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Apr. 25th, 2015 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionPast the obvious Keats bird, a touch of Lycidas & co. in the form and flora and presumably some bits of Lowell himself, I'm wondering how much Diffugere Nives lies behind North Haven. Maybe even Housman's version, since she was a fan of his.
Horace doesn't mediate the recognition of loss through animals at all, nor does he elsewhere that I recall (does any ancient?), so that's all new. But death as stasis, life as change - however cyclical - that's there. The friend who's stuck. The Grecian underworld is barely a metaphor, and not just in Horace. It's a metaphor that leads you at once back to the literal you'd meant to dodge, like Yosemite Sam with his guns at either exit.
Bishop replaces Horace's Empedocles with Darwin, which both sets up a microcosm/macro parallel between Lowell's obsessive revisions and evolution and suggests the small but sufficient problem with both: the precious singularities crowded out, the best ideas shot past. I've come to see her as far more aggressive than I'd have imagined, so there's room for wholly characteristic rivalry and breeder-critique here: kids and blurry texts won't get you clear. Texts that have ridden a single melting (of however many years) won't either but the farthest throw still wins - North Haven will outlast anything of his, I assume she rightly assumed.
Holding, chaining and staying are prominent in DN, using Housman as stand-in for a crib (his is one of the few poems I've somehow kept memorized). But there isn't just night holding Hippolytus who must stay, or Theseus leaving Pirithous in those untakeable U breakable chains. There's also that maybe most amazing part - though Housman's line 4 is my favorite sonically:
Torquatus, if the gods in heaven will add
The morrow to the day what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.
To revise is to replace, Bishop argues, pace Keats. We will be changed right out by life, but that life that we are is also change (to revise what is inevitably revision is to miss this). I think I long missed what the Feast lines were saying, for some reason reading them as "rejoice! for the reason that what you have here is only for you, you're off the hook even trying to transmit it." But though there's a celebratory aspect to feasting it more directly means "feed with the most pleasing foods." It isn't good that this can't be shared, but since it can't be shared go nuts, go apeshit. It's not about pride that you've had what you did, but the Paterian-Horatian imperative to find whatever's here. Hence the flowers - there's just so much, the point of a bouquet.
No holding, at least once dead. No passing on. No need to tinker with the will. The uncharacteristic traditionality of the poem is part of this - revise the tradition, not yourself. Fill the role, since it's not you. What's you how could you even hope to say? It changes, and that's the part you can't simulate. The poem is not the person.
Though of course it is. "It must change" is here: Skunk Hour doesn't. "Dear friend, you did not change" with all your alterations is on some level the lament. She shows him how a touch too late.
Her titles always signify - she'd already claimed North for mind. The Haven for the mind is the notion of permanence, of an ordering principle worth any number of sacrifices to activate. A rock that stays. But we're not that kind of island. We're the condiment, the moss. The "wait wait wait" of nature, its attempt.
Horace doesn't mediate the recognition of loss through animals at all, nor does he elsewhere that I recall (does any ancient?), so that's all new. But death as stasis, life as change - however cyclical - that's there. The friend who's stuck. The Grecian underworld is barely a metaphor, and not just in Horace. It's a metaphor that leads you at once back to the literal you'd meant to dodge, like Yosemite Sam with his guns at either exit.
Bishop replaces Horace's Empedocles with Darwin, which both sets up a microcosm/macro parallel between Lowell's obsessive revisions and evolution and suggests the small but sufficient problem with both: the precious singularities crowded out, the best ideas shot past. I've come to see her as far more aggressive than I'd have imagined, so there's room for wholly characteristic rivalry and breeder-critique here: kids and blurry texts won't get you clear. Texts that have ridden a single melting (of however many years) won't either but the farthest throw still wins - North Haven will outlast anything of his, I assume she rightly assumed.
Holding, chaining and staying are prominent in DN, using Housman as stand-in for a crib (his is one of the few poems I've somehow kept memorized). But there isn't just night holding Hippolytus who must stay, or Theseus leaving Pirithous in those untakeable U breakable chains. There's also that maybe most amazing part - though Housman's line 4 is my favorite sonically:
Torquatus, if the gods in heaven will add
The morrow to the day what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.
To revise is to replace, Bishop argues, pace Keats. We will be changed right out by life, but that life that we are is also change (to revise what is inevitably revision is to miss this). I think I long missed what the Feast lines were saying, for some reason reading them as "rejoice! for the reason that what you have here is only for you, you're off the hook even trying to transmit it." But though there's a celebratory aspect to feasting it more directly means "feed with the most pleasing foods." It isn't good that this can't be shared, but since it can't be shared go nuts, go apeshit. It's not about pride that you've had what you did, but the Paterian-Horatian imperative to find whatever's here. Hence the flowers - there's just so much, the point of a bouquet.
No holding, at least once dead. No passing on. No need to tinker with the will. The uncharacteristic traditionality of the poem is part of this - revise the tradition, not yourself. Fill the role, since it's not you. What's you how could you even hope to say? It changes, and that's the part you can't simulate. The poem is not the person.
Though of course it is. "It must change" is here: Skunk Hour doesn't. "Dear friend, you did not change" with all your alterations is on some level the lament. She shows him how a touch too late.
Her titles always signify - she'd already claimed North for mind. The Haven for the mind is the notion of permanence, of an ordering principle worth any number of sacrifices to activate. A rock that stays. But we're not that kind of island. We're the condiment, the moss. The "wait wait wait" of nature, its attempt.
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no subject
Date: 2015-04-25 11:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-04-25 11:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-04-25 11:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-06-23 04:25 pm (UTC)Did Horace say this? Or is Housman importing Pater? Because isn't that as advanced as even Pater ever got?
Because how could a real heir's fingers clutch a "possession" of the heart? Only metaphorical hands can hold metaphorical whats. Arrest the day not because you'll die but because your heart will, bequeathing your body, aortas and all, to another set of wishes and fears. We remember our impulses, and perhaps they create similar progeny whenever we do, but they've changed. And even when they haven't changed they're other - are clones. The strong pulsations know no time: there's here where they are and there where they need to be and neither is stable, neither a place, but a pole, since we're never not flying or falling once made alive. By beauty, by catching death's lack of eye, by a memory. A memory isn't a bringing of you to the past, but a waking of the larger you into its true life beyond any present. Well, that's Proust - for Housman, Wordsworth. Does he even put that into Horace? With just a few tucks?