both of them know neither the future nor the ending

The specific feature of Surrealistic writing, whether it be autobiographical or automatic, is, in fact, less the lack of knowledge of its final destination as such, than the identical position into which this lack places both the reader and the author in the face of a text whose unfolding neither the one nor the other controls, and about which both of them know neither the future nor the ending.

(Denis Hollner, tr Rosalind Krauss, Surrealistic Precipitates: Shadows Don't Cast Shadows, quoted by Krauss in Robert Rauschenberg: a Retrospective (1997))

A net is a large thing, past thy fadoming, if thou cast it from three, but if thou draw it to thee it will lie upon thy arm.

(John Donne, Sermon 14 (1620s))

falling of waters

There are senses in all three of them, the touching in Lawrence, the seeing for Wordsworth and the listening for the character in Jahn, Geoffrey Hill being closest to Lawrence, early Hill most directly: “There is no bloodless myth will hold,” from Genesis, and those lines about things being struck, faced, and walked on; then going on through more forces until the revealment of forces becomes one of the oeuvre's purposes. “The mountain stamped its foot | Shaking, as from a trance. And I was shut | With wads of sound into a sudden quiet” (God's Little Mountain (1959)). The biggest force has always been the one that is trying to shut him up. It appears in different disguises. “Recap on words like compassion that I | never chanced in your living presence” (In Memorium: Gillian Rose (2007)).

John Donne in his tenth sermon believes that prophets should always speak with strength, which means against some opposition. “[T]hunder, and wind, and tempests, and chariots, and roaring of Lyons, and falling of waters are the ordinary emblems of his [ie, God's] messages, and his messengers, in the Scriptures.”

Dorothy Wordsworth, though, just states everything that is most immediate: that's how she seems to proceed, and very gentle, but I never forget her glittering sheep, which I mention often.

“Do I need to touch the world if I want to experience it at the swooning level, or do I look at it instead, or hear it?” you ask, and there you go; you have various replies. The purpose or goal is that greater privacy which comes through the flesh: other people might make up thoughts for you but no one else can look for you, and no one else is swooning in the garden except Mrs Morel. Lawrence is all about a collaboration between flesh and non-flesh. Still, it looks as if it is the frustration with people outside himself that helps him to write, especially later. The Plumed Serpent is a frustrated book. Not even the violence at the end seems cathartic for him. In Sons and Lovers it is enough to have Mrs Morel putting her hand in a flower. In Serpent he wants cults, drums, and costumes, and I laughed. An artist needs to find their scale, said Richard Tuttle as he was being interviewed by Ross Simonini recently. “One can distinguish between scale and size. Usually, we are happy with the issue of size—if it's small, it's small; if it's big, it's big. But scale is a question of the individual. Each person, everyone ever born, has a unique scale. They have it like a unique fingerprint. You can decide to find your scale. The day you find it is a day you remember. It changes your life. Your parents may determine your size, but you determine your scale.” In the Serpent I think I see Lawrence mislaying whatever it is that Tuttle means by the word scale. Lawrence is scaled to a lily.

many brave soules losd

I search for old examples of the word "song" together with "poetry," in order to prove my own point to myself or to somebody else (then wondering why and who but pausing too briefly over it and pushed along by my own momentum, which has to be partly anxiousness stimulated by the sight of a thin old man pulling a Subway wrapper out of a bin – there are too many – like the children of Jude the Obscure, “The children were past saving, for though their bodies were still barely cold it was conjectured that they had been hanging more than an hour“ -- there are so many "past savings" here, mad, mad, lying on shirts, rocking on top of electrical boxes -- the box was under a mesquite tree -- in a desert at a hundred and ten nobody is mad enough to sit in the sun; you would have to be sane and stubborn --) -- that the conflation of poets with singers used to be normal and now it isn't.

“Sing, Heav'nly Muse,” says Milton in 1664, “I thence | invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song.” He abducts, with the word “Heav'nly,” the pagan Muse from Homer and upgrades it to a new technology of worship, a habit that Alexander Pope continued after him in 1715 when he translated the opening lines of the Iliad: “Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!”

Milton could read his Homer in Greek but if he had looked at a translation then it would probably have been Chapman (c. 1559 - 1634), who starts his own Iliad with the more commanding word “resound.”

Achilles’ bane full wrath resound, O Goddesse, that imposd
Infinite sorrowes on the Greekes, and many brave soules losd
From breasts Heroique—sent them farre, to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their lims to dogs and vultures gave.

His Muse, in the opening lines of the Odyssey, will not sing, she will inform. “The man, O Muse, inform.” "Inform" is sort of accurate according to the Rev. Lovelace Bigge-Wither, author of A Nearly Literal Translation of Homer's Odyssey Into Accentuated Dramatic Verse (1869), who chooses “tell.” “Tell me, oh Muse.”

The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;
That wandered wondrous far, when he the town
Of sacred Troy had sack'd and shivered down

Alliteration, I think as I look at those lines, is the sign of oral transmission. In prose it is like a pawprint from an animal that has gone past. Chapman's Muse doesn't sing but his poet sings. “To hear a poet sing the sad retreat | The Greeks perform'd from Troy.” Why does his “sack'd and shivered” town sound familiar? The anonymous Pearl Poet used the same seesaw before him in Gawain and the Green Knight: “troye […] brittened and brent.”

(Adrian West recently blogged about the artistic excitement of women being hurt. Troy, too, beaten, bashed, always popular.)

In 1961 Robert Fitzgerald brought the opening of the Odyssey closer to Milton -- “Sing in me, Muse” -- an observation that, if you take it on its own, with no other examples around to modify the idea, contradicts the point I was trying to make earlier; and the substitution of the word “sing” for “make poetry” has not been falling out of use for at least the past hundred years, because, look, it was being used in 1961 while Bigge-Wither in 1869 completely ignored it. John Donne, in The Triple Fool (1633), distinguishes between poems made silently and poems sung aloud.


    I am two fools, I know,
    For loving, and for saying so
        In whining poetry ;
But where's that wise man, that would not be I,
        If she would not deny ?
Then as th' earth's inward narrow crooked lanes
    Do purge sea water's fretful salt away,
I thought, if I could draw my pains
    Through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay.
Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
For he tames it, that fetters it in verse.

    But when I have done so,
    Some man, his art and voice to show,
        Doth set and sing my pain ;
And, by delighting many, frees again
        Grief, which verse did restrain.
To love and grief tribute of verse belongs,
    But not of such as pleases when 'tis read.
Both are increasèd by such songs,
    For both their triumphs so are published,
And I, which was two fools, do so grow three.
Who are a little wise, the best fools be.

earth denied

But Doris, fascinated by death, is not alone, Catherine Martin is not alone; the idea of death recurs in the colonial-era writers I've been reading, death is an atmosphere around them, especially the poets, who often kill their characters in the narrative poems --

The bell-bird called to its tardy lover,
The grebe clouds all to the west had sped,
But the river of death had a soul crossed over,
The man with the swag on the bank was dead.


(from The Lonely Crossing by Louisa Lawson -- I suspect that the writer went through the effort of killing this man just for the pleasure of writing about the bell-bird and the grebe cloud and the rhyme of "sped" and "dead" -- the irrefutable neatness of that tump-ta-tump -- and I would suggest, too, that the potential creation of that irrefutability, which is a small mimickry of immortality -- a species of immobility so strongly heavy that it puts the brakes on time itself -- might have been a large part of the poem's demand on the poet's imagination, and that any kind of pity for the possible internal physical or mental strife of the fictional swaggie played no role, though he is "A silent man, on the road alone" )

-- or the narrator tells themselves that life is done but heaven will be happy (Happy Days by Mary Hannay Foott: "And, -- in horizons hidden yet,-- | There shall be happy days") -- there are poems of suicide-longing long before them: "To see God only, I goe out of sight ; |And to scape stormy days, I chuse | An Everlasting night" (Donne, A Hymn to Christ); "O for that Night ! where I in Him | Might live invisible and dim!" (Henry Vaughan, The Night) -- the ancestors of Doris.

Then Caroline Leakey (1827-1881), author of Lyra Australis, or Attempts to Sing in a Strange Land, a book of poems in which almost every page mentions death or else God, who in Leakey's formulation is more or less the same thing by implication because she believes you have to die to seriously enjoy Him, which you will want to do since life is miserable after you have finished childhood (A Young Mother to her Infant: "But, oh! sweet babe, a time is there, | A time of joy for thee, | Ere yet the withering touch of Care | Hath chilled thy young heart's glee;" other poems about careworn adults, "unconscious children in their play," and

The subtle toil,
And shameful soil
Of sorrow, sin, and strife
Cannot out blot
The purer lot
With which it started into life;
And not wholly is destroyed,
But with baser dross alloyed


from To the Evening Star).

Death is an aim, not an obstacle; it cures life.

"What earth denied, -- a father's tear-sought love, --
She now has found in perfectness above:"

from Dora

In 1847 Caroline Leakey boarded a ship for Tasmania where her sister had preceded her, in 1853 she returned to England and the poems she had written for her own satisfaction in the southern hemisphere were published, first in London, then the following year in Hobart, which in those days was Hobart Town but the end part of the name was declared redundant like everything eventually, horses, hand-knitted socks, night soil men, the word "Town" too, and maybe other parts of other words, no set of letters sacrosanct, no phrase utterly safe, a century of transformation for the area, convicts then no convicts, the solid stone roads they built remaining for the time being yet surely not forever, though the one near the Prosser River in Orford (named for Horace Walpole, who was the Third Earl of Orford) on the east coast is "in a remarkably well preserved state. Very easy to find," providing "a delightful and authentic historical walk from Orford along the northern riverbank ... and takes you to the ruins of the Paradise Probation Station."

It was her friend Francis Nixon, the first Bishop of Tasmania, who told her to approach a publisher. These are good, he must have said, reading about the death of a woman named Mabel. "The winds were bleak -- they smote her, and she dropp'd."

The Bishop's mansion lasted less long than the convict road, it's gone; the Quakers built a school there.

so much refin'd

The agony of thinking that you would like to be one with everyone and the difficulty when you discover you can't become that: this was a quality of David Foster Wallace said one commentator I read a few weeks or months ago, and this attitude was juvenile in him, the commentator added, if I remember rightly, but I never bookmarked the article and articles about David Foster Wallace proliferate like stars or freckles. If you have moved into a state of separation through the medium of shame like the people in the William Matthews poem then unification is possible and even desirable since you could reach it by eradicating that shame. Shame is in the action of hiding or wanting to hide; without that hiding impulse there is no shame and by describing the motivation he classified the shame; it is the shame of certain people who understand the words "pink slip" in one way and not another way; in that other way they would not understand them without further explanation, and so the work of comprehension can take different paths even when it starts from the same place, in this case, "pink slip," two words, but what small items are misunderstandings made of, as in comedies of manners and Victorian tragedy novels, which are in this sense identical.

... None here thinks a pink slip
("You're fired," with boilerplate apologies)
is underwear.

So the two phenomena are connected and intimately indicate one another, or have done so since 1998 at least, when his posthumous book was published and the poem inside.

Love can eliminate the alienated separations between people, hints John Donne, "we shall | Be one, and one another's all" (Love's Infiniteness),

But we by a love so much refin'd,
   That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.


Our two souls therefore, which are one ...


(A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning)

So the poems chat, Matthews' explains a problem, shame, separation, and Donne's work proposes a solution, unity, love, romantic love, suggesting that if the men in Matthews' bar could all manage to fall in romantic love with one another then their situation would be cured, they might lose their habit of speaking Demotic, the words "pink slip" would open for them like a blossom: one man might see himself sliding on strawberry gelati, another man might salute his wife's unmentionables.

But that's too simple, argues Matthews. Listen to you, Mr Donne, there's a problem you say, we apply a solution, romantic love, boom, the problem is fixed, no, listen, it wouldn't work, not with the people in my After All poems, whose lives are muted and complicated, something like Raymond Carver people: life or the situation has gone too far, and who knows how to get back -- not me or them. Your way is the Aelian way of dealing with things, and he, the Ancient Roman, would say that there is a natural method that could be used, he would make me this proposal as if we're all a stork in De Natura Animalium having troubles with a bat. Pick this leaf at midnight, he would say: find the right herb at the bottom of a lake, administer it to the source of your problem, and the bat will disappear. Romantic love is not a herb, announces Donne, and there is more to it than that. Not material but spirit. Telepathy too I suppose, says Matthews, like that couple in Voss, having communication over distances because they're in love, no, I still don't swallow it. I haven't read Voss, says Donne, but I know that the narrator in The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson likes to communicate telepathically with his beloved across a landscape full of monsters. Really, says Matthews, but that's the second time in two weeks this blog has connected Hodgson with Patrick White, seeing as Hodgson was an inspiration to Lovecraft and there was that post about Riders in the Chariot and the Lovecraft goat, which I admit I only got halfway through. I think they must be almost identical then, says Donne, this White person and this Hodgson. I look forward to the monsters in Voss.

Writing "herb" I realise that Foster Wallace, being American, might have pronounced that word urb, like Uriah Heep, and I think of the numbers of people on this continent turning Cockney when they meet those four letters.

So that's Charles Dickens who's been brought in, and Aelian, who else, David Foster Wallace, the poet William Matthews, and John Donne. I could save myself the trouble of thinking out another post just by writing, now, "What other names? Who isn't here yet? I'll tackle that in a few days," and then spend my time writing five hundred names: there's my next post: done. Robert Burton sticks his head in. All you need to do is quote something, he says. Something rude in Latin.