Senancour

LETTER XXIV

Fontainebleau, October 28th, 2d year.

The frosts depart, and I give no heed ; spring dies, and I am not moved ; summer passes, and I feel no regret. But I take delight in walking over the fallen leaves, on the last of the beautiful days, in the unclothed forest.

Whence come to man the most lasting of the delights of his heart, that rapture of sadness, that charm full of secrets, which make him live on his sorrows and be still content with himself in the midst of the sense of his ruin ? I cling to the happy season that will soon have passed away ; a belated interest, a contradictory delight, draws me to her as she is about to die. The same moral law which makes the idea of destruction painful to me, makes me also love the sentiment of it in the things of this world that must pass away before me. It is natural that we should more fully enjoy the life which perishes, when, conscious of its frailty, we feel that it still lives on within us. When death separates us from things, they subsist without us. But when the leaves fall, vegetation is at an end, and dies ; while we live on for new generations. Autumn is full of delight, because, for us, spring is yet to come. 

Spring is more beautiful in nature ; but man, by his works, has made autumn sweeter. The awakening green, the singing bird, the opening flower, and that fire which returns to give strength to life, and the shadows which shield those hidden retreats, and that luxuriant grass, that wild fruit, those soft nights which invite to liberty ! Season of joy ! You fill me with dread in my burning unrest. I find deeper repose towards the eve of the year ; the season when all things seem to die is the only time when I sleep  in peace on the earth of man. 

From Obermann (1804) by Étienne Pivert de Senancour (1770 - 1846), translated by Jessie Peabody Frothingham (1901).

Her selections in English:
https://archive.org/details/obermannselectio01senaiala/page/n3/mode/2up

[Here's the original text in French:

Lorsque les frimas s'éloignent, je m'en aperçois à peine ; le printemps passe, et ne m'a pas attaché ; l'été passe, je ne le regrette point. Mais je me plais à marcher sur les feuilles tombées, aux derniers beaux jours, dans la forêt dépouillée.

D'où vient à l'homme la plus durable des jouissances de son coeur, cette volupté de la mélancolie, ce charme plein de secrets, qui le fait vivre de ses douleurs et s'aimer encore dans le sentiment de sa ruine? Je m'attache à la saison heureuse qui bientôt ne sera plus : un intérêt tardif, un plaisir qui paraît contradictoire, m'amène à elle lorsqu'elle va finir. Une même loi morale me rend pénible l'idée de la destruction, et m'en fait aimer ici le sentiment dans ce qui doit cesser avant moi. Il est naturel que nous jouissions mieux de l'existence périssable , lorsque , avertis de toute sa fragilité, nous la sentons néanmoins durer en nous. Quand la mort nous sépare des choses, elles subsistent sans nous. Mais, à la chute des feuilles, la végétation s'arrête, elle meurt; nous, nous restons pour des générations nouvelles : l'automne est délicieux parce que le printemps doit venir encore pour nous.

Le printemps est plus beau dans la nature; mais l'homme a tellement fait que l'automne est plus doux. La verdure qui naît, l'oiseau qui chante, la fleur qui s'ouvre ; et ce feu qui revient affermir la vie, ces ombrages qui protégent d'obscurs asiles; et ces herbes fécondes, ces fruits sans culture, ces nuits faciles qui permettent l'indépendance ! Saison du bonheur ! je vous redoute, trop dans mon ardente inquiétude. Je trouve plus de repos vers le soir de l'année : la saison où tout parait finir est la seule où je dorme en paix sur la terre de l'homme.

Obermann (original text):
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k56959455.texteImage

(I notice that this edition (1852, with George Sand´s preface) spells the author's surname as "de Sénancour" but this spelling isn't shown in his French Wikipedia entry, so I'm not sure what to make of that.)

Well, I suppose it was bound to happen eventually: I began to think about the mysterious "Obermann", this name I had ignored for so long. 

Here it was in Liszt's "Vallée d'Obermann", the intense centrepiece of his magnificent first book of "Années de pèlerinage" (the one about Switzerland).

(Frank Lévy performing "Vallée d'Obermann" by Franz Liszt. From what I've read the first version of this piece was composed back in the mid-late 1830s, then revised about 1850.)

Also, there were Matthew Arnold's Obermann poems. 

Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann" (1849).

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_poetical_works_of_Matthew_Arnold/Stanzas_in_Memory_of_the_Author_of_Obermann

... The white mists rolling like a sea;

I hear the torrents roar.

—Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee;

I feel thee near once more.

I turn thy leaves; I feel their breath

Once more upon me roll;

That air of languor, cold, and death,

Which brooded o'er thy soul.  ...

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43605/stanzas-from-the-grande-chartreuse

... Or are we easier, to have read,

O Obermann! the sad, stern page,

Which tells us how thou hidd'st thy head

From the fierce tempest of thine age

In the lone brakes of Fontainebleau,

Or chalets near the Alpine snow?  ...

(For a much longer conversation with this poem, see this post:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/11/strike-leftward.html .)

Obermann Once More (1867)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43597/obermann-once-more

...    Ah, Jaman! delicately tall

Above his sun-warm'd firs—

What thoughts to me his rocks recall,

What memories he stirs!

And who but thou must be, in truth,

Obermann! with me here?

Thou master of my wandering youth,

But left this many a year!

Yes, I forget the world's work wrought,

Its warfare waged with pain;

An eremite with thee, in thought

Once more I slip my chain,

And to thy mountain-chalet come,

And lie beside its door,

And hear the wild bee's Alpine hum,

And thy sad, tranquil lore!

Again I feel the words inspire

Their mournful calm; serene,

Yet tinged with infinite desire

For all that might have been—   ...

The critic and educator who was so insistent on us focussing on the great classics, those exemplifying "high seriousness" (Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton), kept coming back in his own lyric poetry to an unanswered question, his strange obsession with this not very well-known French book. A book by a self-confessed failure, a man who stood apart from the world and never seemed able to arouse in himself the noble aims of public service and achievement that Arnold had conscientiously taken up. 

Both Liszt and Arnold place their evocations of Obermann in an alpine setting. Senancour's book consists of about ninety letters by this alter ego, scattered over nine years. The book describes visits to the Alps at the start (Year 1) and again towards the end (Year 6 etc). 

You can read substantial selections of Obermann in the Frothingham translation that I'm quoting from here. But what you can also do, and what I'm doing most evenings, is listen to the complete Obermann in this Librivox reading by Jim Locke (This is the 1903 translation by Arthur Edward Waite):

https://librivox.org/obermann-by-etienne-pivert-de-senancour/

Here's one of the best-known alpine letters. This is mainly the Frothingham translation, but she excluded a few passages, which I've restored in my own words. 

LETTER VII

Saint-Maurice, September 3d, 1st year.

I have been to the region of perpetual ice, on the Dent du Midi. Before the sun shone upon the valley I had already reached the bluff overlooking the town, and was crossing the partly cultivated stretch of ground which covers it. I went on by a steep ascent, through dense forests of fir-trees, leveled in many places by winters long since passed away ; fruitful decay, vast and confused mass of a vegetation that had died and had regerminated from the remains of its former life. At eight o'clock I had reached the bare summit which crowns the ascent, and which forms the first salient step in that wondrous pile whose highest peak still rose so far beyond me. Then I dismissed my guide, and put my own powers to the test. I wanted that no hireling should intrude upon this Alpine liberty, that no man of the plains should come to weaken the austerity of these savage regions. I felt my whole being broaden, as it was left alone among the obstacles and the dangers of a rugged nature, far from the artificial trammels and the ingenious oppression of men. 

I stood fixed and exultant as I watched the rapid disappearance of the only man whom I was likely to see among these mighty precipices. On the ground I left watch, money, everything that I had about me, and almost all my clothing, without taking any care to conceal it. Thus, you may remark, the first act of my independence was bizarre to say the least, and I resembled those children who have been too confined, and who commit only stupid acts once left to themselves. I'll admit there was something of puerility in my haste to abandon everything, in my new cut-down equipment, but at any rate I went along more at my ease, and often holding between my teeth the branch I had cut to help me in the descent, I started to crawl along the ridge of rocks which connects this minor peak with the principal mass. Several times I dragged myself between two bottomless chasms. And in this way I reached the granite peaks. 

My guide had told me that I could climb no higher, and for some time I was brought to a standstill. But at last, by descending a short distance, I found an easier way, and, climbing with the audacity of a mountaineer, I reached a hollow filled with frozen and crusted snow, which had lain unmelted by the summer suns. Still I mounted higher ; but on reaching the foot of the highest peak of the Dent, I found I could not climb to its summit, for its steep sides were scarcely out of the perpendicular, and it seemed to rise five hundred feet above me. 

I had crossed few fields of snow, yet my unprotected eyes, wearied by its brilliancy, and parched by the glare of the noon sun on its frozen surface, could see but vaguely the surrounding objects. Besides, many of the peaks were unknown to me, and I could be sure of only the most important ones. Since I have been in Switzerland I have read nothing but Saussure, Bourrit, the Guide to Switzerland, etc., but I am still very much a stranger in the Alps. Yet I could not mistake the colossal summit of Mont Blanc, which rose far above me ; that of Velan ; one more distant, but still higher, which I took to be Mont Rosa ; and, on the opposite side of the valley, near me but lower down, the Dent de Morcles, beyond the chasms. The peak that I could not climb, shut off what was perhaps the most striking part of this scene. For, behind it, stretched the long depths of the Valais, inclosed on each side by the glaciers of Sanetsch, of Lauterbrunnen, and of the Pennine Alps, and ending in the domes of the Saint Gothard and the Titlis, the snows of the Furca, and the pyramids of the Schreckhorn and the Finster-Aar-Horn. 

But this view of the mountain-tops outspread at the feet of man, this view so grand, so majestic, so far removed from the monotonous vacuity of the plains, was still not the object of my quest in the midst of unfettered nature, of silent fixity, of unsullied ether. On the lowlands, natural man is of necessity undergoing continual change by breathing that social atmosphere, so dense, stormy, seething, forever troubled by the clamor of the arts, the din of ostensible pleasures, the cries of hate, and the endless laments of anxiety and of sorrow. But on those desert peaks, where the sky is measureless, and the air is more stable, and time less fleeting, and life more permanent, -- there, all nature gives eloquent expression to a vaster order, a more visible harmony, an eternal whole. There, man is reinstated in his changeful but indestructible form ; he breathes a free air far from social emanations ; he exists only for himself and for the universe ; he lives a life of reality in the midst of sublime unity.

This was the feeling that I desired, that I sought. Uncertain of myself, in an order of things which has been devised with unwearied pains by ingenious and childish minds, I scaled the heights to ask of nature why I should feel ill at ease in their midst. I wished to know whether my existence was out of place in the human economy, or whether the present social order is unrelated to eternal harmony, like some irregularity or accidental exception in the progress of the world. At last I believe I am sure of myself. There are moments which dispel mistrust, prejudice, uncertainties, -- when the truth comes to us with an overruling and unalterable conviction.

Thus may it be! I shall live, miserable and almost ridiculous, on an earth enslaved by the caprices of this ephemeral world, opposing to my ennuis this conviction, which places me, within, nearer to the man I would be. And were I to meet with someone whose character is so inflexible that his being, formed on the above model, cannot be yielded up to the imprinting of society; yes if, I say, I should chance to meet with such a man, we will understand each other ; he will be mine and I his for evermore ; we will transfer to each other our relations with the rest of the world ; and quit of other men, whose vain needs we shall pity, we will pursue, if it may be, a more natural and more equal life. But who is to say if it would be any happier, without any harmony with the things around us, and passed in the midst of suffering nations? 

I cannot give you a true impression of this new world, or express the permanence of the mountains in the language of the plains. The hours seemed to me both more serene and more productive; and, even as though the planets, amid the universal calm, had been arrested in their course, I was conscious that the gradual train of my thoughts, full of deliberation and of energy, could in no wise be hastened, yet was pressing forward at unusual speed. When I wished to estimate its duration, I saw that the sun had not kept pace with it, and I inferred that the consciousness of existence is really more inert and more sterile amid the tumult of human surroundings. I realized that thought, while less hurried, is more truly active among the mountains -- on their peaceful heights -- even though visible movements are more gradual. The man of the valleys consumes without enjoyment the span of his restless and feverish days ; he is like unto those ever-moving insects which waste their efforts in futile vacillations, while others, equally weak, but more tranquil, by their straight and unflagging course, outstrip them in the race. 

The day was hot, the horizon veiled with haze, the valleys flooded with mist. The brilliancy of the fields of ice filled the lower atmosphere with its luminous reflections ; but an undreamed-of purity seemed to form the essence of the air I breathed. At that height, no exhalations from the lowlands, no effects of light and shade, either disturbed or interrupted the vague and sombre depth of the skies. Their seeming color was no longer that pale and luminous blue, the soft canopy of the plains, the charming and delicate blend which forms a visible inclosure to the inhabited earth, and is a rest and a goal to the eye. In those high regions, the invisible ether allowed the gaze to lose itself in boundless space ; in the midst of the splendor of the sun and of the glaciers, to seek other worlds and other suns, as under the vast sky of the night ; and above the burning atmosphere of the day, to penetrate a nocturnal universe.

Stealthily the mist rose from the glaciers and was shaped into clouds at my feet. The snows had lost their dazzling brightness, and the sky grew deeper still and full of shadow. A fog covered the Alps ; here and there a solitary peak rose out of this ocean of mist ; held in their rugged clefts, lines of shimmering snow gave the granite a blacker and a sterner look. The snow-white dome of Mont Blanc lifted its imperishable mass above this gray and moving sea, above these drifts of fog, which were furrowed by the wind and piled in towering waves. A black point appeared in this abyss ; it rose rapidly, and came straight towards me ; it was the mighty eagle of the Alps ; his wings were wet, his eye fierce ; he was in search of prey, but at the sight of man he fled with a sinister cry and was lost as he plunged into the clouds. Twenty times the cry reechoed, but the sounds were short and sharp, like twenty separate cries in the universal silence. Then absolute stillness fell upon all things, as though sound itself had ceased to exist, and the power of sound had been effaced from the universe. Never has silence been known in the tumultuous valleys ; only on the icy summits does that stability, that solid permanence remain, which no tongue can express, which the imagination is powerless to attain. Except for the memories of the plains, man could not conceive of any movement in nature beyond himself ; the course of the planets would be incomprehensible ; even to the changes of the mist, everything would seem to subsist in the very act of change. Each actual moment having the appearance of continuity, man would have the certainty without ever having the sentiment of the succession of things ; and the perpetual mutations of the universe would be to his mind an impenetrable mystery. 

I wish that I could have kept surer records, not of my general impressions in that land of silence, for they will never be forgotten, but of the ideas to which they gave birth, and of which scarcely a memory has been left to me. In the midst of scenes so different, the imagination recalls with difficulty an order of thought which seems to be in disaccord with all the objects of its present surroundings. I should have had to write down what I felt ; but then my emotions would soon have fallen to the level of everyday experience. This solicitude to harvest one's thought for future use has in it an element of servility which belongs to the painstaking efforts of a dependent life. 

Not in moments of ardor does one take heed of  other times and other men ; in those hours one's thoughts are not born for the sake of artificial conventionalities, of fame, or even for the good of others. One is more natural, without even a desire to utilize the present moment : no thoughts that come at one's behest, no reflection, no spirit of intellectual investigation, no search for hidden things, no attempt to find the new and strange. Thought is not active and ordered, but passive and free: dreams, and complete abandonment ; depth without comprehension, greatness without enthusiasm, energy without volition ; to muse, not to meditate, -- this is one's attitude. Do not, then, be surprised if, after an experience in thought and emotion which will perhaps never be repeated during my life, I still have nothing to tell you. You remember those nature-lovers of the Dauphiné, who expected so much from Jean-Jacques, and were so bitterly disappointed. They went with him to a vantage ground well suited to the kindling of a poetic genius ; they waited for a magnificent burst of eloquence ; but the author of Julie sat on the ground, dallied with some blades of grass, and said not a word.

It may have been five o'clock when I noticed how the shadows began to lengthen, and how the cold crept over me, in the angle, open to the western sky, where I had long lain upon the granite rock. It was too treacherous to walk over those steep crags, and so I could not keep in motion. The mists had disappeared, and I saw that the evening was beautiful even in the valleys.

I would have been in real danger if the clouds had thickened ; but I had not thought of it until this moment. The bed of grosser air that envelops the earth was more foreign to me in this pure air that I breathed, approaching to ether ; all prudence had dropped away from me, as if it were an accoutrement belonging only to the life of falsity. 

Descending once more to inhabited earth, I felt that I again took up the long chain of anxieties and weariness. I returned at ten o'clock ; the moon shone upon my window. I heard the rushing of the Rhone ; there was no wind ; the city slept. I thought of the mountains I had left, of Charrières which is to be my home, of the liberty which I have claimed as mine. 

*

This letter gives a pretty good idea of what Senancour has to offer. He's a superb nature writer. He is usually uninterested in small detail. But his vocabulary, dry, austere and abstract, yet always distinct and often unexpected, is brilliant at evoking the large effects of landscape.

Though the two authors differ in so many ways, a comparison with some of Wordsworth's most outstanding qualities is sure to suggest itself. 

Senancour is often an intriguingly unusual thinker. Subsisting on his private income, having cut himself free from nearly all human relations, there's something feral about him; he opens up lines of thought never glimpsed by authors more assimilated to the received opinions of civilisation. 

At the same time, this thought can seem obscure or trifling, and sometimes when Jim Locke's voice falls silent at the end of a letter I find I've almost drifted off. Obermann is gloomy and almost without action or progress. But it's excitingly different, too. I can certainly sense the compulsive quality acknowledged by its fans. 

How to pronounce Arviragus / The Franklin's Tale

English Elm (Ulmus procera). Frome, 22 September 2021.

[Since the 1960s, this is about as big as the trees get in most of the UK. In their youth they are healthy, but once the bark becomes rugged enough it's sure to attract the Elm-Bark Beetle, which inadvertently introduces Dutch Elm disease, and the tree then dies. (In Brighton they take special measures to keep the disease at bay, so you can still see mature English Elms.) In the first Chapter of David Copperfield the "tall old elm-trees ... tossing their arms about", like the expectant Mrs Copperfield not knowing if it's a boy or a girl, signal an era that's long gone.]

This post is a singularly pointless bundle of notes, but it passes, I hope, through some interesting territory.

Arveragus is the name of the noble knight who marries Dorigen with great joy at the start of Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, and then (as knights do) takes off for a couple of years of knightly feats, leaving Dorigen to her own devices. The titular hero does just the same in Wolfram's Parzifal. But in Chaucer the story stays at home: we never hear or care about Arveragus' knightly feats, only that he's not here.

It's clear from the scansion that Chaucer pronounced the name on the second and fourth syllables: Arveragus.

The tale is set in Brittany and is announced as being a Breton lay (a well known medieval genre). Most scholars have believed that Chaucer confected the Breton setting: he adapted source material from Boccaccio (often one of his unacknowledged sources) and gave it a Celtic colouring. If this is true he did it very thoroughly. The name Arveragus could have come from Book IV of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History: one of the sons of Cymbeline, written Arviragus there and in Shakespeare's play. 

Certainly Chaucer's tale has marked differences from a Breton lay. But I do feel attracted to the argument by William Henry Schofield (1901) that there are indications in Geoffrey of Monmouth of the prior existence of exactly such Celtic traditions as appear in Chaucer's tale, both concerning Arviragus (famously happy marriage surviving sore trials) and Aurelius (magical rock removal). It's unprovable, but Schofield's basic contention is persuasive, that Geoffrey's fabulous history wasn't simply made up out of thin air but wove existing oral narratives into a framework of Roman history. So if he dwells on Arviragus' especially happy marriage it's because it was already proverbial.

(Schofield suggests that the original British form of the name was Arverus, with "ar" being a prefix and "ver" the root. The name, in the form "Arveri", appears on a Romano-British inscription.)

In Shakespeare's Cymbeline the name Arviragus appears frequently as a speech prefix and in SDs, but only once in the spoken text, and this appearance is inconclusive regarding pronunciation (taking into account the metrical freedom of late Shakespeare):

(Belarius.) ... The younger brother, Cadwal,
Once Arviragus, in as like a figure
Strikes life into my speech and shows much more
His own conceiving.

(Cymbeline III.3.102-105)

I suspect the stress pattern is meant to be second-and-fourth again: the rhythm of Arviragus matching that of his elder brother Guiderius and foster-father Belarius.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth Guiderius dies soon after becoming king. Arviragus becomes king in his turn and is the more important figure, reigning a long time, sometimes accepting the authority of Rome (he marries the Emperor Claudius' daughter) and sometimes rebelling.

He may have been a historical figure of the 1st century CE. As Geoffrey points out, he is referred to in Juvenal: A gift of a giant turbot to the Emperor is an omen, the flatterer Veiento claims, that "you will capture some king, or Arviragus will fall from his British chariot-pole". 

   -  v  v  /  -  v  v   /  -     v  v   /   -    ()  -   / -  v  v   /   -  v

 excidet / Aruira / gus. pere / grina est / belua: / cernis

(Satire 4, line 127)

Wikipedia gives the name as Arvirargus, which contradicts Chaucer's pronunciation and, so far as I can see, Juvenal's too. (But if you think my scansion is wrong, please let me know... it's been a long time since I parsed a dactylic  hexameter...)

The translators of Juvenal into English seem to agree with the stress on second and fourth. Dryden unfortunately never translated the fourth Satire, but here's Barten Holyday (1593 - 1661):

                                                        Yet came
Vejento short of him? struck with thy flame,
Bellona, he Divines: and, here, says he,
A wondrous Omen of Great Triumph see!
Some King thou shalt lead Captive, or at last
Arviragus from British Chariot cast.
The Beast is Forreigne: On his back behold,
Upright thy Darts stand! 

(Source.)

Dryden didn't think much of Holyday's over-literal translation, though he praised the notes. On Arviragus, the note is about the seeming contradiction of dates: Geoffrey of Monmouth placing him in the reign of Claudius (41 - 54 CE), and Juvenal in the reign of Domitian (81 - 96 CE). Schofield wondered if Geoffrey was misled by Juvenal's prudent naming of the Emperor: though he's in fact talking about Domitian he calls him "the bald Nero".  But then, as Holyday suggested, the same prudence might have led Juvenal to name a past rebel against the Empire rather than a current one. So Geoffrey may have ended up drawing the right conclusion about when Arviragus was active. 

(Juvenal announces his approach to naming at the end of Satire I, here in Dryden's translation:

Muse, be advised; 'tis past considering time,

When entered once the dangerous lists of rhime;

Since none the living villains dare implead,

Arraign them in the persons of the dead.

)

Here's the passage about Arviragus in the translation by William Gifford (1756 - 1826):

Nor fell Veiento short:—as if possest
With all Bellona's rage, his laboring breast
Burst forth in prophecy; "I see, I see
The omens of some glorious victory!
Some powerful monarch captured!—lo, he rears,
Horrent on every side, his pointed spears!
Arviragus hurled from the British car:
The fish is foreign, foreign is the war."

(Source.)

Gifford's is a somewhat infamous name in English Literature (though not to Byron), but even Hazlitt acknowledged the qualities of Gifford's 1800 Juvenal translation; it looks very lively to me.

*

A lost play Arveragus was performed at the court of Charles I in 1636.

*

Which was the mooste fre, as thinketh yow?

Online text of the Franklin's Tale: 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22120/22120-h/22120-h.htm#franklin

The main source for the Franklin's Tale can be read in the link below (in a sixteenth-century English translation), and it's very good reading. It's the fourth of thirteen "Love Questions" that are themselves an episode within Giovanni Boccaccio's enormous romance Il Filocolo. 

http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/authors/boccaccio/filoc.html

This particular Love Question is posed by a certain Menedon; as in Chaucer, it asks who showed the greatest liberality: the husband, the lover or the wonder-worker.  In Boccaccio (but notably not in Chaucer) there then follows a detailed debate.

In Menedon's tale, neither the husband nor the wife have names. The lover (i.e. the equivalent of Aurelius) is called Tarolfo. 

These characters lived, Menedon says, in his own memory and "in the countrey where I was borne", later described by Tarolfo as "the extremes of the west", and by Menedon (during the debate) as part of Spain. (Galicia? Might Schofield have been right, that Boccaccio too was drawing on Celtic story material?)

Unlike Arveragus the husband in this tale is never absent on business. Nevertheless his wife is pestered by the lovestruck Tarolfo, in the form of signs of attention, messengers, passing down the street outside, etc. She's completely loyal to her husband and thinks she'd better tell him about Tarolfo's behaviour before someone else does, so he doesn't suppose she encouraged it.  But then she worries that telling her husband is going to lead to a whole world of trouble, maybe even violence. So instead she comes up with the idea of putting a stop to Tarolfo's indiscretions by offering him a conditional promise that she'll never have to redeem:  OK, I'll give you my love if you can give me a May garden in the middle of January. (And in the mean time, quit hanging around.)

The bulk of the story consists of Tarolfo scouring the world for a way to do this, meeting an impoverished root-gatherer called Tebano and offering half his wealth to produce the required unseasonal garden; Tebano's deployment of herbal lore and observing the moon and pagan prayers, and his voyages around the world on a chariot pulled by dragons, gathering his herbs from exotic places. (His magical herbs are so powerful that even the dragons regain their youth.) And thus, in the midst of winter, Tarolfo has his blooming May garden. For good measure it even has the ripe fruits of August. 

The wife is sufficiently unconcerned to have a long appreciative look round the garden. But when she gets home reality hits, and she's very upset and in a quandary what to do. The husband, seeing her agitation, eventually prises the story out of her. He says, well you struck a deal and he's certainly delivered, so go and give him what you offered, but only this once. And I won't be cross with you, because I know you love me and you never meant for this to happen. But no more conditional promises, eh? So she dresses up and goes to Tarolfo and says: I'm here, do as you please. But once Tarolfo finds out that she's there with her husband's consent, he's struck by the husband's incredible generosity, makes his own generous surrender of his claim, and then the sympathetic Tebano makes the same surrender of his claim. 

Debating this, Menedon argues that the husband is the least liberal, because he offers such an insignificant trifle, something that costs him nothing; that Tarolfo is much more liberal, to give up the sexual satisfaction he's been burning for all this time; but the most liberal by far is Tebano, to give up the wealth he has fairly earned and return to a life of miserable poverty. 

But the queen has the casting vote, and she says that the husband is the most liberal of the three, though not the most wise: because what he offers up is his honour, which unlike a sexual conquest or a sum of money can never be replaced once it's gone. (The queen makes the point, as many modern readers of Chaucer have done, that anyway the husband is wrong to regard his wife's "promise" to Tarolfo as valid, since fulfilling it would break her prior marriage vow.)

*

This isn't a particularly scrupulous account of Boccaccio's tale, but I think it does get the tone about right. He extends himself on Tebano's pagan prayer and the crazy dragon journey, but he fairly rips through the rest of the story because, after all, it's only a prelude to the main course, which is the debate. This summary approach places little emphasis on the characters' emotions. It deals in the facts of the case, and its sped-up narrative even has a touch of fabliau: sexual shenanigans as matter for a hearty laugh rather than earnest ethical consideration. 

*

Chaucer buries that worldly matter-of-factness in an exalted atmosphere of courtly love. His characters are feeling creatures, full of sentiment. In a prelude to the main story Arveragus is shown as an exemplary humble wooer who intends to maintain the same submissive devotion to his lady even now they are married. His wife Dorigen is (unlike the wife in Boccaccio) tormented by her own feelings of love for her absent husband and fears for his safe return to their dangerous coast. In Boccaccio the wife tells her husband: "I will rather rid my self of life, than do any thing displeasant to you, or dishonor to your person"; that hint becomes Dorigen's agitated list of the women she should emulate by dying rather than suffering dishonour. Likewise Tarolfo's passing remark to Tebano that he would gladly welcome death is enormously heightened by Chaucer, Aurelius' "two yeer and moore" of bed-ridden despair matching the two years of silent devotion to Dorigen that preceded the eventual revelation of his feelings for her. And though, in the denouement, Arveragus reflects some of the husband's sang-froid, he's unable to maintain it for long and breaks down in tears. Even Aurelius' brother (one of Chaucer's innovations) is seen to weep and wail. 

With this foregrounding of sentiment we can link the major new features introduced by Chaucer: the unusual set-up of his couple's marriage, with neither having the "maistrie" -- evidently responding to the preceding tales by the Wife of Bath and the Clerk, as Kittredge observed --, the Breton setting and  "thise grisly feendly rokkes blake". 

In Boccaccio, the wife's conditional promise to Tarolfo was well-motivated. Dorigen's, on the other hand, is strikingly unexpected. After her first uncompromising response to Aurelius ends with "Taak this for final answere as of me", this is what immediately follows:

But aftere that in pley thus seyde she:

"Aurelie," quod she, "by heighe God above,

Yet wolde I graunte yow to been youre love,

Sin I yow se so pitously complaine.

Looke what day that endelong Britaine

Ye remoeve alle the rokkes, stoon by stoon . . ."

It's positively tantalizing, the draping of this cold shower in such lacy curtains. And Dorigen's tease or sarcasm or whatever it is seems completely unnecessary: Chaucer has eliminated the motive. By doing so, he's created an enigma for his audience to decide for themselves. (Is Dorigen uncontrollably giving vent to her fears about the rocks and her husband's safety? Is she furious with Aurelius for pursuing her when defenceless and alone?) And yet, this dialogue between Dorigen and Aurelius is profoundly convincing, partly because of its switches of tack and tone. These people are many-sided, they scintillate, changing from moment to moment. 

It's a bit like how Shakespeare leaves it up to his audience to ponder Hamlet's delay or Iago's malignity: whereas, in Shakespeare's sources, Saxo's Amleth had a very good reason for delay and Cinthio's Ensign had a very clear though very bad reason for malignity (towards Disdemona, not her husband). Both Chaucer and Shakespeare whirl us into new narrative depths by sacrificing explanation.

*

It's an intriguing insight into Chaucer's creative process to see how he nevertheless retains some apparently dispensible elements of Boccaccio in transmuted form. 

In Boccaccio, the wife's sense of Tarolfo's irritating persistence was important to the plot. Boccaccio says: "Now for all this, Tarolfo surceased not, folowing the precepts of Ovid, who saith, that a man must not thorough the hardnesse of a woman leave to persever, bicause with continuance the soft water pierceth the harde stone." Chaucer dropped the lover's irritating persistence, yet he retained the worn stone image, applying it to the well-meaning friends who persist (with partial success) in trying to console Dorigen:

By proces, as ye knowen eeverichoon,

Men may so longe graven in a stoon

Til som figure therinne emprented be . . .

Likewise, the garden of Boccaccio's story, though it no longer comprises the "impossible" task, strangely lingers on: as the May garden where Dorigen is taken by her friends, where Aurelius sings and dances and reveals his love (but this time, it really is May); and where, at the end, Dorigen has arranged to meet Aurelius; though as it turns out they run into each other on the way. Nor has Chaucer forgotten about the midwinter aspect of Boccaccio's story: this becomes the beautifully described December season in which Aurelius and the "philosophre" return to Brittany. Finally, Tebano's prayer to night and the stars and Hecate and Ceres seems to have suggested Aurelius' prayer to Apollo and Lucina; though Tebano's prayer produces dramatic results and Aurelius' prayer produces no result whatever. 

*

Looking at these details of what Chaucer did with Boccaccio can seem sort of illegitimate. I mean, these transformations are emphatically not part of what Chaucer expected his audience to see. He did not expect them to have even heard of Boccaccio. You could say we've stopped looking at the front of the tapestry and are looking at the knots on the back. 

But then, we're not in Chaucer's audience any more. Reading six hundred years later, one of the things we keep coming up against is the alien nature of medieval art; the pervasive sense that, in spite of everything we enjoy and relish and admire and love, there are fundamental aspects of Chaucer's poetic that we don't entirely grasp. That Chaucer's narrative logic isn't quite like ours. That his idea of what is or isn't relevant often surprises us. And when we feel a restiveness, so that we impute e.g. sarcasm or irony or boredom or failure, these imputations feel less secure than they do with later writers. Medieval culture is complicated, sophisticated, full of differences to ours, and yet full of similarities that may be genuine, but may also mislead us. 

Pics backlog

 

Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica). Beckington, 15 September 2021.

I'm posting a backlog of late summer pictures. These elegant narrow nettle leaves are late season growth.

Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica). Beckington, 15 September 2021.

Below, the more normal leaf-shape:

Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica). Beckington, 15 September 2021.

Crack Willow (Salix fragilis). Beckington, 15 September 2021.

On the same theme, the dramatic variation in size between a remaining spring leaf and more recent growth on this Crack Willow.

Ripe fig. Frome, 16 September 2021.

Ivy-leaved Toadflax (Cymbalaria muralis). Nunney, 18 September 2021.

A new niche for Ivy-leaved Toadflax: plastic lawns. 

Meadow Vetchling (Lathyrus pratensis). Oldford, 15 September 2021.

Meadow Vetchling in the water meadow outside the creamery at Oldford.

Common throughout the British Isles. Also nearly all of Sweden, except the far north (Sw: Gulvial). Also most of Europe and deep into Russia, but absent from most of the Iberian peninsula.

Meadow Vetchling (Lathyrus pratensis). Oldford, 15 September 2021.

Meadow Vetchling (Lathyrus pratensis). Oldford, 15 September 2021.

Meadow Vetchling (Lathyrus pratensis). Oldford, 15 September 2021.

Meadow Vetchling (Lathyrus pratensis). Oldford, 15 September 2021.

My mildly awakening interest in blackberry species .... I'm hoping this one might be Rubus ulmifolius, the only sexual species and the most widespread one. On the basis of commonness, September fruiting, many drupelets in each fruit and excellent flavour. That's probably wrong but, whatever.

Chinese Dogwood (Cornus kousa). Radstock, 8 September 2021.

Chinese Dogwood noticed in Radstock. The compound fruits are edible, apparently.

Chinese Dogwood (Cornus kousa). Radstock, 8 September 2021.

Sea Spurge (Euphorbia paralias). Sand Bay, 12 September 2021.

Common around southern and western coasts of the British Isles, typically on stable dunes. It does not occur in Sweden.

Sea Spurge (Euphorbia paralias). Sand Bay, 12 September 2021.

Sea Spurge (Euphorbia paralias). Sand Bay, 12 September 2021.

A cordgrass islet on the mudflats at Sand Bay.

Shells from Sand Bay, found in shirt pocket the next day.

The last of the sunlight, in Beckington. At 18:45 and 18:46 respectively.

European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior). Frome, 15 September 2021.

These might soon be poignant pictures. They show a fine ash tree outside Frome College. The Ash is the characteristic tree species of this part of England, but ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) is rife and is killing most of the trees. (It's  thought to be a natural fungus that grows on Asian ash species but is not lethal to them.) Up on the Mendips whole lanes and woods now consist of dead and dying trees. The disease is well established in nearby villages (Nunney, Beckington) but in Frome itself I haven't yet seen many signs. I suppose in a built environment the separation of the trees slows the spread. Apparently about 15% of individuals are resistant, so let's hope this is one of them.

European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior). Frome, 21 September 2021.

European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior). Frome, 2 November 2021.

A view looking eastwards from the southern edge of Frome. In the distance, Cley Hill and the Longleat ridge.

This might be another poignant pic. There are plans to build 1700 homes here (the euphemistically named Selwood Garden Community). The idea, so I've been told, is to encourage greater use of cars instead of people walking downtown or out into the countryside.

https://stopsgc.org/

long looping strands

Favourite lines? Well yes, those are easy to find.

Piglets:

snouts succulent,

these sisters lie outspread, five cordial orchids

against mother's blushing pungent bulk,

("Killiow Pigs")

Michelangelo's clouds:

As old as these nesting clouds

that water-lily the void together,

("God Dividing Light from Darkness")

Something the thief steals:

... the joy that bends you easily and makes you feel safe,

("Thief")

He dreams the fragmental stealth of my spirit.

He dreams my future, he dreams my past.

He dreams the breath of this bare room,

the chimney's old ache of blackened brick,

the ceiling a caul of faded paint,

the walls objecting to windows on principle,

doors opening and closing on an ardent future,

causing horror, fear, delight,

and all these dreams move in me like sex,

with little or no punishment or revenge.

("Draco, the Dreaming Snake")

Kneading clay:

He lifts the clay in both hands

and thuds it down on the wooden benchtop,

... then pressing the weight of his spread hands

down on it; the air must be forced out.

He grabs the clay up, throws it down,

beats it with his fists again. He punches

and pummels it, groaning and urging himself on;

it must be done;

this is not the gentle time.

With a wire he splices the clay in two, like cheese;

examines it for air bubbles.

Walloping the two halves together with a clap of laughter,

he wedges the clay, pushing the softest clay out

in convexing folds ....

("Clayman")

*

No more books, I told myself, conscious that I'd already exceeded the forty cubic inches allotted for books in the van. But then I noticed Penelope Shuttle's Adventures with my Horse in a Frome charity shop (it was in the farming section) and I couldn’t resist revisiting it after thirty years.

This was her fourth poetry collection, published in 1988. (Her latest, Lyonesse, came out in June 2021; I'm eager to read it.)

I've probably mentioned before that Frome has a tenuous Penelope Shuttle connection. It was here, at the George Hotel, that she arranged to meet up with an intrigued Peter Redgrove (in about 1969, I think). They'd briefly crossed paths a year before, at an arts meeting near St Ives. But this was the real beginning of the marriage that would transform their work.

Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle: How we met (Independent, 15 August 1992)

*

But the poem that especially struck me this time was one I neglected first time around. I find I can't omit any of the lines. 

Lovers in a Picture

On a bed like an intimate stage

the lovers embrace between red curtains

caught on five gold rings;

the soles of her feet

and the tips of her toes

are scarlet as some phoenix

her red fingertips have held;

across her face turned from him

is the faintest veil;

otherwise she is like him

naked to the waist,

then swirled in big clinging pants

of crimson silk;

his face as smooth and passionate

a profile as she

on their red-curtained Indian couch,

like sonneteers on a rose-patterned mattress;

the two pearls hung in his pierced ear

quiver and her long looping strands

of pearls that fall from neck to waist

and meet behind her back in a shining halter

shiver with a similar suspense;

familiar to us, his leaning towards her,

his concentration and hope;

familiar to us, her mouth,

her small round kind breast;

familiar to us, her knees he kneels between,

familiar to us, his heart-beat, her breath;

they wait in stillness

for us to see how their watchful ease

between the curtains,

their preliminaries and his hand

beneath her elbow

mirror the only way of solving

the redness of those curtains,

the treasure of pearls,

of feeling the air lifted up

on its golden rings

and rocking us;

familiar to us, these lovers

at their work of guidance and love;

and night's kohl drawn across our own eyelids.

At the end of this gently unspooling sentence the curtains are drawn across. 

In the animized world of this poetry, the pictured lovers are as alive as the lovers who are viewing the picture. Sex always has an audience, because everything around us is alive (and not to mention the lovers themselves); this bepearled pair of lovers have dressed for the occasion. But nakedness is the essence. The argument of the poem is its movement from "similar" to "familiar"; what is more similar than his smooth and passionate skin to hers? Your knee, my knee; your kneeling, my kneeling. So that, by the end, it's the viewers who are involved in the curtains, in the concentration of "solving" and feeling the air lifted up. In their own act of sex, or in sympathetic identification, or in artistic contemplation, or in artistic creation, of a poem for instance? In this poem all the activities form a continuum that we might simply call being alive. 

Penelope Shuttle has said that the form of her poems is driven by breath, and that's especially apparent here, where the flow of the poem's breathing is contained into an expectation, into hope, into "watchful ease".

What neat repast

The "pretty garden-house" in Petty France where Milton lived from 1652 to 1660.

[Source: Wikipedia. Engraving from 1848. The house was demolished in 1877. Later residents included Mill, Bentham and Hazlitt. By this time it was 19 York Street; the name Petty France was restored in 1925. When the Commonwealth collapsed in 1660 Milton went into hiding at a friend's house in Bartholomew Close, Farringdon.]

Lawrence of vertuous Father vertuous Son,

    Now that the Fields are dank, and ways are mire,

    Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire

    Help wast a sullen day ; what may be won

From the hard Season gaining : time will run

    On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire

    The frozen earth ; and cloth in fresh attire

    The Lillie and Rose, that neither sow'd nor spun.

What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,

    Of Attick tast, with Wine, whence we may rise

    To hear the Lute well toucht, or artfull voice

Warble immortal Notes and Tuskan Ayre ?

    He who of those delights can judge, and spare

    To interpose them oft, is not unwise.

This is one of the sonnets Milton wrote while living in Petty France, Westminster. He was now totally blind, and depended on younger friends like Edward Lawrence to go on walks with him. Maybe it was written in 1654 (when Milton was 46), at the same time as "Cyriack, whose grandsire", with which it seems to form a pair; both poems are about judiciously partaking in leisure activities.

There's no agreed standard for numbering Milton's sonnets, but this is Sonnet 20 according to the most widely promulgated scheme.

"Favonius" is the Latin name for Zephyrus, the west wind. It's always associated with the coming of spring and flowers, as in the opening of Horace's Ode III.7.

Milton's sonnet is about passing the winter season. It's a restrained Horatian invitation poem. Puritan feasting doesn't sound too bad to me, if it involves wine and lute songs.

I can't accept that there's any ambiguity about "spare to interpose them oft", it can only mean "refrain from indulging in them often". But I readily accept that there's an ambiguous feeling about leisure within the poem. Why end with the super-cautious "not unwise" instead of, say, "very wise"? Why say "Help waste" instead of e.g. "Enjoy"? 

What's the implication here of those biblical idlers the flowers of the field? 

22 And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on. 23 The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment. 24 Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls? 25 And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit? 26 If ye then be not able to do that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest? 27 Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 28 If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and to morrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith? 29 And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind. 30 For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: and your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. 31 But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you. 32 Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

(Luke 12:22-32, cf. Matthew 6:25-34)

It's the ravens, not the lilies, who do not sow. 

But lilies or ravens, it might seem odd to mention them. Milton, a hard-working and well-paid servant of government, does not seemingly have much in common with these faithful creatures. But maybe he saw himself as halfway between working for a nation of the world (verse 30) and working for the kingdom of God (verse 31). His stupendous labours for the former were winding down a little, because of his blindness. The time was approaching when he could attend once more to his high-pitched poetic ambitions. In 1655 his salary was commuted to a life pension. (It's uncertain whether, by 1654, he had already begun to write bits of Paradise Lost.)

The twin topics of work and leisure had always preoccupied him; as far back as L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, or the sonnet on his 24th birthday. Milton was constantly telling himself that he needed to work bloody hard, and then having to tell himself that it was fine to relax and not feel bad about it. He's a case history for the Protestant work ethic, for over-active adrenals. In the sonnet on his blindness his body urges him to "post o'er land and ocean without rest" and, instead, he has to accept that "They also serve who only stand and wait". It's all about pacing yourself.

The syntax is a bit tricky. "Now" in line 2 is leading up to a question, but the question doesn't arrive until line 9. The beginning of line 3, despite the inversion, is not a question but a relative clause. So a free paraphrase of 2-5 might be: "Now that it's muddy outside, where we will sometimes meet each other and then go (to my home) to sit by the fire and help each other get through the day, thus gaining what can be gained from the hard season...."

 

Surely line 4 alludes to the medieval pairing of Winner and Waster, or is that just a distraction? Anyway, it seems very characteristic of Milton's adrenals that even in the enforced relaxation of winter he should be thinking about "what may be won".

What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, 

Of Attick tast.... 

Milton's play with the -st ending (momentarily splitting into its constituent sounds, in "light and choice"), is very beautiful. Maybe what's being created here is a kind of nourishment that can't be measured in calories: the deep nourishment given by poetry, or the spiritual provision that God gives to his faithful disciples.