After my very satisfactory reacquaintance with Seamus Heaney I’ve continued reading poetry this month. Thanks to a review in the Times Literary Supplement I’ve re-engaged with John Keats. Who, as some may know, provided the impetus for the name of this blog via his poem On The Sea which I have always loved. It opens with: It keeps eternal whispering around desolate shores … (read the full poem here – my whispering is ephemeral!)
I chose two of three books reviewed in the TLS on April 30 2021 (I love reading the TLS but it has the most frustrating website – I can’t find let alone link to the review and I’m a subscriber !)
Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph, Lucasta Miller
Apparently John Keats was very handsome, which is reflected here on the cover of this book. I really enjoyed the analysis of nine of his most famous poems – all of which are included in full in the text which is handy. Although I do have his complete works. Most of them I’d read before but without doing any research on them and therefore not completely understanding the references. Which did not affect my appreciation of loving the use of language and the images and emotions evoked in poems like To Autumn and La Belle Dames sans Merci: A Ballad.
Keats was criticised in his lifetime for making up words which he did frequently like his hero Shakespeare. He’s famous for some aphorisms – A thing of beauty is a joy for ever from the failed and largely unread poem Endymion and Beauty is truth, truth beauty at the conclusion of Ode on a a Grecian Urn. The latter made more haunting, for me at any rate, from the words that follow: that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Even if, as Miller says, all the experts agree, this is a poem about rape rather than, as I read it, admiration for a Greek vase.
Miller describes the circumstances in which the poems were written and the impetus behind them. For instance she places On first Looking into Chapman’s Homer in the context of the difference between Chapmans translation compared to an earlier, well-known one by Alexander Pope. She gives examples of the two approaches and you can clearly see why Keats and the friend with whom he spent a night reading Chapman are so excited about the new one. It’s more faithful, and more full of the energy of the original. This beautiful poem was not well received by the critics with Keats ridiculed for not being able to read Homer in the Greek. Miller adds to my appreciation.
I’m not sure about the close reading of the Odes to a Nightingale and on a Grecian Urn and The Eve of St Agnes all of which are very dark and which I didn’t pick up on at all in my reading. According to Miller in Nightingale Keats is mixing positive with negative, pleasure with pain and loss, through unexpected yokings and minglings that create a penumbra of fecund uncertainty. There’s no mention of the bloodied Philomel, whose tongue was cut out by her rapist before the gods turned her into a nightingale but there’s an ominous soundtrack of decay and death running through the poem including the purple-stainèd mouth of the drinker of red wine and the blushful Hippocrene (fountain) as if its water had been turned pink by human blood. Miller concludes we are left unable to know what to trust, in a poem whose writer is ‘half in love with easeful Death’ and yet which vibrates with so much verbal life.
The Eve of St Agnes according to this close reading is about the rape of a maiden and not as I thought a willing amorous encounter! The scene is set in beautiful language; the night so cold even the birds and animals are feeling it as well as the beadsman / priest whose frosted breath, / (is) Like pious incense from a censer old; the chapel with the sculptured dead that seem to freeze. It’s inspired by an old folk legend that virgins if they follow the right rituals will be visited by the lover of their dreams. Here we have Madeline who is deflowered in her bed by Porphyro and the two then elope into the freezing night. I love the verbal feast of images appealing to all the senses that Miller enumerates but didn’t really recognise the nightmare ending. Those left behind are be-nightmared by witches, demons and coffin-worms. The poem is analysed here in the context of mediaeval mythology and its appeal to the Romantic poets. All of which add to the poem’s interest.
I enjoyed discovering the strangely named Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil and its even weirder story. Which includes a terrific diatribe against slavery and capitalism in general.Isabella’s brothers who want to marry her off to a nobleman are: Enrichèd from ancestral merchandise, / And for them many a weary hand did swelt / In torchèd mines and noisy factories, / And many once proud-quivered loins did melt / In blood from stinging whip – with hollow eyes / many all day in dazzling river stood, / To take the rich-ored offerings of the flood. And there’s another verse along the same lines. Keats was a radical after all.
Alongside the analysis of the poems you get a pretty full picture of Keats’ life story. Which was sad. I didn’t know much about his romance with Fanny Brawn other than Jane Campion’s film Bright Star, which Miller says, was romanticised to a significant degree! Makes me want to see that beautiful movie again. It’s amazing that Keats wrote all of his poetry in about four years. And reading about his death from tuberculosis in Rome aged 25 in the chapter devoted to his self written epitaph Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water is distressing. He wrote the epitaph a week before he died and Miller thinks the words suggest he thought he would disappear into nothingness, unremembered. I’m glad that has not been the case. Beautiful poems; worth seeking out again.
Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, Anahid Nersessian
This was a great complement to the Miller book. I got it after re-reading the review which called her prose bold, irreverent, declarative and feral and said she was interested in the radical implications of his style and poetic vision. She looks at six of Keats’ odes, including three included in Miller as well as referring in passing to other poems Miller discusses in more detail.
Nersessian links Keats to Marx – not the first to do so, George Bernard Shaw did too. Although the TLS reviewer tells us Marx preferred Shelley and Nesessian shows us why in her discussion of Shelleys poem Mask of Anarchy – neatly skewering his aristocratic approach to revolution all the while, a bit like Trots, be passive in the face of violence, the horror of your deaths will arouse all to revolution. The Isabella poem is very direct in its depiction of the horrors of slavery and the horrors of emerging industrialisation on workers – as quoted above. Nersessian quotes a contemporary critic calling it a schoolboy vituperation of trade and traders.
However she takes issue with an interpretation of the Ode to Autumn as having anything to do with the Peterloo massacre to which others, including Miller, have sought to draw links. It was written shortly after the event and Keats had referred to it in letters written at the same time. They are very oblique references if present at all; I’m with Nersessian. But she takes you to a deeper level.
Though on first reading it seems full of celebration, abundance, gravidity, life … a totally real fullness, Keats is trying to show us that the problem with beauty is not that it is fragile but that it is so durable. He forces us to inhabit an excruciating contradiction: we are attached, despite everything, to this place that has been weaponised against us, where the earth ingests our oozings and its ambient noises muffles our screams. We are attached, too, to poems about this place, especially when they commute suffering to metaphor – a half-reaped furrow, a choir of ululating bugs. I love this sort of writing. Others may not.
Nersessian references to Ovid, notably in her discussion of the Ode to a Grecian Urn which, she agrees is about rape. But again she goes deeper.After linking it to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, other Greek myths, current meToo debates and her own experiences, she maintains the descriptive parts of the poem affirm a world in which harm and the threat of harm remain infinite even as they are covered up and brushed aside… a vision of masculinity as license to hurt and of femininity as perpetual provocation. But she argues Keats is critiquing this view; wanting the reader to reject it and to accept a truer version of life, one that involves effort and loss. Makes you go back to the poem. Indeed to all of the poems. All of which are handily reproduced in full, with footnotes, in the book.
The Diary of a Provincial Lady, E. m. Delafield
I’ve read the first part of what are four separate books included in this edition, and written about it here. I bought the wrong version of it in the first instance. It can be complicated tracking the right versions of ebooks – there are so many. I’ve learnt a lesson – always get the most authoritative publication.
This Penguin edition contains a nice introduction which alludes to the continuing popularity of these books. They’ve never been out of print; which is pretty amazing. They’re all good fun. In diary form she describes her days. In Book 1 she tells of her life as a provincial lady in the country, In Book 2 she has become a successful author – though you wouldn’t know why from her description of herself .
She’s very self-effacing. On the strength of that she has taken a flat in London. In Book 3 she’s in America as a successful author undertaking a book tour, giving talks to readers across the country. By Book 4 the Second World War is just starting with all of its asociated muddle and expectations in both the country and London. She is so observant of people and situations, has a great turn of phrase and is completely self-deprecating. The latter to the point where you start to wonder how she has become the successful author that she obviously is.
The humour is of a type that produces a smile and shock of recognition rather than anything else but I found there were lots of laugh out loud moments in Book 4 about the war. She pinpoints and demolishes pomposity and class consciousness. Good escapist reading in Lockdown Number 5 in Melbourne – may we need no more lockdown diversions.
The Spy Game, Georgina Harding
I loved this novel. Beautifully written, it’s about a woman investigating her mother’s past. After reading it I couldn’t remember the narrator’s name; which shows what a shadowy figure she is. Looking it up I see we’re told it on the first page – Anna. We’re also told in the first few pages all the main themes – Mother is German, Annas childhood was during the Cold War. There’s a newspaper report about a spy ring being caught by British intelligence. Just a small report; hidden away in the middle pages. It’s on the same day Anna’s mother doesn’t come home. The effects of the Second World War are still in evidence. Mrs. Lacey, the suburban neighbour, mother of her school friend, who looks after Anna from time to time, and on this day in particular, has been in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Her father met her mother in immediate post war Germany where he was working with the Allies.
Later Anna’s brother, who’s away at boarding school, becomes convinced their mother was a spy; spending his holidays urging Anna to remember details of who said what when. He thinks she hasn’t died as they’ve been told, in a car crash, but has been repatriated back to Russia after her spy ring was tumbled. The child Anna wasn’t convinced, didn’t want to know; wanted to live in the present, perhaps to protect her father, her memories of her mother.
But now as an adult, with father dead and her own children off her hands, she decides to investigate. Interrogating her memories, official records – immigration, marriage, births and deaths – newspaper reports. She travels to places that her mother is associated with – Germany, Poland. All the while remembering what she’s been told and trying to tally it with the evidence she finds. How did her mother come to be in Germany when she met her father? What was the meaning of the childhood memento with a strange name attached. It’s quite gripping in an understated way.
Evoking the world of children – how they interpret the world, what adults say and don’t say, do and not do. We learn nothing about Anna’s current situation apart from a reference to her husband asking why she is undertaking this quest and to her absent children which is why she has time to do it. She doesn’t quite know. Her brother, now living abroad is not interested having gien up his own quest long ago.
Unusually in a novel I loved the ending. Which leaves you wondering where the truth might lie.
The Weekend, Charlotte Wood
I liked this book but was a bit aggravated by it. I thought it could have been much better. Which is a bit unfair on the author! Great idea: three older women come together for a week-end to clear out an old friend’s holiday house after her death. They are all very different personalities and have very different lifestyles. The death of their friend encourages introspection and they each remember bits and pieces from their shared history, and of their separate histories as they make their way to the house.
They remember what irritates them about the others personality or how they’ve lived their lives. This crankiness with each other gathers pace over the course of the weekend. It’s a bit unclear, even unlikely, why they’ve been asked and why they’ve each agreed to undertake the task.
It’s nicely written. All three women are brought vividly to life. I was reminded of me and two friends from university days who have kept in touch. We’ve so much shared history, know each others foibles, can communicate in shorthand and even annoy each other from time to time. So the premise is all to the good.
My gripe is that these women are so different, and so irritated by each other you wonder how they ever came to be friends in the first place. We get potted histories of each life but next to nothing about how they met – in fact one woman says she can’t remember which strikes me as unlikely for people who’ve become lifelong friends. And about one it’s said that she’s never discussed her love life with the others – also unlikely I think. There’s very little about the good times they’ve shared and when they’ve come to each others aid; another thing you’d expect of lifelong friends.
All of which would explain why they’d come together now. And the fourth friend; who has died and whose place they are cleaning out remains very shadowy.I also felt there’s a bit too big an emphasis on the indignities of growing old: sagging skin, stiff joints, straggly/no hair etc. There’s a bit of a side-show about the entertainment industry demonstrating how unfair it is to elderly actresses which distracted from the central theme. And overall not much clearing out gets done!
Despite all of that I did enjoy it. The personalities of the women are vividly drawn – the bossy one, the academic one, the ditzy, creative one. Each of their circumstances are believable; although I’m not that familiar with mistresses to the scions of industry (shades of Richard Pratt). The academic one was a bit Germaine Greerish although I suspect Germs would not be so self-pitying. The place – North Sydney beach somewhere – is nicely evoked. And I liked the dog!
In the final pages we get a fast forward to find out what happens to one of the women; it would have been nice to have that for all of them. Final verdict: okay but could / should have been better.
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