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Comments on Poems 5: "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day"

'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day'

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

   With witness I speak this. But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

To dearest him that lives alas! away.

   I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

   Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

I have wondered how to wake from this poem many times in my life, and so my thoughts are abundant.

I’m caught first by the contrast between “wake” and “feel.” The term “wake” is related to “watch” and carries connotations of sight and seeing. What’s more, darkness is perceived by the eyes, and one would never say, “it feels dark tonight.” Instead, we speak of darkness as a state of being that occludes sight—“it is dark.”

But there is a felt aspect to darkness. There is a sense of the oppressive weight of it. Darkness eliminates the distances that sight illuminates, which in turn points perception inward. There is a presence to darkness—a presence that is somehow also an absence. It interests me that Hopkins names this aspect the fell of dark. What could a fell be?

A brief jaunt through the OED has yields a number of different possibilities, the most obviously appropriate being the final:

-          Skin, or a membrane that covers an organ of the body

o   I wake and feel the skin of dark not day—this meaning would extend the visceral quality of the poem

-          A hill or mountain

o   Darkness is weighty and vast

-          An elevated stretch of uncultivated land

o   And wild

-          A marsh or a fen

o   And mysterious

-          A blow capable of knocking a person down

o   The broken expectation of morning’s light hits like a fist

-          The last line of weft at any given time when weaving on a loom

o   This is my favorite possibility. Using this definition evokes for me the long weave of what came before this moment—the hours, the black hours

-          Gall, bitterness, animosity, rancor

o   Darkness personified as bitter enemy holding feelings of animosity for the speaker

The word fell encompasses a variety of possible meanings. In this, it matches the felt ambiguity of the dark and evokes a sense similar to the confusion of waking to the expectation of day and meeting dark instead.

I’m also interested in the prosody of the first sentence. I wake and feel the fell of dark is perfectly iambic, even sing-songily so. It builds an expectation of iambic pentameter that is broken emphatically by the spondee, “not day.” The percussive triple-beat of “dark not day” belong so closely together rhythmically that the comma between “dark” and “not” violates their unity with a visual separation. This all works to emphasize the contrast between what was expected upon waking (and our own lexical expectation of sight upon waking) with the reality of a felt darkness.

The next line utterly violates any iambic expectations we may cling to as the speaker laments to his heart, jumping foot by foot between meters. An iamb (What hours) followed by a trochee (O what) followed by a spondee (black hours), and then concluded by a cretic (we have spent).

In these two lines, we learn something critical about our speaker—that there is a split between himself and his heart. The eyes of his heart saw sights in the night, and the legs of his heart walked countless ways. Through it all, he must have been nothing more through those black hours than a detached observer: with witness I speak this. He witnessed his heart seeing and wending, but from a distance.

And then a prospective lament: the heart must continue its bitter path in yet longer light’s delay. In yet a longer delay of light, or in the delay of yet longer light? This ambiguity prefigures the amendment of the subsequent line and affords reference both to the time before the dawn of morning and before the dawn of some far off salvation.

The amendment puzzles me. But where I say hours, I mean years, mean life. To this point, I see in my mind’s eye a figure not unlike that depicted on the Nine of Swords, woken abruptly in the night by piercing thoughts. But here Hopkins offers us a tempting way out of the picture—I’m not actually here in my bed in the middle of the night—he tells us—I’m speaking metaphorically about life itself. I find this interpretation too simple—too easy—and too similar to the way sadness works upon the mind to really constitute the interpretative key to this poem.

I turn, instead, outside the poem to Emily Dickinson for a key:

Pain has an element of blank.

It cannot recollect when it began

Or if there were a time when it was not.

It has no future but itself.

Its infinite realms contain its past,

Enlightened to perceive new periods of pain.

I take the universalizing amendment of Hopkins’  line about hours, years, and life to be a performance of the blank of pain. It is the tendency of the mind to project its disposition onto all of time. Psychologists recognize this as the “present bias”—a shortcoming in our ability to remember different mental states or imagine to different mental states in the future. When one feels sad, one can easily begin to feel as though sadness was all they had ever known and begin to believe that it’s all they’ll ever know—that black hours are in fact years, in fact life.

I do not imagine this line—but where I say hours I mean years, mean life—to be the poet at his desk with a pen writing to the reader of how to interpret the poem. Instead, I imagine it to be the man of the Nine of Swords, upright in bed, noticing acutely his own incapacity to imagine a day where his pain was not, realizing that his lament has no future but itself (a realization that we might also call the fell of dark).

In the next line, the speaker goes beyond Emily’s blank and turns his sadness into a religion. His lament is not merely his own—it is the total reaction to life that all honest people must share, “cries countless.”

The second stanza continues the religious turn, and it is thick with biblical symbols in a way the first stanza is not. Our dark prophet has awoken from his bed in the night, and now he extemporizes a dense sermon on the fall of mankind and original sin.  

“Gall” occurs throughout the bible, but most particularly in Jeremiah, where the speaker repeatedly says that God gives the people “the water of gall to drink.” It symbolizes bitterness, and it is the bitter bile that our own bodies produce. Heartburn is an interesting contrast to gall, because it doesn’t occur in the bible, and it’s an opposite etymological formation. Gall is literally bile and symbolically bitterness; as far as I can tell, heartburn first meant anger and bitterness, and then later came to refer to the painful sensation of stomach acid lurching into the throat. And so the speaker declares identity with both ends of a metaphorical loop: bitter bile, bitter heart.

But what is God’s most deep decree? My guess is that it’s the first commandment given to Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat, for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die, and then later after they ate, cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life…in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground…

But what did the fruit of the tree of knowledge taste like when they ate it? My taste was me is so strange grammatically because it’s preceded by the subjunctive mood. God’s most deep decree would have me taste bitterness, my taste was me. Was me. A completed action. God’s most deep decree presages future tastes, but the fruit of the tree has already been tasted: the fruit of the tree is me and is therefore also gall and is therefore also heartburn. I taste the fruit and sense that my bones, my flesh, my blood—they are brimming with the curse that Eve brought onto the human race by abrogating God’s most deep decree. The fruit she digested lives on in my bile.

 But the very words “blood” and “flesh” hold intimations of redemption in the figure of Christ—a figure notably absent from the poem. Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. What a twist! This line contains within it the tension between the traditional Jewish symbolism of yeast as sin and Jesus’ shortest parable: To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God? It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.”

Although this redemptive potential exists in the line, it remains overwhelmingly sour. This is a poem that still awaits its Messiah, and so the selfyeast of spirit still reads as ruin. Indeed, the lost are like this: leavened but alone. Our speaker holds tight to some still-existing hope, for though he is separate from his heart, he is also apart from the lost. He sweats like them, but they are somehow worse.

I like to think that the speaker, upon finishing this stanza of thought, remains upright in his bed. He has merely given himself away to a waking nightmare. He sits, eyes wide, staring, ruminating on our fallen state, sweating the cold sweat of despair. How can he awake from this poem? He woke once to the fell of dark—to the blank of pain—he tastes the bitter bile of his own body—but how can he wake from the deeper sleep of the blank of these infinite realms?

Comments on Poems 4: "A Word Made Flesh"

From Emily Dickinson:

A Word made Flesh is seldom

And tremblingly partook

Nor then perhaps reported

But have I not mistook

Each one of us has tasted

With ecstasies of stealth

The very food debated

To our specific strength —

A Word that breathes distinctly

Has not the power to die

Cohesive as the Spirit

It may expire if He —

“Made Flesh and dwelt among us”

Could condescension be

Like this consent of Language

This loved Philology.

In this poem, we receive the Gospel According to Emily. As Matthew and Luke’s gospels are said to be derivative of Mark’s, so Emily’s is derivative of John’s, whose gospel starts,

In the beginning there was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. […] And the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us. […]

In the remainder of John’s gospel, a few additional lines stand out as pertaining to this poem:

John 3:6—That which is born of flesh is flesh; and that which is born of Spirit is spirit.

John 4:24—God is a Spirit.

John 6:4—Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life…

***

The more I recite this poem to myself, the more it feels like an internal dialogue wherein each line extends, responds to, or turns the line previous, with an air that is unplanned and spontaneous. It’s as if Dickinson is in her study reading the gospel of John, comes across the statement, “And the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us,” and then looks up thoughtfully and speaks aloud—an accidental monologue wherein she reforms John’s notions in her own image.

Already in her first two words, she has transcended the gospel of John. For John, the Word made flesh had been from the beginning, had been with God, and even was God. But Emily’s is only a Word made flesh—one of an implied multiplicity. And what are the parts of this multiple? For John, logos signifies something beyond symbols—Word is his figuration of the Divine— a metaphor. The switch of article from the to a shifts the referent from something outside of language to the parts of language, so I can only assume the dictionary to be her multiple. Her new article exchanges the metaphorical “Word” for literal words.

“The Word made Flesh” is John’s figuration of God’s condescension—the enfleshment of a Divine Principle in the person of Jesus Christ. By shifting one element of that metaphor, “Word,” towards the literal, Emily constructs an entirely new metaphor. How can parts of speech be made flesh? I take it to symbolize that moment when a morsel of speech succeeds in meaning-making—the moment when a word’s contents seem tangible to the mind.

And this, says Emily, is seldom. Of course, in the second line it is discovered (surprisingly) that “seldom” refers to “partook” and not to the “Word made Flesh,” but the first line on its own is too arresting not to take it as a full, complete thought in its own right before reshaping its meaning in the second line. It is so arresting that upon each internal recitation, I take it as aphorism.

 (And this is what I mean by the spontaneous, turning, unplanned feeling of the poem. This poem, more I think than any other I’ve sat with, transcends itself over and again by turning the thread of thought with each line.) (One more side-note on taking the first line as an aphorism: “seldom” is both adverb and adjective, enhancing the initial ambiguity of what it modifies. Were it instead “seldomly,” the entire cadence of the first stanza would differ, and this to the detriment of a poem so beautiful for ambiguity)

So what could “A Word made Flesh is seldom” mean as aphorism? There is a great irony in this first line that I find difficult to express. Christianity maintains that the Word was only made flesh once. Nothing is more seldom than once, and so Orthodoxy might turn its head at this line in surprise and ask, “well, what were you expecting?” Although the article shift distinguishes Emily’s “Word” irrevocably from John’s, the starkly religious context can only indicate that she is also saying something about religion in this aphorism. And what she seems to be saying contextually is the apparent opposite of what she is actually saying. If we take “Word made Flesh” (articles unconsidered) to represent some sort of Divine manifestation, then Emily troubles Orthodoxy by assuming most would find such revelation to be more commonplace than it is and then responding to this unvoiced assumption by saying not that it is actually more rare than supposed. Her aphorism responds to a question Christianity cannot ask.

Now let us reconsider the article. If I’m correct that she’s speaking metaphorically of the ability of words to convey meaning, then her aphorism is saying that words seldom work—the sense (as indicated by her allusion) being not for pragmatic, day-to-day tasks, but for the transcendent. And so her Orthodoxy-troubling aphorism troubles Orthodoxy yet again by maintaining that the sublime resists words: that which is meant to be signified by John’s “Word” itself resists signifiers.

And then, as though this were not puzzle enough, the sentence extends into the second line that reveals the true verb of the sentence—not “is” but “partook.” A Word made Flesh is partook: this is the skeleton of the first clause we are given, stripped of modifiers. Notably, she writes it in the passive voice. Who is partaking? Is it her? Is it someone else? Is it a crowd of people? Is it all people? “Partake” holds communal connotations. To partake is to take your part in a collective experience. It also evokes communion—of which John’s Jesus says, “whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life…”

And so Emily revises her statement about language. The aphorism is undone (and is, grammatically, a part of its own undoing). It’s not that words seldom touch transcendence, but that we seldom partake—and tremblingly when we do. (I love the constriction of the mouth in the repetitive “leeenglee”—a vocal reverence that evokes, to me, the constricted repetitions of ritual). It’s as though Words ready and willing to be made Flesh surround us on all sides, but we seldom think to take our part in them. If the first line already transcended John, in the second, we have transcended that transcendence and entered a new realm entirely.

But what can we say of this new place the poem has taken us? As if the first two lines had been some negation (they weren’t), Emily begins her third line with a mystifying “nor.” The following “then” indicates that the trembling part we have taken in a Word made Flesh has constituted such an event that whatever comes next is separate. And now a “perhaps,” which I sense modifies “nor,” making that befuddling negation befuddle us further by the speaker’s uncertainty. I think it best to extend the grammar skeleton thus: A Word made Flesh is partook then reported. So what is it that we can say of this new place the poem has taken us? We would like to report it, but we are befuddled by strange and tentative negations that stand in our way.

And this is, once more, a clever attack on conventional Christianity, whose Christ commands his disciples to go into all the world and report what has happened. “The Word made Flesh was partook then reported” could be a brief, slightly poetic, and entirely accurate account of the disciples of Jesus in the gospel of John.

But maybe we’re missing something. Emily herself wonders as much in the last line of the first stanza. Have I not mistook? The parallel takings in “partook” and “mistook” amplify the tension of her double-take. Even when we feel to have tremblingly partaken in the communication of something sublime, how do we know we have not mistaken, instead? By this point in the poem, so many possible meanings have floated through the mind that I cannot tell to which her question points. Or perhaps she does not question the potential meanings at all, but the entire project. Have I not mistook in trying to compose a poem about words becoming flesh? Have I not mistook in trying to use words to get at my meaning? Like the aphorism of the first line, this question arrests. And as the second line of the first stanza turns in a surprising direction that clarifies the direction of her thought, so the next line clarifies her question.

...

I’m very interested in the relationship and contrast between “condescension” and “consent.” She uses “consent of language” as a way to reframe the notion of “condescension.” In a way, these two words are synonyms. But in another way, they are antonyms. Importantly, both carry connotations with right, rank, power, and kingship (thus the religious use to refer to the descent of the “king of kings” into mortality).

Both words mean “to yield,” but it’s the directionality that differs. “Condescension” generally implies voluntarily waiving a superior position—to yield one’s rights of status. “Consent,” meanwhile, generally implies yielding when one has power to oppose; hence the phrase, “consent of the governed.” The directionality of “condescension” is from high status to low, of “consent,” from low status to high.

The implication of the statement “Could condescension be this like consent of language?” would be that language is both above us and beneath us. We yield to it; it yields to us. And this parallelism is itself paralleled in the final line which renames “this consent of language” as “this loved philology.” “Loved,” a quotidian word (and missing a definition of the “lover,” who I imagine as all of us), carries the directionality of “consent,” while “philo” carries the weight of Greek, implying love with the directionality of “condescension.” Could “philo” here indicate the love that language has for us? Understanding “Logos” as “the Word,” could “philology” be a stand in for the love of God?

And not just any “consent of language” but this consent. Where does the demonstrative point? Most immediately to the biblical passage.. But the quote is borrowed to complete the conditional “if” statement of the previous four lines, which is itself an extension of the simile “Cohesive as the spirit…” This simile only reframes her (aphoristic) comment, “A word that breathes distinctly/ Has not the power to die.” And this aphorism seems to follow from the logic of the eight lines that precede it, which are all the consequences of her own first thought, “A Word made Flesh is seldom.”

Could condescension be that language comes down to us from the past and yet consents to our creative (mis)uses of it? Could condescension be that language allows for our partaking yet consents to our mistaking, as well?

Comments on Poems 3: "I wandered lonely as a cloud"

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud 

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

I was very interested in this poem from the outset because John Stuart Mill credited Wordsworth's poetry for almost instantly catalyzing his recovery from an intense depression upon reading another of Wordsworth’s poems, “My heart leaps up.” For some time after his episode of melancholy, Mill said that he understood his calling in life as being the persuasion of those of an intellectual disposition that poetry has merit. In an essay on poetry, Mill said that Wordsworth was a writer who came to poetry himself from an intellectual disposition (as opposed to Coleridge, whom Mill described as more “poetical” by nature, and so more difficult for the intellect to grasp). Back when I was reading Mill, I'd never ventured into Wordsworth's poetry, so this was an exciting opportunity to me.

And what figures the disembodiment and loneliness made possible by intellect better than a cloud? The ruminating thinker floats above, over, on top of all that rambles through the mind, disconnected from the world of perception, alienated from subjective experience—lonely. But Wordsworth—almost intimating Mill’s satori—reports that a transformation can occur “all at once” upon perceiving something beautiful. Whereas the cloud is figured as all one (i.e., alone), the daffodils are not only a “crowd” and a “host,” but they’re also situated in a broader company “beside” and “beneath” other features of the landscape. And in a relationship perhaps more poetical than intellectual, the “golden” color of the daffodils seems to me the very antithesis of loneliness. What I love most about this first stanza is how the daffodils’ golden influence is so profound that it alters the very meter of the poem in the final two lines of the first stanza, when the words themselves begin to flutter and dance in a sudden turn from iambic to dactylic feet.

The emergence of the stars in the second stanza has puzzled me. Yes, stars do seem continuous, but to me, at least, they continue in a very different way than daffodils along a bay. The stars don’t merely continue in a line—they also continue across time with such stability as to provide orientation across many dimensions of human life (from sailing to astrology). Daffodils may dance with glee, but they’re seasonal ephemera, not continuous anchors. The only way I can redeem this simile is to judge it a prefiguration of the way daffodils serve to orient the mind of the poet in the final stanza, though it feels a stretch.

I love the third stanza. Again, we see the daffodils joined by other forces, emphasizing their togetherness with all that surrounds them. The enjambment in the first two lines strikes me as particularly important, given that it’s the only instance of enjambment in the poem. For me, it serves to emphasize the other “they”—the daffodils—and the verb at the start of the second line—“out-did.” My favorite thing about this stanza is the meta-commentary on what it means to be a poet. A poet can’t help but be affected by his company. A poet lets features of the world enter him and change his mood, thus overcoming cloudy loneliness. He builds up wealth for himself by implanting images within his mind that he can later use to repicture the world.

The final stanza was so relatable to me. Losing myself to spirals of thought or catching myself staring off vacantly have been features of my most poignant episodes of melancholy, and I love imagining Wordsworth caught away in such an episode when suddenly the flash of daffodils in his inward eye returns his heart to dancing. I imagine this precise experience also characterizes the effect of Wordsworth’s poetry on Mill after his melancholy. Much can also be said about the “bliss of solitude” and the way it contrasts with the loneliness of the first stanza. What comes to me now is the way this last stanza juxtaposes two varieties of inwardness—that of vacant pensiveness opposed to inward image-making—imagination. Loneliness, pensiveness, and vacancy all cloud our sight—but the inward eye sees what is not there now, blissfully.

Imaginative practices, I take Wordsworth as saying, are what make us truly wealthy. I completely agree, and I feel wealthier for having absorbed this poem.