by Judy Jones
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay,
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury with ful devout corage,
At night was come into that hostelrye
Wel nine and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle
That toward Canterbury wolden ride.
The chambres and the stables weren wide,
And wel we weren esed at the beste.
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,
So hadde I spoken with hem everichoon
That I was of hir felaweshipe anoon,
And made forward erly for to rise,
To take oure way ther as I you devise.
from “The General Prologue,”
The Canterbury Tales (1386–1400)
The first wave of English poetry (give or take Beowulf), the tales-within-a-tale being shared by twenty-nine pilgrims en route to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket in Canterbury provide a bard’s-eye view of social classes, economic brackets, and personality disorders in medieval England. Note that the Tabard, where the pilgrims spend their first night out, is one of the famous inns of literature. And that the pilgrims, from the Knight to the Wife of Bath to the Miller, will come to seem as recognizable a bunch of human types as, say, the ensemble in Robert Altman’s Nashville. Note, too, that three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, French words are almost as integral to Middle English (that’s what Chaucer’s writing in) as Anglo-Saxon ones. Speaking of which, if you’re going to tackle the Tales at all, you might as well go for the authentic Middle English version rather than a lame modernization (although you’ll certainly need all the footnotes you can find). And try reading the “Prologue” aloud; once you get the hang of it, Chaucer’s English is surprisingly melodious, even if it does sound a little like Norwegian. EDMUND SPENSER
He there does now enjoy eternall rest
And happie ease, which thou doest want and crave,
And further from it daily wanderest.
What if some little paine the passage have
That makes fraile flesh to feare the bitter wave?
Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.
from The Faerie Queene (1590–1596)
Book I, Canto 9
With characters like King Arthur, Queen Elizabeth, Venus, the Angel Gabriel, Adam and Eve, and Despair (that’s him above, trying to convince the Red Crosse Knight to commit suicide), The Faerie Queene isn’t just England’s first epic, it’s also its first theme park. Though Spenser meant to write twelve books, each celebrating a different knightly virtue, he managed to finish only the first six—to almost nobody’s chagrin. Wildly uneven, The Faerie Queene can go on for pages without producing a single line, image, or insight you care about, then dazzle you by summing up (and sometimes even solving) the sort of personal problem you’ve spent the last five sessions trying to thrash out with your shrink. The two main themes (both fleshed out allegorically, with characters and scenery embodying historical events and ideas): medieval chivalry (already, in Spenser’s day, pretty much a memory) and Protestant Christianity (still, in Spenser’s day, requiring some getting used to). But don’t worry too much about who’s supposed to be Mary Tudor and who’s supposed to be Francis Drake. Better to keep moving, just the way you would at Six Flags. JOHN DONNE
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and harkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (1633)
The first and best of the Metaphysical poets, Donne broke away from the conventions of the Elizabethan sonnet and the courtly love poem to invent a poetry characterized by a dense, almost incomprehensibly learned style, extremely complicated imagery, a zillion offbeat references to the arts, sciences, crafts, and daily life of the times, and a fractured meter and syntax that were meant at times to sound conversational, at other times simply to knock your socks off. His poetry tends to be ironic and erotic or heartfelt and impassioned, depending on which of his two favorite obsessions—love or death—he is focusing on at the time (love, naturally enough, in the early poems; death later on). In both he is wise and intellectually astute, and in the love poems—more precisely, the dissection-of-the-psychology-of-love poems—he’s not only sharp and smart, he’s also more modern than you are. Metaphysical poetry enjoyed a brief vogue in the early seventeenth century, but Donne didn’t really come into his own until the twentieth. JOHN MILTON
High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence; and, from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue Vain war with Heaven; and, by success untaught,
His proud imaginations thus displayed:—
“Powers and Dominions, Deities of Heaven!
For, since no deep within her gulf can hold
Immortal vigour, though oppressed and fallen,
I give not Heaven for lost: from this descent
Celestial Virtues rising will appear
More glorious and more dread than from no fall,
And trust themselves to fear no second fate!—”
from Paradise Lost (1658–1665), Book II
Milton claimed to have written it to “justify the ways of God to man,” but you’d be smart to interpret it as his attempt to one-up Homer, Virgil, and Dante; an outcry by a no-nonsense Puritan against the high-flown Church of England; and an exercise in style-as-substance, with loftiness the upshot in both departments. The most celebrated English poet after Shakespeare, Milton erected a major edifice, gilded and soaring, where Spenser had gone for sheer acreage. Keep three things in mind as you read: (1) It’s still the Renaissance, at least up north, that time during which man was trying to get a bead on who he (or she) was even as he (or she) sought to outperform the Greeks and Romans at their own games; (2) it’s not the theology that matters most here, it’s the scheme, sweep, effect; and (3) you aren’t the only one who thinks Milton’s Satan is infinitely more interesting than Milton’s God. Not enough hours in the day? Forget Paradise Lost and read “Lycidas,” Milton’s bite-sized elegy on the death of a sailor friend—sweet and intimate, yet abristle with the kind of poetic conviction you came to him for in the first place. ALEXANDER POPE
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great;
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created ha
lf to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
from An Essay on Man (1733–1734),
Epistle II
Poor Pope: He was a hunchback, he was barely five feet tall, and he was a Catholic, on account of the last of which he stands outside the Grand (read Protestant) Tradition of English poetry. His revenge: being more epigrammatic than anybody ever (with the possible exception of Oscar Wilde) and so quotable you don’t even know you’re quoting him—e.g., “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” “Damn with faint praise,” “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” and on through column after column of Bartlett’s. Historical note: This is the Augustan Age (also starring Swift, Addison, and Steele; so called because London had come to fancy itself the equal of Augustus’ Rome), a conservative, well-ordered era when rhyming couplets, fine manners, powdered wigs, and elaborate gardens were all you needed to get a reputation as a tastemaker. Not that Pope was himself one of the smugs. For sheer venom, spleen, and bile, his satires still haven’t been beat. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy
But he
Beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807)
A revolutionary in a revolutionary age and the first of the Romantics (Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley were the others, Blake a precursor), Wordsworth hated Pope, arguing that memory counted for more than wit, imagination for more than reason, and nature for more than gazebos and topiary hedges. Visual, subjective, and basically all het up, he introduced a style he thought of as conversational (though you won’t), favored an everyday, even tabloid sort of subject matter (look for lyrics written to “The Idiot Boy,” “The Mad Mother,” and “The Female Vagrant”), and redefined poetry famously as “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Two big don’ts: Don’t think you have to read The Prelude, his longest, most ambitious, and most lethal poem. And don’t adopt him wholesale as your mentor: Wordsworth the revolutionary is notorious for having turned into Wordsworth the reactionary, a nasty old man given to campaigning against the abolition of slavery, the reform of Parliament, and the prevention of cruelty to animals. ROBERT BROWNING
I, painting from myself and to myself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men’s blame
Or their praise, either. Somebody remarks
Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced,
His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,
Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-gray
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain,
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
Our head would have o’erlooked the world!”
No doubt.
from “Andrea del Sarto” (1855)
His contemporary, Tennyson, got most of the attention at the time, but lately it’s Browning who’s become the hero, for blazing the trail of modernism in poetry with his jagged-edged dramatic monologues (in which the speaker reveals things about himself he has no idea he’s revealing) and his jazzy beat. Jettisoning the confessional style of the Romantics in favor of first-person narrative, Browning, though pre-Freud, manages to come across with a fair amount of sexual heat and even more psychoanalyzable content. On the negative side: He tries too hard ever to seem cool or commanding; he can drift off into stupid, just-what-you’d-expect-from-a-Victorian moralizing; and sometimes he sounds as if he thinks he’s writing for children. Personal note: Before he got famous, he was, for most people, Mr. Elizabeth Barrett. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations–at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its moral dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
from “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927)
Yeats (pronounce that “yates,” please) is generally ranked as one of the greatest— oh, let’s just go ahead and say the greatest—of twentieth-century poets. Partly mystical, partly earthy, and partly just plain Irish, he saw himself and his generation as the Last of the Romantics, and resisted all further categorization. His poetry varies from period to period, as does what can be deduced of his philosophy, but it tends to be made up of anecdotal material—some of it autobiography, some of it folklore, some of it occult theory, some of it current events—overlaid by symbolism and sensuality, all honed for maximum precision. Although he got bad press for becoming a Fascist later in life, he did not, like Wordsworth, turn into a bore, and his “mature” period is considered his best. In fact, he’s the poet laureate of old age, a subject with which he became obsessed, and several of his better-known poems, like the one above, provide models for growing old.
HOW TO TELL KEATS FROM SHELLEY
John Keats
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Keats is the one you’d play squash with. He wasn’t happy exactly, but he was better adjusted and less the outcast than Shelley, and it shows. (As a kid, Keats had been noisy and high-spirited, a bit of a hellion; Shelley was always coming home from the playground in tears.) Keats wrote letters that his friends couldn’t wait to get, and that literary critics and biographers delightedly pore over alongside his poetry; Shelley wrote letters in which he talked about himself a little too much, and it’s his essays—philosophical, high-flown, full of abstractions—that the scholars note. Of all the Romantic poets, Keats has worn the best, his stock never varying by more than a point or two; Shelley’s has wavered significantly, ever since T. S. Eliot branded his poetry “an affair of adolescence” and Lionel Trilling said he “should not be read, but inhaled through a gas pipe.” Be that as it may, it’s Shelley, high-principled and farsighted, you’d want by your side at the barricades.
As for the poetry, Keats’ is sensuous, concrete, and concentrated, with art-for-art’s-sake overtones. (It was he, after all, who wrote, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” though there’s some question as to whether he was being sarcastic.) Keats was a craftsman, with no theory to speak of; it’s commonplace to compare him, in the richness and confidence of his language, to Shakespeare, as in
these lines, from “Ode to a Nightingale”:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears among the alien corn; …
Shelley’s poetry is less solid, more shifting and translucent, more volatile. Unlike Keats, who was at home in the world of things and who was capable of both greed and earthiness, Shelley was able to say of himself, “You know, I always seek in what I see the manifestation of some thing beyond the present and tangible object.” (He was also able to address an unsuspecting skylark, “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!”) A radical, full of black despair, Shelley, like Wordsworth, was deemed “a voice of the age.” This is how that voice sounds, in the early “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”:
