Poets Who Matter: Keats, Part IV; or, I like to think my soul is not a clod
The matter of career came up during conversation with a friend I met for a drink on the last Monday of 2009, just before we attended a fine 3 Friends poetry reading that featured Andrew MacArthur, Neil Anderson, and Patrick Bocarde. My friend — call her J. — is casting about for an acceptable career while she finds her way as a poet. At some point in the conversation she inquired about my career. I explained that I never thought of myself as having one of those. There is no career, just whatever ways to generate income that I have fallen into: bookstore clerk and quasi-manager, editor in the employ of a state legislature, fund-raising functionary, a stint pretending to be a freelance writer-editor-proofreader. I put it this way, pretending, because while I do good work, I am less than adept at promoting myself and there is not an entrepreneurial bone in my body, so it comes as no surprise the endeavor never generated much income.
career : n 1 a : speed in a course <ran at full ~> 1 b : course, passage 2 : encounter, charge 3 : a field for or pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement esp. in public, professional, or business life <Washington’s ~ as a soldier> 4 : a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling <a ~ in medicine> <a ~ diplomat>
career vi as a verb: to go at top speed esp. in a headlong manner <a car ~ed off the road>
Meanings 3 and 4 of the noun version are along the lines of what J. had in mind when she spoke of career, implicit in it that this is the manner in which one earns a living. As I have noted elsewhere, if I had it to do over again, I might have sought to make a place for myself in academia. That is where my career would have been if I had one. Youthful romanticism led me away from the university, and I never made my way back. I say this without illusion or idealization, for as a friend recently pointed out, the unfortunate reality is that universities are intensely political places and if you don’t play the politics, you get chewed up and spit out. It is not a given that I would have thrived there. Weighed against that recognition is my experience with wage-work in a variety of honorable employments among many good and some exceptional people, where I have toiled always diligently and conscientiously and on occasion well but at a cost to what is best in me. The work I found demanded my lesser talents at the expense of those valued more highly and held more dear. Perhaps this is my failing. Had I been more clever, more wise, I might have found a way to make my way.
vocation : n 1 a : a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action; esp : a divine call to the religious life 1 b : an entry into the priesthood or a religious order 2 a : the work in which a person is regularly employed : occupation 2 b : the persons engaged in a particular occupation 3 : the special function of an individual or group
My sense of myself as a poet is central to the poetry I make, and this sense is grounded in a notion of vocation or calling. Yes, all very romantic, quite impractical, the kind of thing many people experience in their teens and early twenties and mature out of to make their way in the world of practical affairs. For ill or not, I never did that.
Poets who matter most to us seem to speak directly to our deepest concerns. Not that they offer the final word on age-old questions of existence and meaning. Rather, they keep the cauldron bubbling by stirring our questioning anew.
…Who alive can say,
‘Thou art no Poet — mayst not tell thy dreams’?
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
I like to think my soul is not a clod, as John Keats put it in these introductory lines from “The Fall of Hyperion,” and there are moments my spirit soars with vision when the wind is with me and wisps of cloud streak the blue of the sky.
The main body of the poem begins at line 19, opening in an Edenic setting where the narrator finds “a feast of summer fruits, / which, nearer seen, seemed refuse of a meal / By angel tasted, or our Mother Eve.” He “ate deliciously, / And after not long, thirsted, for thereby / Stood a vessel of transparent juice / Sipped by the wandered bee…”
Naturally he drinks and, quelle surprise, the transparent juice turns out to be a powerful drug that renders him unconscious. Upon awakening he finds himself transported to some strange ruin, an old sanctuary with a roof “Builded so high, it seemed that filmed clouds / Might spread beneath, as ‘er the stars of heaven.” (lines 63–64)
To west he sees “far off / An Image; huge of feature as a cloud, / At level of whose feet an altar slept, / To be approached on either side by steps, / And marble balustrade, and patient travail / To count with toil the innumerable degrees” (lines 88–92)
A voice that turns out to be Moneta, the admonisher, warns him:
…’If thou canst not ascend
These steps, die on that marble where thou art.
Thy flesh, near cousin to the common dust,
Will parch for lack of nutriment — thy bones
Will wither in few years, and vanish so
That not the quickest eye could find a grain
Of what thou now art on that pavement cold.
The sands of thy short life are spent this hour,
And no hand in the universe can turn
Thy hourglass, if these gummed leaves be burnt
Ere thou canst mount up these immortal steps.’ (lines 107–117)
To gain the lowest step takes all the narrator’s strength, and in the effort he comes near death, as
…a palsied chill
Struck from the pavèd level up my limbs,
And was ascending quick to put cold grasp
Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat.
…
Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold
Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart;
And when I clasped my hands I felt them not. (lines 122–131)
But “One minute before death, my iced foot touched / The lowest stair; and as it touched, life seemed / To pour in at the toes…”
Who is he to feel what it is to die and live again before his fated hour? The goddess explains.
‘None can usurp this height…
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
All else who find a haven in the world,
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
If by a chance into this fane they come,
Rot on the pavement where thou rott’st half.’ (lines 147–153)
…
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low —
The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. (lines 172–177)
…
…’Art thou not of the dreamer tribe?
The dreamer and the poet are distinct,
Diverse sheer opposites, antipodes.
The one pours out a balm upon the world,
The other vexes it.’ (lines 198–202)
Ah, I am at a loss to express my delight in these incredibly rich passages. I love this stuff. Two thoughts occur straight off. First, how do these lines play with those from the beginning of the poem: “Who alive can say / Thou art no Poet…”? The earlier passage implies that poetry lies within the province of pretty much everyone, while the goddess suggests that poetry is the fate of “those to whom the miseries of the world / Are misery, and will not let them rest.” Or is it dreamers, not poets at all, to whom the goddess refers? Second, and far from least for one such as I, the question must be asked: Am I poet or dreamer? Which is it? We know which I would like to think myself, but who am I to say?
The narrator shouts back at the goddess:
‘Apollo! Faded, far-flown Apollo!
Where is thy misty pestilence to creep
Into the dwellings, through the door crannies,
Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers
And careless hectorers in proud bad verse.
Though I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.
Majestic shadow, tell me where I am,
Whose altar is this; for whom this incense curls;
What image this, whose face I cannot see,
For the broad marble knees; and who thou art,
Of accent feminine so courteous?’
This place is the temple of Saturn, leader of the deposed Titans, who are “…swallowed up / And buried from all godlike exercise / Of influence benign on planets pale,” Saturn himself a God changed into a shaking palsy with no strength left, and the one who speaks is Moneta the muse, sole priestess of Saturn’s desolation.
‘Mortal, that thou mayst understand aright,
I humanize my sayings to thine ear,
Making comparisons of earthly things;
Or thou mightst better listen to the wind,
Whose language is to thee a barren noise,
Though it blows legend-laden through the trees —
Moneta goes on to tell that though the Titans have fallen,
…one of our whole eagle-brood still keeps
His sovereignty, and rule, and majesty;
Blazing Hyperion on his orbèd fire
Still sits, still snuffs the incense teeming up
From man to the sun’s God — yet unsecure.
As the story concludes, Hyperion “leaving twilight in the rear,” the poem drawn thus to an end, the narrator finds himself standing in clear light.
Anon rushed by the bright Hyperion;
His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels,
And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scared away the meek ethereal Hours,
And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared…
So which is it? Poet or dreamer? Keats, if we take the narrator to speak for him, does not take lightly the charge that he is a dreaming thing, a fever of himself. He is at once generous — “every man whose soul is not a clod / Hath visions, and would speak…” — and not above taking a shot at “mock lyrists, large self-worshippers / And careless hectorers in proud bad verse. / Though I breathe death with them it will be life / To see them sprawl before me into graves.”
Poets who matter most to us seem to speak directly to our deepest concerns. Not that they offer the final word on age-old questions of existence and meaning. Rather, they keep the cauldron bubbling by stirring our questioning anew.
You know my ideas about Religion—I do not think myself more in the right than other people and that nothing in this world is proveable. I wish I could enter into all your feelings on the subject merely for one short 10 Minutes and give you a Page or two to your liking. I am sometimes so very skeptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance—As Trademen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer—being in itself a nothing—Ethereal thing[s] may at least be thus real, divided under three heads—Things real—things semireal—and no things—Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakspeare—Things semireal such as Love, the Clouds &c which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit—Which by the by stamps the burgundy mark on the bottles of our Minds, insomuch as they are able to “consec[r]ate whate’er they look upon“… (Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 13 March 1818)
We look to poets such as Keats to spur us to think of fresh ways to think about ourselves and the paths we have bumbled onto, which may be in part an act of rationalization, but is in better part an assertion of value, a nothing made great and dignified by an ardent pursuit, stamping the burgundy mark on the bottles of our minds insomuch as they bring value to the world. Yes, I know, ignoble ends may be pursued every bit as ardently as noble ones. Our leaps of faith may carry us into the abyss, but as my old French teacher Marie-Laure used to say, “So whacha gon’ do?” We leap. We stand as best we can for what is best in us and in the world.
Three previous essays on John Keats appeared on Memo from the Fringes:
Poets Who Matter: John Keats (1795–1821)
Poets Who Matter: More Keats
Poets Who Matter: Thinking of Keats
David :: Jan.31.2010 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »