
But hear a Mother, when she recommends 
To your fraternal care, our sleeping friends. 
The common Soul, of Heav'n's more frugal make, 
Serves but to keep fools pert, and knaves awake: 
A drowsy Watchman, that just gives a knock, 
And breaks our rest, to tell us what's a clock. 
Yet by some object ev'ry brain is stirr'd; 
The dull may waken to a Humming-bird; 
The most recluse, discreetly open'd find 
Congenial matter in the Cockle-kind; 
The mind, in Metaphysics at a loss, 
May wander in a wilderness of Moss; 
The head that turns at super-lunar things, 
Poiz'd with a tail, may steer on Wilkins' wings. 
   "O! would the Sons of Men once think their Eyes 
And Reason giv'n them but to study Flies? 
See Nature in some partial narrow shape, 
And let the Author of the Whole escape: 
Learn but to trifle; or, who most observe, 
To wonder at their Maker, not to serve."

(Book IV, lines 627-656) 
   In vain, in vain, -- the all-composing Hour 
Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow'r. 
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold 
Of Night Primæval, and of Chaos old! 
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay, 
And all its varying Rain-bows die away. 
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, 
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. 
As one by one, at dread Medea's srain, 
The sick'ning stars fade off th' ethereal plain; 
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest, 
Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest; 
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might, 
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night. 
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled, 
Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head! 
Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before, 
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. 
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, 
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense! 
See Mystery to Mathematics fly! 
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die. 
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires, 
And unawares Morality expires. 
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine; 
Not human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine! 
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd; 
Light dies before thy uncreating word; 
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; 
And Universal Darkness buries All. 

--Alexander Pope 

If Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton are the Big Three of English poetry, then Alexander Pope is a strong contender for fourth place. Not that I was ever able to convince college students of that when I was teaching them. And you may be skeptical, too, if all the Pope you ever read was in a survey course, and that consisted of The Rape of the Lock and maybe some excerpts from An Essay on Criticism and Essay on Man. Brilliant as they are, they don't suggest the full range of Pope's artistry. 

I think one of the chief stumbling blocks to an appreciation of Pope may be the heroic couplet. Pope wrote almost exclusively in this verse form, and if you're not attuned to its subtleties, it may sound to you like a typewriter (if you're old enough to have heard one of those): tappa tappa tappa tappa tappa ding! tappa tappa tappa tappa tappa ding! You have to break yourself of the habit of pouncing on the end rhymes and slow down and listen to the musical effects in the middle of the verse. 

And you have to learn to read footnotes: Pope is intensely allusive, not only to the classical literature of which most of us today are ignorant, but also to historical events and personages of his day. This is especially true in his satiric poems, which also happen to be his greatest ones. The Dunciad is a magnificent assault on all that Pope happened to think was wrong in the arts and sciences of his day: sloppy writing, craven fawning to and flattery of patrons, catering to the lowest common denominator in taste, and in the sciences especially, an emphasis on specialization without regard to the big picture. That's the point of the middle one of the selections reprinted above. 

Like Swift, who satirizes the same thing in Gulliver's Travels, Pope lampooned what he called "virtuosi" -- people who collected butterflies and bred new species of flowers. Pope and Swift's main target was the Royal Society, which they saw (mistakenly for the most part) as a collection of crackpots. The point of the reference to steering "on Wilkins' wings" above, is that John Wilkins, one of the founders of the Royal Society, was fascinated by the possibility of traveling to the moon. We recognize today that specialization is necessary to the advancement of science, and Wilkins may be hailed as a pioneer rather than a lunatic (though in fact he may have been some of the latter) and the Royal Society as a beacon of enlightenment (and the Enlightenment). But Pope feared that scientists would lose sight of the higher aim of understanding God's creation. "The mind, in Metaphysics at a loss, / May wander in a wilderness of Moss" is a reference to specialists in the study of mosses. 


And the mind, lost in the footnotes to Pope, may lose sight of the rich sonorities of his verse, the dazzling skill with which he varies the meter of his iambic pentameter couplets. The great conclusion to The Dunciad, in which Dulness triumphs, is as good as anything in Milton, I think. And here, and in some of his Moral Essays, we see why Pope is valuable: He's a defender of good sense, of reason, of truth. Whenever I read him, I always wish he were around to turn his satire on the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.