 April
is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
This is the
opening of The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965),
and it seems the ideal start to this week’s column at the beginning
of April, on the topic of desire.
The word
‘desire’ is used in two senses: a synonym for ‘want’ in a fairly
general sense; and the general idea of love, as in this line from
The Song of Solomon:
I am my
beloved’s, and his desire is toward me.
Or these
lines, of Euripides (c. 485 – 406 BCE), from Hippolytus:
Love distills
desire upon the eyes,
love brings bewitching grace into the heart
of those he would destroy.
I pray that love may never come to me
with murderous intent,
in rhythms measureless and wild.
Nor fire nor stars have stronger bolts
than those of Aphrodite sent
by the hands of Eros, Zeus’s child.
The first
meaning appears in William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), in Love’s
Labour’s Lost, Act 1, Scene 1, line 105:
At Christmas
I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s newfangled mirth;
But like of each thing that in season grows.
However,
as you can imagine, Shakespeare was not unaware of the more carnal
usage: In King Henry The Fourth Part II, Act II, Scene
IV, Pointz says to Prince Henry, as they are watching the aging
Falstaff dallying with Doll Tearsheet:
Is it not
strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?
Our first
poem of this week is Shakespeare’s first sonnet, From
fairest creatures.
Just a few
years later, John Dryden (1631 – 1700), in Alexander’s Feast,
has:
Thus, long ago,
Ere heaving bellows learned to blow,
While organs yet
were mute,
Timotheus, to his breathing flute,
And sounding lyre,
Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.
 Thomas
Gray (1716 – 1771) spent most of his life as a scholar in Cambridge
University. He actually wrote very little poetry: his collected
works published during his lifetime comprised less that 1,000
lines. However, he was very influential. His poem Elegy
Written in a Country Church-yard (1751) is still one of
the most popular poems in the English language, as indeed is his
Ode on the
Death of a Favorite Cat. He wrote a Pindaric Ode (we have
described what this means in The Mediadrome before: it is enough
here to say that it represents considerable poetic skill!) The
Progress of Poesy. Here is a stanza relevant to this week’s
theme:
O'er Idalia's
velvet-green
The rosy-crowned Loves are seen
On Cytherea's day
With antic Sports and blue-ey'd Pleasures,
Frisking light in frolic measures;
Now pursuing, now retreating,
Now in circling troops they meet:
To brisk notes in cadence beating
Glance their many-twinkling feet.
Slow melting strains their Queen's approach declare:
Where'er she turns the Graces homage pay.
With arms sublime, that float upon the air,
In gliding state she wins her easy way:
O'er her warm cheek and rising bosom move
The bloom of young Desire and purple light of Love.
William Blake
(1757 – 1827) uses the word desire in a few of his poems, notably
Jerusalem:
Bring me
my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire,
Bring me my spear – O, clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
And from
his Notebook, Abstinence Sows Sand:
Abstinence
sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But Desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.
And, also
from his Notebook, Several Questions Answered, 2, What Is It:
What is
it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
Robert Burns
(1759 – 1796) was not especially concerned with academic learning,
as this First Epistle to J. Lapraik makes clear:
Gie me
ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,
That’s a’ the learning I desire.
The romantics
were sparing in their use of the word, curiously enough; but Percy
Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) has this, in his To --- One Word
Is Too Often Profaned:
The desire
of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
Of course,
The Rubáiyát
of Omar Khayyám, in the translation by Edward FitzGerald
(1809 – 1883) has something to say about desire! Here is Stanza
99:
Ah Love!
could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this Sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
Here is Alfred,
Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892), in his poem about the aging Ulysses,
dreaming of past glories:
How dull
it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
 I
like this poem, and although the connection with my theme is only
this one word above, I think the ‘yearning in desire’ of the aged
hero comes through the whole work. For this reason, I have chosen
it to be my third poem of this week.
Robert
Browning (1812 – 1889) wrote a blank verse poem of more than
20,000 lines entitled The Ring and the Book. It was published
in 12 books from 1868 to 1869, and is considered by many to be
his greatest work. It was based on the proceedings of a Roman
murder trial in 1698. It opens it with an invocation:
O lyric
love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire,-
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face,-
Yet human at the ripe-red of his heart,
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee
Except with bent head and beseeching hand-
Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward
Some whiteness which I judge, thy face makes proud
Some wanness where I think thy foot may fall!
Matthew Arnold
(1822 – 1888), in The Buried Life:
But often,
in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us - to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
 Matthew
Arnold, poet and critic, was born at Laleham on the Thames, the
eldest son of Thomas Arnold, historian and great headmaster of
Rugby (one of the great English ‘public schools’), and of Mary
(Penrose) Arnold. He was educated at Winchester; Rugby, where
he won a prize for a poem on Alaric at Rome; and Oxford,
to which he went as a Scholar of Balliol College in 1841, and
where he won the Newdigate Prize for Cromwell, A Prize Poem.
His literary career - leaving out these two prize poems - began
in 1849 with the publication of The Strayed Reveller and Other
Poems by A., which attracted little notice -- although it
contained perhaps his most purely poetical poem The Forsaken
Merman -- and was soon withdrawn. Empedocles on Etna and
Other Poems (among them Tristram and Iseult), published
in 1852, had a similar fate. Arnold was an influential figure
during his lifetime, perhaps more as a gifted critic than as a
major poet: one opinion of his work was “His greatest defects
as a poet stem from his lack of ear and his frequent failure to
distinguish between poetry and prose”. Nevertheless, he did write
a few poems that have lasted well. He may perhaps be a subject
for this column later.
Bayard Taylor
(1825 1878) was born in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. He published
a collection of romantic verse in 1844: Ximena … and Other
Poems, and on the basis of the popularity of this he receieved
a long-standing assignment as correspondent for the New York Tribune.
He traveled widely - California, Mexico, Europe, Africa, and East
Asia – and this provided him with material for lectures, novels,
and travel books. A biographer remarked, “His contemporaries found
these fascinating, but their popularity did not last”. Perhaps
the best of his poetry is in Poems of the Orient (1854)
and in his verse drama Prince Deukalion (1878). His most
ambitious work was his metrical translation into English (1870–71)
of Goethe’s Faust, which earned him appointment as U.S.
minister to Germany in 1878. He died in Berlin. Our second poem
of this week is Bedouin
Song, from Poems of the Orient.
Here is a
sonnet from Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882), from his Sonnets
from the House of Life. This is number 101, The One Hope:
When vain
desire at last and vain regret
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
And teach the unforgetful to forget?
Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,
Or may the soul at once in a green plain
Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain
And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?
Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air
Between the scriptured petals softly blown
Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown, -
Ah! let none other alien spell soe'er
But only the one Hope's one name be there, -
Not less nor more, but even that word alone.
The sonnets
in this collection were written over the period 1870 to 1881.
I think the lines written as the introduction – ‘Proem’
is the word used – are an excellent statement of what one should
think a sonnet is:
A sonnet
is a moment’s monument –
Memorial from the soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour.
Algernon
Charles Swinburne (1837 – 1887) has featured in these pages before,
and we have described both his extraordinary poetic talent and
his even more extraordinary lifestyle. Masochism was one of his
vices, apparently deriving from his boyhood at Eton. This is an
extract from his poem Dolores (1866):
Hast thou
told all thy secrets the last time,
And bared all thy beauties to
one?
Ah, where shall we go then for pastime,
If the worst that can be has
been done?
But sweet as the rind was the core is;
We are fain of thee still, we
are fain,
O sanguine and subtle Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.
By the
hunger of change and emotion,
By the thirst of unbearable things,
By despair, the twin-born of devotion,
By the pleasure that winces and
stings,
The delight that consumes the desire,
The desire that outruns the delight,
By the cruelty deaf as a fire
And blind as the night.
Robert Frost
(1874 – 1963) in his collection New Hampshire (1923) has a short
poem that has amused me for several years, Fire and Ice:
Some say
the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Wallace Stevens
(1879 – 1955) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2,
1879. The following biography is from the Academy of American
Poets.
“He attended
Harvard as an undergraduate and earned a law degree from New
York Law School. Admitted to the U.S. Bar in 1904, Stevens found
employment at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. in Connecticut,
of which he became vice president in 1934. In November 1914,
Harriet Monroe included four of his poems in a special wartime
issue of Poetry, and Stevens began to establish an identity
for himself outside the world of law and business. His first
book of poems, Harmonium, published in 1923, exhibited
the influence of both the English Romantics and the French symbolists,
an inclination to aesthetic philosophy, and a wholly original
style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, infused with the light
and color of an Impressionist painting. More than any other
modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power
of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the
office and in the evenings, Stevens continued to spend his days
behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet, uneventful life.
Though now considered one of the major American poets of the
century, he did not receive widespread recognition until the
publication of his Collected Poems, just a year before
his death.”
I hope to
have Stevens as a subject of one of these weekly articles soon,
but for today I am going to quote just a few lines from the last
part of a long poem of his, Esthétique du Mal, written
in 1947:
The greatest
poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.
I have mentioned
on a number of occasions Ernest Dowson (1867 – 1900), who wrote
a small number of exquisite poems before his untimely death. I
think I will end this week with the lines from his poem Vitae
Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam (this title is
a quotation from Horace) written in 1896:
They are
not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
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