by Harold Bloom
My own blood is what stanches
The wounds in my bark;
Stars caught in my branches
Make day of the dark,
And are worshipped as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their fires as a spark.
. . . . .
That noise is of Time,
As his feathers are spread
And his feet set to climb
Through the boughs overhead,
And my foliage rings round him and rustles, and branches are bent with his tread.
The storm-winds of ages
Blow through me and cease,
The war-wind that rages,
The spring-wind of peace,
Ere the breath of them roughen my tresses, ere one of my blossoms increase.
. . . . .
All forms of all faces,
All works of all hands
In unsearchable places
Of time-stricken lands,
All death and all life, and all reigns and all ruins, drop through me as sands.
Though sore be my burden
And more than ye know,
And my growth have no guerdon
But only to grow,
Yet I fail not of growing for lightnings above me or deathworms below.
These too have their part in me,
As I too in these;
Such fire is at heart in me,
Such sap is this tree’s,
Which hath in it all sounds and all secrets of infinite lands and of seas.
Hertha might well be Krishna speaking to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, declaring that he contains everything and that liberation can be reached in every act and thought. But Swinburne’s Hertha is a polemicist unceasingly battling against religiosity and tyranny. Also, she promises no Mary Gordon or reward for herself or for the reader. There is only growth. Echoing the high song of Shelley’s “To a Skylark” throughout, her hymn is rather prolix; Swinburne envied but could not emulate Shelley’s uncanny speed of cadence and precision of trope. Much as I have always been fascinated by Hertha, I could wish it shorter. Nevertheless, the poem raises itself to an eloquent drive beyond the pleasure principle in its closing strophes:
. . . . .
I bid you but be;
I have need not of prayer;
I have need of you free
As your mouths of mine air;
That my heart may be greater within me, beholding the fruits of me fair.
More fair than strange fruit is
Of faiths ye espouse;
In me only the root is
That blooms in your boughs;
Behold now your God that ye made you, to feed him with faith of your vows.
In the darkening and whitening
Abysses adored,
With dayspring and lightning
For lamp and for sword,
God thunders in heaven, and his angels are red with the wrath of the Lord.
. . . . .
Lo, winged with world’s wonders,
With miracles shod,
With the fires of his thunders
For raiment and rod,
God trembles in heaven, and his angels are white with the terror of God.
For his twilight is come on him,
His anguish is here;
And his spirits gaze dumb on him,
Grown grey from his fear;
And his hour taketh hold on him stricken, the last of his infinite year.
Thought made him and breaks him,
Truth slays and forgives;
But to you, as time takes him,
This new thing it gives,
Even love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives.
. . . . .
One birth of my bosom;
One beam of mine eye;
One topmost blossom
That scales the sky;
Man, equal and one with me, man that is made of me, man that is I.
Victor Hugo’s sense of the Abyss in his posthumously published mythopoeic brief epics, The End of Satan and God, is employed here free-style, and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” hovers in the foreground. The Northern prophecy of the twilight of the gods will be fulfilled by all the Christianities. Freedom will be Shelleyan: “love, the beloved Republic,” and we will be made one with a Nature different indeed from Wordsworthian imaginings.
“Hertha,” like most of Swinburne, has lost its audience, but that is indeed an aesthetic sorrow. In his elegy for Baudelaire, “Ave Atque Vale,” the title taken from the final line of Catullus’s lament for his brother, Swinburne concludes nobly with the legend of Niobe, whose children were slain by Apollo and Artemis, to satisfy their jealous mother, Leto:
For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
Take at my hands this garland, and farewell.
Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,
And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother,
With sadder than the Niobean womb,
And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb.
Content thee, howsoe’er, whose days are done;
There lies not any troublous thing before,
Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,
For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
All waters as the shore.
Those last five lines never leave me. I lose old friends every month or so now. Consolation is difficult to find, but elegiac poetry helps. Swinburne praised Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” as “the most sonorous nocturne ever chanted in the church of the world.” Later, the mercurial and alcoholic disciple of Sade recanted, but the eulogy stands. “Hertha” and a score of other poems by Swinburne are permanent achievements and will survive their current eclipse.
[ Part Four ]
THE IMPERFECT IS OUR PARADISE:
WALT WHITMAN
AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY
AMERICAN POETRY
The Psalms and Walt Whitman
I ONCE SPENT an afternoon with the late Richard Wilbur, admirable poet and translator. He began by reading to me his poem “A Black Birch in Winter,” which had just appeared in the Atlantic, in January 1974. I requested a copy and wish to discuss it here in honor of his memory, since he died only two months ago, on October 14, 2017, at the age of ninety-six:
You might not know this old tree by its bark,
Which once was striate, smooth, and glossy-dark,
So deep now are the rifts that separate
Its roughened surface into flake and plate.
Fancy might less remind you of a birch
Than of mosaic columns in a church
Like Ara Coeli or the Lateran
Or the trenched features of an aged man.
Still, do not be too much persuaded by
These knotty furrows and these tesserae
To think of patterns made from outside in
Or finished wisdom in a shriveled skin.
Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth,
New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth,
And this is all their wisdom and their art—
To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.
Dick was only in his early fifties when he wrote this, yet it is an old man’s poem, suitable for me at the age of eighty-seven. It is December 16, 2017, and New Haven is cold and icy. I wince a little at “flake and plate,” nod at “Or the trenched features of an aged man,” and hearten a little at being urged not to be too much persuaded to think I am unfinished wisdom in a shriveled skin. I w
ish I could believe fully in the final stanza, but would be content still “To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.”
At Wilbur’s suggestion, we alternated reading aloud to each other some of the Psalms, as well as passages from “Song of Myself.” It was his idea that Whitman used the Psalms as his model. We know that Whitman’s father and mother were followers of the radical Quaker circuit-riding Elias Hicks. In old age, Walt recalled hearing Hicks preach and continued to regard him as one of the prophets. The style of the Hicksite meetings encouraged participation and testimony and the singing of Psalms. It is important to have a clear conception of the Psalms before we fully encounter Whitman.
Biblical style in English carries on it the palpable impress of the Protestant martyr William Tyndale (1494–1536). Strangled and then burned, with the approval of Henry VIII, Tyndale did not have time to complete his translation of the Christian Old Testament, as he had the New. All English Bibles after Tyndale manifest his continued presence, and not only because he was the crucial forerunner. It is not excessive to judge that, after Shakespeare and Chaucer, Tyndale may be the greatest writer in the language. We go about daily—many of us—unknowingly repeating sentences, phrases, and words invented by Tyndale as by Shakespeare. The Geneva Bible (1560) was Shakespeare’s resource, from Shylock and Falstaff in 1596 onward, and continued to be favored by John Milton. For most of the English, it yielded to the Authorized Version or King James Bible (1611), which maintains its hold on the English-speaking world, though that may be shifting. Both the Geneva and King James Bibles follow Tyndale wherever they can, so that he remains, with Shakespeare, a comprehensive influence upon us.
David Daniell, Tyndale’s biographer, has written persuasively concerning the translator’s effect upon Shakespeare’s various styles in the later tragedies. Tyndale is the master, when he chooses to be, of a style of plain speaking: short pronouncements held together by parataxis, with no subordinate clauses. “Parataxis” is a word I employ reluctantly (it makes my students unhappy), but there is no good substitute for it, whether in discussing Tyndale and Shakespeare, or Walt Whitman and Hemingway. It is from the Greek for “placing side by side” and emphasizes a way of juxtaposing phrases that is central to the style of Biblical Hebrew, with its parallel syntactic clauses, which tend also to possess a parallelism of meaning.
Shakespeare’s grand gift, for phrasing so memorably that we find the language inevitable, is very nearly matched by Tyndale’s outspoken directness of address, what Daniell calls his “everyday manner,” and his aversion to Latinity. Getting Tyndale out of my head seems to me impossible: “Let there be light, and there was light”; “In him we live, and move, and have our being”; “Am I my brother’s keeper?”; “The signs of the times”; “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”; “Hast thou power wrestled with God and with men, and hast prevailed”; and scores of others. Whether I immerse myself in the Geneva or the King James Bible, Tyndale’s genius (though not his Protestant zeal) enriches me.
The book of Psalms, particularly in the King James Version, is the best-known part of the Hebrew Bible (or Christian Old Testament, if you will). Psalm 23, in its King James text, indubitably is recognized even by people who have never read the Bible: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Though ascribed to King David, whose historical existence is as uncertain as that of his supposed descendant Jesus, the Psalms are no more David’s than the Song of Songs is Solomon’s or the Five Books Moses’s. There is not much in the Bible, whether Hebrew or Christian, that can withstand historical skepticism. The Exodus is as mythical as the Creation, or the Crucifixion. In the United States at this time, religion is politicized, and no one running for office dares to be other than outwardly pious. The abyss between the United States and Western Europe (barring Ireland) is now absolute, in this area.
Scholars agree that the Psalms are an anthology, or a bundle of anthologies, composed during six centuries. Many of the songs were written for use in the Jerusalem Temple, though later Psalms clearly tend to have been created for other purposes. We are likely to characterize all 150 Psalms as “religious poetry,” but that is disputable. Six centuries of a poetic tradition, analogous to English poetry from Chaucer through Yeats, necessarily develop what we could now regard as aesthetic competition. Even with the esoteric tradition of Kabbalah, it helps to consider the literary motives of Kabbalistic authors, who frequently have an agonistic relation to one another.
Some of the early Psalms show a debt to Canaanite mythology, which was polytheistic. From 996 to 457 B.C.E. and beyond is an ocean of time. From Judges past the return from Babylon, ideas of God underwent many metamorphoses. The Authorized Version smooths out differences, but the God the Psalms address has varied guises that closeness to the Hebrew text is better able to reveal. Theologically, Tyndale and his progeny were Calvinists, and Yahweh is not a Presbyterian. But how refreshing it is to read the Psalms in their abrupt rhythms, cleared of irrelevant Protestant “salvation history.” There is no Jewish theology before the Hellenistic Philo of Alexandria. Theology, a Greek idea and term, is alien to the Hebrew Bible. When I encounter discussions of “the theology of the Old Testament,” I wander off, but I am held by its darkly economical texts.
Hebrew tradition always refers to the book of Psalms by a noun meaning “praises.” On their surface, the Psalms praise Yahweh (under various names), and even the frequent appeals for his help abound with overtones of gratitude. From childhood through old age, I have been made uncomfortable by a God who demands sacrifices that are also thanksgivings. Post-Holocaust, this will not work for many among us, and I frequently retreat from the Psalms to the poetry of Paul Celan, which has a difficult rightness, and does not seek to praise what no longer can be praised.
The Psalms give us a Yahweh who himself is a living labyrinth of parallelisms and parataxis. Tradition affirms that Yahweh gave us Hebrew; did Hebrew syntax give us Yahweh? The Hebrew language, Yahweh, and his book, Tanakh, pragmatically are the same.
I wonder whether ancient Hebrew thinking is still available to us at all. Perhaps only Shakespeare rethought everything through for himself; the Psalms do not, though we can scarcely pick out what may once have been original in them. Was it a making of praise, gratitude, supplication, even despair into modes of thinking? Angus Fletcher and A. D. Nuttall, both in Wittgenstein’s wake, gave us useful conjectures as to how Shakespeare thought. Biblical thinking is mostly opaque to our understanding, and the Psalms particularly puzzle me, since many of them are and yet are not prayers. The human analogues may aid in apprehending the Psalms. Anyone called upon too frequently to endorse books and students learns that praise can be both a subtle kind of thinking or rethinking, and also a treacherous one.
The God of the Psalms has comforted multitudes, whether in the valley of decision, or in the valley of the shadow of death. He does not comfort me, because I do not know how to think in a realm of gratitude. When I returned to life this late August, after nine days in a hospital recovering from a syncope, I went back to reading Shakespeare instead of the Bible. There is no separation between life and literature in Shakespeare. Because of American politics, and our crusading zeal abroad, one needs to keep the Bible apart from the way we live now.
The Psalms are a bolder and more problematic field for literary energies and knowledge to explore than either the Five Books or the David saga, because ancient Hebrew poetry seems untranslatable into contemporary American English. The King James Psalms are familiar, comforting or daunting, and almost continuously eloquent. Yet there is little that is Hebraic about them; they have become marvelous Christian prose poems. I prefer to be rougher about this two-thousand-year-old theft. The Old Testament is a captive work dragged along in the triumphal wake of Christianity. Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, is the Original Testament; the New Testament actually is the Belated Testament. I wince when my Jewish students speak of the Old Testament. Yet there are perhaps fourt
een million self-identified Jews now alive, and some two billion, three hundred million ostensible Christians. The arithmetic is beyond me, but if God is with the big battalions, then he would seem to have forsaken his People of the Book.
Tyndale was a far stronger writer than Anthony Gilbey and his Geneva Bible colleagues, or than Gilbey’s revisionists in King James. But Gilbey too was an extraordinary prose-poet—though, however good his Hebrew may have been, his intentions were doctrinal rather than aesthetic. The abruptness of the Hebrew, its powerful economy, is transferred to us, but the results sometimes are jagged. I start now with Tyndale, who rendered Psalm 18, embedded in 2 Samuel 22, and parts of Psalms 105, 96, and 106, included in 1 Chronicles 16. Here is the opening of Tyndale’s Psalm 18:
And he said: The Lord is my rock, my castle and my deliverer. God is my strength, and in him will I trust: my shield and the horn that defendeth me: mine high hold and refuge: O my Saviour, save me from wrong.
I will praise and call on the Lord, and so shall be saved from mine enemies. For the waves of death have closed me about, and the floods of Belial have feared me. The cords of hell have compassed me about, and the snares of death have overtaken me. In my tribulation I called to the Lord, and cried to my God. And he heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry entered into his ears. And the earth trembled and quoke and the foundations of heaven moved and shook, because he was angry.
Smoke went up out of his nostrils, and consuming fire out of his mouth, that coals were kindled of him. And he bowed heaven and came down, and darkness underneath his feet. And he rode upon Cherub and flew: and appeared upon the wings of the wind. And he made darkness a tabernacle round about him, with water gathered together in thick clouds. Of the brightness, that was before him, coals were set on fire.
The Lord thundered from heaven, and the Most High put out his voice. And he shot arrows and scattered them, and hurled lightning and turmoiled them. And the bottom of the sea appeared, and the foundations of the world were seen, by the reason of the rebuking of the Lord, and through the blasting of the breath of his nostrils. He sent from on high and fetched me, and plucked me out of mighty waters.
