The Gentleman of Shalott - Ironic Poem by Elizabeth Bishop

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In her poem 'The Gentleman of Shalott', Elizabeth Bishop parodies Tennyson's 'Lady of Shalott' with its message of female weakness and passivity.

Influences

Among those who influenced Elizabeth Bishop were many outstanding male poets, for example, George Herbert, Gerald Manley Hopkins and the modernists, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens. The poet, Marianne Moore, who was Bishop's close friend and mentor, also had a strong effect on her life. Bishop opposed the idea of a female tradition of poetry and objected to being praised as a 'woman'poet'.

A Voice of Dissent

Bishop provided a voice of dissent by challenging the patriarchal conventions of Tennyson's 'Lady of Shalott'. Tennyson's poem is well-known for its primary message of feminine weakness and male power. This destructive male power is symbolised by flamboyant Lancelot's flaming armour, while the Lady is remote, passive and unable to influence events around her. The Lady weaves a tapestry depicting nature; she does not experience nature directly. Her decision to live in the real world is not fitting for a Lady and she is, therefore, punished with death.

Bishop's 'Mirror Poem' Mocks Male Vanity  

The Gentleman of Shalott  was published in 1936. It is described by Angus Calder with Lizbeth Goodman, as Elizabeth Bishop's 'Mirror Poem', and parodies Tennyson, mocking the male sex for its self-absorption and vanity. This self-reflecting state is a fundamental condition of the gentleman's being. A useful word here is 'solipsim' which applies to the condition of people who relate everything in the world to themselves, whether joyously (manic) or gloomily (depressive). The Gentleman believes himself to be the very centre of the universe. (One might compare this to a small child buying a toy car as a present for his grandmother. He likes it, and therefore believes that she must like it too. Most children grow out of this solipsistic phase by the age of seven.)

Anti-Democratic Standards

In the poem, the Gentleman gazes, fascinated, into his mirror. The shortness and sharpness of the lines gives the poem pace and enhances the quickness of the poet's wit, for example: 'But he's in doubt / as to which side's in or out / of the mirror.' The shifting tone of these lines is echoed towards the end of the poem: '...The uncertainty / he says he / finds exhilarating.' Bishop's use of the term 'Gentleman' is deliberate and loaded with meaning within its social context, for it implies: '...an archaic, anti-democratic standard of social values,' says Angus Calder.

An Unstable Gender-Bias

There are other ways of interpreting the poem, among them, the assertion that its gender-bias is unstable. Even the shape of the poem has been remarked upon as an indication of this trend. There is a loose arrangement of rhyme. In the first and last stanzas there are half-rhyming couplets, but the middle has a more irregular rhyming scheme that led one critic, B. Costello, to comment: '...too many lines in the middle of the poem suggest Bishop's positive identification with the Gentleman.' Maybe Costello is suggesting that a certain fascination with one's own appearance is not exclusively a male prerogative and that Elizabeth Bishop, in her attention to detail, betrays her own weakness while she makes fun of the Gentleman. The jerkiness of the poem adds to its comic effect and some of the lines are farcical. 'If the glass slips / he's in a fix - only one leg...' This line also suggests a split between subject and object.

Only the Mirror Holds the Gentleman Together

Like Tennyson's Lady, the Gentleman looks at himself through a mirror, but unlike her, he is active, in control, and he can make choices. A Lady would be expected to sit passively. Nevertheless, Bishop  insists that he is dependent on his mirror. '...[T]he artist cannot by virtue of her or his occupation participate fully in the life which she or he reflects and reflects upon. Only the mirror holds the Gentleman together,' says Angus Calder. This poem is either Elizabeth Bishop's answer to the male sex, or an attempt at retaliation for the broken mirror of Tennyson's Lady and her shattered dreams. It challenges the Lady's passivity, for Bishop herself renounces, as always, the concept of 'a woman's poetry', preferring to challenge the patricarchy on her own terms and to demand inclusion as a poet whose gender is immaterial.

In 1955 Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for her volume (containing two collections) Poems: North and South - A Cold Spring. Her Complete Poems won the National Book Award in 1969 and her fourth and final collection, Geography III, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976.

Sources:

'The Gentleman of Shalott', Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems, Chatto & Windus Ltd., London, 1991.

'Gender and Poetry' by Angus Calder with Lizbeth Goodman, Literature and Gender, ed. Lizbeth Goodman, Routledge in Association with The Open University, London, 1996.

Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, B. Costello, Harvard University Press, 1991.

Copyright Janet Cameron. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.

William Blake, Ignored Mystic and Visionary who Spoke with Angels

William Blake by Thomas Phillips, Public Domain

How could it happen that one of our best-loved existentialist poets should die unrecognised for his great genius - and then be declared insane?

    

William Blake, (1757-1827) was a gifted graphic artist and a literary genius who produced visionary poetry of remarkable depth and originality. Third son of a hosier, he never went to school but was apprenticed to James Basire, who was an engraver to the Society of Antiquaries.

Blake became a Royal Academy student and In 1779, the bookseller J. Johnson employed him. A year later, Blake met sculptor, John Flaxman, a man who was to become a major influence in his life introducing him to mysticism and to several other intellectuals of that time. His marriage in 1782 to Catherine Boucher, a market-gardener's daughter, was a lasting relationship, although childless.

Flaxman helped Blake financially in the publication of his Poetical Sketches in 1783. More help was given by a Mrs. Mathew to set up a print shop at 27 Broad Street in London. By 1789, Blake had published his Songs of Innocence, as well as The Book of Thel. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature: "both works... manifest the early phases of his highly distinctive mystic vision, and... he embarks on the evolution of his personal mythology." The Book of Thel is about sexual experience and sexual initiation and introduces a parallel world. Blake was railing against the hypocrisy and restraint of the time.

William Blake the Existentialist versus the Enlightenment

Blake was much against the Enlightenment - indeed he felt it a necessity to try to escape its constrictions. He considered it a materialist philosophy with its Puritanical interpretation of Christianity. Unsurprisingly, his own philosophy was directly opposed to that of the essentialist Plato. For Plato, reason controls energy and desire. Blake, however, favours desire and energy over reason. As stated in The Oxford Companion: "Blake turns conventional morality on its head claiming that man does not consist of the duality of Soul = Reason and Body = Evil, but that "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul... Energy is the only life, and is from the Body... Energy is Eternal Delight."

William Blake the Visionary who Talks with Angels

Blake believes himself to be a true visionary, claiming to have seen angels and prophets. Yet his view of Jesus is uncompromisingly rebellious, openly expressed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his first actual Romantic work. This work, published 1790-3, is considered to be his principle work of prose with its paradoxical aphorisms. Among other works, his Songs of Experience followed in 1794, including the well-known "Tyger! Tyger" burning bright" and "Oh Rose thou are sick."

The imagination, Blake believes, aims at a higher reality. An extract from "William Blake," Romanticism, An Anthology claims: "For Blake the imagination is both creative and perceptive, and instrumental in the fulfilment of his revolutionary aims."

A little help from friends combined with his undeniable great genius should have brought William Blake fame and fortune. It did not. The tragedy of William Blake is that his contribution to English literature remained virtually unrecognised.

Throughout his life, Blake's work only received a limited circulation, and this was partly due to the fact that his books were all hand-printed and hand-illuminated. Charles Lambis said to have remarked to Bernard Barton in 1824 that Blake was living in poverty and obscurity.

Interest in the poet was rekindled in the late nineteenth century after a biography by Alexander Gilchrist in 1863.

Sources:

• Blake, William, Selected Poems: Blake, Penguins Classics, 2006.
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Edited by Margaret Drabble, Multiple, Unspecified Contributors, Book Club Associates by arrangement with Oxford University Press, 1985.
• Romanticsim, An Anthology, Edited by Duncan Wu, Mutliple, Unspecified Contributors, Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1994.

Emily Dickinson, Poem 1737 - Rearrange a Wife's Affection

American poet, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was one of three children of a loving family who came to prefer her privacy and lived a solitary existence as an adult. Only seven poems were published in her lifetime although these were well-received, but her sister discovered over one thousand poems hidden away in her room after her death, mostly untitled and undated.

Her poetry has a Puritanical slant and is about love, nature and mortality. She is religious and yet often stricken by doubt, which instils dramatic tension into her poetry. Generally, the poems are fairly short and it is a challenge for a poet to establish meaning in so few words, but Dickinson's work contains multi-layered meanings.

In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson produced a three volume edition: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, containing all 1775 poems. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson appeared in 1970.

Stanza 1

Rearrange a 'Wife's' affection!

When they dislocate my Brain!

Amputate my freckled Bosom!

Make me bearded like a man!

Stanza 2

Blush, my spirit, in thy Fastness -

Blush, my unacknowledged clay -

Seven years of troth have taught thee

More than any Wifehood may!

In this poem, the first three lines of the first stanza end in an exclamation mark, adding a keen sense of outrage to their delivery, further enhanced by the strong verbs Dickinson uses to convey the depth of her feelings. The poet's brain is 'dislocated' and the verb 'Amputate' in the next line is shocking in its implication of female vulnerability to the insensitive male. In the second stanza, it seems the poet has learned through her betrothal that marriage promises little of any value for a woman.

Stanza 3

Love that never leaped its socket -

Trust entrenched in narrow pain -

Constancy thro' fire - awarded -

Anguish - bare of anodyne!

Stanza 4

Burden - borne so far triumphant -

None suspect me of the crown,

For I wear the 'Thorns' till Sunset -Then my Diadem put on.

In stanza 4, Dickinson is comparing her suffering to to that of Jesus Christ, adorned with a crown of thorns as he died on the cross. It is a burden that she, like Jesus, is forced to endure. However, the poet hides her real anguish from the world, as expressed in Stanza 5:

Stanza 5

Big my Secret but it's bandaged -

It will never get away

Till the Day its Weary Keeper

Leads it through the Grave to thee.

Dickinson's special achievement

Dickinson's independence of spirit and the links she makes between personal experience and the universal, reveal a strongly individualistic poet. This uncompromising individualism becomes more compelling when we consider the difficulties she encountered. Clayton Eshleman, in response to the questionnaire: 'What is American about American Poetry?' says: 'At the turn of the century, American poetry, with the compelling exceptions of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, was still filled with Victorian decorum, and was a poetry of taste, on extremely restricted subjects, written almost exclusively by white males.'

To have earned the honour of being separated from this restrictive Victorian decorum and taste, and to do so as a woman before the onset of feminism, is clearly Dickinson's special achievement.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Faber and Faber, London, 1970.

'What is American about American Poetry?', Companion Spider by Clayton Eshleman, Wesleyan University Press, CT, U.S.A. 2001

Emily Dickinson, by Helen MacNeil, Virago, London, 1984

Emily Dickinson - Poems 108 and 303

Hugh McDermiad, Poet, Accuses Soldiers of Being "Professional Murderers"

Hugh MacDiarmid, Controversial WWI Poet
Pic: Wiki, public domain

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) was the pen-name of Christopher Murray Grieve, a former journalist. McDiarmaid was a Scot, a Communist and a staunch supporter of Stalin and he caused considerable controversy with his confrontational verse, especially with the poem: "Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries."

It is a God-damned lie to say that these

Saved or knew, anything worth any man's pride. 

They were professional murderers and they took 

Their blood money and impious risks and died

In spite of all their kind some elements of worth 

With difficulty persist here and there on earth."

All soldiers are mercenaries

If this poem were not arranged into lines, complete with its rhyme scheme, abcbdd, it could almost pass for prose. In the poem, Hugh MacDiarmid makes it clear he has no pity for these "professional murders", who took their "blood money and impious risks."  These men fought, says MacDiarmid, without knowing "anything worth any man's pride." There is no lyricism, imagery, alliteration or assonance in this poem; it is simply a statement of fact, as seen by the poet. The last two lines are an almost grudging acknowledgement that there might be something left worth fighting for. "With difficulty persist" in line 6 is more sarcastic than ironic, and as cynical as it is angry.

For some readers, the different, more distanced perspective might not engage in the same way as the impassioned expressions of feeling displayed by other war poets. The poet is simply saying that all soldiers are, in essence, mercenaries.

Crude allegations against soldiers

Tim Kendall, a professor at Exeter University, says that MacDermiad is writing about the British Expeditionary Force, sent in 1914, by a democratic government and supported by an overwhelming majority of the population. They were sent to:

"...repel invading Prussian forces and protect the sovereignty of occupied nations. To call our soldiers professional murderers is merely to make the same crude allegations against professional forces throughout history.

Are we to understand amateur murderers are more acceptable?"

The poem seems to be a complete contradiction to the poet's strong Stalinist leanings and it is difficult to understand how Hugh MacDiarmid managed to reconcile these opposing positions.

Sources:

Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Poems, Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, 1994

Prof. Tim Kendall's blog

John Donne - Metaphysical Poet and Destroyer of Feminine Virtue

John Donne Portrait, Artist Unknown

Writer of passionate love poetry, devotional verse and brilliant sermons, John Donne's work and life made a mockery of the conventions of his age.

Poet, John Donne, (1572-1631) had no difficulty in reconciling his two great loves, religion and womanising. Because he was equally comfortable with both, the two subjects frequently inform each other in his poetry. His love poems sometimes contain religious imagery, while the religious and spiritual poems are often steeped in sexual metaphors.

"Donne perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love," claimed John Dryden.

Early Life of John Donne

Donne was born in Bread Street, London. His father was an ironmonger, his mother was the daughter of John Heywood, the dramatist. He was also related, on his mother's side, to Sir Thomas More. Sadly his father died when he was four years old and his mother married again six months' later to a Catholic physician, Dr. John Syminges.

Donne was educated at Hart Hall, Oxford, which he left in 1584 and it's believed he later attended Cambridge, but his religion prevented him from taking a degree at either university. He entered Lincoln's Inn in 1592, but shortly after he renounced his faith when his brother, Henry, was imprisoned for protecting and harbouring a Catholic priest.

It is believed Donne travelled extensively, and in 1596, he sailed with the Earl of Essex to sack Cadiz. The following year, he hunted Spanish treasure ships in the Azores with Sir Walter Raleigh. Two poems commemorate these events, "The Storm" and "The Calme". Steady employment followed, when Sir Thomas Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal, engaged Donne as his secretary. The poet was moving up in the world, and in 1601, he became MP for Brackley, Northamptonshire.

Marriage - on the Sly

Later, that year, he married, in secret, Lady Egerton's niece, Ann More and as a result, was dismissed from his post with Egerton and thrown into prison for a brief period of time. The disgrace prevented him finding decent employment and he had to rely on his friends for his living for around fourteen years.

For a while the growing family lived in Mitcham in Surrey but in 1612, they moved to London to a house in Drury Lane. Around three years later, King James I put pressure on Donne to enter the church. This proved a good career move when he became a chaplain. Cambridge University, much to its disgust, was forced by King James I to make Donne a DD (Doctor of Divinity.) By 1621, he had become the Dean of St. Paul's, a celebrated preacher, a great poet and a highly-esteemed writer of brilliant sermons. He also continued to be a great womaniser, although by now he was a widower, his wife having died in 1617 giving birth to their twelfth child, who was stillborn.

A Poetry of Puns, Conceits, Sex and Religion

One of his most popular poems today (among others) is "The Sun Rising" with its irreverent lines: "Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains call on us? / Must to thy motions lovers' season run? / Saucy pedantic wretch, go childe / Late school-boys and sour prentices." The poem is literally an impudent rant against the sun for waking up the lovers after their night of blissful sexual indulgence. "You don't need to follow all the niceties of Donne's metaphysical conceit to appreciate this poem as a glorious celebration of sexual fulfilment," says Daisy Goodwin.

Another poem, "Song" begins: "Go and catch a falling star, / Get with child a mandrake root, / Tell me, where all past years are, / Or who cleft the Devil's foot." This poem is another rant, but of a different nature. Donne is expressing his anger at faithless women. The reference to a mandrake is a sexual one, as people truly believed that a woman could become pregnant by this strange plant with its divided root. (They also believed that a mandrake root screamed when wrenched from the ground.) In the third stanza of the poem Donne expresses the wish to find a faithful woman, and says, "If thou findst one, let me know, / Such a pilgrimage were sweet." He sees this search for faithfulness almost as a "holy" project - a pilgrimage.

(A conceit is a term that establishes a relationship between two things that are remote from each other. It is meant to surprise the reader with this bizarre, outrageous and elaborate relationship. However, conceits, although they begin in absurdity, should be seen to become appropriate.)

A Sermon Fit for a King

Little of his poetry was published in his lifetime, although his son published his Collected Poems in 1633. He wrote most of his love poetry in his youth and his religious poetry in his middle and old age. His love poetry is passionate, intellectual, energetic and indulges in punning and wordplay. His devotional verse reveals uncertainties and his struggles to suppress his doubts and achieve true faith.

After James I died on 27 March 1625, John Donne achieved the distinction of preaching his first sermon before the new king, Charles I. Following a period of ill-health including a series of debilitating infections of the mouth, Donne died on 31 March, 1631.

Sources:

• John Donne Selected Poems, Editor: Richard Gill, Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Poems to Last a Lifetime, Editor: Daisy Goodwin, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 2004.
• The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, Editor: Ian Ousby, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Editor: Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Emily Dickinson, Poems 108 and 303

Emily Dickinson, Public Domain

Emily Dickinson, was born in Massachusetts in 1830 and by the time she was thirty years old, had withdrawn from society and lived as a recluse. She was known for her eccentricity, always dressing in white and maintaining friendships by correspondence. She found a mentor and critic, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who corresponded with her, but Higginson  believed her poetry was not good enough for publication and discouraged her. Dickinson, accepting his verdict, may have had insufficient confidence to send her poems to another critic.

Poem 108

Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the culprit - Life!

At first glance, Poem 108 seems merely an amusing comment on the responsibility of being a surgeon. The poem is a metaphor; the surgeon surely represents the patriarchy, while the culprit is the 'victim', woman, or woman-poet, whose life or creativity is in jeopardy. There is something sinister in the choice of the world 'culprit' rather than 'patient'. One might even stretch the allusion as far as the Biblical Eve and her temptation of Adam. As always, Dickinson turns traditional assumptions around, for the accusation in the poem is implicit (although blurred by humour) in mocking the so-called benefactor of powerless women whose creativity is suppressed. It's a matter of conjecture whether Dickinson was thinking of Higginson when she wrote it and whether she showed it to him. If she did, would he have recognised himself?

In the third line of the poem, the choice of the word 'fine' in 'their fine incision' is particularly powerful. 'A fine incision is much more dangerous than a blunt incision; it does more damage more quickly with little surface pain but it gets much deeper.'

Poem 303

The Soul selects her own society -
Then - shuts the Door -
To her divine Majority -
Present no more -

Dickinson's focus on the danger and pain inherent in the external world is further explored in Poem 303. The poem begins very directly: 'The Soul selects her own society - Then - shuts the Door -...' It is possible the latter line might be read differently, as a defensive statement, involving erecting a barrier against the possibility of threat.

Unmoved - she notes the Chariots - pausing -
At her low Gate -
Unmoved - an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat -

This second stanza contains two lines beginning with the word 'Unmoved' as the Soul rejects what does not interest her.

I've known her - from an ample nation -
Choose One -
Then - close the Valves of her attention -
Like stone -

This is final and unyielding, contrasting, as it does, the Valves (possibly alluding to the heart) with the totality, hardness and finality of enduring Stone. The juxtaposition is powerful. The poem is, therefore, about choice and the responsibility of choosing, a responsibility that rests with the chooser, not the chosen.

'A poor role model for modern women' (Val Smith)

In 'Interview with Val Smith', 1996, the poet says: 'She is writing from the closed, domestic, interior position, which is socially gendered, not biologically gendered... It seems to me she's become a kind of icon for the woman writer, for the solitary soul who shuts herself away from society, who chooses to write and to do nothing else but to look after her own soul.'

Smith continues by comparing Dickinson unfavourably with Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote with the door open so that she could look after her children. Of course, this willingness to assume many roles is true of modern-day women poets, who want to be in the world as a pro-active force. But, perhaps Smith is being prescriptive about women's role, for surely it is a woman's choice whether or not she has children and whether or not she chooses to shut herself away to write poetry.

Sources:
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 volumes, Cambridge, Mass. 1955
'Gender and Poetry', by Angus Calder and Lizbeth Goodman, Literature and Gender, The Open University, London, 1996

Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Unconventional Love-Life of one of Britain's Most-Loved Poets

Dover, (c) Janet Cameron

Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley had a short, but intense life. Shelley was a rebel and an eccentric, whose outrageous behaviour shocked society.

    

When the Dover steam packet was introduced and crossed regularly from Dover to Calais in the 1780s, it proved a great success with the aristocracy, who began writing about their travels, describing them as "Grand Tours."

Soon the Dover cutters were so highly regarded that they were patronised by bankers, politicians, merchants and lawyers, as well as a love-struck poet. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) who had good reason to be glad of Dover's efficient port. The great poet, who is famous for such sublime poetry as "To a Skylark," was already married when he fell in love with sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of publisher, William Godwin and women's rights champion, Mary Wollstonecroft.

Born in Horsham in Sussex, Shelley was a rebel and a rabble-rouser, intense, imaginative and unconventional. At school he was known as "Mad Shelley" or the "Eton Atheist."

Percy Shelley's First Elopement – Harriet Westbrook

Harriet was the daughter of the proprietor of a coffee-house, and when she was sixteen, she and Shelley eloped to Scotland and were married in Edinburgh in August 1811. For three years, the two young people led a nomadic existence. Their relationship was far from conventional, as apparently Shelley tried to share her with his friend T.J. Hogg. It's not too clear from literary references whether he was successful in persuading Harriet to comply.

By 1814, the marriage collapsed – which is unsurprising since Shelley disapproved of marriage, along with eating meat, religion and royalty. The couple had two children and the effect of Shelley's abandonment of them had dire effects on the whole family. Harriet became suicidal, making distressing scenes to try to get her husband to remain with her.

Ménage à Trois with Mary Godwin and Jane Clairmont

In 1814, when he was twenty-two, Shelley and Mary decided to elope. But first, Shelley invited along Mary's stepsister, Jane (Claire) Clairmont, who was just fifteen years old. The three of them made for Dover, boarding the first steam packet they could find. The carefree threesome travelled through France to Switzerland, where Shelley wrote to his wife, Harriet Westbrook, naively suggesting she should join them.

Instead, in 1816, Harriet threw herself into the Serpentine in London, leaving her unfaithful husband free to indulge his scandalous ménage à trois. His second wife, Mary Shelley, was the author of Frankenstein, and she began to write her great work in the summer of 1816, by Lake Geneva, where she spent her time with her husband and the poet, Lord Byron. Their ménage à trois continued until Percy Shelley's death in 1822 aged thirty-years.

In his essay "On Love," composed in July, 1818, Shelley says: "What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life; ask him who adores, what is God? The poet concludes: "So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was."

Sources:

• "On Love," Percy Bysshe Shelley, Romanticism An Anthology, Ed. Duncan Wu, Blackwell, 1994.
• Oxford Companion to English Literature, Ed. Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 1985.