ever racked with ailments fresh

Michael agrees with Butler. “To choose what I must be is mine.” In other words, he will decide to maintain himself post-corpse by performing correctly “the deeds which we have done in the body.” He suggests obstacles to the easy achievement of those deeds, citing “this feeble frame, | For ever racked with ailments fresh” but in the next stanza he reveals that those problems have been introduced so that they can be argued into smaller importance. “This is not I.” (“I” at some points in the poem is neither the physical body nor the personality – since the personality can be estranged from it – but I think this is the fault of semantics rather than metaphysics.)

Geoffrey Hill, in his Tanner lectures, has another point of view, different but likewise rooted in a Christianised culture: “the nature that is most intimately mine” (which I believe corresponds to Michael's notion of “personality”) is necessarily penetrated and corrupt; it is not so free of its physical existence.

My language is in me and is me; even as I, inescapably, am a minuscule part of the general semantics of the nation; and as the nature of the State has involved itself in the nature that is most intimately mine.

If it is “intimately mine” then the simple solution that Michael proposes in his poem – when you discard the body in death you are discarding everything that isn't you – is being questioned. But it depends. How intimate is Hill's intimately? How intimate do you want it to be? To get rid of that question you could say, “Not as intimate as that.”

If Michael, static in the afterlife, has discovered that he was right, then is he reading Hill's oeuvre -- which has been in a condition of struggle from the first line of the first poem in his first published book -- and muttering, “Geoff, Geoff, what a waste of time”?

as sheep were placed where there ought to be sheep

The evidence that both Michael and Powys present, for the survival of “personality,” is the same evidence, which is intransigence, or else desire, and also both: my personality is “vital” and “loving,” it belongs to me, and therefore it “must last” or else the universe is fundamentally wrong. As if extinction is the moral flaw of existence, or as though death is a burglar who can be told that it is wrong to steal, or as if the afterlife can be bullied or reasoned with, or have its arm twisted.

Michael associates fairness with the existence of a God. Powys doesn't. God exists in the posthumous Powys books but he behaves like another human character with moods and depressions, not like the ineffable Christian god; he is closer to a Greek or Roman god.

The character from Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian believes that the character of the post-death personality will depend on the activity of the body prior to its death.

"For ever! -- we are not -- we cannot be lost for ever," said Butler, looking upward; "death is to us change, not consummation; and the commencement of a new existence, corresponding in character to the deeds which we have done in the body."

Butler doesn't doubt that he knows the nature of the being that will pass judgment on that correspondence. This is the same voice that approves of the Highland Clearances in H.H. Dixon's Field and Fern (1865) by calling them “wholesome and right, as sheep were placed where there ought to be sheep, and men where there ought to be men.” It is the tone of the person who knows how winning is done.

Winning, for Butler and for Dixon, is is accomplished through the rhythmic and symmetrical sense of form that the translator of my Buddenbrooks calls “a triumph of style” when he recognises it in Thomas Mann.

make me new or strange

I was thinking about that last post when I opened An Anthology of Australian Verse (1906, ed. Bertram Stevens), and read until I came to James Lionel Michael's poem Personality (1858), which begins and ends with the same stanza:

A change! no, surely, not a change,
 The change must be before we die;
Death may confer a wider range,
 From pole to pole, from sea to sky,
It cannot make me new or strange
 To mine own Personality!

Ten years later he had a chance to find out whether he was right or not when they discovered him floating in the Clarence River near Grafton. He is responding to a fragment of a line from The Heart of Midlothian, "Death is to us change, not consummation,” which he quotes for a preface. The rest of the poem is an elaboration on, but not a development of, the same theme. “This vital spark — this loving soul, | Must last for ever and for ever.” What struck me was the close overlap between the last four lines of that stanza, the beliefs of Therese Weichbrodt, and the ideas of John Cowper Powys in his posthumous novellas, where the characters have a “wider range” conferred on them, and in which death can't estrange anybody from his or her personality except in unique circumstances, eg, the supernatural destruction of the universe.

It's possible that Tony Buddenbrooks would be a heroic character in a Powys novel, and the quality in her that Powys would valorise – her adherence to her own personality – is the one that Mann describes when he wants to reinforce the idea that she is ignorant.

Her strongly developed family sense was instinctively hostile to conceptions of free will and self-development; it inclined her rather to recognise and accept her own characteristics wholesale, with fatalistic indifference and toleration. She had, unconsciously, the feeling that any trait of hers, no matter of what kind, was family tradition and therefore worthy of respect.

The challenge for her in a Powys book would be to keep that stubborn dumbness and separate herself from her family (cf. Porius, Wolf Solent) – but the heavily moored ignorance – would be respected – would be defended – if it kept her in a condition that the author could describe as “herself” -- because intelligence in a Powys book is not more important than that unique triangulation of the will.

(Note: the struggle of the title character, in Porius, to carry out the extroverted actions that seem necessary because he was born into a position of responsible authority, as well as the long, deep, lonely introversions that he needs or else he will lose "himself.")