POETS Day! From Henley to Plath
He's Long John Silver with a Lost Girl daughter and she's the real live lost girl inspiration behind a million composition notebooks filled with bad angsty high school poetry.
I go on for a bit below so I’ll keep this part short.
College football starts this Week! Whatever files need filing or rivets need riveting, leave them be. They’ll sit til Monday. It’s POETS Day! Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
There’s Auburn to route against Friday night and hated Tennessee against a Syracuse team I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with opinions on playing Saturday morning, both looking across the line as if in a mirror and thinking “They look like idiots in those orange uniforms.”
Then there are proper teams playing.
– Alabama @ Florida State – Saturday 2:30 CT on ABC
– LSU @ Clemson – Saturday 6:30 CT on ABC
– Tons of other less compelling but long awaited games bracketed between Boise State @ South Florida at 4:30 CT on Thursday on ESPN and Utah @ UCLA at 10:00 CT on Saturday.
If you’re reading this on Friday and were unaware, you’ve missed the Thursday slate but there’s plenty left to see if you have gumption. Get pissing off early. There are games need watching.
We made it through the desert. First, a little verse.
***
This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald is my favorite of the genre, but there’s also Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce or Pere Goriot by Balzac if you’re in a Contenental mood. There are plenty, a whole grip, to borrow an elastic phrase a chef friend is fond of, of semi-autobiographical first novels written by young writers with more desire than experience, so they run their hero though naivete-shedding travails and leave him wiser and poised to conquer. It’s been forever since I’ve read any of them so they’ve all gotten mushed together in my mind but at least one of them ends with the author stand-in character in a cemetery shouting a version of “Look out world. Here I come!” That’s the synecdochic scene for me.
My senior year high school English teacher was an extreme – to the point of embarrassment – fan of Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe (which might be the cemetery ending one.) He was also Vice Principle and had been on staff at Birmingham University School (claim to fame: Walker Percy briefly attended but graduated elsewhere though the “briefly” and “graduated elsewhere” parts rarely get mentioned by alumni) when it merged with Brooke Hill (alma mater of TV’s Kate Jackson from Charlie’s Angels) to form the coed high school I attended. I can’t confirm it, but I’m pretty sure my English teacher was the one behind naming the new school Altamont, the name Wolfe used for his fictionalized Asheville, North Carolina in the book.
When we started reading the book, he went on about his love for it. He was very effeminate, a former stage actor in New York, and weighed more than three or four average sized people but had once weighed even more, so in addition to being very large and dramatic, he had flaps of loose skin that once stretched beyond elastic limits; never snapped back to accommodate his slightly less oversized form. He would sit behind his desk in his patterned short-sleeve button down with one or both of his hands conducting to the rhythms of his speech, arm flaps presaging tornadoes weeks later, and proclaim. Preposterous looking, but usually worth hearing. This was how he told us about reading Look Homeward Angel as a boy. He started it after dinner one night and was so taken he stayed up all night reading. It was the first book that affected him. His friends, he said, thought he was an idiot for staying up all night for something as silly as a book and made fun of him on the bus. “Oh, Fluff, I can’t believe you’d do that!” he mimicked them.
Our world stopped. Every jaw in class dropped. Had he just let slip his school nickname? Fluff? We whispered or mouthed the name back and forth. I have no idea what else was said that day.
He was a very good teacher with a had a knack for boiling down complex ideas and as a bonus had schmoozed his way to an in with all the right college admissions departments. He could break down a short story, energize a Shakespeare reading, and get a waitlisting to an acceptance. He probably thought he’d escaped “Fluff.”
Oops.
William Ernest Henley didn’t write an artist announcement to the world. Not directly. His “Invictus” is among the more quoted poems in the English language: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” Though not quite of a piece with the above novels, is often invoked as if it were. Fitzgerald, Joyce, et al. announced their arrival on the scene, an implication that they were sweeping away the past and they themselves were the future. Henley’s isn’t like that.
At twelve, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. At eighteen or nineteen, his leg was amputated due to complications stemming from the disease, and a few years later it was recommended that his other be amputated as well. A second doctor suggested that the leg could be saved, but doing so would be arduous. The gambit was successful, but Henley spent almost three years, from 1873 to 1875, in hospital, as they’d say in Edinburgh. There were, throughout his life, painful treatments to drain abscesses. It sounds awful and demoralizing.
“Invictus” was one his “hospital poems.” It’s not an arrival or even an emergence. It’s a declaration of tempered persistence as he’s been, but still is and will be, tested abominably.
Invictus
(William Ernest Henley 1849-1903)Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced not cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbow’d.Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
I keep seeing the word “jovial” in reference to the man. Descriptions perfunctorily mention deformity but center on his wit, energy, and amiability. He sounds like a brilliant becrutched Falstaff. From Wikipedia:
“Lloyd Osbourne, described Henley as “… a great, glowing, massive-shouldered fellow with a big red beard and a crutch; jovial, astoundingly clever, and with a laugh that rolled like music; he had an unimaginable fire and vitality; he swept one off one’s feet.”
Lloyd Osbourne was the stepson of Henley’s dear friend Robert Louis Stevenson. It was Henley who served as inspiration for Stevenson’s iconic character Long John Silver. Stevenson wrote to Henley, again per Wikipedia:
“I will now make a confession: It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver … the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you.”
William wasn’t the only Henley to inspire an enduring literary character. His daughter Margaret was never in good health and died at age five. By report she was a charming child. It’s implied that she had a speech impediment though it may well be that she just talked like a cute little kid. In either case, she had trouble with the “r” in “friend”, which she took to calling her father’s friend J.M. Barrie. In her case it came out “fwend” and she expanded into childish sing-song to “fwendy-wendy.” Barrie loved the girl, and from his esteem was born Wendy of Peter Pan fame.
Henley remained, as he claimed, “unbow’d,” which leads me to Sylvia Plath.
I read “Invictus” and got stuck on “unbow’d” because I flashed to a poem with the word “bow” from Plath. It was an association that doesn’t bear much examination because it’s as superficial as it sounds. I saw a focal word and that reminded me I’d recently read something that stayed with me using the same word however different the meaning in the work.
Her poem, the particular one with “bow,” struck me because it was so emotionally at odds with all the adjectives usually, fairly or unfairly, assembled to describe Plath’s work. “April Aubade” is celebratory. All her powers of agility are on display. The end of the sonnet reclaims her Plathiness (TM) with a dour note, though those last lines could also be read as playful. In either case, she describes a cherishable respite. Of all her haunting imagery for which she’s rightly praised, I think “A saintly sparrow jargons madrigals / to waken dreamers in the milky dawn,” may be my favorite. “Madrigals” is a pleasant word.
You’ll see “bow” in the second stanza. As I said, don’t look for any more connection. It was a visual cue for my association lobe to find something to do.
April Aubade
(Sylvia Plath 1932-1963)Worship this world of watercolor mood
in glass pagodas hung with veils of green
where diamonds jangle hymns within the blood
and sap ascends the steeple of the vein.A saintly sparrow jargons madrigals
to waken dreamers in the milky dawn,
while tulips bow like a college of cardinals
before that papal paragon, the sun.Christened in a spindrift of snowdrop stars,
where on pink-fluted feet the pidgeons pass
and jonquils sprout like solomon’s metaphors,
my love and I go garlanded with grass.Again we are deluded and infer
that somehow we are younger than we were.
It took me a minute to find. I knew I was looking for a poem with “Aubade” and a month. A little scanning and I found it at the bottom of page 312 of Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems. It’s a good book to have if you’re a Plath fan as any collection is a good book to have if you’re a fan of a poet, but moreso here. A new edition of Ariel as laid out as intended by Plath as found in her notes. This new edition is ascendant right now. The original was edited and arranged by her husband, the popularly maligned Ted Hughes. Plath was brilliant, but as a culture we’ve been at publishing long enough to see that even genius benefits from listening to an editor. I like the Hughes edited sequence better. There are poems he included that the new edition leaves out and altered, or unaltered as it may be, versions of others. The original is hard to fins and more recent writing quotes her from the new. All of the missing poems and originally published versions can be found in Collected. They’re out of sequence, but I copied the table of contents from an older Ariel at my local library so I can read them as once lauded.
Back to “April Aubade,” it sits on the bottom of page 312. Above it is “The Trail of Man.” It’s a bleak view of circumstance, “boot stamping on a human face – for ever” hopelessness; a return to what many expect from Plath. Her man is robbed of adventure and vitality by flattening. She doesn’t set the tone with Sam or Bill, the local milkman who’s always smiling or scowling or leering. It’s an “ordinary milkman.” We are in a predictable world with interchangeable parts, meaning we are doomed to be interchangeable unremarkable parts ourselves.
The man is condemned to life. Her poem’s complaint seems petty in comparison to what prompted Henley to write “Invictus.” I don’t think that’s right. Separate them by purpose first, as they are not the same and should not be compared as such. Hers is a poem about despair. His is a poem about resolve. What they share is a recognition of hardship. The difference seems to be of scale. If you’re of the opinion that to display bravery you must face something fearsome – there’s nothing brave about charging into battle if you have a death wish whereas there is climbing a ladder despite a crippling aversion to heights – the magnitude of the obstacle is secondary. Plath is defeated by her hardships where Henley isn’t. Judge them on that if you will.
To say magnitude matters seems at odds with Henley’s point. He’s specifically saying that it doesn’t; that he will overcome no matter what. Did it get easier or harder for him as time passed? Did he have a high or low tolerance for pain? Those are both circumstance, charges of “punishment on the scroll.”
Plath’s despair comes from other than physical pain. Its magnitude is unknown to us and so its communication makes great matter for poetry, and she’s deft as they come at conveying confusion and hopelessness. She’s a compelling tragedy; a voyeurism lingers in her appeal.
The Trial of Man
(Sylvia Plath 1932-1963)The ordinary milkman brought that dawn
Of destiny, delivered to the door
In square hermetic bottles, while the sun
Ruled decree of doomsday on the floor.The morning paper clocked the headline hour
You drank your coffee like original sin,
And at the jet-plane anger of God’s roar
Got up to let the suave blue policeman in.Impaled upon a stern angelic stare
You were condemned to serve the legal limit
And burn to death within your neon hell.Now, disciplined in the strict ancestral chair,
You sit, solemn-eyed, about to vomit,
The future an electrode in your skull.
At fifty-three, Henley fell from a train car. His injuries, complicated by tuberculosis, resulted in his death. Plath famously committed suicide. It’s macabre that it went vice versa; that one died by circumstance and the other was ultimately master of her fate.
[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]