The Battle of Blenheim -- Robert Southey

(Poem #203) The Battle of Blenheim It was a summer evening, Old Kaspar's work was done, And he before his cottage door Was sitting in the sun, And by him sported on the green His little grandchild Wilhelmine. She saw her brother Peterkin Roll something large and round, Which he beside the rivulet In playing there had found; He came to ask what he had found, That was so large, and smooth, and round. Old Kaspar took it from the boy, Who stood expectant by; And then the old man shook his head, And, with a natural sigh, "'Tis some poor fellow's skull," said he, "Who fell in the great victory. "I find them in the garden, For there's many here about; And often when I go to plough, The ploughshare turns them out! For many thousand men," said he, "Were slain in that great victory." "Now tell us what 'twas all about," Young Peterkin, he cries; And little Wilhelmine looks up With wonder-waiting eyes; "Now tell us all about the war, And what they fought each other for." "It was the English," Kaspar cried, "Who put the French to rout; But what they fought each other for, I could not well make out; But everybody said," quoth he, "That 'twas a famous victory. "My father lived at Blenheim then, Yon little stream hard by; They burnt his dwelling to the ground, And he was forced to fly; So with his wife and child he fled, Nor had he where to rest his head. "With fire and sword the country round Was wasted far and wide, And many a childing mother then, And new-born baby died; But things like that, you know, must be At every famous victory. "They say it was a shocking sight After the field was won; For many thousand bodies here Lay rotting in the sun; But things like that, you know, must be After a famous victory. "Great praise the Duke of Marlbro' won, And our good Prince Eugene." "Why, 'twas a very wicked thing!" Said little Wilhelmine. "Nay... nay... my little girl," quoth he, "It was a famous victory. "And everybody praised the Duke Who this great fight did win." "But what good came of it at last?" Quoth little Peterkin. "Why that I cannot tell," said he, "But 'twas a famous victory." -- Robert Southey

An antiwar poem with a somewhat different approach - rather than a graphic
portrayal of the horrors of the battle, or a heartrending account of loss,
it uses a matter of fact tone much more reflective of the common man's
attitude to war, and a couple of children to reveal that the emperor is,
indeed, unclad.

Compare this poem to Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce Et Decorum Est', which speaks of
"children ardent for some desperate glory" - Southey takes the opposite
point of view; that left to themselves, children see war for the pointless
exercise it usually is.

Biography:

  Southey, Robert

  b. Aug. 12, 1774, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng.
  d. March 21, 1843, Keswick, Cumberland

  English poet and writer of miscellaneous prose who is chiefly
  remembered for his association with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
  William Wordsworth, both of whom were leaders of the early Romantic
  movement.

  [...]

  Southey by this time [1799] had decided to earn his living as a writer. In
  these years he composed many of his best short poems and ballads, and he
  became a regular contributor to newspapers and reviews. Southey also did
  translations, edited the works of Thomas Chatterton, and  worked on the
  epic poem Madoc (1805) and completed the epic Thalaba the Destroyer
  (1801).

  In 1803 the Southeys visited the Coleridges, then living at Greta
  Hall, Keswick. The Southeys remained at Greta Hall for life, partly so
  that Sara and Edith could be together. Southey's friendship with
  Wordsworth, then at nearby Grasmere, dates from this time. The
  Southeys had seven children of their own, and, after Coleridge left
  his family for Malta, the whole household was economically dependent
  on Southey for a time. He was forced to produce unremittingly--poetry,
  criticism, history, biography, journalism, translations, and editions
  of earlier writers. During 1809-38 he wrote, for the Tory Quarterly
  Review, 95 political articles, for each of which he received £100. Of
  most interest today are those articles urging the state provision of
  "social services." He also worked on a projected history of Portugal
  that he was destined never to finish; only his History of Brazil, 3
  vol. (1810-19), was published.

  In 1813 Southey was appointed poet laureate through the influence of
  Sir Walter Scott, and in 1835 his government pension of £160, which
  had been secured for him by Wynn in 1807, was increased to £300 in
  recognition of his services to literature. He thus gained economic
  security, but the unauthorized publication (1817) of Wat Tyler, an
  early verse drama reflecting his youthful political opinions, enabled
  his enemies to remind the public of his youthful republicanism. About
  this time he became involved in a literary imbroglio with Lord Byron,
  who disliked him. Byron had already attacked Southey in English Bards
  and Scotch Reviewers (1809) and had dedicated to him (1819) the first
  cantos of Don Juan, a satire on hypocrisy. In his introduction to A
  Vision of Judgement (1821), Southey continued the quarrel by
  denouncing Byron as belonging to a "Satanic school" of poetry, and
  Byron replied by producing a masterful parody of Southey's own poem
  under the title The Vision of Judgment (1822). Southey's last years
  were clouded by his wife's insanity, by family quarrels resulting from
  his second marriage after her death (1837), and by his own failing
  mental and physical health.

  [...]

  Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge
  and was looked upon as a prominent member, with them, of the "Lake
  School" of poetry. His grandiose epic poems, such as Thalaba the
  Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810), were successful in
  their own time, but his fame is based on his prose work--the vigorous
  Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the Peninsular War (1823-32),
  and his classic formulation of the children's tale "The Three Bears."

        -- EB

About the 'Lake Poets':

  Lake poet

  any of the English poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
  and Robert Southey, who lived in the English Lake District of
  Cumberland and Westmorland (now Cumbria) at the beginning of the 19th
  century. They were first described derogatorily as the "Lake school"
  by Francis (afterward Lord) Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review in August
  1817, and the description "Lakers" was also used in a similar spirit
  by the poet Lord Byron. These names confusingly group Wordsworth and
  Coleridge together with Southey, who did not subscribe in his views or
  work to their theories of poetry.

          -- EB

Assessment:

  Except for a few lyrics, ballads, and comic-grotesque poems--e.g., "My
  days among the Dead are past," "After Blenheim," and "The Inchcape
  Rock" (considered a masterpiece of comic invention)--Southey's poetry
  is little read, but his prose style has been long regarded as masterly
  in its ease and clarity.
  [...]
  His less successful epic poems are  verse romances having a mythological
  or legendary subject matter set in the past and in distant places. In his
  prose works and in his voluminous correspondence, which gives a detailed
  picture of his   literary surroundings and friends, Southey's effortless
  mastery of prose is clearly evident, a fact attested to by such eminent
  contemporaries as William Hazlitt and Scott and even by such an enemy as
  Byron
        -- EB

Missing Dates -- William Empson

(Poem #202) Missing Dates Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. It is not your system or clear sight that mills Down small to the consequence a life requires; Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills Of young dog blood gave but a month's desires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires. Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills. The complete fire is death. From partial fires The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. It is the poems you have lost, the ills From missing dates, at which the heart expires. Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. -- William Empson

One of the two 'important' villanelles written in the twentieth century [1],
Missing Dates is fairly representative of William Empson's work as a whole:
dense, carefully constructed, honest to the point of harshness, complex and
intellectual, almost frightening in its intelligence, but still passionate in
its adherence to truth. Many of the same adjectives could be used to describe
his character and his critical writings; indeed, his status as the foremost
literary critic of his time seems assured.

Which is not to say that he'll ever be a popular poet, or even a well-liked one.
Empson's poems, though not intentionally obscure in the manner of, say, Geoffrey
Hill's early work, nevertheless make the reader 'work' to understand them; his
astonishingly wide range of reference and allusion does not make the task any
easier. As a poet's poet and a critic's critic he ranks among the very best;
that's quite enough for me.

thomas.

[1] the other, of course, being Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good
Night, minstrels poem #38; you can read more about this wonderfully intricate
poetic form at poem #38

[Assessment]

Like Eliot before him and Donald Davie after him, Empson has an equal reputation
as a poet and a critic. The passionate intelligence of  his poetry has something
in common with the work of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, though
Empson is more perversely obscure than Donne ever was, and much less directly
concerned - on the surface at least - with his own experience. Empson has
himself spoken of the 'puzzle interest' of poetry, though one feels that this is
in part said with his tongue in his cheek for the sake of shocking readers out
of their preconceived ideas. Unlike Eliot's notes to The Waste Land, the notes
which Empson prints in the back of his Collected Poems are of considerable value
in elucidating the imagery and intention behind some of his poems.

In recent years Empson's reputation has come increasingly to depend on his
tough-minded and yet not uninvolved attitude to life, which has come to be felt
as a sort of moral touchstone. This may in part be due to his open opposititon
to established Christianity. It is certainly also due to his (as it now seems)
more perceptive attitude to the problems of the 1930s than the group of poets
who centred round Auden. Empson himself was teaching in the Far East in the late
1930s and saw more of the upheaval caused by war than poets who seemed to write
more directly about it in Europe. His work was a major influence on the
counter-revolutionary poetry of The Movement in the 1950s.

[Missing Dates] is one of Empson's most characteristic and powerful ones.
Whether one takes it mainly about politics, or mainly about private life, it
conveys a kind of doomed grandeur. Even the inversion in the first of the two
refrain lines seems unobtrusive in the context of the whole poem's even,
dignified delivery.

    -- George MacBeth

[Links]

There's an _excellent_ essay on critical reactions (over time) to Empson's
poetry and his (highly influential) critical theories at
[broken link] http://www.btinternet.com/~j1837c/jbc/empson.html
Strongly recommended.

[More Stuff]

For the significance of Empson's criticism is this: his criticism is an attempt
to deal with what the poem "means" in terms of its structure as a poem. To sense
its importance, one must recall what the critic in the past has attempted to do:
either he attempted to find the goodness of the poem (and its status as poetry)
in terms of its prose argument - and in terms of the "truth" of what was being
said - and thus made poetry compete with philosophy or science; or else he tried
to find the poetry in the charm of the decorative elements - in the metrical
pattern, in the sensuous imagery, etc.

    -- Cleanth Brooks

Ambiguity: A nonpejorative term for the capacity of language to sustain multiple
meanings. Also called plurisignation or polysemy, ambiguity arises from what
William Empson calls "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for
alternative reactions to the same piece of language." In literary parlance,
ambiguity is not a mistake in denotation to be avoided, but a resource of
connotation to be exploited. In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Empson argues
that the richness, complexity, and concentration of literary language derives
from the seven types of ambiguity he discusses. The notion that ambiguity is the
root condition of all literary discourse, a notion that arises from I. A.
Richards's distinction between the scientific (referential or denotative) and
the poetic (emotive or connotative) uses of language, is an integral aspect of
the New Critical view that irony, paradox, and tension are definitive aspects of
the work of art.

    -- Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown
Glossary of Literary Theory,
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/headerindex.html

To the Reader -- Denise Levertov

(Poem #201) To the Reader As you read, a white bear leisurely pees, dyeing the snow saffron, and as you read, many gods lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian are watching the generations of leaves, and as you read the sea is turning its dark pages, turning its dark pages. -- Denise Levertov

             (1923 - 1997)

Quoting a bit from the biography:

   Early in her career, Levertov became associated with the poets of the
   Black Mountain school, and she credited the spare, clear, objective
   work of the poet William Carlos Williams with helping her develop her
   own vital American style of composition. She tended to avoid the use
   of metaphor and allusion, preferring instead the direct and immediate
   description of objects, perceptions, and feelings in the rhythms of
   ordinary speech.

This is by no means an easy style to master - consider how devoid it is of
all the things one tends to associate with poetry; the aforementioned
metaphor and allusion, rhyme, metre, and, in general, 'poetic' language. And
yet this is  by no means 'prose with interesting line breaks'. The images are
carefully chosen and evocative, and the very economy of words indicates the
care with which each one is selected.

Focusing on today's poem, note the way the structure is built up on several
levels. The dominant images towards the start are the soothingly reinforced
of the white bear and the snow. The 'pees, dyeing' enters as a background
note, until it suddenly splashes[1] into prominence with the highly
contrastive 'saffron'.

The second verse adds a whole new level of contrast, with the sudden,
radical scene change to images of jungles and buried gods. ('Generations of
leaves' is, incidentally, an absolutely lovely image IMHO.) And then, in the
final verse, the 'as you read', hitherto merely a narrative device of sorts,
springs in its turn into focus, as it is reflected in the sea's 'turning
pages'[2].

And finally there are lots of nice effects provided by the repetition of the
last line, but they're not too hard to see so I won't bother pointing them
out[3].

[1] sorry!
[2] well, maybe one or two metaphors
[3] one of them, for instance, is the reinforcing of the present-continuous
    tense of the poem

Biography:

  Levertov, Denise

   b. Oct. 24, 1923, Ilford, Essex, Eng.
   d. Dec. 20, 1997, Seattle, Wash., U.S.

   English-born American poet, essayist, and political activist who wrote
   deceptively matter-of-fact verse on both personal and political themes.

   Levertov's father was an immigrant Russian Jew who converted to
   Christianity, married a Welsh woman, and became an Anglican clergyman.
   Educated entirely at home, Levertov became a civilian nurse during
   World War II, serving in London throughout the bombings. Her first
   volume of verse, The Double Image (1946), was not very successful. She
   married the American writer Mitchell Goodman in 1947, moved with him
   to the United States in 1948, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in
   1955.

   Early in her career, Levertov became associated with the poets of the
   Black Mountain school, and she credited the spare, clear, objective
   work of the poet William Carlos Williams with helping her develop her
   own vital American style of composition. She tended to avoid the use
   of metaphor and allusion, preferring instead the direct and immediate
   description of objects, perceptions, and feelings in the rhythms of
   ordinary speech.

   Levertov's first important poetry collection, Here and Now (1957), was
   followed by Overland to the Islands (1958), With Eyes at the Back of
   Our Heads (1959), and several others. She opposed American involvement
   in the Vietnam War and was active in the War Resisters League, for
   whom she edited the collection Out of the War Shadow (1967). One of
   her finest volumes of poems, The Sorrow Dance (1967), reflects her
   opposition to the war, while The Freeing of the Dust (1975) alternates
   antiwar poems with confessional poems about her personal life. Her
   subsequent volumes show a sympathy with Third World cultures and an
   involvement with feminism.

   Levertov's later efforts included essays and prose, as in The Poet in
   the World (1973), and the verse collections Candles in Babylon (1982)
   and Breathing the Water (1987). She taught at Stanford University from
   1981 to 1994.

        -- EB

And a bit on the Black Mountain school...

   By the mid-1950s, however, a strong reaction developed. Poets began to
   turn away from Eliot and metaphysical poetry to more romantic or more
   prosaic models, including Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Hart
   Crane, and D.H. Lawrence. A group of poets associated with Black
   Mountain College in western North Carolina, as, for example, Charles
   Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, and Denise Levertov,
   treated the poem as an unfolding process rather than a containing form.
   Olson's Maximus Poems (1953-68) show a clear affinity with the jagged
   line and uneven flow of Pound's Cantos and Williams's Paterson. Allen
   Ginsberg's incantatory, prophetic "Howl" (1956) and   his moving elegy
   for his mother, "Kaddish" (1961), gave powerful impetus to the Beat
   movement. Written with extraordinary intensity, these works were inspired
   by writers as diverse as the biblical   prophets, William Blake, and
   Whitman, as well as by the dream-logic of the French Surrealists and the
   spontaneous jazz aesthetic of Ginsberg's friend, the novelist Jack
   Kerouac.

        -- EB again

Links: <[broken link] http://www.poets.org/LIT/poet/dleverto.htm>

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks -- William Shakespeare

It's fitting that the 200th poem on the Minstrels is by the greatest poet of
all...

(Poem #200) Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's moulds, and germens spill at once, That make ingrateful man! [ FOOL: O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o' door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters' blessing: here's a night pities neither wise man nor fool. ] Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters: I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness; I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children, You owe me no subscription: then let fall Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave, A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man: But yet I call you servile ministers, That have with two pernicious daughters join'd Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul! -- William Shakespeare

from 'King Lear'.

Othello might be a better play than Lear - tighter in its orchestration, more
clever in its construction, more intricate in its plotting. Hamlet is certainly
a better study of character - deep and insightful, each player's thoughts and
actions depicted to a nicety. Macbeth is more dramatic; the action soars and
plummets, the all-too-human characters move against a violently supernatural
backdrop. The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream are more lyrical, more
shimmeringly beautiful.

Indeed, compared with each of these, King Lear seems to be a failure - a mess of
contradictions, a rambling, incoherent narrative; powerful, perhaps, but not a
little bit disturbing; harsh, even wantonly cruel at times...

And yet...

If I had to choose Shakespeare's supreme creation, it would be Lear. Without a
doubt.

When I think of King Lear, I think of it not as a play, but as something far
greater. Lear has a stark, epic grandeur that transcends the boundaries of the
playwright's craft, a raw power that demands it be placed upon the same pedestal
as the roof of the Sistine Chapel, or Mozart's final requiem mass - works that
seem, somehow, to be beyond the pale of ordinary judgement or classification:
exaltations of the human spirit, explorations of the human soul.

What stage could possibly do justice to a production of Lear? The storm
sequence, where the aged and forsaken King hurls his defiance at the world - ah,
what actor would be foolhardy enough to essay the role? The final scene, where
Lear, blind and half-mad with grief, dies with Cordelia's lifeless body in his
arms - what director could ever hope to capture the pity, the sheer pity of it?
Nay, the truth is this: Lear's proper place is in the realms of the imagination,
in the towering heights and endless depths of the mind. Look at it that way, and
the truth is apparent: King Lear may not be as 'good' a play as some others, but
it's certainly the greatest of them all.

thomas.

PS. In previous mails I've talked about Shakespeare's lyricism, his dramatic
skill, his philosophical genius and his insight into character. This, though, is
where he puts it all together. And ooh, it sends shivers down my spine. Simply
glorious.

PPS. Many of the ideas expressed in today's critical essay were rather
shamelessly filched from A. C. Bradley's definitive collection of essays,
'Shakespearean Tragedy', which I had the enormous good fortune to read in high
school. A highly recommended book.

[Glossary]

Vaunt-couriers (line 5) - forerunners
spill (line 8) - destroy
germen (line 8) - germ, as in 'something that initiates development or serves as
an origin'.

Lord Ullin's Daughter -- Thomas Campbell

(Poem #199) Lord Ullin's Daughter A Chieftain, to the Highlands bound, Cries, "Boatman, do not tarry! And I'll give thee a silver pound To row us o'er the ferry!" -- "Now, who be ye, would cross Lochgyle, This dark and stormy weather?" "O, I'm the chief of Ulva's isle, And this, Lord Ullin's daughter. -- "And fast before her father's men Three days we've fled together, For should he find us in the glen, My blood would stain the heather. "His horsemen hard behind us ride; Should they our steps discover, Then who will cheer my bonny bride When they have slain her lover?" -- Out spoke the hardy Highland wight, -- "I'll go, my chief --I'm ready: -- It is not for your silver bright; But for your winsome lady: "And by my word! the bonny bird In danger shall not tarry; So, though the waves are raging white, I'll row you o'er the ferry." -- By this the storm grew loud apace, The water-wraith was shrieking; And in the scowl of heaven each face Grew dark as they were speaking. But still as wilder blew the wind, And as the night grew drearer, Adown the glen rode armèd men, Their trampling sounded nearer. -- "O haste thee, haste!" the lady cries, "Though tempests round us gather; I'll meet the raging of the skies, But not an angry father." -- The boat has left a stormy land, A stormy sea before her, -- When, O! too strong for human hand, The tempest gather'd o'er her. And still they row'd amidst the roar Of waters fast prevailing: Lord Ullin reach'd that fatal shore, -- His wrath was changed to wailing. For, sore dismay'd through storm and shade, His child he did discover: -- One lovely hand she stretch'd for aid, And one was round her lover. "Come back! come back!" he cried in grief "Across this stormy water: And I'll forgive your Highland chief, My daughter! -- O my daughter!" 'Twas vain: the loud waves lash'd the shore, Return or aid preventing: The waters wild went o'er his child, And he was left lamenting. -- Thomas Campbell

A fairly standard ballad - unremarkable but enjoyable. As far as I know, it
has no basis in fact (the only references to Lord Ullin I could find
referred to the poem), though if anyone knows any better, do write in.

A quick note on the structure - the metre is the standard ballad heptameter,
unvarying throughout (which contributes to the old-fashioned feel); the
rhyme scheme likewise remains constant, except for one verse where it is
changed to link it to the previous one (a sort of carry over effect).

Campbell, Thomas

   b. July 27, 1777, Glasgow, Scot.
   d. June 15, 1844, Boulogne, France

   Scottish poet, remembered chiefly for his sentimental and martial
   lyrics; he was also one of the initiators of a plan to found what
   became the University of London.

   Campbell went to Mull, an island of the Inner Hebrides, as a tutor in
   1795 and two years later settled in Edinburgh to study law. In 1799 he
   wrote The Pleasures of Hope, a traditional 18th-century survey in
   heroic couplets of human affairs. It went through four editions within
   a year.

   He also produced several stirring patriotic war songs--"Ye Mariners of
   England," "The Soldier's Dream," "Hohenlinden," and, in 1801, "The
   Battle of the Baltic." With others he launched a movement in 1825 to
   found the University of London, for students excluded from Oxford or
   Cambridge by religious tests or lack of funds.

        -- EB