PAIRINGS/PARINGS:
Clusters of nineteenth-century poems across the spectrum of ‘the lyric’
for discussion March 13, 2009 / revised with attachments
[Those marked with (X) are attached; NCAP=Nineteenth-Century American Poetry anthology.
Alternatively, many of these are readily findable on the Web]
In making these pairings, I’m interested in intertextual relationships, in webs of thematic
concerns, and (especially) in broadening our assumption that the “expressive romantic lyric,” is
the normative genre (involving normative ways of reading) for short poems. What happens to the
epigram, the ode, the hymn, the ballad…?
Two historical/critical readings to frame our discussion:
1. selections from Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America
(Harvard UP, 2007), on recitation and memorization practices. I’m sending these as PDF.
2. Virginia Jackson, “Who Reads Poetry?” in PMLA 2008 (123 :1, pp. 181-87), accessible
through UCSC e-resources; I will send as PDF. In this introduction to a special cluster of pieces
on “The New Lyric Studies,” Jackson uses Melville’s “The Portent” to mark a shift in the social
function of the lyric in US life.
Riffs on the century’s “memory gems”: the epigrammatic moral injunction
Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life,” (X) “Excelsior” (X)
[read during/after Rubin, since she mentions these poems frequently]; as against
Whitman, “Excelsior” (1867): http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1867/poems/19
[with ‘Excelsior’ theme]: Dickinson 129 (“Our lives are Swiss”), 630 (“The Soul’s Superior
Instants”); [with ‘Psalm of Life’: 666 (“I cross till I am weary”)
The language of flowers: Dickinson and the “poetess” tradition
Osgood, “The Lily’s Delusion,” “The Daisy’s Mistake” (previously given as xerox)
Dickinson 205 (“Come slowly—Eden!”), 367 (“I tend my flowers for thee”), 11 (“Nobody
knows this little rose”)
[optional: throw in Melville’s ‘rose poem,’ “Rosary Beads” (NCAP 315-16)]
The self against history/place and the Romantic imagination
Bryant, “The Prairies” (NCAP 20-23)
Poe, “The City in the Sea” (NCAP 99-100)
Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (for convenience use NCAP 225-231)
“Memoriousness”: ballad and elegy
Poe, “Annabel Lee” (NCAP 115-16)
Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride” (X)
Emerson, “A Concord Hymn” (X)
Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!” (Schmidgall ed. p. 298)
(optional: throw in Melville’s Lincoln poem, “The Martyr” (NCAP 275-6)
The Civil War and national trauma
Longfellow, “Killed at the Ford” (this is in the packet I gave you last week)
Whitman, “As Toilsome I wandered Virginia’s Woods” (Schmidgall ed. 283)
Melville, “The College Colonel” (Melville 56-57)
Dickinson 518 (“When I was small a woman died”)
[optional: Finch, “The Blue and the Grey”—on xerox distributed last week]
(to compare Longfellow’s “The Cumberland” to Melville’s “Cumberland” and the many other
popular poems on the same topic, see Poems of American History on Google Books)
Variations on a theme by Keats: “Beauty is truth…”
Dickinson 448 (“I died for Beauty”); 1263 (“Tell all the truth but tell it slant”); 1038 (“Bloom –
is Result – to meet a Flower”)
Melville, “Fruit and Flower Painter” (NCAP 317-18); “In Shards the Sylvan Vases Lie” (318)
[for an important intertext, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), see:
http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/odeonagrecianurn.html]
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A PSALM OF LIFE:
WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN
SAID TO THE PSALMIST
[First published in the Knickerbocker Magazine, October 1838. It appeared in Longfellow's first
published collection Voices of the Night, 1839.]
TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream ! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real ! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal ;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way ;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle !
Be a hero in the strife !
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant !
Let the dead Past bury its dead !
Act,— act in the living Present !
Heart within, and God o'erhead !
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time ;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate ;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
EXCELSIOR
[“Excelsior,” the motto of New York State, can be translated as “ever higher,” or colloquially
“onward and upward.” The poem first appeared in the Connecticut Courant in January 1841 and
was reprinted in Longfellow’s Ballads and Other Poems, 1841.]
The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, ‘mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
His brow was sad; his eye beneath,
Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,
And like a silver clarion rung
The accents of that unknown tongue,
Excelsior!
In happy homes he saw the light
Of household fires gleam warm and bright;
Above, the spectral glaciers shone,
And from his lips escaped a groan,
Excelsior!
“Try not the Pass!” the old man said;
“Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
The roaring torrent is deep and wide!”
And loud that clarion voice replied,
Excelsior!
“O stay,” the maiden said, “and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast!”
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But steel he answered with a sigh,
Excelsior!
“Beware the pine tree’s withered branch!
Beware the awful avalanche!”
This was the peasant’s last Good-night,
A voice replied, far up the height,
Excelsior!
At break of day, as heavenward
The pious monks of Saint Bernard
Uttered the oft-repeated prayer,
A voice cried through the startled air,
Excelsior!
A traveler, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Sill grasping in his hand of ice
The banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
There in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell, like a falling star,
Excelsior!
=============
WHITMAN, “EXCELSIOR” (first appears in the 1867 Leaves of Grass)
WHO has gone farthest? For I swear I will go farther;
And who has been just? For I would be the most just
person of the earth;
And who most cautious? For I would be more
cautious;
And who has been happiest? O I think it is I! I
think no one was ever happier than I;
And who has lavish'd all? For I lavish constantly the
best I have;
And who has been firmest? For I would be firmer;
And who proudest? For I think I have reason to be
the proudest son alive—for I am the son of the
brawny and tall-topt city;
And who has been bold and true? For I would be
the boldest and truest being of the universe;
And who benevolent? For I would show more benevolence than all the rest;
And who has projected beautiful words through the
longest time? By God! I will outvie him! I
will say such words, they shall stretch through
longer time!
And who has receiv'd the love of the most friends?
For I know what it is to receive the passionate
love of many friends;
And to whom has been given the sweetest from
women, and paid them in kind? For I will
take the like sweets and pay them in kind;
And who possesses a perfect and enamour'd body?
For I do not believe any one possesses a more
perfect or enamour'd body than mine;
And who thinks the amplest thoughts? For I will
surround those thoughts;
And who has made hymns fit for the earth? For I
am mad with devouring extacy to make joyous
hymns for the whole earth!
==============
Longfellow-the-memorized, again:
PAUL REVERE’S RIDE
[first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861; then appeared in the collection Tales of a
Wayside Inn, 1863]
LISTEN, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower, as a signal light, -One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm."
Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.
Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.
Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the somber rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade, -By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town,
And the moonlight flowing over all.
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night-encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay, -A line of black, that bends and floats
On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats.
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry-tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and somber and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!
A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.
It was twelve by the village clock,
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.
It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.
It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.
You know the rest. In the books you have read,
How the British regulars fired and fled, -How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farm-yard wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm, -A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed,
And the midnight-message of Paul Revere.
=========
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
A CONCORD HYMN
[an occasional poem from Emerson’s early years: written for the 1836 dedication of a
Revolutionary War monument in Concord, Mass., it was a common choice for recitations, even
as late as the 1999 performance by then-President Bill Clinton, recorded for the Favorite Poem
Project; you can find this on YouTube]
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dim stream that seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.