Possessed by Memory

by Harold Bloom

Was there a ravaged tree? it laughed compact

  With gold, a leaf-ball crisp, high-brandished now,

  Tempting to onset frost which late attacked.

  Was there a wizened shrub, a starveling bough,

  A fleecy thistle filched from by the wind,

  A weed, Pan’s trampling hoof would disallow?

  Each, with a glory and a rapture twined

  About it, joined the rush of air and light

  And force: the world was of one joyous mind.

  Say not the birds flew! they forebore their right—

  Swam, revelling onward in the roll of things.

  Say not the beasts’ mirth bounded! that was flight—

  How could the creatures leap, no lift of wings?

  Such earth’s community of purpose, such

  The ease of earth’s fulfilled imaginings,—

  So did the near and far appear to touch

  I’ the moment’s transport,—that an interchange

  Of function, far with near, seemed scarce too much;

  And had the rooted plant aspired to range

  With the snake’s license, while the insect yearned

  To glow fixed as the flower it were not strange….

  All of nature lives more blazingly in the sunlight of an autumn morning. Rapturously, even ravaged trees, wizened shrubs, starveling boughs, thistles, and weeds join the joyous rush of light and air. Birds swim, beasts fly, as all of earth’s imaginings are fulfilled. The transport of each moment raises every dimension of being a step higher in the scale. Singing as he marches, the poet Thamuris vaunts his lucid passion for the hopeless agon with the Muses:

  No more than if the fluttery tree-top turned

  To actual music, sang itself aloft;

  Or if the wind, impassioned chantress, earned

  The right to soar embodied in some soft

  Fine form all fit for cloud-companionship,

  And, blissful, once touch beauty chased so oft.

  Thamuris, marching, let no fancy slip

  Born of the fiery transport; lyre and song

  Were his, to smite with hand and launch from lip—

  Peerless recorded, since the list grew long

  Of poets (saith Homeros) free to stand

  Pedestalled ’mid the Muses’ temple-throng,

  A statued service, laurelled, lyre in hand,

  (Ay, for we see them)—Thamuris of Thrace

  Predominating foremost of the band.

  Therefore the morn-ray that enriched his face,

  If it gave lambent chill, took flame again

  From flush of pride; he saw, he knew the place.

  What wind arrived with all the rhythms from plain,

  Hill, dale, and that rough wildwood interspersed?

  Compounding these to one consummate strain,

  It reached him, music; but his own outburst

  Of victory concluded the account,

  And that grew song which was mere music erst.

  “Be my Parnassos, thou Pangaian mount!

  And turn thee, river, nameless hitherto!

  Famed shalt thou vie with famed Pieria’s fount!

  Here I await the end of this ado:

  Which wins—Earth’s poet or the Heavenly Muse.”

  Thamuris fuses with Percy Bysshe Shelley in this defiant lyric. The “Ode to the West Wind” hovers as the forest becomes a lyre and the wind companions the cloud. Childe Roland’s band of brothers throng the pedestals of the temple of the Muses, and Thamuris, seeking to be foremost among them, reverses the outcry of: “Burningly it came on me all at once, / This was the place!” and takes flame: “he saw, he knew the place.”

  The Muses are cruel and blind him for his audacity. They destroy his possession by memory, and thus end his poetic gift. But when I chant his poem, to myself or to others, he seems among the victorious and not among the defeated. The terza rima adapted by Shelley from Dante makes me think of Brunetto Latini, whose instruction and whose poetry helped make Dante possible. Browning’s Thamuris was his own final tribute to Shelley, without whom the master of dramatic lyrics and monologues might not have been able to begin.

  George Meredith,

  “A Ballad of Past Meridian”

  GEORGE MEREDITH at fifty-five composed “A Ballad of Past Meridian” with an acute awareness of what Wallace Stevens at thirty-nine, in his “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” ruefully confessed: “No spring can follow past meridian.” Stevens was jocular, but Meredith was much darker:

  I

  Last night returning from my twilight walk

  I met the grey mist Death, whose eyeless brow

  Was bent on me, and from his hand of chalk

  He reached me flowers as from a withered bough:

  O Death, what bitter nosegays givest thou!

  II

  Death said, I gather, and pursued his way.

  Another stood by me, a shape in stone,

  Sword-hacked and iron-stained, with breasts of clay,

  And metal veins that sometimes fiery shone:

  O Life, how naked and how hard when known!

  III

  Life said, As thou hast carved me, such am I.

  Then memory, like the nightjar on the pine,

  And sightless hope, a woodlark in night sky,

  Joined notes of Death and Life till night’s decline

  Of Death, of Life, those inwound notes are mine.

  I chant this rather too frequently these March days, because the friends of my lifetime keep falling away. Death is rather less horrifying here than the stony shape of Life. Flowers, however bitter, are not bestowed by Life, whose shape is our creation. Perhaps Meredith recalls the withering of his first marriage, to the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, who was a friend of Shelley’s. Peacock is charmingly satirized by Shelley in Nightmare Abbey as Scythrop Glowry; Lord Byron appears as Mr. Cypress and Coleridge as Ferdinando Flosky. Readers of Meredith’s masterpiece of a comic novel, The Egoist, will recognize Clara Middleton as a portrait of Mary Ellen Peacock, who ran off with the minor Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis after nine years of unhappy union with the poet-novelist, who surmounted this wound to his psyche only when he happily remarried in 1864.

  Brilliantly, Meredith compares poetic memory to the nocturnal song of the nightjar or nighthawk, as it is named in North America, and blind hope to the woodlark in the night sky. The strains of Death and of Life are so wound in one another that only Meredith’s ballad can fuse both dreadful entities. One hears in the far background an under-song of Keatsian tradition as modified by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Meredith, during the unhappy interval between his two marriages, shared a single madhouse of a residence with Rosetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and a host of exotic animals.

  I speculate sometimes as to what Keats would have thought had he survived to read “A Ballad of Past Meridian.” As the most healthy-minded of any great poet since Shakespeare himself, he might have associated it with his magnificent “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

  Algernon Charles Swinburne,

  “August”

  ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (1837–1909), like his master Shelley, was wholly daemonic and opposed to the theological traditions of the West. He admired Coleridge for the older poet’s natural magic, yet demurred at any worship of the logos. Very few now read Swinburne, which is a great loss. In my long nights awake, I recite silently his exquisite “August” or, rather, chant it. The poet grew up on the Isle of Wight, where the demarcations between sea and beach constantly shift.

  His cousin Mary Gordon was his constant playmate as they grew up together. Swinburne’s sexual orientation became sadomasochistic, and by middle age he was a total alcoholic. His nost
algia for the familial love he had shared with his cousin never left him and triumphs in “August”:

  There were four apples on the bough,

  Half gold half red, that one might know

  The blood was ripe inside the core;

  The colour of the leaves was more

  Like stems of yellow corn that grow

  Through all the gold June meadow’s floor.

  The warm smell of the fruit was good

  To feed on, and the split green wood,

  With all its bearded lips and stains

  Of mosses in the cloven veins,

  Most pleasant, if one lay or stood

  In sunshine or in happy rains.

  There were four apples on the tree,

  Red stained through gold, that all might see

  The sun went warm from core to rind;

  The green leaves made the summer blind

  In that soft place they kept for me

  With golden apples shut behind.

  This Keatsian ripeness matures into a sudden ecstasy:

  The leaves caught gold across the sun,

  And where the bluest air begun

  Thirsted for song to help the heat;

  As I to feel my lady’s feet

  Draw close before the day were done

  Both lips grew dry with dreams of it.

  In the mute August afternoon

  They trembled to some undertune

  Of music in the silver air;

  Great pleasure was it to be there

  Till green turned duskier and the moon

  Coloured the corn-sheaves like gold hair.

  That August time it was delight

  To watch the red moons wane to white

  ’Twixt grey seamed stems of apple-trees;

  A sense of heavy harmonies

  Grew on the growth of patient night,

  More sweet than shapen music is.

  Dreams irradiate this poignant fantasy that catches the feeling-tone of his unformed desire for his cousin. Moonlight colors corn-sheaves as though they were Mary Gordon’s golden tresses. Heavy harmonies, however sweet, are hollowed out through unfulfillment:

  But some three hours before the moon

  The air, still eager from the noon,

  Flagged after heat, not wholly dead;

  Against the stem I leant my head;

  The colour soothed me like a tune,

  Green leaves all round the gold and red.

  I lay there till the warm smell grew

  More sharp, when flecks of yellow dew

  Between the round ripe leaves that blurred

  The rind with stain and wet; I heard

  A wind that blew and breathed and blew,

  Too weak to alter its one word.

  The wet leaves next the gentle fruit

  Felt smoother, and the brown tree-root

  Felt the mould warmer: I too felt

  (As water feels the slow gold melt

  Right through it when the day burns mute)

  The peace of time wherein love dwelt.

  There were four apples on the tree,

  Gold stained on red that all might see

  That sweet blood filled them to the core:

  The colour of her hair is more

  Like stems of fair faint gold, that be

  Mown from the harvest’s middle floor.

  When this is chanted aloud, its gathering force can be extraordinary. Those four apples in this Eden remain unbitten, and the Eve of Swinburne’s paradise will never be the poet’s bride. And yet “August” remains ecstatic though the implied narrative is one of loss. All fruit is filled with ripeness to the core, but this ripeness is scarcely all.

  Algernon Charles Swinburne,

  “Hertha”

  SHELLEY’S INFLUENCE UPON Algernon Charles Swinburne was lifelong. A mythmaking poet who fused Shelley with other High Romantics—William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, and that debased parody the Marquis de Sade—Swinburne wrote what he regarded as his central poem, “Hertha.” This powerful stasis of a monologue is spoken by the Northern earth goddess who was the patroness of growth and fertility. With the touch of a Browning confession, she defines her own identity for us:

  I am that which began;

  Out of me the years roll;

  Out of me God and man;

  I am equal and whole;

  God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.

  Before ever land was,

  Before ever the sea,

  Or soft hair of the grass,

  Or fair limbs of the tree,

  Or the fresh-coloured fruit of my branches, I was, and thy soul was in me.

  First life on my sources

  First drifted and swam;

  Out of me are the forces

  That save it or damn;

  Out of me man and woman, and wild-beast and bird; before God was, I am.

  Beside or above me

  Nought is there to go;

  Love or unlove me,

  Unknow me or know,

  I am that which unloves me and loves; I am stricken, and I am the blow.

  . . . . .

  But what thing dost thou now,

  Looking Godward, to cry

  “I am I, thou art thou,

  I am low, thou art high”?

  I am thou, whom thou seekest to find him; find thou but thyself, thou art I.

  I the grain and the furrow,

  The plough-cloven clod

  And the ploughshare drawn thorough,

  The germ and the sod,

  The deed and the doer, the seed and the sower, the dust which is God.

  That opening “I am” deliberately blasphemes Jesus in John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I am,” with its echo of Exodus 3:14: “And God said unto Moses ‘I AM THAT I AM.’ ” A touch of the Bhagavad-Gita enters in “I am the blow,” by way of Emerson’s poem “Brahma”:

  If the red slayer think he slays,

  Or if the slain think he is slain,

  They know not well the subtle ways

  I keep, and pass, and turn again.

  Charmingly maintaining his blasphemy, Swinburne reduces God to the Adamic dust. His fixed hymn to surging growth continues with mounting urgency:

  Hast thou known how I fashioned thee,

  Child, underground?

  Fire that impassioned thee,

  Iron that bound,

  Dim changes of water, what thing of all these hast thou known of or found?

  Canst thou say in thine heart

  Thou hast seen with thine eyes

  With what cunning of art

  Thou wast wrought in what wise,

  By what force of what stuff thou wast shapen, and shown on my breast to the skies?

  . . . . .

  What is here, dost thou know it?

  What was, hast thou known?

  Prophet nor poet

  Nor tripod nor throne

  Nor spirit nor flesh can make answer, but only thy mother alone.

  Mother, not maker,

  Born, and not made;

  Though her children forsake her,

  Allured or afraid,

  Praying prayers to the God of their fashion, she stirs not for all that have prayed.

  The voice of God out of the whirlwind with its rhetorical questions in Job 38–39 sets the pattern for Hertha’s unanswerable queries. The tripod, three-legged stool, sat upon by the Oracle’s priestess at Delphi, represents all of priesthood, and
the evolving Mother of Nature rejects any single act of Creation:

  A creed is a rod,

  And a crown is of night;

  But this thing is God,

  To be man with thy might,

  To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life as the light.

  I am in thee to save thee,

  As my soul in thee saith;

  Give thou as I gave thee,

  Thy life-blood and breath,

  Green leaves of thy labour, white flowers of thy thought, and red fruit of thy death.

  . . . . .

  I that saw where ye trod

  The dim paths of the night

  Set the shadow called God

  In your skies to give light;

  But the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is in sight.

  The tree many-rooted

  That swells to the sky

  With frondage red-fruited,

  The life-tree am I;

  In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves: ye shall live and not die.

  But the Gods of your fashion

  That take and that give,

  In their pity and passion

  That scourge and forgive,

  They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off; they shall die and not live.

  We fashion God and pray to him because we are afraid. With Sadean gusto, the earth goddess tells us that creeds are whips and that our darkness imposes kingship upon us. The true God emanates from Blake’s apocalyptic humanism, and Swinburne again echoes Shelley’s Promethean hope and Emerson’s grand remark: “As men’s prayers are a disease of their will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.” Hertha, the goddess within, saves us from jingoism and religion. She pays tribute to Swinburne’s hero of Italian liberation, Mazzini, with the green, white, and red colors of Italy’s flag. Waning Christianities are seen as lights that vanish as the sun rises. The God of Western monotheism is dismissed as a shadow, and instead the ash World-Tree of Northern myth, Yggdrasil, mounts up to the sky from its myriad roots: