100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 3
The writing calms down in the final stanza, the poem’s second sentence, woven across six lines. There’s calculated force in pairing “trod” and “God,” “wept” and “slept”; there’s finality in the closing couplet’s rhyme of “lie” and “sky.” The agitation gives way to a language that is totally transparent, un-antagonized. The desire for relief and repose from the inevitable pain and rejection of being in a social world becomes palpable. In the end, Clare’s speaker longs for some lost Eden-like garden where he can recapture the innocence of childhood, a place where he can rest, alone with God, under “the vaulted sky,” a cathedral-shaped heaven. He longs for an almost womblike space, free from the taint of the human, a world outside of time.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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In Memoriam, VII
(c. 1848)
In the introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (1936), the poet W. B. Yeats declares that “Victorianism has been defeated.” Yeats uses Tennyson’s In Memoriam to illustrate the shortcomings of that era’s poetry, citing the critical response of the French poet Paul Verlaine: “The revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against irrelevant descriptions of nature, the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam—‘When he should have been broken-hearted,’ says Verlaine, ‘he had many reminiscences.’”
I don’t much care for the pat sentimentalism that creeps in toward the end of In Memoriam, which is part of what makes it a representative Victorian poem, but I disagree with Verlaine’s characterization because I believe that Tennyson’s elegy for his friend Arthur Hallam is profoundly heartfelt. It is not all “reminiscences”; much of it expresses genuine grief. Hallam died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1833, and Tennyson’s mournfulness was ongoing. He wrote In Memoriam over a period of many years and, given its intensity of feeling, worried about making it public.
Canto VII—In Memoriam consists of 133 cantos—depicts Tennyson’s distress over his friend’s death in an especially acute way. He most likely wrote this section sometime between 1848 and 1850—in other words, at least fifteen years after Hallam’s death. He then placed it near the beginning of the sequence.
VII
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
* * *
A hand that can be clasp’d no more—
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
* * *
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
This poem, which consists of just two sentences, three quatrains, a mere twelve lines, uses a clever stanzaic pattern that Tennyson employed for all the poems that comprise In Memoriam. The pattern is a quatrain in iambic tetrameter: ˘ / | ˘ / | ˘ / | ˘ /. Its envelope rhyme scheme, abba, begins with an expectation and concludes by looking back. This makes it self-enfolding. Tennyson didn’t invent this stanza, as he thought—Ben Jonson used it in his 1640 poem “An Elegy” (“Though beauty be the mark of praise”)—but Tennyson turned it to such powerful use that it is now referred to as the “In Memoriam stanza.”
Tennyson uses it here to great effect. He also varies the meter. Notice, for example, how he starts the first three lines of the poem with heavy stresses, a spondee or a trochee instead of an iamb, to emphasize four significant words, “Dárk hóuse,” “Hére,” and “Dóors.” That the speaker has returned to a “Dark house” indicates that where once he found a welcoming light, he now encounters a somber threshold and is barred from entering. The “Here” of the second line refers to 67 Wimpole Street (the “long unlovely street”) in London, where Hallam had lived. The speaker remembers how he once waited in that street, at those “Doors,” his heart beating in anticipation. The stanza’s last line, in regular iambic tetrameter, explains that his heart beats “So quickly, waiting for a hand.” One might interpret this “waiting for a hand” to mean “waiting for help.”
However, the second stanza clarifies that he waits for “A hand that can be clasp’d no more.” This absent physical hand recalls the disembodied hand in Keats’s “This living hand,” a hand once “capable / Of earnest grasping,” which Keats then envisions as lifeless. Though Keats’s poem was not a direct influence—the fragment was published after Tennyson died—it’s not surprising that both poets use the hand as a powerful metonym, or stand-in, for the whole person. In the clasp or grasp of a handshake two people feel the intimacies of each other’s skin, each other’s warmth, strength, pulse. The dead or missing hand just as powerfully represents the absence of the other, the permanent losses of death.
The second line of the second stanza begins with an imperative: “Behold me . . .” Now we see that the intentionally stressed “Dark house” and “Doors” of the first stanza serve not just as details of the setting but also as objects the speaker is addressing. This apostrophe to the house, the doors themselves, seems like a displacement of the speaker’s grief. He is asking them to look at him precisely because his friend cannot. He tells the house that he cannot sleep, “And like a guilty thing I creep / At the earliest morning to the door.” He returns like the ghost in Hamlet (“And then it started like a guilty thing,” act 1, scene 1, line 148). Given that Hallam was just twenty-two years old when he died, the speaker’s experience of grief is complicated by the guilt felt by a survivor. He understands that, now that his friend is gone, he has become a sort of trespasser in the neighborhood where he was once a familiar presence.
In the first line of the last stanza (“He is not here; but far away”) one scholar finds an allusion to Luke 24:6, where the angel stands before Jesus’s empty sepulcher (“He is not here, but is risen”). Tennyson’s use of a semicolon after “here,” rather than a comma as in Luke, is the clue that “far away” doesn’t refer to where “He” is, that the hope of a resurrection will not be fulfilled. Indeed, the enjambment between lines 1 and 2 of this stanza joins “far away” to “The noise of life begins again.” The word “noise” suggests something ugly and irritating, something hard to take. That “noise of life,” the new day, inevitably excludes his friend.
The poem turns in the final stanza from the darkness of early morning to the “ghastly” light of a new day. The predawn hour, a liminal space between night and day, darkness and light, serves as the setting for a type of poem called the aubade, which comes from the Spanish alba, meaning “dawn.” The aubade is traditionally a dawn song expressing the regret of lovers parting at daybreak, as in the famous balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. It remembers the ecstasy of their union and describes their sadness at separating. Given the quickly beating heart of the speaker standing in his friend’s street, his intense longing to clasp that absent hand, his guilty creeping to the darkened door—all of which point to a homoerotic undercurrent that runs through the entire sequence—combined with his desolation at the new day, the canto can be read as a sort of aubade, in which dawn reminds the poet that death has parted the deeply bonded friends forever.
Tennyson’s speaker sees the despised signs of life returning to the street through a veil of rain. Everything is obscured by the loss of his friend. The aggressive and almost numbing drumbeat of the alliterative b sound, as well as the consonance of l, d, k, and s sounds in the last line—“On the bald street breaks the blank day”—sonically reflect the bleakness of both the speaker’s state of mind and the city scene at daybreak. The poet literally breaks the word “daybreak” into “breaks” and “day” and reverses their order, inserting “the blank” between them. There is a feeling of utter desolation, exposure, and emptiness. As a new day begins, the speaker is left not with “reminiscences,” but with a broken heart.
Gerard Ma
nley Hopkins
* * *
“Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend”
(1889)
By 1885, Gerard Manley Hopkins had written his great poems of praise and exultation, such as “God’s Grandeur” (“The world is charged with the grandeur of God”), “The Windhover” (“I caught this morning morning’s minion”), and “Pied Beauty” (“Glory be to God for dappled things”). Behind him too were the six so-called terrible sonnets, time capsules of spiritual sterility and religious anguish, such as “Carrion Comfort” and “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.” After five years of teaching Greek to desultory students at University College in Dublin, which Hopkins considered wasted years, the Jesuit priest took a retreat at the Irish novitiate at Tullabeg. He was forty-four years old and did not waver in his allegiance to the church. But he was desolate. On New Year’s Day, 1889, he wrote in a notebook: “I began to enter on that course of loathing and helplessness which I have often felt before, which made me fear madness and led me to give up the practice of meditation except, as now, in retreat and here it is again. I could therefore do no more than repeat Justus es, Domine, et rectum judicium tuum . . .”
To console himself he was reciting Psalm 119, verse 137—“Righteous art thou, O Lord, and upright are thy judgments”—from the Vulgate, the late-fourth-century translation of the Bible, which he dearly loved.
Three months later Hopkins used a similar statement as the title and epigraph of a sonnet: “Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum”; he sent it in a letter to his friend Robert Bridges. This time the poet cites the prophet Jeremiah, who echoes Psalm 119 in his indignant cry. The first three lines are thus Hopkins’s literal translation of Jeremiah 12:1, which the King James Version renders as “Righteous thou art, O LORD, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? Wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?”
This is one of the last three poems Hopkins completed before he died of typhoid fever in June 1889. He dated it March 17 and informed Bridges that it should be read “adagio molto [very slowly] and with great stress.”
Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen
justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.
* * *
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
Hopkins utilizes the argumentative form of a Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet for his anguished quarrel with God. The poem rhymes abbaabbacdcdcd. Like Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, the speaker of the poem acknowledges the Lord as “just” but begins with a mournful complaint. Unlike the King James Version, which translates the word disputem as “plead,” Hopkins chose the word “contend,” which suggests a quarrel, a rivalry, as well as an appeal. Notice how he employs an honorific, “sir,” in directing his complaint, though no such title appears in the Bible verse. It’s a respectful term one might use with a colleague or an elder, and it’s notable that the poet doesn’t capitalize it here, bringing his divine addressee down to the level of the human. Theirs is a thwarted intimacy—a gulf has opened between a frustrated petitioner and an unresponsive deity.
The reader is put in the position of overhearing this argument, and its gist is encapsulated in the third and fourth lines: “Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must / Disappointment all I endeavour end?” In the end-rhyme for the fourth line Hopkins ingeniously contracts the word “endeavour” into the word “end,” enacting in language the curtailment the speaker feels and foreshadowing the sonnet’s repressed main subject, his inability to write. He follows this question with another more pointed one, a grievance even more personal, essentially accusing God of opposing and obstructing him in his desires. “Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, / How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost / Defeat, thwart me?” The change in address from “sir” to “thou my friend” has a tinge of sarcasm, since God seems to treat the supplicant just as badly as an enemy would. A quiet alliteration (“dost / Defeat”) crosses enjambed lines, as does another two lines later, with “spend / Sir.”
The poem dramatizes this argument two more times, first to end the octave and then to begin the sestet. The speaker bitterly observes that those who indulge their desires for alcohol and sex—“the sots and thralls of lust”—flourish more than he does, with his vow of sterile celibacy. This version of the poem’s complaint uses a temporal comparison to make its point; that is, the debauched “Do in spare hours more thrive” than “I that spend, / Sir, life upon thy cause.” Notice how he uses “spend instead of give,” emphasizing the price of his enormous sacrifice.
Hopkins dramatically begins the volta, or structural turn in the poem, with a sudden halt halfway through the ninth line, a Miltonic move. Reminiscent of Keats’s “see, here it is” in “This living hand,” the poem comes alive with imperatives—See, look—indicating that this iteration of the argument will be more active, visual, concrete in its desire to engage the addressee. It is spring and everything bursts to life in the natural world. The very sound and rhythm of the poem become more frenzied and excited:
See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—
So too Hopkins repetitively layers sounds and dislocates the syntax—“leavèd how thick! lacèd they”—to mimic the fecundity of nature, the aromatic herbs, the nesting birds. This sonorous and lively visual description culminates in the twelfth line with the dash after “birds build.” Both words are stressed; both share b and d sounds. After the dash the argument comes to its final point of comparison, wherein the fecundity of nature mocks the speaker’s sterility: “—but not I build; no, but strain.” Stresses on most of these crucial one-syllable words create an emphatic rhythm that enacts the very strain he is feeling. Repeated n sounds in “not,” “no,” and “strain” stress his fruitless efforts.
This section of the poem recalls Coleridge’s precursor sonnet, “Work without Hope,” which the Romantic poet composed on February 21, 1825. It begins:
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Both Coleridge and Hopkins contrast the busy productivity of nature, specifically in spring, with the “unbusy” nonproductivity of the poet. Unlike the birds, Hopkins’s frustrated speaker does not “pair,” “build,” or “sing.” Indeed, the entire poem has a feeling of sexual impotence and confusion, of thwarted desire. In the penultimate line, Hopkins employs the memorable phrase “Time’s eunuch,” which he borrowed from a letter that he had earlier sent to Bridges: “It kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget.” The n sounds in the words “not,” “no,” and “strain” repeat in “eunuch,” as well as in the desolate “not breed one work that wakes.” The fact that the speaker does “not breed” re-emphasizes his lack of fecundity. The alliterative w sounds of “one work that
wakes” create a sonic echoing that drives this frustration home.
Hopkins’s last line is a prayer unto itself. It is also a single sentence, consisting of ten one-syllable words, with six stresses for emphasis: “Míne, O thou lórd of lífe, sénd my róots ráin.” This petition begins with the self-asserting “Mine,” a contrast to the “sir” and “thou” of previous appeals, and the phrase “my roots” near the end of the line echoes “Mine.” The speaker here is claiming the Lord as his intimate. The pattern of nsounds starts with the word “not,” continues in “mine” and “send,” and completes the poem in “rain.” The alliteration of “roots” and “rain” links these two key words in the poem’s final plea. Like a plant that needs water to grow, the speaker needs, and begs God for, the life-giving grace of inspiration.
Ironically, failed inspiration, this sonnet’s repressed complaint and true subject, became the inspiration for one of Hopkins’s most enduring works, his last great poem, a skillfully argued and movingly written late devotional.
Constantine Cavafy
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