Of Language – Mary Gilmore

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Of Language

I

How now, Horatius! Hath language hours?
Sleeps it awhile to wake again renewed,
As chrysalids pupate the many-hued?
Or aging, man-like, hath it mellowed powers?
Sometimes (I dream) language, like Time, devours
The end that earliest it urgent wooed,
Changing its dandling to still stranger brood
As flowers will change to seed, and seed to flowers!
And this crude speech of ours we use today,
Crude as new must, Time-ripened may seem fine
As anything we heard great Sydney say,
Or Shakespeare plunder from the muses Nine;
While future times may, even here, unpack
All that these few poor words, so halting lack!

II

Flower turns to seed, and seed returns – a flower
One seed makes many flowers, one flower much seed.
Thus from a word shall mighty thinking breed,
And single thoughts to words increase the dower.
Are not all words old thought new-set to power,
Late-visible where we, late-come, may read,
Losing in them the habit of the weed,
And climbing where, unlearned, we still must cower?

Speak not of history in stone! For I
Can show you history written deeper yet –
The simple words nor youth nor age forget
Passed lip to lip as centuries went by;
The caravans of years these leave behind,
Shards for which man made ladders for the mind.

Mary Gilmore 1919

Well what is the nature of language? How does it vary with time and interpretation over time. These two sonnets by Mary Gilmore explore these questions. Much thought has been given to the nature of language as well as adherence to sonnet structure.

Looking at the first line – ‘Hath language hours’ … well ‘hath’ is not a word used nowadays but quite common years ago – so here we see a word that has changed in usage over time so in this sense language has hours. Definition (or understanding) may have hours too … for example the common association and meaning of word ‘gay’. But will words (or text) have a deeper or new understanding that future generations might unravel, for example an insight laying latent for many years. I think more the case that new generations will extend or use the words of the past in new creations of their own.

Of course context at the time of writing is highly in the mind of the reader who lives in that time. For future generations may not understand the relevance or appreciate any sting that might have been in the words at the time of writing. But I do like the notion of words as seeds.

Seeds lie in the ground and they are dead until they germinate. Words only come alive when they are read or heard by a person. The understanding, interpretation and associative images and thoughts conveyed by words is in many ways a highly personal and unique experience. I may mention a ‘wheel barrow’ – you may see a red one straight away for what ever reason – so the ‘flowers’ that are generated may be many types – not too mention any vegetables suddenly appearing out of the ground because of strong personal association.

From a word mighty things may breed. Well all words are the product of thought – we think before we speak or write. I think this is the case even for spontaneous output – what do you think? … it doesn’t have to be true of course … that’s another issue. So all words are reflective, history … the product of old-thought … and as Mary Gilmore says, – ‘are not all words old thought new-set to power’.

Of course it could be argued that poetry is often the product of much thought but whether that makes the words more or less powerful in the mind of the reader is of course debatable (I nearly said food for thought).

… and I do like the last lines … history is not cold stone … history is living a history linked by the words expressed from generation to generation … history is attached to every word as death is attached to life.

For those reading this from Oz have a look at a $10 note and you will see Mary Gilmore.

‘Words’ – Sylvia Plath – Analysis

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Words

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road—-

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

Sylvia Plath (written in the same month that she died – February 1963)

S1 – Well axes are sharp and cutting their purpose to bite into wood. Words when released for consumption can be sharp and cutting – very true for SP as I think TH would surely agree! They can move from the centre of the person especially if they have been well thought out … and like horses travel … to whom they go is another matter … and what they mean as they are met by travellers who take any notice is again another matter entirely, but once released they can travel far and forever perhaps … SP’s words are at this very moment reaching the minds of many.

S2 – SP’s words were always part of her very being … the sap in the wood … and when released it is impossible for her to recover completely perhaps … or at least settle back to where she was before … you could say it was as though each of her poems was her own baby – I can accept a certain poetic life to this view … however, in this poem we have the intensity of the release of her words in terms of tears and sap, the essence of wood is sap … tears flow from her passion and of course from the head (link to skull) … and we know she put her very soul into much of her writing … and indeed her writing was at times a desperate cry for help given her mental instability.

S3 – words come from the head and thought … and years later this will be the fate of the body … an empty skull … empty after the initial disclosure … and many years later SP perhaps looks back, reflects on what she once wrote … dry and riderless … they are beyond her control and they never have the intensity that they had when first written … I guess the same for everyone who writes from the heart.

S4 … they are indefatigable … never tiring they will travel forever … and in line with horses in the first stanza they are as hoof-taps that will never lose their sound. They come from the rock the solid bottom of the pool … in line with stanza 2 … SP the rock and a rock that is governed by the stars – a distinct spiritual dimension to her life … governed by something outside herself … something fixed and external as the stars above the universe.

W B Yeats – on his philosophy

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W B Yeats 1885 – 1939 … a symbolist (Ezra Pound) … W  B Yeats the most cited name in The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland.

Here are some words from Yeats on his philosophy and thinking on poetry.

‘A poet writes always of his private life’ … the autobiographical component transmuted by storytelling, fantasy, symbol and also history. I would tend to agree with this in that everything we say and write defines us in some way or other.

Yeats claimed that ‘all sounds, all colours, all forms … evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions … because an emotion does not exist until it has found an expression … poets, painters, and musicians … are continually making and unmaking mankind’

In an essay on the philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry he wrote …

‘It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols which have numberless meanings … that any highly subject art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature’.

He believed there to be emotional and intellectual symbols … often personal … a product of an external force … evoking the shared human mind and memory (similar in ways to Jung’s collective unconscious)

In poetry it is symbolism that has the power to move people. I would argue that it is the association invoked by the symbolism that develops an emotive response by the reader.

He was certain that ‘imagination has some way of alighting on the truth that reason has not’

… and also intuition (my comment)

‘Symbolism began with the first words uttered by the first man, as he named every living thing; or before then in heaven when God named the world into being’ …

From Symons – The Symbolist Movement in Literature 1900

Concerning his basic philosophy … Yeats’ three famous beliefs …

1 … that the borders of our mind are ever shifting and that many minds can flow into one another … and create or reveal a single mind, or single energy.

 2 … that the borders of our memories are as shifting, memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

 3 … that this great mind, memory can be invoked by symbols.

From ‘Magic’ essays and introductions’ … dated 1901 pp. 33,60

Those with a positive outlook might equate the essence of such a single mind to be that of beauty, of order, of joy, of healing, and of course love itself … and for the religious a spiritual communal dimension. Any intuitive thoughts?

Yeats also had an association with the occult …and I think this may have influenced Ted Hughes in his experimentation at university.

Yeats had an image for Ireland based on an agrarian society with few politician and tradesmen and a dominant class based on the landed gentry.

Other References:

Critics on Yeats – Readings in Literary Criticism ISBN 0 04 801012 X
The Twentieth Century in Poetry – Peter Childs ISBN 0 415 17101 6

God is not Nature, Nature God
But Nature product of the same
That from itself a God became
Of beauty beyond any name

The Walk – Thomas Hardy

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The Walk

You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.

Thomas Hardy

Very poignant simple direct words straight to the point and from personal experience.

  S1 – TH speaks of the ritual of a familiar walk without the usual accompaniment of his spouse because she is unable to come due to ill-health … but TH took her with her so to speak remembering the many times they had walked together … he did not mind – ‘not thinking of you as left behind’ … (and when he returned she would be there in the room to share his return … we can infer this after we read the second stanza).
S2 – TH again takes the familiar walk … and what difference then … he was again walking by himself and with his wife in mind … but as he walks he is painfully reminded that the room will be different when he returns and there will be no communion and sharing.

… and here is a link to some images of Thomas Hardy’s home ‘Max Gate’ in Dorset now a National Trust property … he would have had his dogs for company too

Arab Love-Song – Francis Thompson

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Arab Love-Song

The hunched camels of the night
Trouble the bright
And silver waters of the moon.
The maiden of the morn will soon
Through heaven stray and sing,
Star gathering

Now while the dark about our loves is strewn,
Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O Come!
And night will catch her breath up and be dumb.

Leave thy father, leave thy mother
And thy brother!
Leave the black tents of thy tribe apart!
Am I not thy father and thy brother,
And thy mother?
And thou – what needest with thy tribe’s black tents
Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?

Francis Thompson 1899

You get the sense of the camels as moving shapes disturbing moonlight and I do like the idea of the sun drawing up the stars in heavenly song.

The great need of the lover for another expressed so strongly in terms of heart, blood and light – marrying in the words of the heavenly sun-rise from the first stanza.

I don’t know about the scenario of one person’s needs being completely encompassed in the life of another though! … the lover who will do everything for you … but perhaps we can forget realities, it is a love song after all … a song to woo or entice another.

Lovers and poets have a tendency to exaggerate don’t you think?

Francis Thompson … chiefly known for his poem … ‘The hound of heaven’

Some Words and Philosophy – Virginia Woolf

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Her more mature novels – Mrs Dalloway (MD) … To The Lighthouse … The Waves

To my knowledge Virginia Woolf1 never wrote any poetry. However, I really enjoy  her words from her books … you could say there are sparks of the poetic as well as being profound, philosophic … consider Mrs Dalloway (MD) for example …

… from metonymy (an attribute stands for the thing itself) to metaphor … a multi-layered metaphoric stream of consciousness with a certain poetic lyrical flow … VW used a new approach in writing

… all about sensitive people living from one privileged moment to the next, passing through intervening periods of depression and doubt

And then thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

                          What a lark! What a plunge!

 For so it had always seen to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning, like the flap of the wave, the kiss of the wave … (page 3 MD)

Lark and plunge … Life and death … to build up or to close in … these are the two contending forces in MD … Clarissa is touched by both as she moves through her activities in arranging a party on a glorious June day … her parallel opposite is the shell-shocked Septimus Smith who disturbs her joie de vie.

Individuality and universality in irreconcilable opposition … each person seeks to be connected to the whole from which that person is alienated by individual existence.

… different people in different places at the same time … layered together in an underlying communion … reflected in the individual’s actions in ways unknown … exploring the extent and influence of such impressions made on the individual consciousness …

… did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her (page 9 MD)

 … somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, of the trees at home, … part of the people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best (pages 9-10 MD)

 … nothing exists outside us except a state of mind  … (page 62 MD)

 … the narrator is a consciousness born by the consciousness created from the characters in the novel … yet somehow apart … seeing all, knowing all perspectives … in the present as the present unfolds … including in the present the past remembered by the characters … the virtual present of the readers’ experience

… unity, reconciliation, communion well up spontaneously from within the characterisation

… the narrator is unknown but sensed by the characters … does the narrator have life outside the life of the characters and if this is the case then what is the nature of such individuality? … the vital questions.

VW’s ‘great discovery’ 2 … ‘tunnelling process’ … to dig our beautiful caves behind her characters … humanity, humour, depth … the caves connect

VW philosophy … miraculous joy of the moment rises out of the commonplace, not from some transcendental source …

How moments like these are buds on the tree of life (MD page 31)

Foolishly, she had set them opposite each other. That could be remedied tomorrow. If it were fine, they should go for a picnic. Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while they were all talking about boots) just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floating in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends; all of this rising in this profound stillness (she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece more and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed now for no special reason to stay there like smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said, nothing could be said. There it was all around them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr Bankes to an especially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains forever after. This would remain.

(from ‘To The Lighthouse’ … pages 113-114)

 Footnotes …

1Virginia Woolf 1882 – 1941 …  father Sir Leslie Stephen …educated by her father’s magnificent library … member of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’ … lived in the cultured world of the London intelligentsia… bisexual … relationship with  Vita Sackville-West … worked with husband Leonard to found the Hogarth Press … depressive – suicided

Reference –

2Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse … contemporary critical essays … Edited by Su Read.  (New Casebooks – Macmillan)

No Coward Soul is Mine – Emily Bronte

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No Coward Soul is Mine

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the worlds storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heavens glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

O God within my breast.
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life — that in me has rest,
As I — Undying Life — have power in Thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast Rock of immortality.

With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou — Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

Emily Bronte (1818 – 1848)

According to Charlotte Bronte, these were the last lines written by her sister.

A very powerful personal declaration of her understanding of life and God … and in no uncertain terms! The second stanza in particular affirms her internal knowledge in the context of an eternal connectivity … and a connectivity that can never be broken … declared emphatically in the last line.

The third stanza negates the conventional institutional religion of her day. She was brought up in the small parsonage at Haworth and would be well versed in religion. Two strong similes (withered weeds, and froth on the main (ocean). She breaks through the constrictions of ordinary life … the freeing of the spirit against convention.

The fifth stanza emphasing the creativity of life … by one who had great creativity herself (Wuthering Heights) … as well as passion.

When I read this poem at a poetry meeting … one fellow said  ‘nailing your flag to the mast’ … what an apt expression … appropriate task for one nearing death.

Reviewing Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

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The place names and characters in WH …

 Wuthering Heights (Earnshaw) v Thrushcorft Grange (Linton)

passionate hard brutal v comfortable soft refined

 Earnshaw

The children …

Hindley, Cathy – Heathercliff (Foundling)

Relationships …

Hindley–Francis (an outsider) > Hareton (son)

Heathecliff–Isabella > Linton (son)

 Linton

The children …

Edgar, Isablella

Relationships …

Edgar–Cathy > Catherine (daughter)

Isabella–Heathcliff  > Linton (son)

 Ellen Dean … housekeeper to both families at different times and one of the narrators

Lockwood … tenant of the Grange after control by Heathcliff … the second narrator of the story … a southern who would not understand the intensity of the wild north family

Other … Joseph, Zillah … W Heights

Note the apt choice of names … and initials …

It was common for the mother Catherine to become Cathy and the daughter to take the name Catherine.

The HC combination in the first generation  … then the forced revenge marriage of what was in fact a Linton marrying Linton in (Linton and Catherine) and then ending with some hope in the final relationship HC (Hareton – Catherine) in the second generation.

Reviewing the Book  …

Wuthering … a local word meaning atmospheric tumult.

The book may be difficult to read perhaps because there are two narrators and that there are breaks in the ‘time windows’ described. Actual windows play an important part … from Lockwood’s nightmare when forced to stay the night at the Heights … the children looking into the window of the Grange …to Lockwood looking into the window at the Heights at the end of the novel. The family relationships are quite simple and have a well-crafted and designed symmetry (see above).

The novel covers a 25 year period in two distinct parts before Cathy Earnshaw’s (Linton after marriage) death and then the life of the second generation after Cathy’s death. The first part establishes the foundation of the wild love between Heathcliff and Cathy, her ‘bad decision’ to marry Edgar. Then the return of a prosperous but revengeful Heathercliff and the dramatic effect this had on both households.

The remainder of the book deals with the influence of Heathcliff on the second generation. His revengeful acts both by his marriage to Isabella. Then the naming of his son Linton the dominance of Linton’s life and Heathcliff’s reciprocating ill-treatment on Hareton after the death of Francis after his own ill-treatment by Hindley. Heathcliff helps the destruction of Hindley by drink. He forces the marriage of Catherine to Linton to get control on the Grange but after the death of Linton when Catherine develops her relationship with Hareton he curtails his original resentment.

It is the age-old story of humanity connected to nature and the coming to terms with the different aspects of the human condition. The differences and the fragilities are set against the wild environment. The final integration of the two families (Catherine and Hareton) in a sort of happiness provides a calm – that is before the arrival of the next storm of course – hopefully not such as dramatic as the foundling Heathcliff.

The wild moors and the spiritual world is integrated in the characters … especially Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw (Linton) … and after her death she haunts the rest of the book and becomes a ghost obsessive to the thoughts of the revengeful Heathercliff.

Some comments on Emily Bronte

Nature pervades all her writing … a longing to be connected to the forces of nature … her characters representatives of eternal truths.

Expressing high emotion in precise symbol and image is evident throughout the prose and poetry of Emily Bronte.

The open freedom of the moors was essential to Emily’s happiness and creativity. Writings involved themes of liberty and repression.

Charlotte in her memoir to the1850 editions of WH states … Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils

Stronger than a man, simpler that a child her nature stood alone … Charlotte on her sister.

In her own family Emily supported the wayward brother Branwell when other family gave up on his misdemeanours.

She was influenced by the literary figures of her day … especially Byron and Scott.”

My favourite poem by Emily Bronte – ‘No Coward Soul is Mine’.