Hello Victorianists,
For Thursday we are reading poems on the topic of faith and doubt by
two of the most spiritually conflicted figures of Victorian literature: Matthew
Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins. As we
know, the Victorian period witnessed an array of challenges to the Christian
faith that had for centuries been part of the bedrock of British culture. Both Hopkins and Arnold grapple with this
perceived erosion of faith, albeit from different perspectives.
Arnold was profoundly uncomfortable in his cultural moment. On the one hand, he was the product of a doubting age, abandoning the Christian faith of his upbringing for agnosticism when young. On the other, he saw nothing else in the modern era that could unite people and give meaning to life as true faith once had. In his poem “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” he describes himself as one who is “wandering” between past and present, “between two worlds, one dead,/ The other powerless to be born” (85-86). “Dover Beach” seeks to find solace for the erosion of shared faith in interpersonal relationships. You might consider how satisfying the speaker finds this solution.
Arnold was profoundly uncomfortable in his cultural moment. On the one hand, he was the product of a doubting age, abandoning the Christian faith of his upbringing for agnosticism when young. On the other, he saw nothing else in the modern era that could unite people and give meaning to life as true faith once had. In his poem “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” he describes himself as one who is “wandering” between past and present, “between two worlds, one dead,/ The other powerless to be born” (85-86). “Dover Beach” seeks to find solace for the erosion of shared faith in interpersonal relationships. You might consider how satisfying the speaker finds this solution.
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| Storms off Dover Beach, 1840. |
Hopkins, by contrast, struggled fiercely
to maintain his belief. On the one hand,
he was so moved by faith that he left his Anglican upbringing to convert to
Catholicism and abandoned a promising academic career to work as a priest. Much of his work attempts to comprehend the
presence of divinity in the natural world (“The Windhover” and “As kingfishers
catch fire” are two examples). On the
other hand, he underwent a traumatic crisis of faith, documented in what are
often called his “Terrible Sonnets” (which include “Carrion Comfort” and “No
worse, there is none”). Hopkins’
rhythms, syntactic play, and dense sonic patterns give his poetry a unique
sound; you might consider how these unusual formal elements operate in his
works.
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| A Kingfisher |
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| Pages from Hopkins' journal from June 30, 1846. |
Hopkins poems are a whirlwind of sound. It took a couple of readings to even start to attack the meaning of the poems, since the pure sound of them – the alliteration, the internal rhyme, the interesting rhyme scheme, the piling of syllables and images – was so overwhelming and rich. The use of repetition and like sounding words and syllables added to the confusion – “Pitched past pitch of grief, more pangs…” in “No Worst, There is None” and “this morning morning’s minion” in “The Windhover” and “But ah, but O” in “Carrion Comfort” for example. Hopkins is also heavily fond of commas, breaks and enjambments, further complicating his already complex statements. In “Carrion Comfort” for example, his combination of repetition and enjambment leaves the reader totally unsure of his meaning: “…cry I can no more. I can; Can something…”As a result, as I said, getting to what he was actually saying took a fair amount of effort (and even then…things weren’t exactly obvious).
ReplyDeleteI found his poem “The Windhover” very fascinating, especially due to its interesting dedication. My first assumption, upon reading the dedication, to “Christ his Lord”, was that the poem would be highly spiritual. Yet the poem’s subject seems to be entirely physical. The beauty of the falcon in flight – a lovely description, one that seems to echo the flight itself in its swoops and falls – but a subject of mere “brute beauty and valour” as he says himself. It was entirely unclear what the moral was, spiritual component one would expect from a holy poem. It’s also strange for the poet to be addressing the falcon as his “chevalier” and his “dear.” If he wants to write a sonnet to a passing bird, so be it, but why then dedicate it to his God?
In "no worse there is none" the language is just intriguing. "More pangs, will schooled at forepangs, wilder wring." I can't even really say that I know what this is saying, but I think the effect it has is deep. When someone is struggling internally, often times there are really no words to express the pain or confusion, and sometimes just the sound of words and not the definition can help express that. There are many "W" sounds in the poem: wilder, wring, where, wretch, whirlwind. This sound I feel connotes confusion, or a feeling of being mixed-up. As opposed to a hard sound like a "c" or "t", "w" sound is neither hard, not really soft like an "a". A "w" is a flighty sound, that is almost wind like, and I think that works very well with the idea of the poem. In addition, there is almost a struggling or gasping feeling to how one would read this poem. The repetition of words like "where,where" and "then lull, then leave off" when read out loud, almost forces you to emphasize the second word, which makes the poem sound like it's read with desperation, in addition, the unusual format like "ling- gering" forces you to pause and breath which can also give a more desperate struggling feel to the poem.
ReplyDeleteUnlike some of our Victorian authors, Matthew Arnold does not seem like he would be the most fun to be around at a party, (looking at you Christina Rossetti). However, Dover Beach gave me chills, and the more I read it, the more I loved it. The poem starts with a false impression, “The sea is calm to-night.” It ends with a period, this thought is simple and closed, much like the sea. But that is not how the poem continues. The very next like employs enjambment, pushing the reader on, making it seems as if the lines are crashing into each other, overflowing like the ocean. In line 7, Arnold begins with “only,” pointing out the real way to truly explore the sea is to listen (line 9). The way the words sound seem to mean more than the way they look. The calm beginning lulls the reader into a false sense of security that is quickly dashed by the overwhelmingly unreliable rhyme scheme, and enjambment.
ReplyDeleteArnold invokes Sophocles and this invocation coupled with the enjambment reminds the reader that the past is not as far off as one might think. We are tied to them by the moon, and sea, but also by our failures as a species. This failure is pointed out in line 21 when the sea he is looking at becomes “The Sea of Faith.” It gets its own line; this is important the poem yells. Arnold explains that faith should be like a girdle, tightening humanity, perhaps bringing past and future together. But now, faith has become as wild and uncontainable as the sea.
The poem has a strange meter as well. For example, lines 33-34 are in iambic pentameter, while line 36 begins trochaic but soon breaks out of that meter. It is as if the poem itself is struggling with the same chaos that Arnold sees in the world.
Can I just say, I love the line, “where ignorant armies clash by night,” (looking at you Republican Candidates).
I’m going to focus on Arnold for two reasons: 1. I will get completely lost and incoherent as I try to plot out why I like Hopkins’ sonic play so much, and 2. I love the experience of recognizing an oft-referenced line in its original work.
ReplyDeleteNot that there isn’t a lovely sense of sonic play to Arnold’s “Dover Beach” as well. He /does/ rhyme his line endings--their couplet (or triplet) partners are just not necessarily in close proximity to each other. This gives a sense of ebbing and flowing, but it’s not necessarily the rhythmic sort that one thinks of when they imagine a sea. It’s more of… an echo, perhaps, that bounces back late, or if it is the actual sea, the waves aren’t running smoothly but crashing up against a sandbar and cause a delay in return and onset. “The sea is calm to-night,” yet it is very much not so. Everything is on uneven footing, yet always gets resolved in the end.
Arnold describes the Sea of Faith with a roar, which is odd partially because the speaker is trying so hard to be tranquil, and also because faith does not seem to be a “roaring” thing, perhaps more dignified than a word used to describe beasts and rushing chaotic noise. And those waters are described only to be rushing away and outward, “retreating,” which makes it sound as if the waters are all leaving the beaches and stranding everyone standing there further inland. And what with cliffs: if there is no water at the bottom, people are stuck alone atop those mountains with no way off. It all just creates (at least for me) this exceedingly hopeless yet almost natural picture of the sea leaving and never coming back in, and the “breath/Of the night wind” goes out with it, so everything is just… empty silence. And in that image, the faith is the water, or perhaps his god is the water, and it all abandons him in a world with no noise at all, roaring and beastly or otherwise.
England without its beaches is… unfathomable, I think, both geographically and culturally/mentally/emotionally for its inhabitants. Comparing his fluctuating or completely evaporated faith to such a concept is brilliant. It /would/ cause the metaphorical companion to the panic and struggle along the (modern?) darkling plain. Of course, armies already clash for other reasons, but the metaphor has the potential to run deep in many channels, and each one is a legitimate cause for emotional turmoil and panic at the loss of whatever the sea might mean in each given scenario.
Forget "she sells seashells by the seashore"! Move on in Mr. Hopkins and The Windhover. I've got a thing for alliteration, and "I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon" is not the worst way to suck a girl in. Hopkins has this cheeky subversive way of inserting that which is just off or unexpected, a skill used to phenomenal effect when he goes on his Windhover assonance tirade; in piling on the similitudes he repeatedly defies the expectation that the moment of lyrical similarity in sound must inevitably come to end. His playfulness in language is in dissonance with a poem dedicated "to Christ our Lord," as is his choice of opening the poem with "I," a redirect from the supposed dedicatee. Yes, J-man is the metaphorical subject, but the focus is emphatically on the speaker's perception and observation of Jesus. It follows, then, that, having looked up what on earth a "windhover" is, the poem's title is also in odd company with Jesus. A predatory bird? I get the whole walking on water/hovering in the air connect, but is a bird waiting to pounce and destroy and kill and break the neck of his next meal really a cozy image to have of one's divine character? Also, this is a sonnet! What! It took me a couple of readings to catch that. In a smoke-and-mirrors effect similar to Browning, Hopkins's punctuation messed with my head so that the obvious structure of a sonnet was momentarily obscured. Sort of like the godliness is in the poem...
ReplyDelete