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Oct. 21st, 2012 02:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionMeanwhile the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Dots streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other Seas,
Annihilating . . .
From Pleasure less. Either 'from the lessening of pleasure--' we are quiet in the country, but our dullness gives a sober and self-knowing happiness, more intellectual than that of the over-stimulated pleasures of the town ' or 'made less by this pleasure'-- 'The pleasures of the country give a repose and intellectual release which make me less intellectual, make my mind less worrying and introspective.'
Empson on Marvell's "The Garden." I've always read that as "withdrawing from a lesser sort of pleasure into a greater one." I can't tell if I'm wrong (probably) or he's wrong (unlikely) or while insisting on the simultaneous presence of all possible ambiguities he's just taking for granted the obvious.
Here's how awesome Empson is: he spends almost all of the twenty pages of this Garden essay writing about Upon Appleton House, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Smart's Hymn to David, the Mower poems, an exchange in As You Like It, Donne's Ecstasy, The Phoenix and the Tuetle, and the Iliad (with cameos from Shakespeare's Midsummer and Troilus, Whitman, Wordsworth and D.H. Lawrence, as bith poet and critic, as well as Aristotle, Mencius, I.A. Richards and the Buddha), gets you completely lost among widely disparate and dense avenues of speculation, often using vague referents where it takes a while to figure out whether he means something he's just quoted or is about to or some text he's mentioned only by title or if he's responding to a sentence of his own from between zero and two pages previous, and at the end he makes a hard right turn and you realize he's been talking about The Garden (actually just one third of it) all along. Insert garden path pun here.
Withdraws into its happiness;
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Dots streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other Seas,
Annihilating . . .
From Pleasure less. Either 'from the lessening of pleasure--' we are quiet in the country, but our dullness gives a sober and self-knowing happiness, more intellectual than that of the over-stimulated pleasures of the town ' or 'made less by this pleasure'-- 'The pleasures of the country give a repose and intellectual release which make me less intellectual, make my mind less worrying and introspective.'
Empson on Marvell's "The Garden." I've always read that as "withdrawing from a lesser sort of pleasure into a greater one." I can't tell if I'm wrong (probably) or he's wrong (unlikely) or while insisting on the simultaneous presence of all possible ambiguities he's just taking for granted the obvious.
Here's how awesome Empson is: he spends almost all of the twenty pages of this Garden essay writing about Upon Appleton House, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Smart's Hymn to David, the Mower poems, an exchange in As You Like It, Donne's Ecstasy, The Phoenix and the Tuetle, and the Iliad (with cameos from Shakespeare's Midsummer and Troilus, Whitman, Wordsworth and D.H. Lawrence, as bith poet and critic, as well as Aristotle, Mencius, I.A. Richards and the Buddha), gets you completely lost among widely disparate and dense avenues of speculation, often using vague referents where it takes a while to figure out whether he means something he's just quoted or is about to or some text he's mentioned only by title or if he's responding to a sentence of his own from between zero and two pages previous, and at the end he makes a hard right turn and you realize he's been talking about The Garden (actually just one third of it) all along. Insert garden path pun here.
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no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 03:11 pm (UTC)This is one of the great things that ambiguity makes possible: the resonances that come with the strict grammatical construction. They can indeed swamp the grammar and become all the more important thereby.
I love Some Versions of Pastoral. I love all of Empson. I believe I have once or twice referred in print -- certainly in talks -- to "the sacred Empson" (in like with Shelley's "sacred Milton").
In his biography he is quoted as saying that he goes over his essays one final time after a couple of glasses of beer, just to make sure he's sounding as breezy as he wants to.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 06:01 pm (UTC)Curious reversal of "ruin the sacred truths" in his Milton poem, where moderns have to be taught that ruin meant reduce rather than destroy or spoil. Reduce to the point where something is spoiled or destroyed, of course, but it helps the lines to picture the movement. Like an iPad glow reducing to a dot before shutting down from running out of charge - graphic total loss across a time dimension so you feel it. Fainting on rocks was like that.
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Date: 2012-10-23 01:35 am (UTC)