An essay on the instability of symbols, along with some reflections on the literary use of violets

WHEN DAPHNE TURNS into a laurel tree in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Apollo continues to love her, first attempting to embrace her new vegetative presence, and then, still rejected, constructing a set of memorial symbols in her honor. However, one senses a certain desperation in the poet's effort to connect what the laurel has come to signify over time with its immediate physical properties. Since the primary impulse behind the Metamorphoses is etiological, Ovid can't account for the acknowledged nexus between laurel and conquest in morphological terms. He gets round the problem, however, with a set of godly fiats. Deity, after all, is never accountable to anything but itself: But even now in this new form Apollo loved her; placing his hand upon the trunk, he felt the heart fluttering beneath the bark. He errtbraced the branches as if human limbs, and pressed his lips upon the wood. But even the wood shrank from his kisses. And the god cried out to this: 'Since thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt at least be my tree. My hair, my lyre, my quiver shall always be entwined with thee, 0 laurel. With thee shall Roman generals wreathe their heads, when shouts of joy shall acclaim their triumph, and long processions climb the Capitol. Thou at Augustus' portals shall stand a trusty guardian, and keep watch over the civic crown of oak leaves which hangs between. And as my head is ever young and my locks never shorn, so shalt thou keep the beauty of thy leaves perpetual.' Paean was done. The laurel waved her new-made branches, and seemed to move her head-like top in full consent

Felix Holt: The Radical and the Gusset of Cryptic Futurity

Most Victorian novels avail themselves of tidying codas in which the author projects the story into a future-turned-present and, counterpointed by wedding bells, maps out as close an approximation to the \u27happily ever after\u27 formula as the constraints of realism will allow. The locus classicus for this procedure occurs at the end of Martin Chuzzlewit: And coming from a garden, Tom, bestrewn with flowers by children\u27s hands, thy sister, little Ruth, as light of foot and heart as in old days, sits down beside thee. From the Present, and the Past, with which she is so tenderly entwined in all thy thoughts, thy strain soars onward to the Future. As it resounds within thee and without, the noble music, rolling round ye both, shuts out the grosser prospect of an earthly parting, and uplifts ye both to Heaven! George Eliot also avails herself of this standard template at the end of Felix Halt: The Radical, its \u27Epilogue\u27 sketching the future course of her characters\u27 lives through present-tense clauses (,As to the town in which Felix Holt now resides\u272), clauses that catapult the reader from 1833 to the date of composition, thirty-three years on. Futurity here becomes largely notional, its proleptic force bled into the narrative present, and this in turn causes the foregoing narrative to recede in time, investing the novel\u27s closure with a paradoxical sense of retrospection

Aspects of imagery, syntax and metrics in the poetry of George Herbert

I intend In this thesis to examine some central features of George Herbert's art - aspects of his imagery syntax and metrics. These topics have been chosen because they encompass large areas of his poetic practice, ramifying as they do into questions of theme, tone and structure. Even a partial. survey of Herbert' s imagery, such as the one I attempt to offer, should enable the reader to judge the range of experience that Herbert brings to bear upon a comparatively circumscribed number of themes, (The "Affliction " poems, for example, are wonderfully diverse, although they have a common thematic centre). A brief examination of the traditions within which Herbert's manipulation of imagery falls should allow one also to judge his resourcefulness, especially in the composites of emblem and symbol he devises on occasion; which in the concluding analyses I attempt to show the structural significance of image patterns in representative poems from The Temple. Thus Chapter I falls into three sections: a brief discussion of emblematic and symbolic traditions together with Herbert 's place in relation to them, a deliberately selective glance over some images (a full examination is far beyond the scope of this thesis), and finally some close analyses of poems in the course of which I try to show the imagery operating as a structural and coordinating device. In Chapter II, I move on to the closely related area of syntax, examining Herbert's formulation of his material, and finding - amongst other things - that there is evidence of "grammatical" imagery where the disposition of a sentence provides a concrete embodiment of the theme. This interrelationship of imagery and syntax (and of imagery and metrics) is a corollory of poetry's organic nature, and in order to stress the mutual collaboration of these features, I have subjected a single poem, "The Flower" to an analysis from three different angles, assuming that each approach will further illuminate the others. All the lyrics would yield riches if treated in this way but my limits of space have naturally precluded so elaborate an undertaking. Even In the analyses of poems that are treated only once, I have been at pains to allow in a glimmering of topics other than that in hand, so as to enlarge the scope of my examination. Although the material in Chapter II is designed to highlight the structural, tonal and thematic effects of syntax in turn, such divisions remain theoretical rather than actual, for they combine almost indivorcibly into a complex whole. Chapter III is patterned like Chapter I in that it moves from a general survey of Herbert's metrics, his rhyme and his stanzaic design, to further close analyses of his metrical procedures in particular lyrics. Both here and in the preceding chapters I have undertaken to look at Herbert's work in close detail, because, as I have already suggested, his is an art of compression, of telescoping a whole range of meanings into the neatest and most compact shape. Given the differences in mode and intention, his poetry often puts one in mind of Jane Austen's fiction - at least in the profundity it achieves within a consciously limited scale and a critical magnifying glass seems to me to be the most apposite aid for such a study as I have undertaken

Commutation Across the Social Divide

This article records how, even in times of social inertia and repression, writers have found ways of redressing the inequalities of the status quo by plot devices or in mental exercise. Taken together, these add up to a motif of sorts--a moral and qualitative commutability between the privileged and the dispossessed, and of their narrative or actual commutation, as when a god disempowers himself to experience human life, or when a ruler sloughs the gown of office and enters the slums of his capital. This motif was nurtured in part by the radicalism lodged in the Christian gospels, even though the church establishment sought to efface it

An Antecedent to 'The Eve of St. Agnes': Bowden, Newman and 'St. Bartholomew's Eve'

Early in November 1818, John Henry Newman and John Bowden published the first canto of a collaborative poem entitled St. Bartholomew's Eve, though the completed work (in two cantos) appeared only in 1821. Since Keats wrote The Eve of St. Agnes between 18 January and 2 February 1819, a 'window of opportunity' for sight of that first canto opens in the two-and-a-half months between its publication and the composition of his own poem, even though we have no external evidence for his having read it. His chief contact with Oxford, Benjamin Bailey, had resigned from the University on 22 April 1818, and was a curate in Carlisle when the NewmanlBowden text appeared. However, it is at least possible that Bailey received a copy from an Oxford contact, and forwarded it to Keats. The cumulative internal evidence for such a transaction is in my opinion plausible. I am not suggesting that the derivative (but accomplished) poetry of St. Bartholomew's Eve made any real impression on Keats, but rather that it seeded his imagination with ideas of a verse romance, and lodged some gritty particles that would issue in the formation of pearls. Faint support for this notion can be found in a letter to Richard Woodhouse written on 18 December 1818 (midway through the 'window' period) which contains a reference to 'meretricious romance verse'. That at least shows the idea of medieval narrative was milling in his mind. And even if Keats did indeed see St. Bartholomew's Eve, I would argue that it figures in The Eve of St. Agnes not in adaptation or allusion, but rather in moments of 'absorption'. Edward Wilson recently made this distinction in an article on literary influence. Having drawn attention to the fact that both Barbara Pym and Philip Larkin employ the unusual epithet 'crouching' to describe a telephone, he makes it clear that the debt of the poet to the novelist was probably subliminal: However, there is no conscious recollection in the poem (or, as we have seen in the Pym-Larkin correspondence) of the source of the image, such as is found, say in Larkin's 'Sad Steps' where the title recalls with deliberate irony 'With how sad steps, 0 Moone, thou climb'st the skies' (the opening line of sonnet 31 in Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella). The image of the crouching telephone has been not so much remembered as absorbed. I shall accordingly focus this article on a comparable set of 'absorptions' (verbal or thematic echoes distinctive enough to suggest indebtedness, but falling short of deliberate invocations or incorporations). There are several moments in St. Bartholomew's Eve which, because they can be set against modified analogues in The Eve of St. Agnes, point to the likelihood - if not to the certainty - that Keats might have read its first canto

Marvell's 'The Garden' and the 'Ars Moriendi'

In this reading of 'The Garden' I shall attempt to show that the poem, universally acknowledged to be a hymn to the contemplative life, is also in itself a contemplative exercise. I shall suggest furthermore that its contemplation centres on death, a death which the lyricism of the verse denatures into something beguiling and restful. To view the poem from this angle is to view it as a version of the ars moriendi, the meditation on death which, after evolving for centuries, had acquired a distinct (if loose) generic form by the start of the seventeenth. In his introduction to an anthology of Middle English Religious Prose, N.F. Blake has remarked that the 'title Ars Moriendi is applied to works of several different types: the earlier examples are designed to encourage people to lead better lives; the later ones are more in the nature of battles between an angel and the devil for the soul of a dying man; and others, generally from the fifteenth century, are collections of prayers for the dying'. One such 'early example' is The Art of Dieing which Blake has extracted from The Book ofVices and Virtues and included in his collection. I shall take this as my point of reference in discussing the tradition, since it represents the form most relevant to my purpose. (While 'The Garden' clearly offers an invitation to 'a better life', it is quite as clearly neither a psychomachia nor a viaticum.